Keller: Prayer — toil or delight?

AFTER TIMOTHY KELLER · PRAYER (2014)
Communion × kingdom, fruit instead of technique, wordless yes — contentless no. And beneath it the original notes of a man who only learned to pray properly at fifty.

Two streams

Keller opens the book by observing that the library on prayer falls apart into two shelves that don’t understand each other. One describes peaceful rest in God’s love, the other the struggle for God’s kingdom — often without any sense of closeness at all. His question isn’t which is better. His question is why the choice ever arose in the first place.

The axis of the two conceptions of prayer: communion (resting in God’s love) × kingdom (urgent petition for God’s will), with authors from The Cloud of Unknowing to Donald Bloesch

Why it split

The first explanation is uncomfortably ordinary: people simply experience different things. Some don’t respond to God emotionally and can’t keep their attention up for more than a few minutes. For others the experience of God’s presence is standard and natural. Each then writes about prayer out of what they know.

Austin Phelps built The Still Hour (New England, 19th century) squarely on the premise that a sense of God’s absence should be the norm for the praying Christian. Donald Bloesch, in The Struggle of Prayer, then rejected the teaching that the highest goal of prayer is personal union — in his view it turns prayer into “an end in itself”.

The second explanation is confessional: the Catholic tradition aims at wordless union, the Protestant one at a clear verbal response to what God has said through Scripture. Bloesch takes this as proof that the Bible alone is enough.

A badly put question

“Is the highest form of prayer serene adoration or assertive petition?” Keller answers by rejecting the question: asked like this, it expects an either/or answer — and that assumption is pretty unlikely.

His main evidence is historical. Anyone who reads the greatest old authors on prayer — Augustine, Luther, Calvin — finds that they fit into neither camp. And even Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Catholic theologian from the contemplative side, warned believers not to turn too far inward.

In the end Keller grants Bloesch one point: beware of a contemplation that stresses the infinite being of God within me and loses his sovereignty over me. But he doesn’t conclude from it “so, words only”.

The order is the whole secret

This is where the apparent contradiction unravels. Keller doesn’t throw contemplation out — he puts it at the end of daily prayer. What he rejects isn’t wordless rest but the route by which some want to get there.

FRUITLuther · Teresa · Pascal · Keller1The WordA short text — a paragraph, a psalm, a few verses. Not something I make up.2MeditationI read until the information turns into something that concerns me.3Praying it throughI answer in his own words: instruction, thanksgiving, confession, petition.4Without wordsThe words fall away and I simply rest with the God I have just been looking at.TECHNIQUEwhat Keller rejects1Empty the mindSet aside concepts, images, truths — get “beyond” them.2Repeat a wordA mantra-like word as a tool for silencing thought.3A state on demandUnion as a technique that can be triggered and trained.4Two storeysAnd whoever manages it belongs to a spiritual elite on a higher level.

Wordless rest as gift and overflow. Luther: when the Spirit begins to preach to you, stop the routine and listen.

The mistake is in the order: the end point gets turned into the starting method — and both the Word and Christ’s mediation are bypassed.

For Keller, contemplation is fruit, not method. First you fill your mind with the text, then you pray the text through — and then it may happen that the words fall away and you simply rest, wordless, with the God you have just been looking at.

So he rejects three things, not contemplation itself: contemplation as technique (emptying the mind, a mantra word — anything that promises a state on demand), the apophatic goal (getting beyond words and truths to a contentless union, i.e. bypassing the Word and Christ’s mediation) and a two-storey spirituality in which contemplatives are an elite on a higher level.

That it isn’t experience itself he objects to is given away by the second chapter, where he approvingly quotes John Murray on “intelligent mysticism”. He recommends reading the medieval mystics with appreciation, but also with a good dose of caution, and takes over Carl Trueman’s rule: don’t reject their ambition, just join it to sound theology.

Most precise is Luther’s remark, which Keller made the last slot of his daily pattern: when the Holy Spirit begins to preach to you, stop the routine and listen.

Keller: Prayer, ch. 2, 9 and 12 · Luther: A Simple Way to Pray (1535)

Wordless ≠ contentless

This distinction unties the whole knot. Wordlessness is fine — Teresa’s quiet, Pascal’s night, Keller’s contemplation at the end of daily prayer. Contentlessness is not. And because from the outside both look the same (both are silent), they easily get lumped together.

Pascal’s Memorial is the best proof of this, only from the opposite side to the one a critic of mysticism would expect: that night surpasses words in intensity, but its content is saturated with revelation — “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of the philosophers and scholars”. In it Pascal explicitly rejects precisely the god that contentless union gravitates towards.

And with Teresa, Keller distances himself from something she never taught. The mantra-like word isn’t hers — it comes from The Cloud of Unknowing and above all from modern centering prayer. Teresa, on the contrary, defended staying with Christ’s humanity against advisers who wanted to leave it behind in “advanced” prayer, and in The Interior Castle she all but mocks self-induced stupor.

So a real difference remains, just a different one than it seemed: it’s not a dispute about method but about the map. Teresa draws the mansions as the normal trajectory of serious prayer; Keller refuses to draw a map and leaves the experiences as gifts that can’t be planned. A dispute about the framework, not about the technique of an empty mind.

WITHOUT CONTENT

SATURATED WITH THE WORD

WITH WORDSprayer as speechWITHOUT WORDSprayer as stillnessEmpty recitation“the god of the philosophers and scholars”Words without content. A formula I rattle off — God as a concept, not a person who has spoken.A garland of four strandsLuther · Calvin · Keller’s daily patternI read the text, meditate and then respond. Prayer as verbal conversation — in his words.Contentless unioncentering prayer · The Cloud of UnknowingSilence as a method for getting beyond words and beyond Christ. This is where the real line runs — and only here.Quiet restTeresa · Pascal · Edwards · KellerThe words have stopped, the content remains. Pascal’s Memorial: FIRE — the God of Abraham, not the god of the philosophers.

Wordless ≠ contentless. The line doesn’t run between Keller and Teresa but right through the contemplative tradition —
and both lower fields look the same from the outside: both are silent.

“Contemplative prayer neither can nor should be self-contemplation, but rather reverent attention to and listening to that Not-I, above all the Word of God.”

Hans Urs von Balthasar (Keller: Prayer, p. 15)

That’s exactly why Keller quotes a Catholic: the critique of self-contemplation isn’t a Protestant invention and doesn’t divide the traditions into two sides of a barricade.

“I know not otherwise how to express it… a sense of the soul lying in the dust and of being full of Christ alone.”

Jonathan Edwards, 1737 (Keller: Prayer, p. 56)

A preacher of Reformed Protestantism describes an hour of tears and union. Keller doesn’t sweep it under the rug — he explains it like this: the God of the Bible is not identical with me, but neither is he too far from me.

Intensity isn’t the measure

Edwards’s hour of tears is real — but in itself it isn’t the norm. Keller writes that an encounter with God ranges “from a mild, gentle warming to an explosive illumination” and that it doesn’t have to be something you write down and think about for the rest of your life. The distinguishing mark is something other than the strength of the experience: that attitudes, feelings and actions are transformed.

And he warns against the opposite direction too — choosing a way of praying according to what reliably produces the desired feeling: “We must not decide how to pray based on which kinds of prayer most effectively produce the experiences and feelings we want.” We pray in response to God himself.

Keller: Prayer, ch. 11 As Encounter: Seeking His Face (p. 168) · ch. 4 Conversing with God (p. 60)

Why it doesn’t work out

Keller admits he only started praying seriously in his fifties — after the terrorist attacks, his wife’s illness and his own cancer diagnosis. Until then he had preached about prayer. That is why his book is not an expert’s manual but the notes of a latecomer.

We have no time

Kathy Keller put it to her husband bluntly: if a doctor gave you a medicine you had to take every evening or you would be dead within a year, you would not miss a single dose. And prayer is exactly that medicine.

We do not know what to say

Prayer without Scripture shrinks into a monologue about my own worries. That is why Keller never starts with “what should I say”, but with “what has he just said to me”.

We wait for the right mood

How much we pray must never be decided by how much we feel like it. The feeling comes during prayer, not before it.

AWE

God is God: holy, other, great

INTIMACY

A Father who knows me by name

bothat once= prayer

Without honour and awe I am talking to someone I made up myself.

Without closeness I am talking to someone who does not love me.

Awe only → a polite stranger. Prayer as a duty you get out of the way.

Intimacy only → God as a mate to chat with. Comfort without change.

Keller: both poles have to grow together. The greater the awe, the more astonishing that he invites me this close.

Awe and intimacy

Keller’s whole book rests on a single pair: awe (God is infinitely greater, holy, other) and intimacy (and yet he knows me by name and I have access to him). Prayer is the place where both are true at once.

If only awe is left, I pray out of politeness to someone far away. If only intimacy is left, I am talking to a God I have adjusted to my own image.

Keller notices that one pole does not diminish the other — it makes it bigger. The more it dawns on me who God is, the more astonishing it is that he says to me: “come closer”.

Timothy Keller: Prayer — Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

A conversation he started

Keller rejects prayer as a technique for quieting down. Prayer is an answer — and you can only answer something that has been said. That is why Scripture and prayer never stand side by side for him like two items on a list.

Between them he puts meditation: I read the text until the information turns into something that concerns me. Only then do I have something to say — and I say it in his own words.

This bridge also explains why prayer so often “does not work”: usually we have simply skipped the middle step. There is no way round meditation.

Keller builds on Calvin, Augustine and Luther — not on a method of his own

THE WORDGod speaks firstMEDITATIONI let it sink inPRAYERI answer him in his words

HE STARTED

I ANSWER

and again tomorrow — the conversation goes on

Without the Word I am only talking to myself. Without prayer the Word gets no further than my head.Meditation is the bridge between them — and a bridge cannot be jumped over.

ONE PARAGRAPH YOU HAVE JUST READ

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”

INSTRUCTIONWhat does this text tell me about God? What does it teach me — even if it does not suit me?THANKSWhat can I give thanks for here? Where do I see this in my own life?CONFESSIONWhat does it convict me of? Where do I not believe it and live otherwise?PETITIONSo what do I ask for — for myself and for the people on my heart?

And I say all four strands out loud — that already is the prayer. Luther: four strands of one garland (1535).

A garland of four strands

The most practical thing Keller passes on is not his own. It is the method Martin Luther wrote down in 1535 for his barber — Master Peter, who had asked him how to pray.

You take one short text you have just read and go through it four times: what it teaches me about God, what I give thanks for, what it convicts me of, what I therefore ask for. Luther called it a garland of four strands plaited from a single verse.

The beauty of it is that prayer then never starts from zero. You do not have to invent what to say — you are simply answering, and in four directions that stop you getting stuck on requests alone.

And Luther adds one honest note: if the Holy Spirit starts preaching to you in the middle of it, drop the method and listen. The garland is only a support, not an altar.

Martin Luther: A Simple Way to Pray (1535) · Keller: Prayer, ch. 9

A daily rhythm

For years the Kellers prayed together every evening — and each on their own in the morning. Not because it was some lofty practice, but because one day they simply divided it up the way you divide up a medicine.

A small piece of text

Not a chapter — a paragraph, a psalm, a few verses. As much as you can carry slowly.

Stay with it

Read it again until something stops you. That spot is today’s topic of conversation.

Go through the four strands

Instruction, thanks, confession, petition — out loud, one sentence each is fine.

A psalm in the evening

Close the day with a psalm — and if you have someone to do it with, out loud together.

“Prayer is the only way in to real self-knowledge.”

Timothy Keller: Prayer

In front of other people I pose, in front of myself I make excuses. In front of God both stop working — and Keller argues that this is exactly why we dodge prayer so elegantly.

“We must not decide how much we are going to pray on the basis of how much we feel like it.”

Timothy Keller: Prayer

For him prayer is not a mood but relational work — and like every relationship it grows out of repetition, not inspiration. Awe and intimacy are the fruit, not the ticket in.

Sources

Timothy Keller: Prayer (2014) — the two streams (pp. 12–16), Heiler’s typology and Edwards (ch. 3, pp. 56–58), Luther and meditation (ch. 9), unceasing prayer and the daily rhythm (ch. 15, pp. 268–280)

Austin Phelps: The Still Hour · Donald Bloesch: The Struggle of Prayer — the extreme “kingdom” pole; Bloesch’s critique of Christian mysticism

Teresa of Ávila: The Interior Castle (IV,1 · IV,3 · VI,7) and The Book of Her Life (22) — staying with the humanity of Christ, a warning against manufactured states, infused states as a gift

Blaise Pascal: Memorial (1654) · The Cloud of Unknowing · Hans Urs von Balthasar · Carl Trueman and John Murray (“intelligent mysticism”) among Keller’s references

Timothy Keller: Prayer — Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God (2014) — the two poles, the conversation God started, the daily rhythm

Martin Luther: A Simple Way to Pray (1535) — the letter to Master Peter; the garland of four strands

John Calvin — Institutes III,20: prayer as the chief exercise of faith; Augustine — the letter to Proba

Sermons from Redeemer Presbyterian Church — the series on prayer the book grew out of