I know a pastor who admits to suffering from a condition I like to call trinipraedicarephobia: “fear of preaching the Trinity.” In this, my inaugural theology column, I want to address this fear. I submit to you that the Trinity is the ground, grammar and goal of all genuinely Christian outreach.
Let me get one possible misunderstanding out of the way. In encouraging pastors to talk about the Trinity—to do theology and thereby be theologians—I am not backsliding into the academy, or commending the use of technical Latin terms, or condoning something irrelevant. I am rather asking pastors to delve deeper into the Bible, to understand not only the diverse parts of the Bible in their cultural and historical contexts, but also how they compose a single story and unified subject matter of the Bible.
Theology is faith thinking coherently about this big biblical picture and our place in it.
The Ground of Outreach
Irenaeus, the second-century bishop of Lyons, is a good example of how pastor theologians should preach and teach the Scriptures. He directs his most important insight against false teachers: The Old and New Testaments belong together, paired witnesses to a single story, “one consistent melody” about the one God who both creates and redeems the world. It is a story that embraces all of human history. It is a story that centers on and sums up all things in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
The story of Jesus has everything to do with outreach. Outreach covers all the efforts made by individuals or organizations, like churches, to connect with people, either to share knowledge, provide services, or build relationships. Outreach aims to extend the sphere of one’s presence and activity (one’s reach) for the good of others.
The Grammar of Outreach
Economy is the term Irenaeus uses when he’s speaking about the overarching story that holds the whole Bible together. It’s a biblical term (from the Greek oikonomia: household order or management) and refers to God’s purpose for creation and the unfolding in time of his eternal plan of salvation. Paul refers to it twice in Ephesians as “a plan for the fullness of time” (1:10) and as “the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God” (3:9).
The economy is both a narrative and a historical arrangement, authored by God. In a striking image, Irenaeus speaks of God’s Word and Spirit as the Father’s “two hands,” the means by which he created the heavens and the earth. There’s biblical precedent for the analogy: “You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your hands” (Heb. 1:10; cf. Isa. 60:21). To speak of an “economy” of creation is to recall the Son’s and Spirit’s work alongside the Father’s.
There is also a two-handed, three-personed economy of salvation. Irenaeus describes how the Father, through the work of the Son and Spirit, also redeems and recreates humanity. The same two hands that formed Adam in the beginning are now forming a new humanity, in the second Adam, Jesus Christ. This was the plan all along.
The Son accomplishes redemption; the Spirit applies it. We need the work of both hands because, as Calvin says in Institutes of the Christian Religion: Book 3, “as long as Christ remains outside of us … all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us.”
The Goal of Outreach
God, then, is shaping a new humanity. This is the point of the divine outreach. In an essay for Comment magazine titled “The Church Upward and Outward: Implications of the Ascension” pastor-theologian Chris Ganski describes the church as God’s workshop for a new humanity. The divine potter is using both hands, Word and Spirit, to mold congregational clay into a thing of beauty: a temple; a dwelling place for heaven on earth.
Local churches are the result of God’s two-handed outreach and a means of reaching out even further. The Father reaches out to his children and, through his children, to the world. To think that the church’s outreach depends on human energy, activity and ingenuity, however, is too heavy a load to carry—a far cry from Jesus’ assurance that his burden is light (Matt. 11:30). What lightens the load is the realization that Christian ministers are empowered by an energy far greater than anything else on earth.
Reaching Out for Communion
To engage in Christian outreach is to be caught up in the work of God’s own two hands: the proclamation of the Word in the power of the Spirit. Who knew the economy could be cause for rejoicing … and hope. There is no greater privilege, or encouragement, than knowing we are participants in God’s triune outreach—the ultimate source of personal, community and cosmic renewal.
What confidence we have should not be in our own communication skills, but God’s. Left to our own rhetorical devices, there is little reason to think that we can persuade darkened minds or convert hardened hearts. Yet we proclaim boldly, knowing that we owe the measure of our success to the fact that God’s two hands have our backs.
Outreach without theology is in vain, unprofitable; theology without outreach is voided, unfinished.
Have you ever seen a child reach out their arms to their mother, only to have the mother swoop the child up in her arms and say, “I could you eat you up!” This is a picture of successful outreach: communion.
It’s a picture that calls to mind another scene, that of Jesus contemplating the people to whom his Father reached out: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem … how often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings” (Luke 13:34).
The desired result of God’s reaching out to us with his two hands is our reaching out to him with ours. But instead of God eating us up, or a mother hen gathering her brood, it is rather we who partake of him as we take and eat the Lord’s body, broken for us. The end of God’s outreach, and of the economy of redemption, is our taking in the God who has reached out to us.
There is therefore now no reason to fear preaching the Trinity. It is simply the gospel: the story of God’s two-handed loving outreach for us and our salvation.