for as long as the sacrament of Baptism, as it was appointed by Christ to be administered, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, shall continue in the church, (that is, whilst the church shall continue,) as long as the doxology, or glorification of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost together, (which was received in the catholic church in the very age that trod upon the heels of the apostles, as appears from the testimony of St. Justin Martyr and others,) shall retain a place in the Liturgy and public offices of the church, so long shall we not want a clear proof, and a practical evidence and demonstration that the Deity of the Holy Ghost, and so the consubstantiality of each Person in the most blessed Trinity, is a catholic verity.
Bull echoed this in his Sermon XIII, 'Common Prayers ancient, useful, and necessary':
Such also is the doxology or glorification of the ever- blessed Trinity: "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost." For they are much mistaken who think that this form was first set up in the Church of Christ against the Arian heresy: it was in use in the Churches of Christ from the beginning. Hence Justin Martyr, who lived very near to the Apostolic age, in his second Apology towards the end setting forth the public worship of Christians in his time, tells us, " In all our oblations" (i.e. in all our Eucharists) "we bless and praise the Maker of all things, by His Son Jesus Christ, and by the Holy Ghost" ...
But the truth is, this doxology was not occasionally taken up in opposition to any heresy, but is an essential part of Christian worship, necessary to be used always by all Christians, if there had never been any heresy in the world. For all Christians are baptized in, or into, "the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," i.e. into the faith, service, and worship of the holy Trinity, and so from their very Baptism are obliged to render and give to each person divine worship and adoration.
Bull continues by again emphasising the significance of the doxology in the Prayer Book liturgy. Indeed, he suggests that this has even greater weight than liturgical use of the Creeds in rooting us in Trinitarian faith:
the Liturgy of our Church comes behind none of the ancient Liturgies. For therein we are obliged to confess the faith of all the ancient Creeds. But more especially our frequent doxologies to the most holy and ever-blessed Trinity, do abundantly secure us against Arianism and Socinianism, the prevailing heresies of our unhappy times, and of all other heresies the most dangerous. In short, no heretic can heartily join in the offices of prayer and praise, and confessions of faith, prescribed in the Liturgy of our Church.
It is these basic Christian practices of Baptism in the Triune name and praise of the Holy Trinity - and not in what Bull calls elsewhere "the labyrinths of the schoolmen" - that the Church's confession of the Trinitarian faith is to be found. This is a particular strength of Trinitarian minimalism. Trinitarian faith flows from and is dependent upon ordinary, normative Christian practices, not philosophical speculation and intricate terminology. Here is what is sufficient for the nourishing and sustaining of Trinitarian faith. It is, in other words, an invitation to contemporary Anglicans to recover a confidence in the inherently Trinitarian nature of these basic Christian practices at the heart of common prayer. To confess and adore the Holy Trinity is not the preserve of an exclusive, speculative elite knowledge: it is the very basic stuff of praying and worshipping as Anglican Christians.
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