Abstract
The discipline of Biblical Spirituality, with its dual focus on ancient text and modern application, provides the methodological framework for this article. The modern sociological interest in religion, spirituality and prayer is indicated, but not explored, with a shared wisdom orientation in aspects of Old Testament life and in the currently unfolding post-secular religio-cultural climate that forms the bridge between the ancient and the modern in the analysis of prayer. The remainder of this contribution focuses on Deuteronomy 6:4 – the famous Sh’ma prayer – and its historical implications. The editorial history of the book of Deuteronomy, following the theory of E. Otto, forms the basis for understanding more precisely the impact of the Sh’ma in ancient Israel. The link of this prayer to Law inhibited much of its inherent power, testifying to a change in dominant spirituality within post-exilic Judaism. This has had far-reaching implications in the Judeo-Christian history of theology, particularly relating to the grace-law emphases, as indicated in this article, but left to unfold more fully in further research.
Highlights
The discipline of Biblical Spirituality, with its dual focus on ancient text and modern application, provides the methodological framework for this article
From within Old Testament scholarship, a review of thematic studies on prayer in the Old Testament was combined with a more detailed analysis of a single short prayer, but one of the most influential in human history, the Sh’ma in Deuteronomy 6:4. This is followed by an investigation into modern sociological approaches to prayer, namely Rosa’s Social acceleration: A new theory of modernity (2013)
A wisdom-kind of orientation to life-and-the-divine characterises a strong strand of orientation within the Old Testament life world as much as in our currently unfolding life world
Summary
For the purposes of this article, the topic of prayer is approached from two perspectives. Two further editions have been published, namely Giordian & Woodhead’s Prayer in religion and spirituality (2013) and A sociology of prayer (2015) These sociological works are not explicitly referenced in this article, but have informed the interpretative framework of the interaction between prayer and individual and society, as it relates to both the ancient and modern worlds. This two-directional approach is in keeping with the methodology developed within the subdiscipline of Biblical Spirituality, which combines historically oriented exegetical investigations into the ancient texts with contextually oriented phenomenological investigations into the present, in both cases intentionally recognising explicit and implicit impulses of faith. La preghiera pubblica è del resto uno dei grandi contributi dell’ebraismo alla civiltà umana... (Avisar 1985:255)
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