prayer, subjectivity, and politicspray as we should” — but rather a deed of delegation where the human
sender renounces not only all claims of control over the addressee but
also over the medium as such.
Prayer, Subjectivity, and Transcendence
I have above described the address “Father” — abba — as in intimate
speech act. The prayer’s address to God presupposes and cultivates, in
the middle of its struggle, a faith in God as the source of all good gifts.
To understand this intimacy that the praying subject cultivates through
prayer as the possession of a predicative knowledge of God would,
however, be a mistake. Prayer is a way of cultivating the understanding
of God’s transcendence. Transcendence should here not be understood
as a spatial distance that either can or cannot be overcome through
prayer — that would imply a mythological understanding of God.
What the concept transcendence denotes in this context rather is the
experience that God withdraws from any definition that aims at a
representation of God before the tribunal of the subject.^20 It is first
when transcendence is understood as a node on a scale that stretches
from immanence to transcendence or from finiteness to infiniteness
and thereby becomes a part of a hierarchy that the concept becomes
potentially alienating.^21 Then transcendence will be understood as a
contrast to immanence. The conceptual pair transcendence and im-
manence is part of a modern notion from the 19th century and is not
a part of the conceptual repertoire that was at hand for theology from
its beginning. It has probably played theology an unwelcome trick as
the associations more or less inevitably lead to a contrastive relation-
ship.^22 But as I have already mentioned above, transcendence and
- The contemporary literature on the concept of transcendence is immense.
Here I would like to mention Emmanuel Lévinas, a.a., 27–89 and Merold West-
phal, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul, Bloomington/Indi-
anapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. - Cf. Walter Lowe, “Second Thoughts about Transcendence,” The Religious, ed.
John D. Caputo, Malden, Mass./Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, 241–251. - See “Transzendenz,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Bd 10, eds. Joachim
Ritter och Karlfried Gründer, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1998, 1447.