To Pray or Not to Pray

The traditional and somewhat theatrical custom of clergymen opening or closing a political convention was carried on at Los. Angeles and Chicago, among others by Methodist Bishop Gerald Kennedy, Roman Catholic Bishop Hillinger, and Rabbi Hillel Silver. The familiar scene inevitably raises a question: Should different denominations of Christians pray together--or alongside members of other faiths--and if so, under what circumstances?

The Roman Catholic Church is notoriously chary of permitting prayer with non-Catholics; so are conservative Protestants such as the Missouri Synod Lutherans (membership: 2,387,292). At a Lutheran conference on doctrinal unity in Thiensville, Wis. last week, the Rev. Martin H. Franzmann, professor of New Testament interpretation at the Missouri Synod's Concordia Seminary, warned against closing the door entirely to joint praying: "May we not, by too facile and too simple a ruling concerning joint prayer, become guilty of crushing the bruised reed and quenching the smoldering wick, by making the names 'Confessional' and 'Orthodox' names which smell of lovelessness?"

One occasion when joint prayer should be permitted: in doctrinal conferences with other denominations. "It is one thing to refuse joint prayer to heretics and persistent errorists; it is not quite the same thing to refuse joint prayer to the victims and unwitting heirs of heretics and errorists."

Said Theologian Franzmann: "A compromise prayer, in which Moslem, Hindu and pious agnostic may join, is always and everywhere an abomination on the lips of a Christian ... A prayer which is the product of a blind, sentimental enthusiasm and therefore conceals or smoothes over differences in themselves divisive is indefensible."

Public prayer at civic functions is permissible only if it is doctrinally uncompromised. "Our national habit of utilizing prayer as a sort of ecclesiastical garnish to all manner of secular dishes ought to make the church circumspect." No prayer should suppress "the cardinal fact that access to God is by Jesus Christ and by him alone. To portray God, in prayer, as the good-natured old man accessible to all on any terms is to bely the Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ."

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