All Things Seen & Unseen

The title of this post takes its cue from a book written by Tom Smail (1928-2012) on the first person in the Trinity, God the Father, a study, which I heartily recommend. Smail had a Church of Scotland background but later entered the Anglican ordained ministry; he was evangelical, and charismatic (but with reservations later in his career ) in churchmanship. He was a learned theologian and a godly man who wrote with care about church teachings-practices which he believed were becoming lopsided in emphasis.

Trinity Sunday is the first Sunday after Pentecost. It doesn't have a fixed date because Easter doesn't and therefore nor does Ascension Day (40 days post Easter) and Pentecost (50 days post Easter). I've been told Trinity Sunday, inspires a sense of trepidation in preachers in some Anglican churches who observe the day. That's unfortunate, for Anglicans at least, because the Anglican tradition places the teaching of the Trinity liturgically 1 at the centre of its worship. The scriptures set down to be read at Holy Communion for this Trinity Sunday are: Prov 8.1-4, 22-31; Ps 8.1-9; Rom 5.1-5; Jn 16.12-15. 2 The reader may ponder at this point why these scriptures have been chosen. (Mouse over the references to see the NKJV rendering.) The Trinity teaching is One Holy God revealing himself 3 in three persons: Father, Son, and Spirit. But the revelation of the three persons in the Scriptures is one of different relationships and roles among the three persons. For exampl...

I believe that Christians should take the opportunities they receive in their daily lives to speak the good news of God to others they meet.  I n this post I will be trying to lay out one way of understanding what lies behind such witness.  I t's common to represent initiation into the Christian walk as the beginning of a relationship with God . And there's nothing wrong with this conception as long as we keep in mind some important differences between human relationsh ips and relationships with God. 1. God I s N ot A P erson It 's common to hear f o lk say that God is a person. In the evangelical world it's almost a fundamental doctrine and taken for granted.  H owever, although God relates to us in a personal way for we are persons, his being--to use C. S. Lewis' gra phic term--is 'sup er - personal'. What Lewis meant by this language is that God transcends or is beyond what we describe as a person.

The teaching of the Trinity looms large in my life because I was raised in a non-trinitarian family. Indeed my grandpa was also non-trinitarian; he died too early for me to appreciate what he might have to say about this teaching but the family attended an early Pentecostal church in Melbourne founded in 1907 that seemed to have the view that it would only quote scripture with regard to its beliefs and nothing else. I say the latter because their statement of belief did not make definitive statements about God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost but simply quoted scripture. (Interestingly, this church was very open to Trinitarians worshipping with them and was not hostile or antagonistic towards them; nor did it actively speak against Trinitarianism.) It took me some time to work my way out of this frame of belief and it came about through a most unusual way. Although my family's belief about Jesus' deity was my no means identical with that of the Jehovah's Witne...

When I hear some recent church songs I wonder whether Christianity has become a Jesus-only movement! Some songs talk about nothing else but Jesus. Of course we all love Jesus but the calling of the Son is to lead us to the Father. I appreciate that the Trinity is heavy-duty teaching in so many ways because heretics stand ready to demote the Son to a mere creature and the Moslems want to relegate him to an inferior prophet to Mohammed. And Judaism sees him in even lower terms. And Christians too claim not to understand it! Yet the teaching makes the Christian religion distinctive among all religions! But we are Christians, followers of Jesus because he is God's son who reveals the Father through the power of the Spirit. What we do in our songs/hymns we are likely to do in our prayers. So some will pray to the Son directly and never mention the Father. That's not the practice of the biblical writers who consistently pray to the Father through the Son in the power of t...