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The Rhetorical Significance of Liturgical Prayer

Last week I discussed the importance of examining what our prayers communicate about our theology. I have been attempting to be more aware of the implications of my own prayers — whether borrowed (ones commonly used in liturgy) or original (my own impromptu daily petitions). In doing so, the rhetorical significance of liturgical prayer has become apparent to me. There is formative theological richness to prayers that have been part of church history for centuries. Assuming that these prayers encase vital elements of our theology and faith, it follows that our habitual incorporation of these prayers will begin to influence our impromptu ones, as well as various other actions in our daily lives.

I have become aware that my own daily petitions, and I suspect those of other Christians as well, often include imbalanced language when it comes to important doctrines and theological concepts. An example that illustrates this phenomenon is found in the often ego-centric petitions for forgiveness in our prayer language, de-emphasizing or excluding altogether confessions of forgiveness for the transgressions of others. Two prayers used regularly in Christian liturgy express a “collective” and “communal” theological understanding of forgiveness.

The first, The Lord’s Prayer, most of us know by heart. The second, is the well-known and often recited Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. The Lord’s Prayer certainly carries a great deal of theological and rhetorical significance, as it is the primary example of prayer that Jesus gave to His followers. The line that applies to forgiveness has been spoken tens of thousands of times by believers over the centuries: “…And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Other translations use “trespasses” as the synonym for “sins,” but the meaning is the same — our own forgiveness is absolutely conditional on our act of forgiving others. 

We see this illustrated and emphasized again in Matthew 18 with Christ’s “Parable of the Unmerciful Servant.” St. Francis’s prayer echoes Christ’s command to forgive “seventy times seven” with the phrase, “in pardoning we are pardoned.” I think the poetic context is significant in this piece of rhetoric — so here is an excerpt from the prayer:

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that we receive. It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

The entire prayer is beautiful; but more than that, the concept of acknowledging how our individual forgiveness by God is directly connected to how we deal with the transgressions of others is powerful in its daily application. If our own forgiveness is conditional on us forgiving others, then it would follow that our daily petitions for our own forgiveness should be equally matched by our expressions of forgiving others — which is precisely the example of prayer language that Christ left with his followers.

If this is the case, then we can see how the theologically rich prayers of liturgy have an important place in our daily lives. They serve as a theological compass for all our other personal prayers and petitions. They force us to interact with and question the theological significance and validity of our own original, impromptu prayers to God.

Prayer Language: What Does Yours Communicate?

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent around the world. For the next 40 days until Easter many Christians around the globe will institute various spiritual and physical disciplines in preparing their hearts for the Resurrection celebration. One spiritual discipline that is a focus, and one that I am personally dedicating time to over the next 40 days, is the observance of prayer times throughout the day (i.e., Morning, Midday, Evening, and Nighttime prayers). In approaching this Lent season I have been thinking a lot about prayer, specifically prayer language.

What rhetorical significance do our prayers have? What do they communicate about our theology, what we believe about God? I think that many times we do not think of our prayers as being “communication” or “pieces of rhetoric,” but they most certainly are. In fact, they are very significant pieces of rhetoric because of their symbolic and ritualistic nature. Praying is a physical, embodied act just as much as a mental one. The repetition of this practiced ritual — in church services, in personal prayer, at meal times, and even with our children before they nod of to sleep — firmly establishes  what we actually believe about God, our relationship with Him, and our purpose as believers.

I have been re-reading parts of Kenneth Burke’s The Rhetoric of Religion, specifically his essay “On Words and the Word.” Burke is not a theologian, but as a rhetorical scholar he has great insight into how language is used in our religious expressions — both in our words about God and our words to God. He has identified four “realms” of our words —  in other words, four categories of objects to which our words refer: the natural (i.e., “tree,” “sun,” “sky”), the socio-political (i.e., “justice,” “American,” “marriage”), words themselves (i.e., dictionaries, grammar rules, philosophy), and the supernatural.¹

It is particularly interesting to note what he says about the words that we use to speak of the supernatural (and arguably to a supernatural being): “Our words for the discussion of [the supernatural] are necessarily borrowed by analogy from our words for the other three orders: the natural, the socio-political and the verbal.”² In other words, our language about God and to God — of which prayer is a primary expression — cannot be detached from our language in general. Though our prayers may sound different from other daily verbal expressions (perhaps more pious or formal — depending on your style), the words we use in our prayers have a context in our experience of the natural world, in the socio-political culture in which we live, and in our general understanding of words as symbols.

So what practical impact does such theoretical pondering have on prayer, and why would it be helpful to use this time of Lent to consider the significance? Two significant reasons for considering our prayer language come to mind. First, our prayers  communicate what we actually believe about God. Prayers are physical and ritual expressions of intellectual beliefs. Our prayer life is an habitual practice that embodies what we believe about God. Ritual habits like this are powerful because they cultivate our desires — what it is that we love. (Jamie Smith fully develops this idea in his argument of human beings as primarily “desiring beings” rather than “thinking beings.”)³

Second, analyzing our prayer language could also help us discover the origin of our beliefs about God. Though we get our theology from Scripture, much of our religious language can get tangled up in “borrowed analogies.” I wonder how much of our understanding of God — expressed regularly in our prayers — is borrowed from the socio-political structures of the culture(s) in which we live? When we pray for things like God’s “justice,” what concept of justice are we imagining? Or when we petition God with requests, what structures have created our concept of “wants” vs. “needs”? Continuing in this line of thought, many questions start coming to mind.

Over the next several weeks I am purposing to be introspective about my own prayer language — to discover what my words to God confess about Him. I invite others observing this Lent season to do the same.

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1. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970) 14-15.

2. Burke, 15.

3. James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009).

Labels are Symbols: Denominations as an Illustration

Christians use a lot of labels for themselves, for each other, and for other people. They do so to identify themselves with particular sub-cultures and distinguish themselves from others. Denominational labels are some of the most common, and given the fact that the protestant tradition in America is highly fragmented (Christian Smith makes some good observations on this topic),  we end up with a lot of denominational labels floating around in the rhetorical atmosphere.¹

You may ask, isn’t it good to be able to clarify and distinguish between theological differences? Well, maybe. But packaged in those denominational labels is much more than theological differences. These labels function as symbols, verbal vessels carrying a lot of associations, cultural stereotypes, and divergent meanings for both the senders and receivers of communication messages. Because of this, denominational labels that we use to describe ourselves often have very different meanings for us than the meanings attributed to them by those with which we are communicating, especially if they identify with different denominational labels.

I am always on the lookout for narratives that help illustrate this phenomenon. This past week I came across a great one in Jamie Smith’s book, Thinking in Tongues (which my husband had been telling me to read for months). The following is an excerpt that provides a humorous and poignant example of how one denominational label can function as two (or more) very different symbols, based on who is using (or interpreting) it:

The oak-paneled walls of the McGill Faculty Club glistened with privilege and prestige; the room felt like it incarnated the university’s global influence and vaunted heritage. The space was abuzz with the quiet, sometimes affected, chatter and conversation of scholars and fawning graduate students, awash in dark jackets, khaki trousers, and an inordinate number of bow ties, it seemed to me. My first foray into the environs of the Canadian “Ivy League,” I felt like an early anthropological explorer making first contact with an “exotic” world. This was a long way from Bethel Pentecostal Tabernacle, perched on the edge of Stratford, Ontario — five hundred miles east but a world away. My discomfort, tinged with just a hint of a thrill, was a product of that cultural distance — as if the trip from Bethel to McGill has stretched taut a rubber band now full of energy, but also prone to snap.

I found myself here due to the hospitality of the Canadian Theological Society (CTS). Each year, CTS sponsored a graduate student essay competition and the winner enjoyed travel and accommodations to present the winning paper at the annual meeting. In 1994 this had given me the opportunity to attend my first CTS meeting in Calgary, Alberta; having won the competition a second time, I now found myself at McGill. The smaller academic world in Canada yields a kind of professional life that seems more familiar and intimate, more widely suffused with friendship and collegiality, and so the annual banquet of CTS was a charming, lively, chatty affair. It was at this banquet that my award was announced, and upon returning to me seat a distinguished Canadian theologian sitting next to me graciously struck up a conversation. So where are you studying? Who is your adviser? What are you working on? Slowly these questions, in response to my answers, migrated to matters of faith and ecclesial identity. Since I was studying at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, my interlocutor naturally asked: “And so, are you from the Dutch Reformed Tradition?”

“Oh, no,” I replied. “I’m a Pentecostal.”

It’s amazing how much human emotion and communication can be crammed into a nanosecond. By the time the word had come to the end of my tongue, I knew I had said something wrong. And before I had even finished the word, a strange brew of academic alarm and snobbery flickered across the face of my conversation partner. I can’t remember if he actually coughed and choked on his dinner at that point, or whether that detail is a creation of memory, a pictorial place holder that captures the response conveyed more covertly. In any case, the good professor could not mask his surprise and bewilderment. “You mean you grew up Pentecostal?” he further inquired. This was clearly a strategy that would allay his cognitive dissonance, as if saying to himself: “A graduate student in philosophical theology, engaging Heidegger and Derrida and Moltmann, can’t possibly be a Pentecostal. He must have meant he was a Pentecostal.”

“No,” I replied. “I mean I worship in a Pentecostal church every Sunday. I even preach a little bit.”

His strategy for resolving the cognitive dissonance denied, the conversation quickly devolved into awkward pleasantries and a final “Would you excuse me?” Left at the table to process what had just happened, I felt farther away than ever from Bethel Pentecostal Tabernacle. And yet, it was in that experience that the seeds for this book were planted.²

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1. Christian Smith, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011).

2. James K. A. Smith, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010) 1-3.