prayer, subjectivity, and politicstude, as the attempt to conceptualize God as an object for the inquir-
ing gaze of the theologian would be a clear case of idolatry. If God
should be reduced to something, some thing or “a being,” which
would fit into the frames of the territory of human experience, it
would be we humans who set the limits or the conditions for what it
is to be God, or at least for that of God that could be manifested into
human experience. Pre-modern theology has therefore tried to take
care of this insight for instance through its claim that theology begins
and ends with prayer.^10 This might take a tangible form through the
writer directly addressing God — one of the most famous examples
here would probably be Augustine’s Confessiones — and thereby es-
tablishing a persona in the text that is not an example of the all-know-
ing author but rather a receiver, an interpreter, and an inter mediary
of the divine message. This is a consequence of the theological insight
that also the knowledge of God is a form of grace and that the possibil-
ity of such knowledge is established by what traditionally is called
God’s revelation. Even so-called “natural theology” would not, in pre-
modern theology, be established without grace, and thus leaves no
room for a modern, epistemologically autonomous subject. My thesis
is that prayer as a central religious practice or religious phenomenon
could be understood as paradigmatic for how religious human beings
relate to claims for transcendence and universality without having
their subjectivity being crushed by the metaphysical weight of tran-
scendence. In other words, prayer is a form of subjectivity that makes
us aware of this subjectivity as such in its relation to these claims. To
study prayer as a form of human subjectivity in relationship to tran-
scendence makes us aware, not in the first hand of the content of such
claims to universality but of their form. It makes us aware of their how
rather than their what. A phenomenological study of prayer concerns,
therefore, how the human subject relates to the event of truth.
But what is prayer? To answer this question in a truthful way it is
important to realize that prayer is a phenomenon that takes different
forms and expressions in different religions, within the same religion,
and even in ways of living that are not religious in any conventional
- Cf. Karl Barth’s discussion of Anselm’s Proslogion in Fides quaerens intellectum,
Gesamtausgabe 13, Second edition, Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1986.