Advent Apologetics Day #19 – The Apologetic of Prayer

In “Discipleship as a Craft, Church as a Disciplined Community,” by Stanley Hauerwas, he says; 

“After many years of vain attempts to “explain” God as trinity, I now say, “Well, to begin with we Christians have been taught to pray, ‘Our father, who art in heaven. . .’” I then suggest that a good place to begin to understand what we Christians are about is to join me in that prayer.

For to learn to pray is no easy matter but requires much training, not unlike learning to lay brick. It does no one any good to believe in God, at least the God we find in Jesus of Nazareth, if they have not learned to pray. To learn to pray means we must acquire humility not as something we try to do, but as commensurate with the practice of prayer. In short, we do not believe in God, become humble and then learn to pray, but in learning to pray we humbly discover we cannot do other than believe in God.”

Ultimately, the purpose of apologetics is not to “defend our beliefs,” but to give a reasonable hope of why we hold to them.  This quote by Hauerwas is genius in that in learning how to pray become the path to that hope.  Imagine the power of tossing out “the sinner’s prayer,” in favor of teaching people how to pray correctly and continually.  This simple approach could forever turn evangelism and apologetics from their hit and run image to one of communal hope and discovery.

You can read the entire Hauerwas article here.

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