Analyzing Prayer: Theological and Philosophical Essays (Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology) 9780192859044, 0192859048

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OX F O R D S T U D I E S I N A NA LY T I C T H E O L O G Y Series Editors

Michael C. Rea Oliver D. Crisp

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OX F O R D S T U D I E S I N A NA LY T I C T H E O L O G Y Analytic Theology utilizes the tools and methods of contemporary analytic philosophy for the purposes of constructive Christian theology, paying attention to the Christian tradition and development of doctrine. This innovative series of studies showcases high quality, cutting-­edge research in this area, in monographs and symposia. PUBLISHED TITLES INCLUDE Atonement Eleonore Stump Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory Kent Dunnington In Defense of Extended Conciliar Christology A Philosophical Essay Timothy Pawl Love Divine A Systematic Account of God’s Love for Humanity Jordan Wessling Voices from the Edge Centring Marginalized Perspectives in Analytic Theology Edited by Michelle Panchuk and Michael C. Rea The Principles of Judaism Samuel Lebens Essays in Analytic Theology Volume 1 & 2 Michael C. Rea The Contradictory Christ Jc Beall Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion William Wood Divine Holiness and Divine Action Mark C. Murphy Analytic Christology and the Theological Interpretation of the New Testament Thomas H. McCall Fallenness and Flourishing Hud Hudson

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Analyzing Prayer Theological and Philosophical Essays Edited by

O L I V E R  D.  C R I S P, JA M E S  M .  A R C A D I , A N D J O R DA N W E S S L I N G

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2022 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2022 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930327 ISBN 978–0–19–285904–4 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859044.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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To the Fuller AT team for the golden years in the Golden State

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Contents Contributors

ix

Introduction 1 Oliver D. Crisp 1. Petitionary Prayer and Pride Scott A. Davison

8

2. Interceding for the Lost: On the Effectiveness of Petitioning God for the Salvation of Others Jordan Wessling

20

3. Are You There, God? It’s Me, the Theist: On the Viability and Virtue of Non-­Doxastic Prayer Amber L. Griffioen

38

4. Praying in the Name of Christ: Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “Mystical” Account of Prayer James R. Gordon

59

5. Prayer as Complaint Oliver D. Crisp

79

6. Toward an Account of Lamenting Well Kevin Timpe

95

7. Theology in the Second Person: Christian Dogmatics as a Mode of Prayer Ross D. Inman 8. Does God Pray? Katherine Sonderegger

116 136

9. Blessing God as Pledge of Allegiance: A Speech-­Act Theoretic Approach 149 James M. Arcadi 10. Knowing as you are Known: Prayer in the Presence of God Kyle Strobel

166

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viii Contents

11. Prayer as the Road to Self-­Knowledge Adam Green

183

12. Prayer and the Meaning of Life Jason McMartin

202

Index

221

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Contributors James M. Arcadi Independent Scholar Oliver D. Crisp Universtiy of St Andrews, UK Scott A. Davison Morehead State University, Kentucky, USA James R. Gordon Wheaton College, Illinois, USA Adam Green University of Oklahoma, USA Amber L. Griffioen Independent Scholar Ross D. Inman Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, North Carolina, USA Jason McMartin  Rosemead School of Psychology and Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, California, USA Katherine Sonderegger Virginia Theological Seminary, Virginia, USA Kyle Strobel Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, California, USA Kevin Timpe Calvin University, Michigan, USA Jordan Wessling Lindsey Wilson College, Kentucky, USA

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Introduction Oliver D. Crisp

What are we doing when we pray? There may be all sorts of things we think we are doing. But what are we actually doing? And what is prayer? These are important issues for those who care about the practice of faith. They may also be important issues for those of no faith, or those who hope for faith, or act as if they have faith in the expectation that faith may follow practice. For prayer is a central religious practice, one that spans religious traditions and takes many different forms. In analytic philosophy of religion, there has been some interest in petitionary prayer or what is sometimes called prayer as impetration. Although there is not the same amount of literature on the topic as there is on, say, central divine attributes or problems of evil, back in the second half of the twentieth century there were some notable interventions on the topic, including work by D.  Z.  Phillips, Peter Geach, and more recently, David Basinger, Vincent Brümmer, and Eleonore Stump.1 In contemporary research, there has been a “liturgical turn” in analytic theology, with a burgeoning field of work on liturgy, sacraments (especially the Eucharist), spiritual practices, and more recently ecclesiology. It seemed to us (that is, to the three editors of this volume) that the time was ripe for a new look at prayer with the philosophy of religion literature in the background, and the more up-­to-­date work expanding analytic theology in a liturgical direction in the front of our minds. The recent monograph by Scott Davison on petitionary prayer was another impetus. We gathered together to read it and talk about its subject matter as part of the Analytic Theology for Theological Formation Project at Fuller Theological Seminary, which was a John Templeton Foundation funded initiative from 2015-­2018. Eventually, we were joined by several others to form a research 1  See D. Z. Phillips, The Concept of Prayer (London: Routledge, 1965); Peter Geach, God and the Soul (London: Routledge, 1969); David Basinger, “Why Petition an Omnipotent, Omniscient, Wholly Good God?” Religious Studies 19 (1983): 25–42; Vincent Brümmer, What Are We Doing When We Pray? On Prayer and the Nature of Faith (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), and Eleonore Stump, “Petitionary Prayer” in American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1984): 81–91. See also, Richard Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Scott A. Davison provides a useful essay on the state of the art in “Petitionary Prayer,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, located at: plato.stanford.edu/entries/petitionary-­prayer, last accessed November 5, 2020. Oliver D. Crisp, Introduction In: Analyzing Prayer: Theological and Philosophical Essays. Edited by: Oliver D. Crisp, James M. Arcadi, and Jordan Wessling, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859044.003.0001

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2  Analyzing Prayer group, which read and discussed a number of books, articles, essays, and worked on our own research projects that included a number of outputs that contributed to the liturgical turn. One of the themes of the Fuller AT Project (as we called it) was prayer. As part of the project, we convened a series of seminars on the topic, with speakers giving papers that expanded the discussion in various new directions. Revised versions of some of the talks given on those occasions have found their way into this volume. Others joined them in due course as we conceived of a volume of essays on the topic. Prayer is a central religious practice, and the twelve contributors to this volume are all, in one way or another, writing about and commenting on the practice of prayer in the Judeo-­Christian tradition. It is the tradition that we know best. But the hope is that this may also be of interest to those beyond that tradition. One of the things we tried to do was expand the way in which prayer was discussed. Petitionary prayer remains a focus, which is appropriate. It is, after all, one of the central concerns of Judeo-­Christian spirituality. So we have discussions of petitionary prayer and pride, as well as petitioning God for those who are not believers, and who are “lost.” But we wanted to press things further in several directions. On the one hand, we wanted to deepen the engagement with the Christian tradition. How had particular theologians conceived of prayer? Might their contributions be different from the sort of things currently discussed on this topic? And on the other hand, we wanted to broaden out the kinds of prayer discussed. Petition is indeed important, but there are other aspects to prayer that have a grip on the Christian imagination too. What about mystical prayer? What about lament or complaint? Must one believe in God in order to pray? Can theology itself be a species of prayer? Does God pray? And what about the implications of prayer: does it lead to greater self-­knowledge, to a sense of meaning in life, to a greater experience of the presence of God? All of these issues are tackled in the contributions to this volume. Let us consider each of them in a little more detail.

Overview of the Chapters The opening chapter is by Scott Davison, on “Petitionary Prayer and Pride.” Davison has written a book-­length treatment of petitionary prayer from an analytic-­philosophical perspective and this essay extends some of what he began writing about in his earlier study for Oxford University Press.2 He notes 2 Scott  A.  Davison, Petitionary Prayer: A Philosophical Investigation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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Introduction  3 that the philosophical literature concerning petitionary prayer tends to focus on arguments designed to show why God might be justified in requiring petitionary prayers for certain things before providing them. One prominent kind of argument along these lines appeals to the idea that answering petitionary prayers provides an extension of human responsibility for the character of the world. Starting with an analysis of pride proposed by Robert C. Roberts, he discusses divine reasons and the nature of answered prayer in order to explore whether these justifications of the practice of petitionary prayer imply that it is appropriate to feel a certain kind of pride for the results of apparently answered prayer. The second chapter is by Jordan Wessling, and is entitled “Interceding for the Lost: On the Effectiveness of Petitioning God for Human Salvation.” Wessling observes that interspersed throughout Christian Scripture and liturgy is the admonition to pray for the salvation of others. A natural interpretation of such prayers is that one is petitioning God to save certain individuals, or at least to make efforts toward their salvation. So understood, one is asking God to perform some salvific action in response to the prayer—where, roughly speaking, God is thought to respond to a petition if the petition plays an essential role in explaining why God performed the requested action. This petitionary interpretation of these prayers gives rise to two knotty theological problems, however. First, if God’s perfect goodness is such that it disposes him to desire that none shall perish but that all shall come to truth, would God not do whatever he can to procure the salvation of each human person quite independently of anyone’s request? What, then, would be the purpose of praying for another’s salvation? Second, it is often thought that God’s saving of humans requires their free cooperation, such that God cannot unilaterally ensure the salvation of any given human. But if God deeply respects human freedom within the salvation process, then surely God will not override one person’s freedom at the request of another. In which case, what sense does it make for one person to ask God for another’s salvation? In attempting to address these concerns, Wessling offers an account of the relevant form of petitioning prayer whereby God allows us to participate in the salvation of others, while avoiding the problems of redundancy and human freedom. Chapter three is by Amber Griffioen. It is called, “Are You There, God? It’s Me, the Theist: On the Viability and Virtue of Non-­Doxastic Prayer.” The idea of “non-believing prayer” may sound odd, maybe even paradoxical. Yet (we might ask) what is it that prayer accomplishes in the religious life? What is the function of prayer? And is it something that can be successfully engaged in by someone who is unsure about God’s existence? Can an agnostic or an atheist pray? Or is such a person just a foolish “babbler”? In this chapter, Griffioen

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4  Analyzing Prayer examines various types and functions of prayer and argues that not every kind of prayer requires belief in the existence of God. First, some forms of prayer can be exercises in the service of developing and strengthening belief. Second, even in cases of prayerful activities that appear to require taking on a sincere second-­personal perspective toward God, it is possible for nonbelievers to wholeheartedly adopt a kind of imaginative “I–Thou” stance sufficient for engaging in such forms of prayer. Further, she suggests that such a stance might even be more epistemically and theologically virtuous than that which might accompany full belief in the kind of God who could be the recipient of such manifestations of human prayer. The fourth chapter is by James R. Gordon, and is entitled “Praying in the Name of Christ: Friedrich Schleiermacher’s ‘Mystical’ Account of Prayer.” In it, he argues that Schleiermacher’s “mystical” account of prayer offers a viable theological and philosophical alternative to traditional accounts of petitionary prayer. To substantiate this claim, he first situates the practice of prayer in its analytic context, and then responds to objections to the claim that analytic theology has nothing to offer to an account of prayer. He goes on to examine two frequently applied philosophical and theological methodologies (the “from below” and “from above” approaches, as he calls them) used in discussions of prayer. Finally, he provides a kind of third approach in Schleiermacher’s constructive account of prayer, which walks the fine line between a “magical” view of prayer, on the one hand, and an “empirical” view, on the other. After highlighting the key features of Schleiermacher’s account of prayer (as found in his magisterial work, The Christian Faith and sermon “The Power of Prayer in Relation to Outward Circumstances”), Gordon notes the connection of Schleiermacher’s view to other theological loci and responds to potential objections to and tensions in Schleiermacher’s mystical view. The fifth chapter, by Oliver Crisp, is on prayer as complaint. As we have already noted, much recent philosophical-­ t heological discussion of prayer has focused mainly on analyses of intercessory prayer or impetration. This is often understood in terms of a two-­way contingency: put very roughly, a person asks God to bring about something He otherwise would not bring about. However, in this essay Crisp focuses instead on prayer as complaint—specifically a complaint directed at God. He argues for two claims. The first is that prayer as complaint is not antithetical to impetration: the two sorts of prayer sit side by side within the biblical tradition without embarrassment. This second, related claim is that the reason for this lack of embarrassment on the part of biblical authors is that they understand intercessory prayer rather

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Introduction  5 differently from how many recent philosophical theologians do, as alignment with the divine will, rather than a putative attempt to change God’s will. In the sixth chapter, and on a similar theme to that of Crisp, Kevin Timpe’s contribution is entitled “Toward an Account of Lamenting Well.” His goal is to explore the nature of certain forms of lament as an acceptable object of analytic theology. While not all lament is Christian, there are a number of properly Christian expressions of lament. Starting with scriptural lament, particularly as found in the Psalms, Timpe looks at the nature of lament, explores its connection with hope, and suggests that lament often is inherently social. He then suggests that there is even a virtue of lamenting well. Ross Inman provides the seventh chapter, on “Theology in the Second Person: Christian Dogmatics as a Mode of Prayer.” In this chapter, he explores the irreducibly second-­personal dimension of theological inquiry. In the first and longest section Inman sketches a component of a larger ontology of Holy Scripture, one that he argues is indicative of a second-­person dimension to Holy Scripture, namely Scripture as divine speech or address. Provided Holy Scripture as the principal ground of dogmatics is irreducibly second-­personal at some level, then (he maintains) the dogmatic task ought to be carried out in the manner of interpersonal relatedness to God—what he calls “prayerful dogmatics.” In the second section of the chapter Inman provides some historical reflections from the work of Karl Barth on the inseparability of dogmatics and prayer. He concludes in the third section by exploring how the notion of prayerful dogmatics can serve as a guardrail that keeps the dogmatic task properly theological and thereby formational (2 Cor. 3: 18). Chapter 8 is by Katherine Sonderegger, arguably one of the most important systematic theologians working today. She addresses herself to the startling question, “Does God Pray?” If there is one settled conviction among Christians it might be this: we pray; God does not. Prayer, the tradition says, is an expression of lack. Sonderegger believes this premise lies behind the sharp assignment of prayer to the finite creature. Human creatures feel compelled to pray because their prayers express a need. In the Bible, however, we encounter God at prayer, in, for example, the locus classicus for prayer, Romans 8, and in the prayers of the Incarnate God. In this chapter, she provides a dogmatic account of the Triune God who can pray, and does. James M. Arcadi is the ninth contributor. His chapter is, “Blessing God as Pledge of Allegiance: A Speech Act Theoretic Approach.” The eucharistic liturgies of the Anglican and Orthodox traditions begin with prayers that take the form of a blessing of God and God’s kingdom. However, it is not entirely clear what it means to bless God or God’s kingdom in this liturgical context, or indeed in any

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6  Analyzing Prayer context. This essay utilizes the account of speech act theory devised by William Alston to offer a constructive explication of these prayers. In it, Arcadi analyzes candidate interpretations offered by Nicholas Wolterstorff and Alexander Schmemann, before developing one of Schmemann’s suggestions to greater specificity. Thus, he argues, we ought to understand these liturgical prayers to be instances of the minister and the people’s pledging allegiance to God and God’s kingdom. Such an interpretation comports best with the relevant liturgical, theological, and philosophical material. In the tenth chapter, Kyle Strobel writes about “Knowing as you are Known: Prayer in the Presence of God.” The goal of this chapter is to attend to the nature of Christian prayer as a form of shared presence. More specifically, it provides a description of prayer as a sharing in God’s own prayers for the sake of his people, to lead them into the presence of God, and then to guide them pastorally. It also attempts to give directions for Christian praying. In doing this, Strobel draws from Reformed theology for various instincts and constructs that can speak into the odd reality of prayer, tackling issues like the experience of abandonment and alienation in prayer in dialogue with a number of recent treatments of this topic, and in particular the work of Eleonore Stump. The eleventh chapter is by philosopher Adam Green, on “Prayer as the Road to Self-­Knowledge.” There is a long history in philosophy and, indeed, in everyday life of thinking that we have privileged access to our own mind. Who has a right to tell me what I feel if not myself? And who can better relate what I believe but me? Surely, there is something odd about my asking you what I believe, or you asking me what you feel. The medieval mystical theologian, Teresa of Avila, in contrast, claims that prayer is the road to self-­ knowledge. In this chapter, Green argues that prayer provides us with a unique and privileged path to self-­knowledge, one whose strengths complement and contrast nicely with introspection. To this end, in the first section, he explores some of Teresa’s thoughts on prayer and self-­knowledge in Interior Castle and The Book of Her Life. Then, in the second section, he uses analytic philosopher Richard Moran’s discussion of self-­ knowledge and the first-­ person perspective to lay out some of the limitations of unaided introspection as a guide to self-­knowledge. With Moran’s discussion in view, Green shows how thinking of prayer as a (if not the) path to self-­knowledge transforms the conclusions of Moran’s discussion. Jason McMartin’s chapter, the twelfth and final contribution to the volume, is fittingly entitled “Prayer and the Meaning of Life.” His thesis is that “prayer is one mode of free and self-­conscious appropriation of the divinely

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Introduction  7 revealed nature and purpose of human life.” He begins with a discussion of meaningfulness as it arises in recent analytic philosophy. The upshot of this is two kinds of meaning: objective frameworks and subjective appropriations. With Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth as dialogue partners, McMartin explores the way in which prayer in the Christian tradition provides an objective framework of meaningfulness that may be appropriated subjectively. He also addresses himself to the way in which prayer may confront threats to human meaningfulness, with particular reference to death and suffering. His essay closes with some implications that this discussion has for theological education and discipleship.

A word of thanks We have dedicated this work to the Fuller Analytic Theology Project team, because of their vital participation in helping us think through these many issues pertaining to prayer. Members of this team included James Crocker, Jesse Gentile, Steven Nemes, Martine Oldhoff, J.  T.  Turner, Jr., Allison Wiltshire, and Christopher Woznicki. We are grateful, of course, to the John Templeton Foundation, which provided the funds for the project that brought many of these contributors to Pasadena to share their initial forays into the ideas that would form the chapters in this volume. Thanks also to the dean and faculty of the School of Theology and the STAR Office at Fuller Theological Seminary for support of that grant project. We are grateful also to Mike Rea, Tom Perridge, and the team at Oxford University Press for helping usher this project to fruition. We thank also William Bankston and Randall Price for editorial and indexing assistance, as well as Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, which funded these assistants.

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1 Petitionary Prayer and Pride Scott A. Davison

Pride in General Some people assume that pride is bad, always and everywhere. But as Robert  C.  Roberts has argued persuasively, this is not quite right.1 Some forms of pride are actually virtuous, not vicious. For instance, recently I completed a marathon race and received a shirt featuring the name of the event. I didn’t like the style, so I was going to give it away, but my 16-­year-­old son wanted to keep it and wear it. He knew that people would ask him if he had run the race, and he didn’t mind telling them that no, he didn’t run it, but his father did. He was proud of his father, and there seems to be nothing wrong with this. How can we distinguish virtuous cases of pride from vicious ones, then? Let’s begin with Roberts’s account of the nature of pride.2 Pride is a concerned-­ based construal, which involves “a kind of concerned perceptual grasp of a situation in which the elements of the situation are organized according to some paradigm.”3 There are two key elements in the paradigm for pride: (a) something is worthy of praise, and (b) this thing is connected to me. In what follows, I will call that of which someone is proud the “object” of pride, and I will call the way in which the person is connected to the object of pride the “connection” of pride. Pride can be vicious in at least two ways, according to Roberts, and we can see these two ways by considering the two elements of the paradigm. With regard to the first element, the object of pride, one’s pride will be vicious if one is proud of something that is not really worthy of praise.4 The criminal who is 1  Robert C. Roberts, “The Vice of Pride,” Faith and Philosophy 26: 2 (2009), 119–33. 2  Roberts has since provided an updated, more detailed account in Robert C. Roberts and Ryan West, “Jesus and the Virtues of Pride” in The Moral Psychology of Pride, ed. J.  Adam Carter and Emma C. Gordon (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 99–122, but I will begin with his original account and refer later to the refined account where it is helpful. 3  Roberts, “The Vice of Pride,” 126. 4  Ibid., 132. Scott A. Davison, Petitionary Prayer and Pride In: Analyzing Prayer: Theological and Philosophical Essays. Edited by: Oliver D. Crisp, James M. Arcadi, and Jordan Wessling, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859044.003.0002

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Petitionary Prayer and Pride  9 proud of getting away with having committed a crime, or the student who is proud of cheating, or the unfortunate amateur carpenter who is proud of building an unsafe structure illustrate this phenomenon. With regard to the second element, the connection of pride, one’s pride will be vicious if one is too concerned with “. . . one’s own importance, one’s own social status, one’s own greatness,” especially with regard to the attention others pay to these things.5 To use an example mentioned by Roberts, if one is proud of one’s ability to humiliate one’s opponents in public debate, as Ben Franklin was, and one wants others to notice this skill, then this will be a kind of vicious pride.6 Extending Roberts’s account slightly, perhaps we should say that pride comes in degrees—one can be more or less proud of something. Attending to the two elements of the pride paradigm, we might say that one’s degree of pride is appropriate only if it matches (a) the extent to which the object of pride is worthy of substantial praise, and (b) the strength of the connection of pride between the person and the object. If the object of pride is truly outstanding and hence worthy of substantial praise, we might think that a high degree of pride is automatically warranted, but that could be a mistake—if one’s connection to the object is very weak (this is part (b)), then one’s degree of pride should be tempered by this. For example, suppose that fifty million people voted to elect an outstanding candidate to public office, and I am one of them. It would be permissible for me to feel some degree of pride about this, but not very much, because my connection to the election result is so slim. Based upon this example, it is tempting to say that a connection of pride between a person and an object of pride is strong to the extent that the person contributed causally to the existence of the object. And certainly, in many cases, this seems to be the nature of the connection. But when taken in its full generality, the principle seems too restrictive. This is because there are cases in which people are properly proud of things to which they have not contributed causally at all. The case mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, in which my son is proud of his father’s having run a marathon, is a case like this. So the strength of connection requirement need not involve an element of causal contribution.

5 Ibid. 6  Ibid., 126. In fact, an entire family of vices is associated with pride, each of which involves some kind of inordinate concern for the prominence of the self; see Ibid., 124, and the more detailed account of the five species of vicious pride in Roberts and West, “Jesus and the Virtues of Pride.”

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10 Analyzing Prayer Of course, if the object of pride is not really worthy of much praise, then a high degree of pride will not be warranted even if the connection of pride is very strong. For instance, suppose that I make a birdhouse out of a plastic milk jug by simply cutting a hole in it. In this case, the thing in question is strongly connected to me, but it’s not really worthy of much praise (given my mechanical and design abilities), so a high degree of pride would be inappropriate.7 So I am warranted in feeling a significant degree of pride only if both (a) the thing in question is worthy of substantial praise, and (b) the thing in question is strongly connected to me. (More could be said here about how degrees of pride should be determined, but this much is sufficient for my purposes here.) Is it ever appropriate for people to feel proud of what appears to be an answer to petitionary prayer? Before addressing this question directly, let’s consider briefly the nature of answered petitionary prayer.

Answered Petitionary Prayer Theists traditionally recognize various limits on God’s power. For instance, there seem to be logical limits: God cannot create square circles, or objects that are red all over and also green all over. In addition, God cannot do that which is evil per se, for its own sake, or break a promise. God may also have reasons to withhold certain things from created persons unless and until they ask for them.8 Finally, God may have providential plans for the world, and so there may be things that seem to us to be perfectly fine things to request from God, even though God cannot or will not grant them, because they are inconsistent with God’s providential plans. Traditionally, theists have recognized all of these limits on God’s power but insisted that there is still space among God’s reasons for our petitionary prayers to play a role in determining what happens in the world. When God answers a petitionary prayer, there is some sense in which the offering of the prayer made a difference. In order to see this, it is helpful to compare petitionary prayer to other kinds of requests. If I ask my neighbor to trim the hedges between my yard and his, for instance, and he does this partly because 7  In terms of the updated account from Roberts and West: “The more intrinsically good the accomplishment is honestly envisioned to be, the better the possibility of the ambition’s being virtuous” (Roberts and West, “Jesus and the Virtues of Pride,” 12). 8  For more on this idea, see Scott  A.  Davison, Petitionary Prayer: A Philosophical Investigation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), ch. 8.

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Petitionary Prayer and Pride  11 of my request, then it seems natural to say that my neighbor answered my request. But if I ask my neighbor to do this and it turns out that we are not on good terms and he really would love to deny my request but he had already planned for other, compelling reasons to trim the hedges anyway, and he does so, then it seems natural to say that my neighbor did not answer my request, even though he did what I asked him to do. So we should say that in order for a petitionary prayer to be answered, the offering of the prayer must play some role in God’s decision to bring about that which was requested. The offering of the petitionary prayer need not be the only reason God has for bringing about the thing in question, but the offering of the prayer must play some role in order for it to be the case that God answered the prayer. If God had conclusive reasons to bring about the thing in question, reasons that were completely independent of the offering of the petitionary prayer, then typically it would seem mistaken (to me, at any rate) to say that God answered the prayer just because God brought about that which was requested after it was requested.9 There are different accounts of the way in which petitionary prayers might play a role in God’s decisions, depending upon one’s view of the nature of time and providence. All theists hold that God bears an intimate relation to every existing thing in the universe, having created it and sustained it in being and cooperated with the causal powers at work at every moment until the present. But they differ with regard to questions about the future, especially with regard to apparently contingent events like human free choices. For instance, according to the Timeless Eternity view, God exists outside of time altogether, and sees all of history at once, including both our petitionary prayers and God’s answers to them.10 By contrast, according to Open Theism, the contingent future does not yet exist, and so nobody can know about it, including God. So God responds to the contingent future as it happens, including presumably freely offered petitionary prayers.11 Finally, Molinists claim that God knows the contingent future in virtue of knowing what would happen in any possible situation, including those that feature contingent 9  For more on these questions, see Davison, Petitionary Prayer, ch. 2. 10 For more on this view, see Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Eternity,” Journal of Philosophy 78: 8 (1981), 429–58; Brian Leftow, Time and Eternity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Paul Helm, Eternal God: A Study of God Without Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 11 For more on Open Theism, see David Basinger, Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, and William Hasker, eds, The Openness of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1994); John Sanders, The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1998); William Hasker, God, Time and Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); and William Hasker, Providence, Evil, and the Openness of God (London: Routledge, 2004).

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12 Analyzing Prayer events. So they claim that God knew, before creating the world, what people would pray for and what would happen if such prayers were answered, and God uses this information to decide how to respond to such prayers.12 Here I am distinguishing God’s answering a prayer, on the one hand, from God’s responding to a prayer, on the other hand. This terminology can be confusing. It is common for people to insist that God answers every prayer, but that sometimes God’s answer is “No” or “Maybe later.” In my terminology, these would count as responses to prayer, but they would not count as answers to prayer. As I shall use these words, God answers a prayer only if God brings about that which was requested by the petitioner.13 Given that God’s answering a given petitionary prayer requires that the offering of the prayer play some role among God’s reasons for bringing about the thing in question, one might wonder whether it is difficult to know that God has answered one’s prayer on some specific occasion, as opposed to bringing about the thing requested for independent, overriding reasons of which one is unaware. I will set aside this question for now, and return to it later.14 Having now clarified to some extent what it means to say that God has answered a petitionary prayer, we can now frame our main question in a more helpful way.

Pride and Prayer: The Question When people pray to God for good things, and then those things come to be, it is natural for them to rejoice and feel gratitude. It is also not unusual for them to feel proud. There are different ways in which this happens, and the differences make a difference. To illustrate the differences, consider the story of Abraham’s persuading God to spare the city of Sodom (Genesis 18: 23–33). (There are many puzzling aspects of this story that I will not try to address here.) God agrees to spare the city if fifty righteous people can be found in it, and then Abraham talks God down from the initial threshold of fifty righteous people to the 12  For defenses of the Molinist position, see William Craig, The Only Wise God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1987); Thomas  P.  Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Luis de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge (De liberi arbitri cum gratiae donis, divina praescientia, providentia, praedestinatione et reprobatione concordia), trans. Alfred J. Freddoso (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). 13 Davison, Petitionary Prayer, ch. 1. 14  For further discussion, see ibid., chs 4 and 5.

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Petitionary Prayer and Pride  13 much lower threshold of ten. We might say that because of their conversation, God granted Abraham’s petitionary prayer (although see what happens in Genesis chapter  19). Would it make sense for Abraham to be proud of this outcome? Suppose instead that Abraham had persuaded some human king to spare the city on these terms. In that case, it would seem that pride on Abraham’s part would not be entirely misplaced, because we could give Abraham credit for changing the king’s mind. In the case of God, though, things are less clear. Open Theists might say that God does not always know what God will do, because God does not always know what free creatures will do and sometimes God’s action is a response to those free creatures, but those who accept the Timeless Eternity view or Molinism would not say anything like that. For the sake of the argument, let’s assume that had Abraham not negotiated persistently, then God would have acted differently (as the original story seems to suggest). This gives Abraham a strong connection to the outcome of the petitionary prayer, and could ground some degree of pride for Abraham. But we need to be clear about how this might work. Roberts observes that the two elements of the pride paradigm can be differently stressed; if one stresses the object of pride (element (a) in his formulation, the fact that this thing is worthy of praise) over one’s connection to it (element (b) in his formulation, this thing is connected to me), pride “shades into admiration.”15 This is because the focus is not so much on the person and their connection to the thing in question, but rather on the greatness of the object of pride.16 With regard to apparently answered petitionary prayers, sometimes people stress the greatness of the things that have come to be, rather than their connection to them, and their pride becomes a kind of admiration for God’s power and goodness and love, and might properly be described as almost completely composed of gratitude. I have no objection to this kind of pride, and I will not discuss it further. On the other hand, sometimes people express pride in connection with apparently answered petitionary prayers quite differently. Sometimes when people say “God is good!”, it is quite clear that they are proud of themselves, and focused on their role instead of God’s, and stressing the connection they 15  Roberts, “The Vice of Pride,” 126. 16  In terms of the updated account from Roberts and West: The less subordinate or conditional the envisioned accomplishment is to the personal importance of the agent, the more virtuous the ambition (pride); whereas the more the agent wants the envisioned accomplishment abstractly or only for the sake of his own importance, the more the ambition will be a vicious pride, a seeking of self-­importance by way of his agency” (Roberts and West, “Jesus and the Virtues of Pride”).

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14 Analyzing Prayer feel to the object rather than the greatness of the object itself. (Not everyone who uses the expression “God is good!” means it this way, of course.) In fact, sometimes people say proudly, “That’s what I prayed for!” in a rather smug way, as if to claim credit for the existence of the object of pride. (Of course, not everyone who uses the expression “That’s what I prayed for!” uses it this way.) Is it ever appropriate to feel proud in this way concerning what appears to be answered petitionary prayer? In order to address this question clearly, let’s return to Roberts’s two elements of the pride paradigm yet again. Since God would answer prayers only for good things, let’s presume that the object of pride is worthy of praise.17 As we noted above, it would be a mistake to feel a significant degree of pride with regard to something that was not especially worthy of praise. (As I’ve mentioned, I might be the sole creator of the bird feeder formed by cutting a hole in a milk jug, but this would be nothing to write home about.) In the same way, it would be inappropriate to feel a significant degree of pride with regard to an apparently answered petitionary prayer for a trivial thing. If I ask God to bring it about that there is an even number of candies in the jar, for instance, because I love even numbers (and nothing else is at stake here), and that turns out to be the case, then it would not be fitting for me to be proud about this to any substantial degree. (As noted, I will return to the question of whether or not we can know that particular petitionary prayers have been answered.) What about the second element in Roberts’s paradigm, the connection of pride? Is there a strong enough connection between the offering of a petitionary prayer and God’s bringing about that which was requested to ground a significant degree of pride in this outcome? Perhaps it would make sense to be proud of answered prayers if the petitioner’s contribution to the occurrence of that which was requested was really strong, as it appears to be in the story of Abraham and Sodom. Some authors have argued that in general, this is in fact the case. For instance, Richard Swinburne claims that it is good that human beings are responsible to some degree for the character of the world. He adds that “If human responsibility is good, then this extension to it—of exerting influence on (though not of course compelling) God to change things [through petitionary prayer]—would surely also be good.”18 In a similar vein, Isaac Choi 17  For an interesting discussion of prayers for evil things, see Saul Smilansky, “A Problem About the Morality of Some Common Forms of Prayer,” Ratio 25: 2 (2012), 207–15. 18  Richard Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 115.

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Petitionary Prayer and Pride  15 argues that God chooses not to bring about every possible good thing in the world in order to leave room for the effects of human choice, including petitionary prayers for other people that constitute acts of love for them.19 Going even further in this direction, Daniel and Frances Howard-­Snyder hold that there is a really significant causal contribution made by petitioners in the case of answered petitionary prayer. They say that if God has ordained the institution of petitionary prayer, then “the degree to which your asking contributes causally to your friend’s being healed [for example] is no less than the degree to which a particular act of yours contributes causally to, say, the tennis ball’s landing a winner or the sockeye and zucchini being grilled to perfection.”20 Elsewhere I have criticized the claim that in a case of answered petitionary prayer, the petitioner’s causal contribution (or degree of responsibility) for the outcome is very strong; I will not repeat those arguments here.21 But suppose instead we grant the claim that there is a strong connection between the offering of a petitionary prayer and God’s answering by providing the thing requested. Earlier, I argued that if the object of pride is genuinely worthy of praise and one enjoys a strong connection to that object, then a high degree of pride seems to be appropriate. Putting these two things together, then, if there is a very strong connection between the offering of a petitionary prayer and God’s answering by providing the thing requested, then a significant degree of pride concerning answered petitionary prayer seems completely appropriate. But let’s return to the kind of case I have described, where someone is focused on the connection between their petitionary prayer and the outcome, and not on the good thing provided. Imagine that someone says proudly “God is good!” or “That’s what I prayed for!”, apparently taking credit for the object of the petitionary prayer. If the advocates of the strong connection view are correct, as I have noted, then there seems to be a sense in which this attitude is fitting (even if the pride in question is a vice—thanks to Jada Strabbing for making this clear to me). But I find this conclusion implausible; instead, it seems to me, God should get all of the credit. I will return to this question shortly.

19 Isaac Choi, “Is Petitionary Prayer Superfluous?” in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Volume 7, ed. Jonathan Kvanvig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 32–62. 20 Daniel Howard-­ Snyder and Frances Howard-­ Snyder, “The Puzzle of Petitionary Prayer,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2: 2 (2010), 43–68. 21  See Davison, Petitionary Prayer, ch. 7.

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16 Analyzing Prayer

Epistemology Until now, I have deferred discussion of the epistemology of answered petitionary prayer. I argued that in order for a petitionary prayer to be answered by God, the offering of the prayer must play a certain role among God’s reasons for bringing about the object of the petition. Theists might rightly assume that in some sense, God brings about every good thing that happens in the world. But should they assume that they know what God’s reasons are for bringing about something in particular, such as that which was requested in petitionary prayer? In another place, I have argued that it is not clear whether reasonable requirements for knowledge would be satisfied with regard to typical persons in cases in which petitionary prayers were answered, even in cases in which the things that were requested have clearly come to be. I will not rehearse here my arguments for this conclusion.22 But if I am right about this, then it explains why we might be hesitant to say that pride concerning apparently answered petitionary prayer is appropriate, at least in some cases, because there appears to be an epistemic dimension to pride that we have so far ignored. The epistemic dimension is simply this: In order for pride to be appropriate, it is not enough that (a) the object of pride is worthy of praise and (b) the object of pride is connected to me. In addition, I must know these things, or at least reasonably believe them. To illustrate this point, return to the example of my son discussed in the first section. In that example, my son wears proudly a shirt from a marathon race that I completed. He knows that people will ask him if he ran the race himself, and he doesn’t mind telling them that no, he didn’t run it, but his father did. He is proud of me, and there seems to be nothing wrong with this. But suppose he did not have good reason to believe that I had actually run the race, or that running the race was something worthy of praise, or that I was his father. In that case, his pride in wearing the shirt would be misplaced. In the same way, if we don’t have good reason to believe that our petitionary prayers have made a difference in a particular case, then pride seems misplaced, even when the thing requested comes to be. Of course, the defenders of the claim that there is a strong connection between the offering of a 22  See ibid., chapters 4 and 5; for more optimistic accounts of our epistemic resources here, see Michael J. Murray and Kurt Meyers, “Ask and It Will Be Given to You,” Religious Studies 30: 3 (1994), 311–30; Choi, “Is Petitionary Prayer Superfluous?”; and Howard-­Snyder and Howard-­Snyder, “The Puzzle of Petitionary Prayer.”

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Petitionary Prayer and Pride  17 petitionary prayer and God’s answering by providing the thing requested are talking only about answered prayers—they do not claim that God answers all petitionary prayers. But if we don’t know, in general, which petitionary prayers are answered and which ones are not, then pride will be misplaced, in general, even if there is a strong connection, since we would not know that it obtained. So suppose that somehow, for a certain class of petitionary prayers, we knew both things: We knew that they had been answered by God, and we knew that there was a strong connection between the offering of the petitionary prayers and God’s decision to provide that which was requested. In those cases, would we find it appropriate for the petitioners in question to feel proud of the good results of those prayers, where the pride in question is focused on the connection between the petitioners and the good results? I don’t think so. It just seems inappropriate, to me, to be proud in this way of answered prayer. But Roberts disagrees. In correspondence, he concedes that pride concerning apparently answered petitionary prayers would be vicious if the person is “expressing an interest in his own self-­importance or narcissistic enhancement,” as opposed to “taking thankful joy in the fact of his agency, the fact that God has so created him as to involve him causally in some of the events that God brings about.”23 This seems right to me also, as far as it goes, but there is a difference between experiencing thankful joy in the general fact of one’s agency and focusing one’s attention on the role one’s action played in the coming to be of some particular outcome as a result of petitionary prayer. The former, in fact, does not really strike me as a case of pride at all; to use his language from the original article, such an attitude “shades into admiration.”24 Roberts also suggests that although God should get almost all of the credit, perhaps the petitioner might legitimately take some small satisfaction from getting a little credit for the object of the petition. He argues that if we remove questions about petitionary prayer from consideration, and ask instead about things one might try to accomplish on God’s behalf in terms of bringing about good in the world, we might have the same reaction—our role might be tiny, compared to God’s, but we could experience proper pride with regard to that tiny role.25 Here Roberts seems to be right, but is this situation really comparable to the situation we face with regard to apparently answered petitionary prayer? I’m not sure—in Roberts’s hypothetical case of bringing about some 23  Roberts, private correspondence. 25  Roberts, private correspondence.

24  Roberts, “The Vice of Pride,” 126.

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18 Analyzing Prayer good thing in the world, I think we are assuming we know about a strong connection between our action and the result, but I don’t think we are typically entitled to assume this in the case of apparently answered petitionary prayer (as I have assumed it in this section). So I am still inclined to think that in the typical cases, anyway, pride with respect to answered petitionary prayer is not appropriate. Notice that in the quotations provided concerning the responsibility defense concerning God’s reasons for making the provision of some good dependent upon the offering of petitionary prayer, Swinburne indicates awareness of a related issue in the neighborhood, the issue of God’s freedom. In defending the idea that God might withhold some good thing unless and until petitionary prayers are offered for it, he says “If human responsibility is good, then this extension to it—of exerting influence on (though not of course compelling) God to change things [through petitionary prayer]— would surely also be good.”26 Questions about God’s freedom with regard to petitionary prayer are both fascinating and complex. I have tried to address them carefully elsewhere.27 Notice that Swinburne is careful to avoid the view that petitionary prayer compels God to act. If petitionary prayer did compel God to act, then the petitioner’s pride would make much more sense, of course, because the connection would be stronger. So there is a tension here—all other things being equal, the stronger the connection, the stronger the basis for pride, but the stronger the connection, the less room there is left for divine freedom.

A Humean Conjecture David Hume famously offered psychological accounts of common beliefs that he tried to undercut philosophically with skeptical arguments. (For instance, he argued that there is a plausible psychological explanation of our feeling that there are necessary connections between events in nature, even though he took himself to have shown that we have no rational basis for such feelings.)28 In closing, I will offer a few conjectures in the spirit of Hume. We all have a strong tendency to be proud of the good things to which we are connected, whether they involve only our own actions or also involve the 26 Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil, 115. 27  See Davison, Petitionary Prayer, ch. 3. 28 See David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom  L.  Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), section 7.

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Petitionary Prayer and Pride  19 actions of others. So there is a sense in which it is natural to be proud of what appears to be an answered petitionary prayer. We also need external validation in the form of some indication that we are on the right track in life. For some people, petitionary prayers that appear to have been answered by God serve as a sign that they are on the right track, like a divine stamp of approval. This helps to explain, in part, why some people believe that it is very im­por­ tant to keep track of one’s petitionary prayers, because it serves as a source of external validation of their faith and practice. Expressing publicly one’s pride concerning apparently answered petitionary prayers invites other people to add another layer of external validation. So there is a perfectly natural psychological explanation for the expressions of pride concerning apparently answered petitionary prayer, even if such pride lacks a rational foundation. This is not to say that nothing else is going on here, of course, or that the psychological story is the whole story. I have not argued that God answers no petitionary prayers, or that we never know whether our petitionary prayers are answered or not, or that answered petitionary prayers play no role in the faith of the mature religious person. But for some people, at any rate, the temptation to feel pride at what appears to be an answered petitionary prayer might be just that—a temptation, something to be resisted. In fact, one might argue that God does not answer petitionary prayers regularly in order to draw us into a deeper relationship, one based on trust.29 But that is a larger topic for another time.30

29  See Davison, Petitionary Prayer, chapter 9. 30  Many thanks to Robert C. Roberts, Jada Strabbing, and Kyland Carreon for comments concerning an earlier version of this chapter, and to my commentator Kate Finley and other participants in the 40th annual meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers at Calvin College on September 4, 2018, especially Robert Roberts, Isaac Choi, Trenton Merricks, Jay Wood, and Alli Thornton; unfortunately, I was unable to respond adequately to all of the excellent suggestions and concerns voiced by these generous people.

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2 Interceding for the Lost On the Effectiveness of Petitioning God for the Salvation of Others Jordan Wessling

Interspersed throughout Christian Scripture, liturgy, and tradition are prayers for the salvation of others. For example, 1 Timothy contains the injunction to offer “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings . . . for everyone” because “God desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2: 1, 4; cf. Lk 11: 9; Rom. 10: 1; 2 Cor. 1: 10–11; Col. 4: 3; Jas 4: 2–3, 5: 13–20).1 The Catechism of the Catholic Church also affirms, “In the Eucharistic liturgy and in the daily prayers of her faithful, the Church implores the mercy of God, who does not want ‘any to perish, but all to come to repentance’ . . . . The Church prays that no one should be lost.”2 Likewise in the Litany of the Book of Common Prayer, the people directly beseech God “to have mercy upon all men,” hoping that “it may please [God] to forgive our enemies, persecutors, and slanderers, and to turn their hearts.”3 A natural interpretation of such prayers is that they are genuine petitions for God to save certain individuals, or at least to make efforts toward their salvation. So understood, those who offer these petitions are hoping that the prayers will make some kind of important difference in the lives of those for whom they pray, on account of God’s answering their petitions.4 Let us call prayers for the 1  All biblical citations are from the NRSV. 2  Catechism of the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday, 1995), sections 1037, 1058. 3  Book of Common Prayer, 1662 version. 4  The idea that petitionary prayer aims to make some important difference to the instantiation of that which is requested is common among contemporary analyses of petitionary prayer. See, for instance, the following philosophical treatments of the topic: Scott Davison, Petitionary Prayer: A Philosophical Investigation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), ch. 2; Peter Geach, God and the Soul (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 88; Joshua Hoffman, “Petitionary Prayer,” Faith and Philosophy 2 (1985), 21; Daniel and Francis Howard-­Snyder, “The Puzzle of Petitionary Prayer,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2 (2010), 46; Richard Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 115; and Kevin Timpe, “Prayers for the Past,” Religious Studies 41 (2005), 317. Biblical scholars seem to agree that scriptural data point toward the Jordan Wessling, Interceding for the Lost: On the Effectiveness of Petitioning God for the Salvation of Others In: Analyzing Prayer: Theological and Philosophical Essays. Edited by: Oliver D. Crisp, James M. Arcadi, and Jordan Wessling, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859044.003.0003

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Interceding for the Lost  21 salvation of others, given this petitionary interpretation, “intercessory prayers,” or, for short, simply “intercessions.”5 To get at the phenomenon of God’s answering intercessions in a way that makes a significant difference, I stipulate, for the purposes of this chapter, that God answers a petition (or intercession) if and only if the petitionary request plays an essential role in explaining why God performed the requested action, such that, all other things being equal, God would not have acted to secure that which is requested, in precisely that way or for precisely the same dominant reasons, if the request had not been made. Though commonly practiced, intercessory prayers are puzzling. The effectiveness of such prayer seems to imply that God does all He properly can to procure a person’s salvation only when He is asked. However, this seems to be incompatible with God’s love for each person in that He wants none to perish but all to come to repentance (2 Pet. 3: 9).6 In addition, it is not clear that divine answers to intercessions are compatible with human free will. For plausibly, even if controversially, God standardly saves humans only by way of their free and synergistic cooperation. But if this is so, surely God will not override one person’s freedom at the request of another. In which case, what sense does it make for one person to ask God for another’s salvation?7 Impressed by such theological puzzles, one might seek an alternative, non-­ petitionary interpretation of prayer for the salvation of others. Accordingly, these prayers might be understood as a kind of symbolic identification with the lost, or as a means of transforming the attitudes and actions of the one who prays for the unsaved, or as a way of praising God for His saving activity, or perhaps something else entirely. Whatever the case, on this alternative view, these prayers should not be interpreted as genuine petitions, notwithstanding idea that petitionary prayer is the kind of activity that can make a difference in bringing about that which is prayed for. See, for example, the thorough treatments of prayer by David Crump, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: A New Testament Theology of Prayer (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006), 289–96, and Oscar Cullman, Prayer in the New Testament (Minneapolis, MN: 1995), 134–42. 5 Sections of this introduction appear within the article I authored with Steven Nemes, “The Medicine which Heals the World: Praying for Salvation with Catherine of Siena,” Irish Theological Quarterly 82: 4 (2017), 303–21. 6  We see this kind of reasoning employed by David Basinger in a pair of essays: David Basinger, “Why Petition an Omnipotent, Omniscient, Wholly Good God?,” Religious Studies 19 (1983): 25–42; David Basinger, “God Does Not Necessarily Respond to Prayer,” in Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion, ed. Michael L. Peterson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004): 255–64. Also relevant is Scott Davison’s “Petitionary Prayer” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, ed. Michael Rea and Thomas P. Flint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 286–305, and the Howard-­Snyders, “The Puzzle of Petitionary Prayer.” 7  Incidentally, this problem is often raised by evangelical Calvinists against Arminian views of salvation. R.  K.  McGregor Wright, No Place for Sovereignty: What’s Wrong with Free Will Theism? (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1996), 193. Compare with Terrance Tiessen, Providence & Prayer: How Does God Work in the World (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2000), 14.

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22  Analyzing Prayer their surface grammatical form.8 If, at the end of the day, intercessory prayer is proven to be deeply problematic, then perhaps we should opt for one of these non-­petitionary interpretations of prayers for the salvation of others. Arguably, however, we should opt for a non-­petitionary interpretation of the prayers at issue only if the petitionary interpretation is proven untenable. This is because intercessory prayer, understood along genuinely petitionary lines, is practiced widely among the faithful, often done under the inspiration of certain biblical passages and liturgies of the Church (as we have seen).9 In my view, it is not advisable for theologians to seek to overturn consensuses among believers without solid grounds for doing so.10 In this chapter, therefore, I defend the idea that God (sometimes) answers intercessory prayers, notwithstanding certain reasons we have to think otherwise. I do this by first presenting and building upon a common contemporary defense of the idea that God answers petitions in general—a defense that has precedence within the Christian tradition. Then I apply that defense to the specific kind of petitions of present concern: intercessions. Ultimately, my defense of the fecundity of intercessions is not meant to convince those who are deeply skeptical of the notion that God answers petitions. Instead, the aim is to show that certain considerations as to why God might be said to answer petitions concerning significant matters (e.g., matters of life and death) support the idea that God answers intercessions as well, despite the theological puzzles previously mentioned. Before we proceed to the examination of these issues, one initial clarifying comment is in order. Intercessions are prayers for the salvation of individuals, and “salvation” is a term that often signifies the process of being redeemed from sin, conformed to the image of Christ, transformed through deification, and the like. Unless it is otherwise clear from the context, however, I use “salvation” in a narrower sense, as a synonym for conversion, or the entry point into the salvation process (which may be said to include regeneration, justification, and similar events); and here my concern is principally with the 8  Christopher Woznicki finds non-­petitionary interpretations of prayers that are apparently petitionary in the writings of many of the magisterial reformers. See Christopher Woznicki “Is Prayer Redundant? Calvin and the Early Reformers on the Problem of Petitionary Prayer,” Journal of Evangelical Theology 60 (2017): 333–48. If Woznicki’s reading of these reformers is correct, then this perhaps gives those who stand within these reformed traditions some reason to opt for a non-­ petitionary interpretation of intercessions. 9  See Crump, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, for exegetical arguments on behalf of the thesis that God sometimes answers human petitions (in some manner close to the sense of answer that was previously specified). 10  In addition, Daniel and Francis Howard-­Snyder argue that the practice of petitionary prayer assumes that God answers such prayers (where “answers” means something analogous to my usage). See their “The Puzzle of Petitionary Prayer,” 46.

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Interceding for the Lost  23 conversion of the adult, equipped with the standard cognitive faculties typically affiliated therewith. Hence, to intercede for another, according to the emphasis of the chapter, primarily concerns petitioning God to convert another free and rational individual, or to make that individual (more) conducive to conversion. God, I here contend, sometimes answers such intercessions—or, minimally, certain reasons that we have for thinking that God answers petitions about other matters of great importance (such as life and death) apply, mutatis mutandis, to the teaching that God answers intercessions.

The Extended-­Charity Defense of Petitions Christians agree that God calls humans to love their neighbors as they love themselves and that loving their neighbors sometimes involves helping them in tangible ways. Building upon this, recent defenders of the idea that God answers petitions propose that God might answer these prayers in part because it grants humans an additional means of helping others.11 The root idea here—at least as I presently develop it—is that it is a great good to be able to act in love and make a positive difference in another’s life, and petitions enable persons to partner with God to broaden the means and reach of one’s influential love. Call this defense of petitionary prayer the “extended-­charity defense.” The extended-­charity defense of the idea that God answers petitions renders explicit certain ancient assumptions about the power of petitionary prayer in general and intercessory prayer in particular. Consider, as an example, the way in which St. John Chrysostom defends intercessions within a series of homilies on 1 Timothy. John states that God “unites” and “binds us together” in prayer,12 and John implores the faithful to imitate God by deeply desiring the salvation of everyone.13 He further assumes that if the faithful desire this, they cannot help but intercede with fervent prayer for the salvation of all. However, this raises the obvious question, “if the Lord Himself 11 This basic view, in different forms, is defended by the following authors: Isaac Choi, “Is Petitionary Prayer Superfluous?,” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 7 (2016), 32–62; Daniel and Francis Howard-­Snyder, “The Puzzle of Petitionary Prayer”; Nicholas D. Smith and Andrew C. Yip, “Partnership with God: A Partial Solution to the Problem of Petitionary Prayer,” Religious Studies 46 (2010), 395–410; and Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil, 114–15. 12  John Chrysostom, Homily VI on Timothy, in vol. 13 of Nicene and Post-­Nicene Fathers, ed. Phillip Schaff (New York: The Christian Literature Company, 1894), 427. 13  John Chrysostom, Homily VII on Timothy, 430.

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24  Analyzing Prayer wills to give . . ., what need of my prayer?” John’s answer is twofold: “It is of great benefit both to them and to thyself. It draws them to love, and it inclines thee to humanity. It has the power of attracting others to the faith; . . . and this is . . . the salvation of God, ‘who will have all men to be saved’.”14 So, in addition to transforming those who intercede,15 John maintains that God has bound together His creatures in such a way that Christians can intercede for others in a manner that has the potential to impact the eternal salvation of those for whom Christians pray.16 Though John does not exactly say that intercessions extend the capacities of believers to love effectively beyond normal means, the resemblance to the extended-­charity defense is difficult to miss. By God’s providence, prayer enables every Christian to influence another’s salvation as an expression of love. Importantly, John is not alone in his way of defending the practice of intercessory prayer. As Steven Nemes and I argue elsewhere, Catherine of Sienna, the renowned medieval theologian and Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, joins John in the affirmation that God answers intercessions.17 Such prayers are means ordained by God for humans to reach out to others and participate in the operation of God’s grace in the world. For her, intercessory prayer is a “medicine by which [God] willed to heal the whole world.”18 Presupposed by this way of thinking is the notion that intercessions expand the reach of humans to impact the salvation of others. We find hints of similar reasoning within the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. Thomas says that “[w]e should pray for sinners that they might be converted,” and he is convinced that such prayers are sometimes “answered.”19 In addition, Thomas maintains that intercessions are expressions of charity that help others, a means of help, we may assume from the context, that is supernatural.20 Plausibly, as with John and Catherine, Thomas comes close to the extended-­charity defense of intercessory prayer. 14 Ibid. 15  See, in particular, ibid. 16  John could be interpreted as saying that intercessions bring people to a saving faith by means that do not imply that God answers our intercessions—e.g., those we pray for learn that we are interceding for them and this alone moves them toward God (see, e.g., the beginning of Homily VI on Timothy). But, based upon the context of Homily VII on Timothy, I assume that when John says that our intercessions have the ability to attract people toward their salvation, John implies that God answers our prayers by drawing the prayed-­for persons to Himself. 17  Nemes and Wessling, “The Medicine which Heals the World.” I add that the historical figures cited in this chapter probably do not operate with exactly the same understanding of answering a petition that is supposed here. 18  Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, trans. Suzanne Noffke (New York: Paulist, 1980), (section 19). 19  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 39, trans. Kevin D. O’Rourke (New York: McGraw-­Hill; Oxford: Blackfriars, 1963), II.83.7 (67). 20  See, e.g., Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 39, II.83.8 (69).

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Interceding for the Lost  25 But is this extended-­charity defense of intercessory prayer plausible? To assess this, I shall first devote a considerable portion of this chapter to the examination of the extended-­charity defense as it pertains to the general practice of petitionary prayer. The energy expended here will then enable us to direct our attention to the extended-­charity defense of intercessions in particular, and treat the issue relatively succinctly.

A Defense of the Extended-­Charity Defense The proponent of the extended-­charity defense says that petitions enable persons to partner with God to broaden the means and reach of their influential love. Advocates of this defense may contend for two claims as a way of explaining how this partnership with God works: (i) a person’s petition, all by itself, generates reason for God to bring about that which is requested, and (ii) God’s acting on the reason provided by that person’s petition instances a way in which that person’s charity is extended to others. Each of these two claims merits comment. Consider, first, the claim that one’s petition, all by itself, provides God with reason to perform the requested action.21 To get at this claim, we begin with a mundane example involving a human-­to-­human request. (Here, and throughout this chapter, our concern is with instances wherein one or more individuals directly address(es) another in the form of a request, rather than, for example, instances wherein one indiscriminately issues a request to a crowd.) Suppose that I am running a bit late for an appointment, and, on my way to the door, I notice that my two-­year-­old son, Malcolm, is on a distressed hunt for his favorite toy train, Caitlin. It occurs to me that I could take a few minutes to help him locate Caitlin, but I conclude that it is more important for me to be on my way. Just as my hand grasps the doorknob, however, a defeated Malcolm pleads with me, “Please daddy, help me find Caitlin!” Plausibly, this request gives me (additional) reason to help my son on his search, a unique reason that goes beyond the other reasons I previously had to aid Malcolm. Prior to the request, I knew that Malcolm desired to have his beloved toy, and 21 A defense of this claim appears in the Howard-­Snyders’ “The Puzzle of Petitionary Prayer,” 47–51—cf. Alexander R. Pruss, “Omnirationality,” Res Philosophica 90 (2013), 1–21 (especially, 16). In Petitionary Prayer, 101–5, Davison objects to the Howard-­Snyders’ defense of the idea that requests by themselves generate reasons for divine action by attacking the philosophical foundations of their account, which they borrow from Geoffrey Cupit, “How Requests (and Promises) Create Obligations,” Philosophical Quarterly 44 (1994), 439–55. However, Davison’s criticisms of the thesis at issue don’t apply to my brief defense of this thesis, since I don’t rely upon the work of Cupit.

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26  Analyzing Prayer I knew that he was distressed that he did not have it. This knowledge gave me reason to help Malcolm on his hunt, even if the reason was not obliging or overwhelming. All the same, there is something about my son’s direct address to me in the form of a request that provides me with a significant kind of additional reason to lend him help.22 Maybe the reason generated by Malcolm’s request is sufficient for me to grant it, when acting rationally, or perhaps not. My point is simply that the request by itself appears to generate a distinct reason for me to provide my son with a helping hand. Assuming that requests do in fact generate reasons all by themselves, it is an interesting question why this is so. My own diagnosis of the phenomenon is that being willing, in principle, to answer a person’s request affirmatively is a way of respecting or caring about that person. Requests, after all, are attempts to get someone to do something, and (in the typical case) the person that is open to be influenced by another in this way manifests a concern or respect for the requester as a communicative agent who merits “being heard.” Her endeavors to impact the world are worth attending to, and her attempts to modify your behavior for specific purposes are not to be merely brushed aside. This is not to overlook the fact that one should only affirmatively answer requests when the conditions are right—e.g., when the request is for something good, when you have the means to fulfill the request, and when your total reasons for acting do not make answering the request unwise or otherwise dis-­valuable.23 The claim is simply that respecting or caring about someone often entails being willing, in principle, to respond affirmatively to her requests. Petitionary prayers, of course, are requests. With only minor adjustments, therefore, it is easy to see why one might think that petitions give God reasons to bring about that which is asked. Because God loves us and cares about our capacities as communicative agents, He takes our direct addresses to Him in the form of petitions seriously. And, plausibly, taking our petitions seriously means being willing, in principle, to answer them—or, minimally, God may graciously choose to take our petitions seriously in this way. It might turn out that the conditions are rarely right for God to answer our petitions in the affirmative. Nevertheless, because God loves us, it is sensible to maintain that our petitions give God unique reasons, even if not obliging reasons, to bring about that which we request. 22  Some contend that this ‘significant kind of additional reason’ is a morally obligating reason (e.g., Cupit’s “How Requests (and Promises) Create Obligations”). I’m not sure about this, however, and I leave a further examination of this important issue for another occasion. 23  A fuller analysis of when God might act on a request is found in Pruss’s “Omnirationality.”

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Interceding for the Lost  27 If it is true that a person’s petitions generate reasons for God, and He occasionally acts on these reasons, it is not difficult to see why one might hold that petitions are a means of extending a person’s influence. Your requests furnish God with unique reasons for performing certain actions, which would (sometimes) seem to raise the probability that God will bring about certain events. But, plausibly, if you intentionally raise the probability that God will do something, then you bear some responsibility (however slight) for that which is brought about. Here are two rough-­and-­ready ways of thinking about how human requests raise the probability that God will perform certain actions. Suppose, as some contend, that God, on account of His goodness, must always do what is best in each circumstance when there is a best to do, and that what is best is what one has most reason to do.24 If so, and if petitions sometimes provide God with good reasons to perform an action that He would not otherwise have, then petitions may sometimes “tip the scales” in such a way that the prayed-­ for event becomes the best available option. Picture a scenario where a young girl named Kendra loses her dog Dougal, and where God has equal reason to allow, on the one hand, Dougal to be found and cared for by another family and, on the other hand, to guide Dougal back to Kendra. (Assume, also, that these are the only two options that God considers worthwhile.) But now suppose that Kendra cries out to God for the return of her dog. In such a case, it may be that Kendra’s petition creates a situation where God now has more reason to return Dougal to Kendra than He does to bring about any alternative. If so, and if God always does what is best when there is a best to do, then God will ensure the safe return of Dougal. In this way, the petitioner raises the probability that God will perform a given action—here the probability is raised to 1.25 Alternatively, suppose that God has considerably more freedom. Sometimes He does the best available action, but need not, so long as the action reaches a minimum threshold of goodness. Even here, petitions may play an important role in making certain divine actions worth performing. Petitions can factor into giving God adequate reason for performing some action, reason that would not be weighty enough without the petition at issue. Consider an instance where God (perhaps for reasons that rest beyond our insight) does 24 Relevant here is Pruss’s “Omnirationality,” as well as Richard Swinburne’s The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 184–6. 25  Of course, the petitioner will not typically have epistemic access to this. For two recent discussions of the epistemology of answered prayers, see Isaac Choi, “Is Petitionary Prayer Superfluous?,” 44–53, and Davison, Petitionary Prayer, chs 4–5.

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28  Analyzing Prayer not have adequate reason to heal Sally, who is at death’s door, until a church begins to pray for Sally’s healing. Now, on account of the church’s prayers, it might be that God has adequate reason, even if not obliging or conclusive reason, to heal Sally. In such a circumstance, petitions raise the probability of God’s healing Sally. Here the probability is lifted out of zero and into the realm of viable options. If it is the case that petitions raise the probability that God performs certain actions for certain desired outcomes, then it seems that petitioners can be partially credited for the good outcomes for which they pray. For we routinely credit persons with partial responsibility for the free actions of others when they intentionally raise the probability that these actions will be performed.26 If this is right, then the implications for the extended-­charity defense should be clear. Suppose I pray, out of love, for Sally to be healed, and that the reasons generated by my prayer play an essential role in explaining why God heals Sally. In that case, I receive some credit (however small) for this healing, and the reach of my charity has been extended to Sally via God’s agency. Suppose that one is willing to grant that God could, in theory, set up things in this charity-­extending way. Even still, one might worry that extending one’s influential love in the described manner is insufficiently valuable for God to establish a system wherein this is possible, at least when it pertains to significant matters. Consider a situation where a child dies of throat cancer. From a Christian perspective, God may well have reasons (unbeknownst to us) for allowing such a horrible tragedy; but one might think that God certainly would not make this child’s life contingent upon human prayer. That is to say, either God will let this child pass, or He will heal her, but He will not make this momentous decision based upon the unreliable requests of others. The challenge, then, is to identify some reason to think that the noted way of extending one’s charity is more valuable than God making all the relevant provisions independent from any human request.27 This is a tall order that I cannot hope to satisfy completely at present. Nevertheless, I think there are some grounds for maintaining that the described way of extending charity is valuable, even when the subject of the petition is considerably weighty. But, first, note that it is not incumbent upon the advocate of the extended-­charity defense to say that God set up a system 26  For those who doubt this point about responsibility, see Choi, “Is Petitionary Prayer Superfluous?,” 57; Daniel and Francis Howard-­Snyder, “The Puzzle of Petitionary Prayer,” 63; and Nemes and Wessling, “The Medicine which Heals the World,” 317–18. 27  This challenge is articulated by Michael J. Murray and Kurt Meyers, “Ask and It Will Be Given to You,” Religious Studies 30 (1994), 311–30 (313), and Davison, Petitionary Prayer, 122–5.

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Interceding for the Lost  29 whereby He answers prayers regarding weighty matters (like a child dying from throat cancer) merely because it is valuable for humans to have the opportunity to partner with God to broaden the means and reach of their influential love in the manner described. That way of defending petitionary prayer is hopeless, in my view.28 Better to maintain that God has other reasons (some known, some not) unrelated to petitionary prayer for allowing horrendous evils, and that God’s decreeing of the practice of petitionary prayer (and the noted means of extending one’s charity) is but one small way of combating evils, not that which justifies them (at least by itself). In keeping with this, I shall try to locate grounds for thinking that extending one’s charity through petitionary prayer is a valuable way for God to set up things, even as it relates to significant matters, and that this good might, for all we know, factor into God’s decreeing a practice of prayer wherein this extension of charity is possible. To repeat, I do not suggest that the good of extending one’s charity through prayer is what justifies many of the horrendous evils we observe. With these important qualifications in mind, I suggest that petitioning God for important matters in the lives of others is affiliated with two significant goods. The first of these concerns the good of God’s taking our requests for such matters seriously. If, as suggested, God’s being in principle willing to grant our requests is a way of expressing care and respect for us, surely it is valuable for God to be willing in principle to consider our most sincere, and sometimes desperate, requests for good things for others. Our loved ones, for instance, are central to our lives, and it would be a good thing for God to take our requests concerning this central feature of our lives seriously by being willing in principle to answer these requests. This divine willingness is good in its own right as a manner of God’s caring for us, and it is good because it fosters our relationship with God when we believe and see signs that He answers our deepest pleas for those we love. An illustration might prove helpful here. Suppose that, at a negligible cost to myself, I have the means to install an elaborate tracking system that will ensure that Malcolm is never without access to knowledge of the whereabouts of his toy train, Caitlin. The installation of such a device would certainly decrease the stress my son experiences, as he misplaces Caitlin nearly daily. Nevertheless, I might decide that it is better not to install such a device. All things considered, I might conclude that it is better for Malcolm to acquire certain virtues related to the misplacement of Caitlin than it is for him to be free from mental anguish. (And, for the two-­year-­old Malcolm, ignorance of 28  The Howard-­Snyders make this point in “The Puzzle of Petitionary Prayer,” 65–6.

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30  Analyzing Prayer Caitlin’s whereabouts generates considerable anguish.) Still, I might occasionally affirmatively answer Malcolm’s petitions for help finding Caitlin, even though I deem it good for Malcolm to struggle to learn certain lessons affiliated with the misplacement of Caitlin. After all, being willing in principle to answer his petitions concerning Caitlin is an expression of my love for him, and, secondarily, it may foster my relationship with Malcolm. So, insofar as the virtues that I hope Malcolm will acquire in the absence of the tracking device are compatible with my answering his requests for help, I may ra­tion­ally choose to help Malcolm when asked. I trust that it is relatively easy to see how the illustration applies to God, even though the goods at issue in the divine-­human case can be tremendously more significant. The basic point of connection is that God may have good independent reason for occasionally withholding certain goods from us; yet, out of love and respect for us and for the purpose of fostering our relationship with Him, He may sometimes choose to answer our petitions for the very goods He (actively or passively) withholds. Second, if God answers petitions for weighty goods in the lives of others, then this encourages us to engage in a valuable kind of prayer that is other-­ directed. For if God in principle is willing to answer such prayers, then we can bring our deepest concerns for others into prayer in the hope that God will better, not just our own souls, but those for whom we pray. This other-­directed focus of prayer would be absent in important respects, however, if we were aware of the fact that God did not even entertain answering the relevant petitions. To see this, consider a case where a dear friend of yours, David, is in a critical condition on account of a terrible car accident. The event has left you terrified, as you contemplate the potential loss of your friend, and it has filled your heart with compassion for David’s distressed family. Now suppose that you are certain that God does not answer petitions, and so, as a result, you pray for weighty matters not to change events within the external world, but to change your heart and to align it with God’s purposes. Given this, it seems that, but for a lapse of conviction, your prayers concerning David and his family will ultimately concern yourself, not them—minimally, this seems to be the case when you are praying for particular outcomes rather than, for example, simply emoting before God (which certainly has its own value). Because you are convinced that God will not answer petitions for David and his family, your prayers are more fruitful (or outcomes-­producing) when directed toward that which they can influence, namely yourself. So, you might pray that God will help you cope, or that God will steel you so that you can

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Interceding for the Lost  31 comfort David’s family more effectively than you otherwise would. These are good prayers that are to be encouraged, but this shift of focus from David and his family to yourself constricts the range of values associated with the prayers related to David’s situation. Rather than reaching out with God to David and his family as your primary focus in prayer, the fixing of your own interior life moves center stage.29 By contrast, if you are convinced that God might heal David and comfort his family in response to your prayers, then a significant feature of your prayer life can be directed toward David and his family, for their sakes. A system is in place where you can bring your deepest concerns before God, in the hope that He will help others. But, I submit, it is immensely valuable to be able to posture yourself around the good of others in prayer, to try to benefit them with God’s help. Such prayer is good for the petitioner as the practice of praying for others is, certainly, a means by which one is conformed to the loving image of Christ. In addition, this mode of prayer gives the petitioner the immense privilege of helping others in ways that would not otherwise be possible. Finally, this form of prayer is also good for the one that is the subject of the petition. For to be helped by another is a great good, as Richard Swinburne argues.30 The proposal, then, is this. It would be good for God to answer weighty other-­directed petitions because it is a way of God’s taking our requests for such matters seriously, and because it provides a framework for a valuable kind of other-­directed prayer. These two goods alone are perhaps not enough to demonstrate that God does answer petitions for significant matters in the lives of others. But if we have independent biblical-­theological grounds for supposing that God does answer such petitions (as suggested in the introduction of this chapter), the two listed goods may provide a hint as to why God engages in this practice. However, more can be said on behalf of the extended-­charity defense. On top of biblical texts and traditional teachings and practices that seem to provide direct evidence for the doctrine that God answers petitions for important

29  This remains the case, it seems, even if one of your aims in prayer is to identify symbolically with David and his family. For we must ask, why is symbolic identification in prayer good? Plausibly, the answer will be that it directs and changes the minds and wills of those hearing the prayer. If this is right, then, when you are alone, you are the primary beneficiary of the symbolic identification with David and his family through prayer. Another analysis of the value of prayer for the purpose of symbolic identification is that it is intrinsically good to be the object of kind affections. In the case involving your prayers for David, it is good for David to be thought about well by you. Notice, however, that being the object of kind affections does not require prayer. 30 Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil, 93–4.

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32  Analyzing Prayer matters, the extension of charity over significant issues through petitions perhaps finds support from a foundational biblical theme. This is the theme that God has chosen humans to be a primary and authoritative vehicle through which God’s purposes in creation are realized. According to J. Richard Middleton, for instance, there is now a virtual consensus among Old Testament scholars that the imago dei “designates the royal office or calling of human beings as God’s representatives and agents in the world, granted authorized power to share in God’s rule or administration of the earth’s resources and creatures.”31 In a similar vein, Christ established the Church and gave its administrators the keys of the kingdom of heaven, complete with the power to bind and loose (Matt. 16: 13–19). To what this authority amounts is a matter of dispute. Some see it as the authority to exorcise demons, to forgive sins, to make doctrinal pronouncements, or to implement church discipline.32 Whatever the case, there is no doubting that God, through Christ, is authorizing humans to perform actions that have weighty implications as instances of God’s rule. The biblical theme that God has chosen humans to be a primary vehicle through which He reigns over the cosmos certainly does not entail that God has established a system whereby Christians can extend the reach of their love over weighty matters through petitionary prayer. Nonetheless, this biblical theme supports or provides an important kind of evidence for such a conception of prayer, especially when, as David Crump argues in his lengthy treatment of the New Testament theology of petitionary prayer, the power of petitionary prayer is tied to the establishment of the kingdom of God.33

Summary The present extended-­charity defense of petitionary prayer may be summarized as follows. Our petitions provide God with reasons for acting, and we extend our charity when God acts on the reasons provided by our petitions for the well-­being of others. This is a valuable way for God to set up things, since it takes our deepest requests concerning others seriously, and because it

31 Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005), 27 (cf. 24–29). 32  For a survey of ways of understanding the nature of the authority that Jesus might have granted to Peter and the apostles, see W. D. Davies and D. C. Allison, Matthew 8–18, Volume II (New York: T & T Clark, 2004), 634–41. 33 Crump, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, especially 173–4.

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Interceding for the Lost  33 orders us around others when we pray in the relevant manner. In addition, this mode of prayer may be but one means by which God authorizes His humans to participate with Him in His loving reign over creation.

The Extended-­Charity Defense of Intercessions Much of what has been said on behalf of the extended-­charity defense of petitions regarding weighty matters in the lives of others applies, mutatis mutandis, to the extended-­charity defense of intercessions. It is a good thing to be able to bring our requests for the salvation of others before God in the hope that God will answer these prayers. Doing so directs our attention to the most significant goods in the lives of others, and intercessions provide us with one means by which we can lovingly impact others in profound ways. Moreover, if God genuinely entertains our intercessions, and is in principle willing to act on the reasons we generate with these requests, God manifests a deep form of care for that which we hold most dear. One way in which God may grant our intercessions for others is by placing those prayed-­for individuals in circumstances that render them more receptive to God’s salvation, and by working inside their souls to make them more open to the ways of God. The thought is not that the noted goods of intercessory prayer justify God’s creation of a world where people need salvation. Nor is the thought that God acts to save individuals only when intercessions are offered on their behalf. Instead, the idea is that God has independent reason for allowing the Fall and subsequently establishing His salvation plan, and that intercessory prayer is but one means by which God saves souls. I suggest that this way of understanding intercessory prayer is not implausible. Perhaps this will become clearer after objections to intercessory prayer are treated. The first objection concerns human free will. Suppose that salvation is a synergistic process, where God does not save humans without their free cooperation, in some incompatibilist sense of freedom. If God deeply respects human freedom within the salvation process in this way, then, as mentioned at the outset, surely God will not override one person’s free participation in this process at the request of another. What, then, is the point of intercession? Those who raise this freedom-­based concern about intercessions appear to overlook the fact that it is possible to influence another’s decisions without coercing her. Yet we regularly petition one person to influence another without supposing that a favorable outcome precludes the freedom of the relevant individual. (“Please try to convince Sally to attend the party.”) Our prayers to

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34  Analyzing Prayer God for the conversion of sinners may be understood along similar lines: God answers our intercessions by increasing His influence on those for whom we pray, without coercing them. Perhaps, as indicated, God does this by softening the relevant human’s heart via miraculous activity, or maybe God places the person in a circumstance that is especially conducive to her responding to God’s grace. However exactly God draws persons to Himself, this divine drawing (or increase of it) does not obviously entail controlling the relevant human’s actions and thereby overwhelming the human’s freedom. Importantly, Christians who wish to avoid Pelagianism, according to which humans do not need internal help from God to turn to Him, must grant that God influences and assists the human reception of salvation, even if God does not override human freedom entirely. In my view, the provided response adequately addresses the freedom problem only to raise a second more significant problem concerning a particular conception of God’s goodness. Consider John Wesley’s claim that God’s character is most clearly expressed “in offering salvation to every creature, actually saving all that consent thereto, and doing for the rest all that infinite wisdom, almighty power, and boundless love can do, without forcing them to be saved.”34 The idea is that God’s perfect goodness is such that it disposes Him to do whatever He properly can to secure the salvation of each human person, short of overriding a person’s freedom. But if God does all of this for each person, what role is left for intercessory prayer? Eleonore Stump addresses this issue by turning to St. Augustine’s claim in the Confessions that God saved him in response to the ceaseless prayers of his mother Monica.35 Stump suggests that God might have had various means of saving Augustine apart from Monica’s prayers, but that God choose to answer Monica’s pleas, which perhaps impacted the timing and nature of Augustine’s conversion. If so, Monica’s intercessions made a difference without compromising God’s goodness toward Augustine. Stump implies that what was perhaps true for Monica and Augustine may be true for our intercessions for our loved ones as well. Vincent Brümmer, however, is unimpressed with Stump’s way of handling the noted challenge to intercessory prayer. He worries that [i]f the other ways in which God could have saved Augustine (had Monica not interceded) are in any way worse for Augustine, God’s benevolence 34 Wesley, The Works of John Wesley (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1979), 10: 235. 35  See, Eleonore Stump, “Petitionary Prayer,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979), 81–91.

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Interceding for the Lost  35 would still be compromised, and if they were just as good, then Monica’s prayers would have made a difference—but one which did not really matter.36

So, Brümmer raises a dilemma. If, on the one hand, intercessory prayer improves, in some way, the timing or means by which a person is saved, then the strength of God’s salvation-­seeking goodness is compromised. On the other hand, if there is no such improvement, then, even though intercessory prayer may make some kind of difference to the subject of the intercession, the difference can only be trivial. One way out of the dilemma is to specify values (i) according to which divine answers to intercessions improve the means by which a person is saved, but (ii) where the fact that the means of one’s salvation can be improved through intercessions is good for the one for whom the intercessions are offered (perhaps even better than what would otherwise have been the case). A proposal that meets these conditions escapes the dilemma since it ensures that intercessory prayers really do make an important difference and thus matter, yet without compromising God’s goodness toward those who are the subjects of these prayers. These conditions are not too difficult to meet, however. To see this, let us begin with the claim that it is a tremendous good to be able to work out one’s salvation freely in cooperation with God (where “salvation” is here understood as a process that includes but is more than conversion). I will not defend this claim here. Suffice it to say that many have thought it would be a profound act of respect and love for God to allow us to form our characters around Him (our highest good) by way of a history of free choices, and that it is a great privilege to form one’s character with God’s help. Better this long, painful process than for God simply to zap us and make us new—or so many assume. But if this is so, then, by the very nature of the case, God cannot take each step for us down the path of redemption. Instead, God must, so to speak, give us a bit of space so that we can exercise our own means of relating to Him. Almost certainly, it is also good for other humans to play a role in helping us work out our salvation, whether that be our conversion or our sanctification. It is, after all, a wonderful thing when people care about us and invest their time and energy in our betterment, our spiritual benefit being no 36  Vincent Brümmer, What Are We Doing When We Pray?: A Philosophical Inquiry (London: SCM Press, 1984), 56.

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36  Analyzing Prayer exception. This is good in its own right, and this is good because it facilitates deep bonds between us and our benefactors. Think here of the warmth you feel for a spiritual mentor or ancient theologian who fueled your love for God or helped you cling to Christ in times of doubt. If the Christian story is a true one, then these bonds that are forged may not end at death, but endure within God’s redeemed creation.37 Perhaps the goodness of such human-­to-­human help explains why God established the Church to carry out Christ’s saving mission, rather than simply saving each individual in a more unmediated fashion. In any case, it is plausible that the goodness of being helped by another in your spiritual journey requires, at least for a time, human agents to be able to improve the means or manner by which you are converted and spiritually transformed. For if there is no room for improvement on these matters, then it looks as if there is nothing left for other humans to do to contribute to your salvation.38 Finally, it is good to be the one who assists another in her salvation, whether in her conversion or her sanctification. I trust that we all agree that helping others by, say, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, or educating the ill-­ informed is an incredible privilege. As Christ once put it, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20: 35). But if helping others with their basic physical and mental needs is extremely worthwhile, then surely helping someone come to receive God’s grace and grow in her love of God is also fantastically good. You have the privilege of doing something that matters for a profoundly valuable creature, not just now or moments later, but for all of eternity. And by helping others with their salvation, you are transformed into the image of Christ. But, arguably, if aiding another’s salvation is to be significant, one must be able to improve the other person’s condition.39 With these values in the backdrop, Brümmer’s dilemma can be addressed as follows. Intercessory prayer does sometimes improve the timing and means by which a person is saved, and thus intercessory prayer matters significantly for the subject of the intercession. However, being the potential beneficiary of another’s intercessions is valuable. For it is good to be the subject of another’s saving help, and being helped by another in the salvation process forges bonds that will perhaps last for eternity (especially if we learn, in the new creation,

37 Relevant here is Robin Collins’s “The Connection-­ Building Theodicy” in The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Justin P. McBrayer and Daniel Howard-­Snyder (Malden: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2013), 222–35. 38  Compare with William Hasker’s Providence, Evil and the Openness of God (New York: Routledge, 2004), chs 4–5. 39  Relevant here is Richard Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil, 92–3.

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Interceding for the Lost  37 all the relevant details). Moreover, being helped in this intercessory way is but one feature of a broader environment where humans help and are helped as they work out their salvation by way of a synergistic process. And this whole process is good for the creature, even if it means that certain events or paths within the process are suboptimal for this individual. This is especially the case if all things are put right eventually by God, and if certain goods that are accrued in the here and now have eternal implications. The upshot is that intercessory prayer makes a difference, without compromising God’s love for those for whom we interceded in prayer.

Conclusion Christian Scripture, liturgy, and tradition suggest that God hears and answers intercessions. We have examined and found wanting certain objections to this claim. By contrast, we have located solid grounds for maintaining that our intercessions provide God with reasons for bringing about that which we request, and that if God in His grace acts on these reasons, we extend the reach of our love. There are additional objections to intercessory prayer that one might raise, but, for now, I propose that we maintain this classical perspective on prayer, and that we join the saints that have gone before us by interceding for the lost.

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3 Are You There, God? It’s Me, the Theist On the Viability and Virtue of Non-­Doxastic Prayer Amber L. Griffioen

Introduction The idea of “nonbelieving prayer” sounds strange to many contemporary Christian ears. Can one really be said to pray (or to pray authentically) if one doesn’t believe in the existence or proposed attributes of the addressee of one’s prayer? Certainly at least some of the ways we tend to think about prayer appear at first glance to rule this possibility out. Take, for example, the popular analogy employed in some evangelical circles comparing the act of praying to making a “phone call to God”: If prayer were really a kind of “telephone to glory,”1 it might appear rather odd for someone to try to make such a “call” if they didn’t think anyone was listening on the other end of the line. Indeed, if we think that praying, like acts of trusting or thanking, essentially involves taking up a second-­personal attitude—viewing and addressing God as a “You”—it might appear necessary for one to presuppose the existence of some object to which (or, better, some subject to whom) these attitudes are addressed. Certainly, we do appear to be able to experience certain emotions and attitudes regarding characters and settings we take to be unreal in the fictional contexts of, e.g., literature and film,2 but we rarely find ourselves taking on second-­personal attitudes when reading books or watching movies. Were someone to say she “trusts” Harry Potter, or “is angry at” Captain Kirk, or “is grateful to” Jane Eyre, we might be more inclined to think that she is either not speaking seriously or that she has somehow confused fiction with

1  Compare the lyrics to the song “Royal Telephone” made famous by singers like Jimmy Little and Burl Ives: Telephone to glory, oh, what joy divine! / I can feel the current moving on the line / Made by God the Father for His very own/You may talk to Jesus on this royal telephone. 2  Cp. Tamar Szabó Gendler and Karson Kovakovich, “Genuine Rational Fictional Emotions” in Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Matthew Kieran (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 241–53. Amber L. Griffioen, Are You There, God? It’s Me, the Theist: On the Viability and Virtue of Non-­Doxastic Prayer In: Analyzing Prayer: Theological and Philosophical Essays. Edited by: Oliver D. Crisp, James M. Arcadi, and Jordan Wessling, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859044.003.0004

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Are You There, God? It ’ s Me, the Theist  39 reality. So what are we to say about the feasibility of non-­doxastic prayer? Is it possible for someone to pray agnostically or skeptically? And, if so, can their prayer be sincere and fitting? Or is such a person nothing more than a foolish, perhaps even pathological, “babbler” whose talk is mere “mischievous madness”?3 In what follows, I want to investigate these questions in more detail. Since much depends on the way we understand prayer and the function(s) it may serve in the religious life, I will first provide a working definition of theistic prayer. With this understanding of prayer in hand, I will proceed to discuss a few different types of prayer, and I will explore the ways in which these kinds of prayer can legitimately be performed non-­doxastically. If I am right, it will turn out that belief4 is not always—or perhaps even usually—required for a subject to sincerely engage in prayer of various sorts. I will then take this claim even further by suggesting how what I call “prayerful pretense” might, in some circumstances, even be more virtuous than prayer proceeding from full doxastic certitude in the existence of the kind of God who could be the recipient of such forms of human prayer.

A Working Definition of Theistic Prayer Providing a strict definition of prayer is by no means an easy task, but for my purposes here, I will focus on theistic prayer. I think there are at least five relevant features of theistic prayer worth exploring in more detail, especially because it may be less than obvious why one might insist on these features of prayer and not others. I thus want to first discuss them individually and to motivate their individual significance for understanding what prayer is and does, before bringing them together in a working definition of theistic prayer. (1) Mediality: Prayer is most generally a relational activity. It is something in which religious participants actively engage (as opposed to a state in which they find themselves), and it aims at placing the human being in relation to that which is viewed as sacred. It is thus “medial” in a few senses. First, prayer provides a medium by which the aforementioned two-­place relation may arise. Second, it can serve to mediate content from the subject(s) to the object. Third, prayer can also play a therapeutic, or re-­medial, role for the subject(s) 3  Cp. Ecclesiastes 10:11–13. 4  For the purposes of this chapter, I will understand “belief ” as referring to a propositional cognitive attitude that involves something like near-­certainty or at least credence above some relevant threshold on the part of the believing subject.

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40  Analyzing Prayer themselves. It can provide hope or be a comfort; it can foster confidence or aid (self-)reflection; it can reconcile one person to another or bring disparate individuals together in solidarity. (2) Positionality and Unidirectionality: Despite being relational, prayer is not, in the first instance, a two-­way street. It is a “positional” act, in that the particular situation or standpoint of the praying subject(s) matters in understanding what is being done and is directed outward in ways expressive of that situatedness. As Augustine writes, prayer is “the mind’s affectionately reaching out toward God.”5 In this affective and expressive “reaching out,” Augustine gestures at another important feature of prayer, namely its “unidirectionality.” There are several reasons for prayer’s being best understood as one-­directional. First, it is not necessary that prayer be responded to, nor even that it be received by that at which it is directed, to count as prayer. I can pray to Krishna for strength without Krishna’s answering my prayer. Moreover, I can even be said to pray to Krishna if it turns out that Krishna does not exist to receive my prayer.6 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, any possible response by the addressee of a particular prayer is not itself an instance of prayer. While it is fitting to say that the people pray to God, it would be inaccurate—and potentially inappropriate—to say that God prays to the people in response.7 (3) Reverence: Part of what would make it unfitting to speak of God as praying to the people has to do with the way the relationship of human beings to the divine is conceptualized in prayer contexts. Prayer is, in some sense, a deferential activity. As Teresa of Avila writes in The Interior Castle, “[A]nyone who has the habit of speaking before God's majesty as though he were speaking to a slave, without being careful to see how he is speaking, but saying whatever comes to his head and whatever he has learned from saying at other times, in my opinion is not praying.”8 In this sense, then, prayer is an activity in which the addressee of the prayer is conceived of as standing in a relationship of perceived superiority to the praying subject, whether that superiority

5 Cf. Sermo IX, in the appendix to Augustine of Hippo, Sancti Aurelii Augustini, Hipponensis Episcopi, Sermones Inediti: Cura et studio D. A. B. Caillau (Paris: Paul Mellier, 1842), 87 (my emphasis). 6  Note that this is distinct from whether I can pray to Krishna without believing that Krishna exists (or exists as the kind of thing that could respond to prayer). I think the former idea is fairly uncontroversial. The latter is the subject of this chapter. 7 For an alternative viewpoint, compare Katherine Sonderegger’s contribution (Chapter  8) in this volume. 8  Teresa of Avila, The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila: Volume 2, trans. K.  Kavanaugh and O. Rodriguez (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1980), 286.

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Are You There, God? It ’ s Me, the Theist  41 take the form of power, knowledge, love, or greatness (or all of the above, as we find in much monotheistic perfect-­being theology). However, the term “deferential” may connote a kind of obsequiousness or submissiveness that need not accompany prayer in all its forms. A better term to connote this attitudinal orientation is thus perhaps “reverential.” Acting reverentially is a way of taking the action in question (and its objects) seriously, in a way that acknowledges the purported inequality of the two relata of the prayer relation. But it also allows that one may adopt a negatively valenced stance toward the inequality in question. In some cases, it may even be the very manifestations of the relevant inequality that are under discussion in the prayer itself (as, perhaps, with the lament of Job). Indeed, reverential prayer might sometimes appropriately express attitudes of complaint, lamentation, anger, resignation, or even accusation.9 (4) Second-­Personal Directionality: Finally, and most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, theistic prayer is “second-­personal.” This should not be understood as meaning that prayer is always addressed to some particular person, but rather that the praying subject (whether verbally or nonverbally) adopts a second-­personal voice and/or stance with respect to the sacred or divine. In this sense, then, although prayer is unidirectional, it is not monological. The “grammar” of prayer is importantly dialogical in the sense that it manifests a unidirectional “I–Thou” stance.10 Speaking to is importantly different from speaking about: The stance involved in treating the second relatum of the prayer relation as a “You” who is being addressed is essential to an activity’s being a prayer and not some other form of activity. At the same time, prayer is not dialogical in the sense that the two relata of the prayer relation necessarily engage in mutual dialogue with one another.11 Literally speaking or conversing with God is not the same as praying to the divine. Moses did not pray in his “face-­to-­face” encounter with God (Exodus 33:11). Likewise, merely responding to divine calls or exhortations do not, by themselves, constitute instances of praying. Thus Adam’s responses to God’s queries in the Garden are excluded (Genesis 3:10ff), as is Samuel’s initial response, “Here

9  For more on this idea, see Oliver Crisp’s and Kevin Timpe’s contributions (Chapters 5 and 6, respectively) in this volume. 10 Cf. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. R.  G.  Smith (Mansfield, CT: Martino Publishing, 2010 [1923]). 11  This understanding of theistic prayer diverges from that of William James, who defined prayer as “every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine.” Cf. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 399–400.

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42  Analyzing Prayer I am,” to the divine call (1 Samuel 3), even if both involve taking up a second-­ personal stance toward God.12 (5) Absentiality: Prayer’s one-­way dialogicity does not mean that it cannot be one way of responding to events viewed under the aspect of special divine action. Indeed, one may react to the feeling that one has been divinely called, blessed, or even cursed by falling to one’s knees in prayerful worship, gratitude, or repentance. Moreover, many of those engaged in prayer hope for, invite, or even expect some sort of response on the part of the divine, and on many theological views God does commonly answer prayer. Nevertheless, there is also a very real sense in which prayer itself is an activity that takes place in the absence of the addressee. One way of understanding this absence is to point to the radical metaphysical distance between the human being and the sacred as perceived by the praying subject and manifested in her reverence. Of course, the absence of the addressee of prayer may also refer to a God who is perceived as hidden. Perceptions of divine hiddenness may even represent one occasion for undertaking prayer in the first place. Indeed, a central function of some forms of prayer may be to remedy (“re-­mediate”) the gap between the praying subject and the hidden God—to achieve a kind of mutual communion with that which is perceived to be absent.13 Still, it seems im­por­ tant to distinguish the act of prayer itself from the intersubjective, experiential communion that can serve as one of its ends. While prayer may sometimes represent the occasion by which one comes to commune discursively with God, it itself is an act that necessarily takes seriously the distance between humankind and the sacred. Where this gap is wholly eliminated, it might seem inappropriate to speak of prayer, per se. Ultimately, then, we may understand theistic prayer as a (re)medial, positional, unidirectional, and reverential activity by which human beings second-­ personally and dialogically relate themselves to a representation of the sacred in 12  Merold Westphal, by contrast, views prayer as a fundamentally responsive activity to acts of divine speech. He concedes that Samuel’s ‘Here I am’ is “only the beginning of a performative” that is completed in a second speech act, “Speak, for your servant is listening.” Cf. Merold Westphal, “Prayer as the Posture of the Decentered Self ” in The Phenomenology of Prayer, ed. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 13–32, at 19. While I agree that the second speech act, when combined with the first, might legitimately be understood as the opening to a prayer, I do not think that merely by taking on a second-­personal stance and responding deferentially to a divine call one has automatically engaged in praying. Further, I am hesitant to make all prayer a matter of responding to some perceived divine speech act. Indeed, as I note, it can be a sense of divine absence that provides the occasion for prayer. 13  Compare the study of evangelical Christians in which participants reported “that during a typical time of prayer in daily life, they felt the presence of God within one minute or less of starting prayer.” Raymond  L.  Neubauer, “Prayer as an Interpersonal Relationship. A Neuroimaging Study,” Religion, Brain & Behavior 4: 2 (2014), 92–103, at 97.

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Are You There, God? It ’ s Me, the Theist  43 the perceived absence of the direct presence of that which is represented. This definition points to significant features of prayer that can assist us in better classifying it among religious practices and distinguishing it from other kinds of religious activities. For example, on my definition prayer may be understood as a form of worship, yet one distinct from mere praise (which need not be second-­personal) or communion (which is not unidirectional and need not involve speaking at all).

Forms and Functions of Theistic Prayer The definition I have just given allows us to delineate an entire spectrum of activities that might be appropriately called “prayer.” In this section, I would like to name a few prominent forms that fall under this definitional umbrella and discuss the possible functions that such prayerful activities might serve. This will put us in a better position to examine the possibility of non-­doxastic prayer in the next section.

Contemplative Prayer: Oratio quaerens intellectum Much contemplative and devotional literature in theistic traditions takes on an explicitly reverent, unidirectional, second-­personal form. For example, Pseudo-­Dionysius opens the Mystical Theology with a prayer to the Trinity, and there is an entire collection of twelfth-­century Jewish philosophical prayers, addressing God as, e.g., the “Cause of Causes” or “the First of the First and the Eternal of the Eternal,” in which subjects pray to better understand God and nature while being protected from ignorance.14 It is also not of little significance that Anselm of Canterbury’s famous ontological argument in the Proslogion is embedded within the larger context of a prayer.15 In Chapter 1 of the Proslogion Anselm begins with a reverent second-­personal reflection on divine absence, emphasizing the unidirectionality (and potential futility) of his contemplative endeavor:

14 Cp. Paul Rorem, Pseudo-­Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 183f.; Y.  Tzvi Langermann, “A Collection of Jewish Philosophical Prayers” in Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews, ed. Javier Castaño, Talya Fishman, and Ephraim Kanarfogel (London: Liverpool University Press, 2018), 263–84. 15 Cp. Marilyn McCord Adams, “What’s Wrong with the Ontotheological Error?,” Journal of Analytic Theology 2 (2014), 1–12.

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44  Analyzing Prayer Come now, O lord my God. Teach my heart where and how to seek you, where and how to find you. Lord, if you are not here, where shall I seek you, since you are absent? . . . Lord, you are my God . . . but I have never seen you. You have made me and remade me, you have given me every good thing that is mine, and still I do not know you.16

Here, Anselm’s fides quaerens intellectum is not a cool-­headed third-­personal reflection on the existence and nature of the divine. It is a deeply personal—in fact, second-­personal—contemplative exercise that aims to arrive, not at some abstract propositional truth about the Deity but rather at an intimate and profound understanding of what that God could be. Understanding here is not just a cognitive achievement; it is also deeply affective and sensual. It is a way of “reaching out” to grasp the divine by contemplating it second-­personally. It is thus no accident that the Proslogion concludes with both cognitive and affective second-­personal language, and with the sensual metaphors of hunger and thirst.17 In this sense, then, contemplative prayer can serve to increase understanding and love of the divine. Yet the aim of prayerful contemplation need not only concern the divine. One may also thereby arrive at important truths about one’s own self and what one is in contrast to that which is prayerfully contemplated. Through the act of prayer, then, one may also better come to understand the self and its place in the world. This is not a trivial point, insofar as the exhortation of classical philosophy to know thyself has been inextricably tied to understanding of the divine in much classical theism and mysticism. And prayer is one means of bridging this gap in understanding, with the result that one comes to know both God and oneself better through contemplating the divine reverentially in the second person.18

Ritualized Prayer: Orientation, Affirmation, and “Being For” A further category of prayerful activity is that of ritual prayer. Whereas the goal of contemplative prayer has primarily to do with understanding,

16  Anselm of Canterbury, “Proslogion” in Philosophy in the Middle Ages. The Christian, Islamic, and Jewish traditions, 3rd ed., ed. Arthur Hyman, James J. Walsh, and Thomas Williams (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2010), 161–81, at 161. 17  Ibid., 173. 18  For more on the relationship between prayer and self-­knowledge, see Adam Green’s chapter, 11, in this volume.

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Are You There, God? It ’ s Me, the Theist  45 ritualized prayer has more to do with (re-)orienting the will of the praying subjects in various ways. Some ritualistic prayers are predominantly devotional or penitential, as perhaps with the Ave Maria in Roman Catholicism or the Vedic prayers in Hinduism. Others are embedded within the liturgical context of collective worship, and involve patterns and sequences of actions such as blessing, petitioning, and offering thanks,19 as well as acts of confessing, declaring, promising, even lamenting. Some are prescribed, as with the salat in Islam or the tefillah in Judaism, others offer a script for expression in various liturgical and private contexts (as, perhaps, with the Lord’s Prayer). Ritualized prayer carries what Terence Cuneo calls expressive import: Like other ritual activities, its “function is not [merely] to state propositions but to express respect, affection, gratitude, and the like.”20 Additionally, it is characterized by its essentially embodied, repetitive, and public nature. While in principle performable by individual subjects in private, ritualized praying is nonetheless a fundamentally social act, insofar as it arises diachronically out of the norms, values, and communal practices of particular religious traditions. It is endorsed and practiced by the religious community, and it also serves to bind that community together through shared practice. Importantly, as Cuneo notes, the content of what is expressed through these embodied public acts of prayer need not match up to some corresponding mental state in the agent performing them in order to be successful. I need not occurrently feel grateful to efficaciously utter a ritual prayer of thanks, nor need I presently be in a state of awe when reciting a prayer of praise. Although ideally the attitudes expressed in ritual prayer would match up with those of the subjects performing the prayer, the fact that we are not always in an affective position to feel the way we ought points to one of the further functions of ritualized prayer—namely that, as Howard Wettstein notes, “we need not wait until the appropriate [affective] experiences present themselves” to be able to engage with God liturgically.21 That is, we can meet the criteria of prayer I set out in the previous section, even if we cannot wholly instantiate the feelings and thoughts such prayers appropriately express. Moreover, even where fitting religious feelings are present, Wettstein claims, ritual prayer gives subjects the tools to speak meaningfully and appropriately

19  Terence Cuneo claims these three acts constitute the “central pattern” of the Christian Orthodox liturgy. Cf. Terence Cuneo, Ritualized Faith: Essays on the Philosophy of Liturgy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 156. 20  Ibid., 157. 21 Howard  K.  Wettstein, The Significance of Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 45. See also Cuneo, Ritualized Faith, 160.

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46  Analyzing Prayer about their experiences—to give voice to their feelings and relate themselves in fitting ways to the sacred.22 Indeed, given that we are not always especially adept at taking up appropriate second-­personal attitudes toward the divine, the repetitive structures of ritualized prayer can help us express ourselves in ways suitable to the nature of the relationship in question. In this sense, ritualized, repetitive prayer can serve to direct and reorient the will in ways that productively prime attitudes and actions which relate us fittingly to God. Even if one is just “going through the motions” during worship services, such mundane engagement with ritualized prayer can, as Cuneo points out, both encourage “the regularization of attitudes to which it so ably gives voice”23 and, over time, provide one with the “ritual knowledge” of “how to engage God in ways that are fitting.”24 It allows religious subjects to affirm and reaffirm the tenets of their faith in ways that can appropriately relate them to a God whose transcendence makes second-­personal address difficult, even in cases where the relevantly normed attitudes and emotions might be occurrently absent. But ritualized prayer can do more than just orient our wills toward the sacred. It can also improve our volitional situation with regard to our fellow human beings. Especially when we pray such prayers together, we are engaging in a kind of collective symbolic action. And in so doing, we are also able to performatively declare that we stand for the good and in solidarity with one another.25 Ritualized prayer, then, can provide us with a means to move our attention away from our egoistic attachments to our own concerns and to refocus our wills on the well-­being of others. It shifts us from what Cuneo calls an “ethics of proximity” toward an “ethic of outwardness,” where “by standing in solidarity with the marginalized we ally ourselves with what are, according to the scriptural narrative, God’s purposes.”26 Thus loving God and loving others become embodied in a single act of symbolic prayer.

Personal Prayer: Forging Intimacy Finally, there are forms of prayer in which the personal nature of the relationship between the individual and the sacred takes center stage. Whereas 22 Wettstein, The Significance of Religious Experience, 45. 23 Ibid. 24 Cuneo, Ritualized Faith, 164. 25  Cp. Robert M. Adams, “Symbolic Value,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 21: 1 (1997), 1–15; see also Cuneo, Ritualized Faith, 29–33. 26 Cuneo, Ritualized Faith, 29, 30, 33.

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Are You There, God? It ’ s Me, the Theist  47 contemplative prayer pursues understanding, and ritualized prayer aims at volitional, affective, and/or cognitive reorientation, the function of personal prayer has more to do with forging a deeply affective and intimate relationship with the divine. To be sure, both contemplative and ritualized prayer may be deeply personal in this way, but this category may also include less-­ structured, more “informal” individualistic forms of prayer that correspond more closely to the telephone model we considered at the outset of this chapter. This kind of prayer takes very seriously the second-­personal aspect, sometimes in ways that appear to sacrifice the absence condition discussed in the previous section. Wettstein, for example, compares traditional Jewish prayer to “a thrice daily audience with God,”27 which—although compatible with the unidirectionality of prayer—appears to imply that prayer puts one in the presence of the divine in a more literal way than that of merely contemplating or symbolically standing for something. Here, one stands in prayer before God as one stands before a thing of great majesty—namely, in awe. In what appears to be an even more stark divergence from the definition of prayer I gave earlier, the evangelical Vineyard Christians studied by anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann engage in prayerful exercises aimed at coming to hear the voice of God in their everyday lives: Congregants spend time “chatting” with God, going on “date nights” with God, even “singing” with God in the shower.28 In other words, they view prayer not as Wettstein does, as a way of standing in second-­person awe of the glory of the divine, but more as a way of engaging God as one would a close friend. God is addressed as a concrete object who is familiar, responsive, and above all personal. This is neither the God of classical theism nor that of the apophatic mystics. This is a personal God who regularly acts—and interacts—with religious individuals, not as an exception but as a rule. While such an understanding of prayer maintains the relational, (re) medial, and second-­personal aspects of prayer, it appears to stand in direct tension with the unidirectionality and absence conditions. Further, it might even be viewed by some Christians as moving in the direction of irreverence (if not blasphemy), insofar as it transforms the unsurpassable God of classical theism or the unknowable God of apophatic mysticism into an intimate (and

27 Wettstein, The Significance of Religious Experience, 47. 28 Tanya M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 80–3.

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48  Analyzing Prayer wholly immanent), super-­powerful “best buddy,” with whom one can “chat,” “go on dates,” and “sing.” How are we to square this common contemporary understanding of private, personal, intersubjective prayer with the definition developed earlier? One option is to simply revise the definition of theistic prayer by jettisoning the unidirectionality and absence clauses (and perhaps rethinking what counts as reverence). This is certainly a theoretical option, but it is then unclear what prayer is supposed to be and how it is to be distinguished from other religious (or mundane) activities. Another possibility is to suppose that the conversational model of the Vineyard Christians conflates prayer and communion—that what such congregations have in mind when they talk about “prayer” is ideally more like Enoch’s walking with God than Hannah’s entreaty to the deity. Here, “practicing prayer” may still be extremely helpful in opening one up to the possibility of genuine interaction with God in ways that other, less (second-)personal spiritual exercises are not. But on such an account, prayer is best viewed as an important antecedent to communion, not as a matter of communion itself. At the same time, it is not clear that this is what such evangelicals have in mind. Their kind of prayer, they think, actually involves dialogue, not just dialogicity. God is personally encountered in the act of prayer itself and interacts with the subject in real time. Indeed, I think there is a perhaps more charitable understanding of what is going on in the evangelical case than a mere conflation of prayer with communion. And I suspect that a closer inspection of what might be understood by “non-­doxastic prayer” can provide us one way of understanding how the evangelical conversational model can appropriately meet the absence and unidirectionality requirements of the definition without doing too much damage to the reverence condition and making of prayer an unrecognizable, potentially blasphemous charade. I will return to this idea shortly, but first it will be instructive to see just how non-­doxastic prayer might be possible in the first place.

“I and Thou”: Commitment, Imagination, and Prayerful Pretense It is my contention that non-­doxastic prayer is not only possible, it is both actual and fairly common in the religious sphere. To see how this might be so, a few preliminary comments are in order.

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Are You There, God? It ’ s Me, the Theist  49 First, and most generally, it is important to see that religion is not—or is not just—a set of propositions to be believed.29 Although most religious traditions have certain core propositions they would likely take to be fundamental, particular religious traditions are always more than the sum of these propositions. And while analytic philosophy of religion has largely focused its energies on questions surrounding the rationality of religious belief, Cuneo rightly points out that “this tendency threatens to offer a distorted picture of the religious life,” since most religious practice on the ground is “concerned not so much with being in this type of doxastic state with respect to propositions about God as with conducting oneself in certain ways with respect to God that count as engaging God, and knowing how to conduct oneself in those ways.”30 Understood in this sense, Cuneo thinks, the religious life is best characterized as “thoroughly practical.”31 Instead of characterizing religion as a set of propositional candidates for belief, a much more promising correlate attitude for religious faith is not belief but rather something like commitment—not only to the propositions of the tradition in question but also to the rituals, practices, persons, and norms of that tradition.32 This non-­doxastic understanding of faith places more emphasis on the affective and volitional aspects of the religious life rather than the merely cognitive elements. And while believing the propositions of a religious tradition with a high level of certainty might make one more likely to commit oneself to that tradition,33 one need not fully take them on board as true to commit oneself to them. One may not even think the propositions are much more likely to be true than their denial to be so committed.34 Such commitment, then, when combined with a hopeful or other minimally positively valenced attitude toward the content of the relevant propositions,35 might be sufficient to ground the practical orientation that makes up the life of faith.

29  On this point, cf. also Cuneo, Ritualized Faith, 18. 30  Ibid., 165. 31  Ibid., 148. 32  I develop a commitment model of faith more thoroughly in my forthcoming book which seeks to broaden the borders of analytic philosophy of religion along various dimensions, including that of religious faith. 33  It need not. One could be wholly convinced by the truth of some religion and be motivated to do absolutely nothing. Or one might, as with Ivan Karamazov, choose to rebel. Thus, belief is not sufficient for religious faith. The question here is whether it is necessary. 34  Cf. Cuneo, Ritualized Faith, 215–16, n.2. 35  Compare Daniel Howard-­Snyder’s claim that one can be said to have faith that p “only if one cares that p and one is for p’s truth, at least in the sense that one considers p’s truth to be good or desirable.” Daniel Howard-­Snyder, “Propositional Faith. What It Is and What It Is Not,” American Philosophical Quarterly 50: 4 (2013), 357–72, at 360. I take up the attitude of hope again later in this chapter.

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50  Analyzing Prayer Yet commitment by itself does not go all the way to explaining how someone can engage in second-­personal religious activities such as prayer. Even if one is affectively inclined toward and volitionally committed to such activities, how can one authentically pray in a theistic context, if one is unsure, agnostic, or skeptical that the addressee of the prayer is there? Here, the cognitive element of religion again becomes relevant—yet I maintain that it is not the attitude of religious belief that matters in this context but rather that of the religious imagination. To get religious concepts cognitively “off the ground” in the first place takes a feat of imagination on the part of the religious participant, be she a full believer or a committed nonbeliever. The concept of a non-­ corporeal creator and sustainer of the universe who “embodies” certain characteristics such as power, wisdom, and love; of an “eternal person” outside of all time who can respond to human beings in time and act specially in the world; of a trinity or a deus homo; of a God who cares about this world and its inhabitants—all this is impossible without the imagination, at least if religion is to be meaningful to the religious subject. Religion is enshrouded in metaphor and narrative, in allegory and myth, in image and story. Stripped of these aspects, it ceases to matter for us; it ceases to be something we care about committing ourselves to. Prayer is no exception here. The act of praying is so fundamental to the theistic religious life that, to many, a theistic tradition without prayer might seem somehow empty. Prayer is one of the central ways in which human beings relate themselves to what they conceive of as sacred, and its active character makes it easy to understand why. In praying, we are the ones who engage God; we call out to a “Thou,” to a distant yet somehow familiar someone. Prayer makes us active participants in the divine-­human relationship, be it imagined or real (or both). Indeed, even for the individual who believes in God with full conviction, taking up such a stance with respect to the divine requires a significant degree of imagination. To relate to God, we need something more immanent than transcendent, something relatable, which is what the religious imagination provides in prayer: It gives the religious subject a way to cognitively and affectively “reach out toward the divine” through second-­personal address. But can one really take up a second-­personal stance with respect to a metaphor? Can one speak of praising, thanking, or petitioning, if one does not think there is, strictly speaking, someone to whom these attitudes are addressed? As I mentioned at the outset, although we may experience emotions with regard to fictional characters in literature and film, we rarely take up second-­personal attitudes toward them. At the same time, second-­personal

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Are You There, God? It ’ s Me, the Theist  51 imaginative stances are all around us. Children are experts at devising ­imaginary friends to whom they speak and with whom they interact. Even adults tend to anthropomorphize inanimate and nonpersonal objects in second-­personal ways: We yell at our computers when they malfunction, coax our cars into starting on a cold day, speak to our pets as if they understood our complex thoughts, and scold our Roombas when they get stuck in a corner. Likewise, we are given to pretending second-­personally in the absence of actual persons: We may give mock interviews to the press in the shower, or thank the Academy for the best actor award in an empty bedroom, or accuse an empty chair of abuse in talk therapy. This is not to say that prayer is equivalent to these forms of second-­personal pretense. It is merely to note that second-­personal imagining is not difficult for us; rather, it is a kind of thinking to which we, as essentially intersubjective and social animals, are especially prone. In this sense, it is not far-­fetched to see how prayer could be non-­doxastic. In the case of contemplative prayer, for example, the quest for understanding might arise out of a kind of skepticism or agnosticism, and one might adopt a prayerful attitude in the hope that such an attitude could lead to the sort of understanding that one lacks, the sort that might psychologically induce belief. Here, the “faith” of fides quaerens intellectum might involve a commitment to certain concepts and propositions that one does not necessarily believe, perhaps because one does not fully understand what they mean, even if one has a sense of their deep significance. The search for understanding, then, takes the form of oratio, which in turn allows one to imaginatively contemplate the nature of the divine second-­personally in a way that can transform “mere” commitment into committed conviction.36 However, contemplative prayer need not be aimed at belief at all. One can understand how certain concepts hang together, what they mean, and why they might be significant without thereby believing that they are, strictly speaking, indicative of reality. Likewise, one can successfully do things with those concepts without the conviction that they correspond one-­to-­one with the way things really are.37 And one may find that second-­person pretense assists one in such understanding—understanding of what, e.g., the God of 36  I take no position here on whether this is what Anselm is up to or not. I think it doubtful that Anselm takes the “fool” of the Psalms cited in the premise of his reductio to be akin to what we encounter in contemporary atheism. But nothing hangs on this. I merely think that the “faith” in “faith seeking understanding” need not be cashed out doxastically in our contemporary philosophies. 37  A parallel here might be to the case of mathematics. One can have a profound (even “mystical”) understanding of numbers and the way they hang together—as well as what one can do with such concepts—without being forced to grant numbers robust ontological status. On this point,

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52  Analyzing Prayer classical theism could be—in a way that is emotionally or otherwise p ­ ersonally significant.38 Or, as in the case of ritualized prayer, one may come to learn how to appropriately engage the divine (whether or not the divine really exists as it is being addressed in prayer) by praying ritualistically. Such prayer can prime one for certain affective experiences and can solidify in one a genuine commitment to the faith, even if certainty (or any degree of belief whatsoever) is lacking. In both cases of contemplative and ritual prayer, then, belief does not appear necessary to meet the conditions provided by our working definition of what prayer is. Indeed, the absence condition is doubly met in non-­doxastic prayer of these sorts, insofar as God is absent, both formally in the prayer itself and doxastically as the intentional object of a belief. But what of personal prayer—especially the conversational prayer of religious practitioners like the Vineyard Christians? Can such prayer really be non-­doxastic? As Luhrmann notes, many religious subjects who engage in this kind of prayer report knowing “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that God is present, which would seem to entail belief.39 At the same time, the kind of “belief ” involved in such knowing is not necessarily the cognitive certainty generally meant by analytic philosophers when they speak of belief. Instead, Luhrmann says, the God of the Vineyard Christians is “hyperreal,” a “deeply supernatural God [who] takes shape out of an exquisite awareness of doubt,” the imaginative representation of which requires a temporary suspension of things one normally takes to be true: This modern God is . . . so real that you are left suspended between what is real and what is [merely] your imagination. . . . [T]his way of understanding God insists on a reality so vivid that it demands a willing suspension of disbelief while generating direct personal experiences that makes that God real and integral to one’s experiences of self. As a result, . . . the process of believing splits off belief commitment to God as something special and different from other kinds of beliefs.40

cf.  Amber  L.  Griffioen, “Rethinking Religious Epistemology,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion (forthcoming), as well as Wettstein (2012). 38  This idea may be reflected in something like Richard Kearney’s “God of the possible”—a God “whose esse reveals itself, surprisingly and dramatically, as posse.” Cf. Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 37. See also Justin Sands, “After Onto-­ Theology. What Lies Beyond the ‘End of Everything’, ” Religions 8: 6 (2017), 98–122. 39 Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, 77. 40  Ibid., 301ff., my emphasis.

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Are You There, God? It ’ s Me, the Theist  53 On the one hand, the God of the Vineyard Christians—this God who is “realer than real”—makes the prayer of these Christians appear “hyperdoxastic.” On the other hand, as Luhrmann claims, such prayer requires the application of a wholly different epistemological category from that which we generally apply to other objects in the world—similar to the ways in which children treat imaginary friends, only substantially more serious.41 When we look a little more closely, I think that approaching these kinds of exercises in p ­ ersonal prayer as a form of what I call “doxastically-­suspended prayer” might actually better lend itself to a more charitable interpretation of what is going on than those of straightforwardly doxasticist approaches which treat the kind of “belief ” at work in such cases as on a par with ordinary factual beliefs in the indicative mode. Prayer here is best understood as a form of imaginative yet utterly serious “play”42—a kind of prayerful pretense capable of creating an epistemically insulated “subjunctive space” where praying subjects can come to experience the world and their place in it as a place where the “God beyond being” could listen and speak to them in real time. It can become an activity through which the remoteness or absence of the divine—which must be taken seriously in order for prayer to take place—is imaginatively mitigated in a way that allows the religious subject to (second-­personally) take up a serious cataphatic, second-­personal stance and bring God into a relatable position, thereby engendering a sense of real interaction. Certain things one takes to be true of reality are bracketed in such pretense, allowing other ideas to gain salience and relevance in the play-­context (and beyond). One “tries on” various religious attitudes and stances for size, and one thereby learns how to view the world from the religious perspective. This opens one up to the possibility that God, too, can speak. Yet to say that one believes that the God as represented in such prayer exists in the same way that one believes the cup on the table exists  might be misleading. The Vineyard Christians are not unaware that, Incarnational aspects aside, the God of the Bible (or that of Christian perfect-­ being theology) is not the kind of God with whom one could “have a beer” or “go on a date”.43 Yet the second-­personal exercises they undertake allow them to experience and relate to the divine in ways that have the potential to enable a sense of the divine’s speaking and acting in the world—and potentially 41  Ibid., 80. 42  On this point, compare Rachel Wagner, “The Importance of Playing in Earnest” in Playing with Religion in Digital Games, ed. Heidi A. Campbell and Gregory P. Grieve (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), 192–213. 43 Luhrmann, When God Talks Back.

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54  Analyzing Prayer c­ reate a sense of reverence—even if the concept of God as represented in these exercises is one approached as a close friend or “buddy” and not as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans before which one stands in silent awe. Yet the mere fact that this prayer is a form of play does not entail that subjects cannot undertake this stance in utter earnestness and throw their whole weight authentically behind it. Understood as a non-­doxastic (or perhaps a “doxastically qualified”44) enterprise of this sort, there is a charitable sense in which one might say the exercises of the Vineyard Christians represent a form of prayer that takes absence seriously, even while suspending it for the sake of communion-­like experiences. Something similar can be said of the unidirectionality clause: Praying is not the same as talking with God. Put a bit differently, prayerfully pretending to converse is not the same as actually conversing. And there might even be benefits that accrue to this way of praying. For example, there is some indication in the empirical literature that participation in certain “colloquial” forms of personal prayer can play a positive psychological role in the lives of religious subjects distinct from the functions of purely contemplative or ritual prayer.45 Still, even if psychologically beneficial, there is a theological danger lurking in such prayer—namely, the danger of idolatry. If the God of colloquial prayer were believed to exist in the way that God is addressed in such prayer, it might make of the divine a false (or at least inappropriate) image—an irreverent desecration of the sacred to which one is supposed to relate in prayer. In this sense, we can see one reason why non-­doxastic prayer of the form sketched out here might not only be psychologically descriptive of what (at least some) religious subjects are doing; it may even in some cases be recommendable over its fully doxastic counterparts. I thus wish to conclude with a brief discussion of the ways in which prayerful pretense may have ­epistemic, moral, and theological advantages over certain forms of doxastic prayer. 44  If anything, the complex make-­believe activity of the Vineyard Christians points us to the fact that the doxastic/non-­doxastic distinction in the case of religious practice might be more complex than philosophers have heretofore assumed it to be in discussions about the role of belief in religious faith. Indeed, it is somewhat unclear what the relevant candidates for belief are in these cases, and which of those beliefs are psychologically required for “sincere” practice. Most of the Vineyard Christians profess a belief in the reality of a personal God who communicates with human beings. In this sense, their religious faith might be said to be doxastic. At the same time, they readily admit that the God with whom they imaginatively interact is not the God they theologically profess. Rather, they are encouraged “to imagine God as present—theological precision be damned” (Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, 89). 45  Poloma and Pendleton note that of the four types of prayer they studied (meditative, ritualist, petitionary, colloquial), only the latter was a predictor of subjective happiness. Cf. Margaret M. Poloma and Brian F. Pendleton, “Exploring Types of Prayer and Quality of Life. A Research Note,” Review of Religious Research 31: 1 (1989), 46–53.

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Are You There, God? It ’ s Me, the Theist  55

Conclusion: The Virtues of Suspension Religious epistemology has generally focused on belief as the cognitive attitude at the center of their enterprise. Thus, when we talk about the cognitive and doxastic attitudes of epistemic agents, we tend to talk about the degree to which such agents believe or disbelieve propositions, as opposed to the degree to which they suspend, withhold, or otherwise refrain from belief. Yet nonbelief (in the form of, e.g., active suspension, epistemic openness to various possibilities, or merely a lack of concern or consideration) seems to be the default attitude we exhibit with respect to a large majority of propositions.46 Indeed, although belief is often taken to be central to the religious life, it is unclear that the large majority of those people we call “religious believers” really possess the attitudes and dispositions that philosophers would ultimately label as “belief.” Yet even if philosophers disagree with me on this empirical point, there is still reason to think that adopting a doxastically suspended attitude in prayer might be preferable to certainty (or very high-­credence belief). Each of the three forms of theistic prayer I have discussed involves a representation of the divine to which one relates oneself through prayer. Yet the distance condition of prayer also clues us into the fact that God necessarily outstrips our conceptual categories. What is gestured at, real or not, is an idea of “being infinitely beyond,” which almost necessarily rules out the ability of the finite human being to relate to it. In this sense, then, any attempt to “capture” the divine in prayer already commits the sin of idolatry. At the same time, more epistemically and theologically careful approaches—e.g., the apophatic approach of negative theology (which posits a wholly transcendent Godhead incapable of being captured conceptually), as well as the more cataphatic approach of classical theism (which posits a definable, yet wholly abstract, “Perfect Being”)—run up against another problem: They present us with a God who could not possibly be a person, let alone a person to whom we could relate. As Heidegger writes of the “god of the philosophers”: “Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god.”47 And while Marilyn Adams is not wrong that the “idea that we cannot sing and dance before the first cause fails to take seriously Who the first

46  I am grateful to Verena Wagner and Alexandra Zinke for alerting me to this point and look forward to their future work on suspension. 47 Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. J.  Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969) 72.

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56  Analyzing Prayer cause really is,”48 there is something admittedly odd about addressing a causa sui or a wholly transcendent God second-­personally, insofar as it already requires taking the step that the god of the philosophers is a Who. This is where non-­doxastic prayer can come “into play.” The ability of an Anselm to address aliquid quo maius nihil cogitari potest as a You in prayer— to simultaneously profess profound ignorance and yet confidently address God in the second person—displays, not disbelief, but a kind of cognitive and affective play with the tension between classical and personal theism, between God as utterly distant and at the same time as wholly present. It is an enterprise that seeks, not factual knowledge, but wisdom. Indeed, the search for understanding might not only display a deep desire to comprehend what God could be but can also exhibit a profound sense of intellectual humility—an “appropriate attentiveness” to one’s intellectual limitations and an “owning” of said limitations,49 which, at least with respect to the Last Things, seems desirable for epistemic subjects to have. Such humility can also cultivate an openness and willingness to consider other images and ways of approaching God—a diversity that can give one a fuller picture of divine possibility. Where such humility is a virtue, it is one that seems better cultivated through non-­ doxastic prayer than through an inflexible certainty that one has “locked down” the existence and nature of the divine to whom one speaks.50 The cognitive benefits of prayerful pretense are paired with affective and motivational benefits as well. While radical uncertainty may lead to a kind of motivational paralysis and full certitude to rash action, the apophatic-­ cataphatic play involved in non-­doxastic prayer can occupy the space between these two poles, and foster not conviction but hope, an attitude taken to be both a theological virtue and central to the religious life. One who is fully certain has no need of hope, yet the latter sometimes can motivate action as well as the former. Likewise, while certitude may be accompanied by all manner of affective attitudes, hope demonstrates a positively valenced ­orientation toward the proposition or state of affairs in question. One will be ­disappointed if what is hoped for does not come to pass, even if one does not

48  Adams, “What’s Wrong with the Ontotheological Error?,” 12. 49  Cf. Dennis Whitcomb, Heather Battaly, Jason Baehr et al., “Intellectual Humility. Owning Our Limitations,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94: 3 (2017), 509–39. 50  There will obviously be a spectrum here, and (as an anonymous reviewer points out) there is definitely room for a “middle ground” of sorts. The question of how open one must be to one’s own epistemic limitations, as well as how much one must temper one’s certainty regarding propositions about God in light of God’s radical transcendence, is a matter for future discussion. The point here is merely that non-­doxastic or “doxastically qualified” prayer may have an advantage over theistic prayer uttered with strong certainty concerning who or what God is.

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Are You There, God? It ’ s Me, the Theist  57 expect it to occur.51 Especially in the case of corporate ritual prayer, hope may serve an immensely important function: It may bring together a religious community under its umbrella and encourage collective action in cases in which we might otherwise be paralyzed by despair. As individuals, we often find it difficult to do what we ought in a world in which we are confronted with evil, yet as Cuneo notes, “sometimes we can, by engaging in the corporate actions of the church, perform those actions that, simply by our own power, we would otherwise find impossible to perform.”52 Non-­doxastic prayer can thus help us maintain the degree of hope necessary for us to act in such ways and thereby assist us in continuing to stand for the good. Finally, non-­doxastic prayer can give individuals with a tendency toward idolatry a healthy shot of apophaticism, while providing those with strong apophatic leanings their daily dose of cataphatic reinforcement. In the case of personal prayer, the tendency to make of the divine a wholly immanent “best friend” threatens to eliminate the divine-­human distinction and to eradicate the distance that would make such activities instances of prayer. On the other hand, it seems to me that the overly abstract God of classical theism, as well as the God of radical negative theology who cannot be conceived of (let alone spoken to), present approaches to the divine that threaten to make the divine-­ human gap unbridgeable. In fact, I think an approach that takes seriously the considerations of both (or either) classical theism and (or) negative theology cannot normatively view prayer as a fully doxastic enterprise. Yet “healthy cataphaticism” allows that imaginative, non-­doxastic approaches to God can be beneficial to the religious life, without giving one over into idolatry. And the same can be said for the evangelical personal pray-­er, who speaks to God as though she were on a telephone: The caution that suspension of belief can provide prevents a lapse into idolatrous and narcissistic “babbling” that serves little religious function. None of this is to say that non-­doxastic prayer is always virtuous, nor that fully doxastic prayer is necessarily vicious. But the religious life, while psychologically and socially beneficial in many respects, simultaneously places the subject in danger of falling into theological and moral vices that can undermine that life’s very aims and goals. Prayer is one activity in which these dangers are on active display. It is my contention that earnestly playful forms of prayer not only have the ability to cultivate virtuous religious behavior, they may in some cases be more effective in so doing than their more strongly 51  Cp. Howard-­Snyder, “Propositional Faith. What It Is and What It Is Not.” 52 Cuneo, Ritualized Faith, 51.

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58  Analyzing Prayer doxastic counterparts. If I am right, this may be a reason to shift some of the focus in religious epistemology away from the rationality of religious belief and toward the virtues and appropriateness of doxastic suspension, and to get past our fears of words like “imagination,” “pretense,” and “play” in analytic philosophy of religion. Indeed, in this sense, we can follow Plato in learning how to “play the noblest games and [to] be of another mind from what [we] are at present.”53

53  From Book VII of the Laws, quoted in Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-­ Element in Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), 18.

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4 Praying in the Name of Christ Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “Mystical” Account of Prayer James R. Gordon

Introduction: An Analytic Theology of Prayer Analytic theology has, as of late, found its comfortable home in discussions of the central loci of Christian theology, especially the doctrines of the Trinity, incarnation, and atonement, among others.1 Many think that this home is a comfortable one—or at least one filled with historical artifacts in the form of debates and dogmas and conciliar documents—since the tools of analytic theology seem well-­suited for making the important careful distinctions required to sort out views that are coherent and consistent. Analytic theology has not, however, been widely used to facilitate discussions in the realm of pastoral theology or spiritual formation—let alone used to facilitate spiritual formation as such. Rather than argue that analytic theology is useful for spiritual formation, this chapter offers a concrete example of how an analytic theologian might approach a topic central to Christian spiritual formation, namely, the topic of prayer. More specifically, the chapter will argue that Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “mystical” account of prayer offers a compelling theological and philosophical alternative or supplement to traditional accounts of “petitionary” prayer. To substantiate this claim, it (1) responds to objections to the claim that analytic theology has nothing to offer to an account of prayer, (2) examines two common philosophical and theological methods (the “from below” and “from above” approaches) used in discussions of prayer, and (3) provides a third way  forward found in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s constructive account of prayer, which walks the fine line between a “magical” view, on the one hand,

1 For a representative sample of the literature, see Michael  C.  Rea, ed., Oxford Readings in Philosophical Theology: Volume 1: Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). James R. Gordon, Praying in the Name of Christ: Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “Mystical” Account of Prayer In: Analyzing Prayer: Theological and Philosophical Essays. Edited by: Oliver D. Crisp, James M. Arcadi, and Jordan Wessling, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859044.003.0005

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60  Analyzing Prayer and an “empirical” view, on the other. After highlighting the key features of Schleiermacher’s account of prayer (as found in his dogmatic work, Christian Faith, and sermon, “The Power of Prayer in Relation to Outward Circumstances”), it (4) identifies the connection of Schleiermacher’s view with other theological loci and responds to potential objections to and tensions in the described “mystical” view. While analytic theology faces obstacles to being useful for spiritual formation in general, several challenges immediately present themselves to the analytic theologian approaching the topic of prayer in particular. The first challenge is how to close the gap between ecclesial, pastoral ministry and corporate spiritual formation, on the one hand, and a discipline hardly known for its practical applicability—analytic philosophy—on the other hand. Some may wonder, that is, whether it is actually fruitful to think critically about a task that is intended, among other things, to relate one to God and God’s people and to cultivate love and devotion to God and one’s neighbor. The objection here is just that analytic theology really has nothing to contribute to an account of practical piety, since the kinds of intellectual activities that accompany analytic theology are inimical to the posture demanded by prayer. In response to this objection—an objection that ought to be taken seriously— to talk of prayer as an analytic theologian is to approach the spiritual practice in an attempt to gain clarity on the nature of the act itself and to clarify what  one is doing when one addresses God in faith, whether one is asking God to bring in God’s kingdom, confessing one’s sin to God in penitence and faith, or petitioning God to heal one’s loved one of cancer. The analytic theologian approaches prayer in an attempt to answer the question, “What are  we doing when we pray?” to borrow the title of Vincent Brümmer’s seminal work.2 Presumably, knowing what one is doing and what one ought to be doing in  any particular act is likely to make one less liable to fail at the act in question—or at least make one more likely to recognize one’s failures. But, on the other hand, one might think that a necessary condition of “proper” prayer is to know the goals, aims, and ends one is seeking by doing the activity. This is, after all, at least in part why the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. At the same time, this is not to say that knowledge of these ends is always—or must be always—available to one, such that one may participate in a given act of liturgical prayer without fully grasping what one is doing in that 2  Vincent Brümmer, What are We Doing When We Pray?: A Philosophical Inquiry (London: Trinity Press International, 1984).

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Praying in the Name of Christ  61 act. My four-­year-­old sons and I pray the Lord’s prayer on the nights I put them to bed; they ask me what trespasses are and so on, and even though they do not understand what the repetition of the prayer might be doing for them, I take it to be a valuable spiritual practice for them to cultivate. And so, just as accounts of epistemology need to account for so-­called “ordinary knowledge,” so too do models of prayer need to account for “novice prayer”—acts of prayer that occur when one utters specific locutions but does not readily grasp what the accompanying illocution either is or ought to be. Put differently, they need to be able to say that the prayers of my children are meaningful acts, even if there is a barrier of either a lack of knowledge or a disordering of one’s cognitive faculties.3 Another challenge that faces the analytic theologian when she turns her conceptual attention to the act of prayer is the worry that one’s attempt to gain conceptual clarity can somehow improve the idiom of scripture. Some theologians frequently worry that, in attempting to give a “model” of the incarnation, Trinity, or even prayer, analytic theologians are circumventing the inspired words of scripture in order to offer a clearer—and perhaps even better— account of a doctrine than that which is contained in the biblical witness. Some theologians worry, in other words, that the genres of scripture carry meaning that is not reducible to propositional content (i.e., locutions) and are therefore inherently incompatible with the attempt to state arguments in any sort of reductive propositional form. With specific reference to prayer, one might object that scripture is clear in its instructions concerning prayer—that one ought to “pray without ceasing,” that people “ought always to pray,” and that one ought “in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let one’s requests be made known to God”—and that these instructions are in some sense explanatorily basic, such that to attempt to move beyond the basic scriptural idiom is imposing one’s own conceptual scheme upon texts to which it is foreign. While it is important to clarify the aims, methods, and goals of analytic theology in general—especially as they relate to spiritual formation and biblical studies—here we only need to address the particular objection related to the analytic theologian’s respect for scripture. To do so, the analytic theologian can avail herself of the resources of the renewal in the so-­called “theological interpretation of scripture” and the distinction between biblical “concepts” 3  One might also consider “prayer without belief,” according to which one does understand what illocution ought to accompany the uttered locutions of a prayer but intentionally or unintentionally rejects those illocutions, as when one says a prayer without actually believing what one is saying or when one says a prayer to appear pious among one’s peers.

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62  Analyzing Prayer and biblical “judgments.”4 This distinction allows one to affirm that the judgments of biblical authors can be adequately rendered in “non-­identical equivalent concepts.” To use David Yeago’s example, one might claim that Paul’s judgment concerning Christ’s “equality with God” is equivalent though not conceptually identical to Nicaea’s judgment that Christ is of one substance (homoousios) with the Father.5 Paul obviously did not have access to Nicaea’s conceptual scheme when he made his claims about Christ’s deity, but the theologian is warranted to translate biblical concepts into alternative conceptual schemes without moving away from the text of scripture, since what is important is not the specific concepts in use but the author’s particular judgments. This is, in short, just to say that the task of the analytic theologian is not incompatible with the task of the biblical, systematic, or dogmatic theologian.

Prayer and Method We have seen that there is no principled objection to analytic theology’s usefulness for spiritual formation; it can help clarify the nature of the practice and does not necessarily impose foreign conceptual schemes on the text of scripture. That being so, we are now able to pursue the task at hand. In order to demonstrate that Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “mystical” account of prayer is a useful supplement or alternative to contemporary views, we will first turn our attention to the novel method Schleiermacher employs to think about the practice of prayer. When thinking about how to approach the topic of prayer, there are two ways that one may start. We will borrow the Christological language of theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg to refer to these distinct methods as “prayer ‘from below’ ” and “prayer ‘from above.’ ” We will briefly describe both of these common approaches, which will then lead us into the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who offers a third—albeit perhaps unexpected—way to begin discussing prayer.

4 This distinction is made in David Yeago, “The New Testament and the Nicene Dogma: A Contribution to the Recovery of Theological Exegesis” in The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Stephen E. Fowl, BRMT (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 87–100. 5  Ibid., 94–5.

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Praying in the Name of Christ  63

Prayer “From Below” The first way to construct an account of prayer is by starting “from below.” On this method, one takes the “on the ground” practices of the Christian church as epistemically basic and works backward to an account of what must be true about God to make sense of what we know to be true about prayer. Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s recent project of “Liturgical Theology” is an example of this “from below” method. On Wolterstorff ’s approach, the kinds of basic liturgical practices in which one engages are fully legitimate sources for knowing what kind of God it is that one worships. So, the very act of liturgical prayer might suggest, among other things, that there is a God that is a hearer. Wolterstorff attempts, as he puts it, to “mak[e] explicit the understanding of God implicit in Christian liturgy.”6 And so, when the congregation together asks that God hear their prayer in response to the reader’s “Lord, in your mercy,” the inference to be made is that God is the kind of God able to hear the prayers of God’s people. Liturgical practices, in other words, provide a kind of first-­hand, basic knowledge of who God is. This “from below” approach to prayer may also make direct appeals to scripture in a manner slightly different from Wolterstorff ’s approach. It may say that the Bible provides clear examples of a person making a petition to God in prayer and God doing something or intervening in some way in the normal order of things to bring about a particular answer to the person’s request. We might think here of any number of examples from scripture of prayers for something to happen that are immediately followed by that thing happening—Israel’s history is replete with these sorts of requests. The “from below” approach takes these sorts of examples and infers that whatever we say about God must be compatible with the claim that God responds to the prayers of God’s people.7 The point of this “from below” approach is just to say that one constructs one’s account of God’s being and attributes after and the methodologically prior concerns of attending to the activities of the church’s liturgy and the canonical witness to prayer. One might say that because it is a basic commitment that “God hears prayers,” it follows that God must be the kind of God

6  Nicholas Wolterstorff, The God We Worship: An Exploration of Liturgical Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 12. 7  One must note here the difficult task of determining “what counts” as an answered prayer. See Scott Davidson, “Petitionary Prayer” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, ed. Thomas P. Flint and Michael C. Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 286–305.

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64  Analyzing Prayer who can be affected, responds temporally, and feels regret; a God who hears must be passible, temporal, and so on.8

Prayer “From Above” The “from below” approach to prayer is not the only one available to the analytic theologian—and, in fact, it might actually be something of a minority approach. The more common approach is the “from above” approach to prayer. On this method, one begins not with the practices of God’s people, but with an account of God’s being and activity. What is and can be said about prayer is then fitted subsequently into what is already claimed about the nature of God. For instance, this view might ask, if God is omnipotent, om­nis­cient, and omnibenevolent, then what can one’s act of praying to such a God mean? In fact, David Basinger has written an essay with this very title: “Why Petition an Omnipotent, Omniscient, Wholly Good God?”9 It might not be too much of an overstatement to say that, on the “from above” approach, prayer is something of an afterthought to be fitted in after one has already arrived at one’s account of who God is and what God does.10 At this point, one might object that approaches tend to be much more organic than the binary I have outlined. Maybe it is the case that one can use prayer as a criterion to judge a particular model of God, and use a specific model of God to judge a given account of prayer, at the same time. This may be the case, but the point of generalization stands as a broad representation of the sort of basic ways one might attempt to go about the task of talking about the meaning of prayer.

A Third Way: Schleiermacher’s Alternative Method At this point we will propose an alternative third way to address the methodological question before moving on to a positive account of prayer that makes 8  Note that I am not claiming that such a “from below” approach requires a rejection of so-­called “classical theism.” I’m just illustrating one way that one might move from the “from below” to an account of God’s nature after the fact. Though, it is easy to see why one might be more likely to reject the classical account of the divine attributes and perfections if one proceeds in this manner. 9 David Basinger, “Why Petition an Omnipotent, Omniscient, Wholly Good God?,” Religious Studies 19 (1983), 25–41. 10  Again, I am not claiming that “from above” approaches are necessarily tied to perfect being theology or similar accounts of God. One could imagine a case in which one had already determined that something like process theology was true and then attempting to think how an account of prayer might be fitted into such an account.

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Praying in the Name of Christ  65 use of this alternative method. While it may seem like an odd move for an analytic theologian to appeal to a theologian who was very critical of traditional scholastic metaphysics as providing a positive account of how one might think about prayer, the work of the German theologian and philosopher, Friedrich Schleiermacher, the so-­ called “Father of Modern Liberal Theology,” offers a promising way forward.11 So, how does Schleiermacher’s approach to prayer fit into the aforementioned division between “from below” and “from above” methods? At first glance it might seem that Schleiermacher offers a paradigmatic example of the “from above” approach I have described. In his magisterial work, The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher first examines the religious self-­consciousness common to all people and the concept of God presupposed therein. He outlines this general concept of God before turning to the particularly Christian religious self-­consciousness determined by one’s redemption in Christ. It is not until the penultimate section of his work that he turns to the “essential and invariable features of the church” including Scripture, the ministry of the Word of God, Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, the power of the keys of the kingdom, and only finally, prayer in the name of Christ. Merely examining the structure of Schleiermacher’s work would lead one to conclude that he works out a particular concept of God and then fits all of the church’s practices within that concept of God—just like the “from above” approach. At the same time, the popular and “inherited” reading of Schleiermacher’s views on the nature of dogmatics vis-­à-­vis religious experience moves him closer to the “from below” approach. Very early on in Christian Faith, he claims that “Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech.”12 Schleiermacher maintains that dogmatic propositions are those that “have sprung only from logically ordered reflection on the immediate utterances of religious self-­consciousness.”13 Religious

11 I take it that one of the ways analytic theology is useful pertains to its value for so-­called “retrieval” theology, in which one is concerned with, as Oliver Crisp puts it, “the retrieval of . . . ideas for the purposes of constructive dogmatics” (Oliver Crisp, Retrieving Doctrine: Essays in Reformed Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2010), viii). Schleiermacher’s ideas will be used in this way and for this purpose. See also John Webster, “Theologies of Retrieval” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, ed. John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance, Oxford Handbooks in Religion and Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 583–99. 12  Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, trans. and ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989), §15. Or, as Tice, Kelsey, and Lawler translate it, “Propositions regarding Christian faith are conceptions of Christian religious states of mind and heart presented in the form of discourse,” (Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christian Faith: A New Translation and Critical Edition, trans. Terrence  N.  Tice, Catherine  L.  Kelsey, and Edwina Lawler, ed. Catherine  L.  Kelsey and Terrence N. Tice (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2016), §15. Citations hereafter will come from the Tice, Kelsey, and Lawler translation). 13  Ibid., §16. P. S.

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66  Analyzing Prayer self-­consciousness, for Schleiermacher, also called the “God-­consciousness,” gradually develops from one’s feeling of absolute dependence (more on this to come). One might be tempted to think that since Schleiermacher maintains that Christian doctrinal reflection must proceed from the immediate utterances of the God-­consciousness within oneself, it follows that he must accept a “from below” approach to prayer according to which one’s own particular experiences provide the starting point for any account of prayer.14 However, rather than fitting clearly into either the “from below” or “from above” approach to prayer described above, Schleiermacher offers a third way and an alternative method in which to parse the nature of the act of prayer. We will call Schleiermacher’s approach to prayer a “mystical” account, though as will become clear it would be equally proper to call it a “Christological” or even “soteriological” account, since Christian redemption in Christ functions as the all-­ determining factor for what Schleiermacher says about every Christian doctrine. Though Schleiermacher does not explicitly—at least as far as I have been able to ascertain—call his account of prayer a “mystical” view, he does refer to his understanding of Christian salvation more generally as “mystical,” and he draws the same sorts of contrasts in his account of prayer as he does in his “mystical” account of salvation—and so the use of such language here to describe Schleiermacher is justified. However, because the term “mystical” almost certainly means something different for Schleiermacher than it does in its ordinary usage, we must first clarify what Schleiermacher means by a “mystical” account of salvation and prayer before showing how  it is different from the “from below” and “from above” methods I have described.

The “Mystical” Account of Prayer So, what does Schleiermacher mean when he uses the term “mystical”? Whereas the typical usage of the of term “mystical” relates closely to the 14  For those unfamiliar with Schleiermacher, it is important to mention that he is frequently read as (and accused of) reducing the whole of the theological task to anthropology. Karl Barth, most famously, asserted that when Schleiermacher talked about God, he was merely talking about humans in a loud voice. I have argued elsewhere that such a reading is a radical mischaracterization of Schleiermacher’s project. See James R. Gordon, “A ‘Glaring Misunderstanding’? Schleiermacher, Barth and the Nature of Speculative Theology,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 16 (2014), 313–30. On this same point, see Kevin W. Hector, “Theology as an Academic Discipline: Reconciling Evangelical Theology and Theological Encyclopedia” in Karl Barth and the Making of Evangelical Theology: A Fifty-­Year Perspective, ed. Clifford B. Anderson and Bruce L. McCormack (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 91–118.

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Praying in the Name of Christ  67 concept of religious mystery—of, perhaps, how divine action and human action can mysteriously coexist, how one God can be exactly three persons, or how Christ is present in the Eucharist—Schleiermacher does not have such a concept in his mind when he speaks of his “mystical” understanding of salvation.15 What he does have in mind will become clearer as we examine the alternatives against which the mystical view stands. Schleiermacher refers to his own view of Christian salvation as a “mystical” view, which lies between the “magical” view on the one hand and the “empirical” view on the other.16 For Schleiermacher, those who accept a “magical” view of salvation talk of natures and essences as if they were real entities that Christ acts upon individually. So, for instance, when one talks of sin and salvation as abstracted from a concrete individual and views them instead as abstract entities that can be transferred from one account to another, Schleiermacher would consider such a view “magical.” As he puts it, The magical conception certainly does want to hold that the activity of Christ is redemptive, but without the communication of his perfection being dependent on the establishment of a communal body. Instead, the magical conception holds the activity of Christ is redemptive through the immediate influence of Christ on individuals.17

To put it differently, “in the magical conception every substantive element is posited to be supernatural,” as opposed to Schleiermacher’s own view in which “the beginning of the reign of God is supernatural but becomes natural as soon as it appears.”18 The example Schleiermacher gives is the forgiveness of sins. On the magical view, “forgiveness of sins would be derived from the punishment that Christ suffered, and the blessedness of human beings would itself be presented as a recompense that God has extended to Christ for suffering that punishment”; such a view “becomes magical as soon as it is not transmitted through community of life with Christ.”19 What Schleiermacher has in mind when he describes the “magical” view are those views that make Christ, scripture, or some other aspect of the community “magical charms” that bear Christ’s “efficacious action” in some supernatural manner, as if 15  Schleiermacher does express some hesitation in using the term “mystical.” He notes that the expression typically refers to “a presentation of the redeeming activity of Christ viewed as the establishment of a new life, one common to him and to us, one original in him but new in us and originating from him—a presentation such as we have given here” (Christian Faith, §100.3). He adds, “it does indeed seem better to avoid this expression on account of its considerable vagueness,” but he ends up conceding to its use (Ibid.). 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid.

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68  Analyzing Prayer something specific happens to individuals isolated from their participation in the community of faith—such as when a person prays the sinner’s prayer and is zapped with salvation.20 His view of prayer avoids similar “magical” conceptions, though in a slightly different way. Schleiermacher notes that some people constantly object that if prayer does not “exercise an influence on God,” then the idea that God can in fact hear prayer is, in his words, “a mere delusion.”21 Since he insists that “there exists no relationship of reciprocity between the creature and Creator,” to think that one’s prayer can somehow affect God is nothing more than “passing over into magic.”22 A “magical” view of prayer would be one in which a person thinks God responds to the specific requests of individuals without considering the function of the prayer within the context of the community. But what of the opposite error, which Schleiermacher calls the “empirical” view of salvation? On this view, not only does Christ not act upon individuals, but he does not really act in any real way on the community either—his influence is reducible to teaching and example, which would entail “that his appearance would be in vain insofar as it was intended to be something special.”23 Because Schleiermacher is staunchly against introducing magical elements into the Christian faith, some have inferred that he must therefore think that salvation is reducible to a merely social reality—that Christian faith  is anthropology all the way down. But this is decidedly not the case, for  he is as dismissive of the empirical view of salvation as he is of the magical view.24 One may worry that rejecting the idea that prayer causes specific divine actions renders it ineffectual, but Schleiermacher is not willing to entertain this conclusion, for he thinks that the faith which is a condition for prayer is not “an isolated faith in the hearing itself ” but rather “faith in Christ in the full and complete sense of the word.”25 While Schleiermacher does want to maintain that no presumed answer to prayer is causally dependent on a particular petition, he also resists the idea that an answer to prayer would have occurred if there had not been a particular petition. The reason for this is that each prayer—or “Christian anticipatory feeling”—becomes a part of the

20 Ibid. 21  Ibid., §147.2. 22 Ibid. 23  Ibid., §100.3. 24  We might describe the “empirical” account as something like a reductive sociological account of religion, according to which religious traditions are nothing but practices all the way down. For an account like this, see Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Human Instincts that Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors (London: Vintage, 2002). 25 Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, §147.2.

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Praying in the Name of Christ  69 whole of the “interconnectedness of nature” that forms the conditions under which every future action is determined. Every human disposition and activity contributes to the whole, which particular individuals receive as their conditions for action. Put differently, “fulfillment would result only because the state from which a given prayer arises belongs among the conditions that would enable the result to ensue in an effective way.”26 So, to say that Schleiermacher rejects an “empirical” understanding of prayer is to maintain that he would reject something like what is commonly referred to as a “therapeutic” approach to prayer, in which prayer only does something internal to the person who utters the prayer. In short, prayer is not reducible to sociology or anthropology. As an alternative third way between the “magical,” on the one hand, and the “empirical,” on the other, Schleiermacher puts forth what he calls a “mystical” view of salvation. He provides an analogy to explain exactly what he intends to convey by referring to a “mystical” concept of salvation. In the same way that a civil association becomes a state through the consciousness of one individual, who then takes up the members of the association into the new and higher idea of the state, thereby giving them new life as citizens of the state, so too does Christ found a new community and give new life to individuals by his own communicated God-­consciousness. “For a Christian,” he says, “self-­ consciousness regarding our growing perfection generally belongs to the consciousness of grace only if that self-­consciousness is traced back to the Redeemer as its ground . . . that self-­consciousness is interconnected with . . . the actual redemptive activity of Christ.”27 And so, the “mystical” view of salvation is one in which Christ does not act supernaturally on individuals by removing their sin and giving them his righteousness (i.e., the “magical” view), nor does Christ merely provide example, teaching, and instruction in hopes that the community’s own consciousness will develop (i.e., the “empirical” view); instead, Christ founds a new community in which individuals taken up into that community are given new life by the transmission of Christ’s God-­consciousness in and through the community, since the supernatural work of God becomes natural in the person of Christ. Here, then, the concept of “mystical” describes the way that Schleiermacher wants to refer to prayer as something neither “magical,” on the one hand, nor “empirical” on the other. That is, prayer is not a tool to be used like a magic wand to beckon the Triune God to bring about some desired effect for one’s

26 Ibid.

27  Ibid., §100.3.

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70  Analyzing Prayer own benefit; nor is prayer something that can be accounted for by examining its effects on a particular individual within a community. While we have now seen what prayer is not, on Schleiermacher’s view, it remains to be seen exactly what the “mystical” account offers—what kinds of things prayer accomplishes in the life of a Christian in the church. To sketch his account, we will turn to one of his most famous sermons on the topic of prayer before then turning to locate prayer among the other dogmatic themes present in his theological work, Christian Faith.

Schleiermacher’s Sermon on Prayer Schleiermacher’s most famous account of human prayer is found in a sermon, which does not delve into the matters of philosophical significance that will occupy us later in the chapter. This brief statement of his position will allow us to enter more fully into the related theological loci with a better grasp of his basic position. In his sermon titled “The Power of Prayer in Relation to Outward Circumstances” on Matthew 26: 35–46—a text whose significance will become clear—Schleiermacher begins with his famous claim that “To be a religious man and to pray are really one and the same thing.”28 Prayer, he claims, is “really the essence of true religion.”29 Schleiermacher suggests that everyone has felt the power of prayer in the world, but he readily acknowledges that there are problems related to the power of prayer that he must address. In particular, Schleiermacher recognizes that prayer creates what we might call existential problems vis-­a-­vis one’s relation to God “if we regard the fulfilment of our wishes as the aim of our prayers.”30 If a person petitions God to, say, heal a loved one of cancer, the loved one may either be healed of cancer or not be healed of cancer. On the former outcome, the temptation is to view the answered prayer, in Schleiermacher’s words, as a “distinct and infallible mark of the divine favour.”31 On the latter outcome, namely, the lack of God’s healing a loved one, Schleiermacher worries of an equally troubling result, “issues of which disturb our peace, and indeed may bring us into the most painful uncertainty

28 Friedrich Schleiermacher, “The Power of Prayer in Relation to Outward Circumstances” in Selected Sermons of Schleiermacher, trans. Mary F. Wilson (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004), 38. 29 Ibid. 30  Ibid., 39. 31 Ibid.

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Praying in the Name of Christ  71 as to our standing with God.”32 To add to this binary conception of God’s either answering or rejecting our prayers, Schleiermacher thinks a further temptation is to view one’s prayer as adding weight to the balance of a scale; the more one prays for a desirable result, the more likely God is to grant that outcome for the petitioner.33 To resolve these problematic accounts of prayer, Schleiermacher appeals to the prayers of Christ himself, noting “that we cannot expect more from our prayers than Christ obtained by His.”34 If the answering of one’s petition is a sign of God’s favor, then Schleiermacher argues that one might expect Christ—on whom God’s perfect favor rested—to be the most likely one to have his every request answered. In short, “where His prayer could not prevail neither will ours succeed.”35 Schleiermacher turns to Christ’s experience of anxiety in the Garden of Gethsemane, where, knowing his enemies were seeking him out, he felt much distress at the reality of his situation. Schleiermacher notes that “[i]n circumstances like these, even to those who are furthest from true piety, the old, half-­forgotten memory of God comes back, and they turn to Him for help and deliverance.”36 This is equivalent to the claim that everyone prays in a foxhole—so too does everyone pray knowing death is immediately at hand. And so, Christ offers a prayer to God as an expression of his human desires in the midst of his trying situation. Anticipating the obvious objection, namely, that such requests are superfluous if indeed God has, by God’s divine decree, settled the outcome of the situation from all eternity. But, Schleiermacher says, “Do not be perplexed by such words. Christ did it, therefore we, too, may do it.”37 Immediately after encouraging his congregants to express their desires to God in prayer, Schleiermacher urges them “by no means to feel sure that what you ask will of necessity take place because of your prayer.”38 Just as Christ asked to be delivered from his suffering in true filial obedience to the will of God and yet did not have his desires fulfilled, neither should Christians assume that the petitions they make in faith will by necessity be answered—even if the prayer is in line with the divine will. Because of Christ’s example, then, Schleiermacher thinks that the words uttered by Christ, “Ask, and you shall

32 Ibid. 33  One might here detect the same sort of Lutheran worries that kept Martin Luther wrestling in his sleep concerning his sinful state before God. 34 Ibid. 35  Ibid., 40. 36 Ibid. 37  Ibid., 41. 38  Ibid., 42.

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72  Analyzing Prayer receive,” certainly must not mean what a plain reading suggests—that is, the conditional if you ask, then you shall receive.39 One particular view he rejects is the idea that God, in God’s exhaustive foreknowledge from before creation, knew what free creatures would do and “so arranged the chain of events that the issue shall accord with their wishes.”40 Schleiermacher says, “that is to try at once to honour the wisdom of God and to flatter the childish fancies of men.”41 Such a view “is only an invention of a warped understanding, not a conclusion drawn from the way in which God reveals Himself in the world.”42 Thinking that God arranged things according to human wishes usurps the priority of all things leading to Christ and ought to be discarded, Schleiermacher thinks, as speculative reasoning. So, what actually is the result of human prayers? Here, the result of Christ’s prayers is Schleiermacher’s paradigm: “He began with the definite wish that His sufferings might pass away from Him; but as soon as He fixed His thought on His Father in heaven to whom He prayed, this wish was at once qualified by the humble, ‘if it be possible’.”43 Schleiermacher’s confidence in the effects prayer produces in one’s consciousness is bolstered by one’s conception of the divine being—that God is unchangeable, that God has securely ordained all that will come about, and that human creatures cannot bend God’s will to their whims and desires. Based on this account, Schleiermacher wants his hearers to understand that one “must not attach any special value to occasional apparent answers that we may receive.”44 If a petitionary prayer appears to be answered, it is not as a result of one’s petition; the petitionary prayer is not the cause that brings about the effect of an answer. If a prayer appears to be answered, “let not,” he says, “those things lead you to the proud belief that they are a distinctive sign of God’s satisfaction with your spiritual condition.”45 True prayer, then, for Schleiermacher, only occurs “when we have the living thought of God accompanying, purifying and sanctifying all our other thoughts.”46 True prayer, in other words—and as we will see when we turn to Schleiermacher’s dogmatic account of prayer—is prayer in the name of Christ. Interestingly, Schleiermacher ends his sermon by claiming that so-­called petitionary (or “entreating”) prayer is not the mark of true piety, for when one truly lives according to a sanctified life in the Spirit on the basis of Christ’s God-­consciousness, one does not need to have one’s feelings reoriented into 39 Ibid. 45  Ibid., 48.

40  Ibid., 43. 46 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.,43–4.

44  Ibid., 47.

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Praying in the Name of Christ  73 confidence in the creator’s plan. Such entreating prayers are “dictated by the weak human heart.”47 When one’s response to external circumstances is anxiousness or dread, that is a sign of an undeveloped God-­consciousness—a failing to integrate one’s sensible consciousness into the God-­consciousness, the particular variety of sin that Schleiermacher calls “God-­forgetfulness” (Gottvergessenheit) or “obliviousness to God.”48 To have one’s God-­consciousness be fully determined by God’s love and wisdom in Christ is to have one’s immediate response conditioned by Christ’s faith. Rather than petitionary prayer, true Christian prayer is prayer like Christ’s: “devout meditation . . . to the undisturbed enjoyment of communion with His Father.”49 Thus, Schleiermacher can say, “Are you overtaken by such an occasion? Then entreat, until true prayer makes you forget entreaty.”50 Prayer, in short, is a person-­ forming practice that integrates one’s sensible self-­consciousness into the God-­consciousness.

Schleiermacher’s Dogmatic Account of Prayer With Schleiermacher’s basic ideas about prayer in mind, we must now situate Schleiermacher’s Christological and “mystical” understanding of prayer amidst several other theological loci before closing with a discussion of several of the remaining tensions and challenges Schleiermacher’s account faces. First, Schleiermacher thinks that what keeps one from immediately understanding oneself in relation to the Absolute at all moments is a lack of development in one’s God-­consciousness. Every moment in one’s conscious life is characterized by a polarity drifting between freedom and dependence. One is dependent upon all those things which are other than oneself, including all of the previous decisions of all people and the entirety of the finite system of nature into which one is immersed. Yet, one still experiences a relative freedom or spontaneity even in one’s dependence on all that has come before one. This means that every particular act is already conditioned by all of those acts that have preceded it; but it also means that one’s receptivity to all that has preceded one’s act entails that no act of free spontaneity within the system of nature is absolutely free. On the contrary, everything in the world is absolutely dependent, and one’s being aware of one’s dependence on the world that one receives consists in one’s sensible self-­consciousness. But since the whole 47  Ibid., 49. 48  Cf. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, §11.2. 49  Schleiermacher, “The Power of Prayer,” 49. 50  Ibid., 50.

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74  Analyzing Prayer of the world is already dependent upon something ultimate and absolute, Schleiermacher is able to maintain that “God” (here the quotation marks to signal “God” the concept) is the Whence of one’s feeling of absolute de­pend­ ence.51 “[T]his ‘whence’,” he says, “is not the world in the sense of the totality of temporal being, and still less is it any one part of that totality.”52 When one’s sensible self-­consciousness is not, as it were, subsumed into one’s God-­ consciousness—that is, when one fails to see all that to which one is receptive as itself dependent upon a more absolute “Whence” or “God”—one experiences opposition between one’s freedom and dependence.53 The fact that humans regularly fail to integrate their sensible self-­ consciousness into their God-­consciousness results in “God-­forgetfulness.” Further, since individual human instances of God-­forgetfulness add to that to which one is receptive in one’s sensible self-­consciousness, God-­forgetfulness characterizes the community’s consciousness as a whole. In this way, all individuals will inevitably experience God-­forgetfulness, since they are born into the web of social practices that exhibit this trope. This account of Schleiermacher’s understanding of humans and sin is necessary, since because one is born into this web of social practices, one needs a way out of the downward cycle of God-­forgetfulness; humanity needs, in short, a Redeemer. Schleiermacher’s Christology is contentious itself, but we need only to provide a very truncated summary so that it becomes clear how Schleiermacher’s account of prayer functions within the context of one’s state of redemption by grace. In Christ, for Schleiermacher, the supernatural becomes natural. What this means is that rather than the normal development of things in which one’s self-­consciousness precedes the development of one’s God-­consciousness (thus resulting in sin), Schleiermacher insists that Christ’s God-­consciousness proceeds from a supernatural act. Christ’s God-­consciousness is never determined by his sensible self-­consciousness, and his absolutely potent God-­ consciousness is never passive. In reproducing this pure activity, Jesus incarnates the very being and essence of God, which is love. He is fully receptive to the potent God-­consciousness within him, and this constitutes his being as the Redeemer. But what is more, Jesus communicates his God-­ consciousness as he reproduces God’s pure activity of love as his own activity.

51 Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, §4.4. 52 Ibid. 53  For what is a thorough and fantastic—and more explicit—unpacking of the themes I have just glossed, I point you to chapter 3, “Harmonizing Dependence,” in Kevin Hector, The Theological Project of Modernism: Faith and the Conditions of Mineness, Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 75–125.

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Praying in the Name of Christ  75 Christ communicates, as it were, his God-­consciousness to those he redeems. But how does such redemption happen? Schleiermacher turns to the relationship between Christ and his disciples as the paradigm for the communication of Christ’s Spirit to all people. Christ taught the disciples what it meant to be one of his followers through his teachings, parables, and mighty acts of releasing the oppressed. For Schleiermacher, this teaching was more than merely a cognitive communication of propositional knowledge; it was rather the giving of his Spirit by the communication of his God-­consciousness to those who followed him. As the disciples continued to follow Christ, Jesus communicated his “normative Spirit” to his disciples, giving them the power to judge what kinds of acts constituted following him rightly.54 This carrying on of Christ’s Spirit does not stop with the disciples but continues on in the apostolic Church. This just is what it is to be redeemed, according to Schleiermacher—to have one’s God-­consciousness renewed and perfected (converted, even) by Christ’s God-­consciousness. And this account of redemption becomes drastically important for the way Schleiermacher conceives of prayer. It is not insignificant that the Lord’s Prayer is Christ’s response to his disciples’ inquiry concerning the right way to pray. Christ showed his disciples what patterns of judgments and what specific activities counted as carrying on his Spirit. And prayer, it just so happens, was one of these activities. Prayer, that is, is one of the practices of intersubjective recognition that carries on the Spirit of Christ. Prayer is a formative element of Christian vocation in that it is a means by which one integrates one’s sensible self-­consciousness into one’s God-­consciousness. It orients one to the Kingdom of God brought about in Christ’s redemptive work, and this itself is an act of the Spirit. Such integration means that one will see the objects and events about which one prays as absolutely dependent upon God. Since the Church is an imperfect community, the community’s consciousness fluctuates between its sensible self-­consciousness and its God-­consciousness. When the Church considers its past actions—both successes and failures—its posture is one of thankfulness to God for God’s preservation of the community through good and bad. But, for that which is yet to come in the future, the Church’s consciousness is expressed in prayer, which Schleiermacher defines

54  Cf. Kevin Hector, Theology without Metaphysics: God, Language, and the Spirit of Recognition, Current Issues in Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 73ff..

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76  Analyzing Prayer as “the intimate combination with God-­consciousness of a wish directed to the best success possible.”55 Prayer, then, is what happens when one’s desires for the future are combined with one’s God-­consciousness. This allows Schleiermacher to view the command to “pray without ceasing” without any hyperbole at all, since this combination is always taking place in oneself. One’s ceasing to pray could only ever be explained, then, by a disappearance of one’s God-­consciousness and a complete lack of concern for the coming of God’s kingdom. Thus, Schleiermacher can claim, “In using the expression ‘pray in Jesus’ name’, whether one might then be thinking more of praying in terms of his greatest concerns or be thinking more of praying based on his sensibility and spirit, the two possibilities are really not to be separated from each other.”56 One is only praying in Jesus’ name “to the extent that what is prayed for would be that God’s will be done in relation to what God has decreed in Christ.”57 Prayer is true prayer if and only if it is prayer in Christ’s name and therefore for the purpose of the coming of God’s kingdom. Thus the Lord’s Prayer: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done—this is how Christ teaches his disciples to pray. To give an example, when in my church during the prayers of the people, after the reader requests, “Father, by your Spirit,” the people collectively say, “Bring in your kingdom.” The prayer is expressing the community’s collective God-­consciousness founded by Christ and carried on by the Spirit, and one’s individual response to the prayer is the attempt to bring one’s own cares and concerns into line with the cares and concerns of the kingdom of God—with the cares and concerns of Jesus Christ. Schleiermacher claims that “Whatever comes to be God-­consciousness within this Christian domain is also referred to as the totality of all situations of activity within the idea of a reign of God.”58 And so, this wishing for the future to resemble the kingdom of God and integrating one’s experience of the world into the God-­consciousness results in one’s making Christ’s God-­consciousness one’s own and reproducing that God-­consciousness among one’s community. Prayer does not involve the suppression of one’s will and desires, but a plea in the form of a practice to shape one’s will in desires into the will and desires of God in Christ. Thus, we can say that prayer is a way of making the life of God—the life and mind of Christ—one’s own life. And prayer is situating oneself in relation to God’s kingdom and reproducing that relation in one’s community so that others too may be so situated. 55 Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, §146.1. 58  Ibid., §9.2.

56  Ibid., §147.1.

57 Ibid.

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Praying in the Name of Christ  77

Remaining Challenges Despite the generally positive account of the nature of prayer Schleiermacher offers, several particular obstacles yet remain, the first of which is the issue of so-­called impetration, or, petitioning God for some result to happen; many Christians take impetration to be identical to prayer. And yet, impetration seems to be a challenge for the account we have described. Recall that Schleiermacher does not allow for any sort of special divine intervention in the natural order of things (recall the “magical” view we discussed), and it seems that if one is willing to buy into the account outlined here, then sacrificing the validity of petitionary prayer might just be the cost of doing so. Yet, one might indeed be able to take the positive communal aspect of Schleiermacher’s account of prayer—the mystical aspect—and incorporate it into a view in which God still responds to the specific prayers of specific people. Put differently, while petitionary prayer is not compatible with Schleiermacher’s view, a majority of the elements in Schleiermacher’s view might be able to be incorporated into a more standard account of petition—even though Schleiermacher would likely view such a supplement as sliding into “magic.” It is worth noting, at the same time, that how to fit petition into a system in which God is all-­ knowing and all-­powerful is not a problem unique to Schleiermacher—he is in good Thomistic and Calvinistic company. The second challenge for Schleiermacher’s account is this: It is hard to imagine what the locution “I will pray for you” could mean if his account is right. Typically, when one person says to another that he or she will pray for him or her, the person receiving the prayer may rest in the assurance that the prayer’s prayer might be heard by God and that God might bring about a particular effect in response to the prayer. So, in other words, if one cannot petition God for a particular effect to take place, then must one also sacrifice the act of praying for others? Not necessarily. Schleiermacher might have come up with an account like this: One might envision a case where one knows that one is being prayed for in one’s community and that consciousness is implicitly transmitted within the community. If a particular community is the type that frequently offers prayer for others who are part of the community, then that frequent prayer will become an implicit part of the community’s consciousness to which any individual is receptive. Far from superfluous, then, the prayers for others in a community have both a person- and a community-­forming function—both of which help form and develop the mind of Christ in the Church.

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78  Analyzing Prayer The final challenge to mention is an issue that arose earlier, namely, that of “novice” prayer. “Novice” prayer, recall, is the kind of prayer that one participates in when one really does not fully grasp the nature or aims of what one is doing when one prays. One might here think of a child who says the Lord’s Prayer (or other liturgical prayers) without understanding what he or she is either intending or supposed to be intending in that prayer. Schleiermacher’s account does allow for so-­called “novice” prayer by maintaining that one’s initial utterance is merely a reception of a practice received in one’s sensible self-­consciousness. Yet, over time, as one continually habituates oneself into such a practice, one may integrate such a practice into one’s God-­consciousness, thus making that practice intentionally one’s own. In short, one is gradually conformed to the image of Christ, and so one’s merely practicing a particular habit is, as it were, incomplete until one’s practice is fully subsumed into one’s God-­consciousness. This looks something like what is traditionally referred to as discipleship—and is why “confirmation” is important in churches that allow children to participate in the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist.

Conclusion We have examined some challenges analytic theologians face in discussing the topic of prayer and we have surveyed some differing ways one might attempt to approach the topic—the “from below” and “from above” methods. Schleiermacher’s “mystical” way of viewing prayer avoids reducing prayer to a social phenomenon even while it rejects that God responds to individual requests. Even though what Schleiermacher means when he talks about prayer is not what most people think when they talk about prayer, his account offers a way to de-­individualize prayer and shift the emphasis to the person of  Christ and the community of faith. For that, his proposal is worth considering.

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5 Prayer as Complaint Oliver D. Crisp

Introduction Often prayer in the Christian tradition is thought of as a solution to a ­problem—or, at least, as a means by which a person may find a solution to a problem. We pray in order to get a particular sort of result, one that (we hope) will ameliorate if not entirely satisfy some felt need or concern. Here is a hypothetical example. Smith’s spouse is in a critical condition in hospital as a result of a road traffic accident. She prays that her spouse may be saved from death and fully recover in time. She prays that the medical doctors will be successful in their treatment. She prays that God will intervene in some way, or ensure that her desired outcome is the one that actually obtains. Such prayer is a commonplace in Christian piety. It is, in fact, intercessory prayer, or what theologians call prayer of impetration, because it involves actively requesting something of the Deity in the hope that the request will be met. Often, such prayers seem to presume that there are several possible outcomes with respect to a particular set of circumstances, and that a prayer offered up in order to secure one particular outcome rather than another may be efficacious, or at least partially constitutive of God’s directing events in that direction, rather than some other. Suppose we think of a person’s life as like a path, with forks in the road at certain junctures, where the traveler must decide which way to take. Then we might say that the presumption in much popular Christian piety, where such prayers are part of everyday life, is that human intercession may influence which branch of the forking path is taken. Thus, Smith prays in the hope that God will save her spouse, and return her to full health. She prays in the hope that the fork in the path that is taken is the one that leads to this particular outcome. In such cases, prayer seems to be

Oliver D. Crisp, Prayer as Complaint In: Analyzing Prayer: Theological and Philosophical Essays. Edited by: Oliver D. Crisp, James M. Arcadi, and Jordan Wessling, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859044.003.0006

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80  Analyzing Prayer thought of in terms of a two-­way contingency. Things could go one way or another, and Smith prays for one outcome, not the other, to obtain.1 There is much to be said for such prayer. And, although I do not think that this particular analysis of impetration is the correct one,2 it is a common one; perhaps the most common amongst practicing Christians today. For this reason, I shall call it the default option on petitionary prayer, or just the default option, since there seems to be a popular misunderstanding in Christianity not only that this particular way of construing impetration is the “correct” analysis but also that impetration (understood in this way) comprises the totality, or at least the most important way of thinking about prayer as a spir­ it­ual discipline. In other words, there seems to be a popular misunderstanding that conflates a particular way of understanding the nature of impetration with prayer as such, as though there were no other ways of thinking about prayer, especially impetratory prayer, and no other modes of praying besides impetration.3 In this chapter I want to do two things. First, I want to explore one other way of thinking about prayer. Since I am interested only in prayer in Christianity, as a Christian philosophical theologian, I shall restrict myself to consideration of prayer in this particular tradition, although it may be that what I say here has application to other religious traditions as well, particular (though perhaps not exclusively) to members of other Abrahamic faiths. The alternative conception of prayer that I want to focus on is prayer as complaint. This is not necessarily antithetical to impetration, or inconsistent with the practice of impetration. In fact, it seems to me that in the biblical writings we 1  In his classic treatment of petitionary prayer, Peter Geach speaks of this notion of forking paths as a “two-­way contingency,” thus: “The upshot is that if we are to be justified in saying that a state of affairs S came about from somebody’s impetratory prayer, then at the time of the prayer S must have had two-­way contingency: it could have come about, it also could not come about.” Peter Geach, God and the Soul (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 89. A sophisticated recent treatment of petitionary prayer can be found Scott  A.  Davison, Petitionary Prayer: A Philosophical Investigation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Jordan Wessling’s chapter, 12, in this volume takes up this sort of approach in opposition to the way in which I characterize impetration here and in my previous work. 2  For an argument for this conclusion, see Oliver D. Crisp, “John Calvin and Petitioning God” in Crisp, Retrieving Doctrine: Essays in Reformed Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), ch. 7. See also Paul Helm, “Omnipotence and Change,” Philosophy 51 (1976), 454–61, and Christopher Woznicki, “Is Prayer Redundant? Calvin and the Early Reformers on the Problem of Petitionary Prayer,” The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 60: 2 (2017), 333–48. 3  Compare Simon Tugwell, who writes, “Originally there can be no doubt whatsoever that words for ‘prayer’ meant ‘petition’. ” However, he opines, “The history of the word ‘prayer’ represents an outstanding triumph of the Humpty Dumpty school of philology, whose basic premiss as enunciated by its founder is ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’ ” Simon Tugwell, “Prayer, Humpty Dumpty and Thomas Aquinas” in Language, Meaning, and God: Essays in Honor of Herbert McCabe, ed. Brian Davies (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1988), 24. We shall return to this matter in a later section.

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Prayer as Complaint  81 find cases of prayer as complaint and prayer as petition side by side and ­without any evidence that this should be regarded as an embarrassment or as something incongruous, let alone inconsistent. This should not surprise us, since we commonly complain about something with one breath only to ask for something with the next. The child complains that she feels unloved at one moment, and the next is asking her parent when dinner will be served. These are not two inconsistent actions. Similar things could be said, the relevant changes having been made, concerning our prayers to God. We may complain, and we may ask for something from God, and there may be good reasons to do both either consecutively (as with the example of the ungrateful child), or concurrently—as when the child complains that she is hungry and asks for food in the same sentence. Nevertheless, prayer as complaint is different in important respects from prayer as petition, as we shall see. This brings me to a second matter with which this chapter is concerned. This is that prayer as complaint fits better with an alternative analysis of impetration to the one just offered. On the face of it, one might think that one important reason for complaining is that the complainant wishes things were different with respect to some particular circumstance or situation. So, it appears that prayer as complaint would fit better with the default option of understanding prayer as impetration. However, my contention is that an analysis of prayer as complaint helps us to see that prayer as impetration need not be understood according to the default option, and that the default option has a harder time of providing a plausible understanding of prayer as complaint. It seems to me that the alternative account of prayer as impetration fits better with prayer as complaint, and may also be a better fit with other modes of prayer as well (such as mystical prayer, and prayer as meditation) though space constraints prevent the fuller exploration of this larger claim. If this is right, then it has important implications for how Christians think about prayer as well as the liturgical shape of prayers that are offered in the Christian churches.4 We proceed in four stages. In the first, I shall offer an account of prayer as complaint. Then, in a second section, I shall apply this to impetration showing how it fits better with my own characterization of impetration than with the default option. The third section considers two potential complications for this view concerning direct address to the Deity, and concerning atheistic

4  An aside: Christopher Woznicki’s recent paper “Is Prayer Redundant?” shows that this alternative way of thinking about impetration is in fact deeply rooted in Reformation theology. I direct interested readers to that essay for further development of this point.

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82  Analyzing Prayer prayers. Then, in a final section, I raise the issue of the deformation of prayer, which is a problem for the default option, but not for a view that thinks of prayer as principally a matter of alignment with God’s will.

An Account of Prayer as Complaint Let us begin with some brief remarks about prayer before turning to complaint as a mode of prayer. What is prayer? Although this may seem obvious, the nature of prayer is, in fact, disputed. For present purposes, I shall adopt a fairly minimalist approach to the notion of prayer, and admit within its bounds a range of communicative acts directed toward God.5 This is not permissive enough for some, for it appears to exclude relevant communicative acts directed toward non-­divine entities, such as saints or angels or even demons.6 And it is not restrictive enough for others, for whom certain sorts of communicative act would not count as prayer even if they were directed to God (e.g., idle chatter).7 However, rather than provide a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for an act’s being a prayer, I shall simply stipulate that the sort of prayer in view in what follows is prayer that is a communicative act directed toward God. There may be other sorts of act that count as prayer that are not directed toward God (e.g. prayers to saints or to demons), and there may be other conditions necessary for a complete account of the nature of prayer from a Christian point of view (e.g., whether only certain sorts of communicative act count as prayers). But for present purposes, this rough and ready characterization will suffice. For I presume that complaint-­prayers, like many other sorts of prayer in the Christian tradition, are normally communicative acts directed toward God. We shall see that there are objections that can be raised to the claim that all complaints, including all prayers of complaint, are other-­directed. For now it is important to be clear that the view I have in mind here, and that is the subject of the remainder of the chapter, is 5  This follows Shieva Kleinschmidt’s analysis in “Atheistic Prayer,” Faith and Philosophy 34.2 (2017): 152–75, to which this section is indebted. Amber Griffioen also discusses the question of non-­doxastic prayer in detail in her contribution to this volume, chapter 3. 6  I presume that certain practitioners of the hermetic arts think they are communicating with demons, and some Christian exorcists use biblical passages like Matt. 18: 18 as justification for addressing themselves to putative demonic entities in an attitude of prayer. 7  Tugwell in “Prayer, Humpty Dumpty and Thomas Aquinas” cites Hugh of St Victor as a theologian who thought that idle chatter was a mockery of prayer. See Tugwell, “Prayer, Humpty Dumpty and Thomas Aquinas,” 24, citing Hugh of St Victor, De virtue orandi in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, ed. J. P. Migne, Series Latina vol. 176 (1854), 981–2.

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Prayer as Complaint  83 the one according to which complaint-­prayers are normally communicative actions that are, indeed, other-­directed, and specifically, are actions that are directed Godward. With this in mind, we can turn to our target, namely prayer as complaint. The Bible is full of complaints. Many of these are in the form of prayers. Some of these are prayers that have been given a stable liturgical form in the life of the people of God in psalmody, as well as in other parts of Scripture (for example, the Book of Job). There are also many instances in Scripture of prayers or what seem like prayers—communicative acts directed at the Deity—that are what might be described as laments.8 Are these the same sort of phenomenon? Historically, these two sorts of prayer, that is, complaints and laments, are frequently conflated or at least, are not clearly distinguished. We can see this in the literary trope of the jeremiad, which is often taken to include a component of complaint, including the listing of various woes, as well as an element of lament.9 Thus, in his little 1537 work, Instruction in Faith, John Calvin writes that “Prayer is similar to a communication between God and us whereby we expound to him our desires, our joys, our sighs, in a word, all the thoughts of our hearts.” And later in the same chapter, he goes on to say “prayer has not been instituted in order to raise us arrogantly before God, nor to extol our dignity, but to the end that we confess with sighs our calamities, just as children expound with familiarity their complaints to their fathers.”10 Here Calvin seems to think of prayer as a way of bringing complaints before God. But the language of “sighing” and bringing before God our “calamities” might just as easily refer to grievances expressed (though not necessarily fully articulated) as laments offered up to the Almighty. Although complaints and laments have a close association in the tradition, it seems to me that “prayers of complaint” is a more general term under which 8  See R. W. L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013). Moberly writes, “the single most common type of psalm is not the praise but the lament.” 211. This is a common observation. Compare Gordon  J.  Wenham, Psalms as Torah: Reading Biblical Song Ethically (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 167. Kevin Timpe’s chapter, 6, in this volume explores prayer as lament in more detail. 9  In the literature on colonial New England the jeremiad has become associated with a particular kind of homiletical form, in which the preacher bewailed the sins of the people and implored God to be merciful. As historian Harry Stout puts it, such sermons expressed “the rhetoric of failure.” Harry  S.  Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England. 25th Anniversary Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012 [1986]), 63. 10  John Calvin, Instruction in Faith (1537), trans. Paul T. Fuhrmann (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1969), 57 and 58, respectively.

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84  Analyzing Prayer we might include prayers of lament as a species.11 A complaint is an expression of dissatisfaction that normally includes a reason for the dissatisfaction stated in the form of some kind of grievance. We might say that a grievance is a complaint in which a reason is given for the dissatisfaction of the complainant. Sometimes the grievance of the complainant is expressed in the complaint; sometimes it is only implied or intimated elliptically, so to speak, in the way in which the complaint is articulated. But if the utterance really is an instance of a complaint, some grievance should be included (either expressed or intimated) in the utterance of the complainant. I suppose one might also complain by means of a gesture, or a sigh, or some other act that is not articulated in the form of speech. In that case the complaint would be only partially expressed by means of the speech act or the nonverbal ­gesture, and the context of the complaint would normally make clear the reason for the complaint, and therefore, the grievance of the complainant. (Scripture is not unaware of such elliptical prayer, of course. Paul speaks of it in Rom. 8: 26–7.) Two examples will make the point clearer. First, if someone complains to the manager of a swimming pool that there is too much chlorine in the water, the complainant has provided a reason for her dissatisfaction. This reason constitutes the substance of the grievance, which, in this case, is articulated by the complainant. The grievance is that the pool is unsuitable for bathing because of the ratio of chlorine to water in the pool, a matter which the complainant assumes the pool’s management ought to address. But often, complaints are made without a grievance being clearly expressed. For instance, the common complaint “You never listen to me!” is an expression of dissatisfaction with some circumstance, although the reason for the complaint is not wholly articulated. It may be that the complainant thinks that his interlocutor habitually does not give sufficient attention to reasons for a particular course of action that he suggests. (The context of the utterance usually provides sufficient information for this particular speech act, and the suppressed grievance, to be understood by the parties to the disagreement.) Stated in terms of a grievance, this may amount to the claim that “my interlocutor does not give sufficient attention to reasons for a particular course of action that I suggest.” So even when a grievance is not stated, as in this second sort of complaint, this is usually because the complaint is elliptical. The reason for the complaint, though not stated, is implied or assumed. Where the grievance is not 11 Another species of complaint-­prayer might be prayer as protest, which Michael  C.  Rea has explored in more detail in his essay, “Protest, Worship, and the Deformation of Prayer” in Rea, Essays in Analytic Theology, 2 vols. Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). I will return to this later in the chapter.

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Prayer as Complaint  85 expressed, and not understood elliptically (or otherwise, by gesture or speech act, or whatever), the nature of the complaint is not clearly understood by those who are parties to the complaint. The Book of Job is perhaps the pre-­eminent biblical example of a work in which complaint is a recurrent device in the narrative. Complaints where the grievance is expressed, or only implied or intimated, can be found throughout this work. Although Job’s interlocutors all attempt to provide traditional justifications for the actions of God in the face of Job’s complaints, it appears at the end of the work, after God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind in chapter 38, that none of these apologetic strategies have, in fact, been successful (Job 42: 7). What, then, of lament, which is also present in much of the biblical material? It seems to me that laments are best understood as a kind of complaint. Specifically, they are a passionate expression of grief or sorrow, often involving mourning over great loss or hardship. A lament may also involve expressing reasons for the anguish undergone by the one lamenting, e.g. Psalm 22, which speaks of the distress experienced by the psalmist because of “a gang of evildoers” that has surrounded him. But sometimes reasons for the lament are not clearly expressed, as is the case in Psalm 130 with its famous opening line, “Out of the depths I call to you, LORD!” Even when some reason for the lament is given, it is not clear to me that these reasons include the expression of a grievance against God or against some other creature. A good biblical example of this can be found in Jer. 31: 15, “A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” This is a clear example of what might be called a reported lament. In this case, Rachel is a figural proxy for the people of Ramah mourning for their dead children, and the prophet reports that lament in this powerful metaphor. The reason for the grief of figural Rachel is given in the prophetic gloss on her behalf, but is not articulated by her in the text. And, in addition to this, the reason the prophet gives for her lament does not constitute a grievance against God. Rather, it an expression of great anguish in the face of tremendous suffering because of the loss of her children—what is, in effect, the destruction of the future of the community of Ramah. Let us take another example. Psalm 88 opens with a complaint in the form of a lament rather than a complaint that includes a stated grievance: “Lord, you are the God who saves me; day and night I cry out to you. May my prayer come before you; turn your ear to my cry.” (Ps. 88: 1–2.) Such laments in psalmody often end with the expectation that God will hear the voice of the psalmist, as Gordon Wenham points out: “Usually, laments end with a joyful

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86  Analyzing Prayer assurance that God will indeed hear the prayer (e.g., Ps. 6; 7; 13).” Nevertheless, “In many of these laments it is not stated how God will answer the prayer. We are left to use our imagination as to how God will deal with the oppressors who are making life a misery for the psalmist.”12 The resolution of the anguish experienced by the psalmist is often inferred or assumed in the resolution of the psalm. It is not always clearly stated. To sum up, we may differentiate prayers of complaint and prayers of lament in this way: Lament is a kind of complaint. The logical forms of these two sorts of prayer are not always clearly distinguished in Scripture or the post-­ biblical tradition, and sometimes examples of such prayers are not fully articulated in speech. Nevertheless, it seems to me that a helpful way of making clear the difference between these two sorts of prayer is as follows: COMPLAINT-­PRAYER: An expression of dissatisfaction in a communicative act directed toward God that normally includes a reason for the dissatisfaction stated in the form of some kind of grievance. LAMENT-­PRAYER: An expression of grief or sorrow in a communicative act directed toward God, often involving mourning over great loss or hardship. A further complication: Recently Michael Rea has distinguished between what he calls pious and impious protest forms of prayer.13 As I have already indicated, as I understand it, a protest prayer is another species of prayer as complaint. Once more, the words uttered by Job when faced with God speaking out of the whirlwind in the closing chapters of the book are a good example of such protest-­prayer. As Rea points out, God does not merely permit Job to say the things he does about God and his purposes; he seems to validate Job’s protest: This is not to say that God endorses or agrees with Job’s protest. Rather, the idea is simply that God accepts it and recognizes it as a reasonable response to Job’s circumstances on the part of someone who loves goodness and justice but whose understanding of goodness, justice, and the relations between particular goods and evils is occluded by familiar human limitations. I read this validation partly in God’s explicit remark at the end of the book to the effect that Job alone among the speakers in the book has 12 Wenham, Psalms as Torah, 167. 13  See Michael C. Rea, The Hiddenness of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), ch. 8, and Rea, “Protest, Worship, and the Deformation of Prayer.”

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Prayer as Complaint  87 spoken rightly of God, but also in God’s treatment of Job when God finally appears in response to Job’s summons.14

Lament prayer is not necessarily the same as protest prayer, though a lament may be a kind of protest. (For instance, a lament prayer that is also a protest against some egregious violence suffered by the person offering up the lament to God.) I suggest that the difference lies in the fact that a lament as an expression of grief or sorrow need not include a clearly articulated reason for the lament, as with prayers that protest something that the one praying is suffering or enduring—presumably, as in the case of Job, something that either originates with God or could be prevented or stopped by God. Nevertheless, lament may be impious. The person whose existential angst yields an angry cry toward God may well be addressing God in an impious way. And, if Rea is right, it may also be that in some circumstances, like that reported in Job, God nevertheless validates such prayer even if it is uttered from a state of theological confusion.

Complaint and Intercession With our distinction between COMPLAINT-­ PRAYER and LAMENT-­ PRAYER in place we may turn to the relationship between prayer as complaint and prayer as intercession. On the face of it, prayers of complaint, like prayers of petition, seem to presume a kind of two-­way contingency. In the case of petitionary prayer, some state of affairs, S, may obtain or may not obtain, and the petitioner prays either that S obtains or that S does not obtain. On this way of characterizing petitionary prayer the “success” of a given petition can be analyzed in terms of a counterfactual dependence such that, as Davison puts it, “a person’s prayer for some event is answered if and only if had the person not prayed for it, the event in question would not have occurred.”15 The case of complaint-­prayers is not exactly like this, of course. For the form of a complaint-­prayer typically involves some state of affairs that already obtains, and that the complainant thinks God could have ­prevented, but didn’t prevent. Nevertheless, this way of thinking about both complaint-­ prayer and petitionary prayer depends upon the notion of a ­two-­way contingency. 14  Rea, “Protest, Worship, and the Deformation of Prayer,” 196. 15 Davison, Petitionary Prayer, 27.

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88  Analyzing Prayer But suppose we think of petitionary prayer not as asking for God to bring about or prevent some state of affairs from obtaining, but rather as a way of aligning our fallen human wills with what God wills. D. Z. Phillips has something like this view in mind when he writes, “the prayer of petition is best understood, not as an attempt at influencing the way things go, but as an expression of, and request for, devotion to God through the way things go.”16 This strategy involves decoupling petitionary prayer from the notion of a two-­ way contingency. There are good reasons for considering this option, given the well-­known problems with what I am calling the default option on intercessory prayer. For instance, suppose one is attracted to a traditional, orthodox account of the divine nature. Then, God is immutable in a strong sense (i.e., incapable of substantial change). He is also omniscient, and essentially loving. Finally, on at least one traditional (Pauline-­Augustinian) way of thinking about these matters, God ordains all that comes to pass (e.g., Eph. 1; Rom. 9). But if that is true then it is difficult to see how God’s action can be affected by human petition. In fact, one might think that if God is essentially loving and all-­knowing then He has the knowledge and motivation to ensure that the right state of affairs obtains independent of any human petition. And if God is also strongly immutable, then what He has willed cannot be changed. Finally, if God ordains all that comes to pass, then there is no metaphysical wiggle-­ room whereby creaturely agents may, through their petitions, change God’s action in creation. The notion that petitionary prayer does not depend on a two-­way contingency because it is not concerned to change God but rather to change the petitioner, bringing her desires and will into alignment with God’s desires and will faces other problems, of course. Chiefly, there is a worry about apparent redundancy. If petitioning God does not bring about a change in God is such prayer redundant? I do not see why it must be. Consider the case of an addict who knows he needs to kick his habit or face multiple organ failure, and death. He is checked into a rehabilitation clinic. Each day he is visited by the clinic’s physician, and each day he petitions her. “Please help me,” he says. “I am helping you,” comes the reply. “Please help me to have the strength to do what needs to be done in order to kick this habit.” “I will help you,” the physician assures him. There is no expectation in these petitions that the state of affairs the addict is in will change so that he can return to his substance abuse. He acknowledges his own weakness, his desire for the wrong course of action, and his desire to desire the right course of action, which is in keeping 16 D. Z. Phillips, The Concept of Prayer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 120–1.

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Prayer as Complaint  89 with what the physician desires for the addict as well. Somehow, the addict needs to find the will to continue to desire to desire the right course of action, and the will to desire it too, in order that he may overcome his harmful desires and continue with the course of treatment that will return him to full health. The story is only analogous to the idea of petitioning God as bringing one’s will and desires into alignment with God’s will and desires, but even this analogy helps us see how such an account is able to make sense of much in traditional ways of thinking about petitioning God. And, importantly, this story is consistent with the idea that the physician’s will is immutable, that he has ordained a course of treatment that the patient must follow to recover, and that the physician knows exactly what the patient needs to reach that goal, and cares deeply for the patient’s well-­being. What is more, this story helps us see how in such a state of affairs the daily petitions of the addict are not redundant; they express his existential angst, and his need for reassurance and help in bringing about the appropriate course of action. Now, suppose we transpose this sort of thinking about petitionary prayer as alignment to the divine will to the case of prayer as complaint. As with our petitioner, so here in the case of our complainer, the prayer in question is directed toward God without the supposition that some sort of two-­way contingency is in play. The complainer, like the petitioner, is not attempting to change God’s mind. Rather, knowing that God ordains what comes to pass, is immutable, omniscient, and loving, the complainer addresses herself to God in the hope that God may help her to reconcile herself to the tragic and difficult circumstances in which she finds herself. In her current state of mind she is not reconciled to these circumstances; they are deeply troubling, causing great anguish. But she knows that “all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” (Rom. 8: 28) And she knows this is true even if she cannot understand her present circumstances, or how it is that these circumstances do, in fact, ultimately work together for good. This is not to trivialize the seriousness of a person’s complaint or the circumstances that give rise to it. It is not to try to explain or explain away those circumstances either. Our task is merely to provide some theological account of such prayer and the circumstances that give rise to it. Consider these words penned by William Abraham in writing about the grief he endured upon the unexpected death of his son, Why did the Lord not grant our request for healing? Here the answer is ­simple: God does indeed know best. Our perspective and range of information is

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90  Analyzing Prayer limited. To submit to the will of God is utterly apt and decisively correct. For me it makes no intellectual or theological sense whatsoever to get mad or angry at God. Of course, emotionally and psychologically it makes sense when we get angry at God in these circumstances. However, it makes no coherent or intellectual sense given what I believe about God; and I have not had the slightest temptation to do so.17

I am suggesting something similar with respect to both petitionary prayer, and complaint prayer. It may be emotionally and psychologically understandable that we get angry at God in certain circumstances, and complain to God—perhaps even rail against God. But given the sort of traditional, orthodox account of the divine nature it makes little theological or intellectual sense to do so. Rather, what makes sense is to submit to the will of God even when we do not understand why God has permitted what has happened. My suggestion is that this way of thinking about petitionary prayer is not redundant, and may be extended to include complaint prayers. In fact, it makes good sense to think of complaint prayers in this manner, given that we often complain about things in more mundane circumstances even when we know that they are for our good, and that they may not be changed, but must be endured.

Two Potential Complications Let us now turn to two further complications that may prove problematic for the account of prayer as complaint that I have outlined here. A first group of concerns has to do with the claim, central to the view as I have expressed it, that such prayer is other-­directed. Recall that, as I have characterized these two closely related forms of prayer, COMPLAINT-­PRAYER and LAMENT-­ PRAYER both include the notion that prayer is directed toward God. That is, both forms of prayer require that the person praying intentionally directs their remarks toward a particular divine entity. But this may be disputed.18 There are at least two ways in which this might be questioned that are salient for our purposes.

17 William J. Abraham Among the Ashes: On Death, Grief, and Hope (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), 8. 18  See, e.g., Kleinschmidt, “Atheistic Prayer.”

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Prayer as Complaint  91 The first of these involves a claim about the elliptical nature of much prayer, which we have already touched upon. The worry is this. If the prayer is not clearly articulated, or not even articulated in words at all as a groan or a sigh, yet the context in which the prayer is uttered makes it clear that the intention of the person praying is to express a complaint or a lament, is it clear that this is God-­directed? It is feasible to utter a form of words that sounds like a complaint or lament without directly addressing oneself to another person in so doing. It is even possible to utter an exclamation that has no addressee, such as the case of a colleague alone in the next room who suddenly cries out, “Why is life so hard? Tell me why?” But it seems to me that such cases are normally better described as verbal ejaculations or exclamations, rather than forms of address. If the person in question is offering a complaint-­prayer or lament-­prayer, rather than some verbal or nonverbal exclamation, an im­por­ tant factor in determining whether what is uttered or performed is indeed a prayer has to do with intention and whether the speech and/or act is other-­ directed. So the solitary colleague who cries out in the adjacent room, “Why is life so hard? Tell me why?” intends to complain all right. But absent reasons for thinking the colleague is addressing some invisible entity, there is no obvious intention to address his complaint to a particular individual or group. It is a kind of exclamation rather than a form of address, rather like the cry, “That’s it! I’ve had enough!” which, when uttered, is not usually directed at anyone in particular. Normally, when someone utters such a verbal ejaculation or exclamation no response is expected because no one in particular is addressed. This is quite unlike an exclamation that is unambiguously other-­directed, such as the questions, “Why life is so hard? Tell me why?” uttered by somebody as an address to his spouse. Of course, someone could offer a complaint-­ prayer to something other than God—to an idol, say, or some other putative deity, or intermediary such as an angel or saint, as we have already indicated in introducing this topic. But in these cases there is clearly intentionality, and the prayer in question is still other-­directed even if it falls on deaf ears, so to speak. In each of the cases just mentioned context is important. The solitary colleague in the room next door who utters the exclamation about the difficulty of life is not normally disposed to address himself to invisible entities, and may well be under a lot of pressure with writing deadlines and teaching responsibilities. So it would seem reasonable to assume his exclamation is not other-­directed but a kind of verbal ejaculation. However, if you know his wife is sitting with him in the next room or you know that your colleague does have a habit of addressing himself to invisible entities, then things are rather

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92  Analyzing Prayer different and we would normally treat his exclamation differently—as a form of address that is, most probably, other-­directed. Now, if the context is one in which it seems reasonable to assume the person is praying, and the person intends to offer a prayer of complaint, the salient issue is whether an elliptical or inarticulate or nonverbal complaint can count as a form of address rather than as a mere ejaculation or exclamation. That does not seem to be particularly implausible. There are many everyday cases of such forms of address, such as the groan of a teenager upon being asked to do her chores. In which case, this does not appear to be an insurmountable objection to our analysis. The second, closely related way in which the claim that complaints and laments are God-­directed might be disputed has to do with the notion that someone could offer up such prayers without necessarily directing them toward the Almighty. For instance, it would seem that an atheist can offer prayers, including prayers of complaint or lament. A particularly powerful example of this can be found in Elie Wiesel’s book, Night. There, in describing the death marches the SS soldiers made the Jewish concentration camp prisoners endure, Wiesel writes of a prayer he offered in the hope that he would not abandon his father as had happened on the marches to another character in the narrative, the elderly Rabbi Eliahu. “And in spite of myself, a prayer formed inside me,” writes Wiesel, “a prayer to this God in whom I no longer believed. ‘Oh God, Master of the Universe, give me the strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahu’s son has done.’”19 The form of the prayer reported here is not a complaint or lament. It is a request. Nevertheless, it is a powerful example of a prayer offered by someone who is, for all practical purposes, an atheist. Whatever analysis we give of such examples, there does seem to be a plausible way in which prayers of this form do count as being other-­directed even if the person uttering them claims to be an atheist.20 Now, clearly a person may use a form of words without intending to direct them to a particular addressee. Rather like the common distinction between mention and use,21 the idea here is that a person might utter a particular form of words that are a prayer without necessarily intending them to be directed toward God. In such cases I am inclined to think the person in question is

19  Elie Wiesel, Night: A Memoir (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006 [1958]), 90. 20  Setting to one side ironic or insincere ways in which someone might utter such prayers. 21  The distinction is this: mention of a thing does not entail its use. Thus, if in a dispute about expletives a friend utters a particular expletive as an example of what she is talking about, her mentioning of the purported expletive does not count as an instance of her using the expletive to punctuate her speech.

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Prayer as Complaint  93 doing something analogous to mentioning the prayer rather than using it. It might be thought that the case of Wiesel rather complicates matters. But if a person is a professed atheist and yet still utters the prayer it is difficult not to treat this as at least a form of address—in this case, a form of address directed toward an entity that one hopes exists given one’s parlous circumstances, even if one is normally inclined to think the entity in question does not, in fact, exist. If that much is true, then it is not clear that this objection amounts to very much either.

Coda But does this reflect how Christians have thought about prayer as petition and as complaint? I think it does. In fact, it seems to me that the default option on impetration (and complaint) often leads to a kind of deformation of prayer, which is avoided on the analysis I have offered here. Let me explain. Lauren Winner has recently called attention to ways in which Christian practices like prayer can become deformed. She writes, “Not all damage, but some damage, belongs to the form of the thing damaged, and is characteristic of it. Another way of naming a thing’s characteristic damage is to say that the thing has been ‘deformed’: Deformities, after all, are exactly that—related to (or, more pointedly, away from) a particular form.”22 The deformity I have in mind here is not the two-­way contingency characterization of prayer that drives the default option. The notion of a two-­way contingency is not a deformation as such, though I have suggested that it might involve a mistaken way of thinking about the form of prayer given certain traditional, orthodox claims about the divine nature. No, the deformation of prayer I have in mind is not about how we characterize impetration or complaint or any other form of prayer, but about what we think about the upshot of such prayer. In a similar fashion, there is a question about how a sausage machine works to produce sausages from the ground meat fed into it. We might wonder about the processes that go on inside the machine. But whatever those processes are, the question of the outputs the machine generates—the sausages themselves—is a different matter. And, really, in the case of the sausage machine we mostly want to know: Will this machine make delicious sausages or not? Just so, in the matter of prayer there is an important question about the process itself. 22 Lauren F. Winner, The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 5.

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94  Analyzing Prayer What do we mean by impetration? What do we mean by complaint? What is going on when we pray in these ways? But there is also a distinct question about the outputs of such praying. What do we think such prayer does? What does it produce? One residual worry about the default option is that such a way of thinking reduces prayer to something superstitious, making of it a kind of magical formula or spell that ought to be efficacious given the right form of words.23 That is surely a deformation of Christian practice in Winner’s sense of the term. But God is not a Jinn, and prayer (whatever its particular form) is not an incantation. Although the two-­way contingency approach to prayer need not end up in a deformation of this sort, it is certainly a real worry with such a conception of prayer—a kind of liability built into this conception. One of the benefits of the alternative I have been discussing here is that it does not have this consequence. Rather, prayers of impetration or complaint that presume prayer is fundamentally about bringing my own will into alignment with God’s will foster a sense of dependence on God that, I suggest, better reflects the overall narrative of Scripture and common Christian practice.

23  This issue is raised by D. Z. Phillips, in The Concept of Prayer, ch. 6.

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6 Toward an Account of Lamenting Well Kevin Timpe

Introduction The primary goal of this chapter is to explore the nature of certain forms of lament as an acceptable object of analytic theology. Elizabeth Boase and Steve Taylor note the “surge of scholarship around lament in recent times”;1 while this surge can certainly be seen in biblical studies and theology, it has not yet spread to philosophy of religion or analytic theology. This chapter should be seen as attempting to call for greater reflection on lament by Christian philosophers and analytic theologians. While not all lament is Christian, there are a number of proper Christian expressions of lament. Starting with scriptural lament, particularly as found in the Psalms, I look at the nature of lament, explore its connection with hope, and suggest that lament often is inherently social. I then suggest that there is even a virtue of lamenting well. In many ways, this chapter should be thought of not as a final product within analytic theology but rather as an invitation to engage in analytic theological reflection on lament.

A Brief Sketch of the Nature, and Some Dangers, of Analytic Theology A paper I published a few years ago, which drew heavily on the work of others, attempted to do three things:

1 Elizabeth Boase and Steve Taylor, “Public Lament” in Spiritual Complaint: The Theology and Practice of Lament, ed. Miriam J. Bier and Tim Bulkeley (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013), 205. In addition to the work cited there and later in this chapter, see also David W. Smith, Stumbling Toward Zion: Recovering the Biblical Tradition of Lament in the Era of World Christianity (Carlisle: Langham, 2020); Mark Vroegop, Weep with Me: How Lament Opens a Door for Racial Reconciliation (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020); and Scott Ellington, Risking Truth: Reshaping the World through Prayers of Lament (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2008). Kevin Timpe, Toward an Account of Lamenting Well In: Analyzing Prayer: Theological and Philosophical Essays. Edited by: Oliver D. Crisp, James M. Arcadi, and Jordan Wessling, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859044.003.0007

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96  Analyzing Prayer (i) to give an overview of a recent movement which goes by the name of “analytic theology,” (ii) to locate that movement within the larger context of philosophy of religion, and (iii)  to identify some of the weaknesses and objections that analytic theology will need to address, moving forward.2 As Tom McCall writes in An Invitation to Analytic Christian Theology, what is “gathered under the label ‘analytic theology’ is both quite broad and very active . . . The meaning of the term analytic theology can vary in common parlance, and it is safe to say that there is no single, decisively settled meaning of the term when it is used as a name.”3 Nevertheless, like McCall (and Billy Abraham,4 Oliver Crisp,5 Michael  C.  Rea,6 and others), I think that the difficulties involved in defining clear boundaries for what properly counts as analytic theology invalidate neither the usefulness of the term nor the appropriateness of such an approach to theology. For McCall, what is common across the range of uses is this: analytic theology signifies a commitment to employ the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy where those tools might be helpful in the work of constructive Christian theology.7 More recently, Oliver Crisp has characterized analytic theology as “a way of doing ST [systematic theology] that utilizes the tools and methods of contemporary analytic philosophy for the purposes of constructive Christian theology, paying attention to the Christian tradition and development of doctrine.”8 Crisp intends his description of analytic theology to include McCall’s understanding of the same.

2  Kevin Timpe, “On Analytic Theology,” Scientia et Fides 3 (2015), 1–13. 3 Thomas  H.  McCall, An Invitation to Analytic Christian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015), 9–16. McCall’s book unfortunately wasn’t available when I wrote Timpe (2015), or else I would have drawn on it. 4  William J. Abraham, “Systematic Theology as Analytic Theology” in Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology, ed. Oliver Crisp and Michael Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 54–69. William J. Abraham, “Turning Philosophical Water into Theological Wine,” Journal of Analytic Theology 1 (2013), 1–16. 5 Oliver Crisp, “On Analytic Theology” in Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology, ed. Oliver Crisp and Michael Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 33–53. Oliver Crisp, “Once More: Analytic Theology,” unpublished. 6  Michael Rea, “Introduction” in Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology, ed. Oliver Crisp and Michael Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1–30. 7 McCall, An Invitation to Analytic Christian Theology, 16. 8  Oliver Crisp, “Analytic Theology as Systematic Theology,” Open Theology 3 (2017), 165.

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Toward an Account of Lamenting Well  97 Beyond this brief description, I don’t want to rehash much of the debates about the nature of analytic theology as an enterprise, given that my primary goal in the present chapter is lament. But given that my approach to the topic of lament is shaped by my approach to theology, I do want to mention a number of objections some have raised against analytic theology. Ultimately, I don’t think these objections are insurmountable, but I do think of them as challenges that practitioners of analytic theology need to take seriously. And they are challenges that I try to take seriously in my reflections on lament that follow. In my earlier “On Analytic Theology,” I specified a number of criticisms that have been leveled against analytic theology. These criticisms include: 1. a generally suspicious attitude, and sometimes even hostility, toward philosophy of religion within philosophy as a whole;9 2. a skepticism of analytic approaches to theological topics by those within theology and religion studies;10 3. the belief that analytic theology often takes an inappropriate approach to Scripture or other theological sources;11 4. the claim that analytic theology pays insufficient attention to Scripture; 5. the claim that analytic theology is insufficiently attentive to the historical nature of the Christian faith;12 and

9  See Thomas Lewis, Why Philosophy Matters for the Study of Religion–and Vice Versa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) and Kevin Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto (Malden: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2014). 10  Here see especially Harriet Harris and Christopher Insole, “Verdicts on Analytic Philosophy of Religion” in Faith and Philosophical Analysis: The Impact of Analytic Philosophy on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Harriet  A.  Harris and Christopher  J.  Insole (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005), 1–20 and Nick Trakakis, The End of Philosophy of Religion (New York: Continuum, 2008) and Timothy Knepper, “The End of Philosophy of Religion?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82 (2014), 120–49. 11 See, for instance, Marc Cortez, “As Much as Possible: Essentially Contested Concepts and Analytic Theology: A Response to William J. Abraham,” Journal of Analytic Theology 1 (2013),17–24. See also the discussion in Kevin Timpe and Blake Hereth, The Lost Sheep in Philosophy of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2019), 1–27. 12  Thomas McCall has put this worry very well when he writes that analytic theology is often “naive with respect to the history of doctrine,” particularly regarding an awareness of and sensitivity to the social and intellectual context of particular doctrines. McCall, An Invitation to Analytic Christian Theology, 27. This criticism strikes McCall, and myself, as “a legitimate concern, and it is one that analytic theologians would do well to hear and heed” (28). But McCall also notes that this criticism isn’t only true of analytic theology, but is also true of much systematic theology as well. Second, he also points out that this danger isn’t unavoidable: “I see no reason to conclude that this problem must be either essential or endemic to analytic theology. Surely more progress can be made in this area, but I see no reasons to think that such progress cannot happen. Finally, it is worth nothing that such progress in fact is being made” (29). I hope that the present chapter contributes to this progress.

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98  Analyzing Prayer 6. the claim that analytic theology tends toward a hyperintellectualism that doesn’t sufficiently connect with the Church’s commitment to spiritual formation and worship.13 This list was not intended to be exhaustive, but rather was presented as “some of the major issues facing analytic theology as it goes forward.”14 I mention these criticisms not to refute them here but because, in what follows, I want to take them very seriously. In thinking about lament in the context of the present chapter, I’ve had a number of these criticisms specifically in mind and have tried to proceed in a way that rightfully respects their concerns. Consider, for instance, (6), which claims that there’s a disconnect between the goods that analytic theology might achieve and the full range of goods at which theology aims. McCall understands this objection (again, without necessarily endorsing it) as including the claim that “analytic theology isn’t spiritually edifying.”15 I’m willing to grant that perhaps not all individuals who read analytic theology receive spiritual nourishment from doing so (though I’m also not saying that this can’t and doesn’t happen). But I don’t know what could be more edifying than a careful, sustained, and “from the inside” treatment of lament. “Genuine theology, in short, is praxis, one deeply woven together with a Christian life of prayer, virtue, and participation in the sacraments.”16 Consider also criticism (3), part of which attributes to analytic theology a failure to approach Scripture properly and part of which attributes to it a failure to draw on the full range of theological sources. One way of further understanding this objection is that good theology needs to take seriously more than one theological subdiscipline. Again to quote McCall: Recognizing that ‘theologians routinely draw upon a wide range of disciplines and apply them to a complex set of loci,’ Marc Cortez underscores the nature of this challenge. Warning us not to ‘kid ourselves into thinking that even professional theologians have acquired any significant mastery of the many areas and disciplines involved,’ Cortez notes that we all tend to specialize in different areas and then rely on the work of other specialists where needed. 13 For an articulation of and reply to this worry, see Crisp, “Analytic Theology as Systematic Theology,” 165. 14  Timpe, “On Analytic Theology,” 7. 15 McCall, An Invitation to Analytic Christian Theology, 32. William Wood raises a similar worry, again without endorsing it, that much analytic theology is “spiritually sterile.” William Wood, “Analytic Theology as a Way of Life,” Journal of Analytic Theology 2 (2014), 44. 16 McCall, An Invitation to Analytic Christian Theology, 32.

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Toward an Account of Lamenting Well  99 But this is, he rightly points out, a ‘problem with the nature of academic specialization as it is practiced in the academy today.’ Cortez argues that ‘given the disciplinary breadth of theology, such academic ghettoization needs to stop.’17

I in no way claim to be an expert in a number of the fields on which I’ll draw in what follows. But I am intentionally drawing on a wide set of the relevant disciplines because I think that’s what good analytic theology requires. I’m trying to get out of my “academic ghetto,” as Cortez calls it. And I intend the rest of this chapter not as a completed work of analytic theology, but instead as an invitation to engage in analytic theology communally.

The Nature of Lament The previous section was intended as a kind of “stage-­setting,” a prolegomenon if you will. Now, I turn directly to the subject of lament. As an analytic philosopher, my initial tendency in trying to get clear about a concept is to look (rightly or wrongly) for necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the concept in question. Here, I’m reminded of a criticism of analytic philosophy (and I think, by extension, analytic theology) raised by Eleonore Stump: [T]he Anglo-­American tradition [of analytic philosophy] has tended to leave to one side the messy and complicated issues involved in relations among persons . . . It is therefore misleadingly imprecise, I think, to diagnose the weakness of analytic philosophy as its narrowness. Its cognitive hemianopia is its problem. Its intellectual vision is occluded or obscured for the right half of the cognitive field, especially for the part of reality [like lament and the relationships in which lament arises] that includes the complex, nuanced thought, behavior, and relations of persons.18

In his book on analytic theology I’ve already engaged, McCall suggests that this approach to the nature of analytic theology (that is, focusing primarily on necessary and jointly sufficient conditions) is not the most helpful way

17 McCall, An Invitation to Analytic Christian Theology, 165. Here McCall is citing Cortez, “As Much as Possible,” 22. 18  Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 25.

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100  Analyzing Prayer forward on many topics. Oliver Crisp takes a more clear-­cut position: “There are no necessary and sufficient conditions for analytic philosophy, any more than there are such conditions for . . . AT [i.e., analytic theology].”19 Similarly, in his recent analysis of the nature of emotion, Aaron Ben-­Ze’ev writes that “the very complexity of emotions has made attempts to define them [in terms of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions] notoriously problematic . . . In light of the complexity of emotions, I believe that no single mental element can adequately define emotions.”20 Ben-­ Ze’ev’s preferred approached is to focus on prototype categories. In the present section, I want to follow a similar strategy. I’m going to take Scriptural lament—and the lament Psalms in particular—as a prototype.21 I will also periodically discuss, in passing, other kinds of lament that share relevant features with these prototypes. But I will not try and delineate exact boundaries for lament. Proceeding in this way will result in “some sacrifice of sharp and visible orderliness” and will instead be “softer and more rambling, with the bones of the thought beneath the surface.”22 Even focusing on biblical lament, such a strict demarcation would be difficult. As Rebekah Eklund writes in her excellent treatment of Jesus’ use of lament in the New Testament: Old Testament scholars, New Testament scholars, and theologians do not always use these terms [lament as both noun and verb] in a uniform way. Lament can mean complaint, an expression of grief, the ritual act of mourning, a dirge for the dead, a cry for help, an accusation directed to God, a public protest over injustice, or wordless wailing . . . On Old Testament terms, however, lament is a form of prayer in the midst of trouble: A cry for help to a particular God—one who has saved before.23

19  Crisp, “Analytic Theology as Systematic Theology,” 164. 20  Aaron Ben-­Ze’ev, “The Thing Called Emotion” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, ed. Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 56. 21  Lament isn’t found only in the Jewish and Christian traditions, even though that will be my focus here. For more on this, Carleen Mandolfo, “Language of Lament in the Psalms” in The Oxford Handbook of the Psalms, ed. William P. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 114–30. 22 Stump, Wandering in Darkness, 27. See also the discussion of analytic theology as a “centered group” in Crisp, “Analytic Theology as Systematic Theology,” 164. In conversation, Aaron Cobb suggests that instead of providing an analysis of lament, one could offer a syndrome analysis such that one describes the characteristic patterns of emotions, feelings, thoughts, expressions, and behaviors emerging in lamentable circumstances. I think that such an approach has significant overlap with my approach in what follows; an explicit approach to lament along these lines strikes me as worth pursuing in future work. 23  Rebekah Eklund, Jesus Wept: The Significance of Jesus’ Laments in the New Testament (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 4.

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Toward an Account of Lamenting Well  101 So in what follows it will be important to keep in mind that even within the context of Scripture, the exact boundaries of what counts as lament will sometimes be contested.

Scriptural Lament This section explores the use of lament within the Bible, and the Psalms in particular, as a prototype (but not the only kind) of appropriate lament. In doing so, I draw substantively on the work of Brent Strawn, though in no way do I think he’s the only biblical scholar worth engaging in this context. It’s my hope that by beginning here I’ll help avoid the criticism of analytic theology as “armchair theology.”24 I draw on Scripture as a resource for my reflection on lament in the next section. As McCall notes, if “engagement with Scripture is of vital importance for Christian theologians,”25 then this might be a good beginning point even for analytic theology. While we often seem to prefer our Scripture to be tamed and domesticated (qualities that don’t neatly characterize heartfelt lament), lament is found throughout the canon. “Lament is such a key element of the Old Testament that it is hard to read any book without finding an example of it . . . In fact, Old Testament texts describe this form of prayer as constitutive of God’s identity . . . and of Israel’s identity.”26 But lament isn’t found only there; it’s also found in the New Testament, even being uttered by the Incarnate Son at key moments in his life. As Eklund’s examination of lament in the New Testament has shown, “lament in the New Testament depends on lament in the Old. That is, the laments of Israel, especially in the Psalms, provide the essential 24  See McCall, An Invitation to Analytic Christian Theology, 38. Soong-­Chan Rah’s recent book on lament is also worthwhile. There, Rah writes that “lament in the Bible is a liturgical response to the reality of suffering and engages God in the context of pain and trouble.” Soong-­Chan Rah, Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2015), 21. 25 McCall, An Invitation to Analytic Christian Theology, 175. 26 Eklund, Jesus Wept, 1. For a discussion of lament elsewhere in the Old Testament in addition to the Psalms, see Bernhard Anderson and Steven Bishop, Out of the Depths: The Psalms Speak for Us Today (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 50ff.; Tim Bulkeley, “Does Jeremiah Confess, Lament, or Complain? Three Attitudes Towards Wrong” in Spiritual Complaint: The Theology and Practice of Lament, ed. Miriam  J.  Bier and Tim Bulkeley (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013), 5–17; Miriam Bier, “The Unique Contribution of Lamentations 4 in the Book of Lamentations: Metaphor and the Transition from Individual to Communal” in Spiritual Complaint: The Theology and Practice of Lament, ed. Miriam J. Bier and Tim Bulkeley (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013), 18–33; Elizabeth Boase, “Blurring the Boundaries” in Spiritual Complaint: The Theology and Practice of Lament, ed. Miriam J. Bier and Tim Bulkeley (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013), 71–87; Lena-­ Sofia Tiemeyer, “The Doubtful Gain of Penitence: The Fine Line between Lament and Penitential Prayer” in Spiritual Complaint: The Theology and Practice of Lament, ed. Miriam  J.  Bier and Tim Bulkeley (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013), 102–21.

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102  Analyzing Prayer foundation for the role that lament plays in the New Testament.”27 She also argues that lament in both testaments follows the same basic pattern.28 Given that the prototype lament in the Old and New Testaments can be found in the Psalms, I want to focus our attention there. At its core, biblical lament is “a cry for help to God from within a situation of distress, arising from trust that God is faithful to hear and respond to cries.”29 (I return to the centrality of trust for proper lament shortly.) In his influential Psalms for Preaching and Worship, biblical scholar Brent Strawn suggests that the Psalms are perhaps “the most important part of the Old Testament for Christian faith,”30 even though their nature and proper use are “under known.”31 Strawn thinks that contemporary Christian faith and reflection are often underdeveloped because it seems that one of the most neglected aspects of psalmic faith, which is only recently being rediscovered, is the Psalter’s special attention to the dark side of life and faith, especially via the many laments found in its pages. Perhaps the intense honesty of these poems, which can run as close to blasphemy as one can imagine within the context of prayer, is what has led many Christians to distance themselves from the Psalms, respecting them only in a sterilized and sanitized sort of way.32

Strawn builds off the work of the early twentieth-­century scholars Hermann Gunkel and Walter Brueggemann in laying out different types (or forms) of Psalms, and different functions. Gunkel differentiated five main types of Psalms: 1. Hymns of Praise 2. Individual Songs of Thanksgiving 27 Eklund, Jesus Wept, 4. 28  See ibid., 12. She does say that this pattern occurs “within a somewhat different philosophical and theological context” in the New Testament, one that is shaped by the hope of the resurrection. For more on the connection of lament and hope, see the section on ‘Lament and Hope’ later in this chapter. 29 Eklund, Jesus Wept, 7. 30 Brent Strawn, “The Psalms: Types, Functions, and Poetics for Proclamation” in Psalms for Preaching and Worship: A Lectionary Commentary, ed. Roger E. Van Harn and Brent A. Strawn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 3. 31  Ibid., 4. 32  Ibid., 4f. See also Brenda Salter McNeil’s comment in the foreword to Rah : “The church has lost its ability to lament!” Rah, Prophetic Lament, 9. Commenting on an earlier version of this chapter, Aaron Cobb has suggested that the distancing from the lament psalms mentioned in this passage might be unique to the Christian West, and not be an apt description of Christian communities in other cultural contexts. I think this may be correct; an intercultural examination of the use of lament psalms would be interesting on this and other scores.

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Toward an Account of Lamenting Well  103 3. Individual Laments 4. Communal Laments 5. Royal Psalms.33 Strawn admits that scholars since Gunkel have continued both to revise and to challenge Gunkel’s typology, but particularly in light of what I have said about lament not being uniform, I’m not interested into wading into that debate here (though it might be worth wading into at another time). Rather, I  simply want to draw attention to the fact that lament is a central form of Jewish (and, later, Christian) worship as recorded in the Psalms. In fact, lament psalms (and individual laments in particular) are the most common type of Psalm; lament is what Strawn refers to as the “backbone” of the Psalter.34 Strawn outlines the typical form of a lament psalm as follows, though he stresses that the exact placement and even inclusion of these elements within the psalm is “somewhat flexible.”35 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Address Complaint Petition Confession of Trust Praise

Given the fifth element, it is stressed by a number of biblical scholars that laments are usually, even if not uniformly, “a form of praise to God and an expression of trust in his promises.”36 Brueggemann writes that the typical move from “plea to praise” is related to the fact that most end in hope: “The situation and/or attitude of the speaker is transformed, and . . . the lament is

33  Strawn, “The Psalms,” 7. Despite the great work by Gunkel, Strawn, Brueggemann, Westermann, and others, Bruegemmann notes that “scholars have only walked around the edges of the theological significance of the lament psalm.” Walter Brueggemann, “The Costly Loss of Lament” in The Psalms: The Life of Faith, ed. Patrick D. Miller (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), 101. 34  Strawn, “The Psalms,” 9. 35  Ibid. See also Mandolfo, “Language of Lament in the Psalms,” 115f. For a slightly different categorization of the typical form of lament, see Eklund, Jesus Wept, 6. 36 Todd Billings, Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer & Life in Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2015), 45. See also Bernhard Anderson and Steven Bishop, Out of the Depths; Tim Bulkeley, “Does Jeremiah Confess, Lament, or Complain?,” 8; and Rebekah Eklund, Jesus Wept, 16. Similarly, Rah writes that “both the internal . . . content of the lament psalm and its external structure and arrangement reveal an expectation of trust and hope that leads to praise following the presentation of a plea rising out of lament.” Rah, Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times, 66.

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104  Analyzing Prayer resolved by and corresponds to the song of thanksgiving.”37 Hope here should be understood as the theological virtue of hope, and thus is a thick notion that I don’t have time to unpack here. But as Billings notes, the mere fact of lamenting toward God presupposes some degree of hope: “Total despair would not invoke God’s presence. Total despair—with no hope at all—does not pray.”38 So if one can still pray, despair is not total; there is at least a glimmer of hope.39 Rah writes that “lament presents an appropriate response to suffering, but lament must also correspond to the recognition that God is in control.”40 I think it’s too strong to say that Biblical lament must end in such a recognition or explicit affirmation of hope, though I think it usually should (and usually does).41 But even if it did, that wouldn’t mean that lament per se always has to.42 A lament can model a disposition to hope (more on this later in the chapter) even if it doesn’t explicitly invoke that hope.43

The Character of Lament In light of the foregoing discussion of the form that lament takes in the Psalms,44 I want to focus in this section on paradigmatic elements of lament. In line with what I said earlier, these shouldn’t be seen as necessary and jointly sufficient conditions, but rather those features that are characteristic of prototypical Biblical lament.

37  Walter Brueggemann, “The Costly Loss of Lament,” 99. See also Anderson and Bishop, Out of the Depths; Bulkeley, “Does Jeremiah Confess, Lament, or Complain?,” 8; and Eklund, Jesus Wept, 60ff. For a dissenting view that biblical lament need not always end in an affirmation of hope, see Mandolfo, “Language of Lament in the Psalms,” 126: “The language of reassurance and that of complaint sit side by side in the lament psalms without either getting the final say.” 38 Billings, Rejoicing in Lament, 49. 39  Here I have in mind the vice of despair—that vice that is contrary to the theological virtue of hope. It might also be that natural hope is sufficient to move one to pray, even if one lacks the theological virtues of faith and hope. But in such a situation, such hope will be vulnerable and unstable. Relatedly, I think that lament is compatible with feelings of despair, in part because I think the theological virtues of faith and hope are compatible with feelings of despair. Rah’s discussion of Lamentations contains a wonderful discussion of how that Biblical text “recognizes that hope can arise in the midst of suffering because of God’s faithfulness.” Rah, Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times, 106. 40  Ibid., 77. 41  See, for instance, Psalm 88, which Strawn describes as a prayer “in the depths” rather than “out of the depths.” Strawn, “The Psalms,” 12. 42  To be clear, I don’t think that Billings and Rah are concerned with lament per se, but rather focused on Biblical lament. I’m inclined to side with those who even think that Biblical lament need not always end in hope (in part because I hold that hope is an infused virtue). 43  Thanks to Aaron Cobb for pressing me to make this point explicit. 44  And, if Eklund is right, elsewhere in the canon as well; see Eklund, Jesus Wept.

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Toward an Account of Lamenting Well  105 First, I think it’s clear that lament is not dispassionate. It’s not simply an intellectual accounting of what is wrong with the world; it is instead “deeply felt. It is not simply a conscious, cognitive exercise.”45 Lament could here perhaps be understood as what Robert  C.  Roberts refers to as “concern-­based construals”: the agent’s understanding of the situation, as something that they are personally invested in, produces an affective response that calls for action.46 The object of the concern that gives rise to lament can be either a past event, a present trouble, or a looming but still future event, “an anticipation of the coming loss.”47 Brueggemann highlights the prophet Jeremiah as an instance of this: “He weeps not because he is an emotional wreck, but because he already sees clearly the coming disaster that will not be averted.”48 Lament is a cry, sometimes a command for God to do something to fix the wrong which has spurred the lament. In lament one cries “this should not be.” Lament is so impassioned that it often leads one to call out God concerning his absence, his inaction, his silence.49 In lament, one “take[s] initiative” with God.50 One does not do this without thumos. In lament, one dares to call for or even enter the divine audience with an agenda. While the cry to God in lament is not dispassionate, neither is it generic. Lament “challenges the notion of an abstract relationship with God.”51 The God to whom the lament is offered is a particular God, and presupposes a particular view of God’s character, His commitments, His care, as well as a particular view of what justice demands of God.52 Eklund puts this point as follows: Lament thus depends on the idea that attacks from enemies, illness, and so forth are not merely wrong in a general sense, but that they violate something about this relationship with this particular God; suffering disrupts God’s promises to be a faithful God to this people and to bring salvation to them.53 45 Rah, Prophetic Lament, 56. 46  See Robert Roberts, Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), particularly chapter 1. 47  Brueggemann, “The Costly Loss of Lament,” 58. 48  Ibid., 59. 49  For a good discussion of God’s silence in the face of lament, and one which directly engages the Psalms, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Silence of the God Who Speaks” in Divine Hiddenness: New Essays, ed. Daniel Howard-­Snyder and Paul Moser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 215–28. 50  Brueggemann, “The Costly Loss of Lament,” 103. 51 Rah, Prophetic Lament, 178. 52  Mandolfo writes that “the relationship between suffering, God, and justice is more or less explicit throughout every lament psalm . . . Lament language might be considered one of humanity’s earliest attempts to grapple with the conundrum of God’s role in suffering.” Mandolfo, “Language of Lament in the Psalms,” 125. 53 Eklund, Jesus Wept, 8.

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106  Analyzing Prayer Eklund differentiates two major strands of lament: protest and penitence. Protest laments call “on God to account for the ways things are wrong in the world, and [demand] that God listen and respond—to set right what is wrong, mend what is broken, and bring light to the darkness.”54 Consider, in this context, Wolterstorff ’s words on the importance of protest, which could easily be seen in the context of lament: We shall join with God himself in keeping alive the protest against . . . unredemptive suffering. Till breath dies within us we shall insist that this must not be. We shall reject all consolation that comes in the form of . . . urging us to be content with unredemptive suffering . . . We shall keep the memory alive so as to keep the protest alive. And in the stories we tell of our own lives, we shall not disown the suffering but own it.55

Lament often helps us protest with such an agenda. According to Eklund, the second major strand of lament, the penitential laments, focuses on confession and requests for mercy. She acknowledges that these two forms “often overlap and occur simultaneously, or are in­ter­woven.”56 Eklund thinks that New Testament laments, and their role in Christian liturgy, have focused on penitence more than protest, though it is not clear to me that anything normative follows from this.57 Recognizing that Jesus’ laments have no sin of his own to be penitential for gives us further reason to see protest (or at least nonpersonal penitence) as completely appropriate.58 Furthermore, one might also see penitence as a subcategory of protest, since the state of affairs that one laments as wrong is not external but internal (i.e., penitence might involve protesting against some problematic feature of one’s own character or actions). In calling on God to help transform the penitential

54  Ibid., 10. For more on the connection between lament and protest, see also Billings, Rejoicing in Lament, 11, 19f. 55  Wolterstorff, “The Silence of the God Who Speaks,” 227. Wolterstorff continues, in a way that is important for us to remember: “There will be more to our stories than that; but there will be at least that.” 56 Eklund, Jesus Wept, 10. See also Donald Moffat, “The Profit and Loss of Lament: Rethinking Aspects of the Relationship between Lament and Penitential Prayer” in Spiritual Complaint: The Theology and Practice of Lament, ed. Miriam  J.  Bier and Tim Bulkeley (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013) and Tiemeyer, “The Doubtful Gain of Penitence” for more on the relationship between lament and penitence. 57  As Mike Rea has pointed out to me in conversation, this increased focus on penitence in the New Testament is likely connected with the more exalted conception of God that is at work there than is found in parts of the Old Testament. 58  See Eklund, Jesus Wept, 14.

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Toward an Account of Lamenting Well  107 heart, one still implores God to act, in light of His character, to address and change what is wrong. At this point, let me summarize then what I think is paradigmatic of lament, even if these various components are not intended to demarcate all cases of lament from what fails to be lament: Lament is an impassioned—a lived and live—prayer or cry of sorrow or mourning or grief, in the face of what is perceived to be injustice or other wrongness in the world, aimed at God and from within a particular communal understanding of God’s nature and promise to individuals; in which because of their hope the petitioner feels able to raise her concerns and even perceived inaction on God’s part and yet does so within the context that God is, in fact, faithful. The petitioner thus resides in hope that God, who is faithful, will respond appropriately.

In the next two subsections, I explore more fully two aspects of the above characterization that, while hinted at in the earlier discussion, bear more elaboration. In the final section of the chapter, I begin to characterize how we can lament well—that is, what the virtue of proper lament might look like.

Lament and Hope In the foregoing, I indicated my belief that not all lament needs to end in an explicit affirmation of trust in God or hope in His providential control in order to qualify as hope.59 Nevertheless, Christian lament is typically understood as closely connected with the theological virtue of hope. The virtue of hope has historically been understood as a reaching toward the ultimate goodness of our perfect union with God. Insofar as a person laments some state of affairs, they believe they don’t have the perfection of that union. Aquinas’s account of the nature of hope includes the following two characteristics: Hope looks toward the future, for a person never hopes for what he or she already possesses. Hope seeks a good object that still lies in the future; the 59 See William  C.  Mattison III, “Hope” in Being Good: Christian Virtues for Everyday Life, ed. Michael W. Austin and R. Douglas Geivett (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 107–25 and Romanus Cessario, O.  P., “The Theological Virtue of Hope (IIa IIae, qq.17–22)” in The Ethics of Aquinas, ed. Stephen J. Pope (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 232–43.

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108  Analyzing Prayer person who presently and actually realizes the attachment of something desired reacts with joy [rather than hope] . . . One speaks of hoping only when the attainment of the good, future object involves some difficulty or an element of arduousness.60

Hope enables us to adhere to God’s promises toward us, and ultimately toward God as the source from where we shall derive perfect goodness. That is, in hope we trust in God for obtaining of perfect happiness, a state in which lament will no longer be appropriate. But insofar as hope is for a future good, this is an achievement which the one who hopes doesn’t presently possess. For Aquinas, one of the vices opposed to the theological virtue of hope is the vice of despair.61 Despair understood as a vice involves a fixed commitment of the will against the possibility of achieving that good at which hope aims. Lament can thus be a sign that hope is not lost, that despair has not yet set in. One would not lament and thereby call on God to do something that one despaired that God would not do. Hope then involves a trust in and commitment to the loving God, a trust that the object of one’s lament will be made right.62 Ultimately, the “difficult but possible future good,” that hope aims at our perfect union with God in love, with hope (like faith) pointing toward the greatest theological virtue: love. Love so understood is a kind of “participation” in the life of God in which we align with God and all the goods that God seeks to promote. Lament can then help orient us toward those goods that are not yet possessed, and to actively live into a life aimed at securing those goods that God ultimately intends for us.

Lament as Communal As mentioned earlier, the lament psalms are typically divided between individual laments and communal laments.63 In his recent book Rejoicing in 60  Ibid., 233. 61  William  C. Mattison III, “Hope,” 113. As indicated above in footnote 39, the vice of despair is distinct from the emotion of despair. Not all instances of the latter are rooted in the former. The vice of presumption is also opposed to the theological virtue of hope, but those situations that lead to lament make despair more likely than presumption. 62  Two excellent treatments of the connections between hope and trust are Victoria McGeer, “Trust, Hope, and Empowerment,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (2008), 237–54 and Adrienne Martin, Hope We Hope: A Moral Psychology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), particularly chapter  5. Aaron  D.  Cobb and Adam Green, “The Theological Virtue of Hope as a Social Virtue,” Journal of Analytic Theology 5 (2017), 230–50) is an excellent discussion of how the theological virtue of hope is itself social. 63 See Anderson and Bishop, Out of the Depths, 55ff. and Bier, “The Unique Contribution of Lamentations 4 in the Book of Lamentations,” 18–33.

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Toward an Account of Lamenting Well  109 Lament, one of Billings’s central themes is that prayer in general, and praying the Psalms in particular, is always a communal act.64 Even if one offers a prayer as an individual, it is a prayer offered by a member of the Body of Christ, and thus offered within the context of the Church. Just as one laments to God as understood in a particular context, one always prays from within the framework provided by one’s community. No act is in isolation from its larger context. Furthermore, even for the individual laments, a leading understanding is that the confession of trust and praise that typically completes the lament may have been uttered by the officiating priest in the temple as a response of communal faith once the lament had been prayed by an individual or group.65 In his book, which is a reflection on Biblical lament through the lens of his own cancer diagnosis, Billings ties prayer to the body of Christ. He talks about how sometimes during his cancer treatment and as he was coming to terms with his diagnosis, he felt “too weak to hope, too tired and despairing to even lament.”66 It is in such a case that the community can hope and lament on one’s behalf.67 The fact that lament not only can but should be communal should not surprise us, and for at least two reasons: 1. The Christian life is inherently communal; what it means to be a part of the Body of Christ is to live as a member of that larger body. We are to rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn;68 and lament with those who lament. 2. As with most things in life, particularly those things that are hard, doing this well doesn’t come naturally. If, in addition to there being right or appropriate ways to lament, there are also inappropriate ways, then the community can help us learn what it means to lament in the right ways. This realization leads us directly into the last point

64  See, among other places, Billings, Rejoicing in Lament, 51f. For a discussion of the ways in which Israel used Scriptural laments in communal worship and how that practice could inform Christian communal worship, see Robin Parry, “Wrestling with Lamentations in Christian Worship” in Spiritual Complaint: The Theology and Practice of Lament, ed. Miriam J. Bier and Tim Bulkeley (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013), 125–52. 65  See Strawn, “The Psalms,” 11 and the materials cited there in footnote 19. 66 Billings, Rejoicing in Lament, 89. 67  For discussions of how one’s community can help one both lament and have hope, see Aaron Cobb, Loving Samuel: Suffering, Dependence, and the Calling of Love (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), chapter 23 and Rah, Prophetic Lament, 120. 68  Romans 12: 15.

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110  Analyzing Prayer that I want to make about lament, and that is that we can learn what it means to lament well, to lament excellently, to lament virtuously.69

The Virtue of Lament I want to end the chapter in this last section with a few words about what we might think of as the virtue of lamenting well.70 Here, as elsewhere, I approach ethics from within the broadly virtue theoretic family of views that is associated with (among others) Aristotle, Aquinas, and—more recently—Anscombe, Foot, MacIntyre, and Roberts.71 On this family of views, the moral virtues are rationally informed dispositions to feel, desire, or act appropriately given the details of a particular situation, and to take proper pleasure or pain in doing so, in a way that contributes to the good of the individual and her community. Insofar as they are informed by right reason, the moral virtues depend upon the intellectual virtue of prudence. The agent’s taking the proper pleasure or pain is needed to differentiate virtue from mere continence. And most virtues will be paired with two opposing vices, one a vice of excess and one a vice of deficiency. Within this framework, we might think that a person is virtuous to the degree that she, guided by right reason, laments about the proper things at appropriate times, and feels the proper pain (in the object of lament) and pleasure (in the hope within which the lament is framed). It will probably be easy for us to imagine a case where an individual laments inappropriately—perhaps, for 69  For a discussion of the roles that lament can and should play in specifically communal liturgy, see Parry, “Wrestling with Lamentations in Christian Worship,” and Colin Buchanan, “Liturgy and Lament,” also in Spiritual Complaint: The Theology and Practice of Lament, ed. Miriam J. Bier and Tim Bulkeley (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013), 153–69. 70  In personal correspondence, Aaron Cobb has suggested that there might not be a virtue of lamenting well, but rather a number of virtues involved, or even a number of particular virtues that govern lamenting well (much as both generosity and magnificence, for Aristotle, govern giving well of one’s wealth). While I think this is an important question, I’m less interested here in the number of virtues involved in lamenting well, but what lamenting well would involve. For an excellent paper on individuating virtues, though with a focus on virtues that are excellences with respect to emotion, see Ryan West, “Anger and the Virtues: A Critical Study in Virtue Individuation,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (2016), 877–97. Furthermore, one might be inclined to ask exactly what kind of virtue is it—that is, is it a moral virtue or a theological question? I think that’s a great question, and my answer is tentative. I’m inclined to think that the virtue (or virtues) of lamenting well are moral rather than theological, both since I think one could lament excellently even if there is no independent reason to think that the individual has been infused with the theological virtue of faith and since I think that lament doesn’t require hope. Nevertheless, given the complex relationship that holds between the moral and theological virtues in general, much more needs to be said on this matter. 71  See, for instance, Kevin Timpe and Craig Boyd, “Introduction” in Virtues and Their Vices, ed. Kevin Timpe and Craig A. Boyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–34.

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Toward an Account of Lamenting Well  111 instance, she calls into question God’s goodness and faithfulness because her preferred sportsball team fails to win the big game (or match or whatever). Lament can be excessive when it overvalues the importance or nature of the good whose loss or uncertainty one is lamenting. One could also lament falsely if one laments over a state of affairs which didn’t obtain.72 However, I  want to suggest that there’s also a disposition, both in individuals and communities, to not lament enough—that is, that there is conceptual space (and I think reason to believe that this space is actually populated) for people or communities being disposed toward too little lament. My hope is that the earlier discussion of biblical lament has already helped establish that there is such a thing as proper lament—that is, that there are some things that it is “meet and right” for us to lament. Often, the Church has an obligation to help the marginalized, the oppressed, and the sorrowful find their voice. If that’s the case, then failing to lament those things appropriately will also be problematic. Simply put, given its present sinfulness, we ought to be led to engage in lament by various things in our world.73 Billings suggests that the Psalms can play a role in our seeing what it might mean to lament properly. He writes: “The Psalms are given to us as a divine pedagogy for our affections—God’s way of reshaping our desires and perceptions so that they learn to lament in the right things and take joy in the right things.”74 If there is a virtue (or virtues) of lamenting well then it, like all virtues, will be good for its possessor and, in turn, for the community or communities to which the individual belongs.75 How so? Let me suggest a number of ways. First, as Brueggemann notes, in lament, the importance and legitimacy of the petitioning party is “legitimated.”76 Lament gives a voice to those who have been oppressed, harmed, or otherwise treated unjustly, ensuring “that their plight is neither ignored nor minimized.”77 Brueggemann notes two 72  I don’t mean to suggest that all such lament would be vicious, insofar as not all epistemic failures are indicative of personal failures. For some of the complexities involved in understanding culpable versus inculpable ignorance, see Kevin Timpe, “Tracing and the Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility,” The Modern Schoolman 88 (2011), 5–28. 73  See, for instance, Billings, Rejoicing in Lament, 76. 74  Ibid., 38. 75  This will be at least true as a general rule. I leave it for another time to explore whether virtues are always good for the individual and the community, or if it is possible for the two to be in tension or even conflict. 76  Brueggemann, “The Costly Loss of Lament,” 101. In the remainder of this article, Brueggemann explores the role that lament has in “redistributing power,” and the costs to the Christian community when this particular kind of speech act is silenced or eliminated. Relatedly, Rah writes that “part of the important work in ministries of justice for the marginalized is the empowering of those who suffer to find their voice” (Rah, Prophetic Lament, 179). 77  Jeanette Mathews, “Framing Lament: Providing a Context for the Expression of Pain” in Spiritual Complaint: The Theology and Practice of Lament, ed. Miriam J. Bier and Tim Bulkeley (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013), 193.

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112  Analyzing Prayer goods that are lost when communities do not allow for the proper expression of lament. The first “loss that results from the absence of lament is the loss of  genuine covenant interaction, since the second party of the covenant (the petitioner) has become voiceless or has a voice that is permitted to speak only praise and doxology.”78 In other words, the honest appraisal of life—a truth that virtue ought to aim at—is skewed when only positive emotions and prayers are permitted. The lack of lament can be seen as a kind of silencing, which has social implications.79 Virtuous lament, it seems to me, shares a number of features in this context with virtuous anger. In an excellent recent treatment of the emotion of anger, Zac Cogley suggests that anger has three functions: 1. an appraisal of wrongdoing, 2. its role as a motivating force, and 3. its communicative function. According to Cogley, all three of these functions are crucial to virtuous anger: “possessing excellence with respect to only one of anger’s functions is . . . insufficient for virtue.”80 Lament plausibly has parallel functions and, like anger, will involve a proper appreciation of and desire to speak against wrongdoing. Lament not only involves the appraisal that the world is not as it should be but also motivates the individual to a number of actions (not just prayer, but solidarity with those who are being treated unjustly) and can communicate the wrongness of the present situation to both God and others.81 The second way in which the loss of proper lament can harm the community of faith that Brueggemann mentions “is the stifling of the question of 78  Brueggemann, “The Costly Loss of Lament,” 102. 79  For another discussion of how failure to participate in communal lament can harm the worshiping community, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Acting Liturgically: Philosophical Reflections on Religious Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), particularly chapter 3. 80  Zac Cogley, “A Study of Virtuous and Vicious Anger” in Virtues and Their Vices, ed. Kevin Timpe and Craig A. Boyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 199. See also Rebecca DeYoung, “What Are You Guarding? Virtuous Anger and Lifelong Practice” in Becoming Good: New Philosophical Essays in Aid of Virtue Formation, ed. Scott Cleveland and Adam Pelser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), ch. 8. 81 See Terence Cuneo, Ritualized Faith: Essays on the Philosophy of Liturgy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), particularly chapters 1 and 2, for a discussion of solidarity in worship. In personal correspondence, Aaron Cobb suggests that the expression of proper lament might be an activity rooted in virtues connected with the relevant emotion type. So, for laments that are connected with injustice and the anger this promotes, lamenting well involves an expression of proper anger. For laments connected with misfortune/suffering and the sorrow this promotes, lamenting well involves an expression of proper sadness.

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Toward an Account of Lamenting Well  113 theodicy. I do not refer to some esoteric question of God’s coping with ontological evil. Rather, I mean the capacity to raise and legitimate questions of justice in terms of social goods, social access, and social power.”82 I particularly like how Brueggemann connects theodicy here with the need to speak prophetically and take action against those social structures that lead to suffering. Learning how to lament well has a formative element. By routinely engaging in a practice, we can come to shape our orientation to the practice of lament. Robin Parry sees this as a part of spiritual formation involving habituation, a “learning by doing.”83 He writes: Engaging in the stories of the community in communal worship and Christian practice shapes us into a certain kind of people—people of Christian character. Clearly on this understanding of being formed into a Christian disciple there is an important place for engaging communally in practices that we might not fully understand and which might not express how we currently feel. But the ongoing participation in such practices is essential for founded spiritual formation. So liturgical engagement with Lamentations [and scriptural lament more generally] can, in principle, play a role in the training of Christian emotions—not simply expressing how we currently feel but training us to see and to feel in certain kinds of ways.84

By recovering the practice of lament, the Church could actually participate in the formation of its members. Worship, like spiritual formation more broadly, can involve not just the love of God but also love of those one worships with. The process of helping them form virtue is one way of loving them.85 We can love others by helping them learn how to lament properly. Failing to lament well, and failing to help others do the same, can thus be an indication of disordered love, or of lax

82 Brueggemann, “The Costly Loss of Lament,” 104. See also Moffat, “The Profit and Loss of Lament,” 90. Relatedly, Rah writes that “acts of justice and racial reconciliation require a deeper engagement with the other—an engagement that acknowledges suffering rather than glosses over it.” Rah, Prophetic Lament, 21. 83  Parry, “Wrestling with Lamentations in Christian Worship,” 149. For other discussions of worship, see James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016), particularly chapters 1 and 2 and Wolterstorff, Acting Liturgically. 84  Parry, “Wrestling with Lamentations in Christian Worship,” 149. 85  Here I’m thinking not primarily of the theological virtue of love, which takes God as its proper object, but the virtue of rightly being oriented to the good of other humans and being willing to work toward their good as one is able.

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114  Analyzing Prayer love—i.e., of sloth.86 To fail to lament with others is to fail to satisfy the demands of love. Insofar as we are called to unite with those we love in their suffering, we are called to lament with them. The disordering of love leads to the disordering of lament; and the disordering of lament can contribute to the disordering of love.87 The virtue of loving well will be closely connected with a number of other virtues. (If there’s not a single virtue involved in loving well but rather a cluster, it may be that some of these associated virtues are actually themselves virtues of loving well.88) Other virtues that will also be connected here are consolation, mercy (misericordia), compassion (literally, the virtue which rightly disposes one to suffer with others89), and solidarity with others in their suffering.90 One of my hopes regarding analytic reflection on lament is that we’ll be better able to think about these connections in the future.91

Conclusion Rah refers to lament as “the proper response to a broken world.”92 Part of what I’ve done in this chapter is to give an initial account of what can be proper and fitting about lament. I realize that many of the ideas I’ve introduced are merely exploratory rather than completely worked out. As I said in the first section, I intend this chapter not as a work of completed analytic theology but as an opportunity for us to engage in the process together. There are a number of connections that need to be developed beyond even those that I’ve mentioned here. There’s further work to be done, for instance, on the connection between lament and the problems of divine silence and divine hiddenness,93 as well as the need to localize appropriate lament practices. Furthermore, there’s certainly space for more substantive reflection on how 86  An excellent treatment of sloth as “lax love” and “a vice marked by resistance to the transforming demands of God’s love,” see Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2009), 91. 87  Thanks to Craig Boyd for encouraging me to flesh out some of the ideas in this paragraph more fully. 88  See Stump, Wandering in Darkness, 25 and Cobb, Loving Samuel. 89  See ibid., 15f., 23–5, and especially the poem on page 46. 90  I owe a number of these connections to Aaron Cobb. 91  The discussion of the role of hope also illustrates how having one virtue can make it easier to develop and exemplify another. The stronger one’s grounding in the theological virtue of hope, the more prepared one may be emotionally to confront directly the situations that lead to lament, rather than feeling the need to pass over them in silence or deny their impact on one’s life and faith. 92 Rah, Prophetic Lament, 43. 93  See, for instance, Eklund, Jesus Wept, 9 and Cobb, Loving Samuel.

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Toward an Account of Lamenting Well  115 lament can contribute to spiritual practice, showing that analytic theology need not be “spiritually sterile,” but can actively contribute to the good of the Church.94 But I hope that the present treatment can provide a useful resource for those future investigations.95 94  Here I’m again thinking of the excellent discussion in William Wood, “Analytic Theology as a Way of Life,” Journal of Analytic Theology 2 (2014), 43–60. 95  Previous versions of this chapter benefited from the constructive and useful feedback of Aaron Cobb, Mike Rea, Tom McCall, Katilyn Eekhoff, Craig Boyd, David McNaughton, James Arcadi, and a number of participants in the Analytic Theology seminar at Fuller Theological Seminary.

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7 Theology in the Second Person Christian Dogmatics as a Mode of Prayer Ross D. Inman [T]heological work does not merely begin with prayer and is not merely accompanied by it; in its totality it is peculiar and characteristic of theology that it can be performed only in the act of prayer. Karl Barth

Introduction My aim in this chapter is to explore the irreducibly second-­ personal ­dimension of theological inquiry. In the first (and longest) section I aim to sketch a component of a larger ontology of Holy Scripture, one that I argue is indicative of a second-­person dimension to Holy Scripture, namely Scripture as divine speech or address. And if Holy Scripture as the principal ground of dogmatics is irreducibly second-­personal at some level, then arguably the dogmatic task ought to be carried out in the manner of interpersonal relatedness to God, what I call “prayerful dogmatics.” In the next section I highlight some historical reflections from the work of Karl Barth on the inseparability of dogmatics and prayer. And I conclude in the third section by exploring how the notion of prayerful dogmatics can serve as a guard rail that keeps the theological life virtuous as well as properly theological and thereby formational (2 Cor. 3: 18)

An Ontology of Holy Scripture as Divine Speech As I understand it here, the task of sketching an ontology of Holy Scripture involves outlining a biblically, philosophically, and historically informed account of both the form and function of Holy Scripture; what, fundamentally, is Scripture and what might its overall teloi or ends be in God’s redemptive

Ross D. Inman, Theology in the Second Person: Christian Dogmatics as a Mode of Prayer In: Analyzing Prayer: Theological and Philosophical Essays. Edited by: Oliver D. Crisp, James M. Arcadi, and Jordan Wessling, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859044.003.0008

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Theology in the Second Person  117 economy. While I have neither the time nor the expertise to develop a full-­ fledged ontology of Holy Scripture in this sense, in this section I want to focus in on a single, albeit fundamental, aspect of such an account that points to the second-­personal (interpersonal) nature of Holy Scripture. I then turn to examine the potential implications of such an ontology of Holy Scripture for the task of dogmatic theology. To affirm with the Second London Baptist Confession that Holy Scripture is “the Word of God written”1 is to affirm, in part, that it is a locus of God’s communication and self-­ disclosure to humanity. Being uniquely “God-­ breathed” (2 Tim. 3: 16–17, theopneustos) and thus ultimately the product of God’s communicative agency, Scripture ought to be accepted “not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God” (1 Thess. 2: 13). Indeed, Scripture often closely associates, even identifies, the written words produced by human communicative acts with divine speech itself (Gal. 3: 8; Rom. 9: 17; Acts 4: 24–5; Matt. 19: 4–5).2 While the written text of Scripture is indeed the immediate product of subordinate human authorship, Scripture has the triune God as its principal author; one can rightly say, in some sense, that what canonical Holy Scripture asserts, God asserts. Along these lines, English Puritan divine John Owen (1616–1683) remarked “[Scripture] is from God— entirely from him. As to the doctrine contained in it, and the words therein that doctrine is delivered, it is wholly his; what that speaks, he speaks himself. He speaks in it and by it; and so it is vested with all the moral authority of God over his creatures.”3 In the Christian tradition, Holy Scripture is a unique locus of divine speech, utterance, or address to humanity. In reference to God’s “glorious self-­ revelation” in Holy Scripture, Hilary of Poitiers (ad 300–68) claimed that the Word of God is nothing less than God’s own utterance and self-­witness: Since then we are to discourse of the things of God, let us assume that God has full knowledge of Himself, and bow with humble reverence to His 1 Second London Baptist Confession, chapter  1, article 2. In Baptist Confessions of Faith, Second Revised Edition, eds. William Lumpkin and Bill J. Leonard (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press), 231. 2 See B. B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia, PA: P&R Publishing, 2012) for fuller treatment of this identification thesis. Here I ignore what Scripture itself says about its various ordained ends in God’s redemptive economy. A larger account of the ontology of Scripture would include the function of the word of God as being a vital source of human sustenance (Deut. 8: 3, 32: 47; Matt. 4: 4); a source of salvific wisdom (2 Tim. 3: 15) and sanctifying light to help illumine and change the very structure of the human soul (Ps. 19: 7–11; Heb. 4: 12); the means by which the universe was created (Heb. 11: 3) and is currently sustained by God (Heb. 1: 3); and the means by which believers engage the kingdom of darkness (Eph. 6: 17). 3  John Owen, The Divine Original of Scripture, Volume XVI, Ch. 1 (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1968), 306.

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118  Analyzing Prayer words. For He Whom we can only know through His own utterances is the fitting witness concerning Himself.4

Moreover, John Chrysostom (349–407), in his Homily on Psalm 95, emphasized the notion that Scripture is divine utterance when he said, “But when the testimony of the voice of God is uttered from the scripture, it confirms at once the discourse of him who speaks, and the mind of him who hears.”5 Saint Augustine (354–430) pointed to the primacy of Christ the Word, the second person of the Trinity, in God’s communicative discourse in Holy Scripture: There is but a single discourse of God amplified through all the scriptures, dearly beloved. Through the mouths of many holy persons a single Word makes itself heard. That Word, being God-­with-­God in the beginning, has no syllables, because he is not confined by time. Yet we should not find it surprising that to meet our weakness he descended to the discrete sounds we use, for he also descended to take to himself the weakness of our human body.6

Along the very same lines, the sixteenth-­century Reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) noted that one “must deal with Scripture in such a way that you think just as God Himself has spoken”; Luther likens the divine speech in Holy Scripture to human-­to-­human discourse, “God does not deal with us in accordance with his majesty but assumes human form and speaks with us throughout all Scripture as man speaks with man.”7 John Calvin echoes something similar in his commentary on 1 Peter 1: 25, where he emphasizes the nature of Holy Scripture as divine speech by saying “We have to do with the Word which came forth from God’s mouth and was given to us . . . God’s will is to speak to us by the mouths of the apostles and prophets . . . Their mouths are to us as the mouth of the only true God.”8 And in his Institutes, Calvin affirms that “ . . . Scripture is from God; but above human judgment we affirm

4 Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity, 1.18, Volume 25 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1968), 18. 5  Quoted in William Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849), 685. 6  St. Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms 103.4.1 (New York: New City Press, 2003). 7 Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis, chs 21–5, in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Walter A. Hansen (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1964), 4: 61. 8 John Calvin, “Commentary on 1 Peter 1: 25” in Calvin: Commentaries, ed. J.  Haroutunian (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1958), 83.

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Theology in the Second Person  119 with utter certainty (just as if we were gazing upon the majesty of God himself) that it has flowed to us from the very mouth of God by the ministry of men.”9 Scripture is “Holy” in that in it the viva vox Dei, the living voice of God, is heard. In fact, the notion of Holy Scripture as the medium of the viva vox Dei was foundational to the early Protestant polemic against the Roman Catholic contention that ecclesial authority was fundamental in authenticating the divine origin of Holy Scripture. The Cambridge theologian and English divine William Whitaker (1548–95) in his Disputation on Holy Scripture, what is arguably the most sophisticated early Protestant polemic against Rome concerning Holy Scripture, remarks: “so we receive indeed the scriptures sent to us from God through the church, and yet do not believe it to be sent from God solely on the church’s authority, but on account of the voice of God, which we recognize speaking clearly and expressly in the scriptures.”10 Consequently, Holy Scripture is nothing less than divine testimony, precisely because God himself speaks through the humanly-­authored texts that make up the canon.11 But how exactly are we to understand the traditional notion that Holy Scripture is the medium of divine speech or address? How, exactly, does God personally address humanity by way of humanly-­authored texts? In my estimation, we can do no better than to turn to the work of Nicholas Wolterstorff on the nature of Divine discourse.12 Wolterstorff finds in contemporary philosophy of language, in particular speech-­ act theory as proposed by J. L. Austin and John Searle, the resources by which to unpack the traditional claim that Holy Scripture is the medium of the viva vox Dei. The fundamental insight of Austinian speech-­act theory is that speech in general is a performative action; one does something by speaking. In uttering or inscribing a linguistic token (e.g. a word or sentence), one thereby 9  John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville, KY: Westminster, 2006), 7.5. Also, in the first of his Decades, Heinrich Bullinger stated, “Let us therefore in all things believe the word of God delivered to us by the scriptures. Let us think that the Lord himself, which is the very living and eternal God, doth speak to us by the scriptures.” See Heinrich Bullinger, Decades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849), 56–7. 10 Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, 298. The Protestant notion that Holy Scripture is self-­authenticating in virtue of its being the medium of the viva vox Dei (rather than deriving its authority from the Church), is succinctly summarized by Heinrich Bullinger in the Second Helvetic Confession: “We believe and confess the canonical Scriptures of the holy prophets and apostles of both Testaments to be the true Word of God, and to have sufficient authority of themselves, not of men. For God himself spoke to the fathers, prophets, apostles, and still speaks to us through the Holy Scriptures.” (Chapter 1); See also Calvin’s Institutes I.vii.5. 11 For more on the theme of Scripture as divine testimony see Mats Wahlberg, Revelation as Testimony: A Philosophical-­Theological Study (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014). 12  Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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120  Analyzing Prayer performs a locutionary act. In saying to my wife “Till death do us part” at our wedding ceremony, for example, I thereby perform the locutionary act of uttering the relevant English sentence. Or, by James’s inscribing “Arcadi was here” on the stall in the men’s restroom, he thereby performs a locutionary act (an uncharacteristic one at that). It is by way of locutionary acts that one performs what Austin calls illocutionary acts, performative acts like promising, asking, asserting, declaring, warning, commanding, consoling, consecrating, and exhorting. By way of uttering the sentence “Till death do us part” during my wedding ceremony, I promise lifelong loving commitment to my wife. Or, when James inscribes “Arcadi was here” on the bathroom stall, he thereby declares or announces to all passersby that he was at one time present in that place. By my performing an illocutionary act (promising) by way of a locutionary act (“Till death do us part”), I bring about the event of successfully informing my wife and those in attendance of my intentions of lifelong marital commitment, what Austin refers to as the perlocutionary act. The notion of “speaking” or “discoursing,” at its core, consists of one’s performing an illocutionary act or a series of such acts. Among the many categories of illocutionary acts include assertives (e.g. alleging, claiming, testifying), directives (e.g. asking, requesting, commanding), commissives (e.g. promising, inviting, offering), expressives (e.g. thanking, expressing contempt, expressing relief), and exercitives (e.g. adjourning, pardoning, nominating).13 There are, moreover, diverse and complex ways one might speak or address another by way of performing illocutionary acts. “Double agency discourse,” according to Wolterstorff, is the notion of an agent’s performing some illocutionary act by way of another agent’s locutionary or illocutionary act. Take first the case of an agent’s performing an illocutionary act by way of another agent’s locutionary act. By the president of the company’s signing a letter produced by the locutionary act of her secretary, a letter that says “Find a way to cut department spending or you’re fired!,” she issues a warning to its addressee and thus performs an illocutionary act by way of the locutionary act of her secretary; in so doing the secretary’s locutionary act becomes the president’s medium of discourse or speech. Wolterstorff offers two different ways of thinking about how one might perform illocutionary acts by way of another agent’s illocutionary acts. On

13  See William Alston, Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000) and John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

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Theology in the Second Person  121 the one hand, a person can say something by way of deputizing or delegating another to speak on one’s behalf, what Wolterstroff calls “delegated discourse.” If a US ambassador to Ireland has been commissioned to speak to on behalf of the president of the United States with respect to US–Irish foreign affairs, then the illocutionary acts performed by the ambassador on such matters— commands, verbal agreements, promises, etc.—count as the illocutionary acts of the president. Alternatively, one can speak by way of appropriating another agent’s illocutionary acts as one’s own, what Wolterstorff refers to as “appropriated discourse.” Earmarks of appropriated discourse include asserting: “I agree with what she said” or “He speaks for me” or “in the words of . . .” I might, for instance, enthusiastically declare my love for my wife by appropriating Dante’s discourse concerning his love for Beatrice in his La Vita Nuova (or I may do so with less bravado by giving my wife a pre-­made greeting card for our wedding anniversary). With respect to an ontology of Holy Scripture as fundamentally divine speech, Wolterstorff suggests that prophetic and apostolic discourse in particular is best characterized as delegated divine speech: The OT prophets and apostles were divinely commissioned or deputized to speak directly on God’s behalf to a particular audience. In this way, God speaks by way of the prophet Isaiah to king Hezekiah, or by way of the Apostle Paul to the churches in Thessalonica (1 Thess. 2: 13) and Corinth (1 Cor. 14: 37–8). But with respect to the entirety of the Scriptural canon as a single, literary unit, Wolsterstorff argues “All that is necessary for the whole [Bible] to be God’s book is that the human discourse it contains have been appropriated by God, as one single book, for God’s discourse . . . The event which counts as God’s appropriating this totality as the medium of God’s own discourse is presumably that rather drawn out event consisting of the Church’s settling on this totality as its canon.”14 Thus, to say that God is the principal author of canonical Holy Scripture is to say that God appropriates the various locutionary and illocutionary acts of the subordinate human authors as His own. The canon of Holy Scripture in its entirety, then, is the medium of the viva vox Dei; when one reads the humanly authored texts that compose canonical Holy Scripture, one is confronted with God’s intended medium by which He testifies, promises, commands, comforts, exhorts, restores, warns, and personally discloses himself to humanity.

14 Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse, 54.

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122  Analyzing Prayer Let me make two observations as to how the above ontology of Scripture is indicative of an irreducibly second-­personal dimension to the written word of God. First, the act of discoursing itself, i.e. the performance of illocutionary acts, whether human or divine, takes place within the second-­person perspective insofar as it requires persons to relate to one another as addresser and addressee. Whether explicitly or implicitly, performative speech acts are forms of interpersonal engagement and utilize second-­person grammatical devices as markers of address: “I request that you be fair,” “I testify to all of you that what I say is true,” “I beg you to let me go with you”; “I command you to stop at once.” As such, an act of discourse is constituted by at least two individuals relating to one another as addresser and addressee; the nature of discourse itself, understood along the lines of speech-­act theory, is irreducibly second-­personal. Bracketing off very important hermeneutical considerations (ones that would need to be worked out going forward), we can truly say that in Holy Scripture, God is the addresser, and his creatures are the addressee.15 Not only did God address both king Hezekiah in Judah’s pre-­exilic period, and the first-­ century churches in Thessalonica and Corinth by way of delegated speech, God continues to address and speak to his creatures by way of his appropriated discourse in canonical Holy Scripture.16 Herman Bavinck (1854–1921), the Dutch reformed theologian, nicely captures this notion of Holy Scripture as the medium of God’s ongoing discourse and self-­ presentation to humanity: Scripture was written by the Holy Spirit that it might serve him in guiding the church, in the perfecting of the saints, in the building up the body of Christ. In it God daily comes to his people. In it he speaks to his people, not from afar but from nearby. In it he reveals himself, from day to day, to believers in the fullness of his grace and truth. Through it he works his miracles of compassion and faithfulness. Scripture is the ongoing rapport between heavens and earth, between Christ and his church, between God

15  Wolterstorff offers a twofold hermeneutical schema to determine what God says within a particular text of Scripture. One first aims to determine the illocutionary act produced by the human author in producing the text, and aims then to determine whether there is good reason to think God, the divine author, was saying something different from the human illocutionary act(s). This second stage involves treating the entirety of Holy Scripture as a divinely authored, unitary literary whole. Here Wolterstorff (Divine Discourse, 204) employs what he calls the “fundamental principle,” which says “the interpreter takes the stance and content of my appropriating discourse to be that of your appropriated discourse, unless there is good reason to do otherwise.” 16 Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse, 54–7, unpacks this idea in terms of “presentational speech.”

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Theology in the Second Person  123 and his children. It does not just tie us to the past; it binds us to the living Lord in the heavens. It is the living voice of God, the letter of the omnipotent God to his creature. . .Divine inspiration, accordingly, is a permanent at­trib­ ute of Holy Scripture. It was not only “God-­breathed” at the time it was written; it is “God breathing.”17

But the interpersonal dimension to speech or discourse cuts much deeper than the mere presence of an addresser and an addressee in acts of discourse. Proponents of what is known as a “normative theory of speech,” such as Wolterstorff and more recently Terrence Cuneo in his 2014 book Speech and Morality: On the Metaethical Implications of Speaking,18 have argued that speech in general is a deeply normative enterprise; by performing a speech-­ act—promising, testifying, or asserting—one thereby acquires a normative standing within the moral economy.19 My promising to remain faithful to my wife by uttering the sentence “Till death do us part” in the appropriate context is, as Wolterstorff puts it, normatively ascribed to me in that I have altered the moral relationship between my wife and me (and also between God and those in attendance); in performing a particular locutionary act I thereby generate a new normative standing in the moral economy: I am now morally obligated to be faithful to my wife (God, others) and ought to be treated by her (and others) as having made such a promise. In his influential book The Second-­Person Standpoint, philosopher Stephen Darwall has emphasized the point that relations of obligation and accountability fundamentally obtain within the standpoint of the second-­person perspective, i.e. a network of moral agents bound together by second-­person relations generated primarily by speech acts. As Darwall puts it, “whether explicit and voiced—“You talkin’ to me?”—or only implicit and felt, as in a resentful sulk, the I-­you-­me structure of reciprocal address runs throughout thought and speech from the second-­person point of view.”20 According to the normative theory of speech defended by Wolterstorff and Cuneo, the generation of interpersonal relatedness in acts of discourse (e.g. obligation, rights, responsibilities, ­

17  Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 385. I owe this citation to Adam Green and Keith A. Quan, “More than Inspired Propositions,” Faith and Philosophy 29.4 (2012), 416–30. 18 Terrence Cuneo, Speech and Morality: On the Metaethical Implications of Speaking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) . 19 See also Wolterstorff ’s The God We Worship: An Exploration of Liturgical Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), chs 4–5. 20  Stephen Darwall, The Second-­Person Standpoint (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 3.

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124  Analyzing Prayer accountability) is what marks the difference between merely uttering ­sentences (locutionary acts) and speaking or discoursing (illocutionary acts); in other words, second-­person normative relations do the lion’s share in ­linking illocutionary acts to locutionary acts. To see this, suppose Jordan addresses an academic audience and performs the illocutionary act of asserting, Analytic theology is all the rage these days in contemporary theology, call this assertion “AT.” Note that Jordan’s merely uttering the English sentence “Analytic theology is all the rage these days in contemporary theology” doesn’t in and of itself count as (or as Cuneo puts it “count-­generate”) his asserting AT (he could be doing a microphone check prior to his talk or reading out loud to himself, for instance). Rather, on the normative theory of speech, Jordan asserts AT only if certain second-­person normative relations can be appropriately ascribed to Jordan and the audience (which likely extends beyond the immediate audience to include an implied audience, perhaps the academic guild in general). Jordan now takes on the responsibility for the fact that he has made a strong claim about the degree to which contemporary theologians are receptive to the project of Analytic Theology; he is now liable to those whom he has addressed and thus subject to blame and correction if his assertion does not reflect the current state of play in contemporary theology. Moreover, the audience now acquires a second-­person right and obligation to hold Jordan accountable if his assertion is, in fact, false. As Cuneo puts it: “[S]econd person accountability, if the normative theory of speech is correct, lies at the very heart of speech; it is, in part, what accounts for the hook-­up between locutionary and illocutionary acts” (e.g. between uttering the sentence “Analytic theology is all the rage these days in contemporary theology” and asserting AT).21 What might a normative theory of speech look like with respect to Holy Scripture as divinely appropriated human discourse? The divine appropriation of human discourse counts as God’s asserting, requesting, commanding, promising, testifying to, etc. only because God has freely and graciously chosen to alter God’s normative standing with respect to those to whom He speaks. In appropriating human discourse as His own speech, God freely brings into existence new normative relations between Himself and his ­creatures; interpersonal relations that would not have obtained had God remained silent. Consider 1 John 3: 1–2, where the apostle John states, “See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and 21 Cuneo, Speech and Morality, 105.

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Theology in the Second Person  125 such we are . . . Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is” (3: 1–2). In this single text, John performs a variety of illocutionary acts such as directing his audience to the love of God (directive: “See how great a love . . .”), testifying to the glorious reality of regeneration for those in Christ (assertive: “and such we are . . . now we are children of God”), and promising that those who are in Christ will be transformed to be like Christ at the consummation of all things (commissive: “we will be like Him . . .”). In his overseeing that the apostle John’s discourse be included within the canon of Holy Scripture, God thereby appropriates John’s illocutionary acts as His own speech and, in this case, arguably performs the very same illocutionary acts of directing, testifying, and promising as the apostle John, the human author.22 In doing so, God is now responsible for having testified to and made promises about certain present and future soteriological realities and is therefore internally obligated by His own perfect and loving character to be faithful and true to His creatures. In virtue of addressing His creatures by way of performative speech acts, which is itself an act of divine grace and accommodation,23 God acquires the normative status of being an appropriate subject of reactive attitudes with respect to those whom He addresses (e.g. gratitude, approbation, adoration, and blame, resentment, reproach).24

Christian Dogmatics and the Second-­Person Perspective Traditionally, at least within the Protestant tradition, Holy Scripture has served as the fundamental source or foundation for theological inquiry and practice. Along these lines, Jacob Arminius (1560–1609) remarked that “The rule of Theological Verity is not two-­ fold, one Primary and the other Secondary; but it is one and simple, the Sacred Scriptures.”25 Protestant 22  Wolterstorff (Divine Discourse, 208–16) provides a nice discussion of five different ways in which the illocutionary act of the divine author of Holy Scripture may differ from the subordinate human authors. 23  Calvin (Institutes 1.13.1) notes, “For who even of slight intelligence does not understand that, as nurses commonly do with infants, God is wont in a measure to ‘lisp’ in speaking to us? Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity. To do this he must descend far beneath his loftiness.” 24  See Darwall, The Second-­Person Standpoint, ch. 4, for a more detailed account of how reactive attitudes involve a form of second-­personal address. 25 Jacob Arminius, “On the Scripture and Human Traditions” in Certain Articles Diligently Examined and Weighed in The Works of James Arminius, vol 3 (London: Thomas Baker, 1875), 706.

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126  Analyzing Prayer scholastic theologians in general identified two fundamental principia or foundations for dogmatic theology: God and Holy Scripture.26 Both the content and the very possibility of theological knowledge have as a foundation the gracious self-­disclosure of the triune God (principium essendi); without the ex­ist­ence of a self-­communicating being there would be no grounds for theological inquiry.27 And it is the written divine Word of that self-­communicating being that serves as the (external) way by which we acquire theological knowledge (principium cognoscendi externum). Theological inquiry would be impossible without these two principia firmly in place. Here I follow Herman Bavinck in defining Christian dogmatics as “the knowledge that God has revealed in his Word to the church concerning himself and all creatures as they stand in relation to him.”28 If one adopts the above ontology of Holy Scripture, then one might minimally construe the task of Christian dogmatics as “second-­order reflection on first-­order divine speech.”29 But if dogmatics takes divine speech as its principium externum, what implications are there for the manner or mode in which we carry out the dogmatic task itself? One implication for the manner in which one engages the dogmatic task stems from the expectation of reciprocity that is central to personal address or speech. When one addresses or speaks to another person one operates on the expectation of what Wolterstorff calls “a reciprocity of orientation.”30 For instance, as I currently address you, the reader, I orient myself toward you in the expectation that you will in turn orient yourselves toward me by listening, and as a result respond to my discourse appropriately. This is, again, to underscore the notion that acts of discourse are themselves irreducibly second-­ personal. To hear the viva vox Dei in Holy Scripture and yet fail to appropriately respond by orienting oneself toward God is to neglect a fundamental aspect of what makes the theological task properly theological.31 Consequently, if Christian dogmatics has divine address as its fundamental principium—or as Bavinck put it, “the principle into which all theological 26  Here I leave aside the internal work of the Holy Spirit as the principium cognoscendi internum, or the inner cognitive principle or ground of theological knowledge. 27  As John Webster puts it, “As with the church, so with theology; its ontological ground, its ratio essendi, is the divine work of self-­manifestation.” John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 123. 28 Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 38. 29  See Michael Allen, “The Knowledge of God” in Christian Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016), 23. 30 Wolterstorff, The God We Worship, 60. See Wolterstorff ’s book for a fascinating treatment of God as addresser and listener in liturgical acts. 31  See John Webster, “What Makes Theology Theological?” The Journal of Analytic Theology 3, May 2015, 26.

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Theology in the Second Person  127 dogmas are distilled is: God has said it”32—then the dogmatic task cannot be properly carried out exclusively within the third-­person perspective (I–God); to neglect the interpersonal relatedness (I–you) that obtains in virtue of God’s addressing his creatures in Holy Scripture, is to misconstrue both the fundamental nature of Christian dogmatics and also Holy Scripture itself. Well-­ordered theological existence and practice, then, must at some level or other be firmly grounded within the second-­person point of view, and predicated on the understanding that God’s address in Holy Scripture aims, as do all forms of address, for a reciprocity of orientation. In canonical Holy Scripture, the triune God orients Himself towards His creatures in the expectation that they will respond to his personal address and self-­disclosure (Heb. 3: 7–12). “Theology,” says John Webster, “is awed testimony to the critical and consoling presence of God in the Spirit’s power, set before the church in Holy Scripture.”33 For the great Puritan divine William Ames, the second-­person perspective was so integral to dogmatics that he could simply state that “the nature of theological life is living to God.”34 I now want to briefly explore the second-­personal nature of the dogmatic task in the work of Karl Barth, in particular his understanding of the inseparable relation between dogmatics and prayer.

Karl Barth on Prayerful Dogmatics Karl Barth, the great Swiss Reformed theologian of the twentieth century, was of the mind that a continual, prayerful openness to the triune God was an indispensable part of the dogmatic task from beginning to end, I’ll refer to this notion as “prayerful dogmatics” hereafter. Barth commences his Göttingen Dogmatics, his first attempt at dogmatic theology in the form of lectures at the University of Göttingen in 1924–25, with the following prayer from Thomas Aquinas: “Merciful God, I ask that thou wilt grant me, as thou pleasest, to seek earnestly, to investigate carefully, to know truthfully, and to present perfectly, to the glory of thy name, Amen.”35 Barth went on to note that “The manner in which Thomas pursued dogmatics leaves the impression of a holy, lofty, beautiful, and joyful work of art.”36 In these earliest lectures in dogmatics (as well in his later work), Barth considers the dogmatic task to be a 32 Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 30. 33 Webster, Holy Scripture, 124. 126. 34  William Ames, Marrow of Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1997), 77. 35  Karl Barth, Göttingen Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991) 3–4.

36  Ibid., 4.

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128  Analyzing Prayer “­mortally dangerous undertaking,” one in which “we have reason not only at the beginning but also in the middle and at the end to take the last resort of invoking the name of the Most High.”37 He lamented the operative manner in which dogmatics was pursued in his time as “burdensome” and devoid of “presuppositions that a Thomas, an Augustine before him, and a Calvin after him could quietly take for granted.”38 What, for Barth, were these presuppositions that necessarily undergird the dogmatic task? Barth pinpoints several operative presuppositions of “dogmatics as a work that praises its master,” the most relevant for our discussion being the mode of interpersonal relatedness between God and his creatures, in particular “the personal knowledge of serious, disciplined dealings with God; a knowing and fearing and loving of his name that claims our human existence. How little acquainted we are with these things without which no one can really do dogmatics! How artificial, empty, and useless our work will be if we try to do dogmatics without these presuppositions!”39 Barth reaffirms his view that prayer is the “attitude without which there can be no dogmatic work” at the very outset of his monumental Church Dogmatics, and offers two sections devoted principally to the topic of prayer.40 But we find Barth’s most concentrated discussion of what he calls “the unity of prayer and theological work” in his work published in 1963 under the title Evangelical Theology, which consists of the final lecture series that marked the end of his academic career.41 There, Barth faithfully reaffirms his earlier view that “the first and basic act of theological work is prayer,”42 and even goes so far as to say that (as stated in the epigraph) “[T]heological work does not merely begin with prayer and is not merely accompanied by it; in its totality it is peculiar and characteristic of theology that it can be performed only in the act of prayer.”43 According to Barth, it is impossible for proper Christian dogmatics to be pursued exclusively from the third-­person standpoint (i.e. reflection about the divine nature and actions); theological inquiry can only take place “within this I–Thou relation, in which one speaks and another is spoken to, in which there is communication and reception.” When one sequesters the second-­personal point of view from the dogmatic task, Barth points out, we view revelation as “noninvolved spectators” and “we do not think of revelation as such, that is, one person speaking and another spoken to, God revealing 37  Ibid., 3. 38  Ibid., 4. 39 Ibid. 40  Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2010), I/1, 23. 41  Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 161. 42  Ibid., 160. 43  Ibid., 160.

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Theology in the Second Person  129 himself to us and we to whom he reveals himself . . . to receive r­ evelation is to be addressed by God.”44 If dogmatics is orderly reflection on first-­order divine speech, the suggestion here is that dogmatics ought, at some level, to be responsive both to the second-­personal nature of speech itself, and also the fact that Almighty God Himself addresses us in the reception of His Word; as John Webster has emphasized, “the ‘object’ to which theological reason directs itself is subject, the free, personal, gratuitous presence of the holy God.”45 Ultimately, proper theological inquiry is neither self-­initiated, nor is it self-­sustained. As Aquinas stated and was later wholeheartedly reaffirmed by the Protestant scholastics, “Theology is taught by God, teaches of God, and leads to God.”46 For my purposes here, let me suggest a working (though minimal) definition of human prayer as the humanly initiated activity of sharing significant personal presence with God. Significant personal presence is a robust form of shared attention in which the creature (the addresser) actively wills to share attention with God (the addressee), which in turn establishes mutual closeness between the creature and God. In general, the notion of shared attention is a second-­person, higher-­order relation of awareness that obtains between conscious persons (e.g. Jordan and James’ being aware of one another as persons, and both being aware of this mutual awareness).47 For Barth, an interpersonal relatedness between creatures and their Creator, namely prayer as a posture of openness to and utter reliance upon the triune God, is partially constitutive of the theological task itself: “it is imperative,” Barth says, “to recognize the essence of theology as lying in the liturgical action of adoration, thanksgiving, and petition. The old saying, lex orandi, lex credendi [“the law of prayer [is] the law of belief ”], far from being a pious statement, is one of the most profound descriptions of theological method.”48 In Evangelical Theology, his final lectures, Barth elegantly illustrates the inseparability of prayer and dogmatics by invoking the imagery of the theological task as open to both the world in front, and heaven above: 44 Barth, Göttingen Dogmatics, 58. 45 Webster, Holy Scripture, 124. 46  Richard Muller, “Theologia a Deo docetur, Deum docet, et ad Deum ducit” in Muller. Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1985), 299. 47  See Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 75. In general, shared attention is a polyadic relation that can be either dyadic or triadic, i.e. where two persons are jointly aware of one another as persons, or where two or more conscious persons are jointly aware of some third object. 48  Karl Barth, “The Gift of Freedom: Foundation of Evangelical Ethics,” in The Humanity of God, trans. John Newton Thomas and Thomas Wieser (Richmond, VA: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960). I owe this citation to Ashley Cocksworth, Karl Barth on Prayer (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 3.

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130  Analyzing Prayer Proper and useful theological work is distinguished by the fact that it takes place in a realm which not only has open windows . . . facing the surrounding life of the Church and world, but also and above all has a skylight. That is to say, theological work is opened by heaven and God’s work and word, but it is also open toward heaven and God’s work and word.49

Along these same lines, Barth explicitly employs the language of “second-­ person” and “third-­person” as it pertains to the dogmatic task, stating that “there remains a veil of theological thought and speech in the third person.”50 By contrast, “True and proper language concerning God will always be a response to God, which overtly or covertly, explicitly or implicitly, thinks and speaks of God exclusively in the second person. And this means that theological work must really and truly take place in the form of a liturgical act, as invocation of God, and as prayer.”51 While one might quibble with Barth’s claim that theological work must take place exclusively within the second-­ person perspective, we can wholeheartedly agree to his emphasis on the necessity of the second-­person standpoint for proper Christian dogmatics.

Prayer and Theological Habitude The primary aim of my preceding remarks was to offer theological and philosophical considerations as to why the dogmatic task involves, when rightly performed, an irreducible second-­person relatedness to God. I’d like to turn now to inquire how prayerful dogmatics—a dogmatics that is initiated and sustained by shared attention with God—relates to what the Lutheran dogmatician John Theodore Mueller called a well-­formed “theological habitude,” that is, the virtuous character dispositions and behaviors that are befitting of those who endeavor to make progress in Christian dogmatics.52 In the Christian theological tradition, it is not uncommon to find sustained reflection on the formational habits of character (moral and intellectual virtues and vices) that were considered both constructive and destructive to the theological task. The great Cappadocian father Gregory of Nazianzus (329–90), for instance, sharply rebuked the Eunomians (a form of extreme 49 Barth, Evangelical Theology, 161. 50  Ibid., 164. 51 Ibid. 52  John Theodore Mueller, Christian Dogmatics (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1934), 86–9. For an interesting interpretation of Aquinas which situates all virtues within a second-­ personal perspective, see Andrew Pinsent, The Second-­Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics: Virtues and Gifts (London: Routledge, 2013).

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Theology in the Second Person  131 Arianism in the Eastern church in ad 350–81) for their lack of humility, ­reverence, and modesty in carrying out the theological task. To “philosophize about God,” Gregory noted, is “not to all men, because it is permitted only to those who have been examined, and are passed masters in meditation, and who have been previously purified in soul and body, or at the very least are being purified. For the impure to touch the pure is, we may safely say, not safe, just as it is unsafe to fix weak eyes upon the sun’s rays.” By Gregory’s lights, the ill-­formed theological habitude of the Eunomians consisted fundamentally in their treating the dogmatic task as nothing more than “pleasant gossip” or the kind of amusement one acquires from “the races, or the theatre, or a concert, or a dinner, or still lower employments.”53 In precisely the same vein, the premier philosopher-­theologian of the eleventh century, Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), offered the following pastoral warning to would-­be dogmaticians in his letter On the Incarnation of the Word: Let no one, therefore, be in a hurry to plunge into the thicket of divine questions unless he has first sought in firmness of faith the weight of good character and wisdom, lest he should run carelessly and frivolously along the many side-­roads of sophistries and be snared by some obstinate falsehood.54

In the same work, Anselm unpacks a host of character traits that he considers to be integral for proper inquiry into the divine nature, including obedience to God’s commands, an abiding and ongoing trust in God and his illuminating work, and a deep humility that fosters a teachable spirit and keeps one anchored on one’s knees before God; for “only then can [one] investigate perceptively the deep things of faith.”55 As for those who set out to engage in the dogmatic task without regard for such formational character traits, “They presume to rise to the very loftiest questions of the faith before they have developed spiritual wings through the firmness of their faith. This is how it comes about that they absurdly attempt to climb up through their understanding to

53  Gregory of Nazianzus, First Theological Oration 3 (NPNF 7:285–7) in S. Gregory of Nazianzus, Archbishop of Constantinople (Select Orations and Select Letters, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-­ Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series [NPNF2], vol. 7 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999), 285–7. See also St. Athanasius: On the Incarnation, trans. John Behr (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012), 110. 54  St. Anselm of Canterbury, St. Anselm: Basic Writings, trans. Thomas Williams. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2007), 217. 55  Ibid., 216.

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132  Analyzing Prayer those things that first require the ladder of faith: As Scripture says ‘Unless you believe, you will not understand’. ”56 And, of course, we see Anselm masterfully engaged in an explicit form of prayerful dogmatics throughout his Proslogion; it’s as if Anselm lets the reader listen in on his interpersonal and ever-­joyous constructive dialogue with God; each paragraph has a life of its own, and each spills over with praise, humility, and adoration to the tri-­personal God as the object of theological inquiry.57 The great sixteenth-­century Magisterial reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin, followed suit in giving pride of place to the notion of a well-­formed theological habitude in carrying out the theological task. Luther famously prescribed the dictum oratio, meditatio, tentatio [prayer, meditation, trial] as the proper way to engage with the dogmatic task. Luther states, I want you to know how to study theology in the right way. I have practiced this method myself . . . The method of which I am speaking is the one which the holy king David teaches in Psalm 119 . . . Here you will find three rules. They are frequently proposed throughout the psalm and run thus: Oratio, meditatio, tentatio [prayer, meditation, trial].58

For Luther, prayer and meditation were integral to the practice of Christian dogmatics. Commenting on this threefold dictum, John Theodore Mueller remarks that “sincere and constant prayer is an indispensable factor in the acquisition of the theological habitude,” and goes on to say that Luther’s dictum “is the best description of theological methodology which has ever been attempted.”59 As for Calvin, one is hard pressed to make it through a few pages of the Institutes without becoming aware of Calvin’s deep concern with combating a vicious form of dogmatic inquiry, a mode of theological speculation he calls curiositas, following the rich Latin medieval tradition carved out by 56  Ibid., 215. 57  In the words of McCord Adams, “Anselm’s method sees philosophizing at a way of praying, and praying as a way of philosophizing . . . he insists that intellectual inquiry is one dimension of the soul’s stretch for God.” She goes on to say, “Anselm’s cognitive psychology contrasts with that of later medieval Aristotelians, because it denies the existence of ‘unaided natural reason’ and treats all creative problem solving as essentially collaborative: the creature seeks, the Creator discloses, the creature articulates what it has seen.” See Marilyn McCord Adams, “Praying the Proslogion: Anselm’s Theological Method” in The Rationality of Belief (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 37. 58  Martin Luther, “Preface to the Wittenberg Edition of Luther’s German Writings” in Luther’s Works, ed. L. Spitz and H. Lehmann, vol. 34 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1960), 285. 59 Mueller, Christian Dogmatics, 86.

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Theology in the Second Person  133 Augustine and Aquinas.60 Calvin rebukes those with “an intemperate delight in ­speculation”61 with regard to the Trinity, and later offers the following remarks as pertaining to inordinate theological speculation regarding divine predestination: [L]et us willingly refrain from inquiring into a kind of knowledge, the ardent desire for which is both foolish and dangerous, nay, even deadly. But if a wanton curiosity agitates us, we shall always do well to oppose to it this restraining thought: just as too much honey is not good, so for the curious the investigation of glory is not turned into glory [Prov. 25: 27, cf. Vg.]. For there is good reason for us to be deterred from this insolence which can only plunge us into ruin.62

In his insightful discussion of the vice of curiositas in the theological domain, John Webster maintains that curiositas enters the task of dogmatics [W]hen theology neglects the particular object of theology and instead gives itself promiscuously to whatever sources of fascination present themselves, particularly if they are novel; and so theology becomes restless and unstable. Curiosity enters when theology ignores or detaches itself from its location in the sphere of divine instruction and considers itself . . . busy about the acquisition of all sorts of new knowledge but no longer shaped by the curriculum of the school of revelation. Curiosity enters when theology terminates on surfaces, failing to complete the intellect’s course in running to God.63

Christian dogmatics becomes deformational when it attempts to operate exclusively in the third person, wholly detached from a second-­person relatedness to God. But dogmatics that proceeds from a posture of ongoing shared attention with God, that is, one that is opened by heaven and directed toward heaven, keeps one calibrated to the appropriate objects, measure, and ends of theological practice. Lastly, Richard Muller has pointed out that the Protestant scholastics repeatedly emphasized the importance of personal piety in the task of

60  See my “Epistemic Temperance and the Moral Perils of Intellectual Inquiry,” Philosophia Christi 17: 2 (2015). See also John Webster, “Curiosity” in The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason (London: T&T Clark, 2012). 61 Calvin, Institutes, 1.14.29. 62  Ibid., 3.21.2. 63  Webster, “What Makes Theology Theological?”.

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134  Analyzing Prayer theology, principally in the form of humility and the fear of God.64 Muller notes that “Primary among the character traits of the theological student is personal piety or spirituality. This piety, essentially a fear of God, is, as Scripture teaches, the primary ground of both true knowledge and wisdom.” In commenting on the work of Protestant scholastic Franz Burman (1628–79) regarding the character qualities required for the theological task, Muller notes “to this piety must be added the qualities of teachableness and zeal or diligence, manifest, at least in part, through the absence of perverse love, hate, anger, pride, and despair.”65 While certain natural gifts are required to carry out the dogmatic task, the Protestant scholastics also were of the opinion that “all these gifts are to be maintained and augmented through prayer, temperance, and reverent exercise, in the service of theological study.” Prayer is the proper formational context in which one makes progress in developing and maintaining the habits of character necessary to the theological task. In sum: For Gregory, Anselm, Luther, Calvin, and the Protestant scholastics, theological reflection that is initiated and sustained by prayer, a “prayerful dogmatics,” serves as the necessary guard rail that keeps the theological life virtuous, formational, and robustly theological (2 Cor. 3: 18).

A Concluding Remark to Students of Divinity In his delightful manual (what he calls a “spiritual exercise”) for beginning students in dogmatics titled A Little Exercise for Young Theologians, the German theologian Helmut Thielicke offered the following warning to students of divinity, “the man who studies theology, and especially he who studies dogmatics, might watch carefully whether he increasingly does not think in the third rather than the second person.”66 This subtle transition from the second-­person to the third-­person perspective in dogmatics, Thielicke says, is “exactly synchronized with the moment that I no longer read the word of Holy Scripture as a word to me, but only as the object of exegetical endeavors. This is the first step towards the worst and most widespread ministers’ disease.”67 Thielicke’s point, I think, is not that the student of dogmatics ceases doing

64 Richard A. Muller, Post-­Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1, Prolegomena to Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 212–13. 65 Muller, Post-­Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1, 212. 66 Helmut Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1962), 23. 67 Ibid.

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Theology in the Second Person  135 dogmatics when they think in the third person, i.e. give an orderly account of what Scripture says about the nature and action of God in the economy of redemption. Rather, his point, similar to my point made earlier, is that the properly ordered dogmatic task—whose very lifeblood is the viva vox Dei ringing out in the text of Holy Scripture—involves an irreducibly second-­ personal dimension between God and his creatures. And the first step towards this “minister’s disease” is nothing less than the neglect of this interpersonal dimension to theological inquiry. The transition from the second person to an exclusively third-­person standpoint in dogmatics is all too common for those of us who live out our theological lives in the context of a seminary or school of divinity. The transition is subtle, yet pernicious; theology exclusively in the third person misconstrues the fundamental nature of Holy Scripture as divine speech, it evacuates theology of its distinctly theological content, and it threatens to deform those who strive to carry it out. In his 1911 address to students at Princeton theological seminary, titled “The Religious Life of Theological Students,” B. B. Warfield (1851–1921) was at pains to dismantle the widespread yet tacit assumption that robust Christian formation was in some way at odds with the rigorous pursuit of the theological task within the seminary context. Warfield made the following remarks: Sometimes we hear it said that ten minutes on your knees will give you a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge of God than ten hours over your books. “What!” is the appropriate response, “than ten hours over your books, on your knees?” Why should you turn from God when you turn to your books, or feel that you must turn from your books in order to turn to God?68

One’s theological studies, argued Warfield, bring one daily into the very presence of God; “his ways, his dealing with men, the infinite majesty of his Being form their very subject-­matter. Put the shoes from off your feet in this holy presence!”69

68  B. B. Warfield, “The Religious Life of Theological Students,” The Masters Seminary Journal 6: 2 (1995), 182. 69  Ibid., 186.

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8 Does God Pray? Katherine Sonderegger

I begin with an odd question: Does God pray? As with most strange questions in theology—and the tradition would find this a strange question indeed— deep, complex, and lovely problems in dogmatics emerge from a dark background when they are asked. Several questions tumble out: Just what do we mean by prayer, and should we include Almighty God Himself among the petitioners? How is the investigation of Divine Prayer related to Trinity? To the Persons of the Triunity? How would such an odd question illumine dark corners of the Triune Mystery—the relation of Processions to Missions; of the Immanent Trinity, if such there be, to the Economic; of the disputed filioque clause, and the relation of Son to Spirit. More wonderful still is the light shone on the Incarnate Son, the embodied life and passion of the Embodied Second Person of the Trinity. How does the exploration of God at prayer uncover the Mystery of the Son’s ways and works among us, the “whole course of His obedience,” as Calvin puts this, His trials from wilderness to a darkened garden across the Kidron valley, to His anguished cry from a Roman cross? The attempt by the faithful to read Holy Scripture as the rustle of God’s own Presence among us invites us to consider these questions in their depth and range, and to sum them up in this shorthand: Does God pray? or perhaps better, Can the Triune God pray? But this remains an odd question; I want to begin there. If there is one settled conviction among Christians it might be this: We pray; God does not. We might almost term this an “instinct,” as the reaction among the faithful is this strong. Several interconnected premises of the Christian life lie behind such strong instinctive reactions; they emerge into view when provoked in this way. The fundamental conviction—that God does not pray; we do—is best sensed in a coherentist fashion, that is. The delicate and intricate fabric of the faith is torn, the threads exposed, when an angular thought such as Divine prayer is pressed down on its surface. Through a reflection on prayer, I want to bring forward several of these mutually entwined doctrines in order that both prayer and Trinity be more clearly seen, be articulated, be praised. Katherine Sonderegger, Does God Pray? In: Analyzing Prayer: Theological and Philosophical Essays. Edited by: Oliver D. Crisp, James M. Arcadi, and Jordan Wessling, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859044.003.0009

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Does God Pray?  137 Prayer, the tradition says, is an expression of a form of lack. This premise, I  believe, lies behind the sharp assignment of prayer to the finite creature. Human creatures need to pray; their prayer is need. Now, the Christian tradition has joined many of the world’s religions by meeting this need through devotional instruction. By and large, Christian spiritual manuals have relied upon ideal types in the catechesis of the faithful in prayer: Contemplation, intercession, petition, lament, confession, praise. Perhaps it has struck some of you, as it does me, that such typologies seem flat-­footed and oddly artificial when held up against the act that is considered the deepest expression of human life, the one true humane and humanizing work. Why, after all, would spiritual guides of many eras reach for classification when the great mystery of prayer comes into view? It would be as if our first response to the question, how do I ride a bike, would be to lay out five forms and styles of bike riding through the ages. Perhaps—really, I speculate here—it is the very rawness of prayer, its salience as need and hunger, that propels us into the colorless realm of types and kinds. Prayer for much of the Christian tradition has caught up between two folded hands the ache of human life: Our longing for purpose; the gnawing fears of everyday life; the inexplicable and cruel; the loss, the very great loss, that stands in the midst of all things mortal; the hope that there is One who delivers, One who remains when all else goes down to the dust. How could anyone teach such things? Prayer seems to awaken every longing that goes unquenched in human life, and to lift those desires to the dark Luminosity who is God. Now, such a view of prayer makes it plain that God could not pray. God could not have the form of lack and need and misery that stands at the heart of prayer. The Glorious Eternity of God, His Super-­Abundance, His Infinite Richness, His Serene Unchangeableness, His Unshadowed Goodness: All these Perfections mark out Almighty God as the Object but not Subject of prayer. We are the needy, the hungry, dying for the Light. Such an understanding of prayer brings in its wake another startling but often unspoken truth: That prayer, this unrepentant and unvarnished human need, can never be fully answered. To see prayer in this direct incomplete and unanswered way is to say that it expresses the definition of creaturehood; it enacts what we are. This is not to deny, certainly, that particular petitions can be answered, miseries lifted, pains eased, fears consoled and held at bay. Of course God has not forgotten how to be gracious! But the plain hunger for God that prayer just is can never be sated in this life, on pain of losing creaturehood. We may be children of the

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138  Analyzing Prayer day; but never the Eternal Day. Just this, we may think, prompted Christian Platonists from Augustine to Origen to Gregory Nyssa to affirm that human desire, when it meets the Ocean of Delight who is God, can only deepen as it is met and sated. Eternity will be the ripening of human being into everlasting prayer, ever prompted, expressed, met, animated, unexhausted. Such prayer is ours alone; by definition, solely ours. Prayer seeks the Unseen; that is a second, widely recognized theme. Through steady use, however, the sharp corners of this theme have been rubbed smooth. We often consider prayer, in this well-­rounded way, as a kind of request—so Elizabethans treated the term—that just happens to be addressed from time to time to the Invisible One. In a rough and ready way, we often think of prayer as simply asking, the prayer a form of the importunate widow who turns away from the callous judge to beat on the door of the Righteous Judge, who hears all cries, receives all petitioners, avenges every wrong. Now, of course, prayer involves asking! I do not mean to ignore such manifest Scriptural teaching or overlook the Lord’s admonition to ask and to not lose heart. Rather I mean to point to the distinctive character, indeed the essential property, of prayer as the seeking out of the Unseen. Properly and dogmatically, I say, prayer is distinguished from mere asking by its Object: We pray when our petition, our longing and need, is raised to the One Who dwells in Secret. Prayer, that is, stands alone. I mean this in a rather strong sense. We do not have a general kind, “prayer,” in which we find two instances or members, those directed to another creature and those directed toward Almighty God. The same objection might be raised about other central Christian categories. Students of modern theology have raised questions, for example, about Paul Tillich’s conviction that faith can be considered a universal category that can be divided and particularized into secular and sacred forms. Just so, I believe we might question a Doctrine of Prayer that considers prayer merely a particular form of petition set off from other members of the general category, requests, by its Supernatural direction and Goal. Prayer has to do with God. In prayer, we have an act that is defined by its God-­ward movement. We need not delay our line of argument to set out how we might best capture the petition that belongs between creatures. At most we might say here that our human act of asking is analogous to such God-­ward prayer. Note the dogmatic force of this claim: Prayer is a relation to God. We might term this the eschatological dimension of prayer. The Unseen who is Object of the creature’s prayer stands in the metaphysical realm of Eternity; God is the Goal, the Consummation, and Transcendence of creation. Such

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Does God Pray?  139 commonplaces of the modern Doctrine of God work magic on the Doctrine of Prayer. The creaturely notion of request or petition regularly involves the relation of exchange or mutuality. Though usually ranked, the relation of petitioner to a superior who might hear the request remains one of mutual influence. I implore my benefactor; she hears, however reluctantly, answers or refuses my plea. Just this, we may think, is Schleiermacher’s analysis of the Naturzusammenhang, the network of mutually dependent influences that simply is the cosmos. God does not belong to the cosmos in this sense. He is not an Element within it, however Superior, such that we in our prayer begin a chain of influence or cause that reaches up to the Father of Lights. No, the Triune LORD is the Being outside genus, the One, the Final and Absolute, the Eschaton. To have relationem with such Reality is the formal structure of prayer. Perhaps to borrow a page from the scholastic treatment of these matters, we would say that God’s relation to the creature in prayer is “ideal” or “notional”; ours to God, “real.” (This is a brief paraphrase of the famous Questio 13 in the Prima Pars of Thomas’s Summa Theologica.) So it seems that we must simply affirm that prayer belongs to creatures, perhaps only human creatures; God cannot pray. It seems that the tradition has defined, formally structured, and elaborated a Doctrine of Prayer that places it in the exclusive domain of the frail and broken children of Eve. The elements of prayer that I have tried to sketch out make the very concept of prayer into a form of the Creator–creature distinction, the vital center of the Christian Doctrine of God. It is commonly said, for example, that the brightly lit line dividing Creator from creature constitutes the Christian contribution to the world’s teaching about God. (We might take Colin Gunton as offering an industrial-­strength version of this claim.). Essential to the very idea of God, then, is the claim that He is not creature, that He is the Infinite and Eternal Plenitude of Being that could not and will not be breached by the creature. God is not Agent as creatures are; He does not discover or suffer need and want; He need not seek another to slake His thirst; He alone does not bow to the ravages of time; He alone is perfectly A Se, Sovereign, Free, Necessary. Just this distinguishes the Uniqueness and Unicity of Almighty God from any creature, however sublime. Prayer, we would say, simply marks out that distinct line, setting out flares along its borders, illuminating the need and demand of the creature on one side, and casting long shadows into the Dark Mystery of God’s Finality on the other. Prayer would express our reaching out into Another Country, the Land Unseen, and our longing can never cease nor be stilled.

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140  Analyzing Prayer This I believe to be the broad contours of the traditional Christian teaching on prayer. It is a sturdy edifice indeed, and is built up on pillars of the Doctrine of God, the Doctrine of Creation, and the counsel of the faithful. So, much to recommend it in every way! But against this settled opinion I would like to set a counter-­stroke: Might it be, after all that is said here, that the One, Almighty God, could pray? We are brought to the threshold of this remarkable question by the weight of Holy Scripture. In the Bible we encounter a God at prayer. We will have opportunity to examine these central texts; but not before we reflect a moment on the status of Scriptural warrant in the Doctrine of God. As is well known, Augustine in his young, ambitious days found the Holy Bible an intellectual embarrassment: So plastic, so human-­scale, so vivid and passionate! Where was the icy sublimity of Plotinus, the One moving serenely above the realm of thought and of being? All too reminiscent of the Homeric gods, this Scriptural God of Israel seemed to live and move and have being well within this shopworn world of ours, a Character within a people and nation of the ancient world. Augustine, it seems, has many companions in this wary distaste for the Bible. In one sense, this reaction is common property of the high theological tradition. Thomas notes that some descriptions of Almighty God in Scripture must be taken as metaphorical, or as expressing indirectly a proper Attribute of God: God does not have an outstretched arm; He is, rather, Omnipotent. Calvin joins Thomas in this search for proper forms of reading Scriptural texts. The Bible speaks as a nursemaid to her charges, Calvin says in a famous image; it babbles so that even the rude beginner in Divine things can be led safely home. Paul Tillich’s notion of a living symbol which participates in the Reality to which it points rings another change on Holy Scripture as improper speech about God. The very force of “anthropomorphism” as a worry in Holy Scripture testifies to the central axiom of the Creator–creature distinction, and the irresistible pressure of that axiom which bends all texts and tides to its form. Is Divine prayer an instance, perhaps a cardinal instance, of this tender impulse of Scripture to speak in our lowly tongue, to offer us a human God? I think we have reason to be wary of solving the riddles of Holy Writ in this way; of dissolving them, in truth. We need not develop an entire Doctrine of Inspiration, nor of hermeneutics, to see that a method of reading that cuts away images or events or forms of speech to satisfy Doctrinal architecture will not have the whole of Scripture for teaching, for reproof, for instruction in righteousness. I should be quick to say that I am not here simply asserting an inerrancy or perspicuity of Scripture such that interpretation is no longer possible nor faithful for the Christian. No! Of course there will be interpretation;

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Does God Pray?  141 problem texts; offense and stumbling. But I mean instead to say that Holy Scripture cradles the Living God, bears Him up and bears Him forth, in such a way that every slat, every fiber, every hard edge of the cradle counts, and must be included rather than sheared away in the Christian knowledge and confession of Almighty God. The Bible, that is, does not simply refer. It is not principally a Book about something, Someone. It does not teach in that sense—or in that sense only. We do not accord the Bible its proper rank should we view it simply as a Perfect Book, one that points infallibly to True North. No, the Bible is Holy because the Word of Blessing that just is God lies as the Pearl of Great Price, hidden in this field. In this way we might say that the Bible is more Sacrament than text, more form of Presence than disclosure of fact. As faithful readers we are to have confidence, I believe, that Holy Scripture will convey and contain a teaching about God that must be searched for, waited upon, prayed over; but one that is there, in these human words, for these human ears. God in His Aseity is contained, mysteriously and hiddenly, but truly and really, in the images and words and proclamation of Holy Scripture. The aim of the Christian life, the aim of a people at prayer, is to search with all our mind and soul and strength for that Truth. So, we must take these Biblical affirmations of Divine prayer with full seriousness. With full seriousness too do we undertake the act of inquiry, the reading for truth that just is the reader’s act of prayer. Let me begin with the text that has become the locus classicus for prayer, Romans 8. “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And the One who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (26–7, NRSV). This is the Spirit, the Apostle tells us in 1 Corinthians, who searches all things, even very depth, the abyss, of God. This is the Spirit who prays, with us and for us, breathing out inexpressible sighs, searching in the heights and in the depths also, moving within the very mind of God, bearing witness to the Father, forming the very Spirit of Christ, animating the astonishing life of the world, the life over death. In this Romans passage we have all the earmarks of an inexhaustible text: The ample use of the superlative, the super-­superlative, really; the reliance upon the hapax to capture the unutterable; the prominent place for the Greek middle voice where the agency of the actors is combined, mixed, indistinguishable. All these textual signs convey the great mystery Paul has glimpsed among the new children of God, the mystery of the Spirit of God interceding with God Himself. Little wonder that Sarah Coakley in her daring new work on Trinity, God, Sexuality and the

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142  Analyzing Prayer Self, places these verses at the very head of her “Spirit-­led” Doctrine of Trinity.1 The Apostle Paul seems dazzled by the prospect of a God who prays. The hallmarks we laid out for prayer as a creaturely act now seem to apply to the Holy Spirit. Here is the Spirit who utters sighs beyond words, whose very Breath seems born of desire and longing. This is the Spirit plunged into the realm of the Unseen, into its Abyss, whose characteristic Life-­act is to search, to move deeper, to move within. This above all is the Eschatological Spirit, the birth of the new age, the flaming eruption of victorious life from the grave. The gift of the Spirit unfurls the banner of the End-­times; we are the new creation planted under that sign, witnesses to that last rebirth. Karl Barth noted an almost unbearable eschatological tension in these passages—the groaning, the labor pains, the stretching forward and gazing upward, the testimony, and the urgency. All point to the Spirit as One who prays. Now, what should we make of all this Biblical testimony for the Doctrine of Prayer and even more, for the Doctrine of Trinity? We have ruled out the most natural response, born of long habit of conceptual reading: We cannot dismiss them as excessive, even mystical, metaphors and images, born of Paul’s ecstatic vision of the Paschal Christ, risen to the New Age as Victor. We have ruled out, that is, Schleiermacher’s ready willingness to consign all this to the rhetorical overheating of religious devotion. We have ruled out the recourse to a crude historicizing, where the language used here is assigned to some archive of the history of religions, where Jews used to speak in these poetic or enthusiastic tones. Nor do we simply trace this back in a linear form to a history of development in which impossible dogmatic idioms are explained—explained away?—by their infancy in the steady maturing and clarifying of dogma. No, we rather seek to find the Mystery of God enclosed in this little room, the Spirit-­filled landscape of the ancient Roman world. How could the Spirit intercede in this sense as the Blessing of the One, Triune God? Let me begin with one full-­throated dogmatic proposal, an attractive one: That the Apostle Paul has given us a glimpse of the Economy, the Trinity in Its Life with us. There are several strong reasons for favoring such an earthbound, missional reading. This entire section of the Letter to the Romans, after all, concerns itself with the life of those “who are in Christ Jesus.” Paul’s ringing affirmation that “there is now no condemnation” rests upon the Father’s 1  Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy Press, 2013).

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Does God Pray?  143 “giving up the Son” for us, and the Spirit of Christ planting the first fruits of redemption with us, so that “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.” Such broad parenetic instruction seems anchored in the movement of God toward us, the Divine Sending, and the kenotic descent of the Son to rescue those in the “body of death” and raise them to new life in the Spirit. Just this, we may think, is the pattern of the Divine Economy, the movement downward and onward, from sin and disobedience and loss to liberty, pardon, and astonishing grace. And I think we could buttress such a broad reading with the vocabulary of the text of Romans 8 itself. Shot through this golden text are the verb forms that combine Divine and human agency: Praying with, laboring with, bearing witness with, indwelling and inhabiting a mortal body so that it bursts forth with life. This is no simple, additive Economy. The Apostle does not write an account of God’s acting in our midst, something like a new member of the cast striding on stage to speak his lines. Though Paul too can speak of the cosmos as the theater of God’s glory, he does not in these passages seem to reflect upon a New Event or New Agent as a Visible, External Force among the old, which is passing away. Rather Paul appears to glimpse the Divine Economy in a deeply mysterious, deeply inward way. I do not mean to cast aside the strong note of “objectivity” in Paul’s account of the Cross of Christ; certainly not! It would be an odd reading indeed that did not hear the solemn tolling of Christ’s Passion over the whole of this letter, and the next. But the death and rising of Christ, from Romans 8 forward, becomes an eschatological event in us, in the Spirit. There is a remarkable inward turn in this whole triumphant section, where the interceding of the Spirit works deep within the human heart, a Celestial Fire burning deep in the bones. This is Augustine’s Intimior intimo meo, the God more intimate to me that I am to myself. And the liberal use of the middle voice captures that elusive downward act: The Spirit in me such that I act, but the Spirit acts; I cry out, but the Spirit utters cries too deep for words; I name God Father, but the Spirit breathes forth that Name, helping, interceding, living, making alive. Such joint subjectivity, if we may term it this, drives the Triune Economy down into the creaturely marrow, making my own life, the one lost and dead in sin, the throne room—the temple, Paul says—of the Holy Spirit Himself. Now, if this is the proper way to read Romans, we would say that Paul has offered a means of identifying what is new in the Temporal Processions of the Triune God. It is a dogmatic puzzle, after all, to set out how the Mission of the Son and Spirit can be an event, a novelty in God, for God. Just this is the

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144  Analyzing Prayer riddle of the egeneto sarx, the Becoming, the Generation, of the Son of God. Thomas Aquinas argued that in truth we should not speak of Processions and Missions in the Triune Mystery. Rather, the Movement or Life we call Generation and Spiration has both an Eternal and a temporal end: One Reality with two teloi, the Telos that just is the Son and Spirit, and the Telos that is the Divine Persons in their temporal Presence within the cosmos. Now, according to Scriptural witness, something has taken place in the ways of God us-­ward. There has taken place the life of the Son of God with us, from Bethlehem to a hill outside the city walls; the life of the Spirit, poured out and into our hearts, the new life that is the Risen Christ’s, now blazing in Jew and gentile, the prisoners of the Way. Such locutions—there took place; it happened; then was fulfilled—imply something new in Heaven as well as earth. That we have come to call in modern times the Economic Trinity. It seems that Holy Scripture invites us to contemplate an Event in Holy God Himself. In the Incarnate Son, the Triune God looks out over fields white with harvest, turns His Face toward the warmth of the sun, rising on the just and unjust, wonders at the folly and stubbornness of human hearts, weeps at the death of a friend, loved and seen no longer. It appears that the temporal end of the Generation of the Son, His Fleshward movement, brings about a condition that God, Sovereign and Alone in reality, could not undergo: The Life Eternal now in time, now in human inwardness, now in frail suffering and loss. Just so it seems that we Christians are permitted to think of the Spirit of God, the Matchless Gift of Divine Blessing, receiving something new in His Triune Life among and within us. In the temporal Mission of the Spirit it seems that God Himself groans with a joy fighting to be born, longs for completion and deliverance, hands Himself over to the deepest sighs and needs of the human heart, undergoing the explosion from death to life. It seems that God apart from creation could not receive such events into the Divine Life; could not have them for His very own. Just this is assumptio carnis, ipse Spiritus postulat pro nobis. The temporal Missions are the birth of the new for God Himself; so it seems it must be. But such things cannot be! The whole Doctrine of God, from stem to stern in the Christian tradition, militates against such novelties. The very idea that the Creator is sharply distinguished from the creature rests on the confident assertion that God is Eternal, Perfect, and Replete; He does not lack, He does not become, He does not learn. This is what we mean when we speak and confess and praise the God who is Omniscient, Omnipotent, Ever-­ full, Uniquely One. So strong is this conviction that whole Christologies have been built upon it: The flesh assumed bears the suffering, the hunger and need, the

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Does God Pray?  145 weeping and the joy, the death and the bursting forth from death; the whole novelty of creaturely being in Incarnate form. “One of the Trinity suffered in the flesh” was the Cyrillian dictum of the Council of Ephesus, and it was hoped such a phrase could properly ward off Theopassianism, the enormity of the novel in the Eternal, Impassible Life of God. God does not, cannot pray. But let us return once again to the Scriptural record. Consider Jesus, the Man of prayer. Alongside Romans and 1 Corinthians on the Spirit we must place the Gospel accounts of Jesus Christ at prayer. As striking as is the work of exorcism and healing, the miracle of feeding and returning to life, the reading of human hearts, and the ecstatic vision of Satan’s fall like lightning, more striking still is the steady, unfailing rhythm of Jesus at prayer. The Evangelist Luke highlights this characteristic of the Embodied Son: Long nights He spends alone in prayer. But Jesus is a Man of public prayer as well. He teaches His disciples to pray, as do all well-­regarded Rabbis; He scorns the ornate prayers of the gentiles, and shows in His own devotions the simplicity, the vulnerability, and the meekness proper prayer exacts. Jesus intercedes for His disciples, praying that they fail not. He prays, the Fourth Evangelist tells us, not for Himself but for those who stand nearby, a Selfless advocacy by the One for others. And these prayers are summed up, intensified, scorched by the prayers this Incarnate Son offers in the garden at night, the anguished Petitions of Gethsemane. These are the sighs too deep for words, the groans of the Old Eon, torn to the ground, passing away! Here the Son raises prayer to the Father out of the depths, the abyss. Take this cup from me; bear it away! We could not find another prayer so urgent, so poignant, save the one from the cross: My God, why hast Thou abandoned me? Here the Father is strictly speaking the Unseen. Toward the darkened sky this prayer rings out; and after, only silence. In Holy Scripture, the Spirit and Son appear clothed with all the vesture of creaturely prayer: The need, the passion, the hunger and misery, the unexpected, and the feared. All these have taken place in our midst in the Missions of the Divine Persons to this earth. How do such Divine prayers disclosure the Economy of God? How do they, can they, disclose the Transcendent, Holy and Inner Life of God the Trinity? This is the great question about God at prayer. This question is too solemn, I believe, for the ordinary dogmatic answers given in the tradition; it outstrips them. Or perhaps it is better to say: The tradition is far more radical than we allow ourselves to see. We allow the Cyrillian maxim to operate as if the saying promoted a human nature of God that absorbed and endured and undertook elements and events that could not

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146  Analyzing Prayer touch, could not involve, could not belong to the Divine Word. This would be to assume that Cyril and his descendants conjured a Son of God who underwrote and wielded a human heart and flesh that lived at some distance from Deity, insulated and autonomous, who took the beating while the Sovereign stood blindly outside. Now, there is such a thing as “instrumental cause” in Christology and Thomas teaches this with great care. And we might think that Athanasius gives us warrant for speaking in this way. But no traditional Christian teaches directly that the Divine Son has no commerce, no exchange, no presence with and to the Humanity of the Son of God! Whatever we make of the Chalcedonian Definition, a Hypostatic Union does not teach two Sons who live in well-­coordinated but utterly distinct manners. No! There is One Son, One and the Same: That is the daring affirmation of the “egeneto sarx.” We have good reason, beyond Christological, for affirming such strong unity in the Divine Missional Life. The Spirit too intercedes for us in just these painfully vivid ways; and that, without Incarnation. Here is properly the instrumental cause in the Doctrine of God: The Spirit does not assume, does not take for His very own, the human hearts He enters and animates and guides, but rather makes use of them to utter His own Inutterable Sighs. It is at the very least the Economy of the Spirit to pray in this way, and to do so within our time, within our poor frame, yet within and as His own Mysterious Life, and within and as His own Superabundant Goodness. This, it seems, is the novelty the Economy brings to the Sovereign LORD: The prayer of God. I think this is startling, astonishing, extraordinary; a wonder of the Christian Doctrine of God. But might we dare more? Might we press on to ask how such a Doctrine of the Divine Missions might lead on into the Unfathomed Abyss of the Aseity of God, the God who lives beyond, always beyond the cosmos? Can God pray in this sense too? At the heart of this final question, the eschatological question, stands the status and out-­working of the rationality of faith or—though I don’t much like the terms—the relation of reason to revelation. The investigation of Divine prayer forces us into such deep waters. Earlier we excluded several familiar paths to Scriptural interpretation, and were drawn instead down a fully robust, dogmatic line that invites us to read Biblical passages as indirect expression of the Divine Economy, God with us. Now this seems to me vital to the proper recovery of the power and authority of Holy Scripture. Vital; but not sufficient. Should Scripture bear and enclose the Presence of Almighty God, as I believe it does, religious readers should not remain satisfied with a God who is only “with us,” an Economic Deity, should such there be. No, Holy Scripture must show forth, under creaturely veil, the very Life of God,

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Does God Pray?  147 the Triunity, the Glorious and Transcendent One. There is but One Trinity; One pair of Processions with Eternal and temporal Ends; One, the Alpha and Omega; One, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. This Glorious Inner Life of the Trinity must be the furthest reach of Holy Scripture, its crown. We should rightly suspect a reading of the tradition or of Scripture that restricts the Doctrine of God to a creaturely domain: We know God only as He is to us and our experience. That desire, in itself worthy, to anchor Almighty God to His Presence on our behalf, cannot serve as Final End of the human quest and hunger for God. Our prayer, our need, our longing is for the True God, the One Mystery, the very Reality who is Beyond. For that reason alone, though there be many more as well, the LORD cannot be an “anti-­metaphysical,” “nonspeculative” Deity who presents Himself in Scripture as a “narrative” Being; this is an offense to thought. God cannot be “regional” or “local” in that sense. God cannot be a Concrete Individual in the sense that we could look in some direction, take some far journey, to Tarshish, say, and find no God there; God does not belong to geography or seasons in that way. Just so, the One, True, Triune God cannot in the end evade our rationality, our reasoned account of reality. It is well and good, oftentimes very good and salutary, to say that God does not bend to our little intellects and ways; rather He bends ours to His. But God is Ratio, Divine Intellectual Light; beyond human reason, yes, but not against it, not a Divine Surd. The credence we give to the Reality of God is also reasoned, though it be  many other things as well. We cannot simply say—though we can form these words well enough!—that God exemplifies a metaphysic that does not conform to our standard types; and then will ourselves to endorse such an inconceivable metaphysic. Barth says often that faith is not a “sacrifice of the intellect,” a sacrificium intellectus, because God Himself is not darkness or numinosity or wild irrationality. God is Light. He is Mystery, Holy Mystery; but He is Mysterious Light. For this reason alone we must seek an account of Divine prayer that meets our intellectual objections. We will not reach God Himself should we say that prayer belongs only to the human or even only to the Economy. We must see if we can make an account of the Persons, Processions, and Nature, such that the One, Living God can be said, rationally and truly, to pray. Perhaps we might dare to say that the Divine Processions themselves are prayer. I do not mean to suggest we can speak univocally of the Divine Life as prayer even as we pray; no, our language does not directly refer in that way. We stand before God’s Uniqueness here, and we speak of the Exceeding Glory of God’s own Being. So it may be proper to say that the Processions are Divine

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148  Analyzing Prayer Prayer that stand as Source of all creaturely prayer, even that of the Man Jesus. The Divine Spirit intercedes for Him as well with sighs too deep for words. As Source, as Absolute Origin, the Father generates, derives, utters the Word, the Reason, the Son, in a Living, Wholly Personal manner. It is not need, not lack, not loss: The Infinitely Rich God could never pray in this creaturely sense. But to “breathe,” to “spirate,” to “give” and “offer” and “express”: These are cognates of prayer that give us glimpse of a Living God whose Source and Ends are Life, Intercession. The Holy Spirit searches the Deep Things of God in this sense, then: The Word of the Father “breathes” the Spirit, who returns, who is the Living Blessing of this Fatherly Word, the deep Reality of God, who just is Goodness, the Good Word. Divine Prayer tells us how we might praise the Processions of the Living God, how they too might be Good News, Blessing, Rivers of Delight. The Divine Processions most certainly are conceptual truths of great rigor and demand our best thought. But they are not Lifeless Truths! Everything about Almighty God is Blessing; everything. The Eternal Generation and Spiration that is the Living Nature of God is also Gift and Goodness, the Intellectual Movement of the Good God. In this way our prayer is the creaturely life that corresponds to the Divine; it is the blessing of our human life, making it humane and luminous. But more wonderful still, the Divine Prayer that is the Eternal Outpouring of the Origin in His Word of Blessing lays Himself down in our poor words of need and longing, breathing forth the Divine Name, reaching out into the Deep Mystery who is God. In the inexhaustible Riches of God, Processions, in their temporal ends, become the prayers that return to the Father of Lights. It is not easy, nor natural, to say that God prays; but it seems to me to be an astonishing grace, a gift, a Divine Gift, to stretch forth our hands in prayer to receive this thought, to see that the LORD’s Hand is not too distant to bless us even in this way too, that He can pray, and does.

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9 Blessing God as Pledge of Allegiance A Speech-­Act Theoretic Approach James M. Arcadi

Introduction Eucharistic liturgies in the Anglican and Orthodox tradition begin with a blessing of God and God’s kingdom.1 Anglican Church in North America St. Basil & St. John Chrysostom2 Celebrant: +Blessed be God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. People: And blessed be his kingdom, now and forever. Amen.

Priest: +Blessed is the kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and forever and to the ages of ages. People: Amen.

What is the meaning of this blessing? Is this an instance of prayer? If so, what are the minister and the people attempting to communicate to God? And, as we are approaching this from a speech-­act theoretic perspective, what actions are the minister and the people performing? In this chapter, I exposit several interpretations of the actions that are being executed when the minister and people make these opening utterances. I will analyze options proffered by Nicholas Wolterstorff and Alexander Schmemann, before developing one of Schmemann’s suggestions to greater specificity. All along, I will be using a speech-­act theoretic infrastructure to argue that these opening utterances can plausibly be understood as the minister and the people pledging their

1  In the Anglican tradition this opening is more likely to be found in the American context, in both the 1979 liturgy of The Episcopal Church (TEC) and that of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). For discussion of the TEC opening acclamation see Marion J. Hatchett, Commentary on the American Prayer Book (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 318. I note in passing that neither the Tridentine Rite nor the Novus Ordo of the Roman Catholic Eucharistic liturgy includes this opening. Rather they both begin with, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” 2 www.goarch.org/chapel/liturgical_texts/liturgy_hchc.

James M. Arcadi, Blessing God as Pledge of Allegiance: A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach In: Analyzing Prayer: Theological and Philosophical Essays. Edited by: Oliver D. Crisp, James M. Arcadi, and Jordan Wessling, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859044.003.0010

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150  analyzinG Prayer allegiance to God and God’s kingdom. Before turning to the constructive portion, I first here offer a description of the speech-­act theoretic infrastructure.

Speech Act Theory Speech act theorists hold that utterances do more than just convey propositional content.3 Consider the sentences “Ouch!” and “Please pick up your toys.” Rather than describing some state of affairs or stating some fact, speakers who utter these sentences are performing some action by way of their utterances. The speaker of the sentence, “Ouch!” performs the action of expressing, likely expressing some feeling of pain. The speaker of the sentence “Please pick up your toys” performs the action of issuing a request. Through and by these linguistic utterances speakers perform actions. William Alston offers a contemporary account of speech act theory in his Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning. Here he presents a tripartite distinction within a speech act. Typically a speaker performs three conceptually different speech acts in any instance of uttering. These acts are, on Alston’s terms: Sentential acts, illocutionary acts, and perlocutionary acts. “These acts,” says Alston, “constituted a hierarchy. One performs an illocutionary act by (in) performing a sentential act. And one (normally) performs a perlocutionary act by (in) performing an illocutionary act. A typical act of speech involves all three.”4 The first speech act in Alston’s categories is the sentential act (SA). This is simply what the speaker said, as in, what specific words or sounds were uttered.5 For instance, take a sentence that I find myself uttering often: “Please pick up your toys.” The sentential act can be made explicit by an oratio recta report of simply: “James said, ‘Please pick up your toys.’” Alston includes as sentential acts instances such as (a) when utterances are given as elliptical for a sentence and (b) when actions are given as surrogates for a sentence. On (a), one might utter “Ouch” as being elliptical for something like “I am currently feeling pain!” Or on (b), suppose, I give my colleague a high five, which would serve as a surrogate for a sentence like, “You did a great job!” Both “Ouch”

3  For the purposes of this discussion, I take oral and written communication to be sufficiently similar that I need not distinguish between the two. One may simply substitute “author” and its cognates for “speaker” and its, as well as “written words” for “utterances” and the like. 4  William Alston, Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 2, parenthetical insertions original. 5 Alston, Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning, 28.

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Blessing God as Pledge of Allegiance  151 and a “high five” can count as sentential acts in Alston’s theory. Upon the foundation of sentential acts rest the two other speech acts, illocutionary acts (IA) and perlocutionary acts (PA). PAs are the effect or effects an utterance has on an audience.6 The PA is not a statement about a speaker but rather is about the recipient of an utterance, the audience or addressees. For instance, suppose I utter the sentence “Please pick up your toys” to my son. Upon hearing this, my son might pick up his toys. Whatever is provoked in him by my IA bearing SA is the PA. For Alston, IAs are the locus of utterance meaning. To describe an IA is to make explicit the content of the utterance. Suppose Tom says “Ouch!” The IA, as expressed in an oratio obliqua report, might be “Tom expressed that he was in pain.” The pivotal feature of Alston’s account of illocutionary acts is the normative element in which Alston observes speakers participating. For Alston, to accurately describe a speaker’s performance of an illocutionary act is to accurately state that the speaker is “taking responsibility for the satisfaction of a condition”7 or conditions. The questions interpreters need to ask of an illocutionary act is, what sorts of things did a speaker take responsibility for in the utterance of her sentence? Answering this question helps interpreters understand what type of illocutionary act was performed and also to understand the content of the illocutionary act. Alston distinguishes illocutionary acts into five types: Assertives, Directives, Commissives, Exercitives, and Expressives. These include: Assertives:  Merely asserting, acknowledging, concluding, etc. Directives:  Ordering, requesting, suggesting, etc. Commissives:  Promising, contracting, betting, etc. Exercitives:  Adjourning, appointing, nominating, etc. Expressives:  Thanking, congratulating, expressing delight, etc.8 Further on, I will discuss the specific IA types that are most relevant for my analysis of the opening blessing. Before I get into that analysis, however, let me mention a few other preliminary assumptions.

6 Alston, Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning, 26. Cf. J.L Austin’s definition: “what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading,” How to do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 109. 7  Or conditions. Alston, Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning, 54. 8 Alston, Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning, 3.

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152  analyzinG Prayer

Further Preliminaries Defining prayer is no small task. I take a commonsense definition of prayer to be simply illocutionary acts directed toward God. However, some might point to instances of contemplative or meditative prayer which do not seem properly to be acts of communication, yet are also categorized as prayer. That may be all well and good, then what I want to focus on here is, what might simply be called “communicative prayer.” This may not be the only kind of prayer, but it certainly seems to be the species of prayer that is in play in liturgies where utterers seem to be addressing God. If God is not the target of an utterance in the liturgy, then that utterance is not a prayer. There are many instances in the liturgy where the minister speaks to the people, and even the people speak back to the minister. Further, I will group the minister and the people together such that one can say they are both performing the same IA, even though verbally they say different words (they utter different SAs). In the Anglican liturgy, the people’s words clearly complete the thought initiated by the celebrant’s words. In both the Orthodox and Anglican liturgies, the people say “Amen,” which I take to be an endorsement or ratification of what immediately precedes. Hence, I am going to tend to speak of the “minister,” but I intend that to mean the minister and the people performing the one IA. Secondly, on this point, I hope “minister” might be a neutral description of the leader of the liturgy for the benefit of those who do not have “celebrants” or “priests” leading their liturgies. Next, I want to take these two utterances, the Anglican and Orthodox versions, here as functionally equivalent. That is we simply have two similar but different SAs that perform the same IA. This is easy to account for with Alstonian speech act theory. If Matt walks into the room and Tom says, “Hi!” and Sue says, “Hello,” we can easily see that both Tom and Sue performed the same IA (say of greeting Matt, or of welcoming Matt), even though both speakers performed different SAs. Another preliminary point, I will tend to just write “Blessed be God . . .” by which I mean to include the entire utterance; this is just for the sake of brevity. Finally for preliminaries, one must realize that these utterances are not just words on a page, but are enacted events that take place in the course of the Eucharistic liturgies. One will need to imagine the minister in the front of the worship space, leading the worship service. In Orthodox contexts and in Anglican ad orientem services, this involves the minister facing the altar with the minister’s back to the assembled people. With these preliminary considerations in place, I turn now to a first possible interpretation of the opening blessing.

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Blessing God as Pledge of Allegiance  153

The Opening Blessing as an Expressive IA Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s The God We Worship: An Exploration of Liturgical Theology is indeed an exploration of the theological ramifications of the liturgy. In the course of his reflections on the liturgy, he offers some potential guidance for an interpretation of the opening blessing. Wolterstorff writes, “One possibility is that blessing God and God’s kingdom is no different from praising God and God’s kingdom, or declaring them worthy of praise. That seems to me the natural interpretation when the blessing is spoken in the declarative mood.”9 I pause here to note that, in fact, “praising God and God’s kingdom” and “declaring them worthy of praise” are two different illocutionary acts, and the second involves some ambiguity. I take “praising” to be an Expressive IA. When one praises, one expresses a particular psychological state of affairs. “Declaring” is a trickier term to unpack. It could mean something along the lines of what Alston calls an Exercitive: Those acts that bring about a change in the world (say, for instance, in a marriage ceremony, “I now pronounce you . . .” or, in a job interview, “You’re hired!”).10 Yet, we also have, in English, the declarative mood wherein a sentence represents some objective fact (“The fire hydrant is red.”). I think Wolterstorff intends the latter given his reference to that mood, but if so, a declaration of the praiseworthiness of God is an Assertive IA, not an Expressive. Hence, I here pursue this first route of interpretation suggested by Wolterstorff, that of an expression. This will be followed by an examination of the second possible route of interpretation, that of an assertion.

The Opening Blessing as an Expressive IA of Awe A first possible route of interpretation is to take the utterance “Blessed be  God . . .” as, says Wolterstorff, “no different from praising God and God’s kingdom.”11 On the Alstonian speech-­act theoretic infrastructure, this is an Expressive IA. According to Alston, Expressive IAs are such that an utterer expresses an attitude or psychological state. Alston states, “the illocutionary act of expressing an attitude simply consists in linguistically purporting to

9  Nicholas Wolterstorff, The God We Worship: An Exploration of Liturgical Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 50. 10  Austin and Searle actually call these Declarative IAs. 11 Wolterstorff, The God We Worship, 50.

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154  analyzinG Prayer have that attitude. It is a matter of linguistically making it public, getting it out into the open.”12 An act of praising makes explicit or public one’s attitudinal stance toward God. I think this conception of the act of praising is helpfully informed by Wolterstorff ’s own discussion of worship in his book. On this topic Wolterstorff writes, “I suggest that worship of God is a particular mode of Godward acknowledgement of God’s unsurpassable greatness. Specifically it is that mode of such acknowledgement whose attitudinal stance toward God is awed, reverential, and grateful adoration.”13 Combining these two insights from Wolterstorff, as an Expressive IA, the utterance “Blessed be God . . .” would be construed as praise because it is an instance of the utterer linguistically purporting to have an attitude of awe about God (and/or God’s kingdom). In order to present clearly a variety of instances of specific IAs, Alston devises a schema for each IA. Alston offers the following schema for interpreting Expressive IAs. Let me first decode his variable abbreviations before presenting the full schema for Expressives: U—an utterer or speaker P—some psychological state S—a sentence or sentence surrogate R—take responsibility (R’d—past tense) E-­IA U expressed a P in uttering S iff in uttering S, U R’d that U has a P. This can be articulated in smoother prose: An utterer expressed a psychological state in uttering a sentence if and only if in uttering that sentence, the utterer took responsibility for the fact that the utter was in said psychological state.

This is a general schema for all instances of Expressive IAs. I highlight the “R” of the schema for the normative notion that is a key factor of Alston’s explication of IAs. An utterer has to own up to or intend to be performing a particular action in order for her utterance to count as that kind of action. In order to employ it for our use in this particular interpretation of the opening blessing, we can plug in variables in the following manner: 12 Alston, Illocutionary 13 Wolterstorff, The

Acts and Sentence Meaning, 104. God We Worship, 26.

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Blessing God as Pledge of Allegiance  155 E-­IAa1 The minister expressed awe of God in uttering “Blessed be God . . .” iff in uttering “Blessed be God . . .”, the minister took responsibility for the fact that the minister was in awe of God. Filling in the variables of the Expressive IA schema with the components of this interpretation of the opening blessing allows us to evaluate more thoroughly the adequacy of this interpretation. Regarding this interpretation in its current form, perhaps it ought to be understood as a prayer, perhaps not. Attention to the form of the Expressive shows that there need not be an audience in veridical instances of expression. If I say “Ouch” and thereby perform the IA of expressing pain, it need not be the case that anyone hears for this to be an instance of expression. Of course, this is not the case for all Expressives. For instance, suppose in response to Sheldon Vanauken bringing his wife, Davy, a cup of water in the night,14 Davy utters, “Thanks.” This can be analyzed using the schema E-­IA with a few slight modifications. In order to give a full account of this state of affairs we have to include variables for the hearer (H) and the impetus for the psychological state (X): E-­IA' U expressed a P to H for X in uttering S iff in uttering S, U R’d that U has a P to H for X. And hence, with the variable filled in for this instance: Davy expressed gratitude to Sheldon for bringing a cup of water in the night in uttering “Thanks” iff in uttering “Thanks” Davy took responsibility that Davy was grateful to Sheldon for bringing a cup of water in the night.

We could also include an H and an X in the Opening Blessing analysis like this: E-­IAa2 The minister expressed awe of God to God for God’s kingdom in uttering “Blessed be God . . .” iff in uttering “Blessed be God . . .” the minister took responsibility for the fact that the minister was in awe of God for God’s kingdom. 14 

To borrow an example from Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1980).

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156  analyzinG Prayer Is this really best understood this way? To me it seems a little bit odd to express something to someone by referring to them in the third person. Furthermore, even Wolterstorff himself does not think this is the best interpretation of the opening blessing, but he offers another potentially better interpretation.

The Opening Blessing as an Expressive IA of “the Optative” Wolterstorff in fact decides to interpret this utterance in, as he refers to it, “the optative mood.” Wolterstorff writes: A blessing spoken in the optative mood, whether over human beings or God, seems to me to call for a different interpretation, however. When God blesses God’s newly-­created human creatures, God is speaking in the optative mood and saying, May you flourish. May you be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. So too when the priest in the Orthodox liturgy says, “Blessed be the kingdom of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” he is speaking in the optative mood and saying, May the kingdom of the Triune God flourish.15

I take optative mood utterances to be also instances of Expressive IAs. I am not sure that when God says to Adam and Eve “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it,”16 God is expressing a hope or desire that humans do these things, rather than the command to do so, but I will leave that for another day. For the opening blessing we can analyze the utterance as an Expressive, but this is a different instance from the expression of praise I termed E-­IAa. Optative mood sentences express the attitudes of hope, or desire, or wish of the utterer for some future state of affairs. Thus, recall E-­IA: U expressed a P in uttering S iff in uttering S, U R’d that U has a P.

We can account for the Expressive as optative in the following manner: E-­IAo The minister expressed the hope/desire/wish that the kingdom of the Triune God would flourish in uttering “Blessed be God . . .” iff in uttering “Blessed be 15 Wolterstorff, The God We Worship, 51 (emphasis original).   

16 

Genesis 1: 28.

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Blessing God as Pledge of Allegiance  157 God . . .” the minister took responsibility for the fact that the minister had the hope/desire/wish that the kingdom of the Triune God would flourish. On this construal, the minister has a certain attitude of desiring the kingdom of God to flourish, and this is what the minister makes public in uttering “Blessed be God . . .” Wolterstorff goes on in his book to explain how the “already/not yet” status of God’s kingdom makes sense of the hope/desire/ wish that God’s kingdom would flourish. Let us leave this option open and turn to the other suggestion Wolterstorff made, that of seeing this utterance as a declaration.

The Opening Blessing as an Assertive IA Wolterstorff suggests that we might interpret the utterance “Blessed be God . . .” as a declaration, by which he means a simple acknowledgment of fact, an indicative sentence in the declarative mood. There are two species of this genus of interpretation to explore. The first interpretation—from Wolterstorff— states that “Blessed be God . . .” is equivalent to “Praiseworthy are you . . .”17 God and God’s kingdom are in a state of blessedness, and thus a sentence on the order of “Blessed be God . . .” or “Blessed is the kingdom . . .” merely acknowledges this fact. A second interpretation takes its cue from suggestive comments made by Alexander Schmemann.

Acknowledging that God and God’s Kingdom are Blessed What would it look like to perform the act of acknowledging the blessedness of God and God’s kingdom? Acknowledgments fall into the Assertive IA category. Here is how Alston understands the act of asserting some proposition (where p is some proposition): A-­IA U asserted that p in uttering S iff: 1)  U R’d that p. 2) S explicitly presents the proposition that p, or S is uttered as elliptical for a sentence that explicitly presents the proposition that p. 17 Wolterstorff, The God We Worship, 51.

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158  analyzinG Prayer Recall that, for Alston, utterance meaning is tied to that for which utterers take responsibility. For Assertives, the focus of this responsibility is the truth of the proposition that is being asserted. If we were to distill the utterance under analysis to its propositional core, on the Assertive interpretation, this core is: God and God’s kingdom are blessed. Therefore, we can fill in our variables and proposition in this manner: A-­IAb The minister asserted that God and God’s kingdom are blessed in uttering “Blessed be God . . .” iff 1) The minister took responsibility for the fact that God and God’s kingdom are blessed. 2) “Blessed be God . . .” explicitly presents the proposition that God and God’s kingdom are blessed. Thus, we could follow Wolterstorff ’s suggestion and understand the utterance “Blessed be God . . .” as the minister and the people’s performing the act of acknowledging that God and God’s kingdom are blessed. However, this is not the only possible Assertive IA explication.

Acknowledging that God and God’s kingdom are the Minister’s Highest Value Alexander Schmemann, in his magisterial treatment of the Orthodox Eucharistic liturgy, makes similar observations regarding the nature of the IA performed by the opening blessing. He—like Wolterstorff—initially categorizes this opening blessing as an acknowledgment or a statement of fact. Although as we will see in the following quotation, the proposition that is acknowledged by way of the utterance has more to do with the utterer than the kingdom of God. Schmemann writes of the opening blessing: What does it mean to bless the kingdom? It means that we acknowledge and confess it to be our highest and ultimate value, proclaim it to be the goal of the sacrament-—of pilgrimage, ascension, entrance—that now begins. It means that we must focus our attention, our mind, heart, and soul, i.e., our whole life, upon that which is truly the “one thing needful.”18 18 Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World, reprint ed. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 47 (emphasis added).

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Blessing God as Pledge of Allegiance  159 On this interpretation, what is acknowledged is not the blessedness of God or God’s kingdom, but the proposition that God and God’s kingdom are the highest value of the utterer. Here is how this act would look as an Assertive IA: A-­IAv The minister asserted that God and God’s kingdom are the minister’s highest value in uttering “Blessed be God . . .” iff 1) The minister took responsibility for the fact that God and God’s kingdom are the minister’s highest value. 2) “Blessed be God . . .” explicitly presents the proposition that God and God’s kingdom are the minister’s highest value, or “Blessed be God…” is uttered as elliptical for a sentence that explicitly presents the proposition that God and God’s kingdom are the minister’s highest value. An explicit presentation of the proposition God and God’s kingdom are the minister’s highest value would probably look like the minister uttering, “God and God’s kingdom are my highest value,” which, of course, the minister does not here do. Rather this interpretation would hold that it is by means of uttering “Blessed be God . . .” that the minister presents the proposition God and God’s kingdom are the minister’s highest value. Certainly, Alston’s schema can account for this, for condition two includes the provision that occasionally some SAs are issued as elliptical for explicit presentations of propositions. For example, I could give a “thumbs-­up” sign as elliptical for a proposition like “I agree with what you say.” On this analysis, when the minister makes the opening blessing, the minister takes responsibility for the fact that God and God’s kingdom are the minister’s highest value, and the minister then presents that proposition by means of the opening blessing SA. To this point in the analysis, we have four options for understanding what the minister and the people are doing in uttering “Blessed be God . . .” 1) Expressing awe of God (E-­IAa1/2) 2) Expressing the hope/desire/wish that God’s kingdom would flourish (E-­IAo) 3) Asserting that God and God’s kingdom are blessed (A-­IAb) 4) Asserting that God and God’s kingdom are the utterer’s highest value (A-­IAv) Although I think each of these possible actions is plausible, I want to proffer that another route of interpretation suggested by Schmemann gets closer to the heart of the act being performed and, thus, is more nearly an act of prayer, understood as communication with God.

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160  analyzinG Prayer

The Opening Blessing as a Commissive IA of Pledging Allegiance An interpretation that harmonizes better with seeing this utterance as an instance of prayer is one that holds the opening blessing to be an instance of the minister and the people’s aligning themselves with or—perhaps better— pledging allegiance to God and God’s kingdom. As the opening act of the liturgy, the minister and the people proclaim that they are with God and are participants in God’s kingdom. Schmemann writes that this utterance: [M]eans that now, already in “this world,” we confirm the possibility of communion with the kingdom, of entrance into its radiance, truth, and joy. Each time that Christians “assemble as the Church” they witness before the whole world that Christ is King and Lord, that his kingdom has already been revealed and given to man and that a new and immortal life has begun.19

Rather than a simple act of confirming “the possibility of communion with the kingdom” or entering “into its radiance, truth, and joy,” this utterance is an act of pledging or vowing or committing oneself to being in and continuing in God’s kingdom. This act too can be exposited with a speech act schema. Acts of this nature fall into the Commissive type IA. Commissives are those IAs wherein one places some stronger or weaker obligation on oneself. The common example of this is a promise. If I say, “I’ll meet you for tea tomorrow at 10 a.m.,” in issuing that utterance I am placing certain obligations on myself and my future actions. Alston’s forms for Commissives are as follows:20 C-­IA U C’d in uttering S (where “C” is a term for a commissive illocutionary act type, a purporting to produce an obligation on U to do D) iff in uttering S, U R’d for the states of affairs such that: 1) Conceptually necessary conditions for U’s being obligated to do D are satisfied. 2) H has some interest in U’s doing D.

19 Schmemann, For

the Life of the World, 48.

20 Alston, Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning, 97. The original text has “T” instead of “S” in the first

part of the scheme. This, to me, appears to be a typographical error, since T is nowhere else used by Alston as a variable and in all the other instances of his descriptions of IAs he uses S to indicate SAs.

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Blessing God as Pledge of Allegiance  161 3) U intends to do D. 4) By uttering S, U places herself under an obligation to do D. I here first fill in variables for the instance of a Commissive that we are investigating, then I will exposit this schema for this instance. For the opening blessing as Commissive IA, the variables are filled in as: U (utterer)—Minister (and by extension the people) C (a certain kind of commissive such as promising, contracting)—pledging allegiance S (the sentence uttered)—“Blessed be God . . .” D (some act)—participation in God’s kingdom21 H (hearer)—God This would render the schema in this instance thus: C-­IAp The minister and the people pledged allegiance to God and God’s kingdom (where this places on the minister and the people an obligation to participate in God’s kingdom) iff in uttering “Blessed be God . . .”, the minister and the people took responsibility for the states of affairs such that 1) Conceptually necessary conditions for the minister and the people’s being obligated to participate in God’s kingdom are satisfied. 2) God has some interest in the minister and the people’s participating in God’s kingdom. 3) The minister and the people intend to participate in God’s kingdom. 4) By uttering “Blessed be God . . .”, the minister and the people place themselves under an obligation to participate in God’s kingdom. In what follows, I walk through these conditions, making some general comments about the nature of Commissives while also expositing the notion of the opening blessing as a specific Commissive IA. 1)  Conceptually necessary conditions for the minister’s being obligated to participate in God’s kingdom are satisfied. This component of the Commissive IA schema generally preserves the ra­tion­ al­ity of the IA. Admittedly, “conceptually necessary” is a bit vague. However, 21  This might not be the most apt way of describing the obligation that one is under as a member of God’s kingdom, so I just offer this as a suggestive way of describing what it means to D in this instance.

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162  analyzinG Prayer this condition merely tries to make explicit that there have to be certain notions and conventions in place in order to explain just what it is to do some C. Just as in order to promise there necessarily must be some such thing as a promise, in order to bet there must be some sort of phenomenon as betting, in order to pledge allegiance to something there must be some entity to which one could pledge. What could the conceptually necessary conditions be for a minister and the people to place obligations on themselves to participate in God’s kingdom? One obviously necessary item would be the existence of God and God’s kingdom. One would have a hard time participating in a non­ex­ist­ ent kingdom. But it seems that indeed a good deal of Jesus’ teaching related to the kingdom of God being “at hand.”22 It would seem to be necessary that God’s kingdom is the sort of entity that one could pledge allegiance to and thereby join. Further, a sufficient level of agency is required for individuals to place obligations on themselves. Perhaps also at least a rudimentary understanding of what it means to be a participant in God’s kingdom would be required. We might also think that there are certain activities, or values, or beliefs that a participant in God’s kingdom would do or hold: For instance, loving God and neighbor, meeting together to hear Scripture, pray, fellowship, and celebrate the Eucharist, believing that Jesus is God and that God is Trinity, etc. 2)  God has some interests in the minister’s participating in God’s kingdom. A promise, the paradigmatic Commissive example, is an easy illustration in which one can see this condition satisfied. If Matt promises Tom $1,000, Tom has some interest in Matt’s doing D, giving $1,000. However, suppose Matt said to Tom, “I’m going to beat you up and take your lunch money tomorrow.” This also is a Commissive IA, specifically even a promise. Matt has placed upon himself certain obligations of future action in making this utterance. However, Tom has no “interest” in Matt’s fulfilling these obligations; in fact, Tom has interest in Matt’s failing to do D. Thus, “interests” ought to be understood as “it concerns H that U do D” or “H is related to U’s execution of D.” Hence, even though Tom is not desiring Matt’s beating him up, we can say that Matt’s obligating himself to beat up Tom concerns Tom. Does God have interest in or does it concern God that the minister and the people participate in God’s kingdom? Even the passive reader of the New Testament and the 22  Even if, as Wolterstorff describes, there is a sense in which the kingdom is “not yet” awaiting the full inauguration of the eschatological kingdom of God.

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Blessing God as Pledge of Allegiance  163 Christian tradition would see that God has some interest in people participating in God’s kingdom. This condition is one area of the Commissive IA that is especially helpful if we are to understand the opening blessing as an instance of prayer; for Alston’s schema includes an “H” (hearer) as an integral component of a veridical Commissive act (see C-­IA at the beginning of this section). An Expressive need not necessarily have an audience when it is performed by an utterer. The same is true for an Assertive. There is nothing in the Alstonian schema that requires there to be an audience for the Assertive to obtain. It might be odd to comment or acknowledge or assert something to be the case without any interlocutors, but really all that is required is that the utterer take responsibility for the fact that p in those instances.23 However, the Alstonian scheme for Commissives include the condition that there is some H who has an interest or concern in U’s executing what U is obligating herself to perform. Again, promising would seem to be a helpful paradigmatic instance of a Commissive. When Matt performs the action of promising Tom that Matt will meet Tom for tea at 10 a.m. tomorrow, Tom is the hearer of that utterance and has interest in Matt’s executing what Matt has obligated himself to do. If Tom had not heard this, say, he was not even in the room, then we would not say that Matt had promised Tom anything. In the instance under analysis here, the Commissive we are talking about here, the pledging of allegiance to God and God’s kingdom, has God as the H and thus concerns God as the entity to which allegiance is being pledged. Yet, it is also the case that the H in this instance are the other participants in the liturgy. This further serves the interpretation of this IA as a pledging allegiance. I do not think that God needs us to speak audibly in order for him to know our communicative acts. Presumably the minister could just go to the front of the church, think “Blessed be God . . .” and the people could then think “and blessed be his kingdom . . .” and, ta-­da! Commissive IA performed, prayer offered, allegiance pledged, end of story. But this is not what happens, the minister and the people all speak this stuff out loud. They get it out there, make it public, proclaim it audibly, both for the God who does not need to hear it and for their fellow participants in the liturgy who must hear it in order to receive it. The participants in the liturgy have interests in the other 23  However, here are two clarifications. First, it seems that it would be hard to enter into a normative position with no one available to hold the utterer accountable for what she took responsibility for. Second, some forms of Assertives are such that they fit into the flow of a conversation in a manner that seems to require another participant in the conversation; one cannot reply or answer if there had been no external impetus to perform these Assertives.

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164  analyzinG Prayer participants’ pledging allegiance to the kingdom of God. If we view the Eucharist as the people of God joining together for the worship of God, to hear corporately the reading of Scripture, to offer prayers and supplications, to confess sin, and to receive the body and blood of Christ, then it seems very fitting that there be an act at the commencement of the liturgy whereby everyone professes to God and to one another their allegiance to the kingdom of God. 3)  The minister intends to participate in God’s kingdom. One could utter “Blessed be God . . .” and not intend to participate in God’s kingdom. One could be lying, one could be practicing diction, one could utter this phrase owing to peer or social pressure. Neither Alston nor I think that speech acts are magic spells or occur ex opere operato. One has to intend to do something and take responsibility for the fact that you are so intending in order for the IA to obtain. In order for this to be a Commissive IA of pledging allegiance to the kingdom of God, and thereby becoming a participant in God’s kingdom, the utterer must indeed intend to participate in God’s kingdom. This third condition is helpfully illustrated by the promise example once again. Suppose Matt says to Tom, “I promise to meet you for tea at 10 a.m. tomorrow,” but Matt has no intention whatsoever of meeting Tom for tea. I take it that in this instance a Commissive IA has not occurred; Matt has not promised Tom anything. Now, this might strike someone as counterintuitive (and I am not sure the account rises or falls on this point), but in the illustration with Matt not intending to meet Tom for tea, but saying he would, is more accurately an instance of a lie than a broken promise. Neither are acts one ought to perform, and I am not sure which is worse; both ought to be avoided. One of the central features of Alston’s account of speech acts is that speakers perform speech acts and acts are performed by agents and an act performed by an agent needs to have a certain level of intentionality to it to be considered the act of that agent. Old examples from action theory are relevant in this instance. If Matt walks into a dark room and flips the light switch, but unbeknownst to him Sue has rigged the light switch so that when it is flipped it causes a chain reaction that results in Tom’s taking a fatal gunshot to the head, we do not thereby say that Matt killed Tom. Intention has a great bearing on the execution of an action. If one does not intend to promise, one does not promise.24 In this instance,

24  That being said, again, the person who utters a sentence in the form of a standard promise but has no intention of fulfilling the obligations is a liar and should not be trusted.

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Blessing God as Pledge of Allegiance  165 in  order for a pledge of allegiance to take place, the utterer has to intend to participate in God’s kingdom. 4)  By uttering “Blessed be God . . .”, the minister places herself under an obligation to participate in God’s kingdom. Not only must the utterers intend to participate in God’s kingdom, they must intend that uttering “Blessed be God . . .” place them under an obligation to participate in God’s kingdom. This condition is an attempt by Alston to link up the utterance with the intention more tightly. Perhaps one could take responsibility for all that conditions 1–3 entail, but if one does not come out and say it, actually perform the SA, then one does not have the obligation placed onto them. Now, this condition is the route by which I would pursue a practical ministry application. For if this analysis is accurate, then I would suggest it ought to be part of the catechetical work of the minister to help the people realize that this pledge of allegiance is going on. Instruction on the liturgy should include something like “When we say the opening blessing, this is your opportunity to pledge allegiance to God and God’s kingdom. But that isn’t going to happen by a magic spell; you have to do it, you have to pledge allegiance, you have to join with me the minister in using this utterance as a means by which you pledge allegiance to God and God’s kingdom.”

Conclusion In conclusion, let me just offer one bit of corroborating evidence for the “pledge of allegiance” interpretation of the opening blessing. In typical Anglican and Orthodox parishes, when this opening blessing is made, the manual gesture of the sign of the cross accompanies it. “Blessed be God, + the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Certainly, it occurs that just about every time the Trinitarian formula is uttered people will cross themselves. However, one of the purposes of the sign of the cross, and this is one of the earliest uses of it, is to demonstrate that you are a Christian, you place yourself under the cross, you are a person of the cross. In fact, making the sign of the cross bodily demonstrates that you are a member of the kingdom of God. Thus, it seems beautifully fitting that while verbally pledging allegiance to God and God’s kingdom, one also bodily proclaims this same allegiance.

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10 Knowing as you are Known Prayer in the Presence of God Kyle Strobel

The goal of this chapter is to attend to the nature of Christian prayer as a form of shared presence. In doing so, one major issue comes quickly to the fore, namely, what if one experiences abandonment, isolation, or condemnation in prayer? How might one respond? Answering this practical question follows more theoretical material on how Christian prayer assumes a twofold presence: God’s unique presence to the Christian and the Christian’s call to reciprocate that presence with a significant personal presence of her own. I begin by describing the nature of Christian prayer, grounding prayer theologically, before addressing prayer by faith alone. Following this, I turn to two conversations to help consider the task of prayer. First, I briefly narrate a feature of Eleonore Stump’s profound articulation of personal presence in her book Wandering in Darkness. Second, I turn to the notion of faith to articulate the mode of Christian prayer, and the implications for understanding one’s experience of prayer. The final turn of this chapter will advance the previous material to address the seemingly ubiquitous experience of alienation (or “darkness”) in prayer, utilizing two key biblical passages, 1 John 3: 19–20 and 2 Corinthians 12: 7–10.

A Distinctively Christian Notion of Prayer Hans Urs von Balthasar notes, correctly in my mind, that “Christian prayer can attain to God only along the path that God himself has trod.”1 In this sense, one should not begin with an account of prayer as such, or a quest for

1  Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Threefold Garland: The World’s Salvation in Mary’s Prayer, trans. Erasmo Leiva-­Merikakis (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1978), 19, emphasis original. Kyle Strobel, Knowing as you are Known: Prayer in the Presence of God In: Analyzing Prayer: Theological and Philosophical Essays. Edited by: Oliver D. Crisp, James M. Arcadi, and Jordan Wessling, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859044.003.0011

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Knowing as you are Known  167 religious experience, but with God and His action to save.2 God’s mission in the economy sets the stage for our understanding of prayer, and, for my purposes here, helps us navigate the difficult and often lonely realities people experience in prayer. Prayer is a response to God by ascending back up the rungs of His descent in Son and Spirit; prayer is an embrace of God’s presence, Who is uniquely present to, and within, the Christian. For those who grew up in a Christian household, there is a good chance that they learned these theological features of prayer even if they were never explained. Many are catechized to pray to the Father, in the Son (and His name) and by the Holy Spirit. This movement follows Paul’s description in Ephesians 2: 18, “For through him [Jesus] we . . . have access in one Spirit to the Father.” The movement of the Christian is to the Father, in the Son, and by the Spirit (to change the prepositions slightly). This access to the Father in Christ by the Spirit is a response to the presence of God lost in sin and regained only by God’s grace through his “tabernacling” presence, known first in the tabernacle itself, and now known in the incarnation and sending of the Spirit. The words of the author of Hebrews articulate the logic of the Christian’s access to the Father, claiming, “We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf ” (Heb. 6: 19–20). Jesus, as the true high priest, is the “better hope . . . through which we draw near to God” (Heb. 7: 19), and “he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Heb. 7: 25). It is because of Christ’s high-­priestly work that the author of Hebrews declares, “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4: 16). At the broadest level of Christian soteriology, life in the Son requires the Holy Spirit of God—the Spirit of the Son—given over to believers in salvation (Gal. 4: 6). This feature of pneumatology is not remote from prayer, but is fundamental to it. As Paul asserts in Romans 8: 26–7, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” The Spirit of God intercedes from within a person, searching the heart and mind and groaning to the 2  For a more developed account of how Christian prayer is moored to contemplation, see my essay Kyle Strobel, “Contemplation by Son and Spirit: Reforming the Ascent of the Soul to God” in Embracing Contemplation: Reclaiming a Christian Spiritual Practice (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 166–84).

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168  Analyzing Prayer Father. Therefore, following von Balthasar, we can say that the path that God has trod has been, in part, a path of prayer. Both Christ and the Spirit intercede for the believer, and the believer becomes internalized into Christ and has the Spirit internal to her person. The believer comes to know Christ as the “sure and steadfast anchor of the soul” Who has gone beyond the veil into the pure and perfect presence of God. Furthermore, Paul claims, “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3: 1–3). The life of the believer is hidden with Christ in God. This is unprecedented access to God; it is access that ultimately makes sense of how Christians can now pray. However profound this access is, it is not simply a kind of door that has been opened for Christians to come before the Father on their own. Rather, this access is always in Christ and in the prayers of Christ. Christians do not enter the presence of God on their own terms, or in their own “name,” but in the name of another. Their access is given by grace to unite them to Christ, and therefore believers are internalized into the Father’s relationship with the Son. This is the argument of John 14–17, where Jesus tells his people, “In that day you will ask in my name, and I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf; for the Father himself loves you” (John 16:26–7a). It is in the name of Jesus that the Christian comes to the Father. This section culminates in Jesus’ prayer to the Father when he states, “I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17: 26). Jesus does not pray that the Father merely love his people, but for the love of the Father for the Son to be offered to his people. Throughout this passage in John we find Jesus articulating the believer’s relationship to him based upon his own relationship to the Father. This is what is offered to the Christian, and it is offered through the mediation of Christ. It is within this theological structure—ordered by Son and Spirit—that we must come to articulate a distinctively Christian understanding of prayer. To begin with a theological description of prayer is to, in part, reject the notion that Christian prayer is one option among many on offer from various religious and spiritual movements. It is not simply that Christians believe in prayer as a shared practice among any number of religions, however similar prayer practices may, at times, look. Rather, Christian prayer is fundamentally unique in its access and participation in the prayers of God Himself, Who, in the economy, has “trod a way” we follow. This is why, in his articulation of the

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Knowing as you are Known  169 Gospel in Galatians 4, Paul claims that, “because you are sons,” that is, because a Christian is one united to Christ and therefore a son within the sonship of Christ, “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ ” (Gal. 4: 6). Likewise, in Romans 8: 15, Paul makes a slightly different claim: “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ ” In both passages adoption into the sonship of Christ is fundamental, and along with that, a new sort of praying. This new praying, declaring “Abba! Father!,” is praying the prayers of another. This prayer is the prayer of Christ, a prayer prayed first by Christ, second by the Spirit in the heart of the believer (Gal. 4: 6), and then third, from within the first two, prayed by the believer herself (Rom. 8: 15). The Christian’s prayers are now caught up within the prayers of Christ through the Spirit of Christ. Christian prayer is carried upon, and given its contours by, the Son and Spirit who give access to the believer, intercede for her, and reorient her to the truth that her own prayers are a response to God’s work on her behalf. Prayer is not something the Christian generates or establishes, it is something one enters and is carried upon.

Present by Faith Attending to the nature of personal presence builds on my claim that Christian prayer takes place from within the intercessory work of both Son and Spirit, and is governed by the notion of access. Whatever else it means to have “access” to another, presence is, presumably, going to be a key way to articulate that. One implication of what I have suggested thus far is that Christian prayer presupposes a unique kind of presence: The Father is uniquely present to the believer in Christ and by the Spirit. To develop this, we first attend to aspects of Stump’s account, before turning to the unique mode of prayer by faith. In her fascinating study, Stump develops an account of personal knowledge, addressing “closeness” and “presence” in personal knowledge as a way to set up an account of God’s presence. Stump claims, Sometimes being present is a genus within which closeness is a species, and sometimes it is a species which is within the genus of closeness. When being present is a genus such that closeness is one of its species, I will talk of the relation as ‘minimal personal presence’ or as ‘minimal being present.’ When

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170  Analyzing Prayer being present is a species within the genus closeness, then for want of a better term I will call presence in this stronger sense ‘significant personal presence’ or ‘significant being present.’3

When there is a minimal presence between two persons, all that is meant is that there is a “generic connection” that ranges from simple proximity (e.g., “Jim’s brothers were present in the house”) to something like availability, which Stump explains with the example, “The doctor himself was present and available to her only in the early morning.”4 In contrast, significant personal presence occurs when “being present is a particularly significant or powerful way of being close to a person. On this sense of being present, being close to another person is necessary for being present to her (but not sufficient for it).”5 Key to the distinction between minimal and significant personal presence is closeness. “Minimal personal presence can occur without closeness between persons; but closeness is required for significant personal presence. When there is sufficient closeness between two or more persons, that closeness enables them to be mutually present to each other in the stronger sense of being present.”6 Stump advances her discussion through the notion of “second-­person experience,” claiming: “[A] second-­person experience is a matter of one person’s attending to another person and being aware of him as a person when that other person is conscious and functioning, however minimally, as a  person.”7 Essential to this description is an experience of the other’s presence—knowing that as a personal presence—or at least that is how I am understanding her notion of “being aware of him as a person.” Paula, on Stump’s example, has a second-­person experience of another person Jerome, only if: 1) Paula is aware of Jerome as a person (call the relation Paula has to Jerome in this condition “personal interaction”), 2) Paula’s personal interaction with Jerome is of a direct and immediate sort,

3  Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 110. 4 Ibid. 5  Ibid., 111. 6 Ibid. 7  Ibid., 112. I am reversing the order of these discussions from the development in her book. Because I am not offering a full-­fledged summary or engagement with her work, any reduction of it is because of my own use and should not be read back into Stump’s account.

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Knowing as you are Known  171 and 3) Jerome is conscious.8 In her development of this notion, Stump avers, “Even if Paula is conscious, if she is not aware of Jerome—say, because Jerome is hiding and Paula does not know he is present—then Paula does not have a second-­person experience of Jerome.”9 Her account accommodates a broad understanding of “immediate” and “direct,” since one can have an indirect form of communication such as email, and still have second-­person experience. What is necessary for this experience is that “you interact consciously and directly with another person who is conscious and present to you as a person, in one way or another.”10 Furthermore, in explaining condition (1), Stump adds, condition (1) can be met even if Paula does not have perception of Jerome. It is possible for one person to be aware of another as a person without seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, or tasting that other person. For example, if Paula and Jerome are engaged in an animated conversation with one another that they conduct by means of email, Paula is aware of Jerome as a person, even if she does not perceive Jerome.11

In developing this, Stump clarifies by adding: It is hard to know how to make this element of condition (1) precise. It is possible for two persons to make some sort of mind-­to-­mind contact even if neither of them has sensory perception of the other; Paula’s having contact with Jerome through sensory perception of Jerome is not necessary for her having a second-­person experience of Jerome. On the other hand, Paula’s just thinking of Jerome in Jerome’s absence does not count as Paula’s having a second-­person experience of Jerome even if in thinking about Jerome Paula is conscious of Jerome as a person in some sense. Second-­person experience requires conscious awareness of another person considered as a

8  Ibid., 75–6. This is a minimal account, as Stump makes clear: “These conditions are necessary for second-­person experience and sufficient for a minimal degree of it. (It is clear that there can be more to a second-­person experience than this bare minimum. It is evident that knowledge of persons comes in degrees.)” Ibid., 76. 9 Ibid. 10  Ibid., 77. 11  Ibid., 76.

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172  Analyzing Prayer person; contact of that sort does not need perception, but it does take more than an image or a memory of a person.12

From what we have developed concerning a distinctively Christian account of prayer, we can say that God has established a unique kind of presence to the Christian that allows for second-­person experience. It is not necessarily a presence experienced through sense perception, as Stump acknowledges, but this dimension of experience is often unaddressed in discussions concerning prayer. In this sense, we can say that Christian prayer is meant to foster a second-­person experience of faith.13 When using terms like “experience” and “awareness,” we must not take that to mean what we normally think of under the banner of “religious experience” (which is usually tied to some sort of experience that happens to us). If true second-­person experience obtains (on Stump’s minimal conditions just narrated), then we must consider all experience in prayer as religious experience. But this confounds expectations. While God certainly can provide an experience of His presence that is received as such (i.e., that is an experience of joy, love, peace, etc., that has a supernatural origin beyond the self), this is only one type of experience in prayer, and not typical of “normal” Christian praying. In the awareness by faith, God is present to a Christian by the Spirit, regardless of what that sensory experience is. In other words, we can say that because God has made Himself uniquely close to the believer in Christ by the Spirit, the presence offered by God overflows the typical demarcations of human closeness. God’s closeness to the believer establishes a sui generis presence that cannot be reduced to mere creaturely forms of relation or experience, and therefore requires an account of personal presence that can still function in a relational register but is not restricted by finite modalities. It is not only that the Spirit is close to a Christian on this account (however true that may be), but, to follow a strand of the Reformed tradition, the Spirit is infused into a person.14 This is more 12  Ibid., 514 n. 69—my emphasis. 13  Isaac Ambrose is characteristically helpful: “in God’s secret visits of the soul, and in the soul’s restless groping after God, though nothing but darkness be apprehended, yet that soul lives in the light of God’s countenance; the sun shines, though a cloud interposeth; God smiles, though the soul do not perceive it; or certainly thou hast his strengthening supporting presence, if not his shining; now, this is the fruit of Christ’s blessed intercession, and this is the subject matter of Christ’s intercession.” Isaac Ambrose, Looking Unto Jesus: A View of The Everlasting Gospel; or, The Soul’s Eyeing of Jesus, as Carrying on the Great Work of Man’s Salvation from First to Last (Hinton, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 1986), 586. 14  Infusion is a standard construct of the Reformed High Orthodox, but its specific reference differs. I am following Edwards’s understanding of the Spirit as infused, locating the remaining features of infusion (of habits, grace, etc.) as an aspect of the Spirit’s presence and work in the soul. This focus highlights the Spirit’s “physical” act, or, with Francis Turretin, the Spirit’s “hyper-­physical” act. Francis

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Knowing as you are Known  173 than omnipresence, but is God’s unique redemptive presence to the believer. As Augustine prays, “You were more intimately present to me than my innermost being.”15 Following this theological tributary, the Spirit’s dwelling in the believer is not simply an indwelling, but an infusion, and there are real structural, and not only personal, realities to the Spirit’s work.16 The use of “structures” names the Spirit’s work upon the soul to reorder the soul for God’s relational presence. The goal of this language is, in part, to buttress and emphasize the relational components to sanctification, but also to uphold the true humanity of the person. John Owen claims, “The Holy Ghost works in us and upon us, as we are fit to be wrought in and upon; that is, so as to preserve our own liberty and free obedience. He works upon our understandings, wills, consciences, and affections, agreeably to their own natures; he works in us and with us, not against us or without us.”17 This is what Paul seems to be articulating in Ephesians 3: 16b–19, when he implores that God “may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith” (emphasis mine). The Reformed tradition I am resourcing recognized that we must account not only for God’s relational self-­giving in love but also for the work of the Spirit upon the soul for the deeper reception of this relational self-­giving. Following Stump’s conditions, we can say that as a Christian, God is close to Paula, and that the act of prayer is the call for a reciprocal closeness on Paula’s part to establish a relational personal presence by faith. Having faith in God minimally includes knowledge, but this is knowledge that is “through a mirror Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, ed. James T. Dennison, trans. George Musgrave Giger, Vol. 2 (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1992), 524. Turretin continues, “Scripture clearly intimates this when it usually describes the operation of grace in those terms which approach the physical mode and designate the supreme power of God (when it calls it ‘creation,’ ‘resurrection,’ ‘regeneration,’ ‘drawing,’ etc.) . . . The same Spirit by whom we are renewed is a Spirit of strength and a Spirit of grace; a scepter of virtue and the oil of gladness; a Spirit of power (dynameōs) and of love (agapēs) (2 Tim. 1:7)—in order to designate its omnipotent and most friendly power.” Ibid., 525. 15  Augustine, “The Confessions” in The Works of Saint Augustine, ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A, trans. Maria Boulding, O.S.B. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), 3.6.11, p. 83. 16  William Alston suggests three models of the Spirit’s work internal to the soul: the fiat model, the interpersonal model, and the sharing model. My own approach does not fit neatly here, rejecting, with Alston, the “fiat model,” but advocating for both the interpersonal model and the sharing model along with the notion of the Spirit’s infusion and “physical” activity upon the soul alongside a more interpersonal reality of shared presence. Alston’s model seems to narrow the options unnecessarily. See William  P.  Alston, “The Indwelling of the Holy Spirit” in Philosophy and the Christian Faith, ed. Thomas  V.. Morris (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press), 121–50. For an important rebuttal of Alston’s critiques of the interpersonal model, see Steven L. Porter and Brandon Rickabaugh, “The Sanctifying Work of the Holy Spirit: Revisiting Alston’s Interpersonal Model,” Journal of Analytic Theology vol. 6 (May 2018), 112–30. 17  John Owen, Overcoming Sin and Temptation, ed. Kelly M. Kapic and Justin Taylor (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), 62.

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174  Analyzing Prayer dimly” and is “knowing in part” (1 Cor. 13: 12) as Paul claims, and is the “assurance of things hoped for” (Heb. 11: 1) as the author of Hebrews articulates. Faith is belief in an unseen but present reality (2 Cor. 5: 7) that shapes one’s life according to that unseen reality (I take it that “unseen” is in reference not simply to the sense of sight, but to all sense perception).18 This does not, importantly, undermine accounts of religious experience or God’s freedom to provide consolation to a believer in prayer (or otherwise), but recognizes that these things point beyond themselves to the culmination of this age, and will only be experienced in full in the age to come. One of the difficulties of prayer in faith and hope is to present oneself to God per­son­ally—significantly, and not minimally—when one experiences absence, fear, anxiety, etc. We will wrestle with this struggle further on in the chapter, but here it is important to note that prayer in faith accepts the truth that one is not merely imagining that God is with one, but that God is truly present, not generally in His omnipresence (as in Acts 17: 28), but personally and substantially present to the Christian, as the Christian is to Him (Col. 3: 3). In this sense, we can say that God’s presence is real to Paula, regardless of her experience of it, because God is personally present to the souls of those who have embraced Christ in faith. In faith the Christian trusts in this significant personal presence, and by faith the Christian is called to reciprocate with a significant personal presence of her own. To have second-­person experience by faith is to embrace this relational presence by giving oneself to God in truth, knowing His presence and reciprocating by offering oneself to Him. To conclude this section, we can say that, advancing Stump’s distinction between a minimal personal presence and a significant personal presence, God’s omnipresence is a minimal personal presence (this is not to claim that God is not fully present in omnipresence), but that there is a more significant mode of God’s personal presence only actual for Christians.19 In short, God is present to His creation universally in one mode of presence (omnipresence), 18  Bavinck is characteristically instructive here in his discussion of the “conscious” spiritual life: “Its seat is not feeling, but the heart, the mind. From there conscious life does manifest itself in feelings that are satisfied and pleasantly affected by it; this is the blessed life. However, it is not mediated by feeling but by faith, intellect, and will.” Herman Bavinck, Reformed Ethics: Created, Fallen, and Converted Humanity, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019), 253. 19  In Francis de Sales’ classic Introduction to the Devout Life, he encourages his reader to begin with a generic notion of God’s omnipresence, not for the purpose of staying there, but to turn to the deeper reality that “God is not only present in the place where you are, but that he is very specially present in your heart and mind, which He kindles and inspires with His Holy Presence, abiding there as Heart of your heart, Spirit of your spirit.” Furthermore, he then goes on to lead the reader further to consider “the thought of our Lord, Who in His Ascended Humanity looks down upon all men, but most particularly on all Christians, because they are His children.” Saint Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, Vintage Spiritual Classics (New York: Random House, 2002), 50–1.

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Knowing as you are Known  175 but redemptively present to His people who are in Christ and have His Spirit, in a more personal and internal way.20 This unique presence of God concerns His redemptive presence, such that the regenerate are partakers of God’s life in a way not true of everyone God is present to in His omnipresence. In God’s redemptive presence, the Spirit descends into the very depths of the person— into the deepest core of the heart—and from here the Spirit “intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” and searches hearts according to the will of God (Rom. 8: 26–7). While the presence known in faith is still a significant personal presence, it is only in the beatific vision of eternity that the believer will know the presence of God in full (1 Cor. 13: 12). Now, in the age of faith, the believer struggles to grasp the reality of being hidden with Christ in God and having the Spirit infused in her depths, because the bulk of those realities are not experienced by the believer.21 Nonetheless, Christian soteriology entails this kind of internalization of the person into God’s life. The creature is now in Christ, and as such, God is uniquely present to believers in a way that cannot be accommodated through a broader notion of omnipresence.

Struggling in God’s Presence To pray in faith is to embrace the access given by God as one united to Christ by the Spirit, who “enters” prayer within the intercession of Son and Spirit. In Christ, God has presented himself to his people, and by the Spirit he has not remained distant, but has internalized them into his own love; he has established a presence that is a sui generis closeness to his people. To pray in faith is to embrace this presence by refusing to be absent.22 In faith one recognizes

20  Jonathan Edwards uses several distinctions to make this point: natural vs. moral; power vs. love, common grace vs. saving grace, etc. James Salladin helpfully articulates two kinds of participation in the thought of Jonathan Edwards; one he deems methexis, which is omnipresence as I am articulating it, and the other is koinonia, that I am calling God’s redemptive personal presence. See James Salladin, “Nature and Grace: Two Participations in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 18: 3 (2016), 290–303. James has helped clarify these two forms of God’s presence and participation for my own thinking. 21  In a discussion of a broader second-­person experience (that is sufficient for minimal personal presence but not for a stronger personal presence) Stump notes, “These points apply, mutatis mutandis, even to God. It is one thing for God to be present always and everywhere with direct and un­me­di­ ated causal and cognitive connection to everything but hidden from human view, and it is another thing entirely for God to be present to a human person in the stronger sense of presence represented by (iv)–(vi).” Stump, Wandering in Darkness, 114. 22  In Stump’s discussion of significant personal presence, she uses the example, in the negative, of someone who is meant to be present but who is instead absent: “She was distracted all through dinner and was never really present to me.” Stump, Wandering in Darkness, 111. This is one aspect of the absence I am referring to here.

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176  Analyzing Prayer that she stands before God in His infinite fullness and freedom, and yet stands before him as one in Christ. Faith not only is the recognition that God is uniquely present in His work of redemption but also entails that one reciprocate by “drawing near.” Faith allows her to see that even when (especially when!) confronted with the chaos in her soul, she is received because of God’s work to reconcile and redeem. In light of this, we turn now to consider what it means to draw near to God. To put this in a common image from the tradition, prayer requires a kind of ascent to God. But what is this ascent? What does it mean to ascend to God in Christ and by the Spirit? Recalling our discussion concerning Ephesians 3 in the previous section, and the Spirit’s work upon the soul for Christ’s indwelling, Paul continues, “that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3: 17b–19). The Spirit pours love into the hearts of believers (Rom. 5: 5), for the sake of knowing God’s unknowable love, which is available for those “rooted and grounded in love.” The love of God, in other words, creates the necessary context for knowing a deeper love. Putting aside the question of what it means to know love that “surpasses knowledge,” in this instance at least, there is an increasing movement of depth into the love of God that is given by the Spirit. Ascent, likewise, names this movement by love and into love; it is a training of the will to turn to God regardless of circumstance, learning to boast in God regardless of what His presence brings (after the example of Christ in Gethsemane, Paul is the clear example: e.g., 2 Cor. 12: 9–10). A fundamental place for this training is prayer, when God’s kindness and discipline are meant to awaken and guide His people in love.23 The Reformed tradition is inclined to share this instinct concerning ascent as a relational movement in and by love.24 Julie Canlis claims, “But in disciplining ascent specifically to the Son, both Irenaeus and Calvin preserve the 23  Witsius is characteristically helpful: “The soul is not so much where it lives, as where it loves. Bodies are carried according to their weight: such as are heavy, downwards; such as are light, upwards. Love is the weight of the soul; love carries it whithersoever it goes. If, therefore, we love Jesus, as we ought, with a sincere and ardent love, that love will give wings to the soul, on which it will fly upwards, and bend its course towards the Lord.” Herman Witsius, Sacred Dissertations on the Apostles’ Creed vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2010), 234. 24  Angela Carpenter, in her book Responsive Becoming, shows how the Reformed tradition, through a selection of key representatives, understands the nature of spiritual formation to be a relational proc­ess that respects the nature of human personhood. This leads her to claim, in a meditation on Calvin’s thought, “that while the workings of the Spirit are certainly not transparent, they are also not entirely mysterious. They retain an intelligibly human quality through the connection Calvin makes between faith and word, and they occur in and through the human faculties.” Angela Carpenter,

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Knowing as you are Known  177 Creator–creature distinction vital to their conceptions of participation. Ascent is into sonship, but never as the Son.” She continues, Yet it is clear that for neither theologian is this adoptive ascent something that has to do with some abstract divinization of nature; rather, it is ascent into deeper koinōnia with God and his benefits. Everything depends on their theology of the Spirit, as both the one who preserves the contingency of creation and the one who ensures that this is the personal activity of God on and within humanity.25

Likewise, Jonathan Edwards, following in the wake of Calvin, maintains this same emphasis in his own understanding of creaturely ascent to God. For Edwards, participation is always relational, because God offers Himself per­ son­ally in Son and Spirit so that the Christian can share in His life. This participation is fellowship in the love and communion of God, focusing the relational ascent of the believer within the Sonship of the Son to the Father. Edwards avers, “The way in which the saints will come to an intimate full enjoyment of the Father is . . . by their ascending to him by their union with Christ’s person.”26 Similarly, Canlis paraphrases Calvin: “The mystical ascent is this deeper and deeper burrowing into Christ (always pneumatologically conceived), not our effort to do so. His ascent is our path and goal.”27 God’s presence has a certain character, namely love, and by receiving that love and presence the Christian is called to reciprocate with a presence and love of her own. We attain to God only along the path He has trod, and so we ascend to the Father in the Son and by the Spirit. If we recall our focus here on both a relational presence of God and the infusion of the Spirit in the soul, we may note that both can create curious phenomena. Take, for instance, being present to another person. Our experiences of relational presence can awaken love, joy, peace, gratitude, etc., or often confusion, anxiety, loneliness, etc. Being present to another person sometimes awakens the realization that that they are not really present to me, not significantly, but are only near me, or only relating at me. Being present to an infinitely perfect and holy God can awaken experiences of all of these sorts Responsive Becoming: Moral Formation in Theological, Evolutionary, and Developmental Perspective (London: T&T Clark, 2019), 22. 25  Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 237–8. 26  Jonathan Edwards, The “Miscellanies”: Entry Nos. 501–832, vol. 18, ed. Ava Chamberlain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 375. 27  Ibid., 51.

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178  Analyzing Prayer of things. Therefore, it is important not to assume our experience of drawing near is somehow an accurate portrayal of God’s actual intent and action (e.g., “I feel condemned in prayer, therefore God is condemning me”).28 But the Spirit’s presence, not only to the soul but from within it, often awakens psychological structures of the soul, not from without, but from within and through the psychological functioning of the soul.29 This is not a normal relational presence because the Spirit is internally present to the soul (“infused,” as I have noted). So, for instance, the Spirit’s presence in the soul might illumine one’s sin, such that one’s mind either attends to sin, or has one’s sinful desires awakened. This reality, often perceived as a rejection of God and His presence, is a result of God and His presence from within the soul, opening the truth of the soul to God. The Spirit’s work of illumination, in this instance, is to guide the person along the ascent of love, because love requires a significant personal presence in truth (and the truth of the soul, in God’s presence, awakens, regardless of what that truth is). The struggle, in this time, is to begin thinking that a negative experience means that God is not present to me at all, which is a rejection of faith and a desire for “sight” (i.e., sense experience). In order to attend to this often confusing reality of prayer, and others like it, we turn to two curious texts: 1 John 3: 19–20 and 2 Corinthians 12: 7–10. The first passage illumines a peculiar phenomenon: “By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything” (1 John 3: 19–20). John assumes that believers will (or at least can) experience condemnation as they are “before him,” namely, in God’s presence. A common temptation is to assume that this experience somehow has access to God and His intentions (i.e., that He is condemning them, in this example). But to assume this is to trust, not God in faith, but one’s experience of oneself in God’s presence, believing that one’s inner world has access to external realities. This leads many to assume that God is not present to them when they do not have a positive experience in prayer. Rather, it is precisely because it is God’s presence that one experiences condemnation, because it is the presence

28  I am leaving aside questions concerning how a Christian can discern between their own psychological states and God’s gift of consolation. In one sense, however, it may not matter, given that the response will be the same: to seek God in truth. For the Christian, we can know God’s fundamental intention, to love and discipline His children, and to lead them in sanctification: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thess. 4: 3a). 29  Bernard articulates this well: “It was not by any movement of his that I recognized his coming; it was not by any of my senses that I perceived he had penetrated to the depth of my being. Only by the movement of my heart, as I have told did I perceive his presence.” Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs, Cistercian Fathers Series 42 (Collegeville, PA: Cistercian Publications, 1980), 74: 6, 91.

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Knowing as you are Known  179 of a holy and righteous God awakening the truth. Instead of turning the believer to herself and her own internal resources, John grounds her assurance in God’s greatness and God’s knowledge. Following this passage in 1 John, we can say that I am called to recollect myself around the truth of who God is, and then, it would seem, who he is pro me (for me) (i.e., “reassure my heart before him” 1 John 3: 19). The believer is called to trust in the presence of God by faith, trusting that this God, the God who is both omnipotent and omniscient, is the God Who is for me in Christ Jesus and Who is present even in my experience of condemnation (i.e., as the Spirit who groans from my depths (Rom. 8: 26)). It is this God Who is particularly present to believers in Christ and by the Spirit, and Who has internalized the Christian into the Father’s love of the Son (John 17: 26). In the midst of confusion in prayer, one is to draw near, regardless of what the experience is.30 It is a failure of faith to believe that a Christian’s experience of her heart in God’s presence necessarily relates to God’s intentions. Rather, in faith, when condemnation arises in his presence, one should proclaim, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8: 1). Praying in faith leads to a recognition that while condemnation may be my experience before God, it is not an experience of God at all, but is an experience of standing in the presence of a holy, righteous, and omnipotent God who does not merely stand before me, but who searches the “thoughts and intentions of the heart” and leaves one “naked and exposed to the eyes to whom we must give an account. (Heb. 4: 12–13) Many presume that God’s presence could never awaken condemnation in their souls, but John suggests otherwise, and this example helps Christians navigate the somewhat peculiar realities of praying in faith. Our second passage is 2 Corinthians 12, where Paul’s own experience raises similar issues: So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is 30  Carpenter states, “What is particularly noteworthy about Calvin’s association of sanctification with the simple presence of the Holy Spirit in these passages is the fact that the presence of the Spirit does not have a defined subjective corollary. Calvin is not here concerned to demonstrate that the simple presence of the Spirit has immediate, specific, and measurable moral or psychological outcomes. It is the relationship itself that constitutes the gift of sanctification, and it is a relationship that Calvin explicitly connects to adoption—one’s status as a child of God.” Carpenter, Responsive Becoming, 35.

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180  Analyzing Prayer sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.  (2 Cor. 12: 7–10)

There are several features of this passage that should reframe our expectations of prayer. First, the messenger of Satan given to Paul is a gift from the Lord to keep him humble, precisely because of the visions God gave Paul in the first place. Notice that the virtue of humility takes precedence in the Christian life. The Lord refuses to take away a messenger of Satan (whatever that “thorn” was), because Paul’s humility and dependence upon God are more fundamental than an experience of consolation. John Owen narrates a situation where someone is asking God to take away their sin, claiming, “God says, ‘Here is one, if he could be rid of this lust I should never hear of him more; let him wrestle with this, or he is lost’. ”31 “Getting rid of sin,” for Owen, seems only to be meaningful if it leads one to deeper dependence on God. Similarly, it seems that God says “no” to Paul’s request, not because the thorn in his flesh was good in itself, but because Paul needs it to embrace the path of humility and dependence. This is a part of God’s Fatherly disciplining of the believer, not to give suffering or confusion as goods, but because his discipline is meant to awaken the believer to sin and brokenness as vehicles to embrace God in dependence. I have chosen two texts that illumine the unusual reality of life in the presence of God, which should help form expectations concerning the experience of prayer. Just as the Lord led Israel in the humbling and confusing wilderness to reveal “what was in your heart” (Deut. 8: 2), life in the presence of God mirrors back the truth. In my appropriation of Stump’s development of closeness, presence, and second-­person experience, I am suggesting that God is personally present to the soul in such a way that, as we reciprocate His presence with a significant personal presence, embracing this unique second-­ person experience by faith, His presence awakens the soul to the truth for the sake of reordering and reintegrating it by His love. This reordering and reintegration, what we can call the “restructuring” of the soul, includes an integration of the self that Stump deems “whole-­heartedness.”32 This restructuring of the soul does not happen automatically, precisely because it is the reordering 31 Owen, Overcoming Sin and Temptation, 88. 32  See, for instance, Stump, Wandering in Darkness, 124–5.

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Knowing as you are Known  181 of the soul in love; love does not act “upon” the soul as a blunt object, but functions from within a register of persons-­in-­relation. This restructuring, therefore, requires that the believer reciprocate God’s closeness and personal presence by being personally present to Him in faith, as one internalized into God and called to “open wide” their hearts in love (2 Cor. 6: 11–12), “making room” in their hearts for His presence (2 Cor. 7: 2).33 This personal presence requires that one is “open” to God by faith, to “present yourselves” to God (Rom. 6: 13) by casting one’s attention by faith on a God Who is uniquely present to His own.34 Regardless of what a Christian experiences in prayer, it always is an experience in God’s presence, and therefore a training of the will in and through faith to embrace God’s presence even when that presence awakens realities of the heart that one may not want to see. The sight of faith reveals one’s sin, brokenness, and rebellion, revealing the heart so that one may embrace the depths of God’s forgiveness and mercy for the sake of love. Borrowing features of Stump’s discussion of significant personal presence, we can provide directions for Christian prayer ordered by the presence and love of God, as three interconnected realities obtain. First, the one who prays by faith must intend to be present to God. The presence the believer has to God is always by faith, and not by sight, but this requires an intention to present oneself to God in response to God’s self-­giving (therefore this intention to be present is also an intention to receive and embrace God as He is truly present to them). This intention by faith is one that has already rested upon the promise of God, and therefore trusts that one is received because of Christ and His righteousness and not one’s own. This is why the person without faith is, in the words of James, “like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.” (Jas 1: 6) When James called the Christian to pray in faith and not doubt (Jas 1: 6-­8), he was calling them to rest in the knowledge of Who God is, and Who God has been for them, so that they can rest secure in the promise and not their own tempestuous inner world. Second, beyond mere 33  My use of the language from 2 Corinthians 6–7 is applying to God Paul’s call for relationships internal to the body of Christ. I take it that the heart open wide to God that makes room for God within it is the heart whose loves are becoming reordered to the opening wide to others that Paul is describing in that context. 34 There are some minor parallels between what I am doing here and the conversation about knowledge by acquaintance (KA). Brandon Rickabaugh states, “Knowledge by acquaintance demands personal presence—first hand familiarity. In turn KA necessarily involves an encounter, the first experience—in many cases the interaction—with the object or agent being known. Encounter is a rich event while experiences are often quite thin.” Brandon L. Rickabaugh, “Eternal Life as Knowledge of God: An Epistemology of Knowledge by Acquaintance and Spiritual Formation,” Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care 6: 2 (2013), 208. My own account differs here because of my focus on the sui generis reality of God’s presence to internalize believers into the life of God in union with Christ and to infuse the Spirit into the soul of a person.

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182  Analyzing Prayer intention, the believer must “draw near to God,” to use the biblical language— to “practice God’s presence”—as a means of embracing him in the closeness he provides. One does not present oneself to a God distant and removed, but to a God who both indwells the believer and has internalized her into His life. Last, there must be a self-­presentation to God in truth. To present oneself to God, and to draw near to Him in the Son and by the Spirit, is to do so by presenting oneself to God in truth.35 This is a second-­person experience of God, Who is present to you and calls you to Himself in love.

Application In conclusion, we can name two temptations in prayer derived from the preceding. First, Christians will always be tempted to pray to create an experience rather than to present themselves to God regardless of the experience. One will always be tempted to try to use God for another end, rather for what He actually provides. But it is precisely in our disappointment and confusion in prayer that we can see what our souls truly long for, which provides the fodder for offering ourselves in truth to the Lord. Second, it is tempting to try to be ideally present to God, or, in other words, to be present to God by projecting an image of an ideal Christian believer at God in prayer (one’s prayer “avatar”). This is an attempt to be falsely present to God, and so it is a kind of absence. Such a false projection is, therefore, a rejection of the kind of intimacy that significant presence requires, and would not count as the second-­ person experience by faith we are suggesting is necessary to pray in faith. This is the kind of prayer God rebukes when He states, “this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me” (Is. 29: 13). This is the temptation to replace a significant personal presence with a minimal personal presence. But to adopt a significant personal presence in prayer one must actually be present to God by faith. On this modeling of prayer the Christian must intend to be with God, giving herself to the closeness available to the Father, in the Son, and by the Spirit (Eph. 2: 18), and should do so in truth. This is “drawing near” to God by faith.

35  Stump notes that knowledge of persons “comes in degrees” (Stump, Wandering in Darkness, 76). This is true of self-­knowledge as well, and therefore our presentation to God in truth will also be degreed. Nonetheless, within the intention to be with God and be close to Him, there must also be an intention to be with Him in truth.

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11 Prayer as the Road to Self-­Knowledge Adam Green

There is a long history in philosophy and, indeed, in everyday life, of thinking that we have privileged access to our own mind. Who has a right to tell me what you feel if not you? And who can better relate what I believe than I? Surely, there is something odd about my asking you what I believe, or you asking me what you feel. Famously or infamously, it has even been claimed that introspection can provide us with insight into ourselves that can’t be wrong, or at least that it can do so if we are careful. Even as the history of philosophy has seen extravagant claims made about our knowledge of ourselves via introspection, within both philosophy and psychology one sees rejections of these extravagances that are every bit as radical.1 Against this backdrop, Teresa of Avila’s claim that prayer is the road to self-­knowledge stands out as cutting against both optimism and skepticism as regards our ability to know ourselves. In this chapter, I will try to make plausible for the reader that prayer provides us with a unique and privileged path to self-­knowledge, one whose strengths complement and contrast nicely with introspection. To this end, in the first section, I will explore some of Teresa’s thoughts on prayer and self-­knowledge in Interior Castle and The Book of Her Life. I will then, in the second section, use Richard Moran’s insightful discussion of self-­knowledge and the first-­person perspective to lay out some of the limitations of unaided introspection as a guide to self-­knowledge. With Moran’s discussion in view, I  will show how thinking of prayer as a (if not the) path to self-­knowledge transforms the conclusions of Moran’s discussion.

Living on the Surface of Ourselves Teresa of Avila begins her book Interior Castle with this image: 1 For one of the more far-­ reaching and interesting challenges to introspection, see Eric Schwitzgebel, “The Unreliability of Naïve Introspection,” Philosophical Review 117: 2 (2008), 245–73. Adam Green, Prayer as the Road to Self-Knowledge In: Analyzing Prayer: Theological and Philosophical Essays. Edited by: Oliver D. Crisp, James M. Arcadi, and Jordan Wessling, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859044.003.0012

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184  Analyzing Prayer I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions. Now if we think carefully over this, sisters, the soul of a righteous man is nothing but a paradise, in which, as God tells us, He takes His delight. For what do you think a room will be like which is the delight of a King so mighty, so wise, so pure and so full of all that is good? I can find nothing with which to compare the great beauty of a soul and its great capacity. In fact, however acute our intellects may be, they will no more be able to attain to a comprehension of this than to an understanding of God; for, as He Himself says, He created us in His image and likeness.2

Teresa’s introduction of the idea of the interior castle also stresses our limitations in attaining self-­knowledge. Because God is beyond human comprehension, so too one should expect that something made in God’s image will challenge and stretch the intellect, if not also prove beyond human comprehension. Insofar as the soul is apt for reflecting an incomprehensible God, it will in that respect also be beyond our self-­knowledge. Somewhat paradoxically, Teresa then remarks, “It is no small pity, and should cause us no little shame, that, through our own fault, we do not understand ourselves, or know who we are.”3 Our failure to know the true nature of our soul is regrettable in that it is a thing of beauty, but given what she has just said about our inability to get our minds around God’s reflection in the soul, it sounds inevitable. Teresa extends no such consolations but calls our failure to know ourselves a “great stupidity” and says that this stupidity is only compounded if we fail to strive to “discover who we are.” She continues, “Let us now imagine that this castle . . . contains many mansions, some above, others below, others at each side, and in the centre and midst of them all is the chiefest mansion where the most secret things pass between God and the soul.”4 God inhabits the castle, but just as notable as who is present within the castle is who is absent. She says that “we ourselves are the castle” but that “many souls remain in the outer court of the castle.”5 We live on the surface of ourselves, as it were. That is the default position for the fallen soul. She depicts this outer court as an unpleasant place overrun by reptiles and other beasties, and, if one stays in the outer court too long, one will “almost become like them.” One’s very humanity then depends on turning

2  Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 3–4. 4  Ibid, 5. 5  Ibid, 6.

3  Ibid, 4.

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Prayer as the Road to Self-Knowledge  185 within and seeking out that place within one’s deepest self from which one is naturally alienated but where God is at home. In her earlier work, The Book of Her Life, Teresa relates an experience with similar imagery. [M]y soul suddenly became recollected; and it seemed to me to be like a brightly polished mirror, without any part on the back or sides or top or bottom that wasn’t totally clear. In its center Christ, our Lord, was shown to me, in the way I usually see Him. It seemed to me I saw Him clearly in every part of my soul, as though in a mirror. And this mirror also—I don’t know how to explain it—was completely engraved upon the Lord Himself by means of a very loving communication . . . I was given an understanding of what it is for a soul to be in mortal sin. It amounts to clouding this mirror with mist and leaving it black; and thus this Lord cannot be revealed or seen, even though He is always present giving us being . . . I think this vision is advantageous to recollected persons, in teaching them to consider the Lord as very deep within their souls . . . Within oneself, very clearly, is the best place to look; and it’s not necessary to go to heaven, nor any further than our own selves.6

Once again, we see the importance of our imaging God, the metaphor of depth used to express the mode in which God is present, the injunction to turn within ourselves, and the way in which sin is a threat that occludes the nature of the soul and the divine presence within it. How do we make the inner turn that Teresa advises? To pick back up where we left off in Interior Castle, “The door of entry into this castle is prayer and meditation.”7 She quickly qualifies her statement. It isn’t just any prayer that will help one to navigate the interior castle. “[I]f a man is in the habit of speaking to God’s Majesty as he would speak to his slave . . . I do not call that prayer at all.”8 One must bear in mind who is doing the asking and of whom one is doing the asking. We thus get to another tension. On the one hand, the pursuit of God is the only way todiscover ourselves and experience God’s presence. On the other hand, one cannot undertake the journey toward God and the self without humility, but humility requires understanding one’s low position vis-­à-­vis a holy and transcendent God. That is, it requires more than superficial knowledge about both oneself and God. 6  Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2008), 304–5. 7  Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, 7. 8 Ibid.

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186  Analyzing Prayer Consider, for example, the following passages from Interior Castle: Self-­knowledge is so important that, even if you were raised up to the heavens, I should like you never to relax your cultivation of it; so long as we are on this earth, nothing matters more to us than humility . . . As I see it, we shall never succeed in knowing ourselves unless we seek to know God.9 The door by which we can enter this castle is prayer. It is absurd to think that we can enter Heaven without first entering our own souls—without getting to know ourselves, and reflecting upon the wretchedness of our nature and what we owe to God, and continually imploring His mercy.10

Contrast these passages with the following one from The Book of Her Life: The soul is like water in a glass: the water looks very clear if the sun doesn’t shine on it; but when the sun shines on it, it seems to be full of dust particles. This comparison is an exact one. Before being in this ecstasy the soul thinks it is careful about not offending God and that it is doing what it can in conformity with its strength. But once it is brought into prayer, which this Sun of justice bestows on it and which opens its eyes, it sees so many dust particles that it would want to close its eyes again. It is not yet so much a child of this powerful eagle that it can gaze steadily at this sun. But for the little time that it holds its eyes open, it sees that it is itself filled with mud.11

The natural condition of the human being is one where true humility is excluded because we do not see either our true nature or its obscuring. God must touch us for us to see our own blindness. And only then are we in a position to beg for healing. We are not to remain passive, however. Instead, for Teresa, we actively cultivate an understanding of our unworthiness and God’s magnificence through prayer. This is yet another irony. To discover the beauty of a soul created in the image of God, one must, for Teresa, continually attend to the ugliest features of one’s human condition, not for their own sake, but as part of a posture of gratitude and devotion. The dynamic here should be familiar from Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine’s confession of God’s goodness to him is bound up with Augustine’s confession of his own sin. “The memory is bitter, but it will help me savour

9  Ibid., 14.

10  Ibid., 31–2.

11  Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life, 132.

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Prayer as the Road to Self-Knowledge  187 your sweetness.”12 The Confessions, not coincidentally, take the form of a prayer. Augustine does not think privately about his life, but rather takes up his understanding of his life in prayerful meditation. Asking for guidance, asking God to reveal His place within Augustine’s own story that he may find his proper place in God’s story. In doing so, Augustine de-­centers his story, giving divine activity narrative primacy. One might see Augustine’s centering of his life story on hidden divine activity as a dynamic, narrative depiction that exactly matches Teresa’s more static image of the interior castle. Augustine’s narrative is his own story just as Teresa’s castle is her own soul. Yet, the central character of Augustine’s story is not Augustine, just as the presence that defines the core of Teresa’s soul is not her “true self ” but the divine presence. Augustine’s story reaches its completion when the person whose story constitutes the frame of the autobiography consciously encounters the animating presence behind the story, when God’s hidden activity becomes a conscious encounter with a divine presence that was already present and already within. “The light was within, while I looked on the outside world.”13 “You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself.”14 Similarly, in Teresa, the soul’s journey within ends when the soul finds itself in the divine presence at its core. The culmination of the spiritual journey in Teresa presents us with one final paradox. Teresa depicts spiritual maturity and eventual union with God as being characterized by unimaginable bliss but also by pain in the former case if not something like annihilation in the latter case. On the one hand, we eventually realize that our souls are not so much castles as temples, and God, who is at our core, is not enclosed in some inner stronghold into which we are trying to break. Rather, the image is that God has made each of our souls like the temple of old, and at the core of our being is a Holy of Holies where God dwells in His shekinah glory. The soul is like an Eden. It is a garden in which the Lord walks.15 “The soul becomes one with God. It is brought into this mansion of the empyrean of Heaven which we must have in the depths of our souls.”16 But the approach to this edenic core is like “being most delectably wounded.”17

12 Augustine, Confessions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 43. 14  Ibid., 231. 15  Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life, 85. 16  Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, 147. 17  Ibid., 128.

13  Ibid., 143.

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188  Analyzing Prayer Ah, God help me! Lord, how Thou dost afflict Thy Lovers! . . . It is well that great things should cost a great deal, especially if the soul can be purified by suffering and enabled to enter the seventh mansion . . . If this is possible, its suffering is no more than a drop of water in the sea. So true is this that, despite all its torment and distress, which cannot, I believe, be surpassed by any such things on earth . . . the soul feels this affliction to be so precious that it fully realizes it could never deserve it. But the anguish is of such a kind that nothing can relieve it; none the less the soul suffers it very gladly, and, if God so willed, would suffer it all its life long, although this would be not to die once, but to be always dying, for it’s really quite as bad as that.18

The pain Teresa describes as one makes progress in journeying within is directly linked to the progress in self-­ knowledge one makes. Increasing awareness of the greatness of God coupled with one’s self-­understanding stokes one’s desire to be worthy, to be capable of enduring God’s presence, to such an extent that one is consumed with pain. Have all these favours which the Spouse has granted the soul been sufficient to satisfy this little dove or butterfly . . . and to make her settle down in the place where she is to die? Certainly not, she is in a much worse state than before; for, although she may have been receiving these favours for many years, she is still sighing and weeping, and each of them causes her fresh pain. The reason for this is that, the more she learns about the greatness of her God, while finding herself so far from Him and unable to enjoy Him, the more her desire increases.19

Thus, we see that the growth in self-­knowledge to which Teresa points is a more than cognitive task. It involves not only gaining more true beliefs or a more accurate understanding of herself, the divine, and the relationship betwixt them. Coming to know God and the self requires that the self that you know grow in the process. One cannot know God without the realignment of one’s desires, without a conative revolution. Since you also cannot know yourself without knowing God, at least not in a way that gets beyond the surface, a reorientation of desire is necessary to know oneself as well. In fact, the soul’s journey may affect a more radical change than simply the refashioning of one’s desires. This is alluded to by the “death” of the dove or butterfly above. 18  Ibid., 200.

19  Ibid., 197.

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Prayer as the Road to Self-Knowledge  189 Sometimes He comes with such great majesty that no one could doubt but that it is the Lord Himself. Especially after receiving Communion—for we know that He is present since our faith tells us this—He reveals Himself as so much the lord of this dwelling that it seems the soul is completely dissolved and it sees itself consumed in Christ.20

Rather than one consuming some part of Christ in consuming the bread and the wine of the Eucharist, in consuming the elements Teresa experiences herself as being consumed by God. A striking image but one suggestive of annihilation. The image is balanced but not neutered by others she uses. She says of the move to the final mansion that it is like the difference between betrothal and marriage in which two are united “so that they cannot separate anymore.”21 Of course, if you ask what the soul does in the seventh mansion, the answer might again surprise. Consider what God is supposed to have told Teresa when she was trying to figure out how to write about a particular experience in prayer. The Lord spoke these words to me, “[The soul] detaches itself from everything, daughter, so as to abide more in me. It is no longer the soul that lives but I. Since it cannot comprehend what it understands, there is an understanding by not understanding.”22

Intimate union with God is experienced by Teresa as a state in which one has gone from living on the surface of oneself to progressing deeper and deeper until one’s active agency is merged with God in a way that seems to replace one’s agency with that of the Divine. The imagery at least causes one to question what has become of Teresa. If this is not a picture of absorption or annihilation, then what? It looks almost as if one is destined to lose one’s humanity on both ends of the spiritual continuum. If one stays in the outer court, one will become like a beast, but if one completes the journey to God, one enters a state in which, at best, our ability to describe a union that intimate without collapsing the entities involved falters. Before wrapping up this first section on Teresa, let me turn briefly to a striking contrast that will help us crystalize the picture we get from Teresa. In The Guide of the Perplexed, Moses Maimonides also makes extended use of an image in which the divine is to be seen as inhabiting a castle. 20  Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life, 188–9. 22  Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life, 111.

21  Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, 215.

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190  Analyzing Prayer A prince is in his castle; his subjects are partly dwelling in the city and partly without. Of those in the city, some have turned their backs towards the prince’s house and face another way. Others are making for the house of the prince and are directed towards it, seeking to obtain entry to it to have audience with the prince, but to this moment they have not yet seen the wall of the palace. Some of those who are going towards it have reached the palace and are wandering around it in search of the gate. A few have entered through the gate and are passing through the courtyard of the palace and thus are in the same locality as the prince, i.e. in the palace itself. Penetrating as far as the inside of the palace does not yet mean that they see the prince or speak to him. Far from this, after entering the palace further efforts are required: then only does one reach the presence of the prince and see him from afar or nearby, hear him speak, or is one allowed to address him.23

Strikingly for someone as single-­mindedly averse to anthropomorphism as Maimonides, he here depicts in an extended metaphor the Divine as a prince in a temple that we should undertake a journey to find. Already, even before it is interpreted, however, it is striking that some people do not merely live in the outer courtyard. Some people can be wholly absent from the castle altogether. This clues us in to the fact that the castle in this case is not going to be the self. How does Maimonides interpret his metaphor? Those who are outside the city have no religious belief. They are “like animals devoid of reason” and “are not to be classed as human beings.”24 Those in the city with their backs turned to the castle are “men of thought and speculation who have arrived at false opinions.” Those who are making their way toward the castle but have not seen the castle yet are “the great mass of those who obey the Law.”25 Those who have made it to the castle grounds only are those “possessed of religious learning” who “have never made an attempt to speculate on the principles of their faith or inquired in any way into the justification of any item of faith.”26 Those in the forecourts have “embarked on speculation concerning the principles of religion,” and “those finally, who have succeeded in obtaining demonstrative proof of everything that can be demonstratively proved, and have reached certainty with regard to all those metaphysical matters on which

23  Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995), 184–5. 24  Ibid, 185. 25 Ibid. 26  Ibid, 186.

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Prayer as the Road to Self-Knowledge  191 certainty can be reached . . . those, I say, have penetrated to the presence of the prince in the inner parts of the palace.”27 In Maimonides’ tale, the journey is undertaken not by prayer but by ra­ tional inquiry. Knowledge of the self is not focally involved. Rather, one needs to inquire into fundamental metaphysics, searching for the principles that explain religious truths. Desire is ancillary. The endpoint of the journey is not that of a passionate desire for a person, quenched ultimately in the intimacy of union. It is rather a God’s-­eye perspective on the world. God is beyond human thought, after all. Who could know the mind of God? Surely, from Maimonides’ perspective, the closest we can get to God is to see the logic behind the world that God emanates and sustains. Seeing the two castles side by side, certain features stand out. Teresa’s image is private, generous, and egalitarian in its own way. Each person journeys by herself. Each person has her own castle, and the door through which one may start the journey is not far from anyone. Compared to Maimonides’ pursuit of certainty and the fundamental metaphysics of reality, Teresa’s requirement is more homely. Know yourself in your lowliness as you seek to feel more deeply the goodness and beauty of God. The transformation that one seeks to undergo does not require one to be exceptionally intelligent. It requires only the capacity for longing. In our next section, we turn to a contemporary analytic reconstruction of some insights from Sartre and Wittgenstein by Richard Moran as they relate to self-­knowledge and the authority of the first-­person perspective. After we have laid out this more contemporary discussion, we will see how we can gain insight by considering the two together.

Transparency and Alienation It is intuitive to talk as if our relationship to ourselves in introspection is akin to perception, especially if one thinks of the alternative for characterizing introspection as being some form of inference. There often seems to be an immediacy to our knowledge of ourselves that contrasts with the methods of discursive reasoning. Thus, it is natural to classify one’s introspections as being on the experiential side of the ledger and from there to lapse into using patterns of speech and thought for introspection that belong to the familiar dynamics of sense perception. Likewise, it is intuitive to think that we have 27 Ibid.

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192  Analyzing Prayer privileged access to the contents of our own minds, and it is pretty easy to slip into a perceptual idiom in describing what this privileged access comes to. Our access to ourselves, one might think, is like the visual access we have to a room by being inside a room. Our access to others is like being outside of a room. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of the other through a window. Other times we are interpreting the suggestive bumps and thumps we hear through the wall. Through a mirror darkly for others, but surely we relate to ourselves face to face. Traditionally, the immediacy and privileged access that seems to attend our relationship to our own mental lives has underwritten some pretty hefty claims. The early Enlightenment picture associated with Descartes is one on which the inner gaze yields incorrigible beliefs. You cannot help but believe that you are in pain if you experience yourself as being in pain. Moreover, so long as one does not stray beyond a description of what is experienced, the thought was that beliefs based on introspection can’t be wrong. In his book Authority and Estrangement, Richard Moran focuses on a reason for doubting claims to certain self-­knowledge and the undergirding psychology of introspection that goes with it by highlighting the “transparency” of our mental states.28 Here are two key source texts for the phenomenon that Moran gives us. Moran quotes Roy Edgley as follows: [M]y own present thinking, in contrast to the thinking of others, is transparent in the sense that I cannot distinguish the question “Do I think that p?” from a question in which there is no essential reference to myself or my belief, namely “Is it the case that P?” This does not of course mean that the correct answers to these two questions must be the same; only I cannot distinguish them, for in giving my answer to the question “Do I think that p?” I also give my answer, more or less tentative, to the question “Is it the case that P?”29

Moran follows the Edgley quotation with this one from Gareth Evans: [I]n making a self-­ascription of belief, one’s eyes are, so to speak, or occasionally literally, directed outward—upon the world. If someone asks me “Do you think there is going to be a third world war?,” I must attend, in

28  Richard Moran, Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-­Knowledge (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001). 29  Quoted at ibid., 61.

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Prayer as the Road to Self-Knowledge  193 answering him, to precisely the same outward phenomena as I would attend to if I were answering the question “Will there be a third world war?”30

What these passages point to is that it often seems phenomenologically as if there is no object there to see with our internal gaze. When considering whether I believe that there will be a third world war, I don’t go about searching for something that has the look, smell, or taste of a belief. In these examples, there doesn’t seem to be any such thing as doxastic qualia. Rather, I turn my attention to what the given mental states are about, and I report what I “see” as regards those things. If one thought that introspection works in a way analogous to how one can look at one’s hand, one part of the mind perceiving another much as one part of the body can perceive another part, then this phenomenon is more than a little odd. How is it that we can perceive something we can see through, and why do we so naturally conclude that we believe that p from seeing through our belief to p if this judgment is supposed to have a perceptual basis? One might think that transparency in this sense is a unique feature of belief states, but a little reflection should suffice to show that this is not the case. Suppose one entertains the question, “Do you want to go to Big Bear or Santa Barbara for a getaway weekend?” In this case, the natural way to decide the question is not to close one’s eyes and attend to things with the shape and color of desires, but rather to think about Big Bear and Santa Barbara. If one seems more attractive than the other, you know what you want to do. Granted there is a feeling of attractiveness or salience involved, but it shows up as attached to the object. One takes an additional interpretive step to move from a certain way in which thinking about Big Bear shows up in consciousness to the conclusion that one has a particular mental state, a desire, which is responsible for this aspect of one’s phenomenology. So, at least on a first pass, it seems plausible that our inner lives are transparent in the sense that Edgley and Evans have in mind, and our inner lives being transparent in that sense is an awkward fit with the claim that we know our minds through an ability to perceive our mental states. One use that considerations of transparency can be put to is in eschewing the first-­person perspective altogether.31 From a naturalistic point of view in particular, it may be desirable to explain away any distinctive features of the first-­person perspective as being spooky and Cartesian. If the immediacy and privileged access we 30 Ibid. 31  Moran’s first chapter relates a number of deflationary theories of self-­knowledge.

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194  Analyzing Prayer tend to think comes with our knowledge of ourselves proves illusory, so be it. Interestingly, that’s not the use to which Richard Moran puts transparency in his book. For Moran, transparency isn’t inevitable. To use one of his examples, someone in therapy might come to believe of himself that he has repressed feelings of guilt even though these feelings do not show up in his conscious awareness.32 He does not see through a mental state to what the mental state is about. Rather, he might take a stance toward himself much like one would take to another person. He might observe his behavior, and, with the help of the therapist, come to conclude that he in fact does have these feelings of guilt even though he is alienated from them in the sense that he cannot attest to their presence in a distinctively first-­personal manner. Although transparency in one’s mental life isn’t inevitable for Moran, it is normative in both the psychologist’s and the philosopher’s sense.33 A lack of transparency may be evidence of a fractured psyche as a conscious agent finds herself excluded from some of her mental life, and indeed, Moran links an inability to inhabit a transparent mental state with various “pathologies of self-­regard”34 in which he includes akrasia and self-­deception.35 At best, a lack of transparency is produced in a metacognitive diagnostic exercise in which one practices intentionally disengaging from the perspective one would otherwise inhabit so as to try to see oneself in a way similar to how another might see one. For even this second-­order state, however, the second-­ order state itself must be transparent in order for the agent to embody a perspective directed at the first-­order state. You need to inhabit some mental space to observe from. There has to be some mental space that is inhabited rather than scrutinized in even the most introspective (or neurotic) soul. For Moran, transparent states aren’t ones where one merely lacks a certain kind of awareness. They are states where one’s deliberative activity largely constitutes the mental state in question. The relationship between the agent and the state is so close, that looking for a separable object is misguided. You are continuous with what you are thinking about. Your present activity makes the state. When you ask me, “Do you think there will be a third world war?,” my consideration of the relevant evidence creates the answer as much as it reveals it. For long-­standing states, they are in a sense rehearsed rather than just reported. Consider, for instance, the following two passages: 32  Cf. ibid., 31.

33  Cf. ibid., 64.

34  Ibid., 153.

35  Cf. ibid., sections 3.2–3.4.

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Prayer as the Road to Self-Knowledge  195 [W]e see that the vehicle of transparency . . . lies in the requirement that I address myself to the question of my state of mind in a deliberative spirit, deciding and declaring myself on the matter, and not confront the question as a purely psychological one about the beliefs of someone who happens also to be me. In characterizing two sorts of questions one may direct toward one’s state of mind, the term ‘deliberative’ is best seen at this point in contrast to ‘theoretical,’ the primary point being to mark the difference between that inquiry which terminates in a true description of my state, and one which terminates in the formation or endorsement of an attitude.36

The deliberative stance toward the self is the distinctively first-­personal one. The “theoretical” stance just is, after all, redeploying the way one thinks about others by directing one’s thoughts toward oneself instead. Within the deliberative mode, Moran doesn’t think that one has absolute freedom to decide one’s belief and desires. Sartre sometimes gives this impression, but Moran doesn’t think so, nor does he read Sartre as so committed. Deliberative agency is answerable to the empirical.37 In deliberating on whether to take a weekend getaway, I cannot choose to go to Mars. It is not possible for me to come to see Mars as a possible destination, at least not for a weekend and not if I am sane. Likewise, my deliberations may be shaped by my history and prejudices. I always go the mountains and not the beach, say. That still doesn’t mean that going to the mountains is not subject to and a reflection of my activity as an agent who can weigh reasons and make choices. Similarly, suppose the question at issue is whether I believe that deep down everyone wants to do the right thing morally speaking. It is not psychologically possible for me to be Pollyannaish about other people. That’s like choosing Mars for my weekend getaway. It could be that, although it is possible for me to come to a novel commitment on this score, years of exposure to theological vituperation on the sinful condition of man’s heart and whatever negative experiences I’ve had with others will collude to bias my deliberations in a more cynical direction, even though such a conclusion wasn’t positively necessitated by these influences.38 Nonetheless, the important question for Moran is whether or not the belief one comes to passes through one’s 36  Ibid., 63. 37  Ibid., 88. 38  For Moran, it is this constraint imposed on the deliberative by the “empirical” which often produces akrasia as one’s agency is undercut by grounds for thinking that the resolution one would like to make is unlikely to be efficacious (ibid., 78–81).

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196  Analyzing Prayer considering the question or not. Am I subject to it almost as if it were an alien influence, or is it expressive of my enacted perspective on the matter? The former speaks of psychic fragmentation, and the latter of integrated agency, however constrained. Moran’s take on the deliberative nature of first-­person states leads to a novel account of the nature of the authority of the first-­person perspective.39 It is not like the authority that the author of a critical biography of Lincoln might claim in answering questions about Lincoln. It isn’t primarily an authority that comes from knowing a lot about something or being able to make predictions. It is an authority that comes from being the one responsible for and involved with bringing something about. It is more like the authority a cook has over a kitchen. The cook in exercising his abilities has an intimate relationship with what makes an observer’s judgment true, but the nature of the cook’s authority is different from the observer. The cook’s authority certainly has epistemic implications. A cook is an important source of information about meals the cook is making, but the cook’s epistemic authority is simply of a different species from that of the observer. Thus, Moran paints for us a picture on which one can take two different perspectives on oneself. The first perspective is that of the deliberating subject who, within limits, decides what truths she will be committed to and what actions she will treat as choiceworthy. She operates within constraints, but she knows through doing, through the active exercise of agency. The second, parasitic perspective on the self is that of the outside observer. When engaged in this mode of thought, one looks upon one’s behavior in a way analogous to how one might look upon the behavior of another person. One then goes about trying to infer what lends meaning to the behavior one observes, as in the therapy client who comes to believe things about himself that are not featured in his conscious, deliberative agency. Even when our states are transparent, however, what they are and why they are what they are is not transparent to us. The deliberative mode needs to proceed as if one has the power to make up one’s mind, but this operative assumption might be false.40 There is absolutely no reason to think that alienation from our states needs to force us into the observer mode. Consider, once again, Moran’s example of the therapy patient. If he comes to believe in his repressed guilt, he thereby endorses the idea not that he is alienated from some part of his psyche when he inhabits an external perspective on the self, but rather that he is alienated from his repressed feelings in his everyday 39  Ibid., 113.

40  Cf. ibid., 163.

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Prayer as the Road to Self-Knowledge  197 deliberative exercising of agency. In coming to believe in this subterranean psychic force within him, he should thereby also come to believe that, in many of his transparent states, his beliefs and desires are being shaped by these feelings he’s discovered through therapy. When the repressed individual takes the perspective of an outsider, he doesn’t see the feelings of guilt in any privileged way because he’s viewing himself from the outside. If transparency characterizes the inner view, however, then the repressed feelings of guilt he posits can also go undetected from the inside. He experiences the world through them, but because what he takes himself to experience is the world, they are invisible to him. The fact that they are invisible to him is, of course, why it takes a therapeutic context for the patient to discover what he’s repressed. The point generalizes beyond cases of Freudian repression. If Moran is right, you never get to directly confront your mental states. They are always either too close or too far away. When one is embodying them, it would be incorrect to say that one’s access to one’s beliefs and feelings is indirect, but a critical perspective on them is not at home coming from within them. They are the glasses through which one is seeing the world in the first place. Some adjudication is possible. One might be able to judge that a pair of glasses presents the world in a fuzzy way while wearing those glasses. Nonetheless, one does not get to step into the perspective of someone with 20–20 vision to compare, and thus, there is always the risk that one does not know what one does not know, that one is not seeing one’s blindness. We see, then, that the two epistemic stances one may take to the self are in some tension with each other. On the one hand, living from the external, observational perspective would produce psychic fragmentation, since the vantage point of the observer is made possible by treating part of the self as an object to be observed. At best, the external perspective should be adopted as needed to supplement the internal perspective with insights that are unavailable from the inside owing to one’s internal perspective taking so much of one’s internal states as given that they become functionally invisible. On the other hand, to the extent that one discovers novel information from this external perspective, one thereby calls into question the legitimacy of the internal perspective by showing how much about ourselves we may miss when we occupy the internal perspective. If all was well within the soul, the external perspective would be unnecessary. When all is not well, when we begin to feel the weight of our neurotic, self-­justifying brokenness, then we are in a double bind. Our deliberative conscious agency is blind, and an external perspective is uninhabitable and also only partial for all that it can do in detecting problems.

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198  Analyzing Prayer What if, however, Moran’s two modes of relating to oneself aren’t the only options? What if one can relate to the self through relating to God, that is, through prayer? I want to suggest that there is a mode of prayer which matches and transforms each of the two approaches to the self that Moran outlines. Moreover, these transformed modes of self-­knowledge are more naturally complementary than they are as Moran leaves them. One will recall that, for Teresa, there are two different points of emphasis when it comes to self-­knowledge. One concerns the telos of the spiritual journey that Teresa depicts. We begin alienated from and blind to our true nature. The journey to discovering God’s presence within, to discovering the intimacy with which God graces us with His presence, reveals to us who we were made to be as well. Progress in the achievement of this telos is reflected in the evolution of one’s desires and culminates in a kind of union. The second emphasis concerns what drives spiritual development. Prayer that affects greater union must flow from a place of humility and gratitude, a sense of one’s unworthiness and God’s transcendent goodness. My hypothesis is that these two points of emphasis, when projected over Moran’s discussion, track the internal and external perspectives on the self. One begins alienated from one’s true nature and God’s natural place within it. Whatever connection one makes with the truths one wants to discover by undertaking the inner journey must be one that can be had without having completed the journey, one that is external. From the external perspective, one is invited to approach God from a perspective within which the value of union with God is appraised while realizing that one does not enjoy it in the way one is meant to. In Teresa’s image, however, it is not that God has left the soul empty and bereft. Rather, God is perpetually in intimate communion with the depths of one’s soul. It could not be otherwise, for we exist through the tender ministrations of Him who sustains us in being. We do not live from that place, however. Thus, our realization that there is something worth discovering in the depths of our soul must be made as an external observation, but the external observation is of something that should be discoverable within an internal perspective. The deepest first-­person experience of oneself is second-­personal, it turns out, and that second person is working to facilitate the transition from the purely external realization of the divine presence to the internal experience of it. One is not stuck living on the surface of oneself. Rather, the external viewpoint shows one how to enter, and facilitates one’s entering, into one’s internal perspective on oneself in a way that facilitates the journey. Whereas for Moran the external perspective necessarily takes agency offline if you will, here the

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Prayer as the Road to Self-Knowledge  199 external perspective drives one to enact one’s first-­person perspective in the form of a second-­personal responsiveness to the divine presence already within the soul. Notice, though, what happens to Moran’s emphasis on the deliberative element of the internal perspective on the self when we make this move. The internal perspective does not take beliefs and desires as a given. It operates under constraints to be sure, but many of these constraints one feels the weight of as inner trajectories, as psychic inertia. One will recall that Moran stresses the way in which the authority of the first-­person perspective is one of being the one whose agency is making, strengthening, or revising beliefs and desires. An emphasis on the place from which one lives, from Teresa’s metaphor, fits well with this deliberative dimension, as does her emphasis on the changes wrought in one’s desires. Desires are the living record of what one places value in, of the ends to which one’s deliberations are intended. The pain that Teresa reports in the growing and realigning of one’s desires is a form of experiencing radical growth from the inside. In the union affected at the end, she does not simply bring her beliefs and desires in line with those she takes to be God’s. God’s presence is experienced as an internal phenomenon that permeates the proc­ess that determines belief and desire. The deliberative activity that is necessary to find God at the core of one’s being, I would suggest, results in an alignment of one’s desires and beliefs with those of God. One’s perspective is in complete sync with that of the Divine, allowing one to discover God not as an external object but through one’s experience, through one’s participation in the inner life of the Divine. It is knowing not simply by way of privileged access, but it is a knowing by doing. Once again, the deepest form of first-­ personal knowledge ends up being a second-­personal enactment of shared activity. “It is no longer the soul that lives but I.” In The City of God, Augustine discusses the knowledge of the angels, and he says a fascinating thing about how the angels know themselves. He says that, even though the unfallen angels could look within themselves, they don’t dare to take their eyes off of God even to know themselves.41 Rather, they take their perspective on themselves from their vision of God. On the view I’m presenting here, something similar can be said of us, at least at the extreme of spiritual maturity. Part of the intrigue of Teresa’s image, however, is that there is no dichotomy between looking to the Divine and looking within oneself. That’s because our essence is relational in a deeper way than one might 41 Augustine, The City of God (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2013), 336.

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200  Analyzing Prayer have suspected just from knowing that we are a “social animal.” It is not, as in certain Greco-­Roman perspectives, that we are divine or that our souls are of the same kind as the divine. Rather, the deepest fact about ourselves is that we were made in a way that is apt for hosting the divine presence. We are temples, and the most important fact about a temple is not architectural. It is that a god is present within. Living from that place is inviting the divine presence into the deliberative activity that expresses our agency. Our agency was made to be shared or better, to merge with and actively give way to the life of the Divine. When this is affected, one comes to a place of experiential knowledge not only of the Divine but of oneself.42 The tension between the internal and external perspectives on the self in Moran’s case came from the fact that to the extent that the external perspective was necessary it threatened the legitimacy of the internal perspective. Likewise, to the extent that the internal perspective was adequate, it looked as if the external perspective consisted in an unnecessary fragmentation of the self by placing part of the self outside of the scope of the operations of conscious, deliberative agency. There is, of course, no guarantee that the internal perspective is adequate though. Hence, the attractiveness of using the external perspective as a tool. When the external perspective is subsumed within the context of prayer and the internal perspective one adopts as an aim is one within which one will share agency with the Divine in union, the import of detecting faults and fragmentation within oneself changes. Whatever one discovers from the external perspective can be used to whet the appetite by underlining the distance between where one is and what one desires. The reorientation of desire is one of the most important developments in getting close to that state in which one’s psyche will be maximally integrated. Discovering a threat to the internal perspective from within the prayerful external perspective on the  self, then, can actually enhance the internal deliberative activity that 42  As a referee helpfully notes, there is, of course, a worry here about whether the individuality of the self is lost in giving way to the Divine. This is a worry for agency generally, but it also has an ep­i­ste­ mic variant insofar as the self we are knowing might seem to be erased in this vision of union. To be sure, whether a meaningful distinction between union and absorption or assimilation can be maintained is a perpetual question when it comes to the mystics and one not to be resolved in a footnote. In a very flat-­footed way, though, one might say that just as one might uniquely express the divine image vis-­à-­vis other people in the way one pursues the good, the true, and the beautiful, so I think there is some scope here to uniquely share agency with the Divine in a way reflective of one’s particularity. The process of spiritual formation surely should build in the direction of similarity (e.g. each being conformed to the image of Christ), but the idea that shared agency, dependence, and vulnerability lead to an erasure of the self and agency rather than a flowering of them is, I think, an understandable limitation of the imagination not unrelated to what Charles Taylor calls the “expressive individualism” that characterizes the modern self.

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Prayer as the Road to Self-Knowledge  201 eventually produces an integrated self. Put succinctly, sin and shame fragment, but responding to the presence of sin and shame with longing binds together. Likewise, although the external view on the self may eventually be rendered unnecessary when one’s agency is taken up into a final union, until that point there is every reason to think that seeking to ferret out and expose what obstacles there may be to deeper union with God will be an important expression of one’s growth toward psychic integration.

Conclusion In conclusion, I have presented Teresa of Avila’s curious view that prayer is the path to self-­ knowledge. Using Richard Moran’s taxonomy of self-­ knowledge, I have argued that Teresa’s perspective is an attractive one, and indeed, one that can resolve the tension between Moran’s two perspectives on the self. The point aimed at in this chapter, though, is not that the purpose of prayer is first and foremost to arrive at self-­knowledge. Presumably, prayer’s primary purpose has more to do with God, how one relates to God, and how one seeks to relate others to and to others through God. I have tried to show that these more familiar foci for prayer imply an evolving relationship with oneself as well and that indeed growth in self-­knowledge is bound up with spiritual growth generally. It ends up that it is not only Greek philosophers but Christian mystics who lay upon us the moral and existential challenge, “Know thyself.”

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12 Prayer and the Meaning of Life Jason McMartin

Prayer is at once word, thought, and life. Karl Barth1 Prayer is the most deeply human action in which we can engage. Eugene Peterson2 Prayer is . . . one of the essentials of our life. Karl Rahner3

From a theological perspective, perhaps the meaning of life is obvious. Christians who are not professional theologians may readily say that the purpose of life is to glorify God or something similar. At the same time, our culture appears to be in the throes of a crisis of meaning. Long-­standing answers to the question of meaning have not been found satisfactory. Questions concerning the meaning of life are more likely to be fodder for humor than serious inquiry.4 For many, Christian theological accounts of meaningfulness are disconnected from daily experience. We have no shortage of answers to the question of meaning, yet modern people struggle to find these answers compelling. Analytic philosophers have been accused of avoiding the honest inquiry of ordinary people about life’s meaningfulness. In recent years, increased energy may be perceived among philosophers investigating questions of meaning. In this chapter, I will explore a handful of criteria suggested by analytic philosophers for a satisfactory account of life’s meaningfulness. This account will not be comprehensive, nor will it attempt to provide necessary and sufficient ­conditions for meaning in life. 1  Karl Barth, Prayer, trans. Sara F. Terrien, ed. Donald E. Saliers (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 7. 2  Eugene Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 111. 3  Karl Rahner, Happiness Through Prayer (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1958), 7. 4  Robert Nozick, “Philosophy and the Meaning of Life” in Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1981), 571–2.

Jason McMartin, Prayer and the Meaning of Life In: Analyzing Prayer: Theological and Philosophical Essays. Edited by: Oliver D. Crisp, James M. Arcadi, and Jordan Wessling, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859044.003.0013

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Prayer and the Meaning of Life  203 My thesis is that prayer is one mode of free and self-­conscious appropriation of the divinely revealed nature and purpose of human life. It is subjective adoption of an objectively given meaning. In conversation with the emerging analytic philosophical literature, in the first section I identify a few parameters of the discussion of meaningfulness, including potential threats to meaning, the nature of the question of meaning, and the unity or disunity among candidates for meaning-­conferring properties. These criteria, loosely conceived, suggest that two kinds of meaning are needed: Objective frameworks and subjective appropriations. Though I will be unable to provide detailed examination of these many philosophical issues, they may be taken as gesturing toward a space that prayer will be shown to fill. For this chapter, I will assume without argument that Christian theism provides a satisfactory objective meaning framework, but in the second section, I will sketch some of the facets of that framework using a Thomas Aquinas-­inspired approach. I will then explore the manner in which prayer may provide personally significant appropriation of the objective meaning framework using Karl Barth’s theology of prayer as an interlocutor. In the fourth section, I will consider how prayer addresses threats to human meaning, focusing on death and suffering as examples. In the final section, I will draw out implications of this discussion for theological education and discipleship.

Criteria of Meaningfulness from Philosophy Although nonphilosophers are interested in the question of life’s meaning, analytic philosophers have, until recently, been slow to examine the question. There are two broad aspects of the discussion. Much of the revival of  analytic interest in the question of the meaning of life has focused on sharpening the question itself. In addition, philosophers have argued for different views concerning what gives life meaning. Among these are worldviews such as supernaturalism, objective naturalism, subjective naturalism, and nihilism.5 Philosophers have plumbed a variety of facets to clarify the question of life’s meaningfulness. For my purposes, I’ll focus on four lines of discussion. First, philosophers have noted the circumstances that seem to prompt 5  Joshua W. Seachris, “General Introduction” in Exploring the Meaning of Life: An Anthology and Guide, ed. Joshua W. Seachris (Malden: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2013), 10.

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204 Analyzing Prayer questions of meaningfulness. Second, they have attempted to clarify what is meant by meaning. What are we seeking when we inquire concerning the meaning of life? Third, some analyze meaning into a cluster of distinct normative properties. Fourth, I suggest that the normative properties can be grouped into two categories: Objective frameworks and subjective appropriations. In the remainder of this chapter, I will develop a theological account of this latter category.

Threats to Meaning Thomas Nagel suggests that meaninglessness (what he calls “the absurd”) arises from the conjunction of two facts about human lives. First, we cannot avoid living our lives seriously; all of our actions speak of commitment to various reasons and justifications. Second, we have the ability to step back and view our lives as a whole. That is, we are capable of viewing our life sub specie aeternitatis. From this standpoint, we are able to evaluate all of the chains of justification we have made for our actions and also to cast doubt on the reasons for our actions. At the conclusion of his essay, Nagel concludes: “I would argue that absurdity is one of the most human things about us: A manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics . . . it is possible only because we possess a certain kind of insight—the capacity to transcend ourselves in thought.”6 Unlike the orbit of the moon, we have aims; and unlike a mouse, we are self-­conscious. Therefore, the threat of absurdity or of meaninglessness is a particularly human possibility. We are able to raise doubts about our purposes and plans. Evaluation of one’s life may elicit a variety of prompts toward meaninglessness. Periods of crisis resulting from death, evil, suffering, or absurdity may prompt doubts concerning life’s meaningfulness. Certain threats cast a shadow of potential meaninglessness over the purposes and aims of one’s life. Evil and suffering have been philosophically underexplored as instigators of evaluations of meaninglessness, though the emerging discussion of gratuitous evil points in this direction. The problem of death and the uncertainty of immortality are commonly thought to generate the threat of meaninglessness. Tolstoy cited awareness of death as prompting his existential crisis. He reports that the questions that 6 Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 23.

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Prayer and the Meaning of Life  205 haunted him and caused his life to “freeze” were “Why? What is it for? What does it lead to?” Any of his various answers led to further questions: “What then? So what? What for?” He states, “[M]y life then came to a standstill . . . there was no real life in me because I did not have a single desire, the fulfillment of which I could feel to be reasonable. If I wished for anything, I knew beforehand that, were I to satisfy the wish, or were I not to satisfy it, nothing would come of it.”7 Being unable to answer these purpose questions, Tolstoy despaired of life and turned his thoughts toward suicide. Death seemed to drain purpose for ordinary human pursuits, all of which come to the same fate. Charles Taylor proposes that questions concerning life’s meaning arise more readily for us because of the loss of shared frameworks.8 We face the specter of meaninglessness in a way that other cultures (perhaps) have not. For many, searching for a “believable framework” becomes a preoccupation. Kent Dunnington makes a similar argument by describing addicts as “unwitting prophets” of modernity. The increase of addictions in the modern West can be linked to the lack of a shared narrative, forcing people back onto their own resources to discover a unifying schema for their lives. Dunnington suggests that addictions are prevalent because they provide the sought-­for unity. He explains that “addictions provide compelling motivation toward specific ends in a way that is otherwise inaccessible to the modern person who can find no final criterion to justify activity in a definite direction.”9 Much of the energy to ground meaningfulness arises from threat, but it need not. The experiences we have of wonder and awe at the universe may also stir us to inquire after global significance. Both Plato and Aristotle traced the origin of philosophy to the experience of wonder.10 Here the inquiry into meaningfulness is prompted by curiosity, rather than threat. Distinct prompts toward meaning may require distinct meaning frameworks. As I’ll discuss, some philosophers have advocated parsing the question into distinct parts. Prayer may only address some of these. In the absence of specific experiences of threat or wonder, the question of meaning may not arise.11 One implication is that the question of life’s 7  Leo Tolstoy “A Confession” in Spiritual Writings (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006), 48. 8  Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 24. 9  Kent Dunnington, Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), 116. 10  Seachris, “General Introduction,” 8. 11  Roy  F.  Baumeister contends that “most people’s lives are full of meaning.” Roy  F.  Baumeister, Meanings of Life (New York: Guilford Press, 1991), 3.

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206 Analyzing Prayer meaning needs a specifically human context of explanation. More global ­contexts may be relevant, but global answers sans clear human relevance will be unsatisfying. To illustrate this, Nagel asks us to imagine a scenario where humans are being raised by an alien species as a food source for them. This account would provide the broader reality into which humans fit and may find their purpose, but it doesn’t offer much to generate enthusiastic approval. This component will be developed more thoroughly in the following.

Meaning of “Meaning” Philosophical work has been done to clarify the question by finding a ground for a nonlinguistic use of the term “meaning.” That is, as should be clear from the contexts of the question I have delineated, one is generally not seeking the semantic content of the word “life” when one inquires about the meaning of life. One strategy abandons the word “meaning” and replaces it with a word thought to be less vague, such as “purpose” or “significance.” Another strategy notes that we use the word “meaning” in nonlinguistic modes when we inquire concerning the broader context or world into which something fits. Joshua Seachris puts it this way: Discovering this meaning will be a product of asking and answering questions like: In what larger narrative(s) does the sentence (intended to refer to a fact, event, or phenomenon) belong? What worldviews do such narratives embody and reinforce? What are the universes of discourse within which this sentence, and the event it refers to, settle down and make themselves at home—and which, at the same time, they challenge and reshape from within?12 

This meaning of “meaning” sets life (non-­semantically) within a broader world and set of questions relating to how life should be understood in light of such things as existence, purpose, value, worth, suffering, and death. Meaning questions arise from evaluating my life as a whole and its fit or lack of fit with frameworks or worlds beyond myself. I may judge that some disruption has severed my link to this broader framework, prompting a negative evaluation of my life’s meaningfulness. 12  Joshua W. Seachris “Meaning of Life: Contemporary Analytic Perspectives,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/mean-­ana/#SH3a.

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Prayer and the Meaning of Life  207

Monistic or Amalgam Normativity Meaningfulness is a normative property. It prescribes what a life should contain to be considered meaningful and what it should avoid to escape meaninglessness. It has been thought that meaningfulness remains distinct from ethical, aesthetic, or eudaimonistic categories, though perhaps having some intersection with all three. Is there one normative property in virtue of which life may be considered meaningful? Simple or monistic analyses of the meaning of life suggest the answer to this question is yes. Given the relative ease of discovering counterexamples, monistic accounts have not been popular with philosophers recently. The concern over a solitary normative property of meaningfulness is reflected in popular consciousness also. We tend not to think that the answer to the meaning of life is 42. Plurality, disparity, or even tension among possible life meanings may encourage pursuit of a monistic account of meaning. Roy Baumeister opines that “the modern affliction is to have too much meaning, rather than not enough . . . the modern anxiety is whether all these little bits of meaning add up to something suitably big. Life has lots of meaning, but does it have a meaning?”13 If meaningfulness involves connection, as has been affirmed in the previous section, then fragmentation may threaten our ability to attain it. At minimum, fragmentation and disparate meanings may prompt a search for a unifying narrative. Karl Rahner describes such a situation: The life of men is made up of many and varied activities. Deep in the heart of men is the longing, fitfully glimpsed and but half realized, to gather up all these strivings into an intense pursuit of one all-­embracing objective worthy of the toil and tears and devotion of the human heart . . . but the reality is a picture of heaped-­up activities, where the trivial jostles the less trivial, and the less trivial elbows the important things, and there is no unity of design, nor any intensity of single, concentrated purpose.14

Baumeister himself resists the urge to develop a theory that provides meaning for all of the pieces at every level of specificity. In particular, all of the meanings of day-­to-­day living need not, according to him, add up to a high-­level meaning of life as a whole.15 13 Baumeister, Meanings of Life, 5. 15 Baumeister, Meanings of Life, 21.

14 Rahner, Happiness Through Prayer, 7.

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208 Analyzing Prayer Given plausible concerns over simple analyses, others suggest complex ­elucidations of the meaning of life, offering multiple properties in virtue of which a life may be considered meaningful. Frequently, such theorists eschew the goal of providing necessary and sufficient conditions, opting instead to describe several possible candidates for meaningfulness and evaluating them accordingly. Sometimes these theories are referred to as amalgam theses. Amalgam theorists break the question into a series of disjuncts such as “What is the purpose of life?,” “What makes life valuable or worthwhile?,” or “Why does something exist rather than nothing?” Each of these questions continues to be quite daunting in scope, but they are thought to be less vague and more likely to be answered.

Objective and Subjective Meaning Supposing that numerous distinct properties constitute meaningfulness, we may identify two categories of features salient to meaning in life. Meaningfulness benefits both from a sound grounding in reality and from subjective appropriation of that framework as personally satisfying. First, meaningfulness needs subjective appropriation and awareness. If the capacity for self-­consciousness raises the specter of meaninglessness, then it will be difficult (though perhaps not impossible) to avoid self-­consciousness in addressing crises or questions of meaning. Whatever the cosmic grounding of human meaning might be, it won’t satisfy in the absence of knowledge about what it is. As Nagel explains, “its significance must come back to what we can understand, or it will not even appear to give us what we are seeking.”16 This is Nagel’s purpose in imagining the factory farm scenario. Even if that narrative explained how our lives were significant to the aliens, it would not show why our lives would thereby be meaningful for us. Since the question is raised by our ability to view our lives as a whole, the answer must have a place for self-­conscious appropriation. Merely objective answers will not do. As Susan Wolf explains, “a person who is alienated from her life, who gets no joy or pride from the activities that comprise it, can be said to lack meaning in life.”17 Further, it would seem we need fit between our internal sense of meaning and the broader reality of which we are a part. 16  Nagel, “The Absurd,” 16. 17 Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 34.

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Prayer and the Meaning of Life  209 Second, given these considerations, it may be thought that meaningfulness needs the world to possess certain features for our lives to be meaningful. Inquiries concerning meaningfulness or crises of meaning prompt one toward consideration of the broader context in which one’s life makes sense. Nagel’s earth-­as-­factory-­farm scenario provides one such broader context. Nozick’s account of meaning as self-­transcendence and connection to something bigger than oneself fits an intuition we have about that in which meaning consists.18 Wolf characterizes meaningfulness using both an objective and subjective component: “[O]ne’s life is meaningful insofar as one finds oneself loving things worthy of love and able to do something positive about it. A life is meaningful . . . insofar as it is actively and lovingly engaged in projects of worth.”19 I’ll not evaluate her claim that meaningfulness includes both here, since in the next section I’ll assume without argument that the Christian worldview provides an objective meaning for the human person. For my purposes, her claim that the two facets should be connected will be useful. As I mentioned, meaningfulness is a normative property. This illustrates a weakness in Nagel’s factory farm thought experiment. Supposing that we are food for aliens, it is cruel and unnecessary for us to have self-­awareness. We ought not have such ability if it only makes us aware of our role as food. Further, it provides no purpose for us in our day-­to-­day lives. In the end, we’ll be eaten; perhaps the best we can do is fatten up or become tastier. Supposing we are food, what should we do in light of that? In Wolf ’s terms, my fulfillment must connect to the objective framework. Meaning frameworks are susceptible to doubt. Although we may consider our lives as a whole, we have access only to what is available to our conscious awareness. Affirming that, Nagel contends that “there does not appear to be any conceivable world (containing us) about which unsettlable doubts could not arise.”20 Several things result from this. First, our engagement with meaning-­conferring properties will need a means to deal with doubt. Second, divine revelation of our meaning, rather than discovery by means of unassisted human capacities, would aid our process considerably. Third, even when our meaning is revealed to us, we may have difficulty appropriating it. Certainly, some outside the faith view Christianity much as they would the earth-­farm narrative. Those inside the faith do not view it this way, but such

18  Nozick, “Philosophy and the Meaning of Life.” 19 Wolf, Meaning in Life, 35. 20  Nagel, “The Absurd,” 17.

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210 Analyzing Prayer affirmation does not preclude questions, doubts, crises, and other threats to one’s sense of meaning within this larger framework. Although we desire a sense of meaning and purpose that is greater than ourselves, there is no guarantee that we will perceive ourselves to be in possession of that meaning when we find it. Consider, for example, the distinctions made by Eleonore Stump related to human flourishing. It is possible to lack flourishing when we believe ourselves to have it, as when we have an undiagnosed and asymptomatic illness. Similarly, we may flourish without being aware that we do, when, for example, we believe ourselves to have cancer when we are actually in remission.21 In the same way, meaningfulness is not transparent. Suppose I was a fundraiser for an international relief organization and believed that through my contributing to the needs of humanity, my life had meaning in being connected to a cause greater than myself. In reality, the relief organization for which I work is a front that siphons funds to dictators. Presumably, the meaningfulness of my efforts would be undermined without my awareness. A subjectively meaningful life based on falsehood would be a delusion. This is why we’re inclined to think that Truman’s life in the “Truman Show” is empty even before he learns it’s all a sham. Similar scenarios could be generated for situations in which my life was meaningful without my awareness. In the factory farm scenario, it’s probably better that I not know my life’s meaning. Therefore, meaning in life includes one or many normative properties that connect humans to broader contexts and allow them to transcend threats of disconnection. Among such properties are self-­conscious appropriation of a broader meaning framework and the meaning-­conferring properties of the world we inhabit. Moreover, this connection between subjective and objective components of meaning should be resistant to being disrupted by varying threats.

The Christian Meaning-­Making Framework and Prayer In what follows, I’ll focus on the category of normative properties including self-­conscious appropriation of meaning with the aim of showing that prayer is a promising candidate for one such property. I’ll assume the Christian narrative as the best candidate for an objective framework without evaluating 21 Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 11–13.

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Prayer and the Meaning of Life  211 philosophical arguments for and against it. A brief construal of that meaning framework will enable us to evaluate the prospects of prayer as appropriation of these other properties of human existence. A complete account of these properties would be a worthwhile task in its own right, but extends beyond the scope of what is possible here. I’ll sketch a Thomist Aquinas-­inspired model that I find generative. In the next section, I’ll explicate the features of prayer that render it promising for self-­conscious appropriation of meaning and use Karl Barth as an interlocutor. Josef Pieper quotes Thomas as saying that “as created good is a reflection of the uncreated good, so the attainment of a created good is a reflected beatitude.” Pieper goes on to say that attainment happens in many and varied ways and that “each gratification points to the ultimate one, and that all happiness has some connection with eternal beatitude.”22 Here we have a basic structure: Normative human properties derive from God’s being. As one of these normative properties, meaningfulness will also mirror God. Let’s start with the beatitude that is reflected before moving on to explaining how human nature does the reflecting. God is blesséd, having life, joy, and existence by nature. God’s blessedness is the sum total of God’s perfections. As Pieper puts it “There is only one Being that is happy by His mere ­ex­ist­ence.”23 God is blesséd because triune. If God is blesséd, then God is intrinsically perfect and self-­sufficient. God does not require a world or us for his fulfillment. The distinction between the created order and God is maintained. God’s blessedness derives from self-­sufficiency. As Thomas explains, non-­blessedness results from the lack of something that is needed. By contrast “whoever, therefore, is self-­sufficient, needing nothing, he is blessed.”24 Further, as Thomas states, God is God’s own blessedness.25 Pieper explains it thus: “Any human being who is happy shares in a happiness that is not of himself. For God, however, being and being happy are one and the same; God is happy by virtue of His existence.”26 Therefore, all that is not God must receive its blessedness from God. Thomas again: “[W]hoever other than God is blessed, must be called blessed by participation.”27 This takes us to the next step, which considers how humans partake of the norms established by God.

22  Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), 16. 23 Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, 28. 24  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book One: God, trans. Anton C. Pegis (Garden City: Image Books, 1955), I.100.5, 299. (Hereafter, SCG). 25  Ibid. I.101, 300–1. 26 Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, 29. 27  SCG I.102.4, 302.

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212 Analyzing Prayer God’s being is the standard of normativity. All other attainments derive from or reflect this central one. Creation does not bear these normative traits intrinsically but receives them. The creation is not self-­sufficiently existent, joyful, or blessed. The human person must be understood primarily then as recipient of the divine blessedness. That God creates a world at all is an astounding gift of grace; it is a free expression of self-­giving love.28 God did not need to create, being self-­ sufficient, but did it anyway. God is glorified when we flourish, because our flourishing is the reception of and participation in God’s blessedness (the reflecting back God’s being). We have been created (that is, it is our nature) to receive our blessedness from outside ourselves. We are needy creatures. By contrast, God has no needs. If human existence is gift, it is also a task. Having been entrusted with the gift, we are called to steward it responsibly. The pattern here, seen throughout Scripture and particularly in the letters of Paul, is the conjunction of the indicative and the imperative. Thielicke puts it this way: “The creator is here viewed, not merely as the prototype from which human existence derives, but also as the model after which it should be patterned and to which it should conform. Divine likeness is not just that from which I come. It is also that to which—through the gift and claim of God—I go.”29 Human life is patterned after God’s life, which provides the norm for human achievement of its telos. Humans are both blessed and commanded (Gen. 1: 28; 2: 16). The Word of God is the structure of the cosmos. God speaks and the world comes into being. All of creation is responsible to God’s speaking; only humans (and perhaps angels) may choose not to be responsive to the divine summons. The mark of human hearing is human obedience, and thus, according to the biblical concept, hearing and doing ought to be singular.

Meaning and Prayer in Conversation with Barth Given the philosophical criteria and the brief theological anthropology delineated in the previous sections, I turn to consider the manner in which prayer fulfills the need for subjective appropriation of meaning. In doing so, I converse with Karl Barth’s theology of prayer.

28  Thomas Oden, The Living God (Peabody, MA: Prince Press, 1987), 230. 29 Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Volume 1: Foundations, ed. William  H.  Lazareth (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1966), 152.

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Prayer and the Meaning of Life  213 The nature of the human person mirrors the structure of prayer. Thus prayer may be thought of as a uniquely human response that is deeply congruent with human nature. It instantiates the gift and task of being human. First, our reception of God’s blessing rightly results in response. As Alexander Schmemann explains, the natural reaction of the human person and the activity that is meant to be typical for us is that of blessing God in gratitude and praise for the goodness of the world. He explains: In the Bible to bless God is not a “religious” or a “cultic” act, but the very way of life. God blessed the world, blessed man, blessed the seventh day (that is, time), and this means that He filled all that exists with His love and goodness, made all this “very good.” So the only natural (and not “supernatural”) reaction of man, to whom God gave this blessed and sanctified world, is to bless God in return, to thank Him, to see the world as God sees it and—in this act of gratitude and adoration —to know, name and possess the world. All rational, spiritual and other qualities of man, distinguishing him from other creatures, have their focus and ultimate fulfillment in this capacity to bless God.30

Second, petition is at the heart of prayer, mirroring human-­as-­recipient. Gratitude and worship are also important components. Each of these reflects the dependence of the human person on the grace of God and the human vocation to respond. In his biblical theology of prayer, Patrick Miller states the following: Address to God in the Bible and in human life generally moves back and forth between plea or petition and praise or thanksgiving. In that movement, one is at the heart of what prayer is all about. The biblical story as a whole and in many of its parts may be charted along that movement also. It begins in the human address that is the cry of a suffering one (Gen. 4:10), and it ends when those cries have ceased (Rev. 21: 1–4) and the world is filled with the praise of God (Psalm 150 and Revelation 19).31

Prayer reflects the nature of the human person and is an expression of it.

30  Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1963), 15. 31 Patrick D. Miller, They Cried to the Lord: The Form and Theology of Biblical Prayer (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994), 55.

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214 Analyzing Prayer Karl Barth’s theology of prayer coheres well with the portrait sketched thus far. In his exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, Barth views petition as central to prayer; other potential aspects of prayer flow from it.32 He understands the structure of the prayer to be two groups of three petitions. The first three petitions concern God’s cause and glory. The second three focus on us and our dependence on God. Barth links prayer with petition by noting that human existence is utterly dependent on God. No actions, thoughts, or emotions can be without God. We may pretend that God does not exist, but this doesn’t change reality.33 Prayer is then a recognition of the underlying reality of our existence. “When we pray, ‘Give us . . . our . . . bread,’ we do no other than to recognize what is the reality of our life; we admit that which is, namely, that we are nothing without him.”34 The second three fit our cause into God’s.35 As Luther says on the Lord’s Prayer, we must take part in God’s action. God is busy at work for his glory and for our salvation; and we ourselves must benefit from his action, not as spectators, nor by giving ourselves the role of indispensable collaborators, but by praying, by concerning ourselves with him, with what he is doing. Therein is the true collaboration. God invites us to address ourselves to him while understanding that his cause and ours are intimately united, that our cause is comprehended within his.36

Hence, the second three petitions refer back to the first three and link our welfare to God’s purpose. Humans are dependent by nature and our existence is a gift; prayer acknowledges this dependency. Barth states, “To be a Christian and to pray are one and the same thing; it is a matter that cannot be left to our caprice. It is a need, a kind of breathing necessary to life.”37 Since humans are called to be responsible for the gift with which we have been entrusted, we may also link prayer to human vocation. Schmemann, for example, makes the following affirmation concerning human vocation: The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God—and by filling the world with

32  I.  John Hesselink, “Karl Barth on Prayer” in Prayer, ed. Sara  F.  Terrien and Donald  E.  Saliers (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 78; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/3, The Doctrine of Creation, ed. G.  W.  Bromiley and T.  F.  Torrance (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1961), 268. (Hereafter, CD). 33 Barth, Prayer, 28. 34  Ibid., 29. 35 Ibid. 36  Ibid., 30. 37  Ibid., 15.

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Prayer and the Meaning of Life  215 this eucharist, he transforms his life, the one that he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him.38

Human nature as conduit of blessing generates human vocation. We are blessed to be a blessing. Prayer is a means to fulfill our human vocation to partner with the work that God is doing in the world. As Hallesby states, “our lives should be, according to our Lord’s plans, quiet but steadily flowing streams of blessing, which through our prayers and intercessions should reach our whole environment.”39 Prayer is work and can accompany all of our work. Barth, too, views prayer as human vocation. In it “He [God] invites us to participate in his work, in the government of the church, of the world . . . God invites us to join his designs and his action.”40 Sometimes meaning questions arise when work into which we’ve put our effort is threatened by termination or insignificance. As noted, the prospect of death may be thought to undercut the significance of our efforts and render them meaningless. Prayer is a form of work done in faith and linked to God’s eternal purposes. While we may not know the lasting significance of our prayer work, we trust that our responsiveness to God’s command to pray coheres with God’s design. Prayer aligns our internal states with reality. I don’t mean by that to endorse the prayer-­as-­alignment view over and against prayer as moving the hand of God. This has been a subject of much debate. Prayer puts us into the relationship for which we were created and is the fulfillment of our nature. The “being with” component of prayer is essential to it, and can undergird a variety of different accounts of divine and human agency in prayer. Barth seemed to think no contradiction between divine sovereignty and human free will existed in viewing prayer as altering God’s action. For instance, he affirmed that “God answers . . . God does not act in the same way whether we pray or not. Prayer exerts an influence upon God’s action, even upon his existence.”41 Some have thought Barth’s views here to verge on paradox, yet he affirms that God wills for human prayers to be included with the divine governance of the world. He explains, “the fact that God yields to human petitions, that he alters his intentions and follows the bent of our prayers, is not a sign of weakness. In his own majesty and in the splendor of his might, he has willed and yet wills it so . . . he does not then impair himself by yielding to our prayer; on the contrary, it is in so doing that he shows his 38 Schmemann, For the Life, 15. 39  Ole Hallesby, Prayer (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1931), 64. 40 Barth, Prayer, 27. 41  Ibid., 13.

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216 Analyzing Prayer greatness.”42 The point I wish to affirm from Barth is that prayer is the fulfillment of human nature and hence a component of human meaning.

Prayer and Threats to Meaning Having considered ways in which prayer enables self-­conscious appropriation of the Christian meaning framework, I turn to explore prayer’s response to threats to meaning. I’ll consider two such threats briefly: Death and suffering. Death potentially undercuts meaningfulness because it interrupts projects and plans. Prayer addresses the problem of death in two ways. First, prayer enables us to engage with the doubt caused by death without succumbing to meaninglessness. We are not aware in a detailed manner of all that grounds meaning for us, but we trust in the one who assures us that such meaning is present. Faith trusts in the ultimate meaning without being able to see it. As mentioned earlier, Nagel contends that “there does not appear to be any conceivable world (containing us) about which unsettlable doubts could not arise.”43 The biblical record provides much fodder for those who express their doubts to God through prayer. Expression of doubt is not the opposite of prayer in faith, but one means by which it might be enacted. Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane provides a paradigmatic example. Nagel does say provocatively that “the absurdity of our situation derives not from a collision between our expectations and the world, but from a collision within ourselves.”44 Though not what he had in mind, Nagel’s assertion suggests that in some instances of human doubt the problem arises from being sinfully out of sync with our true nature. Second, death does not interrupt that which confers meaning on our lives, and prayer links terrestrial life with participation in God’s purposes in our post-­mortem existence. Pieper reads Thomas as affirming that happiness is contemplation. Without taking a detour to delineate the relationship of prayer and contemplation, we may affirm that the two intersect at many crucial points. Pieper suggests that contemplation links our earthly apprehension of God and the post-­mortem beatific vision. The object of apprehension unites the two instances.45 Death does not render terrestrial life meaningless because it does not bring an end to the meaning found within it. Eternal life begins not when we die, but when we apprehend God through faith.

42  Ibid., 14–15. 43  Nagel, “The Absurd,” 17. 45 Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, 79.

44 Ibid.

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Prayer and the Meaning of Life  217 Working backward from eschatological characterizations of the beatific vision allows us to see the terrestrial significance of prayer. In glory, we will see God’s face (Rev. 22: 3–4; I Cor. 13: 12; II Cor. 3: 28; 4: 6; I John 3: 2). Seeing God’s face is the joyful fulfillment of Christian hope and contrasts with our terrestrial mode of apprehension of God in faith (II Cor. 5: 7). Our darkened apprehension of God in faith finds its completion in the beatific vision and is genuine, though partial, in this life. Moreover, the apprehension of God within the world imbues it with meaning. Even the most mundane facets of the world may be perceived as God’s creations through which God’s glory shines.46 “For [the Christian] earthly contemplation means above all: That back of immediate phenomena, and within them, the Face of the incarnate Divine Logos is visible.”47 Though I have not developed it here, this links with the concern among philosophers that meaning in life should be able to be linked to the ordinary. Rahner affirms that prayer is a means by which diverse and ordinary components of life may be connected to the ultimate and highest part of human nature.48 This brief sketch of prayer as addressing the meaning-­threat of death perhaps indicates a way forward for other kinds of threats also. Prayer can address suffering through lament. Walter Brueggemann’s account of the psalms of lament uses an orientation-­disorientation-­reorientation pattern.49 The third category concerns the way lament enables renewed connection to a meaning framework through lamenting prayer. Any number of forms of suffering—physical, emotional, relational, spiritual—may be ameliorated through this form of prayer.

Implications In this final section, I want to suggest some reasons for thinking that linking the philosophical discussion of meaning to prayer is worthwhile. I imagine it would be tempting to think that since the Christian worldview has human meaning sorted out, no additional contribution is really needed. The implications discussed in this section serve to answer the question: What benefit does the philosophical discourse add to our understandings of prayer and of the meaningfulness of life? Consider again Nagel’s earth-­as-­alien-­food-­source thought experiment. It provides a clear and undoubtable meaning framework, but it’s unappetizing 46  Ibid., 82. 47  Ibid., 80. 48 Rahner, Happiness Through Prayer, 7. 49  Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1984).

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218 Analyzing Prayer as an answer (unless you’re the alien). Some of the dissatisfaction arises from the failure of the scenario to connect with my own desires and concerns for my life. It’s (pun intended) alien to me. This suggests that prayer and spiritual theology should be integrated within theological education. If merely objective answers are unsatisfying, then theological education does a disservice when subjective appropriation and practice of the theological truths is lacking. Beginning with Paul, and throughout history, theologians have interwoven theologizing with prayer, shifting back and forth between third-­person and first-­person address. Barth follows this pattern in his exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, as he “will suddenly and without warning be overheard addressing God.”50 Insofar as analytic theologians wish to emulate their historical exemplars, they might consider interweaving theology with prayer. Doing so may seem awkward in our secularized environment, but an analytic liturgical theology bears further exploration. Just as theology should lead to prayer, so prayerful theology may be framed differently from how it otherwise would be. For example, Barth affirms that we must pray because God has commanded it. This command-­based account of prayer perhaps obscures the reality of the position of the human person in relationship to God.51 Commands grate on modern autonomous sensibilities. In other moments, Barth links the command to our created nature. “What God wills of him is simply that he shall pray to Him, that he shall come to Him with his requests . . . As the creature of God he can only come to God and speak with Him as a suppliant, and he is directed to do so.”52 For Barth, command and natural disposition are linked in prayer. Both are needed, but theologizing shaped by prayer-­as-­meaning-­appropriation will be sensitive to modes of framing Christian meaning that aid in the process of internalizing that framework rather than perpetuating an alien distance from it. Finally, many books on prayer consider forms of prayer and the content of prayer. Linking prayer and meaning has the potential to open up new avenues for prayer and for linking it together with felt needs.

Conclusion When the nonhuman world hears God’s word, it responds. It is not free not to do so. By contrast, humans have freedom and much of that freedom is found 50  Don E. Saliers, “Prayer and Theology in Karl Barth” in Karl Barth, Prayer, xiii. 51  CD, III/4, 95. 52 Ibid., 93.

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Prayer and the Meaning of Life  219 in awareness. The earth may be full of the glory of God (Is. 6: 3) and yet we may fail to see it (Hab. 2: 14). God designed humans with the capacities for self-­consciousness and freedom. We may respond or not. We may appropriate and accept the purpose that has been assigned to us or not. Using Barth’s language, we may obey God’s command and expressed will or turn aside in disobedience. If we do rebel, we do so at the cost of our humanity and will divide ourselves against our true nature. Prayer humanizes us. The elusiveness of the meaning of life arises in part because it can’t be answered by unaided human resources alone. We must be told. Tolstoy relates that he despaired of meaning because he sought answers in science and philosophy, but could not find them there. He thought the peasants may have known, but they weren’t telling. Consider these words from Pascal: I do not know who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I am myself. I am terribly ignorant about everything. I do not know what my body is, or my senses, or my soul, or even that part of me which thinks what I am saying, which reflects about everything and about itself, and does not know itself any better than it knows anything else . . . just as I do not know whence I come, so I do not know whither I am going.53

Only humans are tempted to self-­deception because only humans raise the question of their own identity and do not have the answer ready to hand.54 This is because, as Pieper explains, “Part of the definition of the created soul, therefore, is that it has received its essence—and along with that its assignment in life—from elsewhere, ab alio, from the shaping and life-­giving act of creation.”55 We are not our own and we do not belong to ourselves. Philosophy may be helpful in framing the question of meaning, but not in providing the (entire) answer. Analytic theology, by contrast, can assist us here to be formed to say in prayer with Thomas Aquinas, from the core of our being, “[T]o Him, then, Who is singularly blessed, be honor and glory unto the ages. Amen.”56,57

53  Blaise Pascal, Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensees Edited, Outlined, and Explained, ed. Peter Kreeft (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1993), 192. 54 David G. Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-­Discovery (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004). 55 Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, 22. 56  SCG, 102.9, 304. 57  My thanks to James Arcadi, Oliver Crisp, Kyle Strobel, and Jordan Wessling for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this chapter.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. 1689 London Baptist Confession  117 Abraham, William  89–90 Absentiality (Absence)  42–3, 47–8, 53–4, 175–6 Adams, Marilyn McCord  56 Agnosticism 50–1 Alston, William  150–1, 154, 158–60 Ames, William  127 Analytic Theology  59–62, 95–101, 114–15, 218–19 Anselm of Canterbury  43–4, 56–7, 131–2 Answering Prayer  10–12, 15–29, 31–3, 68–72 Apophaticism 57–8 Arminius, Jacob  125–6 Atheism 92–3 Augustine  34, 40, 88, 118, 137–8, 140, 143, 172–3, 186–7, 199–200 Barth, Karl  116, 127–30, 142, 147, 202, 212–16, 218 Baumeister, Roy  207 Bavinck, Herman  122–3, 126 Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron  100 Billings, J. Todd  103–4, 108–9, 111 Book of Common Prayer  20–1, 149 Brueggemann, Walter  102–5, 111–13, 217 Brümmer, Vincent  34–7, 60 Calvin, John  83, 118–19, 132–3, 140 Canlis, Julie  176–7 Catechism of the Catholic Church  20–1 Catherine of Sienna  24 Charismatics  47–8, 52–4 Charity 23–33 Choi, Isaac  14–15

Christology 74–5 Classical Theism  44, 47–8, 56–8, 88, 137–9, 144–5 Coakley, Sarah  142 Cogley, Zac  112 Communal Prayer  77, 108–10, 113–14 Communion  42–3, 48 Complaint  80–1, 83–94 Contemplative Prayer  43–4, 46–7, 51–2, 55, 152 Conversion, see Salvation Creation (Prayer and)  31–3 Crisp, Oliver  96, 99–100 Crump, David  31–2 Cuneo, Terence  45–6, 49, 57, 123–4 Darwall, Stephen  123–4 Death 216 Despair 108 Divine Freedom  18, 20–1, 26–8, 46 Divine Prayer  136–48 Dogmatics 126–34 Edwards, Jonathan  177 Eklund, Rebekah  100–2, 105–7 Epistemology  16–18, 53–8, 60–1, 147 Eschatology  138–9, 142–3, 217 Eucharist  20–1, 149, 189 Evil 28–9 Foreknowledge 72 God and Time  11–13 Gratitude 13 Gregory of Nazianzus  130–1 Gregory of Nyssa  137–8 Gunkel, Hermann  102–3

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222 Index Hiddenness 42 Hilary of Poitiers  117 Hope  57, 103–4, 107–8 Howard-Snyder, Daniel  15 Howard-Snyder, Frances  15 Human Will Alignment of  88–90, 94, 215 Freedom of  11, 14–15, 17–18, 21–2, 28, 30–1, 33–5, 72–4, 215–16, 218–19 Hume, David  18–19 Humility  56–7, 185–6 Hypostatic Union  145–6 Idolatry 55–8 Image of Christ  78, 186 Image of God  31–2 Immutability 88 Impetration, see Petitionary Prayer Intercession, see Petitionary Prayer John Chrysostom  23–4, 118 Judaism  45–7, 103 Kingdom of God  31–2, 149 Lament  40–1, 83–7, 91–2, 99–114, 217 Liturgy  20–2, 44–6, 60–1, 63–4, 78, 106–7, 113, 129–30, 149, 152, 160, 163–5 Lord’s Prayer, The  75–6 Love  108, 113–14 Luther, Martin  118–19, 132 Maimonides, Moses  189–91 McCall, Thomas  96, 98–101 Middleton, J. Richard  31–2 Miller, Patrick  213 Molinism 11–13 Moran, Richard  192–200 Muller, Richard  133–4 Mystery 66–7 Mystical Prayer  59–60, 66–70 Mysticism  43–4, 47–8 Nagel, Thomas  204–5, 208–10, 216 Nemes, Steven  24 Non-believing Prayer  38–9, 50–1 Non-doxastic Prayer  38–9, 43, 48–9, 51–7 Non-petitionary Prayer  21–2, 30–1

Omnipresence 172–5 Open Theism  11, 13 Owen, John  117, 173, 180 Pannenberg, Wolfhart  62 Parry, Robin  113 Pascal, Blaise  219 Perfect-Being Theology  40–1, 56 Petitionary Prayer  2, 10–37, 59–60, 63, 68–73, 77, 79–81, 87–90, 137–8, 213–16 Philosophy of Religion  1–2, 49, 57–8, 96 Pieper, Josef  211, 216, 219 Praise 42–3 Pride  8–10, 12–19 Pseudo-Dionysius 43 Rahner, Karl  202, 207, 217 Rea, Michael  86–7 Reprobate 20–37 Reverence  40–1, 47–8, 53–5 Ritualized Prayer  44–7, 51–2, 55, 57 Roberts, Robert C.  8–10, 13–14, 17–18, 105 Sacraments  78, 140–1 Salvation  22–3, 33, 35–7 Sanctification  35–6, 72–3, 173 Schleiermacher, Friedrick  59–60, 62–78, 138–9 Schmemann, Alexander  158, 160, 213–15 Seachris, Joshua  206 Stump, Eleonore  34, 99, 169–75, 210 Speech-Act Theory  119–24, 149 Spiritual Formation  59–60 Strawn, Brent  101–2 Swinburne, Richard  14–15, 18, 31 Taylor, Charles  205 Teresa of Avila  40–1, 183–91, 198–200 Theodicy  36, 113 Theodore Mueller, John  130, 132 Thielicke, Helmut  134–5 Thomas Aquinas  24, 107–8, 127–9, 143–4, 211, 219 Tillich, Paul  140 Unidirectionality  40–3, 47–8, 54

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Index  223 Virtue  110–14, 130 Von Balthasar, Hans Urs  166 Warfield, B.B.  135 Webster, John  127, 129, 133 Wesley, John  34

Wettstein, Howard  45–7 Whitaker, William  119 Winner, Lauren  93–4 Wolf, Susan  208–9 Wolterstorff, Nicholas  63, 106, 119–21, 123–4, 126–7, 153–4, 156–7