Now and again I like to share bits and pieces of papers I’ve written over the years that never had much of an audience outside (alas, sometimes also inside) my academic circles. The following is excerpted from an essay I wrote for the 2019 symposium on Jenson’s theology published in Pro Ecclesia 28.2, 167-177.
“We are Bold to Pray”
For Jenson, the Lord's Prayer reveals the nature and purpose of all prayer. The most important revelation comes in the opening words: “Our Father…” What does this form of address mean? It means that against all odds, the Son permits us to take his place in the divine conversation. As Barth says, “the first and proper suppliant is none other than Jesus Christ himself.”1 So, in giving us this prayer, Christ says to us, as he said to his first disciples, “God is my Father and I'm his Son, and I'm going to let you piggyback on my prayer. I call God Father, and now you can call God Father too, with me.”2 Jesus' prayer, like the very life of God, is “roomy.”
It is impossible to exaggerate how unlikely, how audacious it is that we dare to pray Jesus' prayer with him. “What in the world gives me the right every day to start off a prayer ‘Dear Daddy?’”3 To address God in this way is to claim (and proclaim) not just that we are intimate with him, but that we are just as intimate with God as the Son is with the Father and as the Son is with his own body. In Barth's phrasing,
It is not the Christian in and for himself, but the Christian in Christ who is at God's side and has a say and a part in the place where those decisions are made. It is not the Christian in himself, but the Christian in Christ who is the servant and child and also the friend of God, and as such a free lord with him over everything.4
Just for that reason, in praying Jesus' prayer, we manifest our calling as the people of God. “Christian prayer is common prayer.”5 In the words of one of my students, “prayer is entering a community we cannot control.” And, I would add, to pray is to agree to reimagining “control” completely.
“I Am the Lord Your God”
Bold as it is to address God, Jenson will not let us forget that prayer, at its heart, is simply person-to-person conversation. God is “straightforwardly personal”; therefore, “prayer to him is, unmitigatedly, talk to a person.” As such, prayer takes on all the possible forms of personal communication, including praise and complaint, thanks and petition. And Jenson also will not let us forget that at every point our praying assumes that God not only hears us, but also in some sense responds to what we have said. After all, praise is meaningless unless God has in fact acted, and trust is absurd if we cannot trust that God will in fact act for us in response to our prayers…
On the altar, as on the cross, he gives himself to us so that we can give ourselves to him. And in the church's proclamation, he speaks so that we know he can be spoken to. If God were not embodied for us, if he did not "put himself out there," then we could not risk speaking to him. But he has in fact put himself out there. Hence, we dare to pray. And given who God is, what creation is, and who we are in relation to God and creation-in-God, we know that prayer is, quite simply, the most fitting and reasonable thing we could ever do. In prayer, in our person-to-person communication with God, we are becoming like God, who in himself is (in an analogous sense, obviously) person-to-person communication. Thus, prayer is truly “pedagogy for becoming like God.”6
“Give Us this Day”
Following Barth, Jenson holds that in prayer “we become partners with God in the covenant he has established.”7 Speaking to God, we speak our minds. We make our requests known, just as Scripture calls us to do. God asks us what we want to see happen in the world, we offer our judgments, and then he somehow factors our will into the enactment of his own will. In Jenson's own words, “to pray is to lay claim to co-determination of the universe."8 In prayer, we say our own fiat back to the God who says “Let there be.” “The joyful making of requests about what is to happen in the future is the very test of Christian prayer.”9 “Prayer is involvement in Providence. If prayer is anything less, it is simply a pitiful delusion.”10 In the words of Jenson's teacher:
In [Christ] we are set at God's side and lifted up to Him and therefore to the place where decisions are made in the affairs of His government. And this is what takes place in ... Christian prayer ... We then find ourselves at the very seat of government, at the very heart of the mystery and purpose of all occurrence.11
And in the words of Jenson's friend, “prayer is the highest form of our participation in bringing in the kingdom of God,” the concrete manifestation of love of God and neighbor.12 If that seems absurd or arrogant, Jenson reminds us that “to cast ourselves on our Father with our petitions is exactly the sort—the only sort—of humility appropriate before the gospel’s God. The sort which is too humble to trouble God is phony.”13
Barth, CD III/3, p. 275.
Jenson and Gold, Conversations with Poppi about God, p. 123.
Jenson, Can These Bones Live?, p. 51
Barth, CD III/3, p. 287.
Jenson, “Some Platitudes about Prayer,” p. 64.
Daniela Augustine, “Creation as Perichoretic Trinitarian Conversation,” in Stephen John Wright and Chris E.W. Green (eds.), The Promise of Robert W Jenson’s Theology: Constructive Engagements (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), p. 108.
I. John Hesselink, “Prayer,” in Richard Burnett (ed.), The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), pp. 167-168.
Jenson, “Some Platitudes about Prayer,” p. 65.
Jenson, “Some Platitudes about Prayer,” p. 65.
Jenson, “Ipse Pater Non Est Impassibilis,” p. 126.
Barth, CD III/3, p. 287.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), pp. 204, 210.
Jenson, “Some Platitudes about Prayer,” p. 65.
Chris thank you for this. Very topical for me at present and has helped me. Sometimes one thinks prayer has to be on a different level rather than a conversation with our Father.
Let’s say someone has had a terrible relationship with their earthly Father. Let’s say the Father was a violent alcoholic and beat them and their mother for years. So that the word ‘Father’ precipitates a visceral disgust, fear and anxiety... in conjunction with (probably) therapy, could it be theologically valid (and/or pastorally helpful) for someone to pray ‘our Mother in heaven’? How have you guided such people in the way they approach the Lord’s prayer? (BTW i’m not telling my own story, but many people have such experiences). Thanks Chris.