There is a
significant controversy today among Baptist separatists about the propriety of
prayer addressed directly to the Person of the Holy Spirit. There are many arguments that are made
in favor of prayer to the Person of the Holy Ghost that are very problematic,
savoring more of allegorical eisegesis than careful exegesis of Scripture—the
kind that the Spirit who inspired the Word would want us to employ. I have read enough of these painful
misinterpretations of Scripture, and would spare readers from similar agony,
and so bypass them in silence. A
simple and unbiased applications of the principles of sound hermeneutics is
sufficient to deal with such Scripture-twisting. If you who read this believe that one ought to pray directly
to the Person of the Spirit, and you want to convince others of your
orthopraxy, you would do well to bypass these invalid arguments—they will
simply turn those who care deeply about the Bible away from your position.
The
argument that Mr. so-and-so believed in prayer to the Spirit, and when he so
prayed good things happened as a result, is also invalid. If Mr. so-and-so saw thousands of
people saved, I am very glad about it.
If the records of his life are actually more hagiographical than
accurate, then such is unfortunate.
In either case, whatever happened or did not happen with him has no
authority whatsoever in determining whether believers ought to pray directly to
the Person of the Spirit.
Scripture alone is sufficient for the doctrine and practice of prayer.
Until recently, the best
argument I had, were I to wish to argue in favor of prayer addressed directly
to the Spirit, was simply that He is God, and therefore He is worthy of
prayer. I believed that this would
be the best argument, and that it should be left at that. No eisegesis need apply. While I was sympathetic to this
argument, I did not believe that it was convincing or conclusive.
The arguments against
prayer directly to the Person of the Holy Spirit include the following. 1.) There are no examples of prayer
addressed directly to His Person in Scripture. Since Scripture is our sufficient rule for faith and practice,
we ought to pray in the way God has commanded and modeled in the Bible. These commands and models did not
include prayer directly to the Person of the Spirit. Therefore, believers ought not pray directly to the Holy
Spirit. 2.) Prayer directly to the
Person of the Spirit is a practice of the charismatic movement, and so is a
dangerous false teaching.
Prayer
directly to the Person of the Spirit was practiced long before the rise of the
charismatic movement, so argument #2 is not conclusive. However, argument #1 is strong. Based on argument #1, while I am
sympathetic to those who pray directly to the Person of the Spirit because of
the truth of His equality of nature in the holy Trinity, it has been my
practice to refrain from praying directly to the Spirit, trusting that God
knows best how He wants us to worship Him.
2
Corinthians 13:14 has been used by many modern writers as an argument for
prayer directly to the Person of the Spirit: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God,
and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.” Typically, I have heard the argument
framed as follows:
As to the direct worship of the Holy Spirit,
2 Corinthians 13:14 is more than sufficient to bear the weight of the doctrine.
Whatever “fellowship” means when applied to the Father and to the Son also
means the same when applied to the Holy Spirit. We “commune” or have
“fellowship” with the Father and Son by our prayers and praise. The same is
true of our fellowship with the Holy Spirit. (pg. 429, The Trinity: Evidence
and Issues, Robert A. Morey. Iowa
Falls, IA: World, 1996)
That is, since the word koinonia, “communion/fellowship”
in 2 Corinthians 13:14, is employed of communion or fellowship with the Father
and the Son in 1 John 1:3, and fellowship with the Father and the Son include
prayer directly to their Persons (Matthew 6:9-13; Acts 7:59; 1 Corinthians
1:2), then the “communion of the Holy Ghost” must include prayer directly to
His Person.
While this
argument is attractive, in that it appeals to Scripture rather than to Mr.
So-and-so, and it is not a blatant and painful piece of eisegesis, it is
nonetheless invalid. 1 John 1
refers to communion “with” the Father and the Son, (koinonia + meta), while 2 Corinthians
13:14 refers to the communion “of” the Spirit (koinonia in the genitive
case). The semantic structure is
not identical. After studying out
all the New Testament koinonia texts and the syntax of
2 Corinthians 13:14 in the study here, it was clear that
while 2 Corinthians 13:14 teaches that we do indeed have fellowship with the
Holy Spirit, prayer directly to His Person cannot be established solely based
on the argument above.
“Fellowship” + the genitive is used even of koinonia with impersonal objects
(e. g., “the fellowship of the ministering to the saints,” 2 Corinthians
8:4); prayer to “the ministering
of the saints,” whatever that could mean, is not proven by 2 Corinthians
8:4; nor does the “communion of
the Holy Ghost” prove that one is to pray directly to His Person because of the
argument above, although believers certainly do have communion with the Holy
Spirit as He stirs them up to behold the beauty and glory of the Father through
the Son, as He works in them to pray with groanings that cannot be uttered, and
so on.
It should
be recognized also that opposition to prayer to the Spirit is not an
affirmation that He is in any way less than true God. On the contrary, He is one in essence with the Father and
the Son, and He consequently possesses in full all the Divine attributes, with
His sole identifying particularity in the ontological Trinity (“God as He is in
Himself”) being the Spirit’s eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son,
even as the Son’s identifying particularity is to be eternally begotten of the
Father, and the Father’s identifying particularity is to be neither begotten
nor proceeding. In the economic
Trinity (“God as He is toward us”), the Persons assume roles that reflect their
ontology, so that blessings come to us from the Father through the Son by the
Spirit, and we come to the Father through the Son by the Spirit. An affirmation that one is not to pray
directly to the Person of the Spirit is not a denial of His full Deity, His
glory, or His worthiness of worship, adoration, reverence, and honor—just as He
is of equal authority with the Father and the Son as God, as proven by the
baptismal formula of Matthew 28:19, so God the Holy Ghost is unquestionably
worthy of worship. The question is
not His worthiness, but whether He wishes for us to glorify Him by praying
directly to Him, or whether He wishes to receive glory as we approach that God
who is solely one in His undivided essence by coming to the Person of the Father
through the Son by the Spirit.
There is no jealousy or envy between the Persons of the Trinity, and
when we worship the Father, we glorify the Son and the Spirit also, for the one
God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
(By the way, if the argument in this passage seems deep to you, foreign,
or hard to follow, I commend to you the college level course on Trinitarianism
available here. Too many
Baptists today are woefully ignorant of the character of the blessed Trinity.)
However, I
have recently come across two stronger arguments for prayer directly to the
Person of the Holy Spirit. In
reading John Owen’s glorious devotional classic, Communion with God the
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (which, if you haven’t read it, you are definitely missing
out—get it here), a required textbook for the Trinitarianism
class I am teaching, I noticed that Owen believed that, while prayer should
generally be addressed to the Father, it was lawful also to pray directly to
the Person of the Spirit. I wanted
to see what Owen’s case was, and I consequently asked a bunch of Owen and
Puritan scholars what Owen’s case was.
The first of the stronger arguments for prayer to the Spirit can be
summed up as follows. 1.) Since
the Holy Spirit is worthy of and must be worshipped, since He is God, and
prayer is an act of worship, it is fitting, on occasion, to directly invoke the
Spirit in prayer. Now it is true
that the Holy Spirit is worshipped, for baptism is an act of worship, and
baptism is performed in the name of or with the authority of the Holy
Spirit; the Spirit’s equal glory
with the Father and the Son is recognized and glorified whenever a disciple is
immersed in the name of the Trinity (Matthew 28:19). But is prayer directly to the Person of the Spirit a
necessary consequence of the fact that the Holy Spirit is worshipped? Below are the pro-and-con arguments,
reproduced below from my interaction with an Owen scholar who is arguing for
the lawfulness of prayer to the Spirit.
What do you think—does he prove his case, or is my traditional position
against prayer directly to the Person of the Spirit hold? Read the dialogue below prayerfully,
testing everything by Scripture, and then tell us what your conclusion is. The second argument Owen makes will,
Lord willing, be examined next Friday here at What is Truth. If certain terms, such as hupostasis or ad extra, or ontological, etc. are unfamiliar to
you, watch or listen to the lectures on Trinitarianism in my class here.
Dear
Dr. ----,
Thank
you for your help. I am teaching a
college class on the Trinity right now, and we are going to be discussing
distinct communion with the Persons of the Trinity soon, using Owen as our
text. (The course lectures up to this point are online here:
http://faithsaves.net/trinitarianism/)
In
my particular theological tradition there is a debate upon the propriety of
prayer directly to the Person of the Holy Spirit. (There is no debate on the truth of the Trinity, on the fact
that the three Persons are truly equal, worthy of worship, etc.; the question is whether the Spirit, in
the economic Trinity, wishes to be directly addressed in prayer or whether He
wants us to commune with Him by His working in us to pray fervently to the
Father through the Son; of course,
the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive). The main argument against prayer addressed directly to the
Person of the Spirit is the lack of Biblical examples for this practice. I have seen people arguing that there
are Biblical examples, but they really seem to requires a lot of twisting of
passages and nonliteral exegesis. . . . I am sympathetic to the idea of prayer
addressed directly to the Person of the Holy Spirit; I even studied out the various koinonia texts and wrestled
with the type of genitive that is found in “communion of the Holy Ghost,”
desiring to find evidence for the practice. (My study is online here: http://faithsaves.net/theology-proper-christology-and-pneumatology/
and here: http://sites.google.com/site/thross7). However, I just don’t see it in 2 Cor 13:14, and my belief
in the sufficiency of Scripture for our worship does not allow me, in good
conscience, to recommend prayer addressed directly to the Spirit unless I see a
clear basis for it in Scripture. I
would like to be convinced by Owen’s argument above, but I just don't see how
it is convincing. Do you have any
thoughts that can help? . . .
Thomas,
. . . [r]egarding [p]rayer to the Holy Spirit, here are a few thoughts.
Let
me begin by answering confessionally, not because of any inherent authority in
our confessions, but because they are a good starting point as a faithful
summary of biblical truth. The persons in the Godhead are the same in substance
and equal in power and glory. This is why the Westminster Confession and the
London Baptist Confession both begin their chapters on religious worship by
noting that the Triune God is the proper object of worship (second paragraph in
both documents). When we worship the Father, we worship the Son and the Holy
Spirit also, since the one true and living God is the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. These confessions each note that prayer is a part of worship. The WCF notes
that prayer is a “special part” of religious worship and the LBC says that
prayer is “one part of natural worship.” I am not sure about the reason for the
change from the former statement to the latter, other than possibly to reflect
the idea that while worship is limited to what Scripture requires, the light of
nature also teaches the prayer is a duty.
When
we worship God, we worship all three divine persons. Prayer is part of the
worship that we give to God. When we pray to the Father and worship the Father
in our prayers, then we worship all three persons of the Godhead. In this
respect, the Father represents the majesty of the entire Godhead, as he often
does in Scripture when the generic term “God” refers most frequently to the
Father. Every prayer to the Father as it is an act of worship is a prayer to
the Son and the Holy Spirit. We cannot deny that we pray to the Holy Spirit in
this regard without denying his identity as a divine person.
However,
when we pray to the Father, through the Son (in his name), by the help of the
Spirit (Rom. 8, etc.) we respect the personal properties of each divine person.
I always tell my congregation that we have the freedom to pray to each divine
person since prayer is an act of worship and all three persons possess the
whole deity. Yet there are also good reasons why the normal Scripture pattern
is to call God Father (let alone the example that Christ taught us in the
Lord’s Prayer). Just as the gospel originates with the Father's plan, so our
highest privilege in prayer is calling God Father and he is the person whom we
address immediately. Adoption virtually summarizes all of the benefits of our
redemption and calling God Father places this fact in the foreground. We pray
in Christ’s name because he is the only Mediator between God and men and no one
comes to the Father except through him. We pray by or with the help of the Holy
Spirit because his office is to glorify Christ by convincing the world of sin,
righteousness, and judgment and uniting to Christ by faith. This is why
preaching in demonstration of the Spirit and of power involves preaching Christ
and him crucified. Our prayers and every other act of worship reflect how the
divine persons work particularly in our redemption. But the fact that the
entire Godhead is the object of our worship means that we worship all three
persons in prayer.
In
short, my answer is that it is lawful to pray to the Holy Spirit as God, but
that we should ordinarily pray in the order that Christ taught us with respect
to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is lawful, but it is not normal. I
cannot see how we can deny treating the Holy Spirit as the object of prayer
together with the Father and the Son without denying the historic doctrine of
the Trinity. On the other hand, when we pray we must not only regard the unity
of the Godhead, but the distinction of the persons and their order of operation
in our lives. Owen holds these things together wonderfully and gives us a model
of how to hold communion with the entire Godhead jointly and the persons
distinctly. This is largely the genius of his approach.
One
last comment: You stated several times that you cannot find examples of prayer
to the Holy Spirit in Scripture. I know that not all Baptists agree over
whether we should accept the principle of “good and necessary consequence” in
interpreting the Bible. However, there is some irony in requiring Scriptural
examples when we are discussing the doctrine of the Trinity, since virtually
the entire doctrine stands or falls upon good and necessary consequence. The
doctrine of the Trinity is a carefully worded conclusion from stringing
together a series of theological inferences based on the deity of each person
(and not always by express statements of the deity of Christ and the Spirit),
their personal distinctions, their interrelation with each other, and their
work in eternity and in time. Strictly speaking, if we limit Scripture proof to
examples alone, then there would be no doctrine of the Trinity to speak of. . .
.
I
am grateful, dear brother, that you take the Scriptures so seriously and I can
tell that you greatly desire to honor the Lord in limiting your faith and
practice to his Word. I hope my comments are helpful to you in some measure and
I will pray that the Lord would bless you as you continue to wrestle through
this question.
Every
blessing in Christ,
----
Dear
-----,
Thank
you for your reply. . . . Certainly the Holy Spirit, as homoousios with the
Father and the Son, is worthy of worship.
I agree also that as the Divine essence is undivided, worship of any
Person is worship of the entire Trinity.
. . . In the sense that all prayer respects the undivided essence, all
prayer is addressed to the Holy Spirit.
I have no problem with necessary consequences if they are truly
necessary--certainly a condemnation of idols made by Isaiah in his day also
condemns idolatry in our day. I do
not wish to argue that there are no good and necessary consequences in the
construction of the doctrine of the Trinity, although I think that 1 John 5:7 is
canonical, part of what God has preserved “pure in all ages,” as the WCF
states, for reasons explained at http://faithsaves.net/bibliology/ .
What
I am not convinced of is that prayer directly to the Person of the Spirit is
either a direct affirmation of Scripture or a truly a good and necessary
consequence. I don't see why . . .
the fact that the Holy Spirit is worthy of worship means that He wants us to
directly pray to Him, rather than holding communion with Him as He reveals to
us the things of the Father and the Son as an economic consequence of His
ontological procession. The Son is
truly God, but we don’t pray to the Son through the Father, but to the Father
through the Son, and no necessary consequence of Trinitarianism indicates that
it is lawful for us to pray to the Son through the Father (although prayer to
the Son is clearly lawful, cf. Acts 7:59-60; 1 Cor 1:2). If the Spirit wants us to worship Him
as we worship the undivided Trinity, and worship Him through being led by Him
in our prayers to the Father through the Son, worship Him by recognizing His
authority as equal to that of the Father and Son in the baptismal ceremony, and
worship Him by trusting in His strength to mortify sin, etc., but He does not
want us to worship Him by praying directly to His hupostasis--that is, not to
pray to the Spirit through the Son, but to the Father through the Son by the
Spirit, how does this endanger the Trinity? . . . Again, I appreciate your
response. I would like to have
holes in my argument exposed and shot down, if they are there. I am probably going to have to address
the question of prayer directly to the Spirit in my Trinitarianism course
lectures in the relatively near future--and these lectures are going to be
placed on the Internet and made available for billions of people--so I don’t
want to say something that is not Biblical. Thanks again.
For
the glory of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
Thomas
.
. .
Thomas,
I
think that I understand your position a bit better now. Based on what you have
said, I think that your view is not heretical and I am sorry if I came across
as implying as much. Just a quick thought since you believe that we must
worship all three persons of the Godhead. If we must worship all three persons,
then this would include every aspect of worship. This goes back to my original
argument. If prayer is a special part of religious worship, then we must pray
to the Spirit as an act of worship. . . . I think that because prayer is a part
of religious worship, and each divine person is the object of religious
worship, then we must allow prayer to the Holy Spirit.
That
being said, I ordinarily tell our congregation that we should recognize the
importance of how the NT teaches us to pray. As you noted, it is important to
pray to the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit. There is only one
clear NT example of a prayer directly to Jesus. This shows that while it is
lawful to pray to him directly, it is not normal. This would require an
entirely separate discussion why this is the case, but you appear to grasp this
fairly well already.
One
note about Muller. It has been a while since I have read that volume, but I do
keep reading primary source material on the Trinity in Reformed orthodoxy. I
think that it is not so much that the term God refers most commonly to the
entire Trinity in the NT, but that the term God most commonly refers to the
Father as representing the majesty of the entire Trinity. This is why, for
example, when we call on God as Father, we implicitly worship the Son and the
Spirit as being the one true God. This is why I can in good conscience say that
I treat the Spirit as the object of prayer even though I rarely pray to him
directly so that I can follow the NT pattern (which indicates that whichever
position you end up adopting, we should end up in a similar place in practice).
There
is a lot more to say, but you probably have enough to think through in your
studies.
I
agree that it is a sobering fact that we must stand before people and in
essence declare, “thus says the Lord.” What is particularly humbling is that
though I am studying to gain some expertise in systematic theology, I do not
believe that I have ever read an entire work on systematic theology where I
agree with everything the author has said. What does this say about the flaws
in my own theology! “Who can know his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults.”
I
will pray that the Lord would bless your studies and your labors to the
blessing of your student’s souls.
Have
a blessed Lord’s Day.
In
Christ,
------
Dear
------,
Thanks
for the reply. The argument that
since the Holy Spirit is worthy of worship, His Person should be/can be
directly invoked in the act of worship called prayer, is probably the best
argument I have heard for prayer directly to the Holy Spirit. If this is indeed a conclusive
argument, I trust I am willing to adopt it. This is the counter-response that came to mind after
thinking about your affirmation.
Some acts of worship do not respect the Persons of the Trinity in the
same way; for example, the Lord’s
Supper is done “in remembrance of” Christ, not specifically of the Father or
the Holy Spirit (although, of course, they were involved just as they are in
all ad extra Trinitarian acts). If
acts of worship can be Person-specific, and some acts of worship are not
appropriately done in relation to one or more of the Persons (as in the
Supper), then it is not truly a necessary consequence of the worthiness of God
the Spirit of worship that He wishes for us to worship Him by direct invocation
of His hupostasis in prayer. Is my
attempt to make your argument from necessary consequence not truly necessary
valid? I’d be happy to hear your
thoughts. Certainly we can do
worse with our time than think about how the blessed Trinity is to be
worshipped. . . .
I
can see the fact that the Father is the fons Deitas as an explanation of the
very frequent application of the title "God" to Him; what Muller mentioned as an extant
belief, and what I am not sure I have a clear example of in Scripture, is a NT
reference where “Father” refers to the entire Trinity rather than the first
Person specifically; if “Our
Father which art in heaven” is a reference to the entire Trinity in the Sermon
on the Mount, rather than a reference to the first Person in particular, it
certainly has real life significance.
Thank
you for your time and your good thoughts,
Thomas
[From
----- to me]:
Sorry
for not getting back to you sooner. I have two quick thoughts to add:
1.
I still think that Muller is not saying that the Reformed taught that the term
“Father” was a reference to the entire Trinity, but that the Father included
the entire Trinity by implication. The Father in this sense represents the
majesty of the Godhead and when we worship the Father, then we worship the Son
and the Spirit with the Father. In this regard, the Father represents the
common deity of the Son and the Spirit, but not their distinct personal
subsistences. This is an important distinction, since it would otherwise give
the impression of some form of modalism in Reformed orthodoxy. In other words,
“our Father” in the sermon on the mount is a reference to the Godhead of the
entire Trinity, but it is not a reference to the entire Trinity. It remains a
reference to the first person in particular without excluding the Son and the
Spirit as the common object of worship. When we address the Father in prayer,
we address him as a divine person. We respect his personal subsistence and
order of operation when we call him Father. Yet because we worship the Father
as God in prayer, then also worship the whole Godhead simultaneously because
the only God that exists is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is why I said
that we can respect the personal properties of each divine person while
simultaneously treating each divine person as the object of worship.
2.
The Lord’s Supper is a very good illustration of the principles that I have in
view. As you mentioned, there is a special emphasis on the Son in the Lord’s
Supper. We respect his personal properties as the Son of God and we also
remember him and commune with him in his work as Mediator. However, this is not
the same thing as saying that the Son is the exclusive object of worship in the
Lord’s Supper (or in any other act of worship). As our respective confessions
of faith rightly state, the entire Trinity is always the proper object of
worship. This is true in the Lord’s Supper just as much as it is in prayer and
in every other act of worship. If the triune God alone is the proper object of
worship in general, then all three divine persons are the proper object of
worship in every particular part of worship as well. In the Lord’s Supper, we
worship the Father for sending the Son and spreading the feast before us (this
idea is somewhere in Sibbes’s sermons on 2 Cor. 4). We worship the Son for
giving himself for us and for our salvation. We worship the Spirit for
producing spiritual communion with Christ in the [ordinance] and for uniting us
savingly to Christ. Christ may be the central focus of the Lord’s Supper and
the direct object of our attention, but we cannot worship him in the Supper
without worshiping the Father and the Spirit as well. However, we worship all
three persons in a way that respects their personal properties.
3.
All of this relates to the original question of prayer. If the Spirit is God
equal with the Father and the Son, and prayer is an act of divine worship to
God, then the Spirit is clearly the object of worship in prayer. However, much
as the Son receives the central focus of the Lord’s Supper, so the Father is
the central focus of our prayers (In his two sermons on Eph. 2:18 in vol. 9,
Owen actually argues that the person of the Father is the central focus of
every act of religious worship. These sermons are an excellent parallel to Communion
with God, only with a more narrow focus on public worship. These two sources
combined provide the structure for my PhD work.). This means that in terms of
divinity and as an act of worship, every prayer is directed to the Holy Spirit
together with the Father and the Son. The question remains whether we should
address him directly in our prayers. My answer is that it is appropriate to do
so, as long as we respect the personal properties of the Father and the Son as
well. In other words, if we address the Spirit directly in prayer, we must do
so recognizing that it is the Father who answers our prayers, through his Son,
by the Spirit. An example that I can think of that would be appropriate would
be to ask the Spirit to interced[e] within us in our prayers with groanings
that cannot be uttered so that we may cry out to the Father in Christ’s name.
We could offer the same prayer to the Father, asking him to send us the Spirit
in Christ’s name to help us in our prayers. I can conceive of a similar example
regarding the work of the Spirit in preaching, etc. While I would not reject
this kind of prayer to the Holy Spirit (and some of our hymns, such as come
tho[u] almighty king, express this kind of prayer to the Spirit), my ordinary
practice would still be to address the Father directly, in Christ's name, in
dependence on the Holy Spirit.
4.
We must be careful to distinguish but not to separate the deity and the
personality of all three persons in our prayers. We may only address the
persons of the Godhead in prayer because they are divine persons, and when we
address the persons we address them as divine persons. This point merely
confirms and draws on everything that I have stated above, but it again
reinforces the idea that it is not only the triune God who is the object of
worship, but divine persons in whom the entire Godhead resides. The only way I
can conceive of denying the lawfulness of prayer to the Holy Spirit is either
to deny that prayer is an act of worship, or to deny that all three divine
persons are the proper object of worship. Again, in light of your statement
that all three persons are the object of worship, I do not mean by this logical
conundrum to imply that you are heretical if you take a different position.
With the limited light and knowledge that the Lord has given me, I am trying to
point out the potential contradictions involved in holding such a view as I see
them.
I sincerely hope and pray that the Lord
will use these thoughts to help you think and pray through these issues. I have
chosen trinitarian theology as a special area of “expertise” and study, just as
the triune God himself is the center of my affections as a believer. Even then,
the more I study and know our God, the less I feel that I understand him. May
the Lord bless us both as we press on to know him and make him known better.
Blessings
in Christ,
-----
--TDR
