Chapter 12 Prayer and Providence: Matthew Henry and the Theology of the Everyday
Christine Helmer
1. Introduction
A lot has changed since the early modern period. The New World is now officially on maps of the globe. Scientists are able to shift genes around and to theorize about the eleventh dimension. Electricity and running water have eliminated an immense workload, while factories and a global economy circuit Sweden, Bangladesh, and Chicago in intimate relations of clothing production. Marshes have been turned into cities, the smells of pines and goldenrod replaced with soot and industrialization, and cyberspace has taken over the reality of face-to-face conversation. Women can now become pastors and theologians in some Christian denominations,1 while children in many parts of the world must go to school rather than perform manual labour. From geography to economics, politics to inventions, the world today is very different from the environment inhabited by Matthew Henry.
Yet in the midst of this change, Matthew Henry’s Method for Prayer has remained consistently accessible over the past three centuries. Henry’s prayers, written and organized for daily contemplation and devotion, have been formative for Protestant piety since they were first published in 1710.2 The Method continues to be a valued resource for personal devotion even today, as it has recently been issued in a critical online edition.3 When the entire world has dramatically changed many times over, why do Henry’s prayers continue to resonate with the contemporary generation?
On the surface, prayer seems to be an easily identifiable and distinctly religious phenomenon. The Christian and the Muslim, the theologian and the scholar of religion, can resonate with the term ‘prayer’. Yet when questions begin to be posed about prayer, both questions and responses are many and different. ‘What is prayer?’ asked French anthropologist Marcel Mauss in his 1909 book on prayer, La Prière.4 Is it a kind of speech act? Is it a disciplinary effort that addresses the gods in an attempt to elicit a response? German Catholic convert to Lutheranism and historian of religion Friedrich Heiler offered another perspective in his famous study from 1932, Prayer: A Study in the History and Psychology of Religion.5 In this work he asked: what is the difference between a human-centred prayer and a God-centred prayer? Mauss undertook an analysis of different kinds of prayer by constructing a typology of what he considered to be its five structural elements. Heiler too developed a typology, but his approach analysed developmental stages of prayer from the human-centred prayer of ‘primitives’ to the God-centred prayer of advanced religious mystics. These two studies from phenomenological and Religious Studies perspectives represent the scholarly foundations for the subsequent study of prayer. Recent scholarship in Religious Studies has added ethnographic and sociological dimensions to the discussion,6 while a volume of The Anglican Theological Review focuses specifically on theological and pastoral aspects of prayer.7 The study of prayer thus continues to be a rich area of study approached from different methodological angles.
A dilemma, however, characterizes the contemporary discussion of prayer. While scholarship in Religious Studies tends to approach prayer by addressing its human psychological, sociological, and anthropological dimensions, theologians presuppose that human prayer has to do with a particular relationship with God. As theologian Marilyn McCord Adams claimed in a recent article, prayer is an activity that gives evidence for the personal connection of individuals and communities with God. It is ‘simply a way of being in the world with God’.8 While Religious Studies scholars focus on prayer as a broad human phenomenon, theologians identify prayer as a particular religious discourse that takes place in religious communities and is shaped by distinctive religious traditions.9 Mauss and Heiler predated the bifurcation in the relationship between Theology and Religious Studies. Their investigations do not shy away from drawing upon theological resources – such as God as addressee of prayer – that contemporary scholars of religion are inclined to do.
Yet contemporary Religious Studies scholars could benefit from sustained discussion with theologians. Theologians offer analytical resources for achieving conceptual clarity in view of a particular subject matter. They also take seriously the historical contexts of prayer traditions that facilitate interpretation of those traditions. Finally, theologians provide doctrinal concepts that identify crucial terms of prayer having to do with the human-divine relationship. What does it mean for persons within a distinctive religious community to be in the world with God? Who is the God addressed in prayer and what can be expected of the divine response? The study of how the divine nature is both reliable and personal is an important theological question concerning prayer. Matthew Henry, as I will demonstrate in this essay, was interested in the divine concern with human existence.
There are two questions driving my approach to Henry’s Method for Prayer. The first concerns Henry’s book as a classic text on prayer. What topics in Christian theology does Henry discuss that exhibit significant characteristics about Protestant Christianity? In other words, Henry’s work addresses aspects of Christianity that have endured as important for three hundred years. My theological interest consists in identifying these aspects and describing their enduring significance. My second question of Henry’s work concerns its historical context. As an early modern text, the Method for Prayer exhibits specific historical-theological features. What does this text reveal about Henry’s early modern understanding of the self and the self’s understanding of God? My aim is to examine Henry in order to understand why prayer is a significant dimension to Christianity and to consider this important example in the history of Christianity for its distinctive theological profile. If Christianity is to be regarded as a living religious tradition, then its study must consider both enduring features and particular moments at which those features are expressed.
What follows is divided into three sections. I begin by showing how Henry’s Method is part of a long Catholic tradition of monastic prayer that he makes accessible to ordinary Christians. In the next section, I work out Henry’s theological appreciation for the ‘everyday’ as representative of an early modern contribution to Christian theology. Henry’s early modern concern with everyday life betrays a new theological development in Christian history. In the final section, I explore Henry’s ‘theology of the everyday’ as an important contribution to the Christian doctrine of providence. Henry’s text, as I argue, represents an important point of theological transition between the sixteenth-century Reformation’s turn to ‘this world’ as important and the later Protestant understanding of God’s concern with the world as a whole.
2. Prayer and Practice
Henry’s Method for Prayer is saturated with references to Scripture. Every entry, every recommendation, every prayer is articulated with reference to the Bible. The Bible dominates as sole source for all the ways Henry reviews the reasons for prayer and the actual prayers he formulates. All parts of the Bible are included, both Old and New Testaments. While from a contemporary biblical standpoint, different parts of the Bible are read differently according to their respective historical considerations, these historical differences do not figure in Henry’s work. Differences are integrated into a consistent semantic level, namely the identification of the Christian God addressed in prayer.
The issue of regarding the Bible according to its semantic unity concerns the difference between two ways of reading Scripture. Modern readings of Scripture tend to adopt historical-critical hermeneutics that distinguish between biblical passages on the basis of historical or rhetorical differences. Modern interpretation is historically sensitive; historical differences guide the interpretation of specific passages and books. Before the rise of modern historical consciousness in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, Christians read the Bible as a semantic unity. Meanings of terms were determined by comparing their use in different parts of the Bible. Cross-referencing of the same terms from different parts of the Bible led to interpretations that were theologically meaningful. The God witnessed in the Old Testament, for example, was the same God referred to in the New Testament. The nature of God could thus be determined by integrating predicates from both Old and New Testaments into one consistent description.
Semantic unity presupposes a unified translation of the Bible. The Bible’s translation from its original languages of Hebrew and Greek into the vernacular is regarded as a major achievement of the Protestant Reformation. Luther unified the German language by choosing an early modern version of High German as the language for his Bible translation (1522/34), while the King James Version of the English Bible (1611) is attributed to John Wycliffe (d. 1384) and later work by William Tyndale (d. 1536). As the literary product of one translator (in Luther’s case for the Old Testament, a group of translators) the Bible has literary features of terminological, grammatical, and syntactical consistency throughout. This coherence facilitates reading the entire text as a semantic unity. Matthew Henry exhibits interpretive ease in cross-referencing passages that to the modern ear would be read as historically referring to different situations. Such ease presupposes both a common English text and a method of reading the Bible as a coherent witness to the Christian God and divinity’s interactions with God’s people.
While it may be assumed that Henry’s reading of Scripture as a semantic unity is distinctly Protestant, it must be noted that this practice is a long-standing Catholic tradition. Throughout the Middle Ages, theologians read the Vulgate (Jerome’s fourth-century Latin translation of the Bible) along the same lines of semantic unity that characterize Henry’s reading. Cross-references of similar terms and the text’s common referent to the Christian God are features of medieval biblical hermeneutics, just as they are of Henry’s. A look at an example of late-medieval biblical interpretation in relation to prayer can shed light on how Henry’s Method makes use of the Bible.
Martin Luther is known for launching the Reformation of the Catholic Church in the early sixteenth century. Yet as an Augustinian friar and ordained Catholic priest, he was steeped in the medieval monastic tradition of the Divine Office, the recitation of liturgy and prayers eight times a day. The most important biblical book in the Divine Office was the Psalter. When Luther discusses prayer, he refers to the monastic tradition of how the Psalter contains different types of prayers.
In his text, ‘Personal Prayer Book’ (Betbüchlein) from 1519, Luther refers to particular genres of prayer.10 Prayer begins with an approach to God. This approach is couched in the genre of praise. Praise of God orients the praying person’s focus to God, and specifically the reasons why this orientation is of utmost significance. God is praised because God alone is omnipotent and omniscient. The God who creates the world is able to help the person in need. God is praised for continued faithfulness. Narratives and attributes both inform the content of the praise of God as sole being who can save.
Like Luther, Henry follows praise with the confession of sin. Approach to God as worthy of praise is related to a look at the self as entirely unworthy. Confession of sin is the key pastoral implication of Luther’s theological conception that the law magnifies human sin while the gospel magnifies divine redemption. The human acknowledges personal sin and guilt, in addition to the human inextricability from this condition. Recognition of the self’s unworthiness is a significant genre in Henry’s Method. He introduces the section on confession by summarizing previous praise and then gives his reason for introspection:
Having given Glory to God, which is his Due, we must next take Shame to ourselves, which is our Due, and humble our selves before him in the sense of our own Sinfulness and Vileness; and herein also we must give Glory to him, as our Judge, by whom we deserve to be condemn’d, and yet hope, through Christ, to be acquitted and absolv’d.11
The confession of sin is a genre Henry uses in continuity with the monastic tradition and Luther’s own recommendation.
Henry deploys another genre of prayer that has medieval resonances. In his Method, ‘petition’ is a distinct section that is followed by ‘thanksgiving’. The petition/gratitude structure of Christian prayer is taken from the lament psalms in the Bible. The lament or complaint psalms (e.g., Ps 22) have a distinctive structure that is related to verb tense. The lament section records the psalmist’s desperate situation in the past tense. This section is followed by thanksgiving for divine resolution of the problem that is articulated in the present tense.12 Past tense petitions are followed by gratitude for God’s saving action. Henry’s recommended practice for the petition/thanksgiving structure focuses the petition section on two overarching concerns: the first with sin and the second with afflictions in daily life. Each sub-theme insists on commending the self (both sin and the desire for forgiveness, as well as the self’s afflictions) to God, while the thanksgiving section orients the individual thanks for divine care to the broader and universal God of care for all of creation.13 The person praying thus recognizes that the God to whom individual concerns are addressed is the God who preserves the world.
Continuity between monastic and early modern ways of praying has to do with distinct genres that organize content. Whether praise of divine attributes, confession of sin, or petition and gratitude, genres integrate content into particular ways of relating to God in prayer. As a child first learns elementary speech forms of ‘please’ and ‘thanks’, so too the adult learns the speech forms of relating to God by praying in specific genres. Inherited from monastic practice, these genres have taken up biblical forms. The Psalms provide the basic structure of petition and thanksgiving. Biblical hymns provide the form for praise, and Jesus’ own prayer (Matt 6:9–13) is a template for generations of Christians who pray. Henry’s Method for Prayer is not an early modern innovation, but a contribution to the ongoing Christian tradition of prayer to God in distinct forms.
Henry’s Method shows how Christian prayer is informed by biblical and monastic inheritances. Yet it also betrays a distinctly early modern location. Henry’s concern is how ordinary Christians going about daily lives can pray. What had once been a monastic practice is now transferred to the everyday. How this transposition shapes content, specifically theological content, is the subject of the next section.
3. Prayer and the Everyday
Matthew Henry intended his Method to guide ordinary Christians in praying. By transposing medieval liturgical elements into a guide for common people, Henry followed the Reformation changes that Martin Luther had insisted upon a century earlier. Luther did not see vowed religious and ordained priests as sole participants in the church’s liturgies, rituals, and prayers. Instead, he placed the office of the keys – the power to forgive and to excommunicate – into the hands of all believers. The power of the keys meant that the laity could participate in the church’s liturgy by active hearing and singing. Parents at home had a responsibility to educate their households in the knowledge of Christian faith.
Luther’s new appreciation for common believers is represented by his concept of Beruf, or ‘vocation’, as Max Weber insightfully pointed out in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.14 Luther was convinced that all human work, not just the priestly office, is ordained by God. Redemption in Christ frees individual persons from any dependence on external judgements and powers, including false human traditions that masquerade as the church’s communication of divine grace. If a person is freed by Christ, she is not dependent on the church’s power to mediate eternal salvation. In Luther’s eyes, priests lose their privileged status and ordinary Christians are called to participate in the world through ordinary activities. God is honoured when a person is faithful to the vocation (or calling) that God has assigned to that individual through special talent, or practice in skills. The mother is no longer a second-class Christian but a priest and bishop whose vocation of motherhood is ordained by God, and her duty towards her children is to educate them in the faith in addition to feeding, changing, and bringing them up. Secular vocations, such as soldiers, farmers, and beer brewers, are valued on the terms of their vocations ordained by God.15
Weber’s account shows how Luther’s concept of vocation represents the shift from medieval to early modern society. Henry’s Method reflects Luther’s shift, particularly as it had been mediated by the English Reformation and the Westminster Confession. Specific examples of ‘occasional’ prayers demonstrate Henry’s sensitivity to the difficulties associated with particular vocations. There are examples of prayers for his parishioners in their private vocations, for example for women facing imminent childbirth and for parents who have difficult children. There are prayers for those exercising public vocations, for example, sailors who depend on good weather, travelling merchants who hope for safe passage, and those near death who require comfort. There are even prayers for prisoners in need of spiritual renovation.16
The pedagogy of Henry’s Method shows how the laity can orient everyday problems directly to God. In this regard, his work demonstrates the Protestant Reformation’s shift away from the priestly mediation of prayer to the believing Christian. Henry shapes classic genres of liturgical prayer in view of this new orientation. The confession of sin is not formulated in front of the priest, but in front of the living God who knows all. While liturgical prayers connect the confession of sin and the communication of redemption to the church, their transposition into the daily prayers of the laity results in a new preoccupation with God’s concrete work in the world. The petition/gratitude sequence, while acknowledging that redemption occurs in Christ, expresses a new focus on God’s care for the everyday. Henry’s prayers have absorbed monastic liturgical elements, refashioning these elements in view of God’s concrete concern with the everyday lives of ordinary Christians.
Henry emphasizes catechesis as another dimension to his method of praying. In this regard, Henry follows Luther’s Reformation-theological insistence on educating the laity in the knowledge of theology. After some disastrous visitations in 1528, Luther saw the need for catechesis in ordinary homes and parishes, publishing his small and large catechisms one year later.17 Luther appropriated catechetical elements from the medieval church, such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, but organized them in a specific order that correlated with his Reformation theology of sin and grace. Thus, in Luther’s catechisms, the Decalogue precedes the Creed; the Ten Commandments provide content for identifying sin, while the Creed identifies the triune God as forgiver of sin. Henry’s interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer shows how he uses this catechetical element to explain the meaning of theological concepts.18 He discusses the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer (‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name’) by meditating on the nature of the Father, Christ’s work in gaining access to the Father, and in understanding one’s relation to the Father as his children. The fourth petition provides the occasion for seeing daily bread as the reward for the faithful exercise of one’s vocation, in addition to formulating prayers for the poor. Henry makes use of catechesis in his Method to communicate theological ideas that provide content for the prayers prayed by the laity.
What kind of subjectivity is formed by cultivating daily prayers directly to God? The philosopher of antiquity Pierre Hadot has recently provided philosophers and theologians with a conceptual resource to understand philosophy in practical terms. His book, Philosophy as a Way of Life, interprets the cultivation of thoughtful and disciplined philosophical reflection as a ‘technology’ of the self.19 Philosophy is a mindful and attentive practice of thought that forms mind and body into a new way of being a human subject. Scholars of religion and theologians have applied Hadot’s theoretical reflections to religious practices. Contemporary American theologian Shannon Craigo-Snell, for example, has recently studied Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises (1522–1524) as a method in shaping the self through meditation on discrete moments in Jesus’s passion.20 Ignatius’s work, according to Craigo-Snell’s interpretation, represents a distinctive formation in religious subjectivity. The self exists through development guided by deliberate attention to religious content. Ignatian spirituality is formed by embodied meditation on biblical narratives of Christ’s passion that follows a specific doctrinal pattern, the contemplation of the magnitude of one’s sin, the meditation on Christ’s passion as redemption for sin, and the application of the benefits of Christ’s passion to the believer.
Henry’s Method can also be interpreted as a way of shaping the subjectivity of ordinary Christians. In particular, he places significant emphasis on the development of the religious imagination. This gives an intriguing glimpse into how Henry understands prayer to activate a specific religious capacity of the self. The issue of a distinctive religious aspect to the self is indicative of a particular theological idea in Reformed theology. John Calvin introduced the first book in his Institutes (1536) by claiming that all humans have a sense of the divine (sensus divinitatis), in other words, a capacity for religion. Early nineteenth-century German Reformed theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher appropriated this idea in a powerful modern apology for religion, his Speeches on Religion from 1799.21 The human person, according to these Reformed theologians, has a natural religious capacity that can develop. In Schleiermacher’s thought, the cultivation of the religious sense is actually necessary in order to become a person.
A distinct kind of religious subjectivity is formed by making the religious imagination an important feature of prayer. How does the religious imagination orient the concern of the individual who prays to God for the everyday and for the whole world? Henry’s work has already been seen to transpose liturgical genres into forms of prayer for ordinary Christians. Content for the prayers is provided by knowledge from catechesis, by Henry’s own models of prayer, and by the everyday concerns of Christians exercising their private and public vocations. Yet Henry’s prayers, while focused on educating individual Christians to orient their petitions to God, are directed to God, the author of creation. The individual offers the concerns of the everyday to God, while at the same time acknowledging God’s care for the entire world. Petitions articulate everyday difficulties, while praise recognizes God as knowing all happenings in the world and as caring for all creatures. Henry’s prayers have thus a double focus: petition as well as praise; the everyday as well as the universal scope of God’s watchful care. The religious imagination is the human capacity that brings this double focus into coherent prayer. Through the religious imagination, the praying individual orients the everyday to God’s concern and situates the everyday within the universal scope of the divine watchfulness. The human who prays before God has knowledge of the divine interest in the everyday in addition to the divine encompassing of the whole world.
Prayer is an exercise of the religious imagination that articulates God’s concern for the particular and the universal. Subjectivity is shaped by this practice of prayer. Yet through prayer’s double focus, a distinct idea about God is expressed. Henry’s prayers articulate the early modern doctrine of divine providence.
4. Prayer and Providence
Henry’s book represents a remarkable contribution to the history of prayer. His work absorbs liturgical elements into prayers that can be spoken by ordinary Christians; monastic forms of prayer are now the forms in which the laity address God. The Method contains an immense repertoire of biblical passages from both Testaments of the Christian Bible in addition to catechetical content. When praying to God, early modern Christians bring the concerns of both private and public vocations directly to God, articulating them in terms from scriptural and catechetical discourses. Prayer furthermore activates the religious imagination. The person who prays moves between personal petition and worship of God as creator whose ongoing concern is the whole world. When Henry prays, he relates facets of everyday life to God in view of what he theologically considers to be the divine’s particular and universal interest.
Theology thus emerges as an important dimension of Henry’s prayers. Prayer as articulation in words directed to God is an expression of distinct ideas that the praying person has about the self in relation to the world and God. Prayer is, of course, a cultivation of a distinct posture before God in first- to second-person speech. But more than that, it activates the religious imagination in relation to what has been learned from Scripture and catechesis. When formulating prayers, the person praying expresses distinct ideas about who the self is and who God is. Prayer articulates theological ideas or, in other words, doctrine.
Doctrine is usually understood as the theologically normative ideas pertinent to a Christian tradition. The enduring quality of a Christian tradition has to do with the capacity to communicate normative ideas and practices from one generation to the next. Basic commitments of a Christian tradition must be transmitted through the ages to ensure that a tradition continues beyond one generation. These commitments are received by the subsequent generation, informing it of the tradition’s normative ideas. Yet reception occurs together with active articulation of those ideas in the context of reception. As experts in pedagogy know, learning takes place when received knowledge is actively integrated by the learner and then further articulated. Doctrine that is received is also produced.22
Henry’s work exemplifies reception of the liturgical, biblical, and catechetical tradition. His prayers, however, produce a view of a God who is intimately concerned both with everyday affairs and the world as a whole. An example in Henry’s text is the ordinary worker who is concerned that he will not eat the fruit of his labours. Henry structures this person’s prayer around the Lord’s Prayer’s fourth petition for daily bread.23 The God who is concerned with sustenance of all living creatures is implored in this petition for particular sustenance. The received understanding of God as providing sustenance is integrated into specific knowledge about God’s care and admission of the particular person who is praying. A new understanding of God as intimately interested in both personal and universal sustenance comes to the fore.
This understanding of prayer (one in which reception of doctrine is related to its production) differs from the way that the German Lutheran scholar of the Protestant Reformation, Oswald Bayer, views prayer. He claims that prayer takes place through meditation on Scripture.24 The individual who prays does so by situating the self at a distance from the divine word that God can speak through the words in the Bible. By meditating on this ‘external word’ in Scripture, the praying individual waits for God to speak to the individual through biblical words. Scripture as the medium of prayer becomes the vehicle through which God speaks. Praying retains the difference between self and God; the self uses prayer to wait for the divine speech that is distinguished from the human words spoken to God in prayer. With this understanding of prayer, Bayer presupposes the Reformation theological idea that Scripture is ‘self-authenticating’. What this means is that Scripture validates its own content. When God speaks through Scripture, God’s word is true in and of itself. Prayer is the way in which the individual makes room for God to speak divine truth through Scripture.
Henry’s understanding of prayer differs from Bayer’s explanation of prayer’s mechanism. Henry is not concerned with preserving Scripture as the external word of God in prayer. Rather, Scripture is a discourse for exploring the human person’s perspective of the divine watchfulness in the act of the self’s consideration of God’s concern. Scripture helps provide the language and content for exploring a view of reality under God’s watchful eye. When Henry integrates biblical passages into his meditations, he does so in order to articulate the theological idea that God is concerned with the reality of the individual person as well as the reality of the world. By praying, an individual cultivates her subjectivity as one of constant attention to God and vice versa, of articulating God’s constant attention to self and world. Use is made of the Bible to articulate the praying person’s idea that God is concerned with the everyday at both personal and global levels.
Henry depicts specific content that discloses cultural specificity. His prayers are concerned with the travails of an agrarian economy; the weather becomes the content of many specific petitions, on the occasion of either too much or too little rain, fire that devastates those with no insurance, and storms that can destroy homes and farms.25 Henry’s prayers for business practices, daily work, and poverty give a glimpse into early modern life and its shifts to urban guilds.
For those that are rich and prosperous in the World, some of whom perhaps need Prayers as much as those that request them.26
The requests for enjoying the fruit of one’s labours, as well as the injunctions to turn away from niceties and frivolities, point to an economic situation in which work’s rewards can offer advantages that transcend basic needs. Henry’s prayers betray signs of early modern capitalism.
The family too predominates in Henry’s work. There are explicit prayers created for family devotions. These prayers reflect the inheritance of Luther’s own inclusion of morning and evening prayers in his ‘Large Catechism’ as well as an emphasis on transferring the church’s functions to the family setting. Parents are responsible for the religious education of their household. Glimpses into the everyday situation of families are provided by specific petitions. Of great concern to Henry is the health of children, women in childbirth, and children who are an embarrassment to their parents. One prayer heading is explicit about this problem: ‘When we pray with or for those Parents, whose Children are a Grief to them, or such as they are in fear about’.27 Henry is also concerned with those orphaned when fathers die. The Protestant family, not the individual as such, has become the key unit for religious community. From Luther through to Schleiermacher, the family, its physical and spiritual health, is represented in the everyday petitions and requests for divine aid.
Yet Henry situates the concerns with the everyday in relation to God’s watchfulness over all. One example of the relation between specific petition and general view of divine interest is Henry’s morning devotion for the family. He writes:
Our Bodies and all our worldly Affairs we commit to the Conduct of thy wise and gracious Providence, and submit to its Disposals.… O give us Grace to do the Work of this Day in its Day, according as the Duty of the Day requires, and to do even common Actions after a godly sort; acknowledging thee in all our Ways, and having our Eye ever up to thee, and be thou pleas’d to direct our Steps.28
This citation shows how Henry deliberately sets specific concerns of the self in relation to God’s concern for the world. Body and work are given over to God’s care; the praying person requests God to help with work done to the best of one’s ability. The human has a responsibility to exercise a God-given vocation; prayer orients the exercise of this responsibility to the divine interest. Henry’s prayer considers both the person’s vocation and the divine interest in the particular vocation. Yet the praying person’s articulation of God’s interest in the particular is framed by one significant phrase, namely the attuning of personal attention to divine providence. The doctrine of providence frames individual petitions. In prayer, the individual works out the specificities of everyday life in relation to God’s providential care for the world.
Henry’s prayers pertaining to divine providence circle around both spiritual and temporal prosperity for self and for common humanity, even specifically for the ‘lost World’ and for ‘the Land of our Nativity’.29 When, however, personal concern for the world becomes a preoccupation of inordinate desire, Henry requests divine aid to ‘Convince us, we pray thee, of the Vanity of this World, and its utter Insufficiency to make us happy, that we may never set our Hearts upon it, nor raise our Expectations from it’.30 While the world and specific concerns are acknowledged in prayer to be under God’s purview, they cannot detract the individual from a sustained focus on God. Prayer is the medium in which Henry sees the world under divine guidance and distinguishes this perspective from an inordinate desire for the world. The doctrine of providence guides the way a praying person distinguishes between the self’s focus on God and a desire for worldly pleasure.
An intriguing phrase that shows how Henry orients the praying person’s focus on God, rather than on the world, is an acclamation of dependence. Henry writes, ‘We must acknowledge our Dependence upon God’.31 While specific petitions are articulated in view of God’s interest in the everyday, the acclamation of dependence incorporates self and world under the purview of divine providence. All creatures and the whole world are ultimately dependent on God for life, sustenance, and prospering. The self’s concern with the personal sphere ultimately gives way to a view of God’s interest in the whole of creation. Self and world ultimately depend on God. This claim of dependence is theologically worked out in the medium of prayer. In Henry’s work, prayer is the medium for focusing the praying person’s attention from the particular to the whole. Prayer lifts one’s focus from the specifics in the world to God. Dependence on God for granting personal requests gives way to an articulation of God’s providence over the whole world.
Yet this doctrinal achievement – a doctrine of providence that is directed to the whole irrespective of mundane, particular everydayness – is not Henry’s but Friedrich Schleiermacher’s. Schleiermacher’s doctrine of providence represents the culmination of three hundred years of Reformed theological articulation of a doctrine that has to do with God’s interest in the whole world. In his theological system, Schleiermacher sees the divine causality, in other words, God’s interest in effecting changes in the world, as directed to the whole of world history.32 Absolute dependence of the self together with God expresses an awareness in feeling of the relation to the divine causality.33 Individual prayer expresses, in Schleiermacher’s view, God’s interest in the world as a whole and not in the granting of individual requests. Providence has the redemption of the world as a whole in view, and not individual concerns. Thus Luther’s theological achievement, the introduction of the everyday as the scope of divine interest, makes way for Schleiermacher’s understanding of the divine will directed to human history seen from the perspective of its end: the redemption of the whole world.
Henry’s work can be placed in the middle of this trajectory, perhaps closer to Luther’s preoccupation with this world than to Schleiermacher’s focus on the divine causality. Yet Henry intimates that prayer should cultivate a dependence on God by setting the divine will as a constant priority. Prayer is the medium by which religious subjectivity is shaped in its orientation to God’s interest in the particular as well as to God’s view of the whole. In prayer, the individual honours the everyday by placing it under the divine aegis, while also cultivating an attitude of dependence, whatever the particular outcome. As a theological resource, prayer generates ideas about the extent of divine interest in self and world, while in the process of shaping attitudes of dependence, prayer orients the particular to divine providence. Henry’s work on prayer thus represents a key moment in the history of the production of this doctrine.
1. One very recent and unfortunate exception is the decision taken on 3 June 2016 by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Latvia to rescind a 40-year history of women’s ordination. See: Anon., ‘ “Deeply Saddened” by Latvian Church Decision Against Women’s Ordination’, The Lutheran World Federation (20 June 2016), https://www.lutheranworld.org/
2. A second edition (‘with Additions’) appeared the same year: Matthew Henry, A Method for Prayer, with Scripture Expressions Proper to be Us’d under each Head, 2nd ed. (London: n.p., 1710).
3. Ligon Duncan and William McMillan, eds., Matthew Henry’s Method for Prayer, http://www.matthewhenry.org/.
4. Marcel Mauss, La Prière (Paris: Alcan, 1909); Marcel Mauss, On Prayer: Text and Commentary, ed. W.S.F. Pickering, trans. Susan Leslie (New York: Berghahn, 2003).
5. Friedrich Heiler, Prayer: A Study in the History and Psychology of Religion, trans. Samuel McComb (London/New York: Oxford University Press, 1932).
6. See, e.g., the Social Science Research Council digital project, Reverberations: New Directions in the Study of Prayer, http://forums.ssrc.org/
7. Ruthanna B. Hooke and Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, eds., Anglican Theological Review 98.2 (Spring 2016).
8. Marilyn McCord Adams, ‘Prayer as the “Lifeline of Theology” ’, AThR 98 (2016): 271–83 (272) (italics original).
9. On this bifurcation, see Christine Helmer, ‘Theology and the Study of Religion: A Relationship’, in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, ed. Robert A. Orsi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 230–56.
10. Martin Luther, ‘Personal Prayer Book, 1522’, in Devotional Writings II, ed. Gustav K. Wiencke, vol. 43 of Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), 3–46.
11. Henry, Method for Prayer, 21. References are to the second edition of 1710 (see n. 2 above).
12. On lament and praise in Luther’s theology, see Christine Helmer, The Trinity and Martin Luther: A Study of the Relationship between Genre, Language and the Trinity in Luther’s Works (1523–1546) (Mainz: Zabern, 1999), 129–34.
13. See Henry, Method for Prayer, 42–77 (ch. 3, ‘Petition’) and 77–109 (ch. 4, ‘Thanksgiving’).
14. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Stephen Kalberg, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 39–47.
15. For a detailed description of Luther’s concept of vocation, specifically the distinction between private vocations in the household and public vocations for earning sustenance, see: Carl-Henric Grenholm, Protestant Work Ethics: A Study of Work Ethical Theories in Contemporary Protestant Theology, trans. Craig Graham-McKay (Uppsala Studies in Social Ethics 15; Uppsala: Coronet Books, 1993), 33–58.
16. See examples in Henry, Method for Prayer, 131–57 (ch. 6, ‘Occasional Addresses’). Note that this is reordered as section 8 in the online edition: Duncan and McMillan, Matthew Henry’s Method for Prayer.
17. Martin Luther, ‘The Small Catechism’ and ‘The Large Catechism’, in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, trans. Charles Arand et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 345–75 and 377–480.
18. See examples in Henry, Method for Prayer, 162–80 (ch. 8, ‘The Lord’s Prayer’); reordered as section 7 in the online edition: Duncan and McMillan, Matthew Henry’s Method for Prayer.
19. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995).
20. Shannon Craigo-Snell, The Empty Church: Theater, Theology, and Bodily Hope (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 41–60.
21. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (Berlin: Unger, 1799).
22. See Christine Helmer, Theology and the End of Doctrine (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), 109–45.
23. Henry, Method for Prayer, 173–74.
24. Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation, trans. Thomas Trapp (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 34–35.
25. Henry, Method for Prayer, 144–46.
26. Henry, Method for Prayer, 130.
27. Henry, Method for Prayer, 155.
28. Henry, Method for Prayer, 191.
29. Henry, Method for Prayer, 198.
30. Henry, Method for Prayer, 210.
31. Henry, Method for Prayer, 13.
32. Anette I. Hagan, Eternal Blessedness for All? A Historical-Systematic Examination of Schleiermacher’s Understanding of Predestination (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2014).
33. See the famous §4 of Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart, trans. D.M. Baillie et al. (Edinburgh: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), 12–18.