Prayer as Theosis

This post was originally published at another site where I contribute each month.  It is a dialogical experiment where different topics are discussed each month.  This month is prayer and last month was the Imago Dei.   I invite you to check out this site and read what some of the other contributors have to say.   You may wish to become a contributor yourself.   All the info to do so is on the site.   Join the feast at OpenTableTheology.

Prayer as Theosis

I dislike the cliches found on church signs.  One I saw the other day read, “The prayer line to God never has a busy signal.”  I scratch my head at such pithy dictums.  Not because I believe God is at times too busy to hear anyone’s prayers but because these cliches are far too simplistic and are creating in our culture a generation fed on nothing more than what Dallas Willard calls “bumper sticker theology.”  So, if I will never get a busy signal, what does that mean for you and I?  Does it mean I can petition God till I am blue in the face, asking for all that my heart desires?  Does it mean God is a grand Operator in the sky, just waiting to connect me to the answer for all my problems?  Does it mean that talking to God is no different than talking to my friend out of state, only technologically superior?  What happens when we pray?  Or, at least, what should happen when we pray?  In the following essay I want to address this question by first looking at what prayer has come to mean in our culture today.  After that we will investigate what some of the first Christians understood as the objective of prayer, and finally, we will see if there is a framework existing today where the best of both worlds (the new and the old) can be synthesized.

A leisurely stroll through any Christian bookstore today will prove that our culture is obsessed with prayer.  There are prayer books that cover a multitude of issues and are written to target a multitude of interest groups.  If you are a Christian man approaching midlife, divorced and wishing to reconcile with estranged children who have joined the circus, rest assured, there is a prayer book for you.  Prayer, it would seem by the titles of these many books, offers us a pathway out of whatever problem befalls us and can enhance our productivity, value and self-worth in whatever setting we find ourselves.  Prayer is the missing ingredient which when added, brings life and vitality to the prayers’ relationship, career, hobby, finances, goals, diet or whatever.

Most Christians today would nod in assent to the above understanding of prayer.  This is not surprising.  Thomas Constable, a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, talks of prayers as being a “tool kit” which enables us to do the work of God.  In his exegesis of what Scripture teaches us about prayer, he says, “the Bible does not use the term prayer to describe divine-human dialogue,” and that prayer is only our words to God, not God’s to us.  Prayer is our speech directed to the one true God.  It will soon be apparent why I find this to be a very limiting definition of prayer.  But for now it is essential to understand that with Constable’s view prayer is divided into two camps only:  prayers which we ask God for something and prayers were we tell God something.

When prayer is seen solely as something we do to God, it is natural for us to then manipulate how it can best be done.  We would not be human if we did not try to maximize the use of anything that is called a “tool.”  Thus, inevitably, prayer in our modern world becomes “work.”  It is something that we all know we should be doing (Scripture tells us so), feel guilty when we do not, and desire some cure-all fix to our laziness.  R. Kent Hughes, in his book Disciplines of a Godly Man, has presented us with a solution- even it if is one that makes us sulk.  Prayer, he says, is disciplined work! The answer to a bankrupt spiritual life is to simply pull up your bootstraps and sweat a little.  Prayer is not meant to be easy but requires training and discipline which will eventually evolve into a habit. It is during these times of habitual prayer that we bring our petitions before God in an environment that we have created by budgeting our time and space appropriately to make it conducive to prayer.

While Hughes is right to say prayer ought to become habitual, the language used to present this is similar to that of Constable’s where prayer is human oriented, purpose driven, and able to be manipulated to suit our needs.  Prayer doesn’t seem to have a noteworthy goal, or telos, other than becoming a “habit,” albeit a good one.  Now, Hughes does make a sub-point that I like and is worth noting.   In dealing with Paul’s exhortation to “pray continually” (1 Thess. 5:17), Hughes says this is possible because this type of prayer is “not so much articulation of words but a posture of the heart.”  What Hughes has made as a “type” of prayer and a mere subset within his entire chapter on prayer I want to expand upon.   It is this “posture of the heart” that I believe defines prayer more than anything else.

The medieval monk Brother Lawrence might think of prayer as requiring discipline but doubtful as a “tool kit.”  He writes, “The time of business does not differ with me from the time of prayer; and in the noise of the clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were on my knees.”  Brother Lawrence saw prayer as a posture of heart rather than work.  To understand this concept of prayer more fully we must look to see what some of the first Christians thought of prayer.

Very early on in the church prayer played a major role in formulating doctrine.  Much of what we hold as true today was founded on the bedrock of prayer.  As the church began to expand beyond Jerusalem people began asking questions, even complaining, about the gospel being spread to non-Jews.  When the Jerusalem Council convened to handle the dispute over whether Gentiles should be circumcised or not, they issued a letter to the Gentiles making one of the most profound statements in the entire New Testament, writing, “For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things…”  This is prayer!  Now, the obvious decision for these life-long Jewish men to make regarding Gentiles would have been to have them circumcised.  What is keeping them from not making such a decree?  Not Scripture.  Not tradition.  Not reason.  In Acts 15 we find these Jewish men were open to something else for instruction – an experience with the Divine.  Through a community effort of prayer they reshaped doctrine for the entire world, and it “seemed good to them and the Holy Spirit” to do so.

This closeness to God is seen throughout the writings of the early church.  Tertullian used to have his community of faith pray in their liturgies for a “delay of the end,” taking the instructions in 1 Timothy 2:4 seriously, wishing that all might be saved before God’s judgment comes.  Tertullian’s prayer for delay of the end was not to discredit eschatological hope, for his hopes were in something far more experiential, to the point where he could say, “Even if Scripture offered me no hand of celestial hope, I would still have enough preliminary judgment of this promise, since I already have the gift on earth and I could expect something from heaven.”  There was something about the early Christians that rendered their lives as performative reflections of Scripture itself, as if their very lives expressed the will of God. Scripture served to authenticate and validate a prayer-filled life saturated with experience.

The history of the Western church is beyond the scope of this essay but an interesting development with regards to prayer in the medieval period is worth noting.   Many of the men and women who formed the bedrock of our doctrines through the exercise of prayer became venerated as saints.   As such, it was permitted to pray to them along with Christ and the two, over time, became closely related.  The threat to monotheistic worship was brushed aside as it was taught that no saint was greater than Christ and no individual saint was as glorious as all the saints combined, none of which received their virtue apart from God.  However, this did not prevent a certain cultus to get attached to a particular saint based on the quality of their perceived holiness apart from other saints.  Prayer to a particular saint over the “whole” became a common practice, asking the saint to intervene or plead the prayers’ cause to Christ Himself.  A major shift is occurring here.  Now, instead of prayer being communion with God and an experience of the Divine, it has become a “tool” to assert our wills.  This is not far removed from the “strategies” and “disciplines” still pervasive in our Western “how-to” books on prayer today.

While all the above was going on in the West something very different was happening in the East.  The dominant figure in the development of doctrine in the East during the 7th century was Maximus the Confessor.  The ideas of deification and theosis (becoming like God) began to take shape as prayer was seen as a form of grace which joined our minds with the timeless, changeless and absolute mind of God, thus transforming us from, as Paul puts it, from “glory to glory.”  Prayer truly was a “posture of the heart” which sought as it’s primary goal, or telos, to make a person look more like Christ.

This understanding of prayer became foundational (and orthodox) when Simeon the New Theologian came on the scene in the 11th century.  It was at this time that a method of theologizing known asHesychasm was on the rise.  Hesychasm found within it’s practices of devotion, worship and prayer a valuable and necessary resource for formulating Christian doctrine.  Though interpreting doctrine through prayer had been a part of Eastern theology all along, it was now gaining force as being an orthodox teaching through Simeon’s writing.  Prayer was not simply speaking to God and waiting on a response, but to these early Eastern monks, the “matrix of prayer is silence, and prayer is the manifestation of the glory of God.”

A Christian in those days was by definition of person of prayer.  It is interesting to note that even during the Byzantine Empire there were many who professed to believe in the risen Christ yet were dismal Christians.  Things never change!  Jaroslave Pelikan, in his history, relates that the thing that set those who merely profess Christianity apart from those who exhibited Christ-likeness was prayer.  “How blessed is the monk who in prayer stands before God, sees Him, and is in turn seen by Him,” said Simeon.  It is this type of prayer that I am sure the apostles were engaged in during the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15 – prayer that changes individuals and entire communities.  Simeon would go on to say that so intimate is our assimilation with Christ through prayer today that we have the same relationship with him as the apostles had!  This assimilation could be expected in the here and now, not just in some future heaven.  Through prayer we are swept up into the mind of God and become partakers of God’s nature.

Gregory Palamas, an Eastern theologian who came three centuries after Simeon, expressed much of the same meaning and thrust of prayer.  For Palamas, prayer is a means to be snatched away from all that is useless and useful and be elevated into the divine nature.  When asked what the telos of prayer is, he would say, “The end of prayer is to be snatched away to God.”  Note how different that is from our modern definitions.  Prayer has no other agenda than to be close to God and to become more like God.  As we do so our wills and desires become shaped by God’s wills and desires.  Our hearts begin to beat alongside God’s.  If the occasion presented itself where we felt words were necessary to express our desires, imagine what might happen if when we uttered our thoughts they were in essence the thoughts of God?  Can you hear in this echoes of, “It seemed good to us and the Holy Spirit…”?

So what does this look like on the ground?  Theophan the Recluse, a Russian Orthodox saint from the 19th century says there are three stages of prayer.  The first involves a state of readiness beginning with readings, prostrations, vigilance and other forms of piety.  Prayer is not something you jump into haphazardly, but is prepared for in this first stage.  When prayer comes it “is sent as if it were droplets.”  We do not do prayer.  It does us.  The second stage of prayer is when body and mind are working in unison and every word prayed is accompanied by corresponding emotions.  Inner impulses to pray arise from within and are expressed in a person’s own words.  This is everyday prayer.  In the third stage, the inner being, or spirit, prevails and prayer is accomplished without even words.  Instead, “the action of prayer takes place in silence in the depths of the spirit,” echoing the monks of centuries before who gave prayer a similar definition of silence.  This is the essence of inner prayer and is what Paul is calling us to do when he says, “pray without ceasing.”  Prayer, as seen here, is not something we “do” but is entirely seen as developing a relationship with Jesus Christ where we become less and he becomes more.  By accomplishing this progression through the stages we realize that it is no longer I who is praying but it is Christ who prays in my heart.

This brief overview of some key thinkers in the history of prayer paints a picture, especially in the East, of something very different from what we in the West are used to.  We like to think of things in terms of “action” and “doing” and “results” so even our theology is drawn to such devices, certainly with respect to prayer.  I believe that we in the West can learn much from our Eastern counterparts when it comes to prayer, but how do we synthesize those aspects here at home?  If we think prayer should be far more than a chore or a “tool” than must we become Greek Orthodox?  Of course not.   Thankfully there has been a shift in our culture where those leading the charge sound very much like the monks and mystics of centuries ago from the East.  Today we call them emerging Christians.

In Eugene Peterson’s brilliant book, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, echoes of an Eastern mentality are evident throughout.  Prayer, Peterson says, “Is the primary way in which the community [of faith] actively receives and participates” in the presence of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.  Prayer is the language of Christians in community who are becoming more and more like their Savior.  It is conversation with God.  In striking contrast to Constable and Hughes where we initiate prayer with God, Peterson says, “prayer begins when God addresses us.  First God speaks; our response, our answer, is prayer.”  This sounds very much like Theophan referring to prayer as being sent to us “like droplets.”  Prayer is not something we manipulate or use to get something we need, but is a means by which we establish continuities with the life of Jesus.

Kyle Lake drives the point home even further in his book [Re]Understanding Prayer. By truly understanding “God as Spirit” and that Jesus Christ “holds all things together” (Col. 1:15-17), a believer should never again think of God as needing to be beckoned or called out to, but will understand the awesome truth that we move, breath, eat, drink, sleep, wake, work, play, live and die in God. This reminds me of Karl Barth, who wrote, “If we do not pray we fail to realize that we are in the presence of God” while expressing this awesome affirmation: There is no humankind without God.  God encompasses the space that surrounds our very bodies. When we pray, we are not projecting upon some distant God which we can categorize by “disciplines” or duration or quantity, but instead, prayer is fluid and open-ended, lacking compartments.  Luis of Grenada, a 16th century spiritualist defined prayer as “any raising of the heart to God.”  Lake notes that this kind of prayer may already be budding in our lives, partly because it has historical roots, as we have seen here.  We may intuitively be longing for such a prayer life.  But perhaps the reason we do not embrace this attitude of paryer in the West is because nobody has told us that it counts for something – that it is legitimate (indeed, there are plenty today who wish to tell us it is evil, satanic and contrary to scripture).  Who can blame us?  The majority of books on prayer tell us that prayer is work, it is discipline, and it is my communication to God who is listening on the other end of a very long phone line that is never busy.  Where is the thrill in that?  If we worship a God who is truly transcendent as well as imminent, wholly other yet incarnate, then we should allow this God to transform us when we converse – just as any conversation I have with my peers leaves me slightly changed – should it not be even more so with our Creator?  Dan Kimball says that practicing the Spirit’s presence through prayer is vital if we are to grow into disciples.  We cannot continue to package and box something so full of life and so holistic into prescribed methods and systems, but instead we must enter prayer with a sense of awe, fear and reverence, expecting to experience God’s presence – for God is all around us.

The marquee sign of the church I saw is partially right.  The line to God is never busy, but it is not open for me to hog the airways with my issues.  No, the line is open all the time so that I might become more and more like Christ so that his issues become my own.  As Christians we do not need to make prayer one more item on our to do list that we routinely check off each morning or feel guilt for neglecting.  Prayer is not my “tool kit” for doing God’s work nor is it something I can sweat at to get good at so as to turn it into a good habit.  Prayer is my means for growing into a Christ-like disciple and having my inner self become immersed in the Spirit.  By revitalizing this ancient understanding of prayer and what it can and will accomplish the number of books on how to do prayer ought to decrease as we rely less on them and more on the Spirit of God within us.

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