(Painting: "Sunday Morning," by Thomas Waterman Wood, c.1877, oil on paperboard)
In
the evangelical circles in which I’ve lived my life, I often hear Christianity
described as a set of beliefs. That is to say, being Christian means that I
ascribe to a certain set of intellectual propositions: (1) There is a God. (2)
Jesus Christ is the Son of God, fully divine and fully human. (3) Jesus saved
us from our sins by dying on the cross and rising from the dead. And so on.
While there is of course a part of this view that is true—one must ascribe to
these essential truth-claims in order to be a Christian—it reflects a far
shallower view of what constitutes a “belief” than what the Bible would seem to
suggest.
For
the biblical Christian, faith is far more than assenting to a set of
propositions. Our beliefs aren’t simply truth-claims about metaphysical
realities, they are soul-shaking cries of loyalty to a King and his Kingdom.
They are truths that are made manifest in our actions and not just in our
intellects. Christian faith isn’t a part of our identity in the same way that
we might be a Democrat or a Republican, though we often treat it the same way.
It is not about being persuaded by the Christian party platform. Rather,
Christian faith is about entering reality.
It is about seeing the universe as it truly is, with the undying love of God
burning in the center of all time and space, and diving into that reality with
our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength.
So
far that’s not too unfamiliar to modern Christians—most of us have heard many
times, I expect, that faith is more than just intellectual assent to the
Gospel, and that it must be lived out to be real faith. But even so, we often
still separate our Christianity into two distinct categories: “what we believe”
on the one hand, and “what we do” on the other. Prayer is usually lumped into
the latter category. But the Bible doesn’t distinguish so finely between
believing and doing—the two are seen as integral parts of the same faith, woven
together in a way that often makes them indistinguishable. For centuries,
Protestant students of theology have been trying to make sense of what the Bible
says about pure, simple faith in Christ on the one hand, and what it says about
works of righteousness on the other, in an attempt to zero in on the exact
formula of what it takes for someone to be saved. And while it’s clear that
“faith alone” saves us (Scripture), it is also clear that the idea of “faith
alone” includes, at least for many writers of the New Testament, the things
that we do as Christians—i.e., “works” (Scripture). The two sides are too
closely interwoven in Scripture to be consistently taken apart into neat
categories.
And
this is where prayer comes in. Prayer is too often left in the category of
“what we do” rather than “what we believe,” too often seen as one of those
“works of righteousness” that we Protestants have been told are clearly not
what save us, thus relegating it to secondary status. Of course, we acknowledge
that prayer is something you’re supposed
to do—it’s one of those Christian actions you probably should fulfill, along
with reading your Bible and being kind to others. But we’ve never really
thought about prayer as being something that shapes and empowers and breathes
life into what we believe—no, “beliefs” were the purview of the Bible, the
Sunday sermon, and the systematic theologies on the pastor’s bookshelf.
But
this division between belief and practice, between theology and mysticism, was
foreign to early Christianity. Belief and practice were all part of the one
reality that you assented to with your whole mind, your whole body, and all
your willpower. For the early church, prayer was essential to the category of
“what we believe”—it was the experiential reality of that belief, the way in
which we enter into and maintain our relationship with the holy, triune
Godhead. One of the most oft-repeated mottos of the early church fathers was
“The rule of faith is the rule of prayer”—that is, the prayer-life of the early
church was seen as guiding, not simply following, their understanding of true
doctrine. Similarly, another early Christian axiom went something like this: “The true theologian is he who prays
rightly.”
The
early church saw prayer as the most basic Christian action, and thus it was the
primary manifestation of our faith. If faith is expressed in the mind by our
assent to truth-claims about Christ, then faith is expressed in the will and
the body by prayer. And we Christians aren’t just saved as minds or souls, we
are saved as whole beings, our wills and our bodies included, and thus prayer
is essential to faith in its most basic form. Prayer is the daily context of
faith, just as faith is a prayerful, relational reality into which we are
called to enter each and every day.
This
gives us a sense of the necessity of prayer. It is essential to who we are as
human beings, and it is essential to everything we hold to as Christians. It is
the fulfillment of our most basic vocation and the foundational expression of
our faith. If these things are true, then, only one thing is left to be said:
Let us pray.