Psalms

The Prayer Book of the Bible

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506480190
• eBook ISBN: 9781506483580
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

"A valuable guide to these joyful, angry, beautiful, and difficult 'earthly prayers' that allow us... a deep human connection to the God who remains with us and will not abandon us." --Kathleen Norris, author of Dakota, The Cloister Walk, and Acedia & Me

Jesus died with a psalm on his lips. For millennia, humans have been shaped by the Psalms. And before the Nazis banned him from publishing, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer published this book on the Psalms.

What comfort is found in the Psalter? What praise, and what challenge? What threat? In the pages of Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible, discover the richness this book of Scripture held for Bonhoeffer, and learn to pray psalms along with Christ.

First published in 1940, this classic reveals how the Psalms are essential to the life of the believer and offers Bonhoeffer's reflections on psalms of thanksgiving, suffering, guilt, praise, and lament. Now with an introduction by Walter Brueggemann and excerpts from the Psalms, Bonhoeffer's timeless work offers contemporary readers ancient wisdom and resources for the living of these days. Includes a biographical sketch of Bonhoeffer written by his friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge.

1

“Lord, Teach Us to Pray!”

So spoke the disciples to Jesus. In making this request, they confessed that they were not able to pray on their own, that they had to learn to pray. The phrase “learning to pray” sounds strange to us. If the heart does not overflow and begin to pray by itself, we say, it will never “learn” to pray. But it is a dangerous error, surely very widespread among Christians, to think that the heart can pray by itself. For then we confuse wishes, hopes, sighs, laments, rejoicings—all of which the heart can do by itself—with prayer. And we confuse earth and heaven, humanity and God. Prayer does not mean simply to pour out one’s heart. It means rather to find the way to God and to speak with him, whether the heart is full or empty. No one can do that on one’s own. For that, one needs Jesus Christ.

The disciples want to pray, but they do not know how to do it. That can be very painful, to want to speak with God and not to be able to, to have to be speechless before God, to discover that every call to him dies within itself, that heart and mouth speak an absurd language which God does not want to hear. In this need we seek out people who are able to help us, who know something about prayer. If one among us who is able to pray would only take the other along in his prayer, if we could pray along with him, then we could be helped! Certainly experienced Christians can help us in this way a great deal. But they can do it only through him who must himself help them, and to whom they direct us if they are true teachers in prayer, namely through Jesus Christ. If he takes us with him in his prayer, if we are privileged to pray along with him, if he lets us accompany him on his way to God and teaches us to pray, then we are free from the agony of prayerlessness. But that is precisely what Jesus Christ wants to do. He wants to pray with us and to have us pray with him, so that we may be confident and glad that God hears us. When our will wholeheartedly enters into the prayer of Christ, then we pray correctly. Only in Jesus Christ are we able to pray, and with him we also know that we shall be heard.

And so we must learn to pray. Children learn to speak because their father speaks to them. The child learns the speech of the father. So we learn to speak to God because God has spoken to us and speaks to us. By means of the speech of the Father in heaven, his children learn to speak with him. Repeating God’s own words after him, we begin to pray to him. We ought to speak to God and he wants to hear us, not in the false and confused speech of our heart, but in the clear and pure speech which God has spoken to us in Jesus Christ.

The Lord’s Prayer

Our Father who art in heaven,

Hallowed be Thy name.

Thy kingdom come.

Thy will be done,

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts,

as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And do not lead us into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.

[For Thine is the kingdom,

and the power,

and the glory,

forever.

Amen.]

—Matthew 6:9–13 NASB 1977

God’s speech in Jesus Christ meets us in the Holy Scriptures. If we wish to pray with confidence and gladness, then the words of Holy Scripture will have to be the solid basis of our prayer. For here we know that Jesus Christ, the Word of God, teaches us to pray. The words which come from God become, then, the steps on which we find our way to God.

2

Learning to Pray in the Name of Jesus

Now there is in the Holy Scriptures a book which is distinguished from all other books of the Bible by the fact that it contains only prayers. The book is the Psalms. It is at first very surprising that there is a prayer book in the Bible. The Holy Scripture is the Word of God to us. But prayers are the words of humans. How do prayers then get into the Bible? Let us make no mistake about it: the Bible is the Word of God even in the Psalms. Then are these prayers to God also God’s own word? That seems rather difficult to understand. We grasp it only when we remember that we can learn true prayer only from Jesus Christ, from the word of the Son of God, who lives with us, to God the Father, who lives in eternity. Jesus Christ has brought every need, every joy, every gratitude, every hope of humanity before God. In his mouth the word of humans becomes the Word of God, and if we pray his prayer with him, the Word of God becomes once again the word of humans. All prayers of the Bible are such prayers which we pray together with Jesus Christ, in which he accompanies us, and through which he brings us into the presence of God. Otherwise there are no true prayers, for only in and with Jesus Christ can we truly pray.

If we want to read and to pray the prayers of the Bible and especially the Psalms, therefore, we must not ask first what they have to do with us, but what they have to do with Jesus Christ. We must ask how we can understand the Psalms as God’s Word, and then we shall be able to pray them. It does not depend, therefore, on whether the Psalms express adequately that which we feel at a given moment in our heart. If we are to pray aright, perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to our own heart. Not what we want to pray is important, but what God wants us to pray. If we were dependent entirely on ourselves, we would probably pray only the fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer. But God wants it otherwise. The richness of the Word of God ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart.

I call upon you, O Lord; come quickly to me;

give ear to my voice when I call to you.

Let my prayer be counted as incense before you,

and the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice.

—Psalm 141:1–2

Thus if the Bible also contains a prayer book, we learn from this that not only that Word which he has to say to us belongs to the Word of God, but also that word which he wants to hear from us, because it is the word of his beloved Son. This is pure grace, that God tells us how we can speak with him and have fellowship with him. We can do it by praying in the name of Jesus Christ. The Psalms are given to us to this end, that we may learn to pray them in the name of Jesus Christ.

In response to the request of the disciples, Jesus gave them the Lord’s Prayer. Every prayer is contained in it. Whatever is included in the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer is prayed aright; whatever is not included is no prayer. All the prayers of Holy Scripture are summarized in the Lord’s Prayer and are contained in its immeasurable breadth. They are not made superfluous by the Lord’s Prayer but constitute the inexhaustible richness of the Lord’s Prayer as the Lord’s Prayer is their summation. Luther says of the Psalter, “It penetrates the Lord’s Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer penetrates it, so that it is possible to understand one on the basis of the other and to bring them into joyful harmony.” Thus the Lord’s Prayer becomes the touchstone for whether we pray in the name of Jesus Christ or in our own name. It makes good sense, then, that the Psalter is often bound together in a single volume with the New Testament. It is the prayer of the Christian church. It belongs to the Lord’s Prayer.

But I am like a green olive tree

in the house of God.

I trust in the steadfast love of God

forever and ever.

I will thank you forever,

because of what you have done.

In the presence of the faithful

I will proclaim your name, for it is good.

—Psalm 52:8–9

3

Who Prays the Psalms?

Of the 150 Psalms, seventy-three are attributed to King David, twelve to the song master Asaph who was appointed by David, twelve to the Levitical family of the children of Korah working under David, two to King Solomon, one to the music masters Heman and Ethan, probably employed by David and Solomon. Thus it is understandable that the name of David has been connected with the Psalter in special ways.

It is reported that after David’s secret anointing as king, he was called to play the harp for King Saul, who was abandoned by God and plagued by an evil spirit: “And whenever the harmful spirit from God was upon Saul, David took the lyre and played it with his hand. So Saul was refreshed and was well, and the harmful spirit departed from him” (1 Samuel 16:23 ESV). That may have been the beginning of the writing of the Psalms by David. In the power of the spirit of God, which had come upon him at the time of his anointing, he drove away the evil spirit through his song. No Psalm has been transmitted to us from the time prior to the anointing. The songs which later were accepted into the canon of the Holy Scriptures were first prayed by the one called to be the messianic king, from whom the promised king Jesus Christ was to descend.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction by Walter Brueggemann
• 1. “Lord, Teach Us to Pray!”
• 2. Learning to Pray in the Name of Jesus
• 3. Who Prays the Psalms?
• 4. Names, Music, Verse Form
• 5. Congregational Worship and the Psalms
• 6. Classification
• 7. The Creation
• 8. The Law
• 9. Holy History
• 10. The Messiah
• 11. The Church
• 12. Life
• 13. Suffering
• 14. Guilt
• 15. The Enemies
• 16. The End
• 17. Petition for the Spirit of Life
• 18. The Blessing of Morning Prayer
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biographical Sketch by Eberhard Bethge