Prayer can avoid obvious arrogance, however, and still be manipulative. Many requests to God are like Friedrich Heiler’s “ritual prayer”—they are ways of procuring blessings from the deity through compliance with elaborate forms and practices. They are meant to put God in the supplicant’s debt. They do not seek God’s face, grace, and glory so much as power to get things from him. It is quite easy in prayer, even natural, to ask wrongly.
