On Prayer in Anglican Systematic Theology

For an ecclesial tradition that does not have a particularly strong history of systematic theology, it is curious that several of those currently engaged in the production of large‐scale, multi‐volume projects of systematic theology are Anglican theologians. In this article, I investigate three such projects: Sarah Coakley’s God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’, Graham Ward’s How the Light Gets In: Ethical Life I, and Katherine Sonderegger’s Systematic Theology – Vol. 1: The Doctrine of God. In the first section, I examine these examples of systematic theology in light of Stephen Sykes’s analysis of the state of the discipline in Anglican theology. Then, in the second section, I identify a common characteristic shared by Coakley, Ward, and Sonderegger: the grounding of systematic theology in the practice of prayer. I argue that although these contemporary systematicians might not see themselves as enunciating an Anglican systematics, the systematic seriousness they accord to matters of prayer can be interpreted as articulations of the Anglican propensity to grant theological priority to the liturgy. In the final section, I suggest that for all the theological opportunities made available by the systematic reclamation of prayer, these invariably positive embraces of prayer leave little space for what might be called the Schattenseite of prayer. There is a ‘shadow‐side’ to the history and practice of prayer that I argue needs to be appropriately theorized if the category of prayer is to have a future in the discipline of systematic theology.