The Secret of the Psalter
by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A psalm that we cannot utter as a prayer, that makes us falter and horrifies us, is a hint to us that there Someone else is praying, not we; that the One who is her protesting his innocence, who in invoking God's judgment, who has come to such infinite depths of suffering is none other than Jesus Christ himself. He it is who is praying here, and not only here but in the whole Psalter.

This insight the New Testament and the Church have always recognized and declared. The Man Jesus Christ, whom no affliction, no ill, no suffering is alien and who yet was the wholly innocent and righteous one, is praying in the Psalter through the mouth of his Church. The Psalter is the prayer book of Jesus Christ in the truest sense of the word. He prayed the Psalter and now it has beome his prayer for all time. . . . Jesus Christ prays through the Psalter in his congregation. His congregation prays too, the individual prays. But here he prays, in so far as Christ prays within him, not in his own name, but in the Name of Jesus Christ. . . .

The Psalter is the vicarious prayer of Christ for his Church. . . . This prayer belongs, no to the individual member but to the whole Body of Christ. Only in the whole Christ does the whole Psalter become a reality, a whole which the individual can never fully comprehend and call his own. That is why the prayer of the psalms belongs in a peculiar way to the fellowship. . . .

In the Psalter we learn to pray on the basis of Christ's prayer. . . .

from Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, translated by John W. Doberstein.
San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1954, pp. 45-47.