On petitionary prayer: pleading with the Unjust Judge?

Christian Century, Jan 29, 1997 by Ronald Goetz

There are a variety of reasons one might wish petitionary prayer were valid. If God answers petitionary prayer, then it would follow that God is not and will not be bound by the same "natural" regularities which bind the created order. If God, in the spontaneity of the moment, answers prayers, then matter is not its own master, and the eternal God reserves the right of final approval over every event that takes place in the material order. If the true ontological governing reality in the universe is the freedom of God, then we have a basis on which to hope that we creatures have a genuine freedom in God. God's freedom liberates us from the various deterministic prisons into which modern naturalistic thinking, from Marx to Freud to B. F. Skinner, would cast us.

But if God never answers prayer, because God either cannot or will not do so, then our belief that there is any God at all can be grounded on nothing but a chain of dubious abstract arguments based upon our empirical perception of the functioning of the world. For if God cannot or will not act redemptively in the world, there can be no revelation. However, if Jesus was right, and God can and in fact does act in our world, then our proud empiricism and naturalistic deductions are redemptively put in their place.

If petitionary prayer has genuine power, it would give credence to our hope for redemption. If God is truly free of the limiting conditions of our finitude, then we have grounds on which to hope that God's power is sufficient to redeem the finite order. But if God's sovereignty is limited and God cannot act on our behalf here and now, then how could God ever be expected to muster the reserves to redeem us unto eternity?

On the other hand, if God could answer prayer but refuses to do so, on what grounds could we ever suppose that God intends to rescue us in an eschatological future? The Jesus of the Gospels saw God's answers to prayer as signs of, even down payments on, God's eternal commitment to our redemption.

The science of quantum physics has demonstrated that at the subatomic level, "reality" confounds many of our commonsense assumptions about a mechanistic universe. For example, electrons move from one place to another, in quantum leaps, without transversing the intervening space. It has been observed that electrons seem to behave in a manner similar to medieval angels. Modern physics abounds in such dizzying paradoxes. Nevertheless, where the question of the freedom of God is concerned, much modern and postmodern theology still assumes an essentially Newtonian universe.

PERHAPS the reason many Christians function with a view of the world in which God is not free to act is due, finally, not to the native attractiveness of naturalism but rather to the underlying fear that a God who is free cannot escape being the Unjust Judge of Jesus' parable. The unavoidable question is: Where has God, the answerer of prayer, been in the modern world's killing fields--from Armenia to Auschwitz to Cambodia, to Bosnia, to Rwanda? Surely many of the victims prayed to God for deliverance. Why such maddening variations in God's responses? Enter the Unjust Judge- the electing God who can appear ruthless and arbitrary.