Trinity / Christian Worship: Glorifying and Enjoying God, The

The Trinity

By Philip W. Butin

Louisville, Geneva, 2001. 126 pp. $11.95.

Christian Worship:

Glorifying and Enjoying God

By Ronald P Byars

Louisville, Geneva, 2000. 112 pp. $11.95.

While visiting in homes during the 1970s, it seemed to me that every Presbyterian elder owned a set of The Layman's Theological Library from Westminster Press, most often shelved not far from the gray and red covers of The Layman's Bible Commentary from John Knox Press. These were the tools that Presbyterianism of the 1950s offered to equip the saints. For my father-in-law, these editions paved a reliable highway that led through Tillich's, Buber's, and even Jurgen Moltmann's densest volumes.

Recalling the large, longlasting benefits of The Layman's Theological Library, Geneva Press has begun a new series: Foundations of Christian Faith. The authors of its inaugural volumes know about teaching in the church. Butin has been pastor of the Shepherd of the Valley Presbyterian Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is now the President of San Francisco Theological Seminary. Byars served as a pastor for three decades, most recently at First Presbyterian Church of Birmingham, Michigan, before joining the faculty of Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education as Professor of Preaching and Worship. In a day when academy and church seem so far apart, Butin and Byars know not only their fields but how people learn faith. They compliment their readers by taking them seriously.

Butin has perhaps the more daunting task of teaching the Trinity to lay people who suspect that trinitarian thinking amounts to little more than dreamy speculation. He begins and concludes his book existentially and practically by drawing attention to Christians' baptism "in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit," thus recognizing and causing readers to recognize lex orandi, lex credendi ("As we worship, so we believe").

To approach the doctrine of the Trinity one must understand something of the history of trinitarian thinking, and Butin confidently leads his readers through the New Testament experience of God as triune, the early church's reflection on that experience, the affirmations of the Nicene Creed, their refinements by the Cappadocians, all the way to the recovery of trinitarian theology in the twentieth century and the challenges that recovery poses after the Shoah and amid gender questions. Butin also explores the practical and pastoral consequences of affirming a triune God. Reminding his readers that it is "not just arithmetic," he demonstrates how trinitarian conviction shapes Christian spirituality, life, and worship. Acutely aware of the problems of gender-specific language for God and the limitations of language with respect to expressing ineffable mysteries, Butin wisely understands that the last word in trinitarian thinking has not been spoken, and invites his readers into the conversation of faith.

So surehanded is Butin's map of the terrain that seminary students may well appropriate this book in the way that Shirley Guthrie's Christian Doctrine (1968), also written for laity, has become a perennial introduction to Reformed theology. Butin's approach could serve as a model for teachers in the church: he respects the complexity of trinitarian theology as well as the intelligence of his readers and never succumbs to providing, as it were, The Trinity for Dummies. A particularly engaging feature is Butin's mustering of diverse witnesses to begin each section. He quotes, among others, the Bible, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine, Aquinas, Julian of Norwich, John Calvin, John Wesley, plus (from the twentieth century) Barth, Elizabeth Johnson, Catherine Mowry LaCugna, and Robert Jenson. An eight-page glossary at the book's conclusion leads readers through the often esoteric vocabulary of trinitarian theology.

Butin concludes, "Christian worship is the communal event in which the church and its members are defined, restored, and renewed together in our primary relationship with the triune God." Byars begins by announcing, "People worship because it comes as naturally as eating and drinking. We simply can't help it"-but "what makes Christian worship distinct from other sorts of worship? It is Trinitarian." Like Calvin and the Westminster Divines, Byars recognizes the human yearning to worship. This default setting for spirituality may lead people to God, or it may lead them far astray. Calvin warned that the human mind was "a perpetual factory of idols," the Westminster Confession cautioned against worship "according to the imaginations and devices of men," and Byars counsels his readers against fashioning worship as entertainment for ourselves. Writing from the frontlines of "the worship wars," Byars grants that "Credit must be given to those with the imagination and creativity to have responded to the cultural crisis that so deeply affects the churches." Nevertheless, because our worship "is Trinitarian, it will always be communal and relational-- not merely passive. It will be something we enter into and do, rather than receive as an audience or as spectators." Byars demonstrates how trinitarian thinking does the gritty, practical work of thinking through our worship of God.