Avoiding transactional prayers and ways of being
Finding a genuine spirituality that is not about pulling strings.
I sat through a lesson today about prayer. It was from Robert Morgan’s Red Sea Rules series. I find the whole series a bit anemic, but it also suffers from a nearly mendacious use of proof-texting. What a tempting method for Evangelicals to prove their points: just yank out a bible verse to support your idea and give it heft. Don’t bother with the context of the passage, the historical context, the original audience. Just strip it out and plop it in to prop up your point.
I did an experiment once, you can use a variety of books and even, sometimes, the newspaper to proof text. Just cut and paste!
With that said, we learned that regarding prayer:
“God answers us with ‘yes’, “no’, or ‘wait’ “
I think many of us have encountered such Christian education.
But doesn’t that notion belie a faulty framework for experiencing life with God?
What if it has a basic flaw?
Namely, a baked-in and hidden premise that gets us to operate transactionally.
Once we apprehend this mistaken premise, we can see it popping up and peering out from many places. Even places where people genuinely what to grow spiritually, follow Jesus, and find intimacy with God.
This hidden framework is summed up is an insightful quote:
“Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.”1
I must stop now to direct credit toward the person who put this in my path in a recent post:
But his article ⬇️ explains the quote in detail and should be read, if you can:
Shawn explains what Orphic means. It is a reference that will elude most people. For my purposes here, I’ll piece that bit together, in brief, with a few of the article’s quotes:
“Hart is not simply saying American Christianity is shallow or materialistic…
The dominant popular form of Protestant Christianity that has shaped this country’s religious imagination for two centuries is structurally identical to an ancient Greek mystery cult that predates Jesus by half a millennium… Orphism was private, initiatory, and focused entirely on individual soul-destiny…Salvation required initiation.
There were formulas to learn, rites to perform, a priestly class who knew the procedures and guided you through them...
[As to the Mammon portion of the quote] What American evangelicalism largely produced…was a theology of transaction.”
Shawn, and David, point out why we have got it so wrong.
As church folks, we have our convictions of “special knowledge” instead of operating through the Holy Spirit toward creating the Kingdom of God as the world is remade. That’s the first piece.
Secondly, the mammon reference underscores how transactional ways of being stealthily dominate our lives, rather than us being primarily people who are transformed into Christlikeness. This is huge!
I saw it today with teachings that said prayer centers around the idea of what God demands, at best. And ways to pray to get what we want, at worst. It left me feeling a bit dismayed.
These Ideas malform us.
Once we start trying to pull strings and think of God as genie who sends us messages about the status of our queries, it’s turned into a toxic or warped relationship with the divine. Is this not obvious?
Are we really so simple-minded to think this “yes”, “no”, “wait” idea is how Reality actually operates? I hope not! This feels more like lessons for dealing with Santa.
But maybe it’s just me. I wonder if the usual lessons at church are too-often just too incompatible with my own hopes for spiritual growth. Worse than that, does it jive with the telos of Jesus for his followers as the world is remade.
Am I alone in this observation?
I’m wondering what you’ve encountered.
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1. David Bentley Hart, “Three Cheers for Socialism,” Commonweal, February 24, 2020. The quote frequently circulates in an abbreviated form that omits “Orphic” and “fecundated.” The full version, as reproduced here, is available at commonwealmagazine.org. (from Shawn Patrick Connelly)
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Lisa, I resonate a lot with this post. I recognize so many cultural ways of relating to God are based in a transactional model. It's hard to break free from because it permeates so much. And once we do begin to break free, it's hard to believe we stayed in those confined spaces so long. I appreciate the points you draw out here.