Prayer for the Nation

PRAYER FOR THE NATION

Lord, make our nation great, not for our sake, but for Your glory,

Lord, help us fulfill Your mission to live not only for ourselves, but also for the world that You loved and created and redeemed.

Help us avoid the temptation of power for power’s sake and heed Your words that “to whom much is given, much is required.”

Let us truly be a superpower, not to conquer and dominate the world, but to love the world with a love that can only come from You.

That whether the nations love or hate us, they do so because of Your love that flows through us.

Lord, make our nation great, help us to work together to break the bondage of poverty that afflicts so many in our land.

Help us meet the oppressed in the depth of their affliction, not simply with a warm meal but with a way out of their condition.

Though You have said we will always have the poor, help us not grow weary in feeding the hungry and caring for the sick.

With compassion and wisdom and generosity help us free them in Your name so that they will not exchange the bondage of poverty for the bondage of dependency.

Help us work tirelessly to change what is within our nation that creates such bondage and preserve that which stands against it.

And, Lord, help those in bondage to see that You have created them in Your image, not to be slaves to sin or ignorance or people who would seek to take advantage of their situation. But You have created them for a purpose and You have redeemed them at a great price.

Lord, help us fuel competition with love rather than greed.

Lord, help our prisons to be empty and our laws become dusty because we are a people who do what is right because we live by what You have written in our hearts.

Lord, let us lead the world in showing that You can bring together those from far and near, tear down walls, and in our diversity create unity, in our differences establish peace.

Lord, remind us that You make us strong to defend the weak.

That You make us rich to help the poor

That You make us wise to teach the unwise

That You give us eyes to see for the blind

And mouths to speak for those who have no voice

That You give us arms to reach up to You and out to each other

Help us never see Your blessings as something we have earned or deserved, but to know they are from Your abundant grace.

Most of all, remind us constantly that none of this is possible without You.

That we cannot love with Your love without Your Spirit.

That it is You who will see us through the difficult and dangerous times.

That it is You at work even when it seems we are losing.

That in any progress or success that we have, it is only because of Your wonderful, amazing grace.

Lord, make our nation great, not because we have made ourselves into our own image of greatness.

Make our nation great because we reflect Your image, the Most Holy Triune God. Make us great in Your love.

Changing the Game

So my proposal is to change the game, so to speak, when it comes to Trinitarian theology.
The path that I am proposing is

 acceptance-experience-understanding

a path that sounds like Anselm's "faith seeking understanding," but different in application.

I am also proposing setting aside the typical path in Trinitarian theology of

understanding-acceptance

This path has difficulties because it relies first on the finite human mind attempting to understand the infinite. If understanding does not occur, the doctrine is often rejected, accepted in some vague form, or accepted dogmatically. As a result, the doctrine has little to no relevance in the Christian experience, at least not that one consciously acknowledges. It is merely theological trivia revered as divine mystery of the incomprehensible God.

The first path does not reject the work of those who have developed Trinitarian theology. Rather, it is quite grateful for the work done in the past and that continues to be done. This path accepts the conclusions that these giants articulated - God is Trinity - One God in Three Persons. Not one God with three masks or modes or three Gods equal or unequal, but One God in Three Persons. And this path accepts this second belief - that only a God who is Trinity could have done the work of creation and salvation in the way that the Bible reveals that it was done. In personal terms, only a Trinitarian God could have saved us in the way and with the results that He did.

The way that I have summarized this previously is: "Without the cross, we cannot know the Trinity. Without the Trinity, there is no cross. The cross is the full revelation of God. The Trinity is who God is. The cross is our starting point. The Trinity is our destination."

By accepting the conclusions, we can avoid (at least at the outset) from getting lost in the Trinitarian forest. We accept the revelation and live it. As we live out the results of having been redeemed by a Trinitarian God for Trinitarian fellowship, we come to understand what we could not have fully known or appreciated prior to this experience. This also helps us free the doctrine of the Trinity from the ivory towers of academia and take the doctrine to the pews where we ask the question: How then shall we live?

The Trinitarian Problem?

The problem with the Trinity is that people treat the Trinity as a problem. They view the Trinity as the great cosmic puzzle that eludes all analogies or as that enigmatic, essential doctrine that must be constantly defended against attacks from inside and outside the church. How can God be three persons yet one God? When the answer is unsatisfying, people retreat to dogmatic acceptance ("He just is") to rejection ("He cannot be"). The answer must not be so important, they think, otherwise God would not have made it this hard.

Up front, know that I do not believe the Trinity is a problem to be solved or defended. Rather, I believe that the Trinity is God who should be experienced. This might be a disappointment for some people, but there are plenty of books and Web sites dedicated to solving or defending the Trinity. Perhaps in living our lives in relationship to and as a reflection of the Triune God, that experience will reaffirm the Scriptural data and demonstrate to the world that living in the image of the Triune God is significantly different from living in the image of a non-Trinitarian god or no god at all.

Two of the keys to wisdom is knowing where to start and what questions to ask. Perhaps, we need to rethink where our thinking on the Trinity begins and what questions we should ask. The starting place might be acceptance of the doctrine revealed in Scripture and affirmed by the early church in both the East and West and reaffirmed by so many subsequent denominations, other groups, and individual believers throughout the centuries. And perhaps the question should not be "How God is Trinity?" but "Why is God Trinity?" or at least "Why has God revealed Himself as Trinity?" Is there significance to the revelation of God as Trinity other than it being interesting information about the God who made us?

One of the first areas that I want to explore is the significance of the Trinity. My preliminary thoughts on the matter have led me to this belief - The future of the church, if it is to be the church of the Triune God, hinges on how Trinitarian the church is and will be. The church in some form or another will always exist, but the church that fully embraces what it means to be citizens in the kingdom of the Triune God will be Trinitarian.

The significance of this is not simply another version of the self-fulfillment that plagues so much of modern Christianity. For too many people, Christianity is an individualistic search for meaning or purpose. If we are to be Trinitarian, we do fulfill God's purpose for our lives, but our purpose is beyond ourselves and cannot be accomplished by ourselves. When we, the worshippers and lovers of the Triune God, live in this world in a Trinitarian way, God reveals Himself through us, not through each individual, but through our relationships with each other. And while the revelation of God is in and of itself important, the God who is love has yet another purpose. His revelation through our Trinitarian communities of faith is so that the world may know and that the world might have opportunity to reconcile to God through faith in Jesus Christ.

So much relies then on the church of Jesus Christ being Trinitarian. Our ministries must be Trinitarian. Our worship must be Trinitarian. Our relationships. Our evangelism and preaching. Our lives. Our vision. Our love. So that the world may know.

And so it begins

This blog is about all things Trinitarian. Let me state up front that I do not think that I am an expert - in fact, I have yet to find an expert on the Trinity. I have devoted much of the past few years to studying and thinking about the Trinity - but not nearly enough. In fact, the purpose of this blog is primarily to help me think out loud and to keep me accountable to keep thinking and writing. If anyone wants to help me in this process and read and react to what I write, he or she is quite welcome. But if my readers are purely a figment of my imagination, that's okay too because these imaginary readers will contact me in an imaginary way and ask why I am not writing more. (Random thought: if a blog falls in the forest and no one is there to read it, does it make a sound?)

If you are a reader, real or imagined, my purpose is to encourage people to begin to think more on the Trinity and in a Trinitarian way. This blog is a small step in that direction. I do not want this to be overly technical and will try to keep it that way. So whether you are well versed in Trinitarian thought or are not even sure what Trinity or Trinitarian means, you are welcome here.