Theopedia

Invocation

Invocation is the act of calling upon God’s name in prayer: the part of prayer in which the worshiper addresses God directly and asks him for pardon, help, or blessing.1 Because it is God alone who hears prayer, invocation is a worship due to him alone, never to any creature.2 It may be public, offered by a gathered congregation, or private, offered by a family or an individual.3

Confessional Witness

The Reformed confessions treat invocation as one of the acts owed to God in worship, in nearly identical language. The Second London Baptist Confession states that the true God “is therefore to be feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, and served, with all the heart and all the soul, and with all the might,”4 and the Westminster Confession, the Savoy Declaration, and the Philadelphia Confession all say the same of the God shown by the light of nature itself.5 This is the wider Reformed family’s collective witness, not a distinctive of the 1689 alone.

The confessions likewise agree on invocation’s proper object and mediator. Worship, including prayer, “is to be given to God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and to him alone; not to angels, saints, or any other creatures; and since the fall, not without a mediator, nor in the mediation of any other but Christ alone.”6 Prayer “with thanksgiving” is accordingly required of all people, but it is accepted only “in the name of the Son, by the help of the Spirit, according to his will.”7

Biblical Basis

Scripture locates the first corporate invocation in the generation of Enosh, Adam’s grandson: “then began men to call upon the name of the LORD” (Gen. 4:26). John Gill reads the verse as marking the institution of public worship itself, not merely an increase in private devotion: the families of the godly “joined together, and set up public worship; where they met, and socially served the Lord, and called upon him in the name of the Lord.”8

Invocation runs throughout the Psalms as a plea for God’s help in trouble: “call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me” (Ps. 50:15), and as an appeal grounded in God’s own character: “O thou that hearest prayer, unto thee shall all flesh come” (Ps. 65:2). Paul makes invocation the very definition of saving faith’s outward act: “whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved,” a calling that itself presupposes belief in the one called upon (Rom. 10:13-14). Because prayer must be offered “in the name of Christ” (John 14:13-14), invocation is addressed to the Father through the Son, a pattern Jesus himself gives his disciples in the opening address of the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name” (Matt. 6:9).

Historical Development

Gill’s reading of Genesis 4:26 treats the days of Enosh as the point at which individual, private calling on God’s name became a corporate practice: families “being more numerous… joined together, and set up public worship,” rather than each household calling on the Lord in isolation.8 On this reading, invocation as a shared act of worship, not merely private prayer, dates to the earliest chapters of Genesis.

By the mid-seventeenth century, the Westminster Assembly had given invocation a fixed place at the head of the public worship service. Its Directory for the Publick Worship of God (1645) instructs that once the congregation is assembled and called to worship, “the minister… is to begin with prayer,” described as

In all reverence and humility acknowledging the incomprehensible greatness and majesty of the Lord, (in whose presence they do then in a special manner appear,) and their own vileness and unworthiness to approach so near him, with their utter inability of themselves to so great a work; and humbly beseeching him for pardon, assistance, and acceptance, in the whole service then to be performed; and for a blessing on that particular portion of his word then to be read: And all in the name and mediation of the Lord Jesus Christ.9

Offered before the reading of Scripture and the sermon, this opening prayer acknowledges God’s greatness and the congregation’s own need, and asks his blessing on the service to follow: the pattern the term “invocation” now names in Reformed order-of-service practice.

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic teaching and devotion extend invocation beyond God himself to the saints and the Virgin Mary as intercessors, a practice treated at its own article, Invocation of Saints. The Reformed confessions and theologians named above reject this extension on the same ground that defines invocation itself: since invocation is “a worship proper to him alone,” Leigh concludes that “the Papists’ prayers to Saints, Angels and the Virgin Mary are sinful, since prayer is a divine religious worship, and so may be given to none but God himself.”10 The confessions state the same limit positively rather than polemically: worship belongs to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit “alone; not to angels, saints, or any other creatures.”6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Edward Leigh, A Systeme or Body of Divinity (London: A. M. for William Lee, 1654), 611: “It is a calling upon God in the name of Christ with the heart, and sometimes with the voice according to his will for our selves and others.” ↩

  2. Leigh, Systeme of Divinity, 611-612: “the object of prayer is only God… as it is the property of God to hear our prayers, Psal. 65. 1, 2. so invocation is a worship proper to him alone.” ↩

  3. Leigh, Systeme of Divinity, 633: “Publick invocation is the prayer of a Congregation… Private prayer is that, which is made by some few together… or by one alone, which may be called secret prayer.” ↩

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 22, “Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day,” para. 1. ↩

  5. Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 21, para. 1; cf. Savoy Declaration (1658), chap. 22, para. 1, and Philadelphia Confession of Faith (1742), chap. 22, para. 1. ↩

  6. Second London Baptist Confession, chap. 22, para. 2. ↩ ↩2

  7. Second London Baptist Confession, chap. 22, para. 3. ↩

  8. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book IV, chap. 2. ↩ ↩2

  9. Westminster Assembly, The Directory for the Publick Worship of God (Edinburgh, 1645; repr., Philadelphia: B. Franklin, 1745), 13. ↩

  10. Leigh, Systeme of Divinity, 612. ↩