We are human beings, not gods, and our God is not human. We are emphatically taught to respect that boundary and not to cross it. Yet that has been the danger at all times. “Flattening of the image of God”; the term may be new; the practice has always been there.

Recently someone said to me: “a vow should not be necessary, doesn’t God listen anyway when I ask something? Otherwise I get the feeling I am nagging”. Is that the reason we hear so little about vows? Are we reluctant to want to influence God with them?