Transcript
HUNT: Thank you very much, ladies and gentleman, and good morning to you. My name is Chase Hunt, and I'm Director of Development here at the Seminary, and I'm delighted that you could be here and to have the opportunity to welcome you to the campus of Princeton Theological Seminary. I have the distinct pleasure now of presenting to you our speaker for this segment of our program, Dr. Patrick D. Miller, the Charles T. Haley Professor of Old Testament Theology here at Princeton
Seminary. Dr. Miller is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He received his undergraduate degree at Davidson College; his Bachelor of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary, our sister seminary in Richmond, Virginia; and his PhD from Harvard University. Dr. Miller is an ordained Presbyterian minister and had a pastorate in South Carolina before returning to Union Seminary to become a member of the
faculty there in 1966 and later to be the dean of the faculty. It was in 1984 that Dr. Miller came here to Princeton Seminary to be a member our faculty, and he has made a wonderful contribution to the life of this institution and to the lives of his students and colleagues since his arrival here. He is widely published through books of his own authorship and in many scholarly journals.
He's a member of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible committee and holds positions of leadership in the Society of Biblical Literature, and if you have the sense that I could go on and on, you are quite right. Let me just say one other thing before Dr. Miller begins to speak. In my most recent pastorate in Michigan, there was a member of the church there who
had a practice that impressed me greatly, and that was on his birthday, he would make it a point to do something special for his family and for the people around him that he loved. He would give them something. That so impressed me that I have done that in my own life ever since then, and Dr. Miller is in that tradition. This is his birthday, but in speaking to us he gives us a rich gift.
I wonder if you would just join in celebrating that with us. This won't be a surprise to him, because I did this to him the last hour, but let's just welcome Pat by singing happy birthday to him.
(music)
HUNT: I present my colleague and our good friend, Patrick D. Miller.
MILLER: I'm going to try to set up my birthday every year on seminary Saturday from now on. I will have to tell you what I told the other group, because I almost did it. We celebrated my birthday at breakfast this morning, fairly shortly before I came over, and I sat at the birthday table and almost came to the seminary with my birthday present. Marianne did
take a picture of me at the breakfast table poised in my blue blazer and everything and this marvelous, beautiful black Stetson hat that she had given me for my birthday, but I lost my nerve. I've got to get used to that hat. I think in some sense my, or at
least the underlying agenda or the hidden agenda of my being up here is so that some of you who may not be very familiar with Princeton Seminary come here and get some idea of what it is that its faculty does -- what professors, what teachers do. Well, I need to report to you that one of the things that professors at Princeton Seminary do, and do very often, is leave it, and I have
recently left it for a year. By the way, I was given permission to leave, encouraged by the president -- I don't mean encouraged in a sense but supported. I've been on sabbatical for a year. That's what I'm talking about, about professors regularly leaving it. That's a time -- you know what a sabbatical is -- at least here, it is a time in which faculty are cut loose from the many,
many things that we do in order to focus upon one thing and to give time for research and writing for the church and preparation for courses that one is going to teach. This past year, I was on sabbatical, and this coming spring I will be teaching a course on prayer in the Bible. So one of the things I was working in the past year
was that topic, and this, in a sense, is my first report from the sabbatical about some of the things that I was seeing and working on and learning about prayer, and specifically about prayer in Scripture. That thing, that address to God in the Bible
and in human life generally moves back and forth between plea or petition for help and praise or thanksgiving to the God who has helped. In that movement -- from the cry for help to "thanks be to God for what you have
done for me" -- in that movement one is at the heart of what prayer is all about in Scripture. The biblical story as a whole, and many of its parts, may be charted along that movement also. It begins in Genesis. I don't know if you had ever noticed that the first time in
the whole Bible that any human being addresses God -- I don't mean when human beings are forced to respond because God addresses them, but the first time that there is human initiative to speak to God in Scripture is when the blood of Abel's slain body cries out to God for justice against a murdering Cain, and the
Biblical story ends in the last chapters of Revelation, when those cries have ended there shall be no more crying, and God shall wipe away all tears, and the world is filled with the praise of God. That movement, however, from plea to praise happens only because between those words to God, things happen to transform the human situation or attitude and to turn weeping
to joy, tears to laughter. Prayer is thus, in fact, a dialogue, a conversation that takes shape in certain forms, and in the whole of that dialogue we gain some clues, not only to prayer but clues to what faith in God is all about in Scripture.
Now, I am just going to grab hold, in some sense, of the starting point of that dialogue; that is, prayer, as it is most commonly understood, a plea to God for help. That's what I want to lift up for our thinking together. That cry for help is the most common form of prayer in the Bible, and it begins in an address to God. All I'm going to do in the time that
remains is talk about what are the elements that make up the prayer or the cry for help as we find it in Scripture. Its starting point is an address -- "O God" or "O Lord" or variations upon that. That may seem very obvious. It certainly is very familiar to us. Nearly all of us begin prayer or participate in prayers with some kind of similar
address. We must never, never forget what it means that we are doing, then. For prayer assumes that we can in the most direct fashion address the God who made us and keeps us forever in love as we can address one another. Everything else
we have to say is talk about God. It is in prayer, in our address, "O Lord," that the reality of God is truly claimed, that God is not an imaginary object, the subject of theological debates, but indeed real and present and there to listen and respond. That direct appeal to God is often
in highly relational terms identifying or claiming a relationship to God that is an implicit but significant ground for the appeal that follows. One of the most common of these is the simple address, "My God." We hear it in Psalm 22, where the repeated and thus emphasized, "My God, My God" of verse one,
echoed again in verse two, is the strong claim on the close relationship between the sufferer and God, a close relationship claimed precisely in the context of the cry of abandonment, the terrible sense of the absence, the distance, the silence of God. "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Why are You so far from helping
Me from the words of My groaning" -- or better, "My roaring words? O, My God, I cry by day but You do not answer, and by night but find no rest." There's an almost unbearable sense of contradiction between that roaring cry, "Why have You forsaken Me?" and the address that repeatedly insists that the silent,
forsaking, distant God is my God. The psalmist claims in the present what present experience seems to deny. But there is a larger experience that validates the claim of the address, and it is seen in the verses that follow, explicitly stated in verse 10, "On You
I was cast from My birth." That's a powerful image; when the baby is cast forth from the mother, it is immediately cast onto God. "On You I was cast from my birth, from the minute I came into the world, and since My mother bore Me, You have been My God.
Particularly in the prayers for help, there is often, and usually after whatever form this direct address may take, an element of lament about one's plight, one's condition. These prayers are very open about the situation of distress, of the suffering or oppression that evokes the cry to God.
That's not skipped over simply in going to the plea for help. Part of that lament about the situation may be a complaint to God and a complaint against God about the way things are. We heard that in those words from Psalm 22, "Why have You forsaken Me? I cry, but You do not answer."
That complaint can take many forms in sharp questions to the deity such as that one or, "Why have You forgotten me?"; in beleaguered statements about the Lord's undoing of the sufferer, "All Your waves roll over me"; or quotations of those who mock the one prayer because of his or her trust in God, "Where is your God in this
situation?"; or urgent petitions asking God not to hide, "Do not hide Your face from me"; or to reject or to be far off. In all of these, the prayers that cry out for help frequently complain to God about God's indifference or active hostility to the sufferer. The sense of abandonment and rejection by God and the sense of shame and being exposed to the taunts of others
are the primary feelings set forth in these complaints. "I am terribly, terribly ashamed" they say; or, "I am utterly alone in this world." Those of you who have been in deep suffering know about both of those realities in the pits.
The justice of God and the power of God are both at risk according to these complaints. God's way does not seem to be just in that the righteous are wronged, they are unduly punished, and the wicked thrive; or else God's willingness and ability to help the suffering ones, those in distress, is not demonstrated in the world. Those who pray these Psalms and
lament about their condition also find a pain and distress within themselves that is very personal. There's a problem about God often, but there are also clear problems about me. Their prayers give vivid presentations of internal, physical, mental, and spiritual anguish. Tears and weeping often accompany these prayers. Loneliness and alienation or estrangement
from others may be the experience of the one praying as well as -- and you hear this not infrequently -- a terrible, terrible weariness from the plight. Frequent expressions of physical dissolution and disintegration occur in the lament of the psalmist. "My bones are all shriveled up, I am literally melting away from pain."
The language of sickness, not surprisingly, is prominent, and may be recognized as both a reflection of the praying of these prayers in times of sickness -- surely they often were, even if we do not know the circumstance, prayers of people whose terrible suffering was illness -- but also these prayers and that
language of sickness and healing probably reflects the fact that such language and imagery is a rich resource for depicting distress and relief of various sorts. Indeed, we speak of sicknesses not only of the body but of the mind and the spirit, and we understand the category of illness in the broadest sense possible, and no less was that the case with those who prayed these prayers of Scripture. Well, if the laments
of these prayers often included complaint to God and expressions of personal dissolution and pain, they also cried out to God about the threats to their well-being that came from other persons. Those who threaten the ones who pray or have already done something to them tend to be identified in terms
of their opposition and hostility to the psalmist who calls them "enemies," "those who hate me," "those who rise up against me," "my adversaries;" or they are described in terms of their moral reprobation -- "the wicked," "evil-doers," the unrighteous;" or both. It's clear from reading a number of these Psalms
that the opposition -- "those who hate me" -- that that opposition, that hostility was understood to have moral tones, that the enemies are indeed doing something wrong. This is not just that people do not like me. They're malicious and immoral, whether they are designated wicked or not. They have broken off fellowship.
They have cut me off in the world. Well, if the complaint against God and the lament over personal pain make us aware of the way in which these prayers identify the human situation -- in theological terms, in spiritual terms, and also in psychological terms, in physical terms -- the lament about the enemies identifies the problem prayer lifts up as very much also a
social one and one that has moral overtones and characteristics. Enemies may be in opposition in all sorts of ways, some of which are life-threatening and others of which are not, but they are all hurtful in some fundamental fashion whenever these laments about the enemies come up. They do not always appear. Not all the prayers for help in Scripture arise out of the
experience of oppression and hurt by others, but the stories of Scripture -- the stories -- and the prayers of the Psalms inform us of that experience of being done in by others as a primary impetus for much of the praying that is recorded in the Bible. Now, of course at the heart of the prayer for help
is just what is indicated by that very term: a plea or petition for God to help in some way. It takes many forms. It may be a plea for God to hear and pay attention. To catch God's ear and eye, to use those anthropomorphic notions that are so prominent in Scripture, is to be able to expect God's help.
When the Israelites' cry for help rose up to God from Egyptian slavery, Exodus 2:23, God said to Moses, "I have seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt, and I have heard their cry on account of their task masters. Therefore, I have come down to deliver them." The prayer may ask God to heal or to deliver or save; sometimes the plea is for God's forgiveness
when the terrible trouble is sin and guilt, as it sometimes is -- not always, not always. In fact, one of the things that's interesting to see when one reads these prayers -- and a little different, maybe, from what we sometimes assume, at least for ourselves -- these prayers are not always prayed out of the conviction of sin and guilt; quite the contrary, in some instances they pray precisely because of the conviction that
they have not done wrong, that they are innocent in the circumstances, and God's justice, therefore, should move to sustain them. The prayer may be for God to judge, that is, to act in a way that vindicates the righteous and condemns the guilty -- vindicates the innocent -- and frequently the prayer asks for God to remember -- to call to mind the covenant or the promises to our fathers
and mothers and thus continuing to be faithful to God's people even if they have sinned. Well, that's -- petition, of course, is what the prayer is about, and I say it is formulated in many, many different ways, but there are some other dimensions to the prayer for help, some of which are, perhaps, less familiar and noticeable to us but
very prominent in these prayers, and let me mention one or two of those. One is the fact that those who pray in these Psalms, in these prayers, regularly urge and exhort God to act in their behalf, and they give reasons to motivate and push God to help.
The first half of Psalm 22, which I referred to a moment ago, is an obvious example of the way in which the plight of the psalmist and the trust of the psalmist interact and together implicitly ground the claim on God's response. In verses 3-5, the psalmist affirms the history of the people in the past
as a demonstration of the positive response of God to those who cried out in trust. So the psalmist prays to God, "In You our fathers and mothers trusted. They trusted, and You delivered them. To You they cried out for help in prayer, and they were saved. In You they trusted and were not put to shame."
Such recollection joins the psalmist now in terrible trouble with that company but also implicitly contrasts the present condition of the psalmist who trusts with the fathers and mothers who trusted in the past. They were delivered, the psalmist says in effect, but I am not, I am not. The recital, therefore -- this reference to the fathers and mothers crying out and trusting and being
delivered in the past -- that recital is a reminder of the way God has been in order to evoke a similar response from God in the present situation. The next three verses carry that process of implicit motivation on further as the psalmist now presents his or her plight, the terrible trouble, in effect suggesting that whereas my ancestors were not put to shame when they trusted
and cried out for help, I am greatly ashamed and ridiculed because God does not help. I am a worm, a nobody, the psalmist says -- I am nothing. That description of that situation that the psalmist experienced again is an implicit way of presenting reasons for God to act. There
is something very clear going on here, because the psalmist who prays knows what God is like. In another context altogether, when the prophet Amos has seen a vision of God's coming judgement upon the people, he cries out in prayer, "O Lord, forgive, I beseech You. How can Jacob -- Israel -- how can Jacob stand? He is so small."
Now, Amos, who cried for forgiveness because Jacob is so small, and the psalmist who cries for help because "I am nothing," they know that this God is clearly bent toward the weak and the small and the little and the insignificant. If one is truly that way, then one can count on God's
ears being attentive. It's there in the laws. If you oppress an orphan or a stranger or a widow, people who do not have any support in this world, and they cry out to me, I will hear, and you will catch it. In this
Psalm, the claim of the psalmist, "I am a worm and nobody" involves a suggestion that God's way is not consistent unless the psalmist is helped and also that the taunting of the psalmist by others -- "all who see me mock me," he says -- that that is at the same time a mockery of God that God should set to rest.
In verses nine and ten, we encounter the same type of motivating act as in verses three to five: "Yet it was You who took me from the womb. You kept me safe on my mother's breast." This time it's the recollection of the psalmist's own history that presents a contrast with the present and suggests, therefore, that God, who has been my God throughout life, needs to act in this moment as my God; that is,
keep me safe now as You kept me safe in my mother's breast. The history of the personal relationship with God throughout the life of the one who prays, or the psalmist, that presents implicit reasons for God to help now. Often the motivation statements are a declaration of the person's distress: "Help me, because trouble is near, and there is no one to help if You do not."
What is happening in all such motivation clauses is that the fundamental ground of prayer, the assumption that I think is probably as important -- maybe it is the fundamental assumption; no, it's one of the fundamental assumptions of Scripture -- the responsiveness of God to the cry of human need, that is what is being lifted up in all of these motive clauses. All of the description
of the plight of the afflicted, wherever it occurs in the prayer, assumes God's care and compassion especially for those in distress. God may not be coerced. At least, I cannot think of any place in the Bible that indicates that God can be coerced, but God can be persuaded, and I see that all over the scriptures.
Prayers do not assume that things are cut and dried -- either God answers prayer or does not; that's kind of the way we tend to reduce it. They seek to evoke a response, not just in the petitions themselves but in all dimensions of the prayer, and especially those sentences and clauses that suggest reasons why God should act, results that can be accomplished or prevented by God's intervention.
In form and content, the prayer for help assumes that God can be moved. It's interesting how in our theology we sometimes do get in, I think, some conflict; that is, we think of and speak of, and it's in all our theological statements, is God...God's love and mercy and compassion; but at other times we simply abandon that altogether and do not assume
that if one is loving and merciful and compassionate that one can be moved. That is what those emotions are about. Those several places in the Bible where God relents and does not do what God had planned -- there are a number of such places by the way. Some of those cases in the New Revised Standard
Version we have changed the old translation of the verb, which was God repented of His action, as if God thought He had done something wrong, to God changed His mind, because that is what happens. But where that does happen, those are regularly in response to prayer and the human insistence that there are reasons why God should act to help. There is, therefore, a powerful suggestion that the one who
prays can truly engage the deity, can urge reasons upon God for acting. Prayer is the point at which the human creature dares to approach the transcendent holy deity with no restrictions on what can be expressed and free not only to cry out in rage, anger, despair, and hate -- "Happy is the one who dashes your babies against the rocks," that's in one of the prayers -- but also
to beseech, urge, and persuade. We generally place the emphasis on the petitionary dimension of the prayer for help, and that's what it is ultimately about, but these motive clauses indicate that persuasion is as much the heart of the prayer as plea. The mind and heart of God are vulnerable to the pleas and to the arguments of human creatures.
Now, one thing needs to be said about that. I think it's important to keep in mind the nature of the arguments, because they appeal to God to be and act as God would be and act. Here clearly, prayer is not simply, "Thy will be done." Indeed,
the petitioner is at pains to impress his or her will, that is one's need and sense of what God should do, upon the deity; and yet, in another sense the prayer for God to act -- as we often hear in the songs, "according to Your steadfast love," that's a motivation, or "for Your name's sake," there's a reason being given -- the prayer that asks God to act that way, "according to Your steadfast love to Your mercy for Your name's sake,"
is in the profoundest way possible a call upon God to help because that is Your will and way in the world, to do just that. The motive clauses are, in effect, a way of indicating that God's response to the cry for help should be a manifestation of mercy and love, a demonstration of God's just dealings in the world, a compassionate response to the sufferer in
pain or to the weak and powerless in the community, an act of righteousness in that God's help will be appropriate to the relationship established between God and the people. But all those reasons -- all those reasons articulated by the suppliant in distress have been found to be precisely the will and way of God as demonstrated in the long experience of God's way with Israel.
All of these urgings and the like are elaborate ways of saying, "Let God be God, and my situation is now a fantastic possibility for doing that." It is in the very nature and structure of the relationship between God
and the human creature that deliverance from pain and suffering, the overcoming of affliction, guilt, and oppression by others, that that can be counted upon, which is why prayers of pain and suffering are so regularly full also of something else that is very important, and that is many, many expressions of confidence and trust in God.
"Those who pray in pain also declare, 'You are my God.' In You I trust. I really do." The one who cries out does so in trust that this prayer with all its anguish, lament, and complaint to God, that all of that -- that all of that is an act of faith and faithfulness.
You remember those words I read early on from Psalm 22, "In You our fathers and mothers trusted." Listen to the four verbs that describe what the psalmist says they did. "In You our fathers and mothers trusted. To You they cried out and were delivered. In You they trusted.
In You they trusted and were not ashamed." Three times trusted. The only exception to the use of that word is the word, "They cried out," that their crying out this way was the demonstration of their trust in God. Finally, there is in the Psalm prayers for help another anticipation of God's deliverance. I will not stop on it, but it's what lets you know the conversation keeps
going. It is expressed in, usually at the end of the prayer, a vow of praise -- a promise on the part of the one who prays that when God responds and deliverance comes, the one who is delivered will keep the conversation going in hymns and songs of thanksgiving and praise in the midst of the congregation.
So that's what the prayers for help look like as we find them in the Old Testament, especially in the Psalms -- a conversation of the most frank and straightforward character where no holds are barred, no questions or feelings taboo. Pain and suffering of various degrees lie behind many if not most of the prayers, and we said that affliction has physical, psychological, social dimensions to it;
threats from external forces who taunt, oppress, and persecute. But at its deepest roots, the problem often has to do with God. The questions at the beginning of Psalm 22 and many prayers like it speak out of a sense of the abandonment of God, the silence of God, often the blow from God's hand. Here is human pain at its deepest hurt, and the questions to God are really
questions about the presence and power of God. Now, the shape, the character of faith in God does not require such questions. Often prayer arises out of a faithful trust that does not question God in that way, that knows and claims from beginning to end even before the plea is uttered that "God is my
helper." But the prayer of faith, if these are indicative of them, does permit such questions and often cannot avoid them. Sometimes they're veiled, implicit, underneath they're there, and more often than not they break very much to the surface. Is the human predicament, however it is experienced, large or small, by
one or many, is it a testimony to the absence of God from the world and human life, the disinterest or the rebuke of God? Some of these prayers suggest that it was often so felt and perceived even in the midst of a dialogue that assumed a hearing and responding God. There is a profound tension in many of these prayers that I think
is not simply a tension in the Psalms of the Old Testament but belongs to the nature of human existence under God, a human existence that is lived in the tension between fearfulness and despair in the face of the contingency of life. Jacob says, "I am afraid,"
and the psalmist says, "I am like those who have no help." That being where we often truly are, but also the reality of our trust in the very ground of our being that God's providential blessing and God's saving help in time of trouble really can be counted upon. As the psalmist says
in the 56th Psalm, "This I know: that God is for me." Well, we can't go any further this morning. I do need to leave by reminding you that if
the prayer for help is a conversation and dialogical, and if it often ends in expectancy, then one must assume a response of some sort, a word or reaction from the other voice in the dialogue; and when you read of the prayers and the stories of Israel, one sees that the dialogue did indeed continue, that response in some fashion was usually forthcoming from the conversation partner, the Lord of Israel;
and the prayers of the psalter also suggests that God responded to the prayers and the suppliant's need, and some in different fashions was met. The conversation takes place, and faith moves on from plea to praise, from weeping to laughter. That we will have to talk about at another time.
HUNT: Thank you very much, Pat. When I was about to graduate from Princeton Seminary, I recall perhaps the day before graduation that my father and mother, who had come up for graduation, asked me a question. My father was the one who really put it to me. After three years of theological study, he said to me, "Well, what do you think?"
And without having to give it much thought, I said to him, "I think I'm the luckiest fellow in the world, and I wish that everyone, regardless of vocation, would have the opportunity and the privilege that I have had to be at Princeton Theological Seminary," and I meant that from the heart;
and I mean it no less when I suggest to you and say to you that it is because of people like Tom Gillespie, people like Pat Miller, that I think that today's students, whether they fully realize it or not, are the luckiest people in the world. So Pat, I thank you. It's a privilege for us to be at your feet this day and to realize that day after day
students at this institution have that same privilege. Thanks so much, and especially on this day, for giving us your time.