By Nicholas Norman-Krause
August 26, 2022
In the previous post, I discussed three principles for teaching the doctrine of the Trinity in the context of catechesis. Because catechesis is ordered to preparing persons for full participation in the Church’s worship in Word and Sacrament, and also to the maturing of persons already participating in this worship, I suggested that Trinitarian catechesis reflect these goals. Thus, regarding the sources of catechesis in the Trinity, I suggested Scripture and liturgy are the primary ways Christians encounter the Triune God and so are the most appropriate places to begin reflecting on the Trinity. With respect to form, I framed Trinitarian catechesis as a kind of grammatical formation, wherein one learns proficiency in speaking to and with the Triune God, which is the primary substance of Christian worship, prayer, proclamation of the Gospel, and reading of Scripture. Finally, with respect to purpose, I showed how catechesis in the Trinity can be a kind of elucidation of the Christian experience of God in prayer. Rather than a theoretical “add-on” to Christian worship, the Trinity is, in fact, the very condition, possibility, structure, and shape of prayer. Thus, reflection on the Trinity is, among other things, reflection on participation in God.
In this post, I want to unpack a bit more this connection between prayer and the Trinity. I draw on some of the earliest Christian theological writings on prayer, from the second and third centuries, which center on the Lord’s Prayer, as well as my own experience teaching the Lord’s Prayer in catechetical contexts. My point will be rather simple: the Lord’s Prayer is only fully intelligible when understood within a larger Trinitarian account of our participation in the divine life. By the Holy Spirit, we are united to Christ, adopted into his sonship, and so enabled to address his Father as ours. And thus, to pray the Lord’s Prayer is to come to participate in the Triune life of God. For this reason, reflection on the Trinity properly belongs to the catechesis of prayer in general, and to the study of the Lord’s Prayer in particular. But not only is consideration of the Trinity necessary for consideration of prayer, the experience and practice of prayer is also primary source material for reflection upon the Trinity. So, in what follows, I explore both how one might teach the Trinity in the context of catechetical instruction on prayer, as well as how consideration of the latter provides an important, though often neglected, source for the reflection on the former. I begin with this second notion first.
Trinitarian Incorporation: A “Prayer-Based” Model of the Trinity
In her important and ambitious book God, Sexuality, and the Self, Sarah Coakley describes two ways or “models” evident in early Christian approaches to the Trinity. The first is what she calls a “linear,” revelatory model, which considers the Trinitarian persons first and foremost within the narrative and historical arc of biblical revelation (111). In such a model, the focus tends to fall on the Father-Son relation, prefigured in the story of Israel and fully revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of the Incarnate Son, and then secondarily on the Holy Spirit as “purveyor” of that relationship to the church (111). The Gospel of John, the Acts of the Apostles, the Nicene Creed, Augustine’s De trinitate, and many other early Christian texts reveal this strategy, and Coakley takes it to be the standard approach. One might consider the kind of instruction laid out in my first post to be of this kind.
A second model, one which Coakley perceives in the writings of Paul, Origen, and Tertullian, among others, is what she calls the “incorporative” or “prayer-based” model. In this strategy, Trinitarian reflection proceeds first from the Holy Spirit’s incorporation of Christians into the Triune life of God, wherein they receive the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, are thereby joined to Christ and made to share in his Sonship through adoption, and made children of the Father. This incorporative model takes Romans 8, what I have called a kind of “Trinitarian phenomenology of prayer,” as its key text. It is here that one sees what is noticed in the experience of contemplative and charismatic prayer: “that the dialogue of prayer is strictly speaking not a simple communication between an individual and a divine monad, but rather a movement of divine reflexivity, a sort of answering of God to God in and through the one who prays” (113, emphasis mine). Becoming involved in God’s own communion and self-communication—what Paul calls “praying in the Spirit”—is the beginning of Trinitarian reflection on this incorporative model. It is in prayer that one thinks the Trinity not simply as an object, but as a communion of persons one is directly involved in and with.
These models are not mutually exclusive and the distinction between them is not absolute, even as, Coakley argues, the incorporative was sometimes neglected in the emergence and development of Nicene orthodoxy, which drew much from the linear model. At its best, Christian Trinitarian reflection joins the two and sees them as complementary of one another.
What the incorporative or prayer-based approach to the Trinity importantly stresses is two-fold. First, it clearly emphasizes the equality and agency of the Holy Spirit. By according the Spirit a kind of priority—it is by the Spirit that we are adopted into Christ’s Sonship—the prayer-based model emphasizes the Spirit’s role as both the effector of our participation in the divine life and the key agent in our communion and communication in that life. As Coakley remarks, it is noteworthy that Athanasius, whose early work On the Incarnation exhibited a “muted,” almost non-existent pneumatology, came in the latter part of his career, after his time in exile praying with the desert monks, to center the theme of Spirit-effected adoption into Christ, à la Romans 8, and at the same time affirm and vigorously defend the ontological equality of the Spirit (136). “It is through the Spirit,” Athanasius writes, “that we are partakers of God.” And in this, “the unction and seal that is in us belongs, not to the nature of things originate, but to the nature of the Son who, through the Spirit who is in him, joins us to the Father” (Letters to Serapion, I.24, quoted in Coakley, 136).
Second, the incorporative, prayer-based model of the Trinity helps guard against a kind of “extrinsicism,” wherein the Trinity is approached as a kind of conceptual object or puzzle, rather than by way of personal communion. One of the dangers of this extrinsicism is that it tends toward a kind of “picture-thinking”: if the Trinity is an object like any other object, it can be captured and explained in images and analogues. Yet these inevitably lead to misconstruing the relationship between divine unity and the distinction of persons. But in the experience of mystical participation—our union with Christ by the Spirit wherein we share in his Sonship to the Father—God is known as entirely one, even as the distinct persons are clearly differentiated by their works. As Coakley writes, “[T]he pray-er’s total perception of God is here found to be ineluctably trifaceted” (114).
If Coakley is right about the Church’s tendency to neglect this “incorporative” model in preference for the “linear” model—and I think she’s onto something here (consider, for instance, she notes, the surprising absence of discussion of Romans 8, a thickly Trinitarian biblical text, in many Nicene and post-Nicene writings on the Trinity)—then catechetical instruction on prayer will be an important way of shoring up this imbalance. If teaching the Trinity in the context of the creeds, for instance, takes the “linear” approach, and rightly so, then approaching the doctrine again in discussion of prayer can complement this linear approach with the important insights of the incorporative.
On Trinitarian Prayer: Participation and The Lord’s Prayer
I am suggesting, then, that explicit reflection on the nature of the Trinity in the context of catechesis on prayer is precisely where the kind of incorporative approach to the Trinity can be pursued. What the above discussion of this incorporative approach reveals is that the activity of prayer itself is Trinitarian, and so prayer discloses to the Christian the nature of God as Triune. Prayer, in other words, can teach the Trinity. But only if prayer is sufficiently understood, grasped, and thematized in Trinitarian terms. This, of course, is the work of catechesis in prayer.
I take this insight—that the practice of prayer needs to be informed by reflection on the Trinity—to be shared by many early Christian theologians. It’s no coincidence, in my view, that the writers of three of the most important early Christian treatises on prayer—Tertullian (De oratione), Cyprian (De Dominica oratione), and Origen (De oratione)—were also some of the first to begin working out the doctrine of the Trinity in the second and third centuries. Trinity and prayer were, for them, intimately related. Moreover, it is precisely in their writings on prayer, and the Lord’s Prayer in particular, that we see some of their richest Trinitarian insights.
One need look no further, when reading these treatises on prayer, than commentary on the first words of the Lord’s Prayer to find these writers engaged in Trinitarian reflection. “[W]hen we say ‘Father,’” writes Tertullian, “the Son is invoked in the Father, for [Christ] says: ‘I and the Father are one’ (Jn 10.30)” (De oratione, 2). Likewise, Cyprian writes that our “address[ing] the Lord as ‘Father’” is possible because we are “considered sons of God, as Christ is the son of God” (De Dominica oratione, 11). “None of us would have dared use this name in prayer,” he continues, except that the Son has “authorized us to pray after this manner,” that is, he has shared his own status as Son with us (11). Those who pray the Lord’s Prayer may address Jesus’s Father as their Father because, as Origen says, they “are stamped with sonship” and “conformed” to the Son who shares communion with the Father (De oratione, xxii.4).
Standing in the background of these writers’ interpretation of the phrase “Our Father” is Romans 8, Paul’s description of adoption into Christ’s Sonship by the Holy Spirit. Origen’s recurrent references to Romans 8 throughout De oratione, especially in his commentary on the words “Our Father,” and his emphasis that it is by being “mingled with the Spirit” that we become “partakers of the Word of God” (x.2, quoted in Coakley, 127), reveal just how central the notion of Spirit-adoption is for understanding the Lord’s Prayer. For Origen, the Lord’s Prayer only makes sense when one considers how one becomes a child of the Father. Christians are not “children of God” in an abstract or metaphorical sense, and Origen cautions against “addressing such an expression” as ‘Our Father’ to God “unless we have become genuine sons” (xxii.3, emphasis mine). Christians are more specifically, adopted sons and daughters who share in Christ’s Sonship by virtue of their baptism, union with Christ’s crucified and resurrected body, and indwelling by his Spirit. This adoption makes them genuine children of the Father.
What we learn from these early treatises on prayer is that Lord’s Prayer, indeed all prayer, is not fully intelligible except within a Trinitarian frame. Thus, unpacking the implicit Trinitarian logic within the Lord’s Prayer becomes essential to aiding persons’ understanding of what they are doing when they pray Jesus’s own prayer to the Father.
And what is it that Christians are doing? Nothing other than coming to participate—be incorporated—into the communion and self-communication of the Trinity. It is only because we share in Christ’s Sonship by the Spirit that Jesus can give us his own words to address his Father as ours.
I’ll conclude with a very practical suggestion for catechists interested in trying to incorporate this kind of Trinitarian reflection into their teaching on prayer. It is simply to approach the opening address of the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father,” alongside other biblical texts that speak of the Fatherhood of God, Sonship, adoption, and the indwelling of the Spirit. Considering the invocation “Our Father” alongside rich passages like Romans 8, John 17, Galatians 3, and others, the catechist can invite contemplation of the mystery of participation in the Triune life which makes possible the Christian’s joining in the intimacy of the Son’s prayer to his Father.
Rev. Dr. Nicholas Norman-Krause is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University and an assisting priest at Christ Church Waco. He serves as a research fellow for the IRCC.