Trinitarian Theology of Prayer and Healing Essay Example for Free

Trinitarian Theology of Prayer and Healing Essay There has been considerable reflection more recently on the nature of Trinity and its place in church life and theological thinking. Feminists, liberationists, process thinkers, and more traditionalist Catholic and Protestant theologians as well as Eastern Orthodox desire to free the Trinity from its isolation in traditional statements with the consequent lack of relation to practical Christian faith and life. The realization that in the economy of salvation we have to do with God as he is in himself has radically focused thought in a new way on the being and act of God as triune. The double context of salvation and liberation in relation to the Trinity has been the prime reason for renewed interest in the doctrine today and in its practical implications. Recent rejuvenation of the Trinity has owed much to the efforts and success of theologians in laying out a wide range of trinitarian implications. It is as we properly understand God as triune that we win have a right view of the faith, of its doctrines, and of the relevance of all this for every sphere of human life and activity. It is in many ways remarkable that this insight, always latent in our traditions, has now, almost suddenly and unexpectedly, emerged as a central aspect of current theology. Current thinking is very varied; here the work will concentrate on that which relates directly a trinitarian basis and the implication for our understanding of the nature and goal of healing. Before we go on to do this in some detail in the work, we must say something about the Trinity itself as the general framework for understanding religious diversity. After discussing that general framework, we will indicate some of its implications for Christianitys internal life. Trinity means the reality of one God who is three persons. There are not three Gods somehow joined together, which would be explicit tritheism, nor can one envisage the three persons as together making up the Deity. This would reduce the â€Å"persons† to partial gods and mean that the Trinity was some kind of mathematical conundrum. Nor can the unity in Trinity be seen as simply a variety of attributes or perfections which constitute the being of God. Rather, the Trinity affirms that while each person is wholly divine both per se and in relation to the others, there is only one God. Gods being is a unity in Trinity and not otherwise. This naturally excludes the view that one can begin with a different conception of unity to which the Trinity must in some measure conform. It also indicates that the being of God as one can only be known as mystery in the actions of his grace and salvation in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit or, to put it otherwise, in revelation and reconciliation. But if God is the one God as the Father sending the Son by the Holy Spirit, how do these three persons or ways of Gods being in action express his unity? That is the question. Two main answers have been given but elaborated in various ways. The first favored by the Orthodox East and by many Western theologians today is summarized cryptically as â€Å"being in relationship† or â€Å"being as communion† or â€Å"ontorelational unity† (Vanhoozer 188). The second traditional Western view sees the persons as inhering in the being of God as the focus of unity. Christians believe God is intrinsically relational. Salvation is communion with the triune God. Salvation is not a realization of pure identity, the unity of one absolute Self, a one without a second. That religious end would be relationless, because there is nothing outside the One with which to relate. Any relation of the One to something outside it could only be a diminishment or contamination of the divine perfection. Salvation is also not emptiness, the dissipation of any continuing consciousness of being at all. This too is a relationless end. In the first case there was one absolute with nothing/no one to relate with. In this case it is not the absence of an other that rules out relation, but the radical insubstantiality even of one. Instead of one without a second to relate with, we might regard this end as pure relation, with no â€Å"ones† — distinct persons or entities — to have the relation. These religious ends differ from salvation because they exclude relation itself, seeing it as extrinsic to religious fulfillment. In that light, salvation appears too interactive, too wedded to difference. Christians believe that the understanding of God as Trinity, the understanding whose catalyst is the incarnation of Christ, allows us to grasp key features of Gods character and Gods relation with us. If relationship itself is an impossible, unnecessary, or counterproductive religious aim, then this belief is in error. But if relation is truly an irreducible component of the religious end, then characterizations of God are not only passing tools. They are in some measure constitutive of that end. Salvation is shaped by a particular vision of the God with whom we are in relation. Here we glimpse the way in which Christ is integral to salvation, both embodying the relation with God that constitutes salvation and distinctively representing to us the nature of the God with whom we have communion in salvation. The Trinity is not about levels of divine being but about dimensions of God. Height, length, and width are features of a whole body and of every part of it, and yet the three are not the same. If emanations from God or acts of God are put on a ladder of being, then humans, who are farther down the ladder of creation, can relate only to the rungs immediately above or below them. Ultimate divinity lies further above and beyond. If the three divine persons of the Trinity are treated in this way, they become levels of being. But in fact no person of the Trinity is a lower or earlier step, and none is â€Å"less far in† to God. For the Christian, salvation is not passing beyond the Spirit to the Son or the Son to the Father. Salvation is participation in the divine life that is the communion among the three persons. The doctrine of the Trinity has its basis in Gods self-revelation in Israel and in Jesus Christ his Son by the Holy Spirit. In other words, it is to be found exclusively in this revelation as the Scriptures bear witness to it. This positive affirmation carries a negative within it. Since the unity of God is a unity in trinity no other conceived or supposedly proven unity of God is a Christian conception of the true God. Traditional doctrine has sometimes been at fault here. It brought a division into the whole conception of God beginning with a general doctrine of the one God and his attributes on the basis of some biblical material or philosophical proofs and then went on to speak of God as triune. This clearly has various dangers which are being recognized today. It could lead to the Trinity being subordinated to an already preconceived idea of God with a consequent weakening and undermining of its true nature in a modalistic way. Again, it could be seen as a creator God as Father being largely divorced from Son and Holy Spirit so that the Father was known otherwise than by faith, whereas Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit were the true objects of our belief and worship. This could bring a serious division into our conception of the Trinity, endangering the equality and nature of the persons and misunderstanding their mutual relationships. This dichotomy in the doctrine of God meant a real difficulty too in relating it to Christian life, faith, and worship. Augustine considers what is involved in the perfection of the image of God in humanity when through exercise of the trinity of faith the mind is purified and comes to contemplate God the Trinity. The image of God in the soul is memory, understanding and love, which is manifested (and can never be ultimately lost) when the mind remembers itself, loves itself and knows itself, but which is truly the image because it is the capacity the soul has to remember, know and love God and it is in such cleaving to God that the image is perfected: When its cleaving to him has become absolute, it will be one spirit with him . . . The mind will be raised to the participation of his being, truth and bliss, though nothing thereby be added to the being, truth and bliss which is its own. In that being, joined to it in perfect happiness, it will live a changeless life and enjoy the changeless vision of all that it will behold (Cavadini 103). What is happening here is less the souls ascent to God than the souls submitting to be refashioned by God: â€Å"the beginning of the images reforming must come from him who first formed it. The self which it was able to deform, it cannot of itself reform† (Cavadini 115). It is a process which begins in the moment of baptism, and is perfected in a long gradual process of penitence and endurance: â€Å"the cures beginning is to remove the cause of the sickness: and that is done through the forgiveness of sins. Its furtherance is the healing of the sickness itself, which takes effect by gradual progress in the renewal of the image† (Cavadini 121). The souls return to God is the perfecting within it of the image of God in which it was created. It is a movement away from the â€Å"land of unlikeness† in which it finds itself as a result of the fall. But Augustine emphasizes in the last book (XV) of De Trinitate that the likeness to God we have discovered in humanity is no equality: it is a likeness between two utterly different beings, God and the creature, and so he says, foreshadowing the language of the fourth Lateran Council, that we must â€Å"rather discern in its measure of likeness a greater unlikeness too† (Cavadini 122). For the love of God, beware of illness as much as you can, so that as far as possible your self is not the cause of any weakness . . . For the love of God, control your body and soul with great care, and keep as fit as you can. Here speaks the positive, life-affirming voice of Christian spirituality, in this case from plague-ridden England of the fourteenth century. The voice is also realistic: â€Å"should illness come in spite of everything, have patience and wait humbly for Gods mercy† (Peel 255). Between the twin poles of the passive acceptance of unavoidable suffering and the active care of health and work for healing, Christian spirituality moves with varying emphases, first in one direction, then in the other. In the twentieth century, Christian spirituality in its literature and practice has moved in the second direction, showing a more challenging attitude towards disease, and a wider concern for human development, personal and social. Wholeness in body, mind and spirit is presented as a goal to which ascetics need not run counter, and should indeed subserve. Wholeness and holiness, if not precisely synonymous, are regarded as related. â€Å"Properly understood, prayer is a mature act which is essential for the complete development of the personality . . . It is only in prayer that we can achieve the complete and harmonious union of body, mind and spirit† (Dr Alexis Carrel, quoted in H. Caffarel 20). The incarnation is seen to have implications for the redemption of every aspect of the worlds activity. At the same time, in society generally, a larger concept of health has begun to take hold, as meaning not merely the absence of sickness, but the realization of human potential. Advances in clinical medicine, pharmacology and psychiatry have helped to create a new climate of expectation. Partly through the growth of nuclear physics and a changed scientific and philosophical outlook, some writers have questioned the very distinction between the physical and the spiritual, as hitherto understood. It is in this changing atmosphere that the Christian ministry of healing, as distinct from forms of faith-healing which deny the value of scientific medicine, has been renewed in the churches. A fruitful meeting-point between spirituality and medicine lies in the fact that it is the vis medicatrix naturae, the recreative power of nature, which brings healing. Physicians and surgeons do not directly heal anybody: they seek by their skills to remove obstacles to natures healing energies, as when they correct chemical imbalances in the body, or take away diseased tissue. Means which touch the human spirit, such as are employed in the ministry of healing by prayer and sacrament, may equally be seen as seeking to liberate and quicken by grace the God-given forces within human nature. Three aspects of the subject attract attention, and developments in each can be expected. Christian Science arose at a time when Protestantism left little room for the teaching and practice of spiritual healing (Kelsey 69). It offered a unique product blend of metaphysics with an unorthodox interpretation of Christian scriptures that appealed to a large number of people during the late 19th century. With the inception of the Pentecostal movement early in the 20th century and its spillover into historic Christian denominations since 1950, healing was once again incorporated with orthodox Christian theology. Despite some obvious similarities between Christian Science and mainline Christian healing groups, very little rapport exists between the two approaches to religious healing. Christian Science accepts as an assumption that illness is a form of evil, and all evil is an illusion (Peel 254). Each person has it within her/himself to counter illusion with truth. As Christian Science foundress Mary Baker wrote: â€Å"That which [God] creates is good, and He makes all that is made. Therefore the only reality of sin, sickness or death is the awful fact that unrealities seem real to human, erring belief, until God strips off their disguise† (Peel 256). Faith in Gods power to heal has to reckon with the fact that there appear to be blocks in a disordered world and within human personality to receiving Gods healing energies. Such obstacles may be moral, in the form of unrepented sin. They may also be due to emotional disturbances caused by past wounds to the spirit. Inner healing is concerned to bring to light the causes of the inner pain; to help the sufferer to interpret them correctly; and to release the person from the emotional grip of the past. Prayer and meditation play a crucial part in this exodus from captivity. Deeper levels of the mind are reached in contemplative prayer, when the focus is upon God alone, and the soul waits upon him. Inner healing comes also in corporate worship, when the gaze is Godward and the worshipper is lifted by the Spirit out of self-centredness or narrowness of vision. Closer union with God in the depth of the spirit thus brings an integration of the whole person around the new Centre, and it is quite usual for physical health to be improved. Diseases are caught in a diseased society. Environment counts, for better or for worse. â€Å"It is cruel and false to brand every sufferer as a sinner: much suffering and sickness is due to the sin either of other persons, or of society in general† (Peel 269). There is in some churches a growth of less formal kinds of reaching out to minister to the sick in the name of Christ, alongside the sacramental ministries of Eucharist, anointing, laying on of hands, reconciliation of penitents, and occasionally exorcism. The dedicated use by every member of Christ of his or her personal gift of the Spirit enables the local church to become an actively healing community. Where some have a physical gift of healing through the hands (a phenomenon still little understood, though real), they may use it as members of a parish team, and are sometimes licensed by a bishop for a wider ministry. I believe that Jesus Christ is in fact constitutive of healing. Christ is constitutive of healing for all people who attain it. Christ is constitutive in this way not as some separate and additional actor besides God, but precisely as an expression of the triune life of God. Christ is one who comes from the triune life into human life but also one who brings human life into its fullest participation in the triune life. Christ is not extrinsic to the love of God, not only a representation of it, but also the working of it. Christ is in such unity with God that communion with God involves a fundamental relation with Christ. Healing is constituted solely by Gods everlasting love. Christ does not constitute healing; Christ represents the God who does. Ordinary Christian sacraments and preaching can only symbolize God by representing Christ. Christ represents God by constituting these lesser representations. Whereas they represent Gods love by also representing him, he represents Gods love by also constituting them. Christs special role is not to constitute healing but to constitute the Christian symbols for it. Other religions may have their own representations.   The problem with this analysis is that it makes â€Å"Gods everlasting love† an abstract quality and agent, some kind of prior decision in the mind of God, and downplays its personal nature. That love is precisely a feature of the personal communion that is the divine life, of which the second person of the Trinity is a constitutive member. Prior to being an idea or a decision, this love is an event. And Christ, the divine Word, is participant in that event, constitutive of that everlasting love. Likewise the extension of this love to humanity which constitutes healing is not an abstract possibility. The path for human participation in the triune communion is laid in the unity of God and humanity in Christ. Though Christ is certainly the way, in the Christian view, Christ is also the life and the truth in whom we rest and grow while on the way and at the end of the way. The proposition that Christ is the sole savior of the world is not adequately translated by saying that everyone must make use of Christ for at least one crucial moment, long enough to negotiate part of the passage to the promised land of â€Å"salvation,† after which time Christ can be discarded or replaced. In inviting his followers into a relation with God like his own, Jesus presumed that those in such relation were one body that they lived in him and he lived in them, just as Christ lived in God and God in him. Jesus did not counsel his followers to go out and independently approach God as Jesus did. Jesus invited them to share in that relationship by virtue of their connection with him. There is nothing purely instrumental about this: the images and substance are all organic. Communion is the way Christ saves, and it is the salvation that results. Healing seems to be restored as a normal part of the Churchs ministry and of the Christian experience, wherever the Church is alive with faith in Christ. But, as with the mission to evangelize the world, so with the healing work of Christ in his Church, opposition abounds and the story is one of failure as well as success. God reigns, and the word is preached with signs following. But the end is not yet, and in Christian perspective the total healing of people and nations waits for the consummation of all things, when God shall be all in all. Deep dialogue with others can begin with prayer, the deepest dialogue with the Ultimate Other. Within this deepest dialogue, active and receptive prayer processes proposed by the Relational Prayer Model have been related to eastern and western historical descriptions of the prayer of the Holy Name. A comparison of the method and function of the prayer of the Holy Name has revealed several similarities between eastern and western spiritual traditions. These points of common ground between spiritual traditions support the expansion of the original Interpersonal Christian Prayer Model to account for more than a solely western spiritual tradition. In addition, intercultural religious dialogue and prayer between eastern and western spiritual traditions has been developed with several examples. Such religious enculturation could lead to further development and/or revisions of the Relational Prayer Model. Most modern perspectives on the Trinity and worship see prayer as a central aspect of this relationship. The passages in the New Testament that distinguish most clearly between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are those that deal with prayer. Christ as our reconciler and peace giver is the one through whom we have access by one Spirit to the Father. â€Å"It was when he was thinking about prayer that Paul also thought about how in their different ways the Son and the Spirit enable us to approach the Father† (Thompson 70). While all three persons in the Trinity are necessary properly to speak of God as one it is primarily to the Father that the Son and the Spirit lead us in prayer. This is summed up by Paul when he says, â€Å"God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts crying Abba, Father† Thompson 65). Central to this is the Son, who reveals the Father, and whom, when we see, we see the Father. This leads us back to our Lords Prayer and his relation to God where the distinctive name he gives him is â€Å"Father.† Prayer is â€Å"through Jesus Christ our Lord,† that is, through all he was and said and did in his fife, death, and resurrection. He is the way, as well as the truth and the life. If prayer is to the Father and through the Son, it is enabled by the Spirit. Only the Spirit enables us to know God as Father or to confess Jesus as Lord or to pray to the Father in a way that is acceptable to him. The role of Son and Spirit in this is profoundly expressed in Romans. â€Å"Christ who died for us is now our great High Priest and Intercessor by his presence with the Father in the power of his finished work on the cross† (Thompson 96). Yet we can know this and be able to enter into its meaning only by the Holy Spirit. He is the One who lays hold upon our weaknesses by his strength and intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. Through Christ we become children of God and this relationship is made possible, continued, and brought to its completion by â€Å"his Spirit which dwells in you† (Thompson 98). He is the gift and power of the present and the hope of immortality. It is the Spirit (who is divine) who intercedes for us. God the Father who knows us and our weaknesses knows his own Holy Spirit and God, speaking to us through God, as it were, prays for us and with us as the Spirit, as God wants and as prayer ought to be. At the same time, paradoxically, it is not simply the Spirits prayer but ours as well. So close is the work of Son and Spirit in bringing us to the Father that each is spoken of as Advocate and Intercessor. The trinitarian aspect of prayer has profound significance for worship. It is not seen primarily as our work but Gods own gift through Christ and the Holy Spirit. Thus â€Å"prayer and worship are not primarily hard tasks that God sets us; they are gifts that through his Son and in his Spirit he shares with us† (Thompson 99). The triune God in his life is both one and three in his being and relationships. This insight is applied in relation to the church in two areas, the local and the universal. The New Testament speaks not only of the church but also of the churches. By this is not meant denominations in our modern sense of the term, but the various ecclesiae, the various local communities wherever found. In this sense the churches represent the universal church. Each particular congregation shares in this fullness and totality in both locality and universality. In the diversity of churches or communities the one church appears in each place. One can put it in picture form by saying that the whole universal church looks out in the local church. The Conference of European Churches (C.E.C.) made the point clearly: â€Å"The whole church of Christ is constituted not by adding together part church to part church, but is expressed by the communion of local churches in mutual interpenetration. Conciliar community of churches is thus an integral part of the concept of the trinity† (Bockman 89). By this it means not that church can and should seek to live by and for itself   but, by its very basis and existence, is one with the church universal and must express that relationship analogous to the Trinity, in concrete structured form, however one may interpret this. â€Å"The primary goal of the participation of the church in the mission of God is, as expressed by Christ in his missionary mandate, to make disciples† (Bockman 89). Put otherwise, it is to bring men and women into living fellowship with the triune God and with one another through him. The church is thus not a static product of the Spirits work, but a dynamic instrument in the service of others. â€Å"You are Gods own people that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light† (Bockman 89). The church is, on the one hand, the provisional result of mission but, on the other hand, it is Gods agent of it. The goal of the church is thus not itself but the world. The church participates in Gods mission to bring to humankind righteousness and salvation and to reconcile a broken creation. There are many avenues for the interpretation of religions. The distinctively Christian way passes through the trinitarian dynamic we have been describing, the heart of a Christian theology of religions. We saw that Trinity is a non-reductive religious ultimate, in whom the three persons and their unique relations subsist as co-equal dimensions of a single communion. This is like a musical polyphony, a simultaneous, non-excluding harmony of difference that constitutes one unique reality. Each voice has its own distinctive character by virtue of its relation with the others. We can equally well say that each receives its special voice by participation in the oneness of the whole musical work. In the trinity we are dealing with three subjects who are reciprocally conscious of each other by reason of one and the same consciousness which the three subjects possess, each in his own proper way. This means that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are conscious of one another through their united consciousness and possession of the one divine essence and therein lies the unity of God. This does not go as far as either the Eastern tradition or the statement of Torrance. It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of the Christian doctrine that God is one in three persons. This has correctly been called the teaching distinctive of the Christian faith, that which sets the approach of Christians to the â€Å"fearful mystery† of the deity apart from all other approaches. To be human is to be separated from God in some degree. To be Christian, the Christian believes, is to be separated from him least. The knowledge of the Trinity which we have from the New Testament is above all personal. We are introduced to the Three and invited to share the happiness of the divine company. This is truly the great mystery of Christianity, the mystery of love. In the New Testament there is none of the remoteness in conceiving God which today tends to separate Christians from their triune Lord. Bibliography Bockman, Peter Wilhelm â€Å"Trinity, Model of Unity Relationship between Unity and Communion the Universal and the Local,† in The Reconciling Power of the Trinity, p. 89. Cf. Moltmann. Cavadini, John â€Å"The Structure and Intention of Augustines De Trinitate,† Augustinian Studies 23, 1992. Dr Alexis Carrel, quoted in H. Caffarel, The Body at Prayer. London, SPCK, 1978. Kelsey, Morton T.   Psychology, Medicine Christian Healing. San Francisco: Harper Row, 1988. Peel, Robert.   Spiritual Healing in a Scientific Age. San Franciso: Harper Row, Publishers, 1987. Thompson, John. Modern Trinitarian Perspectives. Oxford University Press: New York, 1994. Vanhoozer, Kevin J. The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England, 2003. Endnotes Bockman, Peter Wilhelm â€Å"Trinity, Model of Unity Relationship between Unity and Communion the Universal and the Local,† in The Reconciling Power of the Trinity, p. 89. Cf. Moltmann. Cavadini, John. â€Å"The Structure and Intention of Augustines De Trinitate,† Augustinian Studies 23 (1992), 103-23. Dr Alexis Carrel, quoted in H. Caffarel, The Body at Prayer ( London, SPCK, 1978), 20. Kelsey, Morton T., Psychology, Medicine Christian Healing, (San Francisco: Harper Row, 1988), 69. Peel, Robert, Spiritual Healing in a Scientific Age, (San Franciso: Harper Row, Publishers, 1987), 254-69. Thompson, John, Modern Trinitarian Perspectives, (Oxford University Press: New York, 1994), 69-85. Vanhoozer, Kevin J., The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England, 2003), 188.