How to Think About Prayer III

A Guide for the Perplexed

In the first installment of this series, we considered the historical origins of Christian prayer in the praying cultures of Ancient Israel, Judah, and Second Temple Judaism. In brief, prayer was part of religious life in the preexilic period, but secondary to cult, and only took off as a signature element of Jewish life in the Second Temple period; when the Second Temple in turn was lost, Jews and Christians both turned to prayer as a kind of figurative successor or replacement for the Temple cult, with their distinctive understandings of what it meant that the Temple had been lost defining their distinct praying traditions, while their common roots in the Second Temple period accounted for their ongoing similarities.