When Does God Hear Favorably | Nicholas Wolterstorff

The Henry Center Archive

2013 Kantzer Lecture #6 - God as One Who Hears Favorably Wolterstorff begins his sixth lecture by unpacking the understanding of God implicit in the liturgical act of requesting that God would hear our addresses favorably. What view of God is implied by the participant’s refrain, “Hear our prayer oh Lord”? After surveying the possible moods or stances appropriate for supplication—wishfulness, desperation, confidence—Wolterstorff turns to the Lord’s prayer, which he argues should be paradigmatic for Christian liturgical forms of prayer. He goes on to affirm that the Lord’s prayer is best understood as a declaration that the kingdom is God’s and the prayer for its ever fuller manifestation: when the kingdom is fully manifested, God’s name will be hollowed, his will be done, we will be forgiven as we forgive. Guided by N.T. Wright’s recent work How God Became King, Wolterstorff goes on to explore the content of what it means to pray “thy kingdom come.” He concludes by suggesting that when we ask God to accept our prayers, we’re asking God to accept our concrete longing for the coming of God’s kingdom. Nicholas Wolterstorff (PhD Harvard University) is Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University. He is author of many books, including Reason Within the Bounds of Religion (Eerdmans, 1988), Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton University Press, 2008), and United in Love: Reflections on Justice, Art, and Liturgy (Wipf and Stock, 2021).

The Henry Center for Theological Understanding provides theological resources that help bridge the gap between the academy and the church. It houses a cluster of initiatives, each of which is aimed at applying practical Christian wisdom to important kingdom issues—for the good of the church, for the soul of the theological academy, for the sake of the world, and ultimately for the glory of God. The HCTU seeks to ground each of these initiatives in Scripture, and it pursues these goals collaboratively, in order to train a new generation of wise interpreters of the Word—lay persons and scholars alike—for the sake of tomorrow’s church, academy, and world.

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