My Next Sermon
Sep 5th, 2008 by Ben
It’s the ‘who cares’ of the Trinity.
We believe in it, but the doctrine of the Trinity feels pretty abstract and not altogether relevant to daily Christian life. And sometimes it feels a bit embarrassing; it’s not the first thing I talk about with someone I’m sharing the gospel with.
Is it such a big deal?
Couple of helpful blog posts on this topic by a Lutheran blogger, here and here.
The key point is that the Trinity is fundamentally not about the abstract concepts to which it is often confined, but about our baptism (the clearest Trinitarian text in the Bible being Jesus’ command to baptise people “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”, and another clearly Trinitarian text being the accounts of Jesus’ own baptism).
And this leads on to our understanding of God being relational and Jesus-centred. We don’t start with an abstract notion of God to which Jesus and the Christian life are then somehow related; rather, we start with Jesus, enter into the Christian life through baptism and faith, and it is in that context that we then learn who God is.
So the relevance to the Christian life is that the whole of our life as Christians is lived “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” through our baptism, and the relevance to evangelism is that we are not merely calling people to sign on the dotted line and “get saved”, but to enter into a new life in fellowship with God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
If the Trinity seems irrelevant to daily Christian life and to evangelism, then perhaps that’s because baptism has become irrelevant to daily Christian life and to evangelism. And perhaps the way back to the Trinity lies through a renewed attention to baptism (in particular, a renewed remembrance of one’s own baptism) rather than by trying to convince oneself that the Athanasian Creed is an inspiring piece of prose.
He is…