The Bonhoeffer Reader

31. Prayerbook of the Bible

562 1. [Regarding Bonhoeffer’s christological interpretation of the Psalms, see DBWE 5:53–58 (Reader 532–536), “Sermon on Psalm 58” (DBWE 14:963–970), “Christ in the Psalms” (DBWE 14:386–393), and DBWE 15:496–526. For Bonhoeffer’s christological interpretation of Genesis, see DBWE 3. See also Kuske, Old Testament as the Book of Christ.] 31. Prayerbook of the Bible DBWE 5:155–160 Bonhoeffer begins Prayerbook of the Bible with the disciples’ realization—“Lord, teach us to pray!”—that we cannot pray. As Bonhoeffer had argued from the beginning of his theological career, our sinful state guarantees that our words do not reach God but rather turn back on ourselves. How then can we pray? Though our words fail to reach God, God’s words have reached us. Thus we pray by praying God’s own words. And within the Bible, the book of Psalms is unique in containing only prayers. To pray with God’s own words means especially to pray the Psalms. Further, because for Bonhoeffer the Word of God is not primarily the words in the Bible but rather the person of Christ who binds himself to those words, we pray the Psalms with Christ, who prays them for us. Through participation in the church-community, which itself participates in Christ, we are able to pray by praying the Psalms with Christ. Here as elsewhere,1 then, Bonhoeffer reads the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible christologically. From the contemporary vantage point, this kind of interpretation is ambivalent. On the one hand, such christological reading of the Psalms, which maintains that the Psalmist “David prayed not only out of the personal raptures of his heart, but from the Christ dwelling in him,” strikes us now as dated exegesis and perhaps even pernicious anti-Judaism. On the other hand, this christological interpretation allowed Bonhoeffer to maintain a vital role for the Hebrew Scriptures in a church context where they had largely been dismissed as entirely superseded by the New Testament, and were especially at risk from the German Christians and the National Socialists. 563 Prayerbook of the Bible 155 156 Introduction “Lord, teach us to pray!” [Luke 11:1]. So spoke the disciples to Jesus. In doing so, they were acknowledging that they were not able to pray on their own; they had to learn. “To learn to pray” sounds contradictory to us. Either the heart is so overflowing that it begins to pray by itself, we say, or it will never learn to pray. But this is a dangerous error, which is certainly very widespread among Christians today, to imagine that it is natural for the heart to pray. We then confuse wishing, hoping, sighing, lamenting, rejoicing —all of which the heart can certainly do on its own—with praying. But in doing so we confuse earth and heaven, human beings and God. Praying certainly does not mean simply pouring out one’s heart. It means, rather, finding the way to and speaking with God, whether the heart is full or empty. No one can do that on one’s own. For that one needs Jesus Christ. The disciples want to pray, but they do not know how they should do it. It can become a great torment to want to speak with God and not to be able to do it—having to be speechless before God, sensing that every cry remains enclosed within one’s own self, that heart and mouth speak a perverse language which God does not want to hear. In such need we seek people who can help us, who know something about praying. If someone who can pray would just take us along in prayer, if we could pray along with that person’s prayer, then we would be helped! Certainly, experienced Christians can help us here a great deal, but even they can do it only through the one who alone must help them, and to whom they direct us if they are true teachers in prayer, namely through Jesus Christ. If Christ takes us along in the prayer which Christ prays, if we are allowed to pray this prayer with Christ, on whose way to God we too are led and by whom we are taught to pray, then we are freed from the torment of being without prayer. Yet that is what Jesus Christ wants; he wants to pray with us. We pray along with Christ’s prayer and therefore may be certain and...