Today’s Trinity hymn from Sing Praise is “Christ pours his grace upon his own” by Timothy Dudley Smith to a bespoke tune by Anne Harrison. It differs from most such hymns in placing the Son/Christ first, before the Father/Creator, and is also much more original in its wording than yesterday’s, as befits TDS’s reputation as a leading hymnwriter.
One of the tensions I find in any discussion of the Trinity is between an insistence that they are equal in divine nature and all existing since before time (as an old hymn puts it, ‘consubstantial and co-eternal’), and a hierarchy in which the Father begets the Son and both together send forth the Spirit. If all of them have existed as persons in the same unity since before time, does it matter what order they go in, just because the son was incarnate at a particular time, and the Spirit appeared immediately after the Son’s departure? (immediately? well, what’s ten days in ten billion years?)
Anyway, if the link phrase on Monday was ‘the way’, today’s is the phrase ‘to him [or God) be glory’. In verse one, it is in response to the grace given by Christ thorough his death; in verse two, to the changeless love of the Creator; and in verse three to the work of the Spirit is making us one. The refrain of the last verse is repeated: “to God be glory from us his children, throughout all ages” which takes us back to the co-eternal. Glory is a quality of God and the basic meaning of the word may be something more like ‘honour’, see my previous post ) : we honour God in response to his grace, love and abiding presence with us.
Like Stephen I enjoyed the originality of this hymn, both the words (Timothy has a very straightforward style in which the words flow comfortably off the tongue) and the tune (the two original Ann Harrison tunes in this book – “Light of the world, true light divine” and this one are very accessible melodies). The way the music is set out in the book requires a page-turn for the repeat of the final chorus, but closer inspection shows that this is completely superfluous and I’m surprised that the editors didn’t set the music out more sensibly.
About the order of the Persons and Stephen’s comment about their joint pre-existence and yet internal hierarchy, I’m reminded that an early debate was about the “immanent Trinity versus the economic Trinity”. “Immanent” means “part of God’s intrinsic nature, the way he is in his own being, his ontological state”; and “economic” means “about the way God deals with us, for example in saving us and sanctifying us; how God appears as he interacts with people”. In other words, are our perceptions of the “Son” and “Spirit” merely bound up with the way we see God as he deals with us, or are they part of his essential and intrinsic nature? And the answer of the theologians is that they are part of his essential and intrinsic nature. God has within himself the plurality which we describe by use of words like “Persons”. It follows that “before the world began, God was already in nature three-fold in his personhood”.
There are a number of hymns that put the order “Father, Spirit, Son”, both traditional and modern – mostly to do with reasons of rhythm and rhyme, and as Stephen says, it doesn’t particularly matter in what order they go.