Browsing by Subject "Prayer"

This dissertation attempts to retrieve the integration of prayer and theology in the life of the church. Prayer is a spiritual and bodily theological activity that forms Christian identity and virtuous character. The bodily dimension of Christian prayer plays an essential role in theological understanding and moral formation. However, the embodiment of prayer has been mostly neglected in modern academic theology. This study highlights the significance of the body at prayer in theological studies and spiritual formation.

Chapter 1 presents Karl Barth’s theology of prayer as a model of the integration of prayer, theology, and Christian life (lex orandi, lex credendi, lex agendi). However, Barth’s attempt to overcome the dichotomy between theory and practice in theology did not pay much attention to embodiment of prayer. Through ritual studies and phenomenology (Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Pierre Bourdieu), chapter 2 shows why the bodily dimension of the practice of prayer should be recovered in theology and ministry; then it explains how Christians in the early and medieval church actually prayed with the body, how their bodily actions were understood in their theological paradigms, and how their actions contributed to the formation of Christian character. Chapter 3 narrows the focus to the formation of the heart in the making of Christian character. The practice of prayer has been emphasized not only as an expression of the inner heart of pray-ers but also as a channel of grace that shapes their affections as enduring dispositions of the heart. Furthermore, historically the bodily practice of prayer gave theological authority to the devout Christians who were marginalized in academic theology or ecclesiastical hierarchy, and Chapter 4 presents the lex orandi of praying women who gained their theological knowledge, wisdom, and authority through their exemplary practices of prayer (Catherine of Siena, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Teresa of Avila). These historical examples reveal how Christian communities appreciated and celebrated the theological voices from the margins, which developed from theological embodiments in prayer.

This dissertation concludes that academic theology needs to heed these diverse theological voices, which are nurtured through everyday practice, as an integral part of theological studies. Therefore, it calls for a new paradigm for understanding the relationship between theory and practice in theological education. The integration between theory and bodily practice is necessary for both academic theology and spiritual formation. A more holistic understanding of Christian practices will not only enhance the training of scholars and clergy but also give the laity their own theological voices that will enrich academic theology.

In response to God’s call to love neighbors, some Christians in the United States enter the social work profession. Yet, within a severely curtailed welfare system and the asymmetries of the professional helping relationship, moral hazards abound in discerning the shape of this love. Charged with supporting individuals and families meet their basic needs, social workers decide and act in conditions of insufficient recourses and unmanageable caseloads. Moreover, they frequently serve as gatekeepers to medical treatment, housing, or, paradigmatically, another’s children. Paternalism and exhaustion threaten. Drawing upon interviews with thirty-five Christian social workers in the American southeast, this dissertation traces their reasons for the work, their moral deliberations and judgments, their confessions of uncertainty and regret, and their prayers. In doing so, I offer a theological anthropology and phenomenology of moral agency pressed to its limits. I contend that at these limits, the human agent finds herself to be a creature dependent on God’s care for herself and for others, a confession often mediated by prayer. As a corollary, I illustrate how a properly Christian account of the moral life depends upon reconstituting a version of divine command theory situated in close relation with a prayer-infused practical reason.

To exist racially "in-between," has been characterized as a tragic existence in the modern world. The loneliness and isolation of these lives have given rise to the term the "tragic mulatto." The dissertation Mulatto Theology: Race, Discipleship, and Interracial Existence theologically interprets mulatto lives making visible and interrogating the wider reality of racialized lives in modernity. The mulatto's body is significant in that it discloses what is masked in modern (and particularly white) identities.

Culture, identities (individual and communal) are not only interconnected, but they are mixtures where peoples become presenced in the lives and practices of other "alien" peoples. This mixture requires reflection upon the formation of all identities, and the ways these identities become visible within the world. Given this arc of identity any reflection upon Christian identity must articulate itself within the tensions of these identities and the practices that mark such identities within the world.

In examining the formation and performance of mulatto bodies this dissertation suggests these bodies are theologically important for modern Christians and theological reflection in particular. Namely, the mulatto's body becomes the site for re-imagining Christian life as a life lived "in-between." The primary locus of this re-imagination is the body of Christ.

A re-examination of theological reflection and Scripture regarding his person and work display his character as mulatto, or the God-man. But not only is his identity mulatto, but his person also describes the nature of his work, his re-creation of humanity. So

understood Christian bodies can be construed as "interracial" bodies -- bodies of flesh and Spirit that disrupt modern formations of race. The Christian body points to a communal reality where hybridity is no longer tragic, but rather constitutive of Christian discipleship. This new, hybrid and "impure" way of existing witnesses to God's redemptive work in the world.

This dissertation is a theological exploration of liturgical prayer based on a congregational case study, one that focuses on the actual prayers of a specific worshiping community. The analysis of the prayers at The Summit Church, a congregation in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, leads to an initial conclusion: prayer times at these worship services were relatively short, focusing almost exclusively on matters related to the congregation’s mission and outreach efforts. People at Summit say that they pray a great deal, and they do—but not during corporate worship.

This dissertation interprets this seeming contradiction by drawing on two sources of cultural history. The first looks at the local history of Summit and its adoption of contemporary worship forms. The Summit Church is paradigmatic in its blending of two liturgical theologies and their sets of practices—one from the Pentecostal revival of the mid-twentieth century and the other from the Church Growth movement of about the same period. The convergence of these commitments can explain the reduction of prayer time in light of pragmatic considerations aimed at increasing service attendance.

The analysis of the congregation’s transcribed prayers reveals further connections among the prayer acts themselves and both sources of liturgical theology. The primary way God’s presence is sensed in worship is through the conversion of non-Christians, and so prayers are devoted almost exclusively to that end. The prayers themselves affirm the importance of the congregation’s commitment to mission—and its desire to increase the number of baptized Christians by proclaiming the gospel to those who have not yet accepted it—in decisions about how the church prays.

A second source of cultural history helps explain why Summit and other similar congregations have made such proclamations—and the corresponding propositional claims about God—the centerpiece of their liturgies. Catherine Pickstock’s historical reading of shifts in sacramental theology reveals that all liturgical acts, including prayer, have been altered by modern-era philosophical commitments. Specifically, Pickstock foregrounds a series of liturgical changes that have subordinated the role of the gathered body of Christ in the Western church’s imagination since the late Middle Ages. This change signals a loss of an ancient understanding of Christ’s body as comprising three mutually constitutive components: his incarnate historical body, the sacramental body, and the ecclesial body. Certain segments of Protestantism have prioritized claims about the historical body, and this has led to the kind of mission-focused liturgical praying seen at Summit.

The final section of the dissertation applies an Augustinian theology of the body to liturgical prayer. Saint Augustine’s theology of totus Christus, treated most thoroughly in his Expositions on the Psalms, offers corrections to a Western church that has lost a robust theology of the gathered body. Augustine suggests a different way of looking at the church’s role in prayer by working with the multiple interactions that the body of Christ has with its head and priest, i.e., Jesus Christ. The questions raised by looking at Summit Church thus open a way into a renewed imagination for liturgical prayers for all churches, not only Protestant, evangelical, or free church congregations. Adding an Augustinian liturgical theology to a missional emphasis like Summit’s—that is, teaching the church to pray for converts so that more voices will praise Christ and will be prayed through by Christ—is a way to enrich the prayers of the people of God.