St. Paul’s Lord’s Prayer

“Our Father who art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy name,

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread

And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil.”

In his First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul wrote, “So, three things remain: faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13), (Read ATM's "Faith, Hope, Love" here.) but what does that have to do with the Lord’s Prayer?

Although the Lord’s Prayer is very short, it nonetheless has a lot of structure. It divides into 4 couplets. The opening is concerned with the first of Paul’s last things, faith:

Our Father who art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy name…

The first tenet of Christian faith is that God exists and that he is benevolent, as a father would be benevolent. The first line of the prayer states that clearly.

However, God is not apparent n the phenomenal world, at least not immediately. The ‘phenomenal world’ is the world of time and space and qualities. It is what Parmenides called, Doxa, the realm of appearance. This is the world we inhabit and the only world we know, at least the only world we know or can know by direct experience.

Stephen Hawking pointed out, experience can only occur in the context of time (and entropy, possibly just another name for time). Therefore, we can only have direct knowledge of the phenomenal world.

God is in ‘heaven,’ i.e., the noumenal realm, corresponding to Parmenides’ Aletheia, the realm of truth. The noumenal world exists outside of space and time; it is eternal. The second tenet of Christian faith is that what you see is not all that you get.

Finally, God’s name is ‘holy.’ It may have already struck you that Scripture is inordinately concerned with names (e.g., Exodus 3). This is because in ancient times, your name was not just your ‘handle’; your name defined your relationship with the rest of the world. It was the first derivative of who you were.

Because God’s name is holy, it is unique, as his relationship with the world is unique. God is not just an entity among entities; God is special. This is the third tenet of Christian faith: “I believe in one God…”

The first stanza is an affirmation of the existence and nature of God, and it is an exquisite expression of faith.

The second stanza of the Lord’s Prayer concerns the second of Paul’s second so-called ‘theological virtues:’ hope. Hope is also rooted in the noumenal world. Only a child is satisfied with the hopes of a phenomenal nature (e.g., Santa Claus). As adults, we understand that the phenomenal world is bound to disappoint. True hope must be noumenal; we must hope for something lasting, something eternal in fact, and this is something that can only be found in the noumenal realm.

And that is exactly what the Lord’s Prayer gives us next:

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,

On earth as it is in heaven…

Christian hope is hope that the noumenal world, God’s kingdom, will somehow merge with the phenomenal world so that God’s will may be preeminent in both. In that way, the noumenal world ‘redeems’ the phenomenal world. What is the fleeting in the temporal world is ‘saved’ in the noumenal realm.

This second stanza is both an affirmation and a prayer. We pray that somehow the noumenal and phenomenal realms may merge so that “God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28b). It bridges ‘the kingdom already’ with ‘the kingdom not yet.’

Of course, in our modern age, many intellectuals (e.g., empiricists, realists, materialists) and everyday citizens believe that the phenomenal world is all there is. They do not believe that there is a noumenal world underpinning it; and there is nothing anyone can do or say to prove them wrong because we can have no direct experience of the noumenal world. For that reason, we say that the reality of the noumenal realm is a matter of faith and hope.

The first two stanzas of the Lord’s Prayer define that noumenal world. The third stanza is concerned with ‘love,’ the third of Paul’s virtues and the ‘greatest.’ Unlike faith and hope, love is rooted in the phenomenal world.

Love concerns relationships between entities (phenomena). It has an emotional (‘conceptual’) component and a behavioral (‘physical’) component. Unlike faith and hope, all of us have directly experienced love to one extent or another; there is no serious doubt that it exists.

Why does Paul say that love is the ‘greatest’ of the theological virtues? God created the world with the capacity for good. But if it were not for love, that creation would have been still born. Love is what sustains the world. Without love, new entities could not come into being.

God loves the phenomenal world through the entities that make it up. God has created the phenomenal world to support love between those entities. God has placed the capacity for love into the fundamental structure of the phenomenal world. Love is all around you.

But that is not enough. Entities must, of their own free accord, allow themselves to love and be loved.

Love begins when entities see past their apparent self-interest and see the world through each other’s eyes. Love matures when two entities are willing to suppress their apparent self-interest in order to meet each other’s needs. Love is consummated when both entities realize that their own self-interest is ultimately best served when the self-interest of others is met. This is the foundation of relationship per se and of community.

So, why is love the most important of the theological virtues? First, while we rightly trace the origin of the phenomenal world to the noumenal realm, without love between entities, the phenomenal world could not sustain itself. Love in the phenomenal world is the continuing expression of God’s creative act.

Second, without love between entities in the phenomenal realm, the hope that the noumenal and phenomenal worlds might somehow merge (above) would be in vain. Love is the bridge between the phenomenal and the noumenal, the initial realization of the noumenal in the phenomenal.

Consider the Great Commandment, found in several places in both the New and Old Testaments:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matt. 22: 34-40)

Our love of God is directed toward the noumenal world. It is a fitting companion of faith and hope. We have faith in the existence and nature of God. We hope that the fleeting entities that constitute the phenomenal realm will somehow be saved in the noumenon. And we love God, who is the object of our faith and hope. In fact, it is our love of God that reveals seals our faith and hope. Only if they are sincerely held can faith and hope inspire love.

That same love, initially directed toward the noumenal realm, also operates in the phenomenal realm. The love that we direct toward God in the noumenal realm is the same love that we exchange with other entities in the phenomenal realm.

Further, love only occurs in the phenomenal realm when you love another entity ‘as yourself.’ You accept the other as your ontological equal in every way. You place the welfare of the other on the same level as your own. You even see yourself in the other. ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’

Even more surprising, the Great Commandment tells us that loving our neighbors as ourselves is the same thing as loving God with all our heart. Love of neighbor in the phenomenal realm is love of God in the noumenal realm. In fact, love between us is a foretaste of love in the ‘kingdom come,’ the merging of the noumenal and phenomenal realms. When we love our neighbors as ourselves, God’s will is done on earth…as it is in heaven.

That is why the Great Commandment is one commandment, not two! One commandment, two expressions – a noumenal expression and a phenomenal expression; but to quote Bob Marley, it’s “one love."

The Lord’s Prayer presents faith and hope in a clear and succinct manner; it says just exactly what we would expect it would say, only it says it much better than we could have said it. The exposition of love, on the other hand, is unexpected and rather arcane.

Give us this day our daily bread,

And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,

“Give us this day our daily bread.” We are not expecting God to feed us directly (as with mana). What we are affirming is that God created a world capable of meeting the physical needs of all its creatures. (That it systematically fails to do so is a function of sin: greed, cruelty, apathy, etc.) God created the universe to be free, but with a fundamental structural bias toward ‘The Good.’ That bias manifests God’s love for the world and for the ‘creatures’ that constitute it.

We are accustomed to asking God for forgiveness; but the Lord’s Prayer tells a different story. Forgiveness takes place, at least initially, in the phenomenal realm. We are called upon to forgive those who trespass against us and when we do, that is when we experience forgiveness: It is in pardoning that we are pardoned. (Prayer of St. Francis)

In essence, we forgive ourselves by forgiving others and when we forgive ourselves, God forgives us. Forgiveness in the phenomenal realm translates into forgiveness in the noumenal world: Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. (Mt. 16: 19)

Forgiveness is one of the many ‘middle voice’ concepts at Christianity’s core. With forgiveness, there is no subject or object. The one who forgives is the one who is forgiven. Forgiveness is reflexive and recursive.

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil.”

“And lead us not into temptation,” is probably the most difficult line in the entire prayer. It suggests that God could, if he chose, induce us to sin; but, of course, that is radically impossible because God is all good and incapable of evil.

God created this world to be free; if we yield to temptation (sin), we yield of our own free will. The devil didn’t make you do it; the dog didn’t eat your homework. You did! Paradoxically, at the moment we give in to temptation, we surrender a piece of our freedom as well. We consent to be ‘enslaved.’

So, how are we to understand this verse? We need the context provided by the final line of the prayer: “But deliver us from evil.” In fact, this last verse is the key to the entire prayer. To understand it, we need to make a quick detour by way of St. Augustine.

God is good. God is denotatively (not connotatively) synonymous with Good. God is also being. God is also denotatively (not connotatively) synonymous with Being. Therefore, Good is denotatively (not connotatively) synonymous with Being. This is a long-winded way of saying that everything in the world God created, everything that has being, to the extent that it has being, is good; and everything that is good, to the extent the extent that it is good, has being.

So, why don’t we experience the world this way? Because given the freedom to make their own choices, the world and the entities in it don’t always choose ‘good.’ Temptation is the lure to choose something other than the good, and when entities choose something other than the good, they surrender a bit of their being (as well as their freedom). They make themselves a little less than they otherwise were.

So, just as love is the foretaste of the Kingdom of Heaven, so sin is the foretaste of death; it is the gradual annihilation of phenomenal being. As Augustine taught, evil is simply a privation of Good, a privation of Being.

Therefore, the idea of a totally evil being (‘Evil’) is apparently an oxymoron. Such a being, by definition, could not exist because only things that are at least to some extent ‘good’ can ‘be.’ Even the worst of us must have a spark of good somewhere, however well concealed it may be.

Nevertheless, while there is no perfectly evil being, there is a perfectly evil process on the loose in the world. We know it on the personal level as ‘death’ and on the cosmic level as ‘entropy’.

We all know that the one and only sure thing in our lives (besides taxes) is personal death. Likewise, the inexorably increasing entropy in our universe guarantees that that all order in that universe will eventually be wiped out, and when that happens the universe will cease to exist. We will revert to the way the world was before God said, “Let there be light”:

“And the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters.” (Genesis 1: 2) In other words, pure disorder, chaos, the equivalent of non-being.

Absent a noumenal dimension to reality, nothing remains of us when we die. It is as if everything we experienced, everything we felt, everything we thought, everything we learned, everything we accomplished was erased in an instant. Life is like an Etch-a-Sketch.

People are fond of saying, “Well, at least he had a good life.” No, he didn’t. He had no life at all. It is as if he had never existed.

Likewise, at ‘the end of time,’ the universe itself will vanish and everything that ever happened in that universe will be erased. No trace will remain. Time and space themselves will disappear. Once again, it will be as though the universe had never existed. So, if death doesn’t get you, entropy certainly will; either way it will be as if you never were, as if nothing ever was.

The phenomenal realm, then, is not just a temporal realm, it is a temporary realm! Once it did not exist, once again it will not exist. That is not what ‘being’ is. Being, by definition, is imperishable. You can’t both ‘be’ and ‘not be’; even Hamlet understood that! You either are or you are not, period.

In the phenomenal realm, things become and things decay; that is the nature of phenomena. But that is not what being is. Being is unchanged, regardless of the various ‘accidents’ that express it from time to time. Being (per Parmenides) is what is unchangeable about entities that are otherwise in the process of continuous change (Heraclitus). Hint: Nothing is unchangeable, save that it is!

So, what is the evil from which we pray for God to deliver us? It is death, it is entropy. Now, we know that even saints die, and we don’t imagine that God will somehow reverse the process of entropy in the world, so what does this mean?

God delivers us from evil by virtue of his noumenal nature. Everything that exists, exists both in the phenomenal realm and in the noumenal realm. Our phenomenal selves will vanish, as indeed will the whole phenomenal realm. Our noumenal selves, on the other hand, are eternal and can never perish. We ‘hope’ (see above) that our experiences in the phenomenal realm will be eternally preserved in the noumenal world. We hope that ‘we’ will be so preserved.

David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com.