“The use of set prayers can be
a help even for a small community living together under certain circumstances,
but often it becomes only an evasion of real prayer. By using ecclesial forms
and the church’s wealth of thought, we can easily deceive ourselves about our
own prayer life. The prayers then become beautiful and profound, but not
genuine…Here the poorest stammering can be better than the best-phrased prayer.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together,
Fortress Press, 2015 (Reader’s Edition), page 45.
I was a little surprised when
I read this about “set prayers”, after all, Bonhoeffer previously encouraged us
to pray the Psalms, and “set prayers” by the church are only a step removed
from the Psalms (provided they are Biblically based). We want to encourage
others to live lives of prayer, this means intimacy with God, conversation with
God, prayer-engagement with God in its many forms, including in groanings which
cannot be articulated. This also means praying the Scriptures and it can mean
prayers written and prayed by other disciples through ages and generations. If
we can sing hymns written through the centuries which are directed to God, we
can pray prayers directed to God.
Absent a commentary from
Bonhoeffer that answers the question, “Why did you write this passage?” we can
only attempt to reconstruct why Bonhoeffer thought it important to use limited
space within limited time to coach his readers in this fashion. The driving
force was, of course, the preservation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in His
church, manifested in life together –
Christians living in Christ and Christ living in Christians. His emphasis on “real
prayer” shows his desire for Christians to really be Christians – to know the
indwelling Christ as individuals and as a community – it is not enough to mouth
the words of others without experiencing the relationship from which those
prayer words were birthed by the union of the Holy Spirit and the individual;
as Paul wrote, “He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him.” If we are
to pray the Psalms at some point they must become our psalms, if we are to sing
hymns they must become our hymns, if we are to pray prayers that others have prayed
then at some point they must become our prayers. All of the foregoing must take
possession of us and we must take possession of them – as we are given grace
and understanding by the Holy Spirit.
Mere formalism is not enough,
in fact it is toxic – the heart must be engaged with God and the mind must be
renewed. Bonhoeffer himself did not discover the Bible in his own life until
the early 1930s and it was around 1930 and 1931 that he experienced a “change”
in his life according to his primary biographer, dear friend, and niece’s
husband - Eberhard Bethge. So while Bonhoeffer is likely addressing the
formalism he witnessed in the church, he may also be thinking about his own
life in addressing “real prayer” – the two were intertwined.
Was he also reflecting on his
American experience in the black church and contrasting the worship and prayers
he heard there with the formalistic-established church in Germany? Might he
also have thought about his work in poorer sections of Berlin and how removed
those people were from the formalism of the church? Could he also have pondered
the academic - theological environment and considered how it was intellectual
and philosophical but not Christocentric or Biblically based? Since all of the
foregoing were part of Bonhoeffer’s life, since he had experienced them all, I
think they were all in his heart and mind as he wrote about prayer and
envisioned what prayer should look like in life
together. Maybe Bonhoeffer was more pietistic at times that he would have
liked to think.
The next post in this series will continue with the above
passage from Life Together.
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