The Trinity and My Prayers

Who do I pray to? The Father? The Son? The Spirit? God? The Trinity? All of the above?

Here is the theologically correct answer: pray to the Father, in the name of the Son, through the power of the Holy Spirit. Most New Testament prayers follow that pattern. There are a few recorded prayers to Jesus in the New Testament and, as far as I know, no recorded prayers to the Holy Spirit. But the Son is a divine person, and the Spirit is a divine person, and you can pray to them. But don’t forget … about the way the Spirit and the Son occupy the offices of intercessor and mediator to bring us before the Father. There is a current that runs that direction, and when you know that, you can immerse yourself in that current. It is the logic of how prayer is actually working anyway. Think about it: if you are in the habit of praying to Jesus, are you approaching Jesus the eternal Son of God on the basis of your own merits and deserving? No. Then on what basis? On the basis of his propitiation and mediation. Even prayer to Jesus has to be prayer in Jesus name. So you can see how that current of mediation runs in that direction, and you can be aligned to it by praying habitually to the Father in Jesus’ name.

Fred Sanders in The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything.

What Is the Trinity For?

[T]he first and clearest answer has to be that the Trinity isn’t ultimately for anything, any more than God is for the purpose of anything. Just as you wouldn’t ask what purpose God serves or what function he fulfills, it makes no sense to ask what the point of the Trinity is or what purpose the Trinity serves. The Trinity isn’t for anything beyond itself, because the Trinity is God. God is God in this way: God’s way of being God is to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit simultaneously from all eternity, perfectly complete in a triune fellowhip of love. If we don’t take this as our starting point, everything we say about the practical relevance of the Trinity could lead us to one colossal misunderstanding: thinking of God the Trinity as as a means to some other end, as if God were the Trinity in order to make himself useful. But God the Trinity is the end, the goal, the telos, the omega. In himself and without any reference to a created world or the plan of salvation, God is that being who exists as the triune love of the Father for the Son in the unity of the Spirit. The boundless life that God lives in himself, at home, within the happy land of the Trinity above all worlds, is perfect. It is complete, inexhaustibly full, and infinitely blessed. 

—Fred Sanders in The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything.

When it comes to the study the Trinity, or the study of God in general, we’re too quick, I think, to run straight to the practical implications and ask ourselves, “What does this doctrine mean for me? How does it affect my life? And what should I do in light of this truth about God?”

Of course, learning about God does have practical implications. But first, because God as he is in himself is “the end, the goal, the telos, the omega,” we should desire to know God for his sake. To get at what God is in himself, we can ask, “What is he like ‘without any reference to a created world or the plan of salvation’?” Priority #1 is simply gazing for a while on the answer to this question and marveling at what we see.

Book Review: Can We Still Believe the Bible?

An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions by Craig L. Blomberg

My pastor recently asked me to purchase this book for the church library because he thought there were people in my church who would benefit from it. He also suggested that I review it for the church newsletter. This is the review I wrote. If I had been reviewing it just for my blog, it would have been a different review. For one thing, I would have had no word limit! And the readers of this blog are different than the general membership of my church (and yours, too, probably!). If I had been reviewing for the blog only, I would have mentioned a few places where I disagree with certain remarks Blomberg makes. He’s an egalitarian, for instance, and a bit combative in his approach to the egalitarian/complimentarian issue. But it seemed inappropriate for me to get into those issues in the newsletter, and they have very little bearing on the arguments he makes for the reliability of the Bible, anyway. 

I also would have mentioned that this is not an easy read, something I took out of the review because I needed to shorten it. 

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As you might expect from the title and subtitle, this book addresses several specific recent objections to the reliability of the Bible. You may have seen or read some of these arguments against the Bible’s trustworthiness in television documentaries, magazine articles, or books written by skeptics. In each of the six objections Craig Blomberg tackles, he shows that “new findings, or at least more intense study of slightly older discoveries, have actually strengthened the case for the reliability or trustworthiness of the Scriptures, even while the most publicized opinions in each area have claimed that there are now reasons for greater skepticism!”

The first chapter addresses the reliability of the biblical text we have now, nearly 2000 years after the last of the books of the New Testament were written. Is it true that all we have are hopelessly corrupt copies of the original New Testament writings, copies so full of variants—400,000 is the number some give—that it is impossible to know what the authors originally wrote?

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