John C. McDowell

If at the heart of Christian worship lies the eucharist, with both its dramatic and incorporative potrayal of salvation history and anticipation of the heavenly banquet, at the core of the dynamics of Christian living and its formation of Christian identity is prayer.

While there are multiple versions of theologies of prayer, particularly concerning its nature and function, one important general account advances that prayer takes us, in some sense, into the very dynamic of the divine communication. Unpacking the meaning and significance of the implications of such a statement is a complex process, traversing various thematic readings. None is more significant, given creedal bordering of all talk of God, of the process of divine trinitarian intercourse.

The being of God takes the form of the Word spoken from and to all eternity, a Word that creates, reconciles and redeems those who have become deaf to the deus dixit because they have habitually preferred to hear other things. That creation which thus exists in its own space and time in relative independence from its Creator (albeit that independence cannot be theologically and eschatologically conceived unrelationally, since that is the disfunctioning of the broken), in its own dynamics of communicative acts, exists in a dynamic relationality, or rather communion (hospitality), that constitutes its very created and eschatological essence, as has become its future through the obedience of the Incarnate One. Communion in this intensive dynamic of face to face and eye to eye relationality and reciprocity (albeit asymmetrically formed), and flowing from mutual love is the creation and expression of the existence of the eschatological human being, the One who is identified by Barth as God’s way into the far country and his prodigal homecoming.

The art of prayer stands firmly within that context – for One who is himself the spoken Word of the divine being what need was there of returning other than in the sense of publically demonstrating an eternal inter-trinitarian communion, a relational and conversational openness to that holy Other, a dynamic element of transformation in its trinitarian incorporation – the Son, in the Spirit, communing with the Father in love and obedience.

Prayer was then something that the eschatological Man knew how to do. How much closer can a relationality be than through One whose depiction comes by language of speaking oneself, gifts given and received, bonds of love and grace, etc, and those depicting something within the very being of God himself?

The Lord’s Prayer has a very special significance within this scheme. For here is the prayer that Jesus specifically teaches his closest disciples to pray. Given that that is so, there is something strange in its disciplined use as a ritualistic element, although repetition can be an integral element in keeping memory active. Here, a number of themes impress themselves for thought and theological consideration:

In other words, at the very heart of Christian calling upon the ‘name’ of ‘God’ lie the very questions that determine that the doctrine of God and ethics are not separably studiable items in the armoury of intellectual reflection, but that the very putting of the question of who God is returns the question continually to us in the form ‘who are you to call upon God?’ And this unceasing movement (or rather, series of movements that are by no means temporally separable) opens up that which can be described as the task of being creatures.