Too many are bullied away from real prayer

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

Part Nine (Conclusion)

Of course, there are plenty of Protestant Christians who have experienced some taste of the Divine and who have found ways into stillness before God. But the shadowy legacy of the Protestant Reformation and its interaction with the Enlightenment meant that the way to God became a matter of ideas and words and activism. Prayer became something the believer did on behalf of others or as a rational and verbal expression of devotion.

Gone was the mystery and awe, the intimacy and simplicity of the prayer of the heart—a wordless, contemplative, loving encounter with the Beloved—which had characterized Christianity for most of its history.

Astonishingly, the same Reformation whose ideas fostered democratic reforms throughout Europe, making the political process accessible to all people, more often than not had the opposite effect spiritually: the ordinary believer often felt she didn’t know enough to pray, or was intimidated to open his mouth because he wasn’t sure he had the right words.

But we are moving today toward a recovery of prayer.

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 . . .