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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2024
Let me begin by setting down a passage from the now well-known One God and Father of All, by Eric Milner-White and Wilfred L. Knox (pp. 46, 47):
A common argument of Roman writers on the same lines may be noticed here, since it sometimes causes great perplexity. It is said that our Lord in the .great prayer in S. John xvii prays that the Church may be one. This prayer is sometimes described as a ‘creative prayer,’ whatever the words may mean. If they mean anything, they would seem to be plain heresy, since they would mean that our Lord was simply God, not God made man and therefore subject to the limitations of humanity which made it necessary for Him to pray. More often the argument is used that our Lord at this supreme moment prayed that His Church might be one; we cannot believe that a prayer uttered at such a moment would not be answered. Therefore the Church must be one. But the Roman Church alone claims to be the one Church; therefore the one Church for which our Lord prayed is the Roman Church.
But it would be equally legitimate to argue that at an even greater moment in the crisis of the Passion our Lord prayed, ‘Let this cup pass from me.’ Consequently this prayer could be used to show that, as some early heretics held, He did not really die upon the Cross, but substituted for Himself a phantom or Simon of Cyrene. Obviously our Lord’s prayer in S. John xvii proves nothing more than that the Church ought to be one—which everyone admits. The argument is ludicrous.
With some things in this passage I could not, of course, agree, but with one thing at least I do agree, and that is with the dislike expressed in it for calling Christ’s prayer a ‘creative prayer.’
1 Blackfriars, 1930, pp. 135, 136.
2 Summa Theologica, IIa IIae, lxxxiii, 13 and 15.
3 Ia, lxii, 4.
4 IIIa, xxi, I.
5 Loc. cit. See also IIIa, xvi, 4 and 8. In the latter article St. Thomas explains when the qualification should be explicitly added.
6 I omit the ‘merely’ of the previous phrase simply because I am not sure of its meaning. Christ, as praying, petitioned, nothing more or less. In that sense He merely petitioned, which does not mean that His petition did not impetrate or obtain what it asked for. I omit also the words, ‘if God thought fit,’ because I hold with St. Thomas that Christ even as man, i.e., even with knowledge in His human mind, knew exactly what God willed should be. This foreknowledge on Christ's part might seem at first sight to make it impossible for Him to pray; in reality it does nothing of the kind. The reader will find some excellent observations on the point in Father Vincent McNabb's invaluable Oxford Conferences on Prayer, which, published some thirty years ago, are still by far the finest presentation of St. Thomas's teaching on prayer in English. ‘We have already argued,’ he says (p. 152) ‘against the difficulty that because God foreknew all coming events it was superfluous to pray for them. Now we have to add the apparently more complicating factor of foreknowledge in the one who offers up the prayer. But in truth the difficulty is left unchanged.’
7 Which, needless to say, is not to show that it was not an absolute prayer, but only to suggest the need of careful statement.
8 Hence it follows that whatever be the meaning of Jn xvii, 20, 21, it certainly does not mean that that unity which is a note of the one true Church of Christ is as yet non-existent.
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