Prayer is a universal phenomenon. Regardless of religious faith, cultural differences, intellectual levels, past or present, everyone prays at least once or twice throughout their lives. The non-religious pray to some transcendental being, and the religious pray to their own deities for their wishes and dreams. Contemporary Americans are no exception to this. This is still the case, if not more so, for the sophisticated young urban professionals working and living in Manhattan, NY. So it is not uncommon to read a report from the New York Times that Robert Hammond, the founder of High Line Urban Park in the Western Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan, set out on a three-month trip to India for meditation. Or Rupert Murdoch tweeting about his being immersed into learning Transcendental Meditation (13).
Of course our Christian traditions are replete with rich legacies of mysticism and prayer, especially in the Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox traditions. Keller approaches all these issues in his book Prayer.
Straightforwardly speaking, Keller says that an intelligent mysticism is his understanding of prayer. His intelligent mysticism stems from, interestingly, 1 Corinthians 14:15.
So what shall I do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will also pray with my understanding.
Praying with spirit and praying with understanding means respectively that prayer going beyond our own consciousness and prayer with our consciousness. This becomes Keller’s guideline all throughout the book, which might be helpful for the readers to grasp Keller’s main thesis in it. Additionally, Keller quotes Romans 8:15-16 as another anchor for his understanding of prayer.
The spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship.
Drawing upon the exegetical insights of his mentor Martin Lloyd-Jones as well as those of a renowned New Testament scholar Thomas Schreiner, Keller lays out his claim that in these two verses Paul is talking about a mystical experience that is ineffable (14). In a way, Keller never shuns mysticism, but rather embraces it, of course with qualifications (which I will go into below)
In general, the stereotype that I have alongside many others is that the Reformed theological camp tends to be critical of mysticism, or even calling it a heresy, but Keller directly refutes such tendency, and takes a favorable gesture toward the medieval mysticism. What is really intriguing for me was, Keller’s source for claiming so is John Owen, one of the better known Puritan theologians.
However, Keller’s mysticism is, through thick and thin, an intelligent one. For this reason, while Keller opens up wide to contemporary culture, his adjective ‘intelligent’ enables him to approach prayer more critically, and above all, theologically. Thus, in the remainder of this book review I will unpack what he means by ‘intelligent.’ First, Keller has a presupposition that unless our prayer is grounded on the gospel, it is grounded on something else, whether it be our individual whims, cultural trends, our significant others’ opinions, and what not. Based on this, Keller is a staunch defender of the gospel-based prayer, and that is why “overwhelming precedence of God’s speech to our prayers” (55) should come first. This experience becomes possible only through listening to the Word of God continually. The gospel tells us who God is, what God has done, and what that means for our lives.
Therefore, unless our prayer is based on the gospel message, we will seek our self-worth through our deed of prayer. More than that, when we get what we want through our prayers, we will think that it was because of our effort into prayer that we get what we want. Conversely speaking, this means that when we don’t get what we want even when we prayed hard enough, we will be angry at God, or be disappointed in God and ourselves. Going further, the danger such prayer might bring about is that this is in and of itself an idol worship. For we tend to project our desires into who God is, skewing and distorting the real persons of God into our own refashioning. This is an idol, and not the God of the Bible.
But the gospel tells us that our self-worth is not dependent upon our deeds; moreover, God is not our genie, slavishly following our wishes and whims, drifting here and there without direction and principle. This is why understanding who our God is is absolutely important in our prayer lives.
So what makes our prayers gospel-based? Keller says that the answer is meditating on the Bible. Keller examines Psalm 103:2 here.
Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits.
Keller especially pays close attention to “Forget not all his benefits.” The verb forget means in the Bible that something becomes not part of my reality. Keller illustrates the meaning of this verse by giving the following example. A teenage girl complains of her unpopularity among the boys at her school, saying, “Yes, I know that God loves me, and I am accepted by God, and through Jesus I am saved. But what does all those matter if no boy at my school likes me?”
According to Keller, this girl forgets God’s reality in her life. She has no real experience of God. Instead, what is more real to her is a boyfriend’s love for her. Unless God’s love penetrates into how she feels, thinks, sees others, etc, she has forgotten all the benefits of God’s salvation.
So what makes such experience possible? Again, Bible meditation is Keller’s answer. What does he mean by the term then? Before that, Keller says that we need to study the Bible as thoroughly as we can. Preachers and seminarians call this process an exegesis. Afterwards, we need to contemplate the message drawn out from such study to the point of changing our feelings, our relationships, our dispositions, our perspectives, to the deepest point of who we are.
In light of this, Keller provides three practical guidelines into deeper meditation on the Bible. First, one can throw questions about what implications a particular Bible passage has for one’s relationship with God, with others, with one’s own self and contemplate them. In order to do this, second, one has to be able to delve deeply into one’s inner world. The word ‘deeply’ means that one looks into ‘feelings, dispositions, frames of reference, habits, relationships, hurts, fears, worries, and others. Last, bringing all of them under careful scrutiny for individual and communal lives should come last.
Doing these three things well is of paramount difficulty. It is often a painful process, and many times boring and tedious. The way I deal with things and myself is not very often revealed to my consciousness, not just because the process itself requires high levels of self-reflection, but also because our inherent fears of seeing who we truly are hinders us from looking into them. That is why Keller advises the beginners that they should be realistic. They should not aim high when they first do this; nevertheless, they should be consistent. Only if they can make this a habit of their lives, the yield will be unimaginably beneficial. All through these processes we come to fruition in our prayers, where God throws our enduring patterns of sinful disobedience into the fiery crucible. Despite the harshness of such process, we can daringly come before God, for as Keller often recites, the gospel is “we are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”
This book begins with Keller’s own personal experiences. Contracted with thyroid cancer, Keller had to go through his wife Kathy’s Crohn disease. Making things worse was the horrendous 9/11 in 2001. All through these series of events Keller confesses that he had to discover prayer. This book is a sincere record of Keller’s journey on prayer. Personally speaking, I was able to glimpse into how and why Keller’s sermons were so powerful to so many a people. If Keller was able to carry out all these things that he shares with his readers in this book, then Keller must have gone through enormous process of the gospel transformation, which he challenges his readers to do the same.
This is an enormous book, and perhaps the most challenging book by Keller for me. I heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in prayer. Thank you.