Worship is not ‘vain repetitions’

On Twitter, I while back, I posted this little aphorism: “A vain repetition is when you constantly repeat bad translations of Matthew 6:7 as if it constitutes an argument against liturgical worship.”

The point here is that some cite Matthew 6:7 as ‘proof’ that repetitive prayers are problematic, following the Authorised Version (KJV): “But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.” The problems with this are many. They forget the crucial adjective (‘vain’) to focus just on the noun (‘repetition’). Are all repetitions vain? If so, why add the adjective at all? It’s like talking about a circular ring But more importantly, the translation itself is problematic. It translates the Greek verb battologéō as ‘vain repetition’ which is a noun phrase, not a verb, which is not problematic in and of itself but completely unnecessary here, since the word can easily be translated directly. And furthermore, the verb does not mean ‘repetition.’ The verb, in its infinite form, means ‘to babble.’ A better translation would be: “But when you pray, do not babble as the heathens do, for they think that they will be heard by their many words.” The word has nothing to do with repetition as such, and I would contend that it is actually the opposite. Babbling is chaotic, not repetitive, and it seems to me that this verse, read properly, is rather a warning against gibberish, which seems closer to a warning against certain hyper-modern practices concerning speaking in tongues.

Scripture does not condemn repetition. In fact, one of the Psalms, Psalm 136, is just an almost endless string of repetitions. Battologéō does not mean ‘repetitive words’ or ‘set prayers’ but babbling, gibberish, which you see better in the RSV translation of Matthew 6:7: “And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words.” Here the verb is translated as an actual verb phrase, and it is an actual translation of the meaning. Babbling is a string of empty phrases. So if you insist on using the Authorised Version, do so knowing that the point is not that repetitions are bad but that vain ones are, though as I’ve said, ‘repetition’ is almost the opposite of the chaos that is babbling.

But what is the background here? I think that Christ’s critique of the pagan practice can be seen as a critique of the use of so-called ‘nonsense words,’ the nomina barbara, which are phrases, often from other languages, which have no semantic content in the language into which they are imported. They are meaningless words or ‘empty phrases’ or ‘babbling,’ if you will, used because they supposedly have some ‘magical’ properties connected explicitly to the fact that they become gibberish when imported. They are not imported for the meaning but solely for their sound, something which seems to be exactly the kind of thing Christ warns against. These are not not ‘repetitions’ of words or phrases that carry meaning. Saying “for his steadfast love endures for ever” repeatedly, as the Psalmists says of God in Psalm 136, is not an ‘empty phrase’ or just gibberish. It is the repetition of one of the central features of God’s character. And that is the point of Christian worship.

When we worship, we call to mind who God is and what He has done and we praise Him for it, again and again, repeatedly. And regardless of what a certain kind of evangelical Christian seem to think, we can do so by repeating words, our own as well as those written by others. In the Psalms, the one praying is not just the Psalmist but the reader as well. There is no need for false dichotomies here. The idea that prayer and praise must be ex tempore is a novelty that none of the authors of Scripture would even consider, least of all Christ Himself, who prayed the Psalms that He, as God, inspired the Psalmists to compose. Liturgies are full of repetitions but that does not make it ‘vain,’ precisely because as humans we are ‘hard-wired’ for repetition, as C. S. Lewis shows in his Letters to Malcolm. There, he shows why liturgy should not only be repetitive but stable across time, as he comments on the possibility of a vernacular liturgy and the introduction of new books of worship:

I think it would have been best, if it were possible, that necessary change should have occurred gradually and (to most people) imperceptibly; here a little and there a little; one obsolete word replaced in a century—like the gradual change of spelling in successive editions of Shakespeare. As things are we must reconcile ourselves, if we can also reconcile government, to a new Book.¹

And I think the reason is that fixed prayers are, actually, more in line with the devotional attitude with which we are supposed to approach worship. And since I cannot top him in explaining why, let me just cite Lewis’s own explanation of why ‘spontaneous’ prayer can never top fixed and stable prayers that have been written by others and have been used through the centuries:

The advantage of a fixed form of service is that we know what is coming. Ex tempore public prayer has this difficulty: we don’t know whether we can mentally join in it until we’ve heard it–it might be phoney or heretical. We are therefore called upon to carry on a critical and a devotional activity at the same moment: two things hardly compatible. In a fixed form we ought to have ‘gone through the motions’ before in our private prayers: the rigid form really sets our devotions free.

I also find the more rigid it is, the easier it is to keep one’s thoughts from straying. Also it prevents any service getting too completely eaten up by whatever happens to be the pre-occupation of the moment (a war, an election, or what not). The permanent shape of Christianity shows through. I don’t see how the ex tempore method can help becoming provincial & I think it has a great tendency to direct attention to the minister rather than to God.²

1. C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Kindle ed. (London: William Collins, 2020), 7.

2. Letter to Mary van Deusen, 1st April, 1952, in C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950 – 1963, ed., Walter Hooper, Kindle ed. (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2009), 210 (emphasis in original).