Prayer - Lesson 6

Professor James Houston

Prayer

th732-06

Man-made Theological Barriers

Lesson Transcript

We've been exploring so far how our personal narrative and our most intimate emotions are barriers for our prayer life, but now we want more cognitively to look at how our theologians, man-made theologies, have kept us from really a true understanding of prayer. For man-made theologies are like map projections. It's impossible really to know how to represent a sphere on a flat piece of paper and theologies are like a flat piece of paper that are not multi-dimensional for us to really appreciate God. So they are projections and sometimes they're very false projections.

One of the first to give us a false projection that still haunts us today is that of Schleiermacher in the middle of the 19th century. Schleiermacher was, rather like Carl Jung, the son of a Lutheran pastor and he reacted like Carl Jung did against the doctrinaire and abstract scholasticism that his father represented. And Schleiermacher wanted something that was much more feeling. So in his search for God in terms of his feelings, he argued that the foundation of religion was man's sense of absolute dependence. But when you were to ask Schleiermacher, 'Who is this God?' he's not recognisable as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He's simply a projection of our own human feelings of absolute dependence.

And so in reality, Schleiermacher's god is subjectivism of feeling, of the sense of absolute dependence, and so prayer is simply the exercise of dependence, that the nature of man is to be dependent. And for Schleiermacher, prayer is merely the expression of this feeling. So when you look radically at what Schleiermacher is telling us, he's saying that he has no relationship with God as his Father, with Christ as his Saviour and with the Holy Spirit as his Inspiration in a biblical sense. It's the absolutisation of dependence - that’s his prayer life.

He lived between 1768 and 1834. And a generation later, there's Feuerbach, another German theologian, who lived between 1804 and 1872. He takes his argument even further. God is only a projection of man's own humanity. There's no god in the sense of an independent or personal god. So he argues that Yahweh, as the God of the Old Testament, is merely the objectification of Israel's national consciousness that requires some kind of divine patron. And so when you ask Feuerbach what is prayer, for him prayer is merely man's dialoguing with himself. He's a kind of ventriloquist. And sometimes we've been tempted to think of our prayers as those of a ventriloquist. They seem to bounce off the walls as our own echo. That’s what he thought. In other words, he's basically an atheist. God is simply reduced to an unutterable sigh that lies in the depths of the human heart. So prayer is the principle of absolute dependence on some divine principle is what Schleiermacher argues is now really man's absolute dependence on himself. In other words, to put it crudely, for Feuerbach prayer is navel-gazing.

Now, I could go off at a tangent about navel-gazing, which is what the Buddhists do because Buddha has a big stomach. And the big stomach is because in Chinese culture, where every character of perhaps 20,000 characters are different emotions, then you never know your emotions and that’s why Buddha keeps them all stored in the stomach.

Then there's a third example and that’s Paul Tillich, who was another generation later: 1886 to 1965. And a very popular professor he was at Harvard. He projects God's origin out of the experience of human need in a more specific way. He sees that man's great threat is the void of non-being. He sees man's universal experience of anxiety is what dominates man, not so much by the loss of independence, but as the relative loss of meaning in life. The absolute loss of meaning is, of course, death, but it's death that casts a spell upon us, says Tillich, that man's life is meaningless. Why go on living when you're going to die? That’s his attitude. And of course, he's also influenced by the philosophy of Heidegger that was also this quest for being. This quest for meaning or for being is what desperately drives both these philosophers. And so again God is viewed anthropocentrically. He's not seen as a person. He's certainly not the Holy Spirit. He's simply a principle that guides us through the symbols of human experience. So when you ask Tillich what is prayer, well, it's simply rooted in the human sense of ultimacy, but the idea that God enters into converse with us as a person with person, he wholly, totally denies. And so the impersonal reality of prayer as Tillich sees it is more like a kind of philosophical phenomenon. That's what it is. And that’s why he speaks of it as being phenomenological. There's no understanding of it as a relationship in any way whatever.

Thank God there have been other theological voices that totally, flatly challenged and confronted these nihilists of prayer. Karl Barth is a wonderful champion in the 20th century, especially the later Karl Barth, who saw a great stress that we have to make on the transcendence of God's sovereignty of His rule over all mankind. And so this monarchical view of God is how he sees prayer: that God is standing over us. He sees that man has to be a respondent to His rule, to His transcendent character. And He sees, of course, that the relationship is one of revelation and of command. But for God to command us in prayer doesn’t really facilitate our prayer. That’s the problem with Karl Barth. And even Jacques Ellul, that we've been using as a prophet against the indictment of our tech world today, in his book on Prayer and Modern Man is really following this Barthian bark about you have to pray.

But supposing I don’t have any incentive to pray? How then do these writers help us? And this is why I think in our generation we've been much more inspired by Bonhoeffer. He's much more concerned about the community of friendship and therefore of the community of friendship with God. His view is much more that of a God of love and therefore sees in he light of God's love that man is so intrinsically a relational being and so life under the Word of God is the perspective that is so strong in his theology because the love of God is God's love song, you might say. And this I think I'm finding and perhaps you’re finding much more appealing. So I recommend that you read his small meditative study Meditating on the Word. It's actually a study of Psalm 119, focusing on the first 25 verses. That is to say that it's meditating on the love words of our Lord that is so joyous for a life of friendship and community.

But along with Bonhoeffer, there is someone perhaps more profound and he's my favourite and that's von Balthasar, one of the leading renewers of Vatican II for a renewal of spiritual life in the Catholic Church. Von Balthasar was a Jesuit scholar who gave all his money - he was a man of wealth - and he gave it all to his community in Switzerland where he was in this Jesuit order. But he had to withdraw because he had no real fellowship with his fellow Jesuits. So he renounced all his wealth. He entered the streets of Geneva penniless and he had to spend the next few years making ends meet by teaching part-time as an itinerant scholar in different parts of Germany and Switzerland.

Eventually, he was able to develop a community around him. And one of his great friends was Adrienne von Speyr, who was a physician, a brilliant woman, who had mystical experiences of God that enlightened him and removed from him that cognitive focus that he had been trained as a Jesuit to have. And so if you want to enter into the secret of the intimacy of his prayer life, you have to also read the [Meditations on John 13-17 00:12:50] that Adrienne von Speyr has written. They're wonderful. You almost feel that you're a companion of John, lying on Jesus' bosom, listening to the whisper of Jesus communicating with his Father. So Adrienne von Speyr created a kind of metanoia for the life of this highly intelligent scholar.

One of the beautiful things that he focuses on, of course, is his focus on Mary. And we as evangelicals perhaps have not given Mary the adoration that we should. But in an appropriate way, we need to recover that for our own prayer life because Mary was so close to her son, who she now recognised to be the Son of God. What a transition. He was also, of course, awed by the whole contemplative life of the Trinity and so he sees it all from the perspective of the Triune God and of entering into the life of communion and contemplation of that life within the Trinity like John, the Beloved Disciple.

But one of the things that I've also found so helpful in his writing on his book on prayer is that on the theme of parrhesia, of boldness to enter into God's presence. Yes, there's intimacy. Yes, there's profound love. But how does a small child approach the throne of the King of Kings? And that’s who we are: a small child in the presence of the King of Kings. We need parrhesia. And this Greek word literally means in rhetoric saying it all, that all our speech is given courage to express itself. And there's a need for us in our prayer life to appreciate that, as the Epistle to the Hebrews reminds us, it's now with boldness that we enter into His presence. We’re given this moral courage to have a life of prayer.

Well, these are some of the meditations that we can dwell on in these different ways as we close this session.