On petitionary prayer: pleading with the Unjust Judge?

Christian Century, Jan 29, 1997 by Ronald Goetz

IN THE RARELY cited parable in Luke 18, Jesus compares God to an Unjust Judge. This judge neither fears God nor cares for humanity. He finally grants justice to a widow because she constantly hectors him with her petitions. Jesus observes, "And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?"

The posture of nagging God might seem a rather pathetic one to the theologically sophisticated. Can we actually hope to sway the eternal God with the sheer volume of our insistent petitions? In an epoch which proudly boasts that humanity has come of age, can we relate to God with the desperation of a pathetic widow whose only recourse is to solicit a capricious autocrat? For people who have come of age, corrupt officials are to be sent to jail, not petitioned.

If the parable appears to insult our sense of ourselves, it also raises basic questions about how the universe is governed. How can we reconcile belief in the validity of petitionary prayer--belief that in answer to our prayers God can and does affect our earthly destinies--with the ultimately deterministic presuppositions which lie behind the scientific, rationalistic picture of the cosmos which informs so much of our daily lives? What is at stake in terms of religious practice in the debate over miracles which has raged since the Enlightenment is above all the question of petitionary prayer.

Eighteenth-century deists argued that, given the mechanical regularity of the solar system, God could not make the sun stop in the sky to enable Joshua to defeat the enemies of Israel. One does not have to believe in the literal truth of the Joshua story to observe that the deistic assumption that God's initiatives are utterly restricted by the "laws of nature" means not only that God cannot make the sun stand still, but that God cannot cure a child's cancer. If science and philosophic naturalism provide the final word, then both colossal things and small things must function with the same ironclad regularity within our unified cosmos.

The God of the deists (and there remains a great deal of deism in most of us) does not make a difference in the material order, and such a God cannot touch our hearts and souls either, since in the modern perspective the human being is a psychosomatic unity. Thus everything, even our souls, seems closed to God's actions. Hence, petitionary prayer seems grounded in an illusion.

Another kind of objection to petitionary prayer arises. Isn't petitionary prayer unethical? Knowing that not everyone believes in prayer or practices prayer, are not our personal requests an attempt to gain a privileged position, to jump to the head of the line? If, when the bombs are falling, we pray that they will not fall on us, are we not finally praying for catastrophe to fall on someone else?

Some Christians have given up on petitionary prayer except perhaps as a public formality. Some conceive of prayer as a nonpetitionary submission to the inevitabilities of human destiny, or as the praise of that reality in which all things are grounded, or as thanksgiving for the luck of having been born, or as the confession of one's failings, etc. Such prayer is perfectly consistent with the belief that God does not change anything necessitated by the autonomous natural regularities of the universe. To pray is thus to ask for and expect nothing.

But the Gospels abundantly testify to the fact that Jesus himself engaged in petitionary prayer and taught and commanded his followers so to pray. The Lord's Prayer is filled with petitions. Jesus' belief in the concrete efficacy of prayer was unqualified. "Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you." Such confidence is a reflection of the utter ease and assurance with which Jesus performed many of his mighty works. For Jesus, prayer was an instrument of healing power (Mark 9:29).

AT THIS JUNCTURE, mainstream Christians are afflicted with a certain schizophrenia. If we let scientific naturalism and historicism shape what we think of prayer, we run smack into the Jesus of the Gospels whose beliefs about the power of prayer stand in sharp contrast to a purely naturalistic worldview. We are thus in the awkward position of being disciples of Jesus who nonetheless must conclude that at the most critical junctures of religious life and practice, Jesus was bogged down in a primitive worldview. If, on the other hand, we engage in petitionary prayer, as the majority of Christians still do, our religious lives are swimming against the tide of our own everyday scientific and naturalistic assumptions.

Following through on the implications of petitionary prayer would entail a radical break with our usual rationalistic and naturalistic ways of viewing reality. Further, the practice of petitionary prayer requires, if we are honest, a re-examination of that theological skeleton in the closet--the concept of election. It is small wonder that the parable of the Unjust Judge is so often ignored or that on the whole question of petitionary prayer we frequently do not let our right hand know what our left hand is doing.