For Ever and Ever

I used to think that "for ever" at the end of the Lord's Prayer was repeated just for the sake of emphasis, just as "lots and lots" doesn't mean much more than "lots"! Not only was I wrong, but the explanation of how I was wrong is enough to fill up an article!

The concluding phrase of the Lord's Prayer is an example of a doxology, though a very simple one. A doxology ascribes glory (doxa, in Greek) to God - many doxologies, like the one we sing at the end of some psalms, have a Trinitarian formula, but this one is addressed, like the rest of the prayer, to God the Father.

I say "the rest of the prayer", but the prayer itself, as recorded in Matthew and Luke, has no doxology. However, even in Jewish times, it was customary to end a prayer with words like "Blessed be God for time everlasting," and these words would often form part of a prayer even without being explicitly written down.

We know that people around Jesus' time had different interpretations of the Bible. The Sadducees felt there was nothing outside the present age of history. The Pharisees believed there would be a second age, a "world to come", in which the dead would return to life and wrongs would be set right. To reinforce this latter view, the Temple prayers were changed, to make it clear that God was to be blessed not just to the end of the age, but "from age to age" - from the present world to the future, the resurrection world.

This phrase was taken over by the Church in its earliest prayers, and was easily translated into Greek (eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn - literally, to the ages of the ages) and from Greek into Latin (per omnia sæcula sæculorum - through all the ages of ages). Paul uses it (Rom 16:27, Gal 1:5) and it echoes through the Book of Revelation (from 1:6 onwards!).

Language constantly changes, though, and when it came to translating the Bible and the liturgy into English, there was no obvious equivalent to the Greek or the Latin phrase. The French could continue to refer to les siècles des siècles, even though siècle had come to mean a period of one hundred years. The best choice was to use the word "ever" (or "ay"), although people no longer perceived this as a noun, and only used it in the phrase "for ever". (In German, the problem was different - the noun underlying the adjective ewig had long disappeared, leading to the paraphrases in alle Ewigkeit and von Ewigkeit zu Ewigkeit.)

Nevertheless, "for ever and ever" sounded weak, and did not give the whole sense of God's glory, glory not only in this world, but in the next. For this, Archbishop Cranmer, who was largely responsible for the first English prayer book, adopted a different phrase - "world without end".

"World" and "age" are different shades in the meaning of the original Hebrew word used in the Benedictions in the Temple. But the English word "world" gradually lost its original reference to time, and came to mean little more than the globe we live on. While the team translating the Bible in King James' time could happily use both "world" and "age" to render the Greek aion, modern translations have replaced "the world to come" (in Matt 12:32, for example) with "the age to come".

When the language of worship was modernized at the end of the last century, liturgists felt that "world without end" had lost its meaning, and replaced it with the phrase "now and for ever". We should remember that this is a short way of saying "in this age and the next". For there are two ages, and God guides and rules and is loved, worshipped and adored in both. And so we pray that God's name should be hallowed, for ever and ever. Amen.

HD