E.M. Bounds on Prayer: What He Meant by the Whole Man
⏱ 7 min read
Most people who go looking for E.M. Bounds on prayer are carrying one plain question: does it matter what my body is doing while I pray, or is that just religious theatre? He was an American Methodist minister who wrote a series of short, hard books about prayer, most of them published after his death. He is remembered for the early hours and the scolding tone. Less noticed is that he stopped, more than once, to ask which part of a person is actually doing the praying — and refused the obvious answer.
What E.M. Bounds taught about prayer and the body
The sentence the rest of it hangs from is only twelve words long.
Prayer takes in man in his whole being, mind, soul and body.
— E.M. Bounds, Essentials of Prayer
Three nouns, and the body arrives last in the sentence and first in practice. The claim is about where prayer happens: not in one compartment of a person while the rest waits outside.
Does posture matter in prayer? He answers both ways in one sentence
Having said the body is included, Bounds immediately does something unusual. He argues with himself inside a single sentence, and gives the objection more words than the thesis.
The attitude of the body counts much in prayer, although it is true that the heart may be haughty and lifted up, and the mind listless and wandering, and the praying a mere form, even while the knees are bent in prayer.
— E.M. Bounds, Essentials of Prayer
Read it for shape rather than content. The main clause is seven words. The qualification runs to thirty-odd, and every one of them is spent describing a person kneeling badly. This is a writer who knows which half of his argument will be abused. He wants the body in, and nobody to leave thinking the body is the point. The posture counts much. The posture settles nothing.
Kneeling, standing, prostrate: which prayer posture did he require?
The tradition Bounds is writing inside had no single required position, and he does not invent one.
Prostration of the body becomes us in praying as well as prostration of the soul.
— E.M. Bounds, Essentials of Prayer
Becomes us. Not is required of us — becomes us, as a coat becomes a person: fitness rather than obligation. And when he describes what praying people actually do, he lists options rather than issuing an instruction.
There may be kneeling, and there may be standing in prayerful attitude.
— E.M. Bounds, The Reality of Prayer
Two mays. For a man capable of real severity about prayer, that is a loose sentence, and loose on purpose. Bodies differ. Knees give out. What he will not concede is the third option, where the body is simply absent.
Is kneeling enough? His own warning against it
It would be a misreading to present Bounds as a champion of posture. The sharpest line against kneeling in this whole body of literature is his own, written about the prayer meetings he sat in.
So much knee-bending and talking, and the prayer is done.
— E.M. Bounds, Purpose in Prayer
There is no charity in that sentence at all. Elsewhere he lets slip what he was hearing in those rooms — public prayer performed for the congregation rather than offered to God.
If there were always reverent bended hearts when bended knees are uttering words before God to please men’s ears!
— E.M. Bounds, Purpose in Prayer
The construction is a wish, not a report, which tells you what he took the ordinary case to be. So the honest summary is not that Bounds taught posture matters. It is that he taught posture matters and then spent most of his ink on the fact that it can be counterfeited, and usually is.
E.M. Bounds on tears, and why he counted them as prayer
The place where Bounds is least ambiguous about the body is not the knee. It is weeping. Describing one of the Old Testament intercessors at work, he writes:
He prays unto God, deeply burdened, prostrate on the ground and weeping, while the whole city unites with him in prayer.
— E.M. Bounds, Prayer and Praying Men
Burdened, prostrate, weeping — an emotional state, a physical position, a bodily act, given as one continuous description rather than as cause and effect. He does the same when he reaches for the New Testament image of the intercessor.
Like our one Mediator between God and man, he who prays stands midway between God and man, with prayers, supplications, “and strong cryings and tears.” Prayer holds in its grasp the movements of the race of man, and embraces the destinies of men for all eternity.
— E.M. Bounds, Essentials of Prayer
The grounding underneath this is plainly incarnational. In the passage below, a hymn stanza runs straight into Bounds’s own sentence; it is reproduced here as it stands rather than tidied.
He wept that we might weep; Each sin demands a tear; In heaven alone no sin is found, And there’s no weeping there.” Jesus Christ was altogether man.
— E.M. Bounds, Essentials of Prayer
Altogether man. That is the load-bearing phrase. His case for the body does not rest on psychology or on anything resembling a method. It rests on the claim that the one Christians pray through had a body, used it, and wept with it. If the body were beneath prayer, that would be the awkward fact to explain.
Where E.M. Bounds on prayer overreaches: prayer and sickness
Honesty requires flagging the point at which he overreaches. Quoting the word that came to Hezekiah, Bounds adds a summary of his own.
I have heard thy prayer; I have seen thy tears; behold I will heal thee.” Sickness dies before prayer.
— E.M. Bounds, Prayer and Praying Men
The first half is Scripture, a specific promise to a specific king. The second half is Bounds generalising, and it is not true as stated. Faithful people have prayed and stayed ill, and the century Bounds wrote in was full of them. A reader can take his argument about the whole man seriously and still decline that sentence. The interest of the line lies elsewhere anyway: what God is recorded as noticing is not the prayer only but the tears. The body was part of what was seen.
What prayer does back to the body, mind and soul
The last move in the argument is the one most easily missed. If the whole person prays, then the whole person is affected by praying.
So we repeat, that as the entire man comes into play in true, earnest effectual praying, so the entire man, soul, mind and body, receives the benefits of prayer.
— E.M. Bounds, Essentials of Prayer
And he is careful about what kind of benefit he means. Not relief, not resolution — something slower and less comfortable.
Prayer so prepares the heart that it softens under the disciplining hand of God.
— E.M. Bounds, Essentials of Prayer
Softening under a disciplining hand is not a promise that anything will get easier. It is a claim that the person praying becomes more workable. Andrew Murray, writing in the same decades on another continent, arrived at much the same place by another road, urging readers to begin in a posture of reverence and let the sense of it follow; his practice is set out in his complete reader’s guide.
What E.M. Bounds did not teach: no method, no technique
Bounds is regularly conscripted for things he never taught. He prescribed no breathing pattern, no body-awareness exercise, no technique of any kind. What he and his contemporaries prescribed were conditions: a place, a shut door, an hour set aside, an unhurried approach, a posture entered deliberately. That is a smaller claim than the one usually made on their behalf, and the only one the texts will carry.
And when he finally says what prayer is, the body drops out of the sentence entirely — the last evidence that he never confused the two.
Prayer is the helpless and needy child crying to the compassion of the Father’s heart and the bounty and power of a Father’s hand.
— E.M. Bounds, Purpose in Prayer
A child crying does not have a posture. It has a need, and a body that cannot help showing it.
Which E.M. Bounds books on prayer to read first
Four of his books carry the whole-man material quoted above: Essentials of Prayer, The Reality of Prayer, Purpose in Prayer and Prayer and Praying Men. Most of the whole-man passages quoted above come from Essentials of Prayer, which is where to begin if the body is the question you came with; Purpose in Prayer is the shorter, sharper book, and the one where the scolding runs hardest. All of them are long out of copyright and freely available, and all of them are short enough to read in an evening — which is not the same as being easy to read.
Where this leaves a reader, and why a journal day begins with a pause
This is the reason a Stilling Waves day opens with a short pause before the reading rather than starting straight in. Nothing is being asked of the knees. The pause is only an admission that the person about to read has a body, arrived in it, and is unlikely to leave it at the door — which is roughly all Bounds was claiming, at greater length.
This article belongs to a series on what the older devotional writers actually taught about the body in prayer. The overview is here: Does the Body Matter in Prayer? What the Old Writers Said.
