Most Christians are deeply conscious that their prayer life is not what they think it should be. Exhortations to ‘pray continually’ (1 Thes 5:17) tend to prick the conscience more than energise action. And so, many of us are on the lookout for the silver bullet—the method or hack or idea that that will make us prayer warriors.
Into this space comes Daniel Brendsel’s book Answering Speech: The Life of Prayer as Response to God. It joins many recent and not-so-recent books on prayer that set out to be pastoral theology—theology in the service of practice. Brendsel is a Presbyterian church pastor in the United States.
This is not a ‘Dummies Guide to Prayer’—it contains thoughtful theological and philosophical discussions about the dilemmas involved in praying to a sovereign God, about unanswered prayer, and about the pedagogy of language usage. And it contains a heap of pastoral guidelines for prayer, including how to address God, the value of Collects (short thematic prayers that follow a set pattern, found in the liturgical books of many churches), and the influence of church services in the formation of pray-ers.
Answering Speech: The Life of Prayer as Response to God
Daniel J. Brendsel
Answering Speech: The Life of Prayer as Response to God
Daniel J. Brendsel
In wondrous contrast to silent idols, the one true God speaks. He addresses his people in love, and it’s their great privilege to answer him in prayer. At its root, prayer isn’t mere self-expression or a prod to get a silent God to speak, but it is a learned skill to answer God’s initiating word in Christ.
Through this thoughtful book, author and pastor Daniel J. Brendsel explains how responding to God can nurture prayerful engagement with Scripture, shape healthy rhythms among God’s praying people, and spur excitement for communion with God.
Although Brendsel does not explicitly tell us the goal of writing this book, it seems clear to this reader that he hopes to make us better prayers through both theological insight and practical guidelines. More specifically, his target audience appears to be theologically literate pastors, who are both prayers and leaders-in-prayer. I value the goal, for both myself and for those I walk beside.
The Premise: Prayer is Our Speech that Responds to God’s Prior Speech
As his title suggests, Brendsel understands pray to be answering speech—in our praying we are responding to God’s initiative in speaking to us. He thinks that if we get this orientation right, it will inform and shape and encourage good praying. And I agree.
The core shape of the Christian life is responsive. God makes glorious promises to the godless. He takes the initiative in redeeming us through sending and giving his Son. God chooses us and draws us to Christ by his Spirit. And God brings new birth through the word of the gospel he speaks to us. Even when we repent and believe, we are taught that it is God who grants repentance and faith. And so at a fundamental level, all of the Christian life is a response to God’s initiating action, including prayer.
But Brendsel’s point is more particular. Prayer is speech, addressed to God. And so prayer is properly a response to God’s speech. Here, Brendsel’s conviction that God speaks to us in the Scriptures plays a central role in the way he wants us to pray. If Scripture is where God speaks to us, and prayer is answering speech, then our praying should be shaped by Scripture. Which sounds right to me. But this is the point the book gets weird, at least to my ears.
The Thesis: Use God’s Words to Answer God
What he advocates for is that our prayers ought to use the words of Scripture, in order to be answering speech. He asserts that praying Scripture ‘is necessary for a healthy prayer life’ (88, italics original). He gives some examples of this from the Scriptures, such as Acts 4 where the early church prays Psalm 2:1-2 (81). He particularly points us to the Psalms as Israel’s prayer book—‘Spirit-authorized words for us to speak to God’ (83), and discusses the way Psalms 130 and 105 are prayers whose words we could use to pray (83-86).
I am not opposed to using the words of Scripture in my praying, and I agree that my prayers could be enriched by such a practice. But the approach he takes pushes him into a much narrower space than the Scriptures themselves do. He advocates using the words of Scripture in our praying, but many of the prayers we have in Scripture don’t use the words of (already written) Scripture. The Lord’s Prayer does not pray the words of Scripture. Paul’s prayers (as he recounts them in his letters) seem to be free creations, expressing the desires of his heart. Even Brendsel’s examples of people in the Bible using the words of Scripture in their prayers do not demonstrate what he is advocating: in Acts 4 the early church only uses Psalm 2:1-2 to frame their actual prayer (i.e. request), in which they beseech God to ‘enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness’ (Acts 4:29); Psalm 105 is not a prayer at all.
My Concern: A Straitjacket in Place of Gospel Freedom
Another way of explaining why I found the book weird, is that he does not appear to have listened to what the Scriptures actually say about prayer. His theological convictions about prayer being answering speech become a straitjacket that constrains prayer into an unnecessarily tight practice. But the Scriptures’ teaching on prayer is the opposite of a straightjacket—the atoning work of Christ means that all of us can approach God with freedom and confidence (e.g. Eph 3:12). We don’t need to censor our prayers to make our praying ‘right’. We have a freedom to approach God boldly, asking for what we want in whatever words express our desires. Brendsel does seem to have some appreciation of this freedom in prayer because of the gospel of Christ, but it only becomes explicit in the last 2 pages of the book (222-3), by which time the horse has bolted.
We don’t need to censor our prayers to make our praying ‘right’. We have a freedom to approach God boldly, asking for what we want in whatever words express our desires.
If I read Brendsel rightly, his target audience is pastors whose prayers are facile and shallow. He wants to give us theological insight and techniques for a richer, more disciplined, more intimate prayer life. And many of the things he suggests could help us pray better. But his starting point is not the gospel of God’s grace as the truth that shapes truly Christian prayer. He doesn’t do what the Scriptures do, assuring me that the blood of Jesus opens a new and living way into the very presence of God in the Holy of Holies so that I can enter with confidence (Heb 10:19-20). He does not exhort us to ‘cast all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you’ (1 Pet 5:7).
He is right to warn me that such confidence can lead to me only asking for my own selfish desires. And I could (wrongly) think prayer is twisting God’s arm to get what I selfishly desire. Spot on. But without the gospel foundation of confidence and freedom, his corrections will feel like a prayer straitjacket. His straitjacket has some attractive features, but it is still an uncomfortable straitjacket. Unless you pray the way he advocates you are praying wrongly. As a pastoral book, it will discourage most readers from praying until they are confident they are praying rightly in the eyes of Brendsel. Which could be never.
I agree that our prayers can be facile in their selfish shallowness. His solution is to push me to confine my prayers to the words of Scripture, to make extensive use of liturgical prayers like the Collects from various liturgical prayer books (e.g. The Book of Common Prayer and revisions), and to regulate my prayers to the sort of ‘hours’ of pre-industrial cultures. I too am often awestruck by the profound beauty of the Collects, and have learnt much through them. So I am not opposed to the directions he pushes us. But I think the push is pastorally counter-productive unless the freedom and confidence of praying as children to our heavenly Father, cleansed by the blood of Jesus, is already laid as the foundation of prayer. Sadly, this only features in the very last chapter, all too briefly.
Pastorally and biblically, I think it is better to start with, ‘Pray for whatever you want, knowing that your Father hears and responds with compassion and wisdom’. Then, as our minds are renewed by God’s word, what we want changes. We long for the things God longs for and promises to give. And so our prayers change towards the sorts of things Brendsel wants us to pray.
Could I recommend this book? Only with reservations, and only to someone who already has the gospel foundation firmly in place. If that is you, and your praying is thinning out towards zero, then many of Brendsel’s methods could be worthwhile. But treat them as suggestions, not as directions.
