On Theology as Prayer

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord my Rock and my Redeemer.

Theology is a task undertaken with great caution. We dare speak of the thrice-holy Lord, from whom the seraphim hide their faces. This may be one reason why, for most of the history of the church, theology was seen to be intimately tied to virtue, and ultimately, prayer. 

Writing in the fourth century, Athanasius writes: "Without a pure mind and a life modeled on the saints, no one can comprehend the words of the saints...one wishing to comprehend the mind of the theologians [the authors of Scripture] must first wash and cleanse his soul by his manner of life" (On the Incarnation, paragraph 57). The entirety of Augustine's Confessions is written in the mode of prayer, asking God to aid him in the task of recounting his life and searching out God's works in it. A more recent example is the Episcopal theologian Katherine Sonderegger, for whom theology must be worked out prayerfully: 

"There is no contemplation of the supreme Oneness of God without taking to prayer. To attempt to speak of the One God whose nature is without form or similitude is to strive to name, approach, and worship the God who is unapproachable Light, Holy Fire, and Goodness."

I confess this is not something I am very good at. Theology for me has all too often been an academic discipline, one which I find fascinating for all sorts of reasons but rarely because it beckons me to humble myself before the Lord's glorious presence (James 4:10). Sure, while some of my peers in college found the academic nature of theology as discipline dry and I found it invigorating, many of them succeeded far better than I did at devoting themselves to prayer and the word of God. Rather than get down on my devotionally-challenged self for this, however, I'm seeing 2021 as an opportunity to remedy it. 

In recent months I've been increasingly interested in a number of fascinating areas of theology and biblical studies, particularly the relation between finite and infinite (human and divine) agency, the indwelling of the Spirit and sanctification, and Trinity and Christology. This last pair is what I want to focus on here. Part of what I hope to inculcate this year is an understanding of theology as, in the words of Matthew Levering, sapiential. If theology is scriptural wisdom ("biblical reasoning" as John Webster terms it), then I ought to do as James instructs and ask God for the wisdom I believe I currently lack (James 1:5). Moreover, I can do so trusting that theology is not only sapiential but salutary. That is, God's word studied and applied can bring healing to one's life and, indeed, produce virtue (hence Ellen Charry's account of the aretegenic nature of theology). 

So why the Trinity and Christology? Well, this year I finished Rowan Williams' Christ the Heart of Creation (after a long break and concerted effort to get back to it). What I was struck by as I read was not only the depth of contemplative riches to be explored in the history of Christology and its contemporary prospects but also the wider devotional application in understanding that Christ's divine nature in no way crowds out his humanity, but rather energizes and makes operative the precisely human character of his words and actions. In other words, God's saving action in Jesus is a restoration of our genuinely human nature, a saving action that loves us as humans, not as something else. Jesus expresses what it truly means to be human, and (to return to the initial subject), an essential aspect of that is his filial relation to the Father. (In other words: Jesus' obedient life as God's son proves essential both to God's life as Trinity and, analogically, to the proper character of human life as it was meant to be.) An interesting corollary here is that this perfect filial relation to the Father is essentially a posture of prayer; Herbert McCabe even goes so far as to refer to Jesus as "sheer prayer," saying that "the entire person of Jesus is contained in his prayer." What this means is that Jesus, demonstrating what it means to be truly human, reveals true humanity to be humanity-in-relation-to-God. Prayer, then, is the fruit of redemption. 

In redemption we are united by faith to Jesus (cf. Col. 3:1-4, Rom 6:4ff), and we our caught up in his perfect filial relationship with the Father. Prayer is therefore not only the fruit of redemption but is in one sense participation in God's triune life. When we pray, we are imitating Jesus by the power of the indwelling Spirit, and the Father of Jesus is truly our Father. This is why contemplation of the Trinity (even at its most metaphysically speculative) has historically been seen as something only deeply prayerful believers should undertake. Again with Sonderegger, to contemplate the One-in-Threeness and Three-in-Oneness of God is impossible apart from prayer. Or at least, it is severely undermined by prayerlessness.

These are some inchoate thoughts that will probably continue to percolate for a while, but I wanted to air them out a bit here, in part as a way to maintain accountability for my goal of growing in prayerfulness this year. If I understand myself to be called in some sense to spend the rest of my life thinking about Jesus and the Trinity, I have been enlisted in an area of theology that demands utter devotion. This can only be accomplished by prayer. It is not a task I feel qualified for. "But he gives us more grace" (James 4:6). 

Lord, may it be so; keep me from hidden faults and willful sins (Ps. 19:12-13), and give me the grace to humble myself so as to truly know You, even as I am fully known. I echo the words of Anselm:

"Teach me to seek You, and reveal Yourself to me as I seek, because I can neither seek You if You do not teach me how, nor find You unless You reveal Yourself. Let me seek You in desiring You; let me desire You in seeking You; let me find You in loving You; let me love You in finding You."

Amen.