Praying Like Jesus

Praying Like Jesus. By James Mulholland. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. 133 pages.

The latest craze in the world of "pop Christianity" is The Prayer of Jabez, in which Bruce Wilkinson takes the prayer recorded in 1 Chronicles 4:10 and elevates it to a key to a "blessed life." In Praying Like Jesus, James Mulholland has written a welcome counterpoint in a commentary on the Lord's Prayer. While Wilkinson insists that the phrases "bless me" and "enlarge my territory" in The Prayer of Jabez are not to be understood in a materialistic way, nevertheless, the prayer itself, as well as Wilkinson's exposition, lend themselves to a rather self-centered understanding in which the prayer is a means for us to manipulate God.

For Mulholland, prayer is a matter of humility and trust, and he warns against the self-righteousness and self-interest that Wilkinson seems to promote. Prayer is described in various ways as "climbing into the lap of a Parent," as "seeking ways to establish God's Kingdom and do God's will," and an "opportunity for God to teach us." The book then discusses the Lord's Prayer a phrase at a time. Ample personal anecdotes effectively illustrate the commentary and add to the readability of the book. The Lord's Prayer becomes for Mulholland the "Prayer of Jesus" to contrast it to the "Prayer of Jabez," a useful distinction but unfortunate terminology since Orthodox and other Christians have been emphasizing a different "Prayer of Jesus" (based on Mark 10:47) for hundreds of years.

Mulholland considers the image of God as "our Father" to be significant and helpful, but also effectively argues that an equally valid and helpful image is that of God as mother. In the light of this discussion, however, one wonders why he refers to God using exclusively male pronouns throughout the book. In the section commenting on "Thy kingdom come," he emphasizes the essential significance of the kingdom of God as "the key to understanding God's will." It is a reversal of the social order, vital in our daily living. While his emphasis on the kingdom as an experience in the here and now is instructive for our daily living, his denial of the kingdom as future eschatological reality leaves us with a onedimensional kingdom. The NRSV (and others) translation of Luke 17:21 as "the kingdom of God is among you" would serve his purposes better here than the phrase "is among you" that he uses.

An essential theme of this book is the concern expressed for the Christian's responsibility to the poor. However, his statement that we have been "given abundance as a responsibility," is problematic. We need to face the fact that our abundance hasn't been given to us; rather, we have taken it, in the form of land from the Native Americans, labor from the slaves, and cheap labor and resources from the third world. Later, in seeming contradiction to the just quoted phrase, Mulholland does deny the validity of defending "our prosperity as a result of God's favor." A greater difficulty in his overall discussion of our wealth in comparison to world poverty is his emphasis on charity at the expense of systemic issues. Systemic issues of poverty are outside the scope of this book, but the reader could be referred to relevant books by William Julius Wilson or Ron Sider, among others. Nevertheless, Mulholland's emphasis on Christian responsibility to the poor is badly needed in our culture.

The book defines grace as restoring us to God and to each other (the kingdom among us), and describes forgiveness as deliverance from individual sin, but even more significantly, from corporate sin. In the tradition of Rauschenbusch, Mulholland touches on the systemic here by identifying greed as perhaps the most problematic sin in our society today.

Mulholland's approach to prayer does not promise the spectacular results that Wilkinson does, and thus probably will never become the media sensation that Jabez has been. However, it represents a more mature and authentic approach, and in the long run, has the potential to be more deeply rewarding.

Lawrence M. Lindley

Christian Theological Seminary

Copyright Christian Theological Seminary Spring 2003
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved