Contemplative Praying

 If you are allergic to the word contemplation, remember that, exegetically, one’s view of contemplation will follow how you interpret Colossians 3:2, “Set your minds on things that are above.” Every Christian who wants to be biblical has an account of contemplation. It is necessary given passages like this. 

It could be that the current focus on contemplative prayer (a focus, it should be said, that has no agreed upon definitions) is simply an attempt to recover wordless prayer. That is possible. What we need to ask, however, is what are the distinctively Christian ideas and doctrines that govern and guide an account of wordless prayer? 

It can’t simply be that wordlessness is somehow better than wordedness. That is sometimes found in the Christian tradition, but we must know and name it as false. In the beginning was the Word. The very ground of reality is a worded one. Pushing beyond words is not obviously good in a Christian vision of reality, although I think there are important and meaningful reasons why we should have an account of wordless prayer. 

So what is wordless prayer and why is it meaningful? Likewise, what have we lost by shifting contemplation into prayer? 

What seems to have happened is that we lost a focus on contemplation entirely, either because we didn’t want to associate with contemplative prayer or because we assumed that contemplation and contemplative prayer are the same thing. 

Contemplation, is one of the, if not THE overarching focus of spiritual practices in the Christian tradition. Spiritual practices were ordered to and by contemplation, because all spiritual practices were modes of seeking God, the perfection of which is the beatific vision when we will see God face to face (1 Cor. 13:12, 1 John 3:2). Losing this emphasis means losing sight of the logic of the Protestant spiritual tradition (not to mention the broader Christian tradition). 

On the other hand, the focus on contemplative prayer that I see today is often unconnected to a distinctively Christian vision of prayer. Because of this, those of us who were wrestling through these things thought it would be important to have a conversation about contemplation and contemplative prayer. What started out as an academic discussion at the Evangelical Theological Society, turned into the book Embracing Contemplation: Reclaiming a Christian Spiritual Practice. I also co-published a popular-level book on embracing our finitude, which ended with an evangelical account of wordless prayer, called Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself (with Jamin Goggin).

Our hope in both projects was to regain a distinctively Christian and, in fact, evangelical account of contemplation and wordless prayer, and not succumb to whatever is currently on the market of pop-spirituality. Embracing Contemplation, in particular, tries to attend to the idea of contemplative prayer in relation to contemplation and wordless prayer, but it does so through the lens of a group of evangelical scholars wrestling with the biblical, historical, and theological dynamics of these things. 

So when we think about the nature of spiritual practices, whether that is prayer, worship, preaching, fasting, or something like contemplation, we must not merely turn to a practice as if it can be abstracted away from theology, the gospel, or the nature of life in Christ. We have to have a theological vision of reality that makes sense of how we draw near to God. 

Kyle Strobel