Trinity in liturgy: Not Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer

I have been hearing some people blessing a congregation using the phrase "And the blessing of God; Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer be  with you....". I honour their desire to avoid reinforcing a gendered impression of God because I understand that the priming power of language can further set back our efforts to enable women to be genuinely empowered and I think that the use of feminine imagery for God (which is in scripture) and of terms that do not connote a particular gender (including avoiding gendered pronouns as far as possible) is part of helping along a just and inclusive church and society. God is not gendered in God's own being -both genders reflect God's image, so we allow a falsehood in as far as we allow God to be thought of in exclusively masculine terms.

That said, I have been uneasy for some years about the popular formula "Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer" which popularly seems to be the go-to replacement for the usual "Father, Son, Holy Spirit". The reasons for my unease are well set out in the post linked here and the bit quoted here gets to the heart of the problem.

"Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer don’t work. They are about what God does not who God is. They are about operations not ontology"

And to extend the point a bit further than in the linked blog post, in most cases, the things that God does are operations of God rather than a single Person of the Trinity: God creates, meaning the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit creates. God saves: the Father in the Son by the Holy Spirit works salvation. And so on. Which means that the Creator is not just the Father, the Redeemer is not just the Son -and so on. So the formula does not properly delineate the Persons in any case.



For this reason when I have been writing liturgy, I have experimented with triad of terms which attempt to capture the interPersonal relationships of God. First off, I have written some prayers which use "Begetter, Begotten and Begetting" -though I struggled then with how learned this sounded. So I have been wondering about, and tried for one context, "Lover, Beloved and Loving". I'm still wondering about that, but I think it could work, certainly in terms of the referred-to blog post.



'Father, Son, Spirit: Not Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer: via Blog this'