Below you will find an excerpt from St. Augustin’s 412 A.D. letter to an elderly widow by the name of Proba giving her advice in general about prayer and Augustin’s explanation of the Lord’s Prayer. What struck me is how Luther’s Explanation is so similar. So, should we say instead of Luther the Reformer, Luther the Copy Cat?
Yes! By all means. To paraphrase 18th century German Lutheran theologian (I paraphrase because I’m not sure I remember the quote, and I can’t find its citation.), if our church were only 300 years old we would hasten to leave it. Amen to that! In the 90s when I expressed to a Confessional Lutheran theologian outside the LCMS that I regarded the Fathers of the Church as my fathers. He said almost reflexively, “Then you’ll never last in the LCMS.”
Well, I didn’t. My confession of faith was broader the LCMS but no broader than the Book of Concord of 1580 which particularly in the Catalog of Testimonies is at pains to establish that the way Confessional Lutherans speak of the Person of Christ is in-line with the Church Fathers. The Reformed way is not.
So enjoy this from St. Augustine. I think there are more understandable versions of this letter, but you’ll hear echoes of Luther clearly:
“21. To us, therefore, words are necessary, that by them we may be assisted in considering and observing what we ask, not as means by which we expect that God is to be either informed or moved to compliance. When, therefore, we say: ‘Hallowed be Thy name,’ we admonish ourselves to desire that His name, which is always holy, may be also among men esteemed holy, that is to say, not despised; which is an advantage not to God, but to men.
“When we say: ‘Thy kingdom come,’ which shall certainly come whether we wish it or not, we do by these words stir up our own desires for that kingdom, that it may come to us, and that we may be found worthy to reign in it.
“When we say: ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,’ we pray for ourselves that He would give us the grace of obedience, that His will may be done by us in the same way as it is done in heavenly places by His angels.
“When we say: ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ the word ‘this day’ signifies for the present time, in which we ask either for that competency of temporal blessings which I have spoken of before (“bread” being used to designate the whole of those blessings, because of its constituting so important a part of them), or the sacrament of believers, which is in this present time necessary, but necessary in order to obtain the felicity not of the present time, but of eternity. [PRH: In Luther’s 1529 Explanation, he notably only cites daily bread for this life. That was because he was in the midst of his struggles with the Sacramentarians who went outside the Words of Institution to support their “representative presence” of Christ in the Sacrament. In other writings, you will find Luther say that this petition for “daily bread” is not only for bread for this body and life today but for the Bread of Life for eternity.]
“When we say: ‘Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,’ we remind ourselves both what we should ask, and what we should do in order that we may be worthy to receive what we ask. [PRH: This could be understood in the vein of Luther but Luther has no trace of the “in order that we may be worthy”. Luther says God’s forgiveness leads us to forgive others.]
“When we say: ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ we admonish ourselves to seek that we may not, through being deprived of God’s help, be either ensnared to consent or compelled to yield to temptation.
“When we say: ‘Deliver us from evil,’ we admonish ourselves to consider that we are not yet enjoying that good estate in which we shall experience no evil. And this petition, which stands last in the Lord’s Prayer, is so comprehensive that a Christian, in whatsoever affliction he be placed, may in using it give utterance to his groans and find vent for his tears—may begin with this petition, go on with it, and with it conclude his prayer. For it was necessary that by the use of these words the things which they signify should be kept before our memory.”
[PRH: What’s significant in this last sentences is that Augustin takes seriously “the use of these words”. He doesn’t imply, neither does Luther, that saying these words diminishes our prayer or demotes it to the status of “much speaking” or mere rote as Evangelicals and Non-denominationalists often say (St. Augustine’s Letter elderly widow Proba, Letter 130 (NPNF, First Series, 1, 465-6).
