T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Prayer

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780567664389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The essays collected in this volume provide a resource for thinking theologically about the practice of Christian prayer. In the first of four parts, the volume begins by reaching back to the biblical foundations of prayer. Then, each of the chapters in the second part investigates a classical Christian doctrine – including God, creation, Christology, pneumatology, providence and eschatology – from the perspective of prayer. The chapters in the third part explore the writings of some of the great theorizers of prayer in the history of the Christian tradition. The final part gathers a set of creative and critical conversations on prayer responding to a variety of contemporary issues. Overall, the T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Prayer articulates a theologically expansive account of prayer – one that is deeply biblical, energetically doctrinal, historically rooted, and relevant to a whole host of critical questions and concerns facing the world today.

PART ONE

Biblical Perspectives

CHAPTER ONE

Prayer in the Scriptures of Israel, the Christian Old Testament

CHRISTOPHER R. SEITZ

When we come to a topic like prayer, especially with a wide-angle lens seeking to encompass the scriptures of Israel in their entirety, it is probably important to consider what we are looking for, measured against preconceptions. What is it we are looking for, and what do we have in mind when we speak of prayer? Prayer as private devotion, prayer as spiritual exercise (Thomas Keating and ‘Centering Prayer’), prayer as corporate worship (Matins), prayer as praise in hymn, prayer at a sickbed, prayer on retreat, prayer as a universal exercise undertaken by Muslim, Hindu, sailor in straits, golfer in frustration or joy? Much of this conceives of prayer as an individual exercise of some kind, deeply interiorized or private, kneeling before worship or sleep or at break of day to petition for the sick, the lonely, the grieving, for ourselves and for our loved ones.

The famous episode from Book VI of Augustine’s Confessions comes to mind, where the worldly but searching saint-to-be encountered the spiritual hero Ambrose. Ambrose, he observed, prayed silently, and when he read, his lips did not move. He read to himself, and prayed the same way. We may forget how familiar practices like reading without reading aloud were once rare, and strangely isolated and private.

Now, as he read, his eyes glanced over the pages and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. Often when we came to his room – for no one was forbidden to enter, nor was it his custom that the arrival of visitors should be announced to him – we would see him thus reading to himself. After we had sat for a long time in silence – for who would dare interrupt one so intent? – we would then depart, realizing that he was unwilling to be distracted in the little time he could gain for the recruiting of his mind, free from the clamor of other men’s business. Perhaps he was fearful lest, if the author he was studying should express himself vaguely, some doubtful and attentive hearer would ask him to expound it or discuss some of the more abstruse questions, so that he could not get over as much material as he wished, if his time was occupied with others. And even a truer reason for his reading to himself might have been the care for preserving his voice, which was very easily weakened. Whatever his motive was in so doing, it was doubtless, in such a man, a good one.¹

This is likely how we think of prayer, too, and of a very good kind of pray-er. And it is not without its biblical – Old Testament – models. Individual, silent, intent, interiorized. The scene of bereft and barren Hannah comes to mind:

As Hannah kept on praying to the Lord, Eli observed her mouth. Hannah was praying in her heart, and her lips were moving but her voice was not heard. Eli thought she was drunk and said to her, ‘How long are you going to stay drunk? Put away your wine.’

‘Not so, my lord’, Hannah replied, ‘I am a woman who is deeply troubled. I have not been drinking wine or beer; I was pouring out my soul to the Lord. Do not take your servant for a wicked woman; I have been praying here out of my great anguish and grief’.

(1 Sam. 1.12-16)

Hannah’s silent prayer – her lips moved however! – was taken by Eli as a kind of drunkenness because her voice was not heard. She was ‘pouring out her soul to the Lord’, and ‘praying out of great grief and anguish’. The same phrases describe prayer as we may mean it, and think of it today, but as we shall see is in fact not very representative.

What is representative, and will need underscoring, is the uncontested fact that in her praying she had a listening ear, the Lord God of Israel. Even when seemingly silent or hiding his face, as the language goes and as sometimes happens, he is being called upon as he is. Eli did not doubt any of this, even as initially he thought she was drunk and not praying at all. Hannah was praying, and she was praying properly within the covenant life of a personal God with a personal people. She had a dial tone, and in this case, God was both listening and prepared to say yes on her terms as well as on his own. The child she prayed for she received and he would be Samuel – because the Lord God heard her.

The Character of the Old Testament Witness: The Oracles of God Entrusted to the Jews

If we are seeking to give a global account of prayer in the Old Testament, we must first ask what kind of witness this is.² For this literary deposit consisting of thirty-nine books does not say what it says on some neutral plane.³ In Paul’s language, the Old Testament constitutes ‘the oracles of God entrusted to the Jews’. That is to say, the Old Testament is a privileged and distinctive witness to God, to God’s speech to a people, and to their recording of that, stretching over a millennium. God entrusted himself and his speech and life to a people. And the canonical form bears witness to the limits of that special entrusting, so that we who are Christians, and we who are Judaism without temple, priesthood, prophet or king, and we who judge ourselves neither of these things all together look into a world not our own, yet somehow continuous with our own world. It is important to register this distance in the light of what we have said above, since praying is something we do, or claim to know something about, or at least have a preconceived hunch about just what the word means. Yet we are seeking to look over into an account that in the nature of the case has a distinctive character, inhering in what it means to speak of a ‘testament’ or covenant life, ‘oracles of God entrusted to a people of his choosing’. If this is a truly distinctive canonical presentation, which we hold it to be, it should present us with an understanding of prayer appropriate to that character and purpose. We must be prepared to see it as odd, and to let its particular word inform us on its own terms.

Consider the book of Genesis as an example. Not once is recorded a scene or act of praying as in a form familiar to us as prayer.⁴ God speaks. He speaks directly. He appears. The ancestors who are part of this world of Genesis hear and speak back in response. This happens all quite naturally and without elaborate procedures for communication. God said to Abraham, ‘sacrifice your son’ (Gen. 22.2). God visited Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. He cautioned, he aided, he directed, he allowed himself to be negotiated with, he appeared in a dream. Given the richness and directness of this reality, it is perhaps no surprise that we do not see prayer in the form we know it or see it elsewhere in the books to follow. It is important to keep this in mind in reflecting on prayer when it does appear. It is constitutive of the character of the witness we are considering that by its very form it is oracular: in it God speaks to a people. That is what makes it what it is. Prayer emerges against this backdrop. To read the Old Testament is to be initiated into a world where God is speaking directly to people, and where prayer is a subset of that basic communicative bottom line.

To be underscored here is an important consequence. The reading of this distinctive literature can be said to be a kind of praying itself, as it is a participation in the oracular life of God with a people, the reading and meditating on which involves us in this selfsame divine communication. It shapes what we know about God, and about his ways with humanity, we who share that life by virtue of the scriptures being opened to us. Genesis shows God at work with humanity both in reality and in promise, prior to the covenant at Sinai. The distinctiveness of the portrayal – direct communication, ‘and God said’ – portends a relationship in prayer that will follow, but also a reading and mediating – silently like Ambrose or aloud in worship – of scripture so as to be formed prayerfully by what it has to say.

This can be illustrated from another direction. Genesis reminds us in the nature of how it speaks that the God of this speech can be known as Elohim. That is, by a word that can be and will be taken on the lips of all humanity and by all creation in praise of him; a word the elect share with the generic of all his creating purposes. But this God is also giving himself to be known more personally and intimately. ‘At that time humanity called on the name of the Lord’, Genesis 4.26 tells us in its lapidary declaration.⁵ The Lord appearing by the narrator’s hand or in direct discourse to follow is at one and the same time the God of all creation. He appears and speaks in truth and in promise to those of his choosing, and in time he will make himself known by the name more fully in fulfilment and in future faithfulness through time (Exodus 3 and 6).

Inside this strange admixture of direct divine speaking and acting, on the one side, and the more general canvas of prayer-like relating which includes those prior to or outside of the covenanted Israel alone, we can see the general shape of a contrast that will appear in sharper form subsequently. That is, ‘the oracles of God entrusted to the Jews’ contain descriptions of those outside the covenant life and the way in which God as Elohim is in relationship with them, including what may be called their prayerful approach.

Consider, for example, the prayer of those outside the covenant dial-tone, from the ironic example of the prophets confronting Elijah or the hired hand Balaam, to the more sympathetic portrayals of Ruth and the sailors on board ship with Jonah. The Old Testament presents Israel not in isolation in its covenant life of prayer but fully alive in the good world of his creating.

Elijah is in full-throated opposition to Israel’s own king, Ahab, due to his forfeiture of the covenant life in following the Baals of Canaanite worship. Flood, rain, drought are their domain, so it is held. Elijah has Ahab gather all Israel in a contest between himself and 550 prophetic rivals. He puts the matter economically, as having to do with prayer and response: ‘You call on the name of your god and I will call on the name of the Lord; and the God who answers by fire, he is God’ (1 Kgs 18.24). The typographical conventions for rendering the verse into English reveal the theological substructure, itself rooted in the Hebrew. Elohim when referring to the deity/deities of the opponents rendered god/gods; YHWH, the revealed name inside the covenant life; ha’elohim the true God. We know the story. After a full morning of failed ‘calling on the name’, Elijah mocks the interceding because directed at a vain target. They are calling on someone who is asleep, in the bathroom, musing or on a journey, or non-existent, as it were. Elijah’s formal petition follows, and it contains this line, ‘Answer me, YHWH, answer me, that this people may know that thou, YHWH, art Elohim’ (1 Kgs 18.37). YHWH Elohim responds to the prayer of Elijah, and to this the people make solemn reply, ‘YHWH, he is Elohim; YHWH, he is Elohim.’ Now this is a stark example because it comes in the context of life-and-death religious truth and devotion. But it shows that prayer is not about technique – we have omitted the ritual details and their elaborate nature – but about proper address and obedient life inside the solemn covenant of God’s electing purposes.

That this is no simple affair of inside/outside, it is to be re...