Getting to the Point: Tertullian

Showing posts with label Tertullian. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

The One Thing That Can Conquer God

In the past prayer was able to bring down punishment, rout armies, withhold the blessing of rain. Now, however, the prayer of the just turns aside the whole anger of God, keeps vigil for its enemies, pleads for persecutors. Is it any wonder that it can call down water from heaven when it could obtain fire from heaven as well? Prayer is the one thing that can conquer God. But Christ has willed that it should work no evil, and has given it all power over good.

Its only art is to call back the souls of the dead from the very journey into death, to give strength to the weak, to heal the sick, to exorcise the possessed, to open prison cells, to free the innocent from their chains. Prayer cleanses from sin, drives away temptations, stamps out persecutions, comforts the fainthearted, gives new strength to the courageous, brings travellers safely home, calms the waves, confounds robbers, feeds the poor, overrules the rich, lifts up the fallen, supports those who are falling, sustains those who stand firm.

All the angels pray. Every creature prays. Cattle and wild beasts pray and bend the knee. As they come from their barns and caves they look out to heaven and call out, lifting up their spirit in their own fashion. The birds too rise and lift themselves up to heaven: they open out their wings, instead of hands, in the form of a cross, and give voice to what seems to be a prayer.

What more need be said on the duty of prayer? Even the Lord himself prayed. To him be honour and power for ever and ever. Amen.

Tertullian, Treatise on Prayer

Reflection – Well, this is just all so beautiful that I hardly know what to say about it. ‘Prayer is the one thing that can conquer God’—that is a magnificent turn of phrase right there.

This was in the office of readings last week, and it struck me so powerfully, not only because it is so very beautiful, but because it resonated so deeply with what I was teaching last week, namely, a course on liturgy and worship. I love especially Tertullian’s bit about the beasts of the field lifting their voices to heaven and the birds opening their wings like hands opened in prayer, in the form of the cross.

All creation is made for prayer, that is, for a radical openness to God. Creation is not a closed shop, a mute and isolated lump of matter. Creation is, in its true created nature, its deepest essence of being, an open space for God, a type of being conditioned utterly by its relationship to the Other who made it.

Prayer is the soul of creation, and the soul of humanity. We are made in a state of total dependence and receptivity to God, and when our life is not bound up in the action of prayer, in the lived out, fleshed-out, reality of prayer, our life is wrong at the most fundamental level it can be wrong at. If we are not praying, we have gone astray at the most serious and damaging point of our humanity.

But the last words of Tertullian are even more penetrating into this mystery. The Lord Himself prayed. He just leaves it there, but consider that. Jesus, who we believe to be God, prayed… to God. How can that be? God prays to God? A theologian being very precise and technical would say that this is the human nature of Christ, not the divine.

But pray is a personal act of the subject, and there is only one person here, the divine person of the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity. And that right there plunges us into the deepest level of this prayer business. The Son ‘prays’ to the Father, from all eternity. Not as we pray—God is God and we are not—but prayer nonetheless. Dialogue, communion, love, totality of gift and totality of reception, from all eternity.

So when I say that prayer is the radical nature of created human reality, what I really am saying is that the most radical nature of human reality is to enter the communion of the Trinity. We are made, not simply to live some sort of ‘good human life’ (whatever on earth that means), but rather to enter into the life of God. And we do this above all in our prayer, through prayer, by prayer.

That is, we do it by crying out to God continually. That which may seem like an act of weakness turns out to be our greatest strength, of servility turns out to be our glorification, of desperation turns out to be the one sure hope of our race, of futility and uselessness turns out to be the most powerful and effective path in life.

In short: pray. Pray badly, pray well, pray reluctantly, pray eagerly. It don’t matter. Pray, pray, pray—and in that prayer, enter into the very life of God.

Monday, March 31, 2014

Let Me Re-Word That

Prayer is the offering in spirit that has done away with the sacrifices of old. ‘What good do I receive from the multiplicity of your sacrifices?’, asks God. ‘I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams, and I do not want the fat of lambs and the blood of bulls and goats. Who has asked for these from your hands?’

What God has asked for we learn from the Gospel. The hour will come, he says, when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. God is a spirit, and so he looks for worshippers who are like himself.

We are true worshippers and true priests. We pray in spirit, and so offer in spirit the sacrifice of prayer. Prayer is an offering that belongs to God and is acceptable to him: it is the offering he has asked for, the offering he planned as his own.

We must dedicate this offering with our whole heart, we must fatten it on faith, tend it by truth, keep it unblemished through innocence and clean through chastity, and crown it with love. We must escort it to the altar of God in a procession of good works to the sound of psalms and hymns. Then it will gain for us all that we ask of God.

Since God asks for prayer offered in spirit and in truth, how can he deny anything to this kind of prayer? How great is the evidence of its power, as we read and hear and believe.

Of old, prayer was able to rescue from fire and beasts and hunger, even before it received its perfection from Christ. How much greater then is the power of Christian prayer. No longer does prayer bring an angel of comfort to the heart of a fiery furnace, or close up the mouths of lions, or transport to the hungry food from the fields. No longer does it remove all sense of pain by the grace it wins for others. But it gives the armour of patience to those who suffer, who feel pain, who are distressed. It strengthens the power of grace, so that faith may know what it is

gaining from the Lord, and understand what it is suffering for the name of God.

Tertullian, Treatise on Prayer

Reflection – There are some real gems in the Office of Readings this time of year, and I thought I would spend the week sharing some of them that have struck me. This 2^nd century treatise on prayer came up last week, and is especially beautiful.

Prayer as replacing the sacrificial animals is a rich image, and Tertullian has a good time (it seems to me) playing with it. The animals were fattened on grain; prayer is fattened on faith. The animals were housed and tended and kept safe by the shepherds; prayer is shepherded by truth. The animals were kept unblemished and clean; with prayer this happens through the fight against sin and impurity of heart; the animals were borne to the altar by their handlers; the ‘handlers’ of prayer are the psalms and hymns and inspired texts of the Word of God.

This is not just playful literary imagery, though. This is really exactly how it works. Especially, it seems to me, the whole connection of psalmody and scripture with the bearing of our prayers to the altar of God. Often we do feel a bit lost, a bit aimless in our praying. Many people struggle to know how to pray or flounder in prayer. The place of Scripture in the prayer life of the Christian cannot be overstated.

We are a people of the Word. Christ is the Word of God, and the whole of our prayer, if it is Christian prayer, is a gathering of all our human words into a union the One Divine Word, a gathering that itself is a work of the Spirit in us.

We are re-worded in prayer, all of our human knowledge and affections, longings and understandings, brought into, purified, corrected, strengthened, healed, restored, into the knowledge and love of the Trinity, made accessible to us in Jesus Christ.

But it is the specific use of Scripture, the Gospels and psalms in a particular way, to incarnate that ‘re-wording’ in concrete specific terms. The Gospels, since they are Christ’s own words and deeds. The psalms, because they were Christ’s own prayers in his life on earth. And so, while prayer has manifold forms and expressions, we can never get away from the ancient practice of lectio divina, of the reading of the Word of God in the context of deep personal prayer and meditation.

We are re-worded by this, and this re-wording is vital in all of our lives. All our words, so many words, so much verbiage (ahem, speaking for myself…), and all of it needs to be brought into The Word, submitted, corrected, purified. Without this, it’s all ‘vanity of vanities and a chasing after wind,’ as Ecclesiastes put it just the other day. But with this re-wording, this Christifying of our words and innermost being, that ‘wind’ becomes the Breath of God and the Spirit of love and truth bearing us into the heart of the Trinity. And that’s what prayer is really about, isn’t it?