Promise and Prayer

The Biblical Writings in the Light of Speech-Act Theory

Anthony C. Thiselton

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725253629
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In the Bible, promise and prayer are essential and connected components of the inter-personal relationship between God and his people. And both promise and prayer are kinds of action undertaken by means of speaking, utterances philosophers refer to as speech acts. In the case of promises this is clear: they constitute firm commitments to act in certain ways under appropriate conditions. This book considers biblical examples of divine promise, from both Old and New Testaments. All speech acts depend upon institutional facts, and Thiselton argues that in the biblical writings Divine promises are based on the prior institution of God's covenant. That same covenant forms the institutional context of prayer. Thiselton shows how different kinds of prayer--blessing, thanksgiving and praise, petition and intercession--count as speech acts in different ways and to different degrees.

1

Promise as a Speech Act

1. The distinctive nature of promise as a speech act: it changes a situation

A promise constitutes more than a descriptive statement. Statements or assertions reflect or describe the world. Valid promises change or transform situations within the world. This is because in their very speaking they perform acts: the act of making a promise. As Austin, Evans, Searle, Recanati, Ricoeur, and many others point out, they perform an act that entails a commitment and a taking of responsibility. Searle calls them speech acts; Austin calls them performatives. As I wrote nearly thirty years ago, “The speaker ‘stands behind’ the words giving a pledge and personal backing that he or she is prepared to undertake commitments and responsibilities that are entailed in extra-linguistic terms by the proposition which is asserted.”15

This categorizes “promise” under the heading of speech acts. But what does this say about the promises of God? When God makes a promise, God performs an act in the very making of a promise. It is genuinely remarkable that God makes promises at all. He voluntarily and in sovereign grace commits himself, or binds himself, or limits his options, to act only in accordance with what he has promised.

Hence, Austin calls these commissive performative utterances. Searle calls them commissive speech acts. We know all too well in everyday life how costly a promise can be. If God has promised to save, he cannot condemn. An invitation to a wonderful event may come after we have promised to take our son to a football match. Both Austin and Searle call such speech acts “commissives” because they are speech acts that involve commitments, which tie our hands. We have promised to undertake appropriate actions. To ascribe such self-chosen limitations to God might seem incredible, but for the fact that he has limited himself in the covenant.

Before making the claim that the covenant is the institution that underlies and makes possible divine promise, we must first take a step back since biblical covenants are themselves examples of promises. Clearly according to the narrator in Genesis, God could promise life or death to Adam before any covenant was enacted. Yet covenant places divine promise on a formal or quasi-legal setting. When God promises something happens, and the covenant gives substance to this. The covenant may indeed take the form of a promise, but of a promise that is paradigmatic for other promises. This is because, as Walter Eichrodt declares, a human being knows where he or she stands according to the terms revealed in the covenant: “With this God men know exactly where they stand; an atmosphere of trust and security is created, in which they find both the strength for a willing surrender to the will of God and joyful courage to grapple with the problems of life.”16 By contrast, the worshippers of pagan deities remained in constant fear of the arbitrariness of their supposed gods.

John Searle therefore calls this kind of thing “an institutional fact,”17 i.e., one that applies to an institution or a corporate relationship. It stands in contrast to what he calls “a brute fact.” He continues, “It is only given such institutions as the church, the law, private property, the state, and the special position of the speaker and hero within these institutions that one can excommunicate, appoint, give and bequeath one’s possessions or declare war.”18

We are now in a position to say that the covenant is the institution that underlies divine promise. In the covenant God promises to act in certain ways so that people know where they stand with God. In the Bible this means the covenant (the institution) of the divine King (the one with the appropriate status and role to make a covenant), ratified by sacrificial blood (the means of making a covenant); in the New Testament it means ratification by the blood of Jesus Christ.

For our purposes the most important feature of speech acts is that they change the world, or situations within the world, in contrast to propositions or assertions, which describe and reflect the world. Searle illustrates this “difference of fit,” as he calls this, between words and the world by citing an illustration of everyday shopping suggested by the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe.19 A man goes into a supermarket with a shopping list gi...