Book Review: Prayer
Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God
Tim Keller
Hodder, 2014.
Tim Keller continues to churn out books at a terrific rate and distill his years of life and ministry into readable volumes that reflect his wide reading and thoughtful engagement with past writers and present experience. I was curious to read his book on prayer in particular because I had come across him mentioning a watershed in his own prayer life, where he learnt to pray in a way that he had not hitherto. Indeed he opens chapter one with the line, ‘In the second half of my adult life, I discovered prayer. I had to.' (p 9) For Keller teaching the Psalms, the events of 9/11 in New York where he ministers, a sick wife and being diagnosed with cancer himself were all catalysed by his wife's request that they pray together every night into a new commitment to pray and to pray better.
Keller decided to learn from old books, not new ones, and he found help in writers like Luther, Calvin, John Owen and John Murray. For his own book he has read more widely and, typically for Keller, interacts with fiction writers, poets, general theorists of prayer, philosophers, theologians, popular authors, and of course, the Bible.
The book is in five parts, that move from our consciousness of our need to learn to pray and the promise that prayer holds for us (Part 1), through theological exploration of what prayer is (Part 2), to a primer on prayer guided by Augustine, Luther, Calvin and the Lord's prayer (Part 3). Keller is keen to say that prayer must be our response to God who has already spoken to us, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Prayer may be a human instinct, but true prayer is the gift of the Holy Spirit by whom we call God Father.
Keller is also keen to say that prayer is more than simply bringing our requests to God, but that prayer can be an experience of sweet communion with God. Hence Part 4 is entitled Deepening Prayer, and has chapters on meditation on Scripture as a discipline ancillary to prayer and on prayer as a sweet encounter with God. Keller is not mechanical or presumptuous about this, but wants to encourage us not to leave our affections behind in prayer, and pray only with our minds, or as a duty. He wants us to learn to pray with spiritual intensity, open to a sense of God.
The fifth part of the book is Doing Prayer and runs through the practice of praise and thankgiving, confession, petition and patterns for daily prayer times. Keller makes comments on the classic ‘quiet time' that I was discipled in. He wants to broaden the quiet time's emphasis on study and petition to embrace meditative reflection on the Bible and heart-affecting encounter with God in adoring prayer. He also prefers a twice a day pattern, morning and evening, with brief prayer at other times, rather than a once a day pattern. He outlines a structure for such prayer time under the headings Evocation, Meditation, Word Prayer, Free Prayer and Contemplation.
Praying requires faith, persistence, discipline, thoughtfulness, open heartedness and more faith. I find it good to keep reading books that put the promise and practice of prayer before me. Keller's book is an engaging mix of the personal, theological, biblical, historical and practical. I found his emphasis on the practice of biblical meditation, and his recommendation of a structured twice-daily practice of prayer stuck in my mind as particular challenges to my own discipline of wrestling in prayer.
Ben Underwood, Shenton Park WA