When mystery gives way to certitude, the pursuit of God becomes a head-trip

The Shadow of the Reformation :: A Short Series on Why Protestants Have Trouble With Prayer

Part Eight

As it aged, Protestantism lost the sense of mystery that was common to Christianity during most of the first fifteen hundred years of Christian history, a mystery that was still cherished among early Reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin. The mystery of God was reduced to thoughts we can think, ideas we can debate, and words we can speak or write or even pray.

The need for theological precision and intellectual rigor required of Christianity a rationalism that was foreign to its experience, especially as Christians were forced to debate not only with Christians of new sects and denominations, but also as they were forced to meet the challenges of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason.

Mystery gave way to certitude. The pursuit of God became largely a head-trip, and prayer now required right thinking, where before all it required was love.

Prayer was relegated to religious services where experts crafted artful sermon-prayers spoken to God on behalf of others who merely listened. Among some Christians the devotional life became a highly rational form of prayer urged upon believers who were to practice “quiet times” so filled with Bible study and intercessory prayer for others that they were rarely "quiet times" at all.

To be continued . . .

The Protestant problem: prayer became a mere tool to get things from God

The Shadow of the Reformation :: A Short Series on Why Protestants Have Trouble With Prayer

Part Seven

The early Reformers rediscovered some great truths about God, a rediscovery that was long overdue.

But their followers became enamored with those truths turned into ideas, and with each step along that path, God was increasingly reduced from the living Word—wild, free, untamable, even unknowable apart from the prayer of a loving heart—to mere words about God that no longer needed prayer to make any sense.

In the fourteenth century, an English spiritual director could say to his flock, “You must abandon everything you know to love the one thing you cannot think” (The Cloud of Unknowing).  But within a few hundred years, that orthodox teaching was turned upside down. God could now be thought, and no longer needed to be loved.

Prayer became a tool to get things from God, not the means of grace for knowing God as God.

To be continued . . .

Too much religion is mere abstraction

The Shadow of the Reformation :: A Short Series on Why Protestants Have Trouble With Prayer

Part Six

To understand what happened following the Reformation, consider the difference between a magazine article about a sunset and a sunset itself. Words can quite easily take on a magical quality; they can cast a spell over us. Once we name something, label it, or describe it, we can find ourselves believing we’ve captured it. A living, mysterious thing like a sunset or a flower or a person is reduced from the wild thing it is to ideas in our head and words on a page. But those ideas and words are not the thing itself, only symbols of that thing. They are abstractions.

Over the years, I’ve talked to thousands of people about prayer. When I ask them to describe prayer, their first response is nearly always to describe prayer as the words we speak to God. True, sometimes there’s a person who will say something like, “Prayer is intimacy with God,” “Prayer is listening,” or “Prayer is silence,” but by and large, the shadowy legacy of the Reformation—its heavy emphasis on thinking and the power of the words we use to label, describe, and capture what we’re thinking—has dominated Christian spirituality.

Consequently, nearly all of us pray from above the neck—with our brains and lips; our pursuit of God is largely a head-trip.  For many of us Protestants, God is a mere idea to be believed, debated, and defended, not a real, living Presence that stops us dead in our tracks, who renders us absolutely speechless.

To be continued . . .

A protest of words and ideas

The Shadow of the Reformation :: A Short Series on Why Protestants Have Trouble With Prayer

Part Five

Protestantism arose as a protest made up of ideas and the words that communicate them. Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses, or ideas, on the castle door at Wittenberg in 1517. As the Reformation grew, the ideas of the Reformers were disseminated through books and pamphlets printed on a new invention, the printing press, which made mass communication possible for the first time. These ideas brought down kings, empowered the peasants, and made new ways of thinking possible. I’ll not dwell on the effect of these ideas on politics, the arts, philosophy, or theology. Instead, I’ll focus on the effect these ideas had on the experience of prayer—that is, the experience of living a life in communion with God.

To be continued . . .

The Reformation left interior prayer behind

The Shadow of the Reformation :: A Short Series on Why Protestants Have Trouble With Prayer

Part Four

All this changed in the sixteenth century with the advent of the Protestant Reformation. The change had been coming for centuries; medieval scholasticism was no stranger to abstract ideas and words, books and debates. But the Reformation turned the corner abruptly, leaving the legacy of interior prayer behind. For most of the last four hundred years the practice largely disappeared . . . until recently.

There is no question that the Protestant Reformation was not only a great gift to the Church but also to society—the democratic reforms arising from the Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Anabaptists, and much later, even the Pentecostals, have deeply influenced movements for justice and peace around the world and shaped political ideologies and structures. They also influenced important reforms within the Roman Catholic Church. However, there is a shadow to the Protestant Reformation, and as a Reformed Christian I know this shadow intimately—not only its effect on my own spiritual life, but also its legacy in the lives of those Protestants I’ve taught to pray over the last quarter century, and those who, having grown up in Protestant churches, lost their faith and walked away.

To be continued . . .