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Worshipping Trinity: Coming Back to the Heart of Worship

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Worshipping Trinity was a required text for a theology of worship course I taught at Denver Seminary. The associate dean, Don Payne (PhD, Manchester), was the person who recommended this wonderful book to me. I would require it again as it is an accessible introduction for dealing with the question, "At what point does worship cease to be Christian worship and become simply Christians worshipping?" (pg. 3)

Parry's thesis is this, "Worship is about God and God is the Trinity, therefore worship is about the Trinity. Christian worship, in other words, is worship focused upon the God who has revealed himself through Christ to be Father, Son and Holy Spirit." (pg.3)

This book found its inception when Parry examined his own worship tradition. Following Parry's example, our class took forty of the most current popular worship songs in North America and discovered that there were only two implicitly Trinitarian songs. Most of these songs were focused on our dedication to God instead of His dedication to us. They were about what we will do instead of what God has done. Unfortunately, Evangelical preaching in North America follows this pattern. It's focused on moralism and pragmatism not on declaring the mighty acts of God. Furthermore, we found it sad that there were so few songs that focused on the Father or the Holy Spirit. The reality is that we choose worship songs musically not theologically. Yet, lyrics must be examined. What we sing not only expresses but shapes what we believe.

And for whatever it's worth, I'm only dealing with one aspect of Parry's book. He dedicates the earlier chapters to reflecting on the Trinity's involvement in the biblical narratives and in our own redemption, sanctification, etc. This then provides the foundation for discussing worship from a Trinitarian perspective. In summary, if you are ready to think biblically and theologically about your worship tradition, this is a must read. I believe you will find this book wonderfully accessible and theologically profound.

Kevin J. Navarro, author of The Complete Worship Leader and The Complete Worship Service

Worshipping Trinity by Robin Parry is about the need to return our modern worship to its rightful authentic place of a Trinitarian focused place. Today's culture, or at least the authors UK culture in 2004, placed a heavy emphasis on worship of Jesus alone and seemed to forget about the Holy Spirit and God the Father as equally important. Worshipping a triune God of 3 individual entities who are all one god is a very complex idea to grasp and can be so confusing that it leaves the new Christian in a place of enormous dismay on how to properly focus his honor and praise on the whole without neglecting the parts.
Robin Parry states " I wonder just how Trinitarian contemporary charismatic worship really is?" In the authors experience, the UK has made enormous strides in Christian resurgence. People are coming to Christ in droves and the work of the spirit is evident across the island. Along with people coming to Christ comes inherent problem, the proper education of new believers as to what Christianity is all about. At the center of this process should be "who God is, who Jesus is, and who the Holy Spirit is?" After all, it's who we worship and we should have a sound understanding of the specific role of each part of the trinity. The most confusing part of the trinity is that all are one God yet are expressed in three distinct forms with three distinct roles in history, in our lives and in the future.
Parry attempts to use an analogy of the glove and the hand to make the distinction as to the separateness of each part. Unfortunately his analogy, like all does break down in many ways and this analogy makes so little sense as he spends page after page trying to make the reader understand his analogy he simply could be using the subjects themselves of Jesus, God the Father and the Holy Spirit as they relate to humans. I would like to describe more of the analogy but after reading and rereading I cannot begin to comprehend this thought and it frustrates me to even think that we can spend so much time trying to tell others that God is like the hand in a rubber glove that I would rather move past this thought and review more of the main focus.
As we read Worshipping Trinity, we must understand that the authors experience in his country and church will shape the book and we cannot think that what he writes about is descriptive of ours in America. Of course the ideas of understanding the roles of the trinity and the need to properly worship all three equally is relevant, but like all humans writing out side the special revelation of biblical authorship, our sinful nature gets in the way of authentically relating to the masses what we feel.
There is a distinct difference in the way in which revival takes place. When a culture focus too much emphasis on one thing, the knee jerk reaction is to go form one extreme to the other. In Robin Parry's case, the UK was pouring out worship events, and bring people to Christ, but the songs were less than scriptural and the education was less than necessary. People were full of the understanding that Jesus died for their sins and He was the way to salvation. The people prayed to Jesus, sang to Jesus and worshipped Him in truth. Unfortunately, they didn't understand that God is still and always has been fully active in the process and although Jesus died on the cross to save them, it was the work of the Holy Spirit in their current lives who drew them near to God for His revelation and calling.
What Parry saw was too much emphasis on Jesus and not enough on God or the Holy Spirit. Like the good emergent he is, Parry immediately sought to take the focus off Jesus alone and return it God and the Holy Spirit. Unfortunately, his theology is lacking when he relegated Jesus to total humanness and lacking any power without the holy spirit. "Jesus works are clearly works performed by the Son, but they are more accurately seen as works of the Father performed through Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit...It is the Spirit who enables Jesus to do the things he does." According to Parry, Jesus was only Jesus because God the father enabled Him with the Spirit. With this theology, anyone could have been Jesus if the father enabled that person with the spirit. Jesus was and is fully God. "I and the father are one .(John 10:30)" Even satan knew Jesus was the Son of God and had complete authority to call angels down from Heaven to tend to his needs. Satan knew Jesus didn't need to be enabled by the Spirit to have all power and authority. Jesus had/has that authority and chose limit himself to human standards to full fill his role as the human sacrifice for mankind.
But Parry says " Jesus alone is the exact representation of God the Father." According to scripture, Jesus is completely God and completely Jesus simultaneously. Parry spends all of ch.2 decentralizing the Lordship of Jesus and tries to raise the level of worship of the spirit and worship of the father because his culture was not doing so. Parry also states that it was "the Spirit who enabled Jesus to live a sinless life." Was Jesus not the son of God who always was, is and ever shall be? Is Jesus not the first of all creation? Is the aseity of Christ not important to Parry? The immanence, immutability and transcendence of God means that I AM. Jesus, caused himself and as such did not need the Holy Spirit, who He fully is as well, to lea a sinless life, he lead a sinless life because HE IS. According to Parry, Jesus became "Jesus" when God the father enabled him with the spirit at his baptism. According to Parry, God could have given anyone the spirit and done the work of Jesus. Jesus lived a sinless life because he was in constant communion with the father, lived with the father, knew His glory, knew what pleased the father, and this incommunicable attribute cannot be understood by our finite minds.
Parry's theology, as supported by heretics like Mclaren in his foreward, reduces Jesus to just a man, just a human and not fully God. Parry supports this by saying" God the father raised Jesus form the dead through the work of the spirit." Again, his theology is lacking. Jesus took on the sin of the world, the father turned away from the son because he was covered in sin and God cannot be near or in communion with unrighteousness. If God, the Holy Spirit and the Son are one, when the son took on sin, neither God the Father nor the Spirit were in communion. The aseity of Christ raised himself from the dead because He is more than we can understand. Like most emergents, Parry tries to reduce the Lordship of Jesus. Jesus is immutable. The word became flesh but never left his place as the God the Son. The word became flesh to save mankind and returned to his rightful place in heaven. According to Parry, "Christ is still human now and evershall be. Even in his role as the second Adam." If the word became flesh, then Jesus cannot be immutable because according to Parry, Jesus became human, needed the holy Spirit to have the authority of Jesus as we know form the Bible, and needed the Spirit to fulfill what God has planned for the redemption of man. God is not human, Jesus wasn't human but became flesh for a time. But to think that Jesus changed into human and remains human does one of two things. It either elevates humans to God like status upon completion which is to be Mormon or it reduces Christ to a man glorified by God to his current position because the spirit empowered Him so which is almost like Jehovahs Witness.
Parry may have set out to write a book about the need to worship God the father, God the Son, and God the Spirit equally and educate his culture to what the trinity Biblically is, but he deauthorized Jesus, empowered the Spirit over Jesus and reduced Christ to just a man with special authority by the spirit. Parry did what most emergeants do, take bits and pieces form the Bible and liberally apply them their specific needs of the their culture to correct and instruct them without sound theology and sound understanding of what the long term effect will be. He let culture shape his theology instead of correct theology shaping culture. Instead of creating an educated generation of Trinitarian worshippers, if this book does what it sought to do, it created a generation of sound spirit worshippers who don't believe Jesus is truly who the bible says He is. Jesus is fully God, fully man, fully the Savior of the world who always was, always is and always will be God.
This book is so full of theological contradictions, full of such confusing heretical analogies like the repeated use of the rubber glove, and the false teaching from "pick and choose a verse theology" that one of any sound evangelical understanding must not take anything beyond the premise of the book to heart.
The premise is that we as a Christians must look at our worship in a totalitarian manner. We must sing our praises to God in His rightful manner as the father, Jesus as the Son who became human to save the world, and the Spirit who works in our lives everyday to reveal the nature of the God, the power and truth of scripture and their existence as a triune God who are equally one. We cannot overemphasize one more than the other. They are all uniquely important and uniquely sovereign. The triune God is metaphysical and there are aspects that are incommunicable. We know as much as He has revealed through His word. We cannot assume this is all there is and we cannot take the knee jerk approach to application of scripture to Parry's application worship. His culture overemphasized Jesus above God and the Spirit. Like the triune God, all are equal, like this all of scripture must be studied and applied equally. When bits and pieces are taken and taught as totality instead of what he wrote- partial theology, we do a continuing harm and it perpetuates the problem. If Parry want to do what the book cover states- " Coming back to the heart of Worship" then maybe he should study all of the Bible to understand what true worship is.
I must apologize for smashing this book. My spirit was so uneasy as I read this book that I could barely finish it. I want to teach others about what true worship is and that we serve a unique God who is three forms yet all One. I want to be authentic and lead others in the same manner. This book was anything but that. This book is what the emergent movement is all about. When someone like Mclaren supports it, huge red flags start waving. Unfortunately those flags were correct. I cannot believe someone who claims to be a Christian could spend so much time de-emphasizing Christ and overemphasizing the spirit when what they claimed to do was return a generation to Trinitarian worship. If I were one of the believers Parry wrote about who did not know that there was more to Christianity than Jesus, I would end up not believing Jesus was/ is fully God. I would end up thinking the Spirit is the sole importance here on earth and that Jesus is just a man.
This is not the literary review I sought out to write. It is the only thing I could write in response to what I just read though.