Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth: Set up your kingdom in our midst.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God: Have mercy on me, a sinner.

Holy Spirit, breath of the living God: Renew me and all the world.

-N.T. Wright, The Prayer of the Trinity

One of my favorite authors is Eugene Peterson who is known for his Bible translation The Message. Here is an excerpt from a great interview in which Peterson acknowledges the centrality of the Trinity in the Christian life. – Rustin

MH As you referred to holiness here, as well as in your writings, you offer a refreshing picture of holiness that doesn’t seem like the typical evangelical definition. How would you define holiness?

EP: Holiness is the Christian life mature. It’s gathering all the parts and pieces of your life into obedience and response to God, and living with some energy. Holiness is a blazing thing, it’s an energetic thing. Part of the reason the modern church has lost its taste for holiness is that it was engineered. Although we were really firm about the fact that justification is by faith; holiness was by disciplines, work, arranging. So it became hedging around the rules, hints, regulations, and technology. Therefore, it became very boring and claustrophobic.

MH As opposed to what is conveyed in The Message , that it’s something that naturally grows out of your life as you enjoy relationship with God?

EP: Yes, but I wouldn’t say that holiness naturally grows out of your life, I would say that it’s the work of the Holy Spirit in your life. It’s a work in which there is conscious and intentional participation and obedience. It’s living the life of the Spirit under the same theological conditions that you live the life of faith or justification. It’s very Trinitarian. Unfortunately, we have lost that Trinitarian wholeness, a sense of relational wholeness. I think it’s a result of the culture and the fragmentation of the culture, how we specialize in different things. As Protestants we get nervous at anything that didn’t stem from the last revival.

MH How has our loss of relational wholeness that we see in the Trinity affected the church?

EP: It’s made the church very busy, because if you don’t have a sense of a large context in God you get frantic. There’s a lot to do and you’d better get at it. It’s also affected the church in depersonalizing relationships. We are now defined by our function. You are a good Sunday School teacher or a zealous missionary, so the activity that we generate becomes a substitute for non-Trinitarian idea. The Trinity is a very active concept, if you lose that you just end up with doctrines; a doctrine of God, a doctrine of justification, all propositions that you continually have to reactivate in your life.

Traditional Christian spirituality is not taking bits and pieces of doctrine and putting them to use, it’s entering into the life of God that is already in motion. There is already movement in the Trinity. It’s a matter of shifting your image of what’s going on. Are we in a spiritual bazaar where we are picking out verses and texts that we can use, or are we in a home that is ordered by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, where we can enter into what’s already going on? We can learn to be obedient, participant, learn to receive affection and give it. But it’s not our home, we’re not the ones in charge of this.

MH Can some of what’s been lost be recovered with a reclamation of the doctrine of the Trinity?

EP: We’re never past recovery. The church is always finding itself in some place or another whereby it needs to be rescued, and we currently need to be rescued from this excessively commodity oriented culture. Everything is thingified, and we become thingified. There is a lot of recovery of the doctrine of the Trinity going on right now. But it probably hasn’t gotten down to where it’s shaping pastors and leaders and teachers where there is evidence yet.