A prayer is always also a theological statement and a tool for theological instruction. Not only serving as a means for communicating with God, prayers are vehicles of theology informing those who pray. Prayers therefore were always a component of catechetical instruction. This is true also of the Lord's Prayer. Having been learned and internalized, the Lord's Prayer leads to further theological reflection. This is how the instructions on prayer, in which the Prayer is now embedded, came about, a process that continued into church history and the history of theology down to the present. If, as already pointed out, the Lord's Prayer stands in the middle of the SM, this prominent location is not an accident.
- Hans Dieter Betz, The Sermon on the Mount,1995
No comments:
Post a Comment