Abstract
In the tradition of guidebooks on prayer, Ashley Cocksworth’s Prayer: A Guide for the Perplexed is a welcome addition. Cocksworth, Senior Lecturer in Theology and Practice at the University of Roehampton, offers a guide to prayer that balances the more recent trend toward the “how-to” by approaching prayer doctrinally. He wants to “think expansively as possible about prayer” (10) by arguing the dialectical relationship between lex orandi (the law of prayer) and lex credendi (the law of belief) renders more complex both prayer and theology.
In the Introduction, Cocksworth identifies three guiding themes of the book. The first he calls a “subterranean” influence throughout the book: feminist and liberation theologies’ insistence on deconstructing the hierarchical relationship between theory and practice. The second is the dialectical relationship between lex orandi and lex credendi. Finally, he intends to offer a theocentric account of prayer, which places divine agency at the heart of prayer.
Chapter 1 interprets Evagrius of Ponticus’s treatise On Prayer, which contains the saying, “If you are a theologian, you will truly pray, and if you pray truly, you are a theologian.” The very form of the treatise, Cocksworth argues, acts as a formative pedagogy to lead the reader/pray-er toward union with God. Chapter 2 argues that the integral relationship between theology and prayer came apart with the marginalization of theology within the curriculum of the modern university and of practical theology and prayer within the theological curriculum. He lifts up Sarah Coakley, Rowan Williams, and Nicolas Lash as contemporary theologians who offer a “better integration of theology as a discipline that is truly contemplative, genuinely spiritual, ‘honest’ and always alert to idolatry” (73). Chapter 3 explores the dynamic of lex orandi, lex credendi in relationship to the doctrine of the Trinity. The church’s practice of prayer, Cocksworth argues, pushed the church toward the radical affirmation of the full divinity of the Son, while the doctrine of the Trinity pushed prayer toward a radical participation in the divine conversation that is the life of God. Chapter 4 addresses Christology and prayer, arguing that Jesus Christ embodies in his very person the quintessence of prayer through the union of the divine and human in one person. That union means that God does not pray in us without our own participation—prayer is a divine and human action—in a way illuminated by, if not identical to, the union of the divine and human in Christ. Chapter 5 addresses the difficult question of petitionary prayer and providence: Why pray if God is the immutable, providential cause of all that is? Deftly engaging the thought of Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, and Kathryn Tanner, Cocksworth affirms a non-competitive relationship between divine and human action, such that human prayer can be a cause through which God providentially acts in the world without in any way abrogating human freedom. Chapter 6 addresses the political implications of prayer in the life of discipleship by engaging theologians (such as Stanley Hauerwas), who argue that ecclesial prayer embodies the church’s counter-politics. Furthermore, Cocksworth engages the liberation theology of Leonardo Boff, who argues that contemplative prayer leads to liberative action. The book ends by advocating for the ancient orans posture for prayer—standing with arms out and head raised—as it embodies the integral relationship between prayer and theology. It is a hopeful posture of openness to God and liberative action in the world.
This book will be useful to pastors who desire to address theologically the many questions about prayer raised by parishioners. Though titled Prayer, it is as much an argument for doxological theology, and could find a home in seminary theology courses. Cocksworth’s engagement with his interlocutors, both ancient and contemporary, is generous, informative, and clear, making the book a rich resource for further study on theology and prayer.
I do wonder whether the integral relationship between prayer and theology could have more fully shaped the book itself. The book lauds the formative character of both Evagrius’s and Aquinas’s work; what might it have looked like if the book had embodied such a formative approach, rather than remaining in the mode of academic argumentation that risks reproducing the very disintegration the book seeks to correct? I also wonder if the engagement of liberation theologies most explicitly in the last chapter, “The Christian Life and the Politics of Prayer,” reproduces the marginalization that practical theology, and with it prayer, experienced in the modern theological curriculum. These larger questions notwithstanding, this book deserves a wide reception among theologically informed readers and ministers.