MetaCatholic

I’m afraid I can’t give you all the links for this post, at least for a week, since the Church Times irritatingly insists on reserving much of their current content for those who subscribe to the print edition. They charge more for the print edition if you subscribe, than if you buy it in the newsagents, so I suppose they see this as part of what they’re making you pay extra for. Personally I think it’s an exceptionally daft business model.

Anyway, that aside, their regular columnist Giles Fraser veers between the thoughtful and the silly. His column last week was one of the silly ones. And the silliest observation was this one (on this story):

This week’s latest irritation from the Bishop of Rome was the proclamation that anyone baptised according to the Trinitarian formula “Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier” would have to be baptised again using “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”. The first description of the Trinity is apparently dangerous feminist propaganda, and must be stamped out.

This week’s letters contained some responses, from the knee-jerk, to the well-reasoned, and the best among them was that by Clifford Longley, one time doyen of religious journalists in the UK, in which he carefully took Fraser’s objections apart. As he dryly pointed out, changing the baptismal formula is almost certainly as much against Anglican Canon Law as it is against the Roman Catholic. (There is no specific canon, but one can deduce this from a mix of the canons and the liturgy.)

It seems to me blindly obvious that while phrases such as “Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier” may legitimately supplement the traditional language, it cannot replace it.

• The traditional formula deals with relationships within the Trinity, and not simply the relationships of the Trinity to us.
• The modern formula deals only with divine works, none of which are exclusive to any one person of the Trinity. It fails to make any differentiation of persons within God, and could easily be read as modalist.
• The traditional formula is not an abstract ascription of patriarchal language to the Godhead, but is rooted in the real language and story of Jesus of Nazareth. Trinitarian language is not the invention of theologians from thin air, but a description of God as he is known through the history of Jesus. It anchors us in the gospel.
• The modern formula could be used about God in a whole range of religious traditions, including those which entirely reject the Trinity as tritheist. It has no specific roots in the story of Jesus.

While I think that validity is rarely a good way of talking about sacraments, those do seem compelling reasons for rejecting any attempt to use the newer formula in baptism. Viva Papa Ratzi.