Content area
Abstract
My dissertation studies the way in which Erasmus understood prayer and taught Western Christendom to pray in the first three decades of the sixteenth century. I examine his concept of prayer according to three of his own categories: (1) the nature of God, (2) the identity of those who pray to him, and (3) the principal object of petitionary prayer. According to Erasmus prayer is addressed to a God whose nature is goodness by those who are under obligation to be pious and who become spiritually transformed as they ask God for whatever may contribute to the spiritual scopus or chief object of their prayers: the glorification of God and the accomplishment of their salvation. The contextual framework of my argument includes what I have called Erasmus' "pastoral ministry through the printing press." I present Erasmus not only as a thinker about prayer but as a teacher of prayer through his books, and I see his teaching as a function of ministry. Erasmus did not think and teach in a vacuum. I place his apology for the invocation of the saints, his interpretation of the Lord's Prayer, his prayer book, and his attitude towards praying for the dead into the context of the religious thought and culture of the Church Fathers, the Middle Ages, and of the Reformation.
