“Even extemporaneous prayer
will be determined by a certain internal order. It is not the chaotic outburst
of a human heart, but the prayer of an internally ordered community…At first
there may be some monotony in the daily repetition of the same petitions that
are entrusted to us as a community, but later freedom from an all too
individualistic form of prayer will surely be found. If it is possible to add
to the number of daily recurring petitions, a weekly order might be tried…” Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Life Together, Fortress
Press, 2015 (Reader’s Edition), page 44.
Bonhoeffer does not tell us
enough about what he is thinking to understand the specific good models or
excesses that are in his mind as he writes the above. Later in this passage on
page 44 he uses the term, “the arbitrariness of subjectivity” as he counsels
the benefit of “relating prayer to one of the Scripture readings”. It is
difficult to separate “subjectivity” from “extemporaneous” and one wonders if
it is even safe to do so lest we fall into an unintended rigidity and legalism
and authoritarian mindset. Perhaps this is Bonhoeffer’s corrective to having
either witnessed or heard about “the chaotic outburst of a human heart”?
Our salvation in Jesus Christ
is holistic; our minds and hearts are made new and renewed in the likeness of
Jesus Christ. If “subjective” primarily
relates to affections and “objective” primarily relates to thoughts, we ought
to recognize that the marriage and unity of both are found in the shalom we
have in Jesus Christ, we are made whole men and women in Him – people with
increasingly whole hearts and whole minds and healthy souls in His new creation.
The Fall shattered us internally, Christ restores our souls.
My observation about “chaotic
outbursts” is that while it may not be fruitful to have them as a matter of
course, that there are times when they express both the agony of the human
heart and the agony of the Spirit of God as He cries out on behalf of humanity.
Sometimes what appears to be indecorous behavior is just what is needed to
break the hardness of hearts and to strip away facades of religiosity. It is
easy to be a Pharisee in communal prayer when we know that others are
listening. There are historic examples of “chaotic outbursts” breaking the dam
of religiosity and being manifestations of the Holy Spirit bringing people to
repentance and renewal in Jesus Christ. Two examples I have in mind are Jonathan
Edwards and Andrew Murray – neither of these men did anything to encourage
these outbursts, nor (as far as I know) to propagate them, nor to use them as a
standard for spiritual maturity.
What does Bonhoeffer mean by “internal
order” and “internally ordered community”? Does he mean that each community has
an order similar to the spiritual orders of Franciscans or Jesuits? Does he
mean that what we do and how we pray is to be ordered and formed by Scripture?
Is this internal order implicit or explicit? Is it a culture peculiar to each
local community?
What should be the norm in communal
prayer? Patience, longsuffering, consideration, honesty, submission to the Holy
Spirit and the Word of God, bearing the burdens of others, freedom to express
the yearnings of our souls and the joys of our hearts and the perplexities of
our minds as children of God, as brothers and sisters gathered before their
Father and Lord Jesus.
Communal prayer cannot be tidy
prayer for tidy prayer is prayer more concerned with its form and how it looks
to others than it is with spiritual realities. In tidy prayer children are to
be seen and not heard, I am not speaking of children in chronological age, I am
speaking of those young in Jesus Christ. To be sure there is a Scriptural
internal order to prayer and fellowship, such as we see in 1 Corinthians
Chapter 14 – assuming we still believe 1 Corinthians Chapter 14.
The prayer life of a
community, of those in life together,
should not be static, indeed, in Christ it cannot be static – anymore than the
prayer life of an individual Christian ought to be static. Internal orders,
whether explicit or implicit, carry with them the danger of becoming more form
than substance – a corrective and protection to this is allowing the myriad
forms of Scriptural petition and worship and communion to mold us as God’s
people – communal prayer is a pilgrimage, we pitch our tents in many places on
our journey.
We all face the temptation of
allowing excesses we’ve seen to dictate our thinking; let’s not look at the
excesses for our guidance, but rather to God’s Word.
We’ll continue to explore
communal prayer in the next post.
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