RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Prayer
lief in his speedy second coming. The deepening thought of the Church was Christologic (e.g., II Cor., as a model of pastoral theology). The miracles of healing were wrought in his name (Acts iii. 6). His name was taken to be the only name given under heaven among men whereby they must be saved (Acts iv. 12). Hence the person of Christ becomes inseparable from the idea of God (John xiv. 9). Consequently prayer is necessarily related to Christ. In Paul this is particularly clear. The mystical immanence of the risen Savior is the center of the inner life (Gal. ii. 20); all things which it becomes a Christian to do must be done in his name (Col. iii. 17). Therefore it follows that thanksgiving and prayer, the upgoing and outgoing of the soul to the source of life, while it goes direct to God, may, without detriment to the vital strength of monotheism, pass through the mind and person of Christ. In the ripest form of New-Testament thought, the Johannine theology, this becomes even clearer than in Paul. The mature Christian is to ask all things of God in his son's name (John xv. 16, xvi. 23).
The necessary recasting of trinitarian doctrine in the light of historical knowledge of the New Testament, the more vital pressure of the divine unity upon Christian consciousness brought about by the social problem, the deepening sense of the divine immanence — these forces in course of time will enable Christians to put aside those imperfect conceptions of the mediatorhood of Christ which led the Church to underweigh the humanity of the Savior. While praying to Jesus they will not forget that Jesus prayed. Henry S. Nash.
III. In the Church: Prayer purports to be communication with God. Friends as well as opponents of prayer regard it as an attempt to gain in time of need the aid of a power supramundane. On this ground prayer might be dei. Defini- fended as an expression of human tion. impotence. Prayer in its essence, however, is quite other than a cry of distress to an indefinite power or object; it is communion with God. Necessity is a stimulus to prayer, but the capacity for real prayer does not Driginate in need.
Prayer, as an address to God, implies that God is near to man, it involves certainty of the reality of God. One who had received no revelation of God would not be able to pray, while con- 2. The sciousness of such an experience brings Element of ability to pray aright and inspires Experience, devotion. Such devotion expands spiritual power, and at the same time continues the experience through which is realized consciousness of God's interposition in life. Absorption in such consciousness affords confidence that God is present to us. None can pray if by his own fault the recollection that God once called him is abscured. However urgently Jesus enjoined prayer, tie surely did not believe that man should pray without regard to his present condition; he did not iesire prayer in which the heart is removed from God. Each individual must feel the revelation of God to be his personal experience. God is found m that life in which he reveals himself as personal life in Jesus Christ, so that in addressing him man
addresses the Father. The ability to commune with God is for man an introduction into a new reality and a foreglimpse of an infinite future. Nothing can give deeper joy than these drafts of breath in a new life. Consequently Luther asserted correctly that the Lord's Prayer, and indeed every right Christian prayer, begins with thanksgiving and praise. But after the address to God has unfolded as an invocation of the Father in heaven, prayer becomes necessarily an entreaty. With the Christian supplication originates in God's revelation of himself. To possess God means to seek God. He who does not find the desire for God repressing every other desire has not found the God who reveals himself in Christ. This desire should be the starting-point of the Christian's unceasing prayer. This thought is expressed in the opening petitions of the Lord's Prayer. They are not a declaration that the Christian wishes to consider God's affairs more important than his own; they express rather the most urgent concern of the Christian himself. Those men are not children of God who do not desire above all to be near the Father; and for this knowledge of God is necessary.
While Jesus directed to urgent and trustful prayer, without reservation and limitation, his directions presupposed that independence which was to grow up under his influence; they imply a disposition consciously ready to utter such petitions. They might be interpreted as though 3. Self- God would grant every self-indulgent Seeking and selfish wish of his children. In- Excluded, deed, they must be so understood if followed by one who knows no desire for God. One whose heart is filled with earthly care can utter only this in his prayer. Such a man, therefore, dares not pray as others pray, but is intent upon his own needs. This was doubtless the meaning of Jesus. He must have hated supremely insincere prayer. But is that prayer sincere which expresses only burning desire for some worldly concern under the idea, upheld by an energetic will, that a power exists which by continual supplication may be moved to grant some definite petition? It is evident that such a prayer is only seeming ; for while the petitioner pretends to address God, his representation of God is only an amplification of his wish. That prayer is not real in which effort is needed to follow the words of Jesus in which he limits the confidence of supplication. One not in the proper inner condition can not understand how a man can pray in earnest realizing that the Father in heaven knows and considers his needs without his asking or expressing with his supplication the willingness to renounce it. He who takes these words of Jesus as precepts that may be followed, is left without a motive; he can not realize that they are the expression of experiences gained in the exercise of prayer. All these difficulties disappear for those to whom Jesus spoke these words. If the eye has been opened to the fact that the efficient cause in all reality is a personal life that surrounds man with fatherly love, longing for God results. This longing is real life, and to develop it is the one inexhaustible task. Only when God is known from personal experience will it be possible to discern
Prayer Prayer-Gage Debate