In Letters to Malcolm, C. S. Lewis frames prayer not as a transaction but as a personal encounter, drawing on philosophical currents like the philosophy of personalism developed by Martin Buber (1868-1975), an Austrian philosopher and theologian, and the concept of the “numinous” espoused by Rudolf Otto (1869-1937), a German Lutheran philosopher, theologian, and comparative religionist. Buber’s philosophy of personalism posits that “[a]ll real living is meeting” and distinguishes between an impersonal “I-It” relationship and a direct, mutual “I-Thou” dialogue, favoring the latter (Buber, Martin. I and Thou [trans. Walter Kaufmann]. Free Press, 1970). Rudolf Otto, meanwhile, described the “numinous” as a nonrational experience of awe in the presence of divinity (mysterium tremendum et fascinans). He noted that a major commonality among the world’s religions is that they inspire deep emotional experience.

Lewis applies these ideas to the practice of prayer, explicitly praising Buber’s insights. He reconceives petitionary prayer as an act of “unveiling,” a willed consent to be known through a personal relationship with God, rather than as informing an omniscient God of a desired outcome. This transforms prayer from a report into a meeting, a moment in which God “speaks as ‘I’ when we truly call [God] ‘Thou’” (26). This personalist view allows Lewis to navigate between two theological risks: a cold, abstract deism he calls the “Managerial God” and an overly familiar anthropomorphism. He argues that images and abstractions are mutually corrective, preserving both God’s transcendence and God’s intimate presence. Similarly, Lewis invokes the numinous in his defense of archaic language in worship, suggesting that its unfamiliarity can be “a real aid to devotion” (6) by inspiring reverence. Through these frameworks, Lewis presents a theology of prayer grounded in dynamic, personal encounter.