AAR
“Openness to the World”:
Karl Barth’s
Evangelical Theology of Christ as the Pray-er
John C. McDowell
[NOTE – as you will see the footnotes are far from finished, the reason being that this paper is in the process of being prepared for publication]
Introducing a Properly Evangelical
Theology
According to Stephen Sykes,
The interrogative must be seen as embracing the dogmatic. It is relatively easy to catch Barth in the act of making a sweeping claim on epistemological grounds – understand things my way, nor not at all. Many imitators, and critics, of Barth see in him nothing other than a theological dogmatist given to the assertion that the standpoint occupied by the Christian theologian is inherently epistemologically privileged. If … the interrogative embraces the dogmatic, then the position has to be qualified.[1]
However, in depicting Barth’s theological disposition talk of “the interrogative … embracing the dogmatic” is potentially problematic.[1] The proper dogmatic ordering of the two moods is reversed, and thus left open to the dogmatic being a product of critical thought, of a negative theology commencing when reason comes to the boundary of finitude at the cessation of its way.[2] It would be better to speak of the interrogative mood having its own grounding within the dogmatic, or to use Rowan Williams’ description of a threefold theological style (celebratory, communicative and critical), the critical mood is theological celebration “alert to its own inner tensions or irresolutions”.[3] The difference between these two articulations is significant, and it is so for theologies of prayer, as is indicated by Karl Rahner’s complaint that many imagine that because “this nameless God is an, as it were, faceless and ineffable mystery he cannot be addressed.”[4]
Yet, if nothing else, Sykes aptly chastens an all-too familiar perception of Barth by recognising his self-critical theological impulse. Those who spend too little time listening carefully to the recapitulations within (and even, arguably on occasions, dissonance), and claims to provisionality tempering, the harmony of Barth’s witness, miss this self-deprecation in an act of hermeneutical bad manners.[5]
This set of
themes features prominently in Barth’s Evangelical Theology, the fruit
originally of his final cycle of
This lecture series was the closest Barth had come for some time to offering reflections on the nature of theology and its method. As one commentator recognises, “Although Barth was speaking emphatically, at the same time it was striking how open was the piece of theology which he now presented.”[8] It is largely free of the polemics of earlier periods, and Barth himself observed that as he grew older he found less pleasure in saying no, in “demolishing and dismissing”, and more in saying something positive. Even so, “the fire still glimmering under the ashes [of old age] cannot simply be quenched.”[9]
The texts tremendum are texts of joy, gratitude, awe and wonder, in their witness to the abundant life of “the eternally rich God” (der ewig reiche Gott).[10] And they are no less joyous and free in the proper and self-reflexive recognition of the “great distress which assails … [theology] on all sides” and of the fragility of the theological witness to the God whose eternal life is unpossessably event-full [ET, 148].
This introductory series to the nature of the theological task, then, deconstructs any sense of theology being an act of possessive power, control, or self-aggrandisement. Instead, theology properly functions in the faithful obedience and response-ability that take shape in and through the performance of prayer, and operates “Precisely [in] the knowledge that by our own power nothing at all can be accomplished” [ET, 148]. In fact, by our own power it is not even theo-logia. This dynamic interrelation re-evaluates beyond modern theology-practice divisions what theology is, as a work the “basic act [of which] … is prayer [and] performed only in the act of prayer” [ET, 149]. Theology for Barth, then, has to be articulated in self-involving categories.[11] Simultaneously, we should re-think prayer in the context of properly human or good action “which is commanded by God in his Word and is obedient to him”.[12] And this approach, both in being able to ask concerning “true prayer” and in guiding a fitting response to it, in turn has significance for subverting accounts that present prayer as an act of irresponsibility, individualised therapy, and childish bondage, among other things.
The first substantive claim regarding prayer in the 14th lecture, is that “prayer … is work; in fact, very hard work, although in its execution the hands are most fittingly not moved but folded.” [ET, 149] This expression is important for denying that prayer is an evasion of work: instead it is work. Yet, presumably to address worries over prayer as the sole (or substitute) work, Barth adds the rule “Ora et labora! … pray and work”.[13] This does not undo the ‘prayer is work’ formula, but clarifies what is meant by the ‘is’. Barth does not understand Paul’s injunction to “pray without ceasing” (1 Th. 5:17) to refer to a substitution by the momentary performance of what we normally call ‘prayer’ for other work.[14] Equally, he does not fuse the concept of prayer with that of virtuous Christian living as Simon Tugwell accuses Haimo of Auxerre and others of doing.[15] However, it is equally clear that prayer and work cannot be construed as two separable moments, as if one prays and then works, works and then prays. (In this way Barth’s regard for Anselm’s approach in the Proslogion cannot be read as locating prayer in some simple beginning to theological work.) Prayer, properly performed, is the ethos or “underlying note and basis of all human activity”, the heartbeat of the everyday and its purificatory ascesis [CD III.4, 89].[16] Work itself becomes an act of prayer insofar as it is an expression of prayer and is regulated by this “true and original form … [of] Christian obedience …, from which all other acts must spring.” [CD III.3, 264f.] Likewise, prayer “goes to work.” [CL, 68] This is the reason why the Church Dogmatics’ two main independent sections on prayer are located in the ethical part-volumes – ethics, of course, being the “attempt to answer the question of what may be called good human action” [CL, 3].[17]
Barth’s succeeding reflections focus on what he claims to be “Some of the most significant dimensions of the unity of prayer and theological work” [ET, 150], and exhibit several important features of his approach to prayer as the act and determinant of free persons before the free Self-revealed God.
The Sache of Prayer
The first dimension Barth identifies is familiar from his much earlier discussions of biblical hermeneutics – theology must be open to its subject matter. An image used to explain this should be handled carefully lest it suggest an unmediated and highly individualising theology of revelation that would destabilise his theology of, for instance, the scriptures and proclamation as “tokens of revelation”:[18] “theological work … takes place in a realm which not only has open windows … but also and above all has a skylight.” [ET, 150] While the analogy is distinctly limited (are not all analogies?), Barth’s point is to disrupt privatised and self-enclosed (self-referential) theologies, theologies, he articulates, “locked in a closed, barred, stuffy, and unlit room.” [ET, 150] Because theology is God-talk it ‘begins’ in listening, and here he identifies the biblical, confession of faith’s, patristic and contemporary witnesses all being combined “with the required openness to the world.” [ET, 150][19]
Barth’s concern is that theology should have its ground in an act of what amounts to the kind of passivity appropriate to discourse of ‘discovery’ as opposed the activity involved in ‘construction’. Theology lives in a ‘gift’ not of its own making, and follows its own constructive way only when it is distracted from its proper Nachdenken (‘thinking after’ revelation). Its legitimacy is ultimately a question about whether or not the Church is committed to beginning in hearing and responsibly obeying the Lord it lives to proclaim.
Correspondingly, prayer too has its place in this movement of “hearing [that] really precedes the asking” and the responsive dependency of “receiving” [CD III.3, 270], and the subsequent ‘following after’ or ‘corresponding to’ the “gift” of the God who elects God’s Self not to be “without human beings.”[20]
This sensibility concerning the prayer that is “a kind of breathing necessary to life”,[21] is expressed in Barth’s theology of prayer as petition. This is the requesting invocation of God which is both done “in answer to the Word and work of the Son of God” and which “makes the first available use of freedom which is given … in Jesus Christ.” [CD III.3, 269][22] However, has Barth here not improperly reduced all forms of prayer to one, as John McIntyre charges?[23] Yet, as Tugwell explains, “Originally there can be no doubt whatsoever that words for ‘prayer’ meant ‘petition’.”[24] Moreover, according to Barth, relativising petition entails a problematic loss of prayer’s “natural centre and connexion” [CD III.4, 97]. And furthermore, the heart of the Lord’s Prayer “consists exclusively of pure petitions.”[25]
Motivated by responsive gratitude,[26] human obedience in invoking ‘Our Father’ manifests right awareness of being “absolutely dependent and conditioned.” [CL, 57] The “real man”, the person for whom prayer is “a necessary and essential act”, is herein placed, constituted, and determined as response-able.[27] Consequently enquiries about prayer’s meaning begin with, and are dominated by, questions of efficacy (‘what does prayer do?’, ‘how is prayer efficacious?’, ‘how does God answer prayer?’, and so on) only when reflections are improperly abstracted from the irreducible actuality of grace and disorderedly assume a ‘success-oriented’ perspective and an instrumentalising of ‘god’.
Among other things, this sense of dependency on grace indicates that the God invoked cannot primarily be responsive or reactive, and the human consequently positioned as the primary praying agent. Human agency does not find or activate a position in God’s universe; it does not create the favourable conditions for divine agency; nor does it “present something worthy to God” but instead requests “with empty hands … as the one who has to receive all things from Him.”[28]
Thus prayer has to do with the nature of the divine-human relationship in the freedom of divine grace in which “all masks and camouflages may and must fall away.” [CD III.4, 98] And one of those camouflages is identified and relativised by the absolute dependency on God and God alone as the ground and determinant of our being – our commitment to creatures and any particular creaturely project.[29]
All this reveals the need for theological reflections on prayer to critically identify the particular ‘god’ or ‘gods’ prayed to, and thus attend to matters of idolatry, while simultaneously and necessarily consider the pray-er who is positioned as invoking this ‘god’ or ‘gods’. Indeed, many of the confusions concerning the kind of activity prayer is arise from theological confusions, for as Herbert McCabe declares, “we do not know how to talk to God [precisely] because we do not know how to talk about God.”[30]
What kind of ‘god’ regulates therapeutic approaches to prayer, for instance? That, of course, is something of an ironic question since early psychologists of religion refused to view prayer as a communicative act precisely because it was assumed to be a form of auto-suggestion or monologue with oneself that has value in cathartically enabling the expression of personal concern.[31] Such accounts are, of course, well adapted to an environment in which the life of the church becomes of use in the increasingly “small space” [CL, 139][32] allotted to it by secular society. For Barth, however, we must pray as if nothing had happened, and thereby let prayer be prayer with its meaning being dictated by God alone.[33] His objection is simple and well-focused: therapeutic approaches negate the very meaning of prayer as asking, asking of the God who in God’s inconceivable closeness to us remains unpossessably Other than us.[34] Invocation resists the therapy society’s egoistic curving of the self in on itself.
Barth’s language of “true prayer” as opposed to untrue prayer, then, is suggestive, although to use the adjective ‘true’ may seem to be a little redundant – if what is called ‘prayer’ is false then it is, simply, not prayer as such. Damningly he announces that “We must not be surprised that many [so-called] prayers resound in a void and that they are neither listened to nor answered.”[35]
The Sache as No-Thing
Barth opens his second point with the general, but iconoclastically significant claim, “The object of theological work is not some thing but some one. … This object is not an ‘It’ but a ‘He.’” [ET, 152] In fact, since speaking of theology’s subject-matter as an ‘object’ is itself odd, making God into something observable, Barth overcomes the modern subject-object dualism with a dialectical claim that enables both the talk of the knowledge of God while at the same time preserving the divine mystery: God is the Subject of God’s own Self-objectification [cf. CD REFERENCE]. As Barth was fond of saying of this pure event which is no simple Objekt, Deus non est in genere [CD II.1, 310].[36]
Crucially such a broad claim does not condition the account of divine knowability and unknowability from a generative dialectical method, for that would be to predicate the theological on the basis the pre-theological.[37] Instead, the dialektik emerges from the witness that is conceived to be fitting to God’s super-abundant Self-giving. Consequently, Barth’s opposition to Brunner’s ‘capacity for revelation’, among other things, indicates that talk even of human angst and the voidal nihil, are as theologically grounded as talk of sin and the divine No. Barth’s theological non-speaking, or ascesis in his speaking, emerges from within the witness to a divine concealment that has meaning only in the revelation of God itself and not in some generalised or theologically non-specific account of divine incomprehensibility or the limitations of human knowing [CD II.1, 186ff.].
These reflections are significant, particularly since several theological accounts of prayer in one way or other relegate God to some-thing of a dispensary Thing, a deus ex machina, and thus reduce prayer to a mechanistic process.[38] After all, Josef Brommer declares, “Prayer originally meant ‘exercising power’, was closely related to the practice of magic and laid claims to God himself.”[39] One might say that, adapting the words of David Burrell, this belongs to “the tendency of all discourse about divinity … to deliver a God who is the ‘biggest thing around’”, assigning “God a place in the universe, albeit the largest or the first or the most significant.”[40] However, this approach attempts, Rahner laments, “to subject God to himself with some form of conjuration”, and thus become an exercise in controlling the divine object of prayer.[41]
This is where Barth’s warning, Latet periculum in generalibus [CD II.2, 48], is dogmatically effective. Theologically there can be no generalised account of prayer, as if ‘any prayer will do’, such as E.B. Tylor’s identification of prayer as “the soul’s sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed” in “the address of personal spirit”.[42] While, we cannot, in fact, guarantee any non-idolatrous use of the word ‘God’, to abstract what is meant by ‘prayer’ from the ‘God’ confessed to be revealed in Jesus Christ is at least to distort theology’s very conditions of intelligibility and trespass the first commandment that is theology’s axiom.[43] As Barth confesses, “God cannot be greater than he is in Jesus Christ.”[44]
It is noticeable that generalised perspectives on prayer tend to be driven by competitive accounts of the divine-human relations, and these consequently generate problems over the relation of human and divine freedoms. Behind them lurks the image of a ‘great power up there’ “whom we can shout at and who, if we are lucky, will hear us and provide us with magical help.”[45] So Eleonore Stump, for instance, speaks of prayer in terms of a protective “buffer” against two vastly unequal “persons”.[46] Prayer, in this sense, frequently further slips into either equating it, firstly, with ‘conversation’ between these persons, or, secondly, and even more problematically, with persons getting things done. Barth, of course, utilises the conversational metaphor, but does so in a distinctly muted fashion, claiming that prayer “is a sort of conversation with the heavenly.”[47] At the very least, discourse of ‘conversation’ may be too bland to be able to indicate that prayer, to cite Barth, is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.[48] Moreover, at the very most the metaphor is distracting and even theologically inappropriate. So John Calvin proclaims, “For nothing is more contrary to reverence for God than the levity that marks an excess of frivolity utterly devoid of awe.”[49] Conversation, of course, requires two linguistic subjects who share a linguistic context, and manifestly “God”, as von Balthasar declares, “is not a Thou in this sense of being simply another I”.[50] To suggest otherwise, as we will see later, is to think idolatrously.
Now what about prayer-talk about getting things done, as in ‘success’ or efficacy-talk?[51] Unsurprisingly there are floods of materials on strategies, and formulas, for praying, especially for praying with power,[52] a power which is now delivered into the hands of individuals and/or churches[53] (but, of course, only if they do it right).[54] Predictably these are followed by scientific attempts to measure “evidence for the effectiveness of prayer”.[55]
Barth, however, denies the sacramental status of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, for instance, precisely in order to dispute the ability of humanly orchestrated performance to possess and control grace’s free operation. “The true and living God … is not a ‘datum’ of ours.” [CL, 128] God does not become subject in any way to the human will, but instead “summons us to make His purposes and aims the object of our own desire.” [CD III.4, 104] In fact, “We can live with God only when we are in agreement with his designs, with his cause, which includes ours and all the others.”[56] At worst, talk of what prayer does or effects is a theological mistake since God is the creative agent of creaturely wellbeing. But, at best, such language can only operate metonomously within theological grammar, as a linguistic shorthand for the redeeming work of God in Christ. Thus it is only with considerable care that Gustav Aulén’s claim concerning “prayer as a means of grace” can be utilised, although that would question Barth’s later rejection of that kind of language altogether when he replaced it with talk of the prophetic work of Christ.[57]
It is quite apparent that Barth just does not advocate inversely proportioned divine and human relations, and even as early as 1917 he explicitly asserts that God “is not a dark power in the clouds over against which a person can only be a slave, but a clear force of freedom that must be honoured above and in all things”.[58] Whatever is meant by the honouring of God here, Barth clearly understands it as something quite unlike the exertion of power in a zero-sum game, a power and control that have to be claimed back for the maturation of the post-Cartesian self.[59] Likewise, it makes no theological sense to postulate human freedom as a freedom from, or an independence of, God. This illusory freedom would be that of timely I-centred ego rather than that founded as freedom for the will of God, the freedom that liberates the human from her status as “an automaton” to be the divinely ordered spontaneous “autonomous being”.[60] As Rahner maintains, “dependence and autonomy are two qualities which increase in equal and not inverse proportion.”[61] While it remains a few years before he is able to articulate a christologically focused account of the two forms of divine freedom, Barth nevertheless quite early on understands freedom not in terms of the God whose life is not an empty space needing to be subsequently filled, or of a power requiring the rule of the dominator – God’s free life is richly lived as dispossessive and consequently as the creative potency of abundant life, grounding, sustaining and renewing creaturely freedom. From this develops an ontology of prayer that locates it as ‘The freedom before God’, the primal act of spontaneous obedience, and thus “the very highest honour that God claims from man and man can pay Him.” [CD III.4, 87]
In this way, prayer cannot be drawn into accounts of manipulation, magical or otherwise, but not because we can appeal to a divine personhood that is unlike the causally predictable agency of machinery, as Vincent Brümmer imagines.[62] Rather, pre-eminently because of the very nature of what it means to speak of the ‘God-ness’ of God Barth has to refuse the possibility of saying “that we ‘have’ him, as we often like to put it.” This claim necessitates a subversion even of the negative spaces by which we create space for the coming of revelation such as Brunner’s “capacity” or Kant’s boundary-limit.[63] Christians, in contrast, Barth argues in a prescriptive challenge, “will not suffer from the delusion that God is in their hands or in their power, that with their action they can control him and his action” [CL, 105].[64]
As such, to approach God in a manipulative, instrumentalising and consumptive fashion with “mercenary hands” outstretched, even for an ego-centric acquiring of one’s own salvation or comfort,[65] is a “parody” and “travesty of prayer” according to Rahner.[66] Yet, in the event of divine Self-Revelation the God of possessiveness, or of the acquisitiveness of private property (a privacy that derives from the Latin privare, meaning ‘to rob’ [CD IV.2, 442]), or of “spiritual consumption” in Jacques Ellul’s words,[67] is unmasked to be the “Deus absconditus in His naked majesty” [CD III.4, 100]. This idol is thereby unmasked and smashed by the givingness of the “triply rich and active” Subject [CL, 7] whose free gift is inseparable from God’s own free Being in and for God’s Self: the “one great gift.” [CD III.3, 271] When the question of prayer assumes the question ‘what is the use of prayer?’, it becomes the religion “of the marketplace”.[68] Theologically, however, “‘possession’ is precisely the wrong, the corrupt and corrupting, metaphor for our finding place in the world.”[69]
Nonetheless, Barth’s talk of God as “a genuine counterpart” [CD III.4, 479], his claim “that God can let Himself be conditioned … by His creature” [CD III.4, 108f.],[70] his talk of the prayerful exertion of influence upon God,[71] and his use of personalistic I-Thou discourse, gives comfort to those seeking to develop bipolar or panentheistic accounts of divine and human agencies.[72] Attempts are made to claim, for instance, that God kenotically decides “to make some divine actions contingent upon our actions”[73] The result is a “relational theism”,[74] or reciprocity of affectivity between two collaborative and non-controlling freedoms, leading to the claim that “petitionary prayer changes things”. Prayer, it is argued, is only meaningful on that basis.
Arguably, this account’s persuasiveness is largely the product of the way it rhetorically develops the ‘straw man’ it is against – a static, detached, unaffected and determinatively controlling divine being. However, these bipolar accounts are, among other things, crudely anthropomorphic in that they imagine divine decision in a somewhat too similar vein to that of other choosing agents. Does this too neatly develop from the ancient pagan context in which arbitrary deities are badgered and bartered with for their favour? One writer even contends “that people can argue with God and win”.[75] So when this theorist claims that “Our prayers make a real difference” we need to ask what kind of difference, and difference to whom?[76]
Part of the difficulty here lies in the sequentiality or successiveness involved in the agencies as here conceived. ‘God’ begins where the praying creature leaves off, and vice versa – prayer moves from the creature to the God who is purely hearer, and thus something of a passive spectator; God then acts in response to the now waiting one who had prayed. We are back with the zero-sum scheme questioned earlier, and the image of the relay-race is the most appropriate image for it.
It is, of course, profoundly mysterious that we should be able to speak of the concursus dei, but it is not flatly contradictory or paradoxical, for a paradox is a seeming contradiction between two known terms, and whatever else we are doing we are not claiming that ‘God’ and ‘human’ can be given meaning outwith the actuality of the incarnation. “Divine and human,” McCabe maintains, “because they do not occupy the same universe (the divine does not occupy any universe), do not exclude each other in the way that two created natures would do.”[77] Barth’s concursus account enables him to speak of divine and human agencies in such a way that one is not swallowed up, replaced, or subverted by the other. Hence, he argues, “the omnicausality of God must not be construed as His sole causality.” [CD IV, 22] “God, acting in creatures, therefore, must be understood”, Aquinas proclaims, “in such a way that they themselves still exercise their own operations.”[78] “[T]he same effect is not attributed to a natural cause and to divine power in such a way that it is partly done by God, and partly by the natural agent; rather, it is wholly done by both, according to a different way.”[79] Consequently, it is becomes meaningful to say that God brings about all free actions without them being any less free for that. We are speaking of two different orders of causal efficacy, hence analogies with other sorts of agents quickly break down.
Among other things, ‘double agency’ means that we are never able to draw clear lines of demarcation between human and divine agencies, although, crucially, several commentators claim Barth’s later doctrine of baptism does just that..[80] Whatever the doubleness or concursus means it does not have do with God and creature as symmetrical or even successively acting agents (it is not synergism) so that human agents contribute to the making of God’s Godness, or the establishment and maintenance of relations with God. Here Austin Farrer’s talk of the inscrutable causal joint is helpful, albeit only if grounded in the actuality of its having taken place in Jesus Christ.[81]
If Barth sounds perilously deterministic, as he does to Duthie and Fiddes,[82] it is precisely because one has missed the central point that determinism has to do with the causal influence of other bits of the universe, the operation of creature upon creature.[83]
Things cannot be left there, though. Particular care is required when speaking of God’s agency in and through all things, and hazard signs along the road can do just that in order to resist the temptation to equate human agency with God’s, and thereby to subvert the indifference to divine and human difference. And this is crucial since Barth worries about accounts of divine agency that too easily identify God’s positive will with the prevailing world order.[84]
Firstly, this is why Barth, when speaking of God and the human as “two subjects in genuine encounter” who “confront one another”, emphasises the difference in this unity: they are “two partners of different kinds, acting differently so that they cannot be exchanged or equated”, even “compared, confused or intermingled” [CL, 26]. Secondly, it is this concern that drives Barth’s use of externalist metaphors – following, witness, and correspondence being the most notable ones for depicting human agency in relation to the divine. But these too cannot be pushed too far lest the two forms of agency be separated easily in the relay-race agential successiveness. So he qualifies, “while they are so different, [they] are not two things but one.” [CL, 30]
The fact that Barth’s account of the concursus is given shape and meaning in the context of Christ’s history, a history marked crucially by crucifixion and resurrection, his reflections offer ways of replying to a common complaint levelled against providential determinisms – that they become unable to offer criteria for discerning that which is resistant to the Good (wickedness). Because of the way he develops christology’s criteriological significance for God-talk Barth is able to speak of the left-hand of the divine willing and the divine non-willing.[85] In fact, Lochman adds, by praying “Your will be done” there is the suggestion that God’s will is not done, at least in some situations, and thus “The petition … demands resistance as well as submission.”[86] Consequently, it is thus a basic error for Fiddes to claim that in Barth “God appears to be responsible for everything that happens in the world, including evil and suffering.”[87]
Emerging from these sets of reflections is the fact that the theological answer given to the question of prayer not only reconstrues what is meant by God and God’s agency, but equally, and simultaneously since they are necessarily interrelated, what is meant by humanity, and thus the human as pray-er to God. Not only can there be no abstract arbitrary and Self-possessive God, but there can be no abstract pray-er. It is “There, at the centre,” von Balthasar declares, in the event of incarnation, that “he is spoken to; it is there that he receives the definitive pronouncement: the truth about his life”.[88]
These reflections are significant for the meaning and substance of Christian life and practice. Christ is, as Barth explains, the Teacher and Leader in prayer [CD III.3, 274], our example [CL, 64], and our prayer a conformatio or imitatio Christi. Yet, equally, prayer is not merely something he does but something he is, and for this theological reason Barth approvingly cites Calvin’s assertion that “He, Jesus Christ, is properly and really the One who prays.”[89] In McCabe’s terms, he “is not just the one who prays, not even the one who prays best, he is sheer prayer.”[90] This entails, among other things, that the repetition, conformatio and imitatio discourse is too formal and external, or by itself simply insufficiently generative of the human, to be adequate to what happens in prayer. On the other hand, at least these metaphors do offer useful resistance to any placing of Christ only at the original point of entry into the good life but not as that good life itself, the initiator of prayer and not the substance of both prayer and the true pray-er, and subsequently supplementable and even subsequently dispensable. Potentially, though, they can support Semi-Pelagian tendencies when speaking of the good, or sanctified, life.[91] What is needed here is the ongoing presence of Christ, and that is provided through the theme of Christ as intercessor or perennial suppliant, even though it is notable according to T.F. Torrance that Barth tends to underplay the motif of the high priesthood of Christ at a crucial point (the later account of baptism).[92]
This Christological approach precludes one from regarding prayer as an event in itself, either as a ritual act that has meaning in and with its performance, or even as an ethical act that has its meaning primarily in the human response to what God has already done. Its ground lies in the divine Self-gift of creating and sustaining the communicative agent; its offering is by the response-ably obedient humanity of Jesus Christ, and its substance is in that One who is the Mediator, its archē and its telos. It is, in other words, “totally determined by this event” “between God and man in Jesus Christ” [CL, 45]. Undoubtedly ritual and ethical acts have their proper place in reflection on prayer, but they have their centre, sense, and source beyond those acts in the one saving act of God embodied in Jesus Christ. Invocation is, in other words, to be approached not in terms of what we or I do but in terms of what God in Christ has done, is doing and will do for our sakes by God’s Spirit.[93]
Such an ontology of prayer necessarily accords special regulating significance to the Lord’s Prayer. It is read as no instance or example of prayer, even of the best type of prayer, but, as “the essence of prayer” [CD III.3, 268], it has a considerably greater theological significance than that. This prayer, in fact, provides the test of what counts as prayer, and, as Lochman observes, exhibits the “basic rule for the legitimate use of the name of God.”[94] So Barth both appreciatively cites Tertullian’s claim that “It is a breviary of the whole gospel”, and warns that although it is not the sole form of prayer, “both in public and private prayer, it is unwise to try to break free from its dominion and service.”[95] As exemplary and generative, illustrative and substantial, the Lord’s Prayer manifests the happenedness of the being in Christ’s prayer then that regulates the happening of our becoming in Christ now, and herein subverts too easy complaints of a christomonistic approach to prayer in Barth.[96] After all, Barth’s non-competitive account of divine and human agencies too, should alert one that the typical ‘christomonistic’ criticism makes little obvious sense.[97]
Von Balthasar, working from Adrienne von Speyer, grounds this prayer ontologically in the doctrine of the Trinity. Christ’s prayer is an expression of the triune relations, and consequently, declares McCabe, redemption “is precisely the act by which we cease to be extra to God and come within his own life.”[98] In his explicit texts on prayer, Barth does not tend follow this potentially fruitful theological approach, though it is not immediately obvious why not given the triune grounding of human communicatability so elegantly articulated in CD III.1, for instance. Yet he does rightly claim that the identity of the pray-er is both a manifestation ad extra of the God who elects not to be free without human being, and of the proper response-ability of human being to this eventful situation. In this regard, it can be argued that Barth’s suggestion that in the Spirit we are invited and enabled to participate in the incarnate Son’s prayer to the Father (cf. Rom. 8:26) is another way of saying that we are taken up into the Son’s eternal love of the Father, from which his love of all creatures is the timely expression. The ultimate root of our prayer, it follows for von Speyer, is “the fruitfulness of the divine nature” and the eternal exchange of hospitality of the Father and Son in the Spirit that prayer is.[99]
Incompleteness
Barth’s third point grows out of the first two. The event of the confession of the eventfulness of God has implications for understanding the nature of the confession, and of theology, its critical self-reflection.
So, he argues, one cannot work from achieved results but must begin again from the beginning. “One can be God’s witness only by becoming so ever anew.” [CD III.4, 87] Care should be taken here to avoid understanding this as a kind of occasionalism, as those who fail to understand Barth’s actualistic theology of the divine eventfulness tend to.[100] The theme of God’s faithfulness in Christ, among other things, should provide considerable pause for thought. Instead, Barth’s language functions as a further way of articulating a theology of self-dispossessing non-mastery, and non-possibility. “Christians”, Barth referring to Luther proclaims, “have never become but are always becoming … in their journey or pilgrimage”, and therefore always remain “beginners” and never become “masters and virtuosos” through “euphoric fluency” in their work of invocation under grace.[101]
In and through the Lord’s Prayer the pray-er is drawn in to invoking God for the hallowing of God’s Name, and so on. There could not be any stronger theological ban on the notion of God and the human pray-er as being cajoled and cajoler, bargained with and bargainer. Nor could there be theological sense in speaking of prayer in the context of what God wills, when both ‘God’ and ‘will’ talk are separated from their Christological ground of intelligibility of God’s Self-Naming.[102]
God’s will is, theologically, the undeflected purposiveness of God’s faithful covenant claim on humankind (and thus its flourishing), ensuring that that will to be for us, with us, and in us shall not be irrevocably spoiled by wickedness by death and destruction.[103] And, of course, it has its instantiation and fulfilment in Jesus. Assenting to this divine will, then, cannot be an act of self-resignation, but is rather the very Reality and flourishing of the human. For as Calvin declares, “when his name is hallowed as we ask, our own hallowing in turn comes about.”[104] Also, God’s will is not enacted without us, even though this is an act of grace since “God has no need of us”.[105] It makes no sense to speak of this will, revealed and concretised in Christ, being influenced or changed.
The regulative context the Lord’s Prayer’s invocation ‘Our Father’ provides for this talk of the divine willing, is profoundly socialising. Barth here resists the individualisation and privatisation of prayer, especially since that all too easily slips into self-interest and self-centredness. There are two ways in which this sociality of prayer, or “the communal character of true prayer” [CD III.4, 112], manifests itself in Barth’s account.
In the first place is prayer’s communal contexting – the context of the Christian community. It is just not the case that prayer, as an expression of communicative meaning, ever takes place solely between God and the communicative agent whose humanity is received as complete.[106] So, Barth argues, “the individual is a member of the community, and that even in his private prayers he can pray aright only in this capacity.”[107]
Nevertheless, he carefully refuses to suggest that the Church forms an exclusive, and thus self-possessive, circle, “an ‘island of the blessed” [CL, 97]. It “is not an end in itself” for the “cultivation of the very private concerns of its individual members”.[108] So the second social form takes place in recognising that we are “essentially and necessarily” “most intimately bound to the human world around us … in order that we may be responsible for” it.[109] Barth here speaks of the Christian community as but a provisional form or anticipation of God’s eschatological community that presently exists “in solidarity with the [whole] world and the human race” [CL, 68]. Thus, “invocation … is as such a supremely social matter, publicly social, not to say political and even cosmic.” [CL, 95][110]
Again, this set of claims is Christologically ordered, therein reflecting the way of the God who makes God’s Self free for the existence and to the “benefit … [of] absolutely everyone” [CD III.4, 104]. Barth argues, “we are also in communion with those who do not yet pray … but for whom Jesus Christ prays” as “the representative man … for the whole race”.[111]
In societies largely determined by consumerist models of meaning and sustained through narcissistic models of therapy ‘prayer’ will express an indifference to sociality, intensify spirituality as the cultivation of self, and endlessly proliferate desires for self-satisfaction. Yet those who imagine that the sign of God’s presence is best expressed in private or personal prayer, or who believe that God’s agency in the prayer does not have implications for each step of their own way, fall into idolatry. Invocation is no private enterprise in any simple sense, a sacred practice in strict contradistinction from other performances of the human. Consequently, Barth displaces the multiple dualisms impoverishing modern theologies and their secular counterparts. “Christian ethics”, he argues, “is in no sense dualistic. … It knows no soul apart from body, nor a body apart from soul, no private sphere without public responsibility”.[112] As faithfully performed by Christ prayer becomes an “indispensable … antidote” [CL, 101] by holding up a mirror to other forms of sociality and their dislocations, placing them under the “holy discontent” of a radical subversion given by grace’s liberating judgment [cf. CL, 211] and drawing them into God’s radical reordering of living as it has been actualised in Jesus Christ.[113] Consequently Barth, then, speaks of “prophetic prayer” [CL, 102] offering a “provisional and very relative and modest resistance” [CL, 174]. And it does so against the false locatability of persons in places that demand the kinds of relations of mastery and possessiveness and instrumentalisation that dominate the economic, cultural, social and even theological landscape of modernity. Crucially instead all things have their lives “ec-centrically” [CL, 94] in the giving of divine grace.[114]
Questioning the Answers
Barth’s fourth and final point explicates the reverse side of the theological proposals, the conditions under which the human following takes place – in frailty and hope.
The Lord’s Prayer involves self-dispossession, or a training, as Calvin says, of those who are “otherwise idle and lazy” to become the freely obedient people that we are in Christ so as “to present” ourselves “before God wholly and utterly as an application directed to Him.” [CD III.4, 87][115] God, here, is properly honoured “for his own sake” [CL, 87], and not for ours so that God cannot become a means to our end.[116]
Even when the Lord’s Prayer’s petitions turn to asking for ourselves, their form is challenging. For example, on the petition “give us today our daily bread”, Barth refuses spiritualising readings[117] and instead relates it to the modesty of need that subverts greed.[118] From this he declares that it both demands justice for the poor and a transformative resistance to our behaving “like well-satisfied bourgeois or like greedy creatures”.[119] Prayer relativises or suitably situates human desire, and thus reorders our relationship to things and persons.[120] While it, properly speaking, is not for things but for the coming rule of God in and among God’s creatures, we can nonetheless pray for things as long as they are fitting for preserving us as disciples.[121]
Our prayers, though, are “feeble, selfish [and] inarticulate”, according to James Torrance.[122] “The whole of human egoism, the whole of human anxiety, cupidity, desire and passion, or at least the whole human short-sightedness, unreasonableness and stupidity, might flow into prayer” [CD III.4, 100f.]. But, Barth claims, our asking “is not a capricious act” deriving from our “own needs and desires” – instead it is “related … to the divine gift and answer already present in” Christ [CD III.3, 283][123] And Jesus’ prayer is illuminative of what we do as something less than prayer, but in so judging it he redeems it, in dissolving it he exalts and purifies it. The Lord’s Prayer, “full of critical dynamic” as it is [CL, 165], unmasks our pretensions, our distorted, misplaced and infantile desires, our ego-sustaining idolatries, and our delusion over what we claim to ‘need’, and draws us into God’s cause which has “no peace with the ‘other gods’, as Barth argues in 1933.[124]
We are even radically disposed of our tendency to speak of ‘answers’ to prayer when this requires a dispensatory God whose grace is possessedly perceivable in world affairs. Barth’s doctrine of providence is not event-making in any simple sense and is thus not “testable in a crudely experimental way”.[125] Theologies of providence that function to do precisely that involve, in Hans Frei’s terms, a “transposition and logical confusion between two categories or contexts and meaning and interpretation”.[126]
We could
claim that we do not really know what we are saying when we speak of ‘answers’
to prayer, but that we do know that Jesus Christ is prayer, the Pray-er, and that we pray through him. However, if we speak of him as the “the
Answer to the great and small questions of our life and common human history”,[127] we
must also recognise that he is the proper ‘question’, and our being transformed
in him involves a challenge to the questions and answers we provide. The challenge involves God’s calling us away
from our insatiable desire for things by reconstruing
us as being-in-attachment to the ground and End that is God’s freedom for us in
Christ. For this reason, von
In this respect there is a provisionality at the heart of what we do, a frailty and distortion insofar as Christ’s prayer is not embodied in our performance. The pro nobis yet awaits its fulfilment in the in nobis, and we remain groaning and sighing in the Spirit as the Spirit teaches us to pray.
Conclusion: The Pray-er in
Prayer
In his famous Christian apologetic composed in the aftermath
of the assault on Roman self-consciousness, and its feeling of the
invulnerability of the Roman self, posed by the Vandals’ sack of
It is nothing but folly, nothing but pitiable aberration, to humble yourself before a being you would hate to resemble in the conduct of your life and to worship one whom you would refuse to imitate. For surely the supremely important thing in religion is to model oneself on the object of one’s worship.[130]
What kind
of God do accounts of prayer assume? In
the image of what is pray-er being formed? In identifying the conditions for the
meaningfulness of prayer-talk the concept of ‘idolatry’ must be a significant feature, and so Barth claims, “The
worshipper of the idol must not be surprised if he calls upon it in vain.” [CD III.4, 109] This declaration could call to mind the trial
at
However, in the context of focusing prayer on obedience, Barth’s point is not that the idolater does not receive her heart’s desire, whereas the Christian does and possesses the power of prayer. Rather it is that the idolater shows no signs of obedience and thus of the liberating judgment of God and the leading of Christ’s sanctifying Spirit. Even the Christian is far from free from this tendency to have “‘other gods’ as well”.[131]
In contrast, “The Spirit definitively leads … [humans] into that liberty of the children of God where they make use of their right.” [CD III.4, 110] This is “true prayer”, petition to God, the asking purified by following the One who alone truly embodies in his history the presence of God and the truth of humankind. To adapt a point made of ethics, Barth declares that the question of prayer “cannot be asked in a vacuum but” rather from the knowledge of “the situation already depicted” [CL, 31f.].
In this way, talk of the meaning and significance of prayer has to ask about its properly specified shape, its so-called ‘object’, the ‘subject’ who prays, and the goal of its invocation. To fail to do these is to slip back into the all-too-familiar generalisations concerning prayer that may not even be fittingly spoken of as ‘prayer’ at all, and thus avoid considering their regulating idolatries. It is for these reasons that the theologian of the witness to the eventfulness of divine and human freedom remains significantly interrogatively and iconoclastically liberating for theology today.[132]
[2] In the second edition of the Romans commentary (1922) Barth declares that “We must also recognize that we cannot lay hold on this power, even by the strictest abnegation. The mystic’s ‘Way of Denial’ is a blind alley, as are all ‘ways’. The only way is the Way, and that Way is Christ.” [DETAILS, 316]
[3]
Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology
(
[4] Karl Rahner, The Practice of Faith: A Handbook of Contemporary Spirituality, eds. Karl Lehmann and Albert Raffelt (London: SCM, 1985), 70.
[5] In one characteristic comment, made towards the end of his life, Barth hoped that others would carry on the theological task as he understood it, but that they would do so “a little better, indeed very much better, than I.” [Cited in Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth, 490]
[6] Einführung in die evangelische Theologie (1962).
[7] Karl Rahner’s transcendental arguments are complex, and one would need to caution against easy identifications of these with that which Barth labels ‘natural theology’, or a theologising independently from the actuality or the reality of revelation. Yet, in ‘Some Theses on Prayer “In the Name of the Church”’, for instance, he opens with several claims that could be read as verging on a ‘general theology of prayer’: “Prayer is an act of the virtue of religion … by which the creature turns towards God by acknowledging and praising His limitless superiority explicitly or implicitly and by subjecting itself to that superiority…. Hence, prayer is an act by which (a) man as a whole ‘actualizes’ himself and (b) by which this thus actualized human reality is subjected and, as it were, surrendered to God.” [Theological Investigations 5 Later Writings, trans. Karl-H. Kruger (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966), 419]
[8] Busch, Karl Barth, 455.
[9] Barth, cited in Busch, Karl Barth, 461f.
[10] Barth, letter to Jürgen Moltmann (17th Nov., 1964), cited in Busch, Karl Barth, 487.
[11] George Hunsinger, DETAILS. Busch: “Revelation is not merely the event in which God is known by us.” [Great Passion, 63] That is why Barth’s ethics is a theological ethics, ethics “only as an integral element of dogmatics” [CL, 3], and simultaneously why Barth’s theology is ethically significant.
[12] Prayer, 3.
[13] ET, 149, my italics.
[14] Cf. CD III.4, 89.
[15]
Simon Tugwell, ‘Prayer, Humpty Dumpty
and Thomas Aquinas’, DETAILS, PAGE NUMBER.; Cf. Clement of
[16] Cf. ET, 149f.; Barth, Ethics, 473.
[17] These are the ethics of the doctrine of creation (CD III.4), as section 53 ‘Freedom before God’, and the ethics of the doctrine of reconciliation (CL), as an extended study of the Lord’s Prayer. Barth’s understanding of the necessary interaction between theology and practice was the reason why Barth reacted to the ethics of the German intellectual manifesto by questioning their theologies. Their “ethical failure” indicated that “their exegetical and dogmatic presuppositions could not be in order” [cited in Busch, Karl Barth, 81]. It is this that Gordon H. Clark bizarrely fails to comprehend. REFERENCE What kind of God is required by an aggressive imperialist ethic? According to Naumann in 1915, “All religion is right for us … whether it is called the Salvation Army or Islam, provided that it helps us to hold out through the war.” [Cited in Busch, Karl Barth, 84]
[18] Karl Barth, ‘Revelation’, in Revelation, ed. John Baillie, DETAILS.
[19] A danger in Barth’s analogy emerges, however, in his talk of prayer. He claims that if one listens to all these voices, but “opens no skylight towards heaven”, then one is “all alone in his work.” [ET, 150] The remedy for this predicament? “[T]he theologian for a moment should turn away from all his efforts in the performance of the intellectus fidei. At such a moment he can and should turn exclusively towards the object of theology, himself, to God.” [ET, 151] Has Barth put pressure on the multiple conversations that the theologian has – indeed the determinative conversations, those which continually impact upon and determine the shape of one’s hearing of God? Does he set listening to others and listening to the Other over against each other at this important point? It must be recalled that Barth’s point is to reinforce divine primordiality, and to disallow all forms of laborious human achievement.
[20] CD III.3, 270; Prayer, 27. “Prayer is a grace, an offer of God.” [Prayer, 13; cf. 20; Augustine, De Preser. FULL REFERENCE xxiii] Following, correspondence, thinking after, and witnessing may be Barth’s favoured descriptions of the theological shape of human activity, but the models are all constrained by a certain externalising sensibility that has all too little sense of the divine movement in and through the human at these points. CITE GUNTON The models need to be supplemented by something more participative. EXPLAIN
[21] Prayer, 15.
[22] Hesselink claims that “Barth has a special or polemical reason for emphasizing prayer as petition. … Barth points out the danger of thinking of prayer as basically mediation which has no concrete substance.” [Hesselink, 80] This is true to an extent, but it misses the extended tradition which includes Thomas and Calvin, among many others, from whom Barth learns to understand prayer as petition.
[23] John McIntyre, Theology After the Storm FULL REFERENCE, 183. Cf. Migliore, FULL REFERENCE 120.
[24] Tugwell, 24. Oratio and precatio; precari means to plead, to beg, to ask earnestly.
[25] CD III.4, 97; cf. CD III.3, 266f.
[26] Cf. CD III.4, 88, 99.
[27] CD III.4, 98; Prayer, 16.
[28] CD III.4, 97; cf. III.3. 288. This is why John Calvin, for instance, opens his reflections on prayer with a re-articulation of the theological ban on human soteriological meritocracy [Institutes of Christian Religion, DETAILS III.20.1].
[29] Cf. Nicholas Lash, Holiness REFERENCE, 51.
[30] McCabe, God Still Matters, 215. Cf. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man’s Quest for God (New York, PUBLISHER, 1954), 87; Jacques Ellul, REFERENCE 44f.; Peter R. Baelz, Prayer and Providence: A Background Study (London: SCM Press, 1968), 11; D.Z. Phillips, The Concept of Prayer, DETAILS 43.
[31] Cf. Williams James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: University Books, 1963).
[32] CHECK TRANSLATION
[33] I have here echoed Barth’s claim of 1933 concerning the church that should be church which requires that theology continue as if nothing had happened. REFERENCES As Busch observes, “This formula does not mean the same thing as the slogan of the centrist faction of the church at that time, ‘Church must remain church.’ What that meant was that the church should protect itself against changes that threaten to encroach upon its substance” from outside [Great Passion, 246f.].
[34] It is important to recognise that even in 1922 Barth’s account of the Wholly Otherness of God was not one working from a simple diastasis between God and humanity. “[B]ecause God is even beyond the ‘Beyond’, he is not simply distant from the world – which is a view that Barth was often thought (wrongly) to put forward.” [Busch, Karl Barth, 120] Elsewhere Busch argues that “When Barth in this context picked up the not unproblematic idea of ‘the finite not being capable of holding the infinite’ (finitum non capax infinitii), he did it only because he expressly understood by ‘finitum’ humankind outside of grace.” [Karl Barth and the Pietists, DETAILS 202]
This is a marked improvement on Vincent Brümmer’s critique, for instance. He, like Barth, admits affectivity is indeed a crucial aspect of prayer in the Christian tradition, and this can be seen in the work of Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin and Kierkegaard [What Are We Doing When We Pray? A Philosophical Inquiry (London: SCM Press, 1984), 23]. Yet he objects that this is insufficiently theistic [52]. Now he has a point in arguing that affectivity and theological subjectivisation are close kin, but to blanketly fuse the two confuses several matters. After all, it depends what kind of affectivity or effect one is speaking of. For instance, while Chopin’s Études might help one relax, contemplation of God may be God’s means of providing particular strength in a way not necessarily provided by any other means.
[35] Prayer, 27. Cf. Barth, Romans, 317.
[36] “That way we might save ourselves from a host of false personal and theological problems that arise when we imply that God changes his mind, loses his temper, is a spectator … and so on.” [Nicholas Lash, His Presence in the World REFERENCE, 16]
[37] Barth’s theology is a theological method that arises from the liberating Self-revelation of God, and thus his theology of freedom can be misconstrued when it is packaged as a critically realistic, dialectical theology, as Bruce McCormack does [REFERENCE].
[38] It is revealing of the state of modern Christian Europe that Immanuel Kant, for instance, felt the need to critique superstitious attempts to influence deity with our requests [Religion, 181],and Friedrich Schleiermacher can criticise versions of prayer that “lapse into magic” [Christian Faith, 673].
[39] Josef Brommer, ‘Is the Prayer of Petition and Intercession Still Meaningful?’, in The Prayer Life, ed. Christian Duquoc and Claude Geffré (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 73-82 (73).
[40] David B. Burrell, REFERENCE, 4f.; ‘Divine Action and Human Freedom in the Context of Creation’, in Thomas F. Tracy (ed.), The God Who Acts: Philosophical and Theological Explorations (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 103-109 (104). It is this ‘God’ that many see underlying the birth of modern atheism. See, e.g., McCabe, WHICH BOOK?, 6f.
[41] Rahner, Practice of Faith, 71.
[42]
E.B. Tylor, Primitive
Culture: Researches into the Development
of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom, 2 vols. (4th
edn.
[43] See ‘The First Commandment as the Axiom of Theology’, 77. Barth’s reflections on atheism are interesting here. In 1933 he claims: “According to Luther’s explanation, which coincides exactly with the biblical view, no god is that in which human beings place their trust, in which they have faith, from which they expect to receive what they love and to protect them from what they fear. A god is that to which one gives one’s heart. Luther went on to say that money, possessions, art, wisdom, power, favour, friendship and honour could in this sense as equally well be real gods as the idols of the heathen, the saints of the papacy and, last but not least, our good deeds and our moral achievements. Wherever the human heart is, in other words wherever is the foundation of our real ultimate confidence and hope, our primum movens of our vitality and the basis of the security of our lives, there also, in all truth, is our god.” [‘The First Commandment as the Axiom of Theology’, 69] Cf. Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (FULL REFERENCE), 33.
[44] Prayer, 15.
[45] McCabe, WHICH BOOK? 70.
[46] Eleonore Stump, ‘Petitionary Prayer’, in Phillip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (eds.), A Companion to Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 577-583 (582). Cf. Stump, ‘Petitionary Prayer’, American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979), 81-91 (90).
[47] Prayer, 43, my emphasis. In this respect Saliers’ observation of “Prayer as the ongoing dialogue between Jesus Christ and the Father” [xvii] is not strictly accurate of Barth, although in his ethics lecture cycle, Barth does speak of “Prayer, as talking with God” [Ethics FULL REFERENCE, 472]. Baelz’s preferred term “communion” may have other, and more satisfactory, connotations [Prayer and Providence, 101].
[48] REFERENCE
[49] Calvin, Inst. III.20.5.
[50] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer, trans. A.V. Littledale (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1961), 19.
[51] See, e.g., R.A. Torrey, How to Pray (Old Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1900), ch. 1. It is unsurprising that Torrey’s talk takes a semi-Pelagian turn: “If, then, we would pray aright, the first thing that we should do is to see to it that we really get an audience with God, that we really get into His very presence.” [ch. 2]
[52] See, e.g., Torrey, ch. 2; Edward M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1966).
[53] See Paul E. Billheimer, Destined for the Throne: A New Look at the Bride of Christ (London: Christian Literature Crusade, 1975), 17.
[54] Maynard G. James: “It is told of a certain Salvation Army officer that she had tried in vain to get revival in her corps. Various methods had been used, but without success. In desperation she General William Booth for advice in such a difficult situation. Back came a telegram with the laconic words: ‘Try tears.’ … [W]e desperately need the right kind of tears …. They are the tears which move the heart of a pitiful Creator and which bring untold blessing to needy humanity.” [When Thou Prayest: Plain Talks on the Devotional Life (Kansas City, Missouri: Beacon Hill Press, 1963), 41] Similarly, G.H. Lang: “We get proportionate result to the effort put forth. It costs to pray effectively.” [Praying is Working, 4th edn. (Walsham-le-Willows, 1943), 3] Stump, for instance even speaks of prayer as possibly being able to “bridge the distance between human beings and God” [‘Petitionary Prayer’, in Quinn and Taliaferro, 582].
[55] Mary Joe Meadow and Richard D. Kahoe, Psychology of Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 120.
[56] Prayer, 27.
[57] Gustav Aulén, REFERENCE 401.
[58]
Karl Barth, Suchet Gott, so werdet ihr leben!
(
[59]
Barth claims that Descartes was the father of the modern crisis in the
knowledge of God in rendering God dependent upon the self-conscious epistemic
subject or I, thus reducing God to a part of that I. Consequently, as a human construct, “This God
is hopelessly within” CHECK WORDS [CD, III.1, 360]. Too many critics of Barth fail to see this
non-competitiveness. For instance, Baelz problematically declares that “Barth’s epistemological
realism and theological objectivism are in part a massive attack on all
attempts to reduce the being of God to that of the world or of man. God is other than the world and other than
man. His being is hidden. There is a radical discontinuity between the
being of God and the being of man.” [Prayer
and
[60] McCabe, God Matters, 11; CD III.3, 274.
[61] Rahner, The Practice of Faith, 71f.
[62] Brümmer, 6. Of course Brümmer, with his personalist
version of what Peter Geach calls “two-way
contingency” [Geach, 89; cf. Brümmer,
30], is right about the difference between persons and machines, and the
biblical imagery of the personhood of God draws theology closer to analogies of
persons in conversation than agents acting sufficiently on machinery, or even
the impersonal operations of fate.
However, the analogy involved
in speaking of divine personhood should not be overplayed. Firstly, persons can be manipulated, and in
so being lose something crucial to their personhood. Of course, one might respond by saying that
God is not a human person and therefore not manipulatable
in that way. Yet if we do that we are
already showing the concept of ‘personhood’ to be only limited in relation to
the Godhead. Secondly, there is the
danger of subverting the difficulty of explicating the divine by categories
fitted for the universe. Brümmer seems to imagine that personhood crosses the
Creator-creature distinction. Yet, this
is problematic on the very basis that it tends to assume a certain univocity of
reference between divine and human personality, whereas whatever God’s
‘personhood’ means as the creative ground of human personhood in the imago dei it does not create such a
comparability on the basis of an analogia entis. Brummer’s God, then, is too neatly construed as an agent in
a world of agents, even if his privileging of the personal metaphors in
God-talk subvert some of the more unpalatable consequences of talk of God in
terms of being a cause in a world of causes.
[63] It is only the coming of God’s Spirit that “rid[s] him [viz., the human] of any idea that he possesses a possibility for such a meeting” [CD I.2, 234] CHECK TRANSLATION
[64] An interesting question is proffered by Phillips concerning the worthiness of the God worshipped – if God is the God of power, the One whose way with us is one of reward – satisfying our egos – then the main thing distinguishing worship of God from the worship of the devil is that we think we have reason to believe that the former will win. Ultimate success here drives our worship, and that means the placing of us within an eternally significant frame. To continue to use ‘God’ language of this, conceals what is really driving it, concealing from even the pray-ers themselves.
[65]
God’s gracious turning to humanity in the Spirit’s holiness does not permit a
“selfish desire for salvation” nor “the satisfaction of the private religious
needs of man” [CD I.2, 237] CHECK
TRANSLATION It was Barth’s
opposition to these matters, added to the concern over individualism, that
drove his critique of Pietism’s spiritual egoism in the first edition of the Romans commentary (1919): “Precisely the importance and glory human
beings ascribe to the sphere of their own soul, to their personal, individual
life, is a falling away from the living God.” [cited
in Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth and the Pietists: The Young Karl Barth’s Critique of Pietism
and Its Response, trans. Daniel W. Bloesch (
[66] Karl Rahner, Happiness Through Prayer (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds, Ltd., 1958), 9. Cf. 15f.; The Practice of Prayer, 74.
[67] Ellul, 144.
[68]
Baelz, Prayer and
[69] Williams, 273f.
[70] “The will of God is not to preserve and accompany and rule the world and the course of world as world-occurrence in such a way that He is not affected and moved by it, that He does not allow Himself to converse with it, that He does not listen to what it says, that as He conditions all things He does not allow Himself to be determined to be determined by them. God is not free an d immutable in the sense that He is the prisoner of His own resolve and will and action, that He must always be alone as the Lord of all things and of all occurrence.” [CD III.3, 285]
[71] See Fiddes, 118f.; Ellis, 83ff. Barth, Prayer, 13: “Prayer exerts an influence upon God’s action, even upon his existence.”
[72] Barth differs from Buber in claiming that co-humanity is of the essence of the human [CD III.2, 289]. Moreover, one could say that, despite his particular use of it in CD III.1 and III.3 CHECK REFERENCES, the I-Thou scheme is not well suited to Barth’s theology because it potentially retains something of an individualised sense of being before God, the human I before the divine Thou.
[73] Clark H. Pinnock, ‘Open Theism: An Answer to My Critics’, Dialog 44.3 (2005), 237-245 (237). Cf. David Basinger, ‘The Open View of God: Practical Implications’, available at http://www.faithquest.com/modules.php?name=Sections&op=viewarticle&artid=11, consulted 28/05/2005.
[74]
John Sanders, A God Who Risks: A Theology of
[75]
Ellis, 14. Cf.
Sanders, 64. Intriguingly, Barth reads
the Jacob story in a different way:
Jacob and
[76] Ellis, xi.
[77] Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), 47f.
[78] Aquinas, ST 1a.105.5. Cf. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology volume 1, FULL REFERENCE 48.
[79] Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentes, 3.70.8.
[80]
So John Macken claims that there is an “axiomatic
disjunction between the action of the one [God] and the action of the other
[viz. the creature]” [The Autonomy Theme
in the Church Dogmatics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 86 ] Consequently, baptism “is so much the act of
the human subject that it cannot be the act of God.” [82] SEE WEBSTER &
[81] Austin Farrer, Faith and Speculation (New York: New York University Press, 1967), 110. It is important to remember that theology’s job is not to reduce its mystery to that of a logical puzzle, or worse, to empty it altogether in systematising productivity which makes God’s action something intelligible on the basis of creaturely action. Theology’s drawing out the rules of its intelligibility demarcates sense from theological nonsense (whatever other sense the latter might claim for itself), witnessing to the ground of its actuality. Rahner: “When petitionary prayer is understood in this way, the question of how it is granted (if it is granted) is of secondary importance, because a person at prayer should not think he is heard only when his prayer as concrete request is granted in precisely the same way as in that in which he had proposed it.” [The Practice of Faith, 76]
[82]
Paul Fiddes, Participating
in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (
[83] This critique “only seems shocking to those who expect the study of God to be easy and obvious, a less demanding discipline than, say, the study of nuclear physics.” [McCabe, God Matters, 13 OR God Still Matters, 39] CHECK Phillips, The Concept of Prayer, 57f.: “Many people feel that unless prayer is talking to someone ‘out there’, who is ‘there’ in a quasi-physical sense, prayer becomes little more than a psychological phenomenon in the person who prays.” “But this objection is a hankering after the old spatial model, in terms of which God’s reality is likened to the externality of the planets. … People who protest … must face the question of whence they obtain their model for understanding prayer. The answer, whether they like it or not, is: from debased traditions within religious language. The model they wish to retain is that of an anthropomorphic conception of God, a God whom one can address as one could address the moon – or better – the man in the moon.”
[84] Mysterious, hidden and often contrary to appearances, providence requires to be more closely attached to the covenantal purposes of God enacted in the history of Jesus Christ. It has to be understood as a confession of faith in the God of Jesus Christ [see CD III.3, 57].
[85] CD III.3, §50.
[86] Lochman, 71.
[87] Fiddes, 118. Phillips, The Concept of Prayer, 97, 102: “The relation between the assertion ‘God is good’ and what happens so is not one of inference. … The believer cannot expect one thing rather than another – in the world of events. … [T]he essence of the believer’s belief in divine goodness consists precisely in the fact that the meaning of life does not depend on how it goes.”
[88] Von Balthasar, 16.
[89] CD III.4, 94; cf. III.3, 274f.; Prayer, 14.
[90] McCabe, God Matters, 220.
[91] ‘Prayer’, however, can have no techniques that can be learnt [see McCabe, 215]. “We can never pray as we ought, so let’s just pray as we can. … There is no special way of talking that will catch God’s attention. There is no etiquette, no good manners about how we are to address God. … Of course, there are ways of talking to God which would just be plainly wrong or blasphemous, just as there are statements we cannot make about God.” [McCabe, 216]
[92]
See
[93] In his Ethics lectures Barth announces that the prayer Veni Creator Spiritus is “the prayer that includes within itself all prayer” [478]. It is “the Holy Ghost [who] makes a person who actually, really prays.” [Barth, The Holy Ghost and the Christian Life, 86] “Veni, Creator Spiritus! In his movement from below to above and from above to below, the one Holy Spirit achieves the opening of God for man and the opening of man for God.” [ET, 158]
[94] Lochman, 17; cf. CL, 44.
[95] CD III.4, 112, citing Tertullian, De Oratione I.6.
[96] Cf. Prayer, 14; CD III.4, 94, 108. Pannenberg claims that “Prayer has received treatment in very different places in dogmatic presentations. There is traditionally no fixed place for it.” [Systematic Theology 3, 202] His own suggestion is “that we should deal with prayer in the context of pneumatology, for the Spirit enables us to pray and gives us strength to do so.” [202f.] Careful reflections on the pneumatic context of prayer in Barth are vital.
[97] However, several recent studies tend insufficiently only to assert this rather than adequately explicate Barth’s anti-christomonistic theo-logic [e.g., Spencer REFERENCE]. The question is whether Barth has permitted enough differentiation between the concrete and irreducible particularity of Jesus Christ as our Representative, and other human beings – in Dorothee Sölle’s somewhat imprecise terms, it would be Representation with the force of a thoroughgoing Substitution. REFERENCE
[98] McCabe, BOOK 53.
[99] Von Speyer, 31. Cf. von Balthasar, 35f., 42.
[100]
One recent collection of papers contains several contributions of those who
particularly badly misconstrue Barth’s theology of event [Sung Wook Chung (ed.), Karl
Barth and Evangelical Theology (
[101] CL, 78f.; Williams, 10. Cf. CD III.4, 90, 97, 100, 112.
[102] Cf. CD III.3, 274. Theodicists often resort to talk of God’s acting as God wills. So Stephen T. Davis declares that “Reformed Christians – believing, as we do, in the sovereignty of God – stress God’s freedom to act as God wants to act.” [‘Free Will and Evil’, in Encountering Evil, DETAILS 102] Even more clearly John K. Roth announces that “God is bound only by God’s will. Ultimately, nothing except it determines what he shall do or become. All possibilities are within God’s reach.” [John K. Roth, ‘A Theodicy of Protest’, in Encountering Evil, 13] These accounts are plagued with the feeling of divine arbitrariness – God wills and is as God wills.
[103] Cf. CD III.4, 93.
[104] Calvin, III.20.35. Cf. CD III.3, 274. This ‘humanising of God’ is the reason why Barth protests against the Reformation accounts of God’s Self-glorifying. Crisp puzzles over “the redemption of all humanity” being “God’s end in creation” rather than “his self-glorification to which even the redemption of humanity is subordinate.” [FULL REFERENCE, in Chung, PAGE NUMBERS, 81] Quite simply the two are not opposed for Barth – the redemption of humanity is the will of God, and the fulfilment of the will of God is God’s Self-glorification. “The purpose of fellowship between God and man, and therefore of the relationship of command and obedience that characterizes it, is determined in the covenant of grace by the fact that God’s glory and man’s salvation, while they are so different are not two things but one. … God’s free kindness alone is the point of his demanding and ordering and commanding. Hence the point of the obedience that man owes him can be only the demonstration of his free gratitude.” [CL, 30] Among other thing, Crisp really should more carefully read Barth’s doctrine of election and The Humanity of God.
[105] CD III.4, 104, my emphasis. Cf. 103.
[106] See Ellul, 177; von Balthasar, 82f.
[107] CD III.4, 110; cf. CL, 82f.
[108] CL, 96, 95.
[109] CD III.3, 281; CL, 102; cf. 95. Barth says that “To begin with, a special, qualified, but numerically limited number of people are commanded to call upon God as their Father.” [CL, 70, my emphasis]
[110] So Barth says that “The Lord’s Prayer is not just any form of prayer to be used by just anybody. It presupposes ‘us’: ‘Our Father’! It addresses a Father who is a father to us in a most particular fashion.” [Prayer, 22] Moreover, Jesus’ imperative ‘ask and you will receive’ is made to those he calls to follow him.
[111] Barth, Prayer, 23; CD III.3, 275.
[112] Barth, God Here and Now, 93. Barth’s sense of difference is not a simple difference that would, in promoting the good of God (or the world) would be indifferent to the good of the world (or God). In March 1939 Barth spoke in a series of Dutch cities, and to the request not to speak on political issues he proclaims, “Wherever there is theological talk, it is always implicitly or explicitly political talk too.” [Busch, Karl Barth, 292]
[113] The phrase is from Stanley J. Grenz, DETAILS 52.
[114] EXPLORE RECENT THEOLOGIES OF THE GIFT
[115] Calvin, Inst. III.20.3.
[116]
EXPLORE NOTION OF GOD’S
[117] Cf. Rahner, The Practice of Faith, 75.
[118] Barth, Prayer, 48. “Jesus is teaching his disciples to be satisfied, not to want superfluity, not to seek long-term security, not to heap up goods, but to ask only for what is necessary and sufficient for the day.” [Lochman, 91] Calvin: “Yet those who, not content with daily bread but panting after countless things with unbridled desire, or sated with their abundance, or carefree in their piled-up riches, supplicate God with this prayer are but mocking him. For the first ones ask him what they do not wish to receive, indeed, what they utterly abominate – namely, mere daily bread – and as much as possible cover before God their propensity to greed, while true prayer ought to pour out before him the whole mind itself and whatever lies hidden within.” [Inst. III.20.44]
[119] Barth, Prayer, 51f. “How senseless it is that in this humanity surrounded by thy gifts there are people still dying of hunger.”
[120] Cf. Rahner, The Practice of Prayer, 75.
[121] Cf. Thomas Aquinas, ST II-II Q.83 Art.16.
[122] J.B. Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace, DETAILS 3, 34f.
[123] Thomas argues that the Lord’s Prayer “directs all our affections.” [ST II-II.Q.83 Art.9]
[124] Barth, ‘The First Commandment as the Axiom of Theology’, 78. In 1922 Barth admits that even the most pious prayers are reflections of one’s own thought and experience [Romans, 316]. Barth claims that Feuerbach’s charge against all religion is justified. Ellis fails to understand this notion of prayer’s purification: “one wonders what is left of our prayers … if in fact our prayers are altered and changed beyond recognition by their divine reception?” [86] The reason is that he associates prayer initially with anthropology and not the anthropology that is constituted theanthropologically or christologically. See CD III.4, 91. Cf. Calvin, Inst. III.20.4; Jacques Ellul, 26; J. Neville Ward, The Use of Praying (Plymouth: Epworth Press, 1967), 57; McCabe, God Matters, 74; McIntyre, 179. Denys Turner: the event of prayer itself is an act of purification, “a kind of hermeneutic of the opaque text of desire” [98]. Fiddes: “Those who pray that God will find them a parking space, or give them a fine day for a church outing, provoke the question as to why a God who can manage such trivial matters was less successful in preventing a Holocaust. Those who believe that God has stepped in to prevent them from getting on a plane that crashed raise acute moral problems about those who have apparently not been so guarded and guided.” [130]
[125]
Citation from John Polkinghorne, Science and
[126] Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, FULL DETAILS 16. Cf. Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (DETAILS), 25.
[127] Barth, God Here and Now, 38. Cf. CD III.3, 271.
[128] Adrienne von Speyer, The World of Prayer, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985), 15.
[129] Baelz, Does God Answer Prayer?, 54.
[130]
Augustine, The City of
[131] Karl Barth, ‘The First Commandment as an Axiom of Theology’, in The Way of Theology in Karl Barth, ed. Martin Rumscheidt (DETAILS), 77. Consequently, all the fights against others “can be fought only with a penultimate, never an absolute, seriousness and anger. We cannot see through any theology so completely that we can assert with any final certainty that next to the deus ecclesiae it has ‘other gods.’” [78] This ethos echoes Barth’s earlier worry expressed against Bultmann which claims that there are many spirits in the New Testament REFERENCE & QUOTE; and his argument in his Tambach lecture of 1919 that Jesus Christ is the only Christian REFERENCE & QUOTE.
[132]
Migliore, 112:
“Of all the resources available to the church for serious reflection on
the place of prayer in Christian life, ministry, and theology, the work of Karl
Barth is among the richest.” When one
considers the work of Rahner and von Balthasar, for
instance, it may be too exaggerated to commend Migliore’s
succeeding claim that “No other theologian of the twentieth century took prayer
more seriously or developed a more extensive theology of prayer than Barth
did.” Yet Migliore
also observes that themes of cross and