"Let no one say that prayer is self-evident." Sasse

Let no one say that prayer is self-evident. After all, we have services once or twice a Sunday. No, that prayer of the church which we find everywhere in the New Testament where the life of an ecclesia is spoken of, unfortunately, is not something self-evident. Who would maintain that prayer is offered in our Lutheran Churches today with a fervor, which even approaches that with which the church of the New Testament prayed “without ceasing?” (Acts 12:5.) Where today is Luther’s mighty praying with its visible answers? Where is the prayer of those pious people, of which Luther spoke in his explanation of the Lord’s Prayer in the Large Catechism, the prayer which in those days held the Devil back from destroying Germany in its own blood? Yea, despite all the criticism which the Reformation has directed at the mumblings of Catholic prayer and which the modern liturgical movement within the Catholic Church undertook (quite independently from an entirely different viewpoint) must we not finally ask where, in which church, prayer is being offered with more fervor and perhaps also with better training—for prayer too must be learned? Will the answer be the Catholic Church or the churches of the Reformation?

Just think of the rosary. It is quite properly a great offense to us, even as it has been sharply criticized by Catholics themselves. Is not perhaps the fundamental mystery of divine revelation, the miracle of the incarnation of the eternal Son of God, still much better preserved in it than in the prayer-weak or prayer-less Protestantism of our day?[1] Is not a Catholic Church, where the worshippers go in and out all day long, to be preferred to a Protestant house of God whose doors are locked throughout the week, only because Calvin and the old Reformed people feared that the cult of the saints and worship of the Sanctissimum [i.e. the consecrated elements retained after the celebration of the sacrament] —which, however, was no longer present—might secretly be continued? Where else then should poor Christians pray? That praying in one’s chamber which is lauded so much—in a questionnaire of Berlin’s working class children twenty years ago Guenther Dehn[2] found that in many cases the passage Matt. 6:6 was one of the few fragments which still stuck after confirmation instruction—that praying in one’s chamber has always existed only in connection with prayer in the church. And how many people today have a their own prayer chamber?

Is not the great crisis of modern Christianity, of which we spoke in our first letter, perhaps connected with this prayer crisis? The Ancient Church entered a world in which prayer was taken for granted among Jews and Gentiles. If the ninefold Kyrie eleison of the Roman mass was really taken over from the cult of the Sol Invictus, as a Catholic scholar, the late Odo Casel, supposed, then it is an example of the fact that the ancient pagan world was in her way a world of prayer. The church of the present day lives in a word which no longer prays and which can no longer pray. One has only to recall Kant’s famous dictum that the more a person progresses in the good, the less he prays. Has the lack of prayer in the modern world influenced the church more deeply than we are inclined to believe; just as the incapability of modern man to understand sin has influenced Christendom so deeply?

It is so much the more promising then when everywhere in Christendom people are concerned about real prayer. For in this concern there is no attempt to get out of the duty of practicing Christian love over against the world. There is rather a striving to find the way back to the “one thing needful.” Without this the “Martha-service” of social work and of “political theology” necessarily become worldly business. In this concern for prayer is found rather the desire of the church to again be the church of Christ, and not to merely another agency for the general improvement of modern mankind. And that concern is not addressed to the professional liturgical scholars, who do nothing but instigate ever new liturgical movements. It is a plea directed to the greatest prayer of all, the praying Son of God, “Lord, teach us to pray!”

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[1]Perhaps the most profound paragraph Sasse ever wrote on the nature of the incarnation is the following, "The extraordinary difficulty created by these conceptions for the modern man lies in the question: How can the eternal Being of the exalted Lord and the temporal appearance of Jesus Christ be related in thought? Here a twofold danger threatens the theologian. Either the eternal Christ is lost in the historical Jesus, or the contrary happens. It all depends whether we recognize that in Jesus Christ time and eternity become one: eternity passes into time: God's revelation takes place in the world: God becomes man. That is the miracle of God's revelation in Christ: Finitum capax infiniti, tempus capax aeternitatis, saeculum hoc capax futuri saeculi. If this assumption is not admitted, then the revelation, of which the Bible speaks, has not taken place." "Jesus Christ, The Lord", Mysterium Christi, 110 .

[2] Karl Guenther Dehn (b. 1882) was a theologian and pastor in Berlin until 1930, from 1931-33 professor of practical theology in Halle. Active in the Confessing Church. From 1946 professor of practical theology in Bonn. Because of statements on WWI he was attacked by the Nazis which led to his dismissal. RGG3.II.57. Sasse commented in “Zum 'Fall Dehn' in Christentum und Wissenschaft 8.1 (Jan 1932) 33-34. See: “Die Kirch und die politschen Maechte der Zeit” [1932], Feuerhahn Bibliography 091/045 pp. 77-113 & [1933] 114/054. See also Ch.10: "The Dehn Affair," in Jack Forstman, Christian Faith in Dark Times, Theological Conflicts in the Shadow of Hitler, Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992, 179-190. Feuerhan Chronology. Sasse also commented in the Kirchliches Jahrbuch: “Er­widerung auf eine Zuschrift der Theol. Fakul­tät Halle-Witten­berg zur Darstellung des ‘Falles Dehn’” im Kirchliches Jahrbuch 1932, S. 77-100. MH