Tripartite Structure of Prayer & Trinitarian Formulary

(Faith : Worship)
Prayer, Tripartite Structure,

The Tripartite Structure of Prayer and the Trinitarian Formulary

Jewish table prayer, thought bt some historians of liturgy to be the antecedent of the early Chritian eucharistic prayer, evidences a threefold pattern of praise, remembrance, and petition. In a general way this sequence corresponds to the formula "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" in Christian worship, Thus, liturgical practice may have helped to shape classical Christian Triitarianism.

In recent years, more and more attention has been given to three issue that bear upon the understanding of the classic eucharistic praters.
Fist, there has been a developing concern to disciver the possible relationships, both of continuity and change, between Jewish worship practices and prayers and the worship and praters of early Christianity.
Second, there has been a growing iterest in the way in which praters are structured.
Thus, it has been oberved by many scholars, both Jewish and Christian, that traditional prayers usually embody a pattern or sequence of themes and emphases.
Thrid, throughout these studies there has been an acknowledgment that prating shapes believing. An example of this dynamic is the way in which the clasical doctrine of the Trinity evolved gradually as Christians began to pray to the Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit.

Parallel Praters in Jewish and Early Christian Tradition
It is clear from the NT that Jesus and all of his disciples were Jews accustomed to the beliefs and practices of the time. (Luke 2:41; 4:16)
Thrughout the NT there are numberous and quite significant evidences of the dependence of early Chritianity upon its religious background in Judaism. (Aatt.6:9-15, Luke 11:2-4)
Furthermore, the language and contents of the Didacbe, which is perhaps the earliest manual of Christian guidance for living and church order, indicate that early Christianity was developing in paths that may have been somewhat similar to those suggested i nthe Mishnab as characteristic of the Judaism of the first century.

The Structure of Jewish and Christian Prayers
Several scholars are now fruitfully studying the patterns of the prayers found in the Bible, the synagogue, and the church. A splendid example f this approach is Morshe Greenberg's recent study of Biblical prose Prayer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), which recognizes that such ordinary human acts as petitioning, confessing, and expressing gratitude have ther own patterns. These "patterns remain constant throughour the Scriptures, regardless of source, because they arise immediately and naturally from life." Among others who have done significant structural studies of Jewish and Christian prayer are Joseph Heinemann, Louis Ligier, and Thomas Talley.
One of the significant results of these structural studies is the discovery of a classic example of a Jewish table prater in the Book of Jubilees 22:6-9. Jubilees was written sometime before 100 B.C. and it gives evidence of what may have been a typical table blessing from the time of the Maccabees. It attributes the prater to Abraham, and its structure is formed by the acts of :
Praising
Remembering
Asking
The tripartite pattern of prayer. It is this tripartite structure that appears whith vigor and clarity in the classic euharistic prayer whch may have been composed i the third century in the Apostolic tradition of Hippolytus.
In that prayer the structure begins, analogously, with thanks to the God who made all things, then recounts the story of Jesus, and finally asks for the sending of the Holy Spirit. As a result, one can see a liturgical impulse at work in the sha[ing of the classical Trinitarian formulary. The sequece "Father, Son, Holy Spirit," althugh found i Matt. 28:19,
The tripartite structure of prayer may have cntributed to the establishment of the classical trinitarian sequence.

John E. Burkhart