On liturgy, for the non-liturgical

It seems to me that the renewal of our corporate worship ought to be a priority for evangelical churches in the UK.  I think so many of our problems can be traced back to weakness here - whether it's a lack of joy in the gospel (and therefore a lack of joyful witness), a leadership that doesn't stand in awe of the Lord (and therefore abuses authority in the church), or a weak discipleship (and therefore ethical compromise with the world).  We need liturgical renewal (amongst other things) because worship stands at the very centre of our church life, of the outworking of God's redemption in the community life of God's people.

But I know that whenever you start talking about liturgy, there is a group of Christians immediately turned off.  If you think that liturgy means ritualism, dressing up, reciting everything from a script, and inaccessible choir performances in place of congregational singing - well, in that case I can see why you might not be thrilled at the thought.  For many who grew up in traditions which had, perhaps, beautiful liturgy and shiny vestments and ancient sanctuaries, but little to nothing in the way of living faith, I completely understand the negative associations.

Suffice to say that when I'm agitating for liturgical renewal, I'm not aiming for any of those things (although some of them might do more good than harm, if done well).  What I'm talking about is simply making our Sunday gatherings appropriate, or fitting, to the immensity of what is happening in the gathering of God's people - in tone, structure and content.

Tone is perhaps the most difficult thing to pin down, but essentially I mean this: does this feel like we are coming into the presence of Almighty God?  The book of Hebrews tells us that, whereas Israel came to the burning mountain of Sinai, we come to the heavenly mountain of Zion, gathered into the presence of innumerable angels and the assembly of the saints who have gone before, into the very throne room of God through the Mediator, our Lord Jesus Christ.  Does the tone of our worship reflect that?  The tone we're going for is reverence and awe with cheerfulness, a sort of serious joy.  This tone will be set by the nature of the greeting, by the voice and posture of the service leader, by the choice of hymns, and perhaps preeminently by the way we are led in prayer.  Does it feel like we are meeting with God?

Structure helps to underline what it is that we are doing.  If we are coming to God through Christ in the Spirit, it is helpful to have some narrative structure, a movement, to what we are doing.  The imagery of spatial movement is useful and thoroughly biblical here: we draw near, we enter, we come.  The sense of movement and direction fosters the sense of encounter, as we approach the Lord.  This is not a manipulative thing; we're not trying to manufacture something that isn't there.  Rather, we are trying to make the outward structure fit with the inner spiritual reality.  When God calls his people together to worship, he does meet with them, and we want to show that.  And of course the particular narrative structure for our worship is the gospel.  That is the story we retell and in a sense relive each Sunday.

Content is actually much more flexible from my perspective, but it has to serve tone and structure.  A jokey little sketch is inappropriate tonally (and can't be justified by the bad excuse of talking to kids!); a lack of Scripture reading and preaching is inappropriate in terms of narrative, missing the central place of God's speech in the gospel story.  A participatory liturgy - the congregation doing more than just singing the hymns! - helps with that sense of coming together to worship.  Responses, confessions, corporate prayers - all good.  As an aside, in the sorts of churches I'm most familiar with, this is often hindered by too much talking from the front; there is no need for an explanation of each Bible reading, or an extra sermon before Communion!  And speaking of Holy Communion, this should ideally be a weekly feature of our worship, the highpoint of our time together.  Giving it this place will help with tone and structure as well.

There are lots more specifics that we could get into, but I imagine the more specific we are the more likely it is that there will be disagreement.  I have strong opinions on all sorts of minor details!  But in the end I'm convinced that what really matters for our spiritual health as believers and as churches is that we be able to come week by week, with serious joy, to rehearse the gospel as we come into the presence of God to worship him.

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (2)

The next subsection carries the title 'Scripture as the Word of God', and opens with a helpful summary of where we've got to so far: "If what we hear in Scripture is witness, a human expression of God's revelation, then from what we have already said, what we hear in the witness itself is more than witness, what we hear in the human expression is more than a human expression.  What we hear is revelation, and therefore the very Word of God." (473)  How is this the case?  Well, put a pin in that question.  First of all, Barth wants to clarify and expand our understanding of Scripture as a witness, and he initially does so in a list of (I think) 6 points.  We'll only get to the first one today, but hopefully the others will move along a bit faster!

Point 1 clarifies that when we are talking about Holy Scripture, we are talking about the canon of books acknowledged in the church.  It is not for us as private individuals to go around making judgements about the scope and extent of the canon; rather, we receive and acknowledge the canon that our spiritual forebears have recognised.  Barth is at pains to point out, however, that this certainly does not mean that the church historically had the right to decide the canon.  The church cannot "give the Canon to itself." (473). It can only recognise that which is given it by God, and therefore all its decisions on this matter, whilst important, are nonetheless merely human and therefore to some extent provisional decisions.  We do well to listen to the judgement of the church in this matter, but we don't believe the Scripture because of the church's judgement.  "When we adopt the Canon of the Church, we do not say that the Church itself, but that the revelation which underlies and controls the Church, attests these witnesses and not others as the witnesses of revelation and therefore as canonical for the Church." (474)

For those unfamiliar with the Church Dogmatics, just to note that if you ever read it you'll find some in a normal typeface, and some sections in a much smaller font.  The main line of thought is presented in the larger and more accessible text, but the detailed argument, exegesis, and citations in the smaller text.  The small text parts of this section are largely historical.  Barth notes that "the establishment of the Canon has a long and complicated history." (473)  Certainly it was controversial in the early centuries, and became so again at the Reformation.  Against the Roman view that the authority of Scripture derived from the church - Barth notes that some Roman apologists even argued that Aesop's Fables would be Scripture if the church so declared (475) - the Reformers saw the role of the church as like the Samaritan woman of John 5, who merely directed those in the town to Jesus; the church directs people to the canon, but does not make the canon.  However, at the same time, the Reformers almost unanimously wanted to remove the Apocrypha from the canon, and some wanted to reopen the question further: Luther had serious doubts about various New Testament books (Hebrews, James, Jude, Revelation), and he was far from alone (476-7).

Barth notes helpfully that even where the question of the canon is not regarded as open, there can be - and perhaps almost always is - a functional 'canon within the canon', where greater stress is laid on one part of the Scriptures than another.  Perhaps the New Testament is privileged over the Old, or the Gospels over the Epistles (think of the treatment of the Gospel Book in liturgical churches).  It is useful to repeatedly ask "whether we do not neglect essential parts of the witness of revelation to the detriment of our knowledge of the Word of God" (478) even when the whole canon is formally acknowledged.

Nevertheless, for Barth the question of the canon must remain at least in principle open.  He considers that the attempts of Protestant Orthodoxy in the 17th Century to definitely close the question end up circling around to the old Roman answer: that the church has the authority to decide the canon.  For Barth this will not do.  Whilst there may be no question of the church - and certainly no question of any individual - actually changing the canon, to preserve the truth that its authority derives not from human pronouncements but from the Word of God to which it bears witness, the question must not be in principle closed.

What is Barth trying to do here, and why this disturbing conclusion?  I think here, as throughout volume I of the Church Dogmatics, Barth is trying to walk a narrow path of Reformed theology, with a deep and dangerous ditch on either side: to the one side, Roman Catholicism; to the other, Neo-Protestantism, what we might call liberal theology.  To say that the church defines the canon will lead us off to Rome; ultimate authority then shifts from the Word of God in Scripture to the church as an institution.  For Barth the great peril here is that the church ceases to listen to God, and becomes merely engaged in a conversation with itself.  On the other hand, the individual may decide the functional canon for themselves, or perhaps a group of individuals or congregations will do so.  This is Neo-Protestantism in the sense that it makes human beings the judge of what must be received as God's Word.  Whilst the one ditch is institutional, and the other feels very free and individualistic, they are basically the same error.  In both cases, authority derives from somewhere other than God.  That is why Barth has to leave the question open: to demonstrate that the only person who can close the question is God, just as the only person who can cause the witness of Scripture to decisively rule in the church and in the individual life is God himself.

Psalm 110 and the cross of Christ

Psalm 110 is one of the most cited passages from the Old Testament in the New, and its popularity continued through the first centuries of the church.  It is not hard to see why.  For one thing, the Lord Jesus quoted it in reference to his own identity.  But even without that, the picture of the triumphant Priest-King, seated in victory at the right hand of God speaks powerfully of the Messiah and his glory.

For us, the Psalm can feel harder to appropriate.  There are elements of the structure which are confusing, and in particular it is not immediately obvious who is speaking at each point.  I think this can be cleared up relatively easily, just by noting the difference between LORD (a placeholder for the divine name, YHWH) and Lord (the Messianic King-Priest).  In verses 1 to 4, David reports the address of YHWH to the Messiah (who is David's lord); YHWH tells the Messiah that he will have victory and eternal priesthood.  In verses 5-7, David sings to YHWH, celebrating the fact that (just as YHWH promised in verse 1) the Messianic King-Priest is indeed at God's right hand, and is indeed accomplishing victory.

Probably the toughest bit for us, though, is the end.  "He will crush kings on the day of his anger.  He will judge the nations, piling up corpses..."  The image of the nations filled with the slain is of course deeply unpleasant, but more than that it sits uneasily with our vision of Christ and his victory.  Isn't this, in fact, the polar opposite of the gospel?  Christ suffered death to deliver his enemies from death, right - not to inflict it on them in vast numbers!  So what do we do with this end of the Psalm?

I think the answer, at least in part, is in passages from the New Testament like 2 Corinthians 5.  This passage is all about the Apostle Paul's missionary motivation.  What is at that drives him out to preach the gospel, at such cost?  One part of the answer to that, it seems to me, is that Paul sees humanity around him through the lens of the history of Christ.  That is to say, he doesn't look at the people around him and then try to work out how the gospel is relevant to them; rather, he considers Christ's story to be the central story of all humanity.  He has reached this conclusion, on the basis of his knowledge of Christ: "that one died for all, and therefore all died."  All died.  Paul, realising that Jesus truly is the Christ, sees his death as an event which has validity and reality for all humanity.  All died.  This is so because Christ took the place of sinners ("[God] made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us...") and suffered the judgement of God on sin - and in so doing, executed the judgement of God on sinners.  Sinners were put to death in him.

And so the Apostle, looking out across the nations, sees them filled with corpses, those slain by the judgement of God executed by - and miraculously, marvellously, in - the Messiah.  This is why the nature of his victory requires a Priest-King, after the order of Melchizedek: his great Kingly triumph over the nations is a Priestly sacrifice of himself.

Because Paul knows that Jesus is risen, he also knows the story doesn't end here.  Psalm 110, after all, envisages the Messiah's enemies coming to serve him; how can they do so if they are all slain?  But Christ died for all so that those who trust in him might rise with him; he put an end to their sinful humanity so that they might share with him in the new humanity, by foretaste in the outpouring of the Spirit ("he will drink from the brook by the way") and then finally in the physical resurrection.  Paul's missionary motivation, then, is that all the people around him are dead, really dead, because of the cross; they just don't know it yet.  But this judgement carried out in Christ is not the final word for humanity.  To submit to this judgement, to accept (in baptism) the death executed on sinful humanity in him, is to find the door opened to resurrection life, and to have a certain hope that as our King and Priest is seated at the right hand of God, so we will be seated with him.

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (1)

Just a reminder that we're in Church Dogmatics I/2, and numbers in brackets are page numbers.

The heading of the first section of the chapter is 'Scripture as a witness to divine revelation'.  For some, alarm bells will already be ringing - is this not what we've heard about Barth?  That he pries apart Scripture and revelation, such that the Bible is merely a witness to revelation rather than revelation itself?

Well, try to quiet the alarm bells briefly, and let's consider what it is that he means by this.  Essentially, it is a question of the appropriate hermeneutic to bring to Holy Scripture.

Firstly, let's put this section in context.  Barth reminds us that the purpose of theology is to ask whether the proclamation of the church corresponds to God's revelation, "or, concretely, the question of the agreement of this proclamation with Holy Scripture as the Word of God." (457)  The preceding sections have looked at God's revelation as the presupposition of both Scripture and proclamation - its objectivity in Jesus Christ, its subjective opening by the Holy Spirit - but this has already been drawn from the Scriptures.  That is to say, for Barth there is no getting behind Scripture to an idea of revelation that does not itself derive from Scripture.  The Bible is established as a sign that points beyond itself to "a superior authority confronting the proclamation of the Church" - and that authority is the Word of God.  The Bible "has attested to us the lordship of the triune God in the incarnate Word by the Holy Spirit."

So when Barth says that the Bible is a witness to divine revelation, he means first of all that the existence of the Bible points to the God who stands over and above the preaching of the church.  It is on this basis that theology can, and indeed must, continually ask the central question of church proclamation: does your preaching conform to Scripture?  Does it attest, therefore, the lordship of the triune God?

But there is an "undoubted limitation" introduced here in Barth's view of Scripture: "we distinguish the Bible as such from revelation.  A witness is not absolutely identical with that to which it witnesses." (463)  Now here we see a classic Barthian move, a piece of dialectical theology.  Because within a few lines of writing that we distinguish the Bible as such from revelation, he is able to write that "in this limitation the Bible is not distinguished from revelation.  It is simply revelation as it comes to us..."  What is going on here?  Essentially Barth is calling us to pay attention to the way in which the Bible is revelation to us.  It is a human word, multiple human words in fact, which attest to something beyond themselves.  The Bible is not revelation as it came once to the prophets and apostles; but as the word and witness of those prophets and apostles, the Bible is nonetheless revelation to us who were not there.

At this point I can sense the impatience. Why all this 'yes, and no'? Why not just be plain and unequivocal in declaring that the Bible is God's word?

I think there are a number of things going on here, although only one is really developed in this context. Briefly, I think Barth is seeking to safeguard the doctrine of Scripture against what we might call the Quranic error.  For Muslims, the Quran is eternal, timeless - and this causes some theological difficulty in describing its relationship to God.  In Christian theology, it is not the Bible but the Lord Jesus who is the eternal Word of God, and he is this because and as he is himself fully God.  So in a sense Barth's position is about the uniqueness of Christ.

A second point, again more my reflection than anything Barth explicitly discusses here, is that redemptive and revelatory history really matters for our view of God.  Barth does not want revelation so bound up in the pages of Scripture that it is no longer about what God has done and said in the history of the covenant, and especially in the Lord Jesus Christ.

But the main point he actually develops here is, as noted above, a hermeneutical one.  Because Scripture is a human word, Barth insists, it must be read as a human word, in all its historical and cultural specificity.  And yet, because it is witness, it must be read not as an enclosed artifact, but for the sake of the subject matter to which it bears witness.  Here he clearly has in view much of the critical, academic reading of Scripture, which wants to ask all sorts of questions about the prophet Isaiah, or the apostle Paul, and their times and circumstances, and even the nature of their faith - but does not want to ask or to be answered about the one thing Isaiah and Paul et al actually want to talk about, which is God in Christ.  Barth is making the point that because the Bible as a human word is a word of witness to God, we are not genuinely reading it as a human word unless we allow it to tell us about God.  Paying attention to the Bible means paying attention to the God of whom the Bible speaks.

For Barth this is not some special biblical hermeneutic.  It is just hermeneutics in general.  To listen to someone is to listen to what they are saying, and to allow what they are saying to take control.  We do not respect anyone if we receive what they are saying as material to think about their character or whatever but don't allow the subject of which they are speaking to have any impact upon us.  It is perhaps characteristic of us sinners that we typically hear "as though we know already, and can partly tell ourselves what we are to hear.  Our supposed listening is in fact a strange mixture of hearing and our own speaking, and in accordance with the usual rule it is most likely that our own speaking will be the really decisive event." (470).  It is only if we really pay attention to the subject that we can even partly escape this sinful hermeneutic, and that is equally true of any human word.

The unique thing that is brought by the biblical witness to this hermeneutic is not, then, that it requires a special way of reading.  Rather it is that it demands the attentive reading which is actually due to every human word - and unlike every other human word, it does not only demand or request our attention.  "God's revelation in the human word of Holy Scripture not only wants but can make itself said and heard." (471). In the Bible, human witnesses show themselves to have been utterly overcome by the subject matter; they do not in fact speak of themselves or their circumstances, but they only bear witness to God in Christ.  And in our reading of the Bible, this same 'gripping' can occur, when God himself causes us to see and hear his revelation in the words of the prophets and apostles.

This account will be developed further as we go.  But already I hope we are seeing, whatever we think of Barth's account in detail, something of the powerful expectation of encounter with God in the Scriptures.  That for me is the most exciting thing about his explication of this doctrine, and it has certainly shaped by own understanding and practice in beneficial ways.

Thoughts? Questions?

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (intro)

Some years back (checks number of years, slightly shocked to find that it's 6 years) I ran a couple of series of posts engaging in a bit more detail than I normally do with some big books.  I looked at Bonhoeffer's Ethics, and chapter VII of Barth's Church Dogmatics, the chapter which looks particularly at the doctrine of election.  I called the series 'Reader Response' to try to highlight that, although I would be attempting to explain what the 'big book' was actually saying, I was also going to include some of my own response to it, and thoughts about how it might inform church, theology, and Christian life today.

I'm going to try to resurrect that concept, albeit with significantly less time for reading at the moment than I had back in the day.  So whereas the previous series was a weekly effort, this one will be more irregular, and might sometimes end up looking at quite small chunks in each post.  We'll see how we go.

I'm going to be reading Church Dogmatics chapter III, which you'd find in volume I/2.  It is Barth's main treatment of the doctrine of Scripture.  Now, if conservative evangelicals know anything about Barth, it is that he is dangerously weak, if not actually heretical, on Scripture and its authority.  I think one of the things that gives this impression is the sheer size of Barth's treatment.  This chapter occupies nearly 300 pages, and is situated in an even larger discussion of the nature of revelation which takes up the whole of volumes I/1 and I/2.  There is a suspicion, I think, that anybody who needs to take this many pages to explain their view of Scripture is probably making things deliberately complex.  After all, doesn't it just boil down to the question of whether it's the Word of God or not?

Interestingly, for Barth that simply isn't the question, or even a question.  He takes it for granted that the dogmatic theologian, standing within and for the church, stands on the acknowledged reality of the word of God in Scripture.  To ask the apologetic question - is the Bible the word of God? - is to remove oneself from this position, if only hypothetically and for the purposes of discussion.  That isn't what Barth thinks he is doing.  For many contemporary evangelicals, the apologetic question is acute, and it is therefore hard to imagine a doctrine of Scripture that does not really engage with it.  But perhaps Barth can push us here to see things we wouldn't otherwise see.

For Barth the question is more 'how is the Bible the word of God?', boiling down into the practical question of what it looks like to live under the authority of the word of God in Scripture.  I hope that over the next few weeks we'll be able to see whether Barth's answers have anything to teach us.

A theology of self-service checkouts

Karl Barth said that 'in its basic form, humanity is fellow-humanity' (CD III/2, 285).  This claim is not difficult to defend from Scripture.  The creation narratives point out that it is not good for the man to be alone; human being, it seems, requires other human being in order to make it whole.  This is a point which goes well beyond the context of marriage, although that is a particular example of 'fellow-humanity'.  For Barth, of course, the primary evidence that humanity simply is fellow-humanity is derived from the Lord Jesus.  Christ came to be with us.  If real humanity is seen in Jesus, and only in Jesus, then what we see is humanity as being-with, humanity as fellow-humanity.

We see more than that.  If true humanity is seen in Jesus, then true humanity is being-with-in-service.  Christ's service of his people, his sacrificial love for them, was not something extra added to his humanity; it was a display of true humanity as that true humanity can only fully exist when energised by the presence of God.  Real humanity is not whole and entire to itself, but is oriented in service towards others.

Note that this is, for Barth, the 'basic form' of humanity.  We tend to think of the individual first, defining him or her within his or her own limits.  Only then do we look outward.  Being-with becomes something the human, complete in himself, does (or does not do); it is extrinsic.  This is doubly the case when it comes to being-with-in-service.  But this is not a true representation of humanity as we are taught to think of it in Jesus.  In actual fact, the self-complete human of our imagining is barely human at all; I said that we think of him or her within his or her own limits; but in fact in a crucial way this imaginary human - the human we like to think of ourselves as being - is free of limits.  He is whole and entire in himself.  He is a sphere which may come into contact with other spheres.  Whereas the true human is limited, and thus defined; he has shaped edges, and those shapes are contoured to the shapes of others.  Being-with is not a thing he chooses (or declines to choose); it is who and what he is.

Which brings me to self-service checkouts.  Self-service checkouts, and other self-service machines, are everywhere now.  It is very difficult to see a human being in my bank - the robot will deal with you.  Our local Sainsbury's has just taken out half it's old (manned) checkouts to replace them with more self-service machines.  Part of the motivation for the current rail strikes in the UK is apparently the threat that ticket office staff will be replaced with machine.

I confess, I make use of self-service checkouts.  They are quick and convenient (except when they aren't, because they go wrong, or the person in front of you in the queue doesn't understand the system).  But to a theological view of humanity, the self-service checkout is at the least an unfortunate development.  Anything that removes an element of being-with from our everyday tasks, usually in the name of efficiency, helps to conceal from me a central truth about myself: that I need other people, not merely to help me achieve my goals, but to be human.  The same sort of thing could be said about other trends in working life at the moment - the increase in remote working, for example.  Something important about being human, that sense of being-with-in-service is diminished.

Two arguments are usually advanced in favour of self-service checkouts.  The first is efficiency.  The business is viewed here as if it were a machine.  Why not cut out some unnecessary cogs?  Why not make the whole thing flow a bit faster?  But this assumes that the goal of human life is to get things done, and that anything that makes getting things done easier and quicker is therefore a good thing.  I can easily think just the same: anything that speeds up my weekly shop must be good.  But what if the snippet of conversation with a cashier is actually one of the most valuable things that can happen in the shop - more valuable than the goal-oriented act of shopping, because oriented towards another human being, a little slice of being-with that goes to the heart of our mutual humanity as created in the image of God?

The second argument is that this sort of automation removes low quality jobs, freeing people to do better things.  The idea is that we get rid of drudgery.  But I wonder whether this has a lot to do with our faulty perspective on service.  Sure, if we treat the shop like a big machine, and the people like parts of the machine, this might make sense.  But if they are actual human beings, whose basic existence is being-with-in-service, whose deepest reality is shaped by Jesus Christ as the one true Human, isn't there a huge dignity in serving in this way?  And doesn't the encounter at the checkout offer a brief opportunity for mutual service as you recognise one another's humanity?  I hope that if you're a Christian you always make some effort to chat with the cashier!

So anyway, I'm not proposing that we all be Luddites and resist every technological innovation in the sphere of work.  I'm just suggesting that we try to think Christianly about what these innovations do to us, in terms of our view of humanity.  Maybe sometimes that will mean resisting societal and technological change, but I suspect more often it will mean resisting the cramping effect on our own hearts and minds which these changes bring along, so that whatever is going on out there, I can still be an exhibit of real humanity, pointing to Christ the great Servant of his people.

Three reasons to meditate on the doctrine of the Trinity

On Trinity Sunday, here are three reasons (many more could be given) why it is good to think long and hard on the doctrine of the Trinity:

1. To know God.  Most basically, if you want to know God, you need to think about the Trinity.  God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, from eternity to eternity.  This is not an extra, deep and ultimately optional piece of knowledge about God; it is not something obscure which is only for advanced believers.  The doctrine of the Trinity describes God's name - Father, Son, Spirit - and somebody's name is perhaps the first and most basic thing you learn about them.  In one sense the whole of redemptive history can be read as God introducing himself, over the course of thousands of years, as Father, Son, Spirit.  It is his name.  And whereas for us a name is a fairly arbitrary label - many names have meaning, but they don't really relate to who we are - God is wholly himself in every presentation of himself: his name conveys the depths of his reality.  Knowing God as Trinity is both basic knowledge - his introductory name - and deep knowledge - because God is not divided, does not hide behind his name but is his name.  To know God, meditate on the doctrine of the Trinity.

2. To understand the gospel.  I take it that the gospel is essentially the good news that Jesus Christ has given himself up to death on the cross and been raised to new life.  His broken body and shed blood are given for the life of the world, for the forgiveness of sinners, for the redemption of the nations.  But how, and why, does this work?  How does the death of one man atone for the sins of countless millions?  Why can death not hold him?  The answer is manifold, but at root it is this: it is the human life of the eternal Son of God which is offered up on the cross and raised up from the tomb.  It is God himself, God the Son, who offers obedience to God the Father, taking up our cause.  And then again, how is it that this comes to affect us?  How does what Christ did there and then come to mean something for me here and now?  It is because the same God, God the Holy Spirit, lives in me and causes me to live.  One God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: this is at the foundation of the gospel history.

3. To delight in our blessings.  The gospel tells us that we are invited in to share the love that has always existed between Jesus and his Father; it tells us that we are given the life which Jesus has in himself, having been granted it from his Father.  The doctrine of the Trinity helps us to see that we are beckoned, indeed welcomed, into the life of God himself.  As we are joined to Christ by faith and by the Holy Spirit, we share in the love which the Father eternally has for his Son in the unity of the Spirit.  We are given by grace to share in the divine life of God.  The Spirit poured out on us, enabling us to pray and to praise, is nothing other than God himself - a God who is close at hand as well as far away, inhabiting our own hearts.  To meditate on the Trinity is to gain deep insight into the manifold ways in which we are blessed as believers.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit -
as it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be forever.
Amen!