In the Provisional Liturgy of the German Reformed Church developed in the 1850′s under the guidance of Philip Schaff (image right) and John Williamson Nevin, the services of worship developed began with a statement that may seem strange to modern ears. This was not a formula reserved for communion services alone, but for all the times where God’s people gather for the Word and Prayer on the Lord’s Day.
The services begin thus:
“In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
to which the congregation says “Amen.”
In addition to the above, Schaff and Nevin’s liturgy contains other Trinitarian references that modern Christians should note: the weekly prayers according to the Christian year which summarized the recommended scripture readings for the particular day often end with phraseology that directs the prayer to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit whereas we are used to praying solely “in Jesus’ Name.”
While modern liturgists call the season after the feast of Pentecost by the name “Pentecost”, this liturgy maintains the seasonal name as ”Trinity”.
Though the joke goes that the difference between liturgists and terrorists is that one might possibly negotiate successfully with terrorists, these elements of the influential but never “official” liturgy cannot simply be written off to Schaff and Nevin’s liturgical or theological eccentricities.
No, the repeated reference to the Triune name has an importance we must reappropriate for ourselves if we are to renew the church and, for that matter, ourselves.
Matthew 28:19, embedded within the “Great Commission”, is the source of the phrase in question. It is, furthermore, the phrase that accompanies the baptism of every Christian as the presiding minister declares prior to the act of baptism “I baptize you in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
The precise nature of God’s action in baptism was formerly as hotly debated as the mystery of Christ’s presence in the Supper. The historic church at the time of the Reformation in its Evangelical, Reformed and subsequent Congregationalist branches which merged into today’s United Church of Christ were all agreed about one thing regarding baptism… For them baptism was the act whereby God grafted the one baptized into Christ’s visible body, the Church (To be sure, the issue of baptism is hardly debated today because we do not consider baptism God’s act in the church at all, but solely our act or our testimony to God. Our forefathers would consider this a heresy related to Socinianism).
To remind ourselves of the Reformation era agreement about baptism, we need only turn to two documents briefly. The Congregationalist Confession, the Savoy Declaration, in Article 29, paragraphs 1 & 6 states the significance of baptism in this way:
Baptism is a sacrament of the New Testament, ordained by Jesus Christ to be unto the party baptised a sign and seal of the covenant of grace, of his ingrafting into Christ, of regeneration, of remission of sins, and of his giving up unto God through Jesus Christ to walk in newness of life; which ordinance is by Christ’s own appointment to be continued in his Church until the end of the world.
The efficacy of baptism is not tied to that moment of time wherein it is administered; yet notwithstanding, by the right use of this ordinance, the grace promised is not only offered, but really exhibited and conferred by the Holy Ghost to such (whether of age or infants) as that grace belongeth unto, according to the counsel of God’s own will in his appointed time.
The Second Helvetic Confession describes baptism in this way:
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE BAPTIZED. Now to be baptized in the name of Christ is to be enrolled, entered, and received into the covenant and family, and so into the inheritance of the sons of God; yes, and in this life to be called after the name of God; that is to say, to be called a son of God; to be cleansed also from the filthiness of sins, and to be granted the manifold grace of God, in order to lead a new and innocent life. Baptism, therefore, calls to mind and renews the great favor God has shown to the race of mortal men. For we are all born in the pollution of sin and are the children of wrath. But God, who is rich in mercy, freely cleanses us from our sins by the blood of his Son, and in him adopts us to be his sons, and by a holy covenant joins us to himself, and enriches us with various gifts, that we might live a new life. All these things are assured by baptism. For inwardly we are regenerated, purified, and renewed by God through the Holy Spirit and outwardly we receive the assurance of the greatest gifts in the water, by which also those great benefits are represented, and, as it were, set before our eyes to be beheld.
While it would be possible to go on in discussing the meaning of baptism in those churches which subsequently became the United Church of Christ, it is enough to list these citations for today’s purpose.*
Our forefathers in the faith held a high view of baptism as the God-ordained act which assured its recipients of all the Gospel’s blessings, if they would but embrace them and walk in the “newness of life” appropriate for the baptized as Paul discusses in Romans 6. By invoking the baptismal formula and the Triune name at the beginning of every worship service and calling the people to respond, they declared that the acts of worship which followed were nothing other than the self-presentation of the redeemed people of God to God by the grace of God (Romans 12:1,2)! What followed, then, in the elements of the liturgy were not the acts of mere men “doing religious things” in an attempt to “appease” God or even provide a “service” which produced “benefits” for God.
The worship of the baptized then, consisted wholly of the acts of people who are redeemed by divine grace, called to gather by divine grace, and offering the sacrifices of thanksgiving by divine grace. The baptismal formula, in other words, marks the hour of worship as the historical fruit of grace flowing into history thanks to the Triune God. Worship is nothing less than the grace empowered human response to God’s “service” to us in Word and Sacrament. Worship then is not a “work” we “accomplish” in our own strength or wisdom. For these reasons, the opening prayer of a worship service should not be considered our invocation of God as if He were absent and waiting to be summoned by us. It is the reverse where we are summoned into God’s presence! In restating the baptismal formula we acknowledge that we come into God’s presence at His beckoning, in His strength, and for His purposes.
Furthermore, the Trinitarian references within the weekly prayers and the denotation of the season after Pentecost as the “Trinity Season” relate to this biblical and historic concern to see all we do as Christians as the outworking of the call and privileges signed and sealed by our baptism into the Name of the Triune God. Without these reminders and encouragements, we are all to likely to believe the Christian Life can be lived by our own strength and wisdom. Living the”Christian Life” however requires and presupposes the coordinated actions of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who together savingly unite us to the incarnate, crucified and risen One who is truly God and truly Man, Jesus Christ.
Our reformation heritage is overwhelmingly united in the insistence that the Christian Life is lived entirely by God’s enabling grace from first to last (“sola gratia”). Furthermore, this faith flows from the working of the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who acts in cooperation and coordination throughout salvation history in creation, providence, and redemption – from Genesis to Revelation.
To pray continually without reference to the Trinity is to risk a piecemeal faith that neglects the grand sweep of God’s working. This results in an infantile and piecemeal faith. It leads us to believe that cultists like Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses who claim to “pray in Jesus’ Name” are “just like us” when they are, in fact, polytheists or Arians respectively who in fact deny the reality of the Biblical God as He reveals Himself.
To call the season after Pentecost something other than the “Trinity” season is to potentially link the “semester of the Church” to something other than the saving grace signed and sealed in baptism. By calling it the season of “Pentecost” only, we potentially risk equating the work of the Church to a post-baptismal second work of grace not available to the church at large. Or by doing so we might convey that only the Holy Spirit works in the church now and fail to note our Lord’s ongoing work as our Prophet, Priest, and King. These may seem overblown concerns in light of the modern corruption of the church, but as one reads through Schaff and Nevin’s liturgy, our modern minimizing of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity becomes apparent simply by the strangeness of the Trinitarian Name variously expressed upon our lips.
Because the doctrine of the Trinity is a doctrine so alien to us practically speaking, it might be wise for us to reinstate the use of this baptismal formula frequently in our worship as an important first step in renewing the church. In these times when salvation through Jesus Christ exclusively is questioned, perhaps the modern heirs of the reformation should begin with this slightly adapted form of the baptismal formula:
“In The Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the One True God”
This joins the formula from the Great Commission with the Shema of Israel (Deuteronomy 6:4-6) which declares the uniqueness of Yahweh who is none other than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
In doing so, we will be returning to our roots in the Reformation and the original faith of the churches which now form the United Church of Christ.
*It should be noted that when the United Church of Christ in 1997 entered into “A Formula of Agreement Between the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Reformed Church in America, and the United Church of Christ” it was, in effect, confirming this position on baptism because it affirmed its unity in doctrine with bodies like the PCUSA whose “Book of Confessions” contain the same statements yet today. This position, as Romans 6 makes clear, requires that we pursue lives of holiness empowered by divine grace. Sadly, the UCC’s high baptismal affirmation in this act was not accompanied by a consistent call to holiness in all areas of life.
