The last of the philosophical arguments against prayer is that prayer is inconsistent with the truth that all which comes to pass is predetermined in the predestination of God. Unless the will of God could have been, or could be, other than it is, what room is there for the effect of prayer?
1. The objection carries us into the old controversy between the defenders of the Divine foreknowledge and Divine sovereignty on the one hand, and the defenders of the freedom of the human will on the other. With the comprehensive breadth characteristic of perfect truth, the reality of both, alike in the Old Testament and in the New, is assumed. Simply from the fact of that breadth of treatment, men might indeed have learned that, in our own acceptance of both these facts, there was nothing to harmonize, because between the two there is, in reality, no conflict, and many a subtle intellect might have saved itself much painful effort and disappointment. On the one side, the house of Israel is “as the clay in the potter’s hand”; on the other, “at what instant” God “shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom,” His attitude towards it is contingent on the nation “turning from their evil,” or “doing evil in his sight”.
If we cannot reconcile the two facts of eternal predestination and of the power of prayer, we must not for that reason overlook either. On the one hand, we shall become heartless and hopeless unless we firmly believe that “through the ages one increasing purpose runs,” a purpose which will work itself out independently of us, a purpose of love which has in long ages past settled what shall take place, and to what it will lead. And, on the other hand, we shall become lifeless and formal atheists unless we allow that our prayers can and do have an effect in the world, that events are moulded according to our requests, that God does hear and answer the supplications of His people.
2. Wherever a moral government of the world is acknowledged, it must be likewise acknowledged that the Divine purpose is no fate, no inflexible allotment, but a purpose which in its execution is conditioned by the free actions of men, a pre-supposition without which the conceptions of imputation and responsibility, of being lost and saved, of judgment and mercy, of faith and conversion, would be without all sense and meaning. But of the human actions, the free acts of men, by which the Divine purpose is self-conditioned, and which it has ordained as conditions for the development of God’s Kingdom in the human race, prayer also is one.
Whether I open my mouth or lift my hand is, before my doing it, strictly within the jurisdiction and power of my personal will; but, however I may decide, my decision, so absolutely free to me, will have been already incorporated by the All-seeing, All-controlling Being as an integral part, however insignificant, of His one all-embracing purpose, leading on to effects and causes beyond itself. Prayer too is only a foreseen action of man which, together with its results, is embraced in the eternal predestination of God. To us this or that blessing may be strictly contingent on our praying for it; but our prayer is nevertheless so far from necessarily introducing change into the purpose of the Unchangeable that it has been all along taken, so to speak, into account by Him. If then, with “the Father of lights” there is in this sense “no variableness, neither shadow of turning,” it is not therefore irrational to pray for specific blessings, because God works out His plans not merely in us but by us; and we may dare to say that that which is to us a free self-determination, may be not other than a foreseen element of His work.
Prayer has always to do with the relation between our aims and God’s eternal aim, between our will and God’s will. Whatever we pray for (and we may pray for even the smallest earthly things that are really dear to us) must have reference to our highest aim, which is included in God’s eternal purpose. Otherwise our prayer is not Christian; we cannot pray with the firm assurance of being heard, we do not have the promise that what we ask will be given us by the Father in heaven. [Note: J. Kaftan, Die Christliche Lehre vom Gebet, 14.]
Nothing can alter God’s grace, His will in that sense, His large will and final purpose—our racial blessing, our salvation, our redemption in Jesus Christ. But He is an infinite opportunist. His ways are flexible. His intentions are amenable to us if His will is changeless. The steps of His process are variable according to our freedom and His. [Note: P. T. Forsyth, in The London Quarterly Review, July 1908, p. 13.]
3. For God’s will, which we pray may be done, is, after all, no impersonal law. It is the will of a personal Being who in the secret chamber of our soul reasons, expostulates, explains, warns, guides, attracts us to Himself. And this is the thought that may best sustain us to pray and not to faint. If we are created to seek intercourse with God, it is because He so created us, or, in other words, because He first desired intercourse with us, and therefore endowed us with its capacity. It is an attribute of our creation, and therefore a purpose of our Creator. And as Christians we know, what even as men we could not but hope, that the purposes of our creation are purposes of love, and that our every effort to fulfil them will be more than met by Him who first loved us and gave Himself for us, and who has left us the picture of the father who, when his sinful son was a great way off, saw him, and had compassion on him, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.
Above the thought that we are known, with all its awfulness, towers the thought that, despite that knowledge, we are also loved—loved through all the disguises that conceal us from ourselves or others; loved through all our temptations, our sorrows, our sins; loved through all our ineffectual wanderings away from love; loved with a love which, because it is all holy, must at times appear to sinners strangely, imperiously stern; but all the while desires to have fuller fellowship with us in prayer, and to say to us at the last, “Ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full”. [Note: J. R. Illingworth, University and Cathedral Sermons, 179.]
To our idea of God moral fixity and perfection are needful; but He, “with whom there can be no variation, neither shadow that is cast by turning,” is a personal Being who acts by a law of love. He is “the Father of lights” from whom “every good gift and every perfect boon” comes down, and of such an One we are encouraged to “ask in faith, nothing doubting”. His predestination is a predestination in love, and, obviously, love offers itself to a free response. Beyond all our finite limitations of time, He has foreseen actions as well as prayers which to us are, at the moment, perfectly spontaneous; they are already included as factors and causes working out that final result which, beyond all dispute is “on a line with the good pleasure of His will”. [Note: A. J. Worlledge, Prayer, 58.]
God’s unchangeableness is the very foundation of desire, and hope, and activity, in things religious as in things natural. The uniformity of nature’s operations in the one, and the constancy of God’s promises in the other, give aim and calculation and certainty to events; God’s promises being so many pledges of His procedure, upon the immutability of which the Christian conceives hope and anticipation, and waits for accomplishment. It is His unchangeableness that gives confidence so soon as you know what His purposes are. Of these purposes the Scripture is the record. They are laws like those of the Medes and Persians, which alter not, and their fulfilment may be built on as securely as the rising of the sun, or the revolution of the heavens, or the most stable of nature’s courses. [Note: TheCollected Writings of Edward Irving, iii. 4.]
4. But another difficulty here arises. It is obvious that any doctrine of the efficacy of prayer must maintain that God will do for a suppliant something which He will not do for one who does not supplicate. Is not this inconsistent with the unchangeableness, not merely of the Divine predestination, but also of the innermost character, as determined by His essence, of God Himself? Do we not imply that He acts under the influence of emotion? May we not, unconsciously, but none the less really, attribute weakness to Him?
The answer is that, unless there is a deeply rooted disunion between the character of the Creator and the creature, there must be in Him a true emotion; for even in our own personality we are convinced that the constituent elements are not reason and will only, but also love. It would, indeed, be a moral weakness in a parent always to yield to a child’s wayward wish, however injurious to his own purpose of love and to the child’s highest interests the wish might be. But it would be the gravest of all moral defects if there were no desire in the parent’s heart to grant, if possible, the child’s requests, especially when the child reposed in him an absolute trust, expressed by his petition, confident in the conviction that the will of father and child were one.
This doctrine of Providence is by no means free from difficulties; but it avoids the difficulties that beset the doctrine of predestination. God is not moving men like pieces on a chessboard, but is exerting over them, as free, the guidance to which as a good God He is entitled. So long as He treats them as the free and responsible beings that they are, who can object to His ruling their life in the interest of His own gracious and holy purpose? These statements do not remove mystery from Providence; but they justify confidence in such a Providence as the Christian revelation sets forth—a care and direction universal, paternal in spirit, holy in aim, wise in administration, spiritual in quality, educative in purpose, looking ever to the good, and using natural means along with spiritual as agencies helpful to spiritual ends. [Note: W. N. Clarke, An Outline of Christian Theology, 152.]
The conception of prayer as a means of influencing an unwilling God to do that which He would not otherwise have done rests on a theory of the relation of the Divine will to the human which is equally unsatisfactory to ethics and to religion. The true conception of prayer is that it opens the way for the impartation of the Divine blessings by providing the necessary condition of their bestowal, and this all along the line. [Note: W. Adams Brown, Christian Theology in Outline, 385.]
It is irreverent, they say, to express a wish rising out of the narrowness of our intellect and heart, about something which His decree has long ago settled; it is an ill-timed curiosity to say, I wish it might be so and so, when we shall presently learn how He has willed it. Do not be perplexed by such words. Christ did it, therefore we, too, may do it. It is one of the privileges that belong to our position as children of God. [Note: F. E. Schleiermacher, Sermons, 41.]
