Confessional Lutheranism and the Western Catholic Practice of Ceaseless Prayer
How can we, as Confessional Lutherans, understand the acceptability of the practice of ceaseless prayer as famously taught in the Eastern churches? As long as it is not confused with the false construct of late Byzantine EO Palamite soteriology, but is understood properly in the light of the Gospel, then such prayer is fine, and can even be helpful, whether as "ceaseless prayer" (1 Thessalonians 5:17, cf. Luke 18:1, 18:7, 21:36; Romans 12:12; Ephesians 6:18; Colossians 4:2) or as a continual meditation on (cf. Psalms 1:2; 119:15, 97, 98, 99) and recollection of God, or both. Interestingly enough, St. John Cassian wrote of this practice of ceaseless prayer/meditation in the early 5th Century, in his book, The Conferences , having been taught it even earlier while younger and travelling to Egypt in the late 4th, where he was instructed by an old desert father, Abba Isaac, who had himself known Anthony the Great. Abba Isaac, already old at the time of the conversation with John...