Source of Popular Martin Luther Quotation on Prayer?

[Alexander Suarez]

Does anyone know where this quotation, often attributed to Martin Luther, originates?

Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance. It is laying hold of His willingness.

 

[py3ak]

The phrasing does not appear in the first 55 volumes in the American edition of Luther's Works. It's also attributed to Lady Julian of Norwich, but it is at best a summary of a line like this one:
"And all this brought our Lord suddenly to my mind, and shewed these words, and said: I am Ground of thy beseeching: first it is my will that thou have it; and after, I make thee to will it; and after, I make thee to beseech it and thou beseechest it. How should it then be that thou shouldst not have thy beseeching?"
Or this one:
"(But the soul by no manner of prayer maketh God pliant to it: for He is ever alike in love.)"

-Lady Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chs. XLI & XLIII

 

[Phil D.]

I've seen this quotation attributed to at least 4 different authors.* But it undoubtedly comes from Richard Chenevix Trench, the venerable 19th century Irish-Anglican archbishop, philologist and poet. Here is the larger context:

There is the same argument as in the Parable of the Unjust Judge, one from the less to the greater; or more accurately, from the worse to the better,—but with this difference, that here the narrow-heartedness and selfishness of man is set against the liberality of God, while there it is his unrighteousness which is tacitly contrasted with the righteousness of God. The conclusion is, if selfish man can yet be won by prayer and importunity to give, and unjust man to do right, how much more certainly shall the bountiful Lord bestow, and the righteous Lord do justice.​

And perhaps there is this further difference, that here it is intercessory prayer,-prayer for the needs of others, in which we are bidden to be instant; while there it is rather for our own needs. Yet must we not urge, in either case, the illustrations so far, as to conceive of prayer as though it were an overcoming of God's reluctance, when it is, in fact, a laying hold of his highest willingness. For though there is an aspect under which God may present himself to us, similar to that of the Unjust Judge and the churlish neighbour, yet is there ever this difference,-that his is a seeming neglect and unwillingness to grant, their's a real.​

​

Under such an aspect of seeming unwillingness to hear, did the merciful Son of Man present himself to the Syro-Phaenician woman. (Matt. xv. 21.) But why? Not because he was reluctant to give, but because he knew that her faith was strong enough to bear this trial, and that in the end, though the trial for the moment might be hard, it would prove a blessing to her, more mightily calling out that faith; since faith ever needs to find some resistance, before it can be called out in any strength.​

(Notes on the Parables of Our Lord, [London: 1844], 311f.)​

In a footnote, Trench in turn attributes the inspiration for this quotable quote as having come from Dante's Inferno:

Regnum coelorum [The Kingdom of Heaven] suffereth violence​

From fervent love, and from that living hope​

That overcometh the Divine volition;​

Not in the guise that man o’ercometh man,​

But conquers it because it will be conquered,​

And conquered conquers by benignity.​

(Paradiso, XX, 94ff.)​

​

*(Actually, eight, as I go back and look: Lady Julian of Norwich; Martin Luther; Richard Trench; Richard Baxter; George Mueller; Phillips Brooks; Warren Weirsbe; Walt Gerber(?!) - as well as being shamelessly expropriated into various texts without attribution...)