being unable to pray as we ought. For Barth, Paul’s very act of letter writing was an act of prayer, composed in the paradoxical posture of being unable to pray. ‘Are these words aught else but one precise prayer? Yet, even while writing these words he knew that he did not know what he should pray for as he ought.’18 Barth’s exegesis of Romans 8 is largely dominated by the ground-clearing exercise of determining what prayer is not. It is not the mystical ‘way of denial’, for this is a ‘blind alley’;