The Shadow of the Reformation :: A Short Series on Why Protestants Have Trouble With Prayer

Part Three

From earliest days, Christians were taught to relinquish their ideas about God in order to embrace (and be embraced) by the one thing mere thoughts can’t give them. This doesn’t mean that Christianity shunned the intellect; it simply means that in the end, the mind stands dumb before its Maker, and the only way to the Heart of God is through the human heart—that is, through love. So prayer, especially wordless, interior prayer, was the ultimate expression of prayer for most Christians for most of Christian history. And even if Christians didn’t all practice some form of the prayer of the heart, its value was rarely questioned, and its practice always had teachers.

To be continued . . .