Knocking on Heaven’s Door | David Crump

David Crump. Knocking on Heaven’s Door: A New Testament Theology of Petitionary Prayer. Baker, 2006. 345 pp.

With a glut of books on prayer in the Christian market, here is a scholarly addition to the mix, worthy of the serious reader’s time. The books on prayer tend to be light and devotional in nature, like Murray’s classic With Christ in the School of Prayer, or the more recent and popular The Prayer of Jabez and Secrets of the Vine. The recent popular works especially tend to promise more than they can deliver, or are products of the “Health and Wealth” television preachers.

David Crump’s (Ph.D., University of Aberdeen) work has all the apparatuses one would expect in order to do back checks and further research, if one is so inclined. His footnotes are not simply references to the source texts, but are minor excursions into the implications of those works. There are more complete excursuses where those are needed, such as at the end of chapter seven, “Our Wishes and God’s Will,” on the topics of “Our Epiousios Bread,” and “Periasmos in the Lord’s Prayer.” The bibliography of some twenty-two pages is worthy of a larger work. Crump did not limit himself to English-language works, but drew from scholars of many cultures; and he did not limit himself to just books. If there were one recommended improvement in the area of the bibliography, it would be to separate the list into categories of books, journals, etc. In addition to the bibliography are an excellent subject index and a Scripture index that goes beyond Scripture to include the extra-biblical works of the Apocrypha, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Early Christian Fathers. These tools make the book much more useful as a research tool, and not just another book on the subject of prayer.

Knocking on Heaven’s Door is not pabulum for the uninitiated. Crump asks the hard questions about why it appears that our prayers are not answered, why should we pray at all, and the connection between prayers of the saints and the existence of evil, even evil in the lives of believers. Crump also takes on the popular question of persistence in prayer (praying through) as a recent (1800’s–present) devotional prayer method. These are some of the hard questions that pastors must face in the lives of their congregations at the funerals of infants, the suffering of the elderly, as well as describing the effects and purposes behind persecution. How are these within the will of God? How, asks Crump, does God use, and even manufacture, and send evil for the benefit of His children (224)? How does God allow His saints, even His choice vessels (Paul) to suffer the effects of thorns in the flesh (222)? When Jesus taught the disciples to pray, “Deliver us from evil” (Matt 6), how does that relate to testing from God and temptation from Satan (James 1:2; 12-14) (142)?

Crump has not faded away from the hard questions, fully engaging Scripture without taking the easy path of harmonization and simplification. He sought to wholly answer the questions we have concerning apparently impossible promises from Jesus in Scripture that what we pray for we have. One difficulty this reviewer encountered in reading the book is that Crump resolves some of the difficulties by redefining Greek words. For example, in Luke 11:8 Crump also dealt with using Jesus’ name as a Christian shibboleth, not allowing the command of Jesus to pray in His name to become the magic password that makes up for the inadequacy of the rest of the prayer (169-178). Even the popular relationship of fasting and prayer is examined, and common ideas are exploded and replaced with a Scriptural view. Scriptural theology is examined through out this excellent book, as the doctrine of prayer weaves through the other Christian doctrines of the Cross, Theodicy, Salvation, and the person of Christ, among others. Here is a classic work on prayer that should become a classroom textbook in seminaries that are faithfully training pastors.

Timothy Mills
Pastor, Whitton Baptist Church
Tyronza, AR 72386
MidAmerica Baptist Theological Seminary, 2000 Alum
Aug 21, 2007

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