RELACIONES EVALUATIVAS

Accordingly, O’Donovan looks to the Lord’s Prayer [Matt. 6:9-15] as the centre, both structurally and thematically, of the moral teaching of the Sermon on the Mount.178 The Prayer serves to transform the ethical teaching of the Sermon, to render it in the context of the transforming work of the Father in the lives of the faithful, rather than in a context of

moralistic prescription. The Prayer thus occupies the place of prime importance in the center of the chiastic structure of the Sermon, in order to transform what might otherwise be

received as a set of ethical principles or a rules-based prescription for moral behaviour, into a witness to the faith relationship which provides access to moral truth.179 It sets morality in the context of the moral agent’s relationship with the living God, which relationship alone creates the possibility for ethics to become more than a heap of empty phrases [Matt. 6:7]. O’Donovan highlights this transformative impact of the Prayer by viewing it exegetically as the centre of a dialectical contrast between the desire for the treasures of earth vs. those of heaven:

… the lynch-pin which holds the prayer in place at the centre of the Sermon is the little group of sayings which contrast two possible orientations of the heart: seeking treasure on earth and seeking treasure in heaven… the decision between two competing frames of reference for our action.180

On O’Donovan’s view this prayer “unites the religious with the moral” by providing a sense- giving structure which places parameters around desire in order to direct it toward the proper

178

Cf. O’Donovan, ‘The Sermon on the Mount and Christian Ethics’,Society for Study of Christian Ethics Conference(Jesus College, Cambridge: 2008), which captures the content of his keynote address at the Society for Study of Christian Ethics conference, “The Sermon on the Mount and Christian Ethics”,held at Jesus College, Cambridge (September 2008). Barth also emphasized the centrality of the Lord’s Prayer and the “invoking” of God as “the basis of all Christian ethos”, with reference to 1 Peter 3:19-20;CDIV/4, 211.

179

O’Donovan alludes to the transformative power of relationship, achieved through prayer, as a core reality of the universe: “The Lord’s Prayer… inducts the worshipper into the elementary relations of the universe…These relations link God the Father… with ourselves”; ‘Prayer and Morality in the Sermon on the Mount’,Studies in Christian Ethics 22.1(2009): 21-33: 30. Hereafter, ‘Prayer and Morality in the Sermon…’.

180

Chapter 6: Transformation of Persons 178 object of desire; this structure frames the worshiper’s petition within the structure and order of “the elementary relations of the universe”.181 Furthermore, the Prayer has the ability to “control our imaginative enthusiasms… and focus our desires”, thus constraining and

organizing what would otherwise be misguided natural passions and idolatrous desires.182 In this sense, O’Donovan finds prayer to be the reconciling link between a natural ethic and a Christian ethic—an idea of utmost interest given our analysis of the idea of a point of contact for ethics. How could it be possible for the Lord’s Prayer (or any prayer, for that matter) to mergecompeting“frames of reference”, if one frame of reference contains evangelical faith and the other does not?

We might rephrase the concern by asking: of what significance is a prayer uttered from within a cosmology which lacks evangelical faith? There would seem to be reason for some concern in this regard, given O’Donovan’s expression of “pagan” prayer as a possibility to be held in relationship with Christian prayer:

The pagans pray, even those who doubt the reality of what they pray to… But Christians are taught to call God ‘Our Father in heaven’, for this brings to clarity the truth of the dimly discerned relation between human agency and the government of the objective world…183

Though it is clear from O’Donovan’s statement that pagan prayer and Christian prayer operate from opposing cosmologies, with the latter being the one in which truth comes into clarity, there lingers within his statement the suggestion that pagan prayer and Christian prayer are parallel paths, each aligned with the same objective reality of moral order, determined by the will of God the Father who is “the source of ordered and intelligible governance of the universe.”184 We are assured that God can hear even inarticulate prayers,

181

He interprets all the dichotomies of the Beatitudes as representative instances of “the contrast between the ages”, between thenowand thethen, [which] lies at the heart of all other contrasts. Given this pivotal position, sitting at the fulcrum as it were, between off-setting “frames of reference”, O’Donovan interprets the Prayer as an endeavor which sorts out and reconciles the panoply of contrasts exhibited in thenowvis-à-visthenduality of the moral order; ‘Prayer and Morality in the Sermon…’, 22- 30.

182

O’Donovan, ‘Prayer and Morality in the Sermon…’, 30. 183

O’Donovan, ‘Prayer and Morality in the Sermon…’, 30-31. O’Donovan goes so far as to suggest that “Barth’s reference to invocation as ‘the basic act of the Christian ethos’” supports the notion of Christian prayer “[not] as asublimationof natural ethics, a replacement of the moral enterprise by one on a higher and more Christian plain, but as itsfulfilment”, 30.

184

O’Donovan, ‘Prayer and Morality in the Sermon…’, 30. David Crump offers a helpful analysis of pagan prayers which confirms the plausibility that they may align with Christian prayers in terms of a structure fitting with Paul’s exhortation of Phil. 4:6. He attributes this alignment in structure to “the unquenchable human impulse to implore divine intervention…”, Crump, ‘Are Practical Prayers Pagan Prayers?’Expository Times 5

and the Holy Spirit can intercede with sighs too deep for words [Rom. 8:26]; but what moral significance can be gleaned from a prayer which has faith not in Christ, but in some other reality?185 What does it mean to call this aprayer?186 To suggest that the naturally existential and intellectual longing of the human heart for truth is to be held together in dialectical tension with the evangelical understanding of prayer as embodying a relationship with God the Father, would seem to invite those same difficulties we have already identified in the implications of a dialectical epistemology. For this reason, we would endorse

O’Donovan’s conclusion that the Lord’s Prayer “constitutes the very heart of moral teaching”187but not the suggestion that pagan prayer might be considered as a viable and parallel path toward ethical understanding.

This primacy of prayer leads to a serious admonition for the teacher of ethics, as O’Donovan recognizes rightly:

The teacher who will teach us to act and to live our lives before and for God, will teach us, as the ‘basic act’ of our living, how to pray.188

The teacher of ethics is therefore admonished to pay as much attention to the ethos of faith and the object of prayer as to the content of moral principles. This is a ringing endorsement of the cosmology of faith. O’Donovan closes his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer with this affirmation of faith at the heart of ethics; however, there remains in his closing statement on the subject a noticeable silence with respect to the Gospel. The innertrinitarian life of God at work in the act of prayer and the awareness of the moral agent remain tacit in O’Donovan’s statement, as do the transforming agency of the Holy Spirit and the actualization ofmetanoia realized in those events. Perhaps there is no need for O’Donovan to emphasize here yet again, as he has done so well elsewhere,189the importance of the Gospel and the prime place of the

content alignment, as Crump points out. By my question here regarding the comparison and potential alignment of pagan vs. Christian prayers I do not mean to suggest that pagan prayers are ungodly; rather, the question remains whether and upon what basis such prayers—being directed as they are to idolatrous gods—might be considered to be aligned with Christian prayer.

185

Paul makes no allowance here for a “pagan” form of prayer. There is a difference between a prayer rendered inarticulate due to a depth beyond the reach of words, and a prayer rendered incoherent due to a lack of faith. 186

Barth’s comments on the ‘little lights’ is helpful here. These “prayers” may indeed express the existential desire of the human heart to seek God’s truth, even without knowing God; nonetheless, these lights do not, in and of themselves, express or teach the truth of the moral order or bear witness to the triune God.

187

O’Donovan, ‘Prayer and Morality in the Sermon…’,33. 188

O’Donovan, ‘Prayer and Morality in the Sermon…’,33. 189

As O’Donovan has taught elsewhere with respect to the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ question, “Why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?” [Luke 12:57; cf. Matt. 5:25] might better be translated, “judgeof

Chapter 6: Transformation of Persons 180 Resurrection at the heart of evangelical ethics. The more substantive concern lies not with the perception of the degree to which O’Donovan either does or does not adequately emphasize evangelical affirmations in his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, but rather with the

suggestion that competing frames of reference—pagan and Christian—can be considered as viable modalities of moral discourse capable of reconciliation with one another.190 What would such a reconciliation of cosmologies look like? Upon what epistemological premise could it proceed? The idea that these competing cosmologies might be reconciled raises the question of what it means to say that prayer, as the invocation of God, “constitutes the very heart of moral teaching”.191To suggest that moral learning could proceed apart from and outside the event of transformation within the faith of the moral agent would be to hold to a doctrine of morality that engendered friction with the affirmations of evangelical ethics. This point is perhaps best seen through the exercise of a case study; so I offer the following

illustration.