You know me better than I know myself: Augustine and confession

The most famous maker of confessions of the Christian tradition was of course Augustine of Hippo, who wrote what is possible the first spiritual autobiography of all time. It would be impossible to say that it doesn’t contain passages where he self-justifies, or where he bends the truth to make himself appear better. But it does appear at least that nothing is held back. And, in any case, Augustine is well aware of the tendency of the human person to spin the truth, even subconsciously.

What saves his confession and sets it apart is his theology: it is his vision of the one to whom he confesses that makes his confession real. Here, as an example, is a passage from Book V:

Accept my confessions, O Lord. They are a sacrifice offered by my tongue, for yours was the hand that fashioned it and yours the spirit that moved it to acknowledge you. Heal all my bones and let them say Lord, there is none like you.

If a man confesses to you, he does not reveal his inmost thoughts to you as though you did not know them. For the heart may shut itself away, but it cannot hide from your sight. Man’s heart may be hard, but it cannot resist the touch of your hand. Whenever you will, your mercy or your punishment can make it relent, and just as none can hide away from the sun, none can escape your burning heat.

Augustine knows that he cannot even begin to face the Lord of all things without the grace that God gives him in the first place. It was God’s spirit who moved him to acknowledge God – without the movement of God towards him, Augustine cannot imagine himself moving towards God.

And: ‘If a man confesses to you, he does not reveal his inmost thoughts to you as though you did not know them’. This is crucial feature of the confessions of a Christian person. There is no point hiding from an all-seeing God. To tell your sins to a God who already knows them is not then an act of revelation to that God. You aren’t surprising him. As the Psalmist says:

Before a word is on my tongue

          you, Lord, know it completely.

You hem me in behind and before,

          and you lay your hand upon me.

So what does it mean to confess to such a Lord? It cannot ever be an act of self-justification. There cannot be such an act. It cannot be an explanation, or a diversion. It cannot be anything other than a completely open giving of oneself over to the mercy of God.

This is of course both deeply terrifying and deeply comforting to Augustine. God exposes everything that the self has in it by his burning heat. It is a complete exposure, a stripping away of all our pretenses.

But when you read the Confessions, you are struck by the tender love Augustine has found in God. He is not dismayed or terrified by knowing that he is known by God; the opposite is true. He is completely overwhelmed with relief and love at the thought that God knows him better than he knows himself.

And that’s the truth at the core of the Confessions: actually, it is God who knows us better than we even know ourselves. Whenever we try to tell the story of our own lives, we find that we simply cannot tell the whole truth. We are incapable of disentangling the web of our own motives and reasons. We have faulty memories, and minds incapable of really sorting it all out. Why did Augustine steal the pears? He cannot really say! He is unable to judge himself with truth. He even goes so far as to say: ‘…where were you when I looked for you? You were there before my eyes, but I had deserted even my own self. I could not find myself, much less find you.’

So he must cast himself on the mercy of God of the God who exposes him to himself. When he does so, he is amazed and relieved by what he finds there:

What return shall I make to the Lord for my ability to recall these things with no fear in my soul? I will love you, Lord, and thank you, and praise you name, because you have forgiven me such great sins and such wicked deeds….

A lesson in self-justification: Adolf Eichmann

The brutality of the Nazi programme to eliminate the Jews from Europe was not particularly new. What was ingenious about their evil was its efficiency. Genocide, as you know, is not an invention of the modern era. But doing it with train timetables is. The shuffling of a million pieces of paper in a thousand boring half-lit offices in the service of the final solution was in fact as savage as firing of bullets. If Zyklon B was to be used to exterminate the Jews, then Zyklon B needed to be ordered, manufactured and supplied; the whole process needed to be overseen. And these overseers and paper-shufflers were every bit as complicit in mass murder as those who actually killed people physically.
It was the young officer Adolf Eichmann’s particular role to be the overseer of the entire terrible process. He became known indeed as ‘The Specialist’ in the logistics of expatriation, the expropriation and the deportation of the Jewish people. Born in 1906, this unremarkable man had dropped out of high school without a diploma; but his rise through the ranks of the Nazi Party was rapid. He was a willing servant of their processes, and proved a very capable organizer and strategist.

The story of his flight to Argentina and his later capture by the Israeli secret service agency Mossad is well known. Amid great controversy, Eichmann was brought back to Israel to face trial - a country which had not existed when he committed his crimes. It was there that he began to construct his defence. Eichmann did not attempt to make a denial of the fact of his involvement in the transportation and exportation of millions of Jews. His strategy was on two fronts. On the one hand, his defence team argued against the right of the court to sit in judgment on him, since he had not committed his alleged crimes under their jurisdiction. The second strategy was the one that had been famously deployed in the Nuremburg trials in the 1940s: ‘I was just following orders’.

Both of these are clever strategies – though in the case of Eichmann it can never have seemed realistic to him that Israel would let him go. What was the right of this court to judge him, in a technical, legal sense? How was that established? And yet: the court was simply answering the call of a kind of natural justice. The blood of millions of human beings was crying out from the ground: there may have been a shaky legal ground for the trial, but not many people would admit to feeling that it wasn’t a good thing that such a person was being brought before a court, especially when there had been inaction from those who may well have been responsible. The right of a court to judge? Certainly, it is a question that needs to be asked; but there needs to be judgement.

But what of ‘I was just following orders’? Or, Befehl ist Befehl, ‘an order is an order’? A keen observer of the trail, the philosopher Hannah Arendt noted that in his written statements Eichmann seemed more concerned for his own career than anything else. He was not denying his involvement, at a very high level, in the system that led to the extermination of millions of people – how could he, since the evidence so plainly told against him? – nor was he particularly ashamed of his role in it. He simply claimed that he was doing what he had to. He was answering the call of the system in which he had to live; and he was doing what any of us might do in the same situation.

What was really chilling about this was not that Eichmann had horns on his head and forked tail, but that he didn’t. Arendt argued that he was astonishingly, boringly normal. His petty selfishness and his ambition made him capable of extraordinary evil; and then capable of justifying extraordinary evil to himself as an ordinary day at the office. He did not deny the truth of his own actions. He simply had no interest in widening his vision and taking in the human consequences of his actions. He shut himself off from empathy because it was too inefficient and ineffective. And, somewhere in the recesses of his conscience, he was able to shut down that sense of taking responsibility for one’s actions and say to himself: I am just part of the system, a cog in a machine. Who can blame me for that?

The Eichmann story has been told several times in books and films, and some might argue it is exhausted as a morality tale. But Eichmann still has a number of lessons for us. Eichmann shows us that you can confess the truth without owning the truth. Telling the story of your past actions truthfully is more than simply saying ‘I did it’. It is also giving a true explanation of your motives and your responsibilities in each case. ‘Just following orders’ is deeply disturbing, because it implies that a human being can somehow shut off responsibility in this way, and hand it over to someone else. It is a denial of human freedom – which in other instances we would love to uphold. We see this increasingly with the introduction of genetics and neuroscience into the mix to explain human behaviour. We are wrestling with the possibility, it seems, that our choices are not ever chosen by us. Of course, this will always be extremely one-sided, because we will be quick to take the credit for our achievements. We will still want praise for the things we do well, and we will accept the praises and the prizes, even if we decide that the things we do badly are not our fault.

The great mistake here is that we confuse explanation and context with causes. There may be a number of things that causes us to do what we do; and these causes are external to us. I may have been beaten as a child; I may come from a family of drunks; I may be part of a system that demands that I do what it says or it will punish me; but a true story of my life is not reducible to these forces acting upon me. We know this, at the very basic level, because we know that there are others who have the same circumstances in play (or very similar), and do not act similarly. That there are choices being made in the opposite direction to the ones I have made proves that my actions are not predestined by my genes or my upbringing or my culture.

There are orders, and they have a force upon us. They have the authority given to them by human institutions. They have the threat of punishment and the promise of reward, in earthly terms. But that is all. They do not penetrate beyond that. ‘Orders’ are temporal: they have their time and their place. But they too are subject to judgement, a judgement which Eichmann had a responsibility as a human being to foresee. Eichmann had no right to question the court’s authority and its jurisdiction, since he did not question the authority and jurisdiction of the orders that he himself had followed without question. If anyone was being arbitrary, it was he.

Eichmann failed to see the true context in which his actions might be judged, and by whom; but he also failed to see how far his actions reached. He was willfully blind to the knock-on effects of the things he organized. The inability to trace through the things that his actions caused made his denial more appalling. All he could see in front of him, day by day, was the paper he was signing, the meetings he was chairing, the world of briefcases and minutes and desks and lunches and train-rides home in the evening. His defence that he was merely a cog in the wheel was the wrong metaphor; he was in fact an engine turning a whole system of cogs and pulleys, not ever pulling a trigger or popping a Zyklon tablet in to a room, not ever hearing the screams of the dying, but nevertheless supplying the power that made those things possible.

We are not Eichmann’s of course. But like Eichmann we are prone to a failure of insight in to our own actions. It is a very human tendency to live with moral blinkers on; or to want to blame the system or the rules. This is why confession, when it comes, so often involves self-justifications. Explanation becomes justification; and responsibility simply disappears. This is where telling the truth becomes a screen for the deeper truth.

Prayer in Reformation Anglicanism II

The first of these homilies on prayer makes no distinction between the private prayer of the individual Christian and public prayers of the gathered community of faith. The second in the series, ‘An homily of the place and time of prayer’, is concerned with more obviously practical matters. The homilist commends the practice of keeping the Christian Sabbath, Sunday, aside for meeting together with God’s people and addresses our common prayers to him. Distractions of work and recreation ought to be put aside by the community on these occasions. Furthermore, there ought to be places constructed for prayer, so that people can gather there to do so. The true temples of God are in fact the bodies and minds of his people: there is no suggestion that a church building substitutes for this in any way. And yet, there is a good purpose in building meeting places for the people of God that encourage them in their reverent seeking after God.[1] Likewise: there is no place or time which is not fit for prayer. But setting aside a time and place for prayer is a particularly edifying practice to be greatly encouraged. 

The third homily is entitled ‘An homily wherein is declared that common prayer and sacraments ought to be ministered in a tough that is understanded of the hearers’. The title promises an exposition of a characteristic Reformation theme: that common worship ought to take place audibly and in the vernacular, and not in Latin. But there is a great deal more in this somewhat more lengthy sermon than the title gives us. The homilist takes up a definition of prayer which Augustine was thought to have authored: “Prayer is the devotion of the mind, that is to say, the returning to God through a godly and humble affection; which affection is a certain willing, and sweet inclining of the mind itself towards God”. 

There are, for the homily, three kinds of prayer – two being private with a third “common”. The first kind is that silent prayer which lifts up the mind to God, as exemplified by Hannah the mother of Samuel in I Sam 1. This is the sort of prayer that all Christians should be praying continually. The second sort of prayer is the private prayer that Jesus describes in Matthew 6, whereby the voice is used but used in private without great display of piety, since insincere posturing is so great a temptation for human beings. But there is a place for Public or Common prayer, since Scripture contains so many instances of it. And thus, for the preacher of this homily, there is no excuse for negligence in Common Prayer. In Common Prayer the people of God are united to call on him, which in itself is a demonstration of his power.

The practice of Common Prayer should, though, follow the principles for corporate worship already outlined in the writings of Cranmer and the other Reformers. That is: “Let all things be done to edifying”. It cannot be edifying for public prayers to be offered in a language that people simply do not understand. They cannot be edified if they do not comprehend what they are praying. This is as much a reason to forbid Latin as it is to be reticent about the public exercise of speaking in tongues. It is also a reason to commend careful instruction of the people in what they are praying so that when they say ‘Amen’ they know that to which they are assenting. Babbling a formula of words is of no spiritual value at all, and indeed is condemned most roundly in Scripture. If prayer is “a devotion of the mind which enforceth the heart to lift up itself to God” then the person who prays aloud without understanding what they are praying cannot be said to be praying at all. The congregation should be given a chance to prepare their hearts to pray, so that they are not simply mouthing that which is said without a readiness to agree with sincerity. 

As we have seen, the homilies are not offering a culturally different preference for a new style of praying, but are applying the theology of the Reformation to the Christian life as consistently and biblically as possible. To pray together is a significant reason that Christians gather. But they gather to pray to the God who has drawn them to himself in Christ, justifying them freely by his grace. They pray to God with no need for any other mediator than Christ himself, and as sinners but confident in Christ of meeting a gracious and merciful God in their hour of need.

And they are to pray in intelligible words – words that they understand. The prayer of the Christian as a creature of the word of God corresponds to that word by being something understood. There is no hint that prayer is a kind of mindless repetition of  a formula of talismanic sounds. Though there is a place for the inarticulate groanings of the inner being in private prayer, this is not tantamount to a form of mystical prayer. Public prayer must edify the congregation; they can only truly say ‘Amen’, and thus only truly pray, if they hear and understand what is prayed. 

III Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer

What then of prayer in the Book of Common Prayer? It is notable enough that it is called a ‘prayer’ book, and not by some other title – giving a hint as to what Cranmer and others thought that they were doing by preparing their liturgies. One feature that is prominent from the 1549 book onwards is the services for Morning and Evening Prayer designed as a replacement for the seven ‘offices of prayer’ that framed the monastic life. These were intended to be daily services of prayer accessible to any in the community who should be able to gather – a sign that, at least in principle, the routine of daily prayer was not the particular responsibility of a professionalized group but belonged to the laity as well. 

The Prayer Book was intended to be a school for prayer. Its prayers are crafted so as to be vivid in imagery and easily memorable. Take the line “we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep”, from the general Confession, for example. The biblical and agricultural image is vivid and yet appropriate; it conveys exactly what is intended, with the language of Isaiah 53 in the not-to-distant background. The rhythm of the line (technically speaking “anapestic”) draws emphasis on the key words “strayed” “ways” and “sheep”. The language is quite concrete and direct. At its best, the Book of Common Prayer in its various editions achieved this didactic effect very well indeed. 

Furthermore, public prayer was designed to be truly congregational. It was certainly to be led by the Minister, but the congregation were invited to pray aloud, either alongside him or in response. The place of the choir was in effect being taken by the congregation, who were to find their voices now. Whether of course this is what happened in practice is doubtful. No doubt illiteracy and inattentiveness meant that the Minister would continue to read the service for the most part on his own. Nevertheless, there was in this form of service an intention to encourage participation by the congregation as a reflection of the more egalitarian theology of the Reformation. 

In public prayer, Christians were to pray as they were in private: by confessing their sins, by thanking God, by praising him and by bringing before him their common needs. As the exhortation before the general confession reads:

And although we ought at all times humbly to acknowledge our sins before God; yet ought we most chiefly so to do, when we assemble and meet together to render thanks for the great benefits that we have received at his hands, to set forth His most worthy praise, to hear his most holy Word, and to ask those things which are requisite and necessary, as well for the body as the soul.

We shall consider each forms of prayer these briefly. From 1552 onwards, the striking thing about the daily services was the prominent place given to the general confession of sins. By 1662, both Morning and Evening Prayer would begin in this way. The practice of auricular confession and priestly absolution had been abolished because, it was argued, it placed a mediator other than Christ between the believer and God. But the gospel of justification by faith was not a declaration that the Christian had moved to a state of sinlessness. Indeed, the basis for the gathering of the Christian church was the shared need of fallen sinners. The act of general confession reminded the congregation of that common need, and indeed of their assurance of forgiveness. The confession takes place, indeed, in the light of the promises of the gospel. 

Confession begins with the reading out of Scriptures that both remind the congregation of their sins, and point to the promises of the merciful Father. The verses from 1 John 1:8-9 are typical of this theme:

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us: but if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

The exhortation that follows likewise aims to bring to the notice of the congregant the reality of ongoing sin in their lives and the promises of God in Christ. It enjoins the congregation to “accompany me with a pure heart and humble voice unto the throne of the heavenly grace”. The basis, that is to say, of the Christian confession of sin is not fear of punishment but humble expectation of grace. 

And thus follows the confession itself, which articulates a thoroughgoing doctrine of sin in the life of the believer. A number of metaphors are used: the straying sheep; the trespasser against the holy laws of God; and sin as sickness (“there is no health in us”). This last expression is a radical statement of the situation before God even of the baptized Christian. There is by nature nothing that simply commends the person to God. Not simply our actions, but the “devices and desires of our own hearts” are blameworthy. We have an orientation within that is badly askew. But the prayer turns around the plea for the Lord God to “have mercy upon us miserable offenders”, as he himself has promised in Christ Jesus. The final petition of the prayer is that the believer might live a “godly, righteous and sober life” – a striking recognition that the changed heart of the believer is the work of God. In the Service of Holy Communion, too, the congregational response to the reading of the Law is the same in structure: Lord, have mercy on us, and incline our hearts to keep this law. Keeping the law of God requires, in fallen human beings, a change of heart that can only be brought about by a work of God. Mercy precedes reform, and not the other way around. It is worth nothing, as well, that the declaration of absolution by the Priest is not conditional. There is no penitential requirement.

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[1] Church buildings, therefore, are not simply constructed according to practical needs, but to encourage reverence – not for themselves, but for the God to whom we pray.

Prayer in Reformation Anglicanism

There is nothing in all man’s life, well beloved in our Saviour Christ, so needful to be spoken of, and daily to be called upon, as hearty, zealous, and devout prayer; the necessity whereof is so great, that without it nothing may be well obtained at God’s hand

“A homily or sermon concerning prayer”, Second Book of Homilies

God’s breath in man returning to his birth

                                                          George Herbert

Prayer is, it is not too bold to say, a human universal. Human beings at all times and in all places (if not every individual) have called out to the divine being or beings – whether for help or protection or to praise or to give thanks, or to call down curses on an enemy’s head. At one level this makes prayer not so very interesting, since it is so ubiquitous. The similarities between the forms of prayer are far less significant than the differences. Christian prayer claims not simply to be another form of prayer but to be indicative of a quite specifically defined relationship to the divine being, who it calls on as ‘Father’. As we have seen already, the Christian approaches God only on the basis of God’s prior approach. Thus, like the other aspects of Christian worship, prayer is fundamentally a response to who God reveals himself to be.

The theological transformation heralded at the Reformation was, as we have also seen, a transformation of Christian piety in all its forms. This was no less evident in the matter of prayer than anywhere else. Though perhaps prayer as a subject attracted less controversy than other aspects of Christian corporate worship, it was still the case that a very significant reconstitution of the nature and meaning of prayer was being undertaken. It doesn’t take much reflection to understand why this is so. What prayer is in essence is very much determined by to whom it is that one is praying. If, with Luther, the evangelicals of the Reformation discovered afresh the grace and mercy of God in combination with (and not in tension with) his righteousness, then it makes sense to expect from them a new understanding of what prayer is and what prayer does.

The English Reformers, like their European counterparts, were keen to provide in their freshly minted orders of service a school for prayer in the vernacular tongue. The Book of Common Prayer was a repository not only of congregational prayers but of prayers that could be learnt and repeated by any congregation member. The Reformers took great care, as we shall see, to reflect in their composition of prayers for the people the theology of divine grace mediated only in Christ – and the proper human response - that they had so lately learnt. They were responding to the division of labour so characteristic of the medieval church, in which the monasteries provided a specialized – and amply funded – service of praying. Now, prayer was the privileged task of every believer.

In this chapter I shall seek to outline, from the three homilies on prayer that appeared in 1563, a Reformation Anglican approach to prayer. We shall from these homilies note that prayer was not simply those prayers authorized for use in common worship. The Reformers were adamant that prayer was a basic property of the Christian life for every believer. Next, by means of an examination of some of the prayers in The Book of Common Prayer itself, we shall see how Cranmer and others put into practice their convictions about prayer in the light of the theology of grace.

I Prayer in medieval Christianity

In medieval Christianity, there had developed a veritable industry of prayer. We have already seen how, in the chantry houses of Europe, the monastic movement made the business of prayer their very own. The demands of a daily life of prayer were too onerous for the everyday Christian. The monks, friars, nuns and other religious functionaries took the burden on themselves on behalf of the rest of the social order. As a result, they lived apart, sequestered from the everyday concerns of family life, political life and economic life.

What was this prayer for? Those who prayed had a job to do to plead with God on behalf of society for its protection and its wellbeing. They prayed against the uncertainties of human life – against plague and pestilence, famine and misfortune. They prayed not simply to God but also sought the help of the host of saints, and of the Virgin Mary. Luther himself spoke of calling out to St Anne in the midst of a mighty storm in which he was caught sometime in his youth.

It was not an expected part of an ordinary Christian’s spiritual life that they should pray in the sense that we become familiar with in the Reformation era. Church services were not in the vernacular, and so their participation in the prayers offered in church were not at the level of the understanding. However, there was even prior to the Reformation a widespread dissatisfaction with this prayerlessness amongst the laity, and a number of lay spiritual movements sprang up reflecting this hunger for something more spiritually authentic.

The “Devotio Moderna” was one of these, arising in the Netherlands at the end of the fourteenth century. Dissatisfied with the state of the church and the absence of piety among the clergy, Dutch scholar Geert Groote preached for a return to a simple and pious way of life saturated with meditation and prayer. The communities of lay people that sprang up as a result of his teachings became known as ‘The Brethren of the Common Life’. These communities consisted mainly of laymen who did not take vows.

They did however devote themselves to Scripture and prayer and to looking after the poor. Their influence should not be underestimated, since Erasmus and Luther both had degrees of contact with their teachings; and perhaps the most influential work of medieval piety, Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ composed in the fifteenth century, was a product of this new turn in piety.

The piety of The Imitation of Christ links an intense inwardness to a life of quiet and humble good works – as far as possible removed from the world. a Kempis emphasizes silence and solitude as the necessary contexts for the life modeled after Christ. The life of intense meditation is the pathway to the heavenly throne, and the study of the life of Christ is necessary so as to inculcate those virtues that the Christian requires. As he writes, “grace will always be given to the truly grateful, and what is given to the humble is taken away from the proud.” Note here that gratefulness is the trigger for the divine gift of grace, and not simply a response to it. Prayer is a movement of the individual soul towards God in devotion.

Thus, even while there was a surge in lay piety in the latter middle ages, it modeled itself on the piety of monasticism. Prayer in the “Devotio Moderna” was still a matter of seeking to meet God on terms that pleased him; of impressing upon God the humility and the devotion of the individual soul. There was, as Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar was later to point out, no cross in this Christianity: “There is no mention of the mediation of the God-man, of access through Christ, in the Holy Spirit, to the Father” (in The Glory of the Lord). Jesus is to be imitated, but strangely, imitated by a withdrawal from the world which he himself never modeled. And prayer is made possible through or on account of his work but almost in denial of it.

II Prayer in the homilies

The theology of prayer that we encounter in the series of sermons on prayer from the  Second book of homilies (1563), probably penned by Bishop John Jewel of Salisbury, is of an entirely different order. It is no less zealous for the Christian practice of prayer. It is no less the case in this account of Christian piety that prayer should take place with regularity and be marked by discipline. But prayer serves an altogether different purpose in the Christian life, since it does not in and of itself draw the believer closer to God.

The first homily on prayer, “An homily or sermon concerning prayer”, falls into three parts. In the first of these parts, Jewel points out that even though God knows our needs even before we ask him, prayer is still a great benefit to us. Our prayers do not surprise God, but they are God’s ordained means for strengthening our faith in him: “there is nothing more expedient or needful for mankind in all the world than prayer” (p. 321). The purpose of prayer is that we might indeed learn thankfulness:

…to the intent we might acknowledge him to be the Giver of all good things, and behave ourselves thankfully towards him in that behalf, loving, fearing, and worshipping him sincerely and truly, as we ought to do, he hath profitably and wisely ordained that in time of necessity we should humble ourselves in his sight, pour out the secrets of our heart before him, and crave help at his hands, with continual, earnest, and devout prayer. (p. 321)

In the second part of the homily, the emphasis turns to the God to whom the Christian prays. It is useless to turn to God in our moment of need if God is unable to help us. But he is certainly not unable. And furthermore, he is willing to help, able to hear our prayers and – even better – knows what we need even better than we do. These divine qualities make him the sole worthy recipient of our prayers. Indeed, it is faith which directs our prayers, and if faith be in any other than the God who is powerful, knowledgeable and generous, then we blaspheme him. If prayer is, as Augustine says, a lifting up of the mind to God – more an inward disposition of the heart as it is a form of words on the lips – then we have no business, and no comfort in, praying to someone who cannot truly know our mind, or our heart.

The critique of the medieval system of prayers to the saints is scarcely veiled here. But this is not simply a polemical point. It is a corollary of the Reformation theology of justification by faith in Christ alone: “Christ is our only mediator and intercessor with God and…we must seek and run to no other”. In Christ we perceive that God is not dangerous or unpredictable, judge of all though he is. He is, rather, merciful and just, and “nigh unto them that call upon him in faith and truth”. We espy in Jesus Christ God’s compassionate love, and his call to seek him. A person’s sins are not an obstacle to prayer – not because God overlooks these sins, but because in Christ atonement is made for them. Taking up the Christology of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the homily emphasizes Christ’s ongoing role as our mediator by dint of his everlasting priesthood. Our access to the Father, to whom we pray, is sufficiently and completely obtained by Jesus Christ. And this is the grounds for the Christian confidence that we are heard when we pray: not because we have abjected ourselves, or because we have found the right formula of words, or because we have thanked him finally enough. All that is needed has been done for us.

For what ought the Christian pray? The third part of the homily urges the Christian to pray to God wisely, remembering that we pray to the “heavenly King, who is only delighted with justice and equity”. The Christian should pray for his or her own spiritual and physical wellbeing. The needs of the soul should be remembered at a higher priority than those of the body – since these are ultimately of greater importance. Seeking the honour and glory of God, and not our own, is the key to making our petitions, however. Love (as Gerald Bray notes) is the key: “Whomsoever we are bound by express commandment to love, for those also we are bound in conscience to pray”. Prayer expresses love; and the love of God knows no bounds. Therefore, prayers should be offered for kings and rulers, for ministers, for fellow Christians and for those not Christian – indeed for all people on the earth.

Just as the Christian is not to pray to the saints, so he or she is not to pray for the dead. There is no commandment in the Bible to do so; and furthermore, the homily argues (in keeping with Reformation orthodoxy on this matter) that the judgment of God is final post mortem. Purgatory is held to be a fiction, and a disastrous one at that, since it undermines the cross of Christ as the only sure mediation between God and human beings. And the idea that our prayers could in some sense speed the soul’s passage through purgatory is disastrous, since (once again) it implies that the cross is insufficient for the purpose. The cross of Christ is “that purgatory wherein all Christian men must put their whole trust and confidence, nothing doubting but, if they truly repent them of their sins, and die in perfect faith, that then they shall forthwith pass from death to life.” If that be not enough, no prayers of human beings shall release a soul from purgatory.