The Grand Coherence, Chapter 20. On Prayer
This post is part of the book The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity. For all the links in the book, see this introductory post.
Most of this book has been about the public evidence for Christianity. This chapter is about the private evidence. It's the nature of private evidence that I can't share mine with you, and you can't share yours with me, without the vast majority of its evidential force being lost in translation. I'll tell you a little, a very little, of mine later, by way of illustration. But you'll have to find your own to be convinced, and the main goal of this chapter is to teach you how.
Many claims have been urged in the course of this book, and it would have bogged down the text to fully spell out the level of evidence, and the justified degree of confidence, in each claim along the way. But two urgent, overwhelming propositions stand out:
Scientific materialism is false.
Jesus Christ rose from the dead.
The second claim would be entitled to belief in the same way as any other well-attested historical fact, if not more so, because there is more eyewitness testimony, more disinterestedly given, more bravely defended, etc., were it not miraculous. As it is, doubt is legitimate because of its prima facie improbability. Rather than compel belief, therefore, it irrevocably disrupts the complacency of unbelief. While the evidence for the resurrection can't be dismissed or explained away, belief in the resurrection can't settle until it's part of a coherent worldview, a reflective equilibrium. And the only worldview in which the resurrection fits in and is at home is full-fledged Christian orthodoxy. That's more than I can prove here, but I've provided a glimpse. To arrive at complete Christian conviction, though, that's not enough. It takes lived experience of the Christian life and at least a little bit, probably a lot, of prayer.
Have you prayed yet? You should. It's only sense. To seek truth without praying would be a little like going to a library to research some difficult topic, and turning from one book to another, trying to understand, racking your brain, having a difficult time of it, and making a little bit of slow progress, while all the time, the world's greatest expert in the subject is sitting there in the library, watching you, completely at your disposal to answer any questions you may have. Several people point out to you that he is present and available to answer questions and provide explanations. But you don't take advantage of it. You won't talk to him. He sits there, smiling, waiting for you to speak, while you struggle through a whole stack of his books, wrestling with the difficult phrases, in an agony of confusion about his meaning. In the same way, God is present as you read this, and well able to answer all your questions, if you ask them through prayer.
Prayer is at once easy and very difficult. It's as easy as speaking, and as difficult as laying bare one's whole soul and inviting an awesome, overwhelming, and incomprehensible power to enter into it, occupy it, and do you know not what. If there is no God, what do you have to lose? Possibly you risk looking a little silly, or getting your hopes up in vain. But not much. If there is a God, you might have a good deal to lose, in a sense. He might tell you to do something you don't want to do. But I don't think that's the main source of reluctance to pray. I think there's a fear of encountering God, not so much of what He might do to us as of what He is, of His sheer greatness and power and goodness, and our own insignificance and vileness in comparison. But if you want the truth, you'd better be willing to face that.
Then again, you’re likely to get, or think that you get, nothing but silence.
The example of the expert in the library suggests one reason why. If you ask the expert what a passage in his writings means, no matter how well-disposed he is towards you, he may not give you an answer that you can recognize as responsive to your question. Answer may be impossible, because you don't have the prerequisites. Often, what a fellow expert might understand in ten words, the novice can't understand in a thousand. The best possible explanation the novice could understand might take a hundred words and still get it somewhat wrong. Or the best answer might be to tell the novice something quite different and apparently unrelated, which, however, would set him on a path to learn the prerequisites for understanding the answer to his question, eventually.
Another reason God leaves some prayers unanswered is that, while it is good to ask for God's help in discerning whether Christianity is true, it is wrong to test God. As Jesus told Satan in response to one of the temptations in the wilderness:
Jesus responded, “The Scriptures also say, ‘You must not test the Lord your God.'" (Matthew 4:7)
The scriptural passage to which Jesus is referring here occurs when the Israelites, at a place called Massah, or Meribah, admits to the desert through which they are traveling, demand that Moses give them water, in such intemperate and challenging language that they effectively make the provision of water the test of whether God is helping them at all.
Elsewhere, when the Pharisees and Sadducees ask for some miraculous sign to prove the extraordinary claims Jesus is making about himself, Jesus rebukes them, saying
"A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah.” (Matthew 16:4)
Scripture juxtaposes these warnings against testing God by means of requests for miracles with emphatic affirmations that God answers prayers. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says:
"Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.
"Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? So if you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!" (Matthew 7:7-11)
Yet another recurring theme is that God will answer prayers only for those who believe that their prayers will be answered. He often tells those who request and receive miracles of healing, "Your faith has saved you," implying but only because they believed the miracle would work, it did. Most dramatically, Jesus says:
“Have faith in God. Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. (Mark 11:22-24)
This gets rather alarming! A world in which every faithful Christian can order mountains to be thrown into the sea sounds chaotic and dangerous. What if we should happen to be on the slopes of one of them when it gets dunked?
Also, from a scientific perspective, this teaching is very frustrating! It's part of the scientist's ethos to conduct experiments, and to believe hypotheses on the basis of testing. A hypothesis that forbids itself to be tested stands self-condemned. Falsifiability is the standard of science, and we used it earlier in the book to refute the scientific pretensions of the theory of evolution. But Christian claims about prayer are strangely gerrymandered to be unfalsifiable! It's not permitted to be tested, and as soon as the motive is to test it, it stops working.
But this taboo against testing the power of prayer seems reasonable as soon as you regard it not as a scientific hypothesis about natural laws, but as part of a relationship with a person. It's typical of most human relationships, too, that deliberately testing them is taboo. I might sometimes need to make a request, in desperate need, that tests a friendship. If the friend answers my need and fulfills the difficult, urgent request, the friendship will probably be strengthened. But if I make the request in order to test the friendship, it certainly won't strengthen it. In that case, it is proof of mistrust, and will give offense as soon as the friend finds out.
God really does want to be your friend. Jesus tells his disciples on the eve of the crucifixion:
"I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you." (John 15:15)
In praying, we should seek to strengthen our nascent friendship with God. And that's the best way to get at the truth of Christianity, too, for the most incredible claim of Christianity is precisely God's friendship with us, God's great love for us even in our sin and moral squalor and weakness. Once you've understood the great truths of pre-Christianity, the commonsense theology of creation and fall, the one towering difficulty that remains is to accept, to realize, to embrace that the all-wise creator and sustainer of the world is profoundly interested in you, and determined to make you live in bliss forever, if it's at all possible, at any cost to you, at any cost to Him. The more your friendship with God flourishes, the better is your personal evidence that the good news of the Gospel is true.
What does that imply for how we ought to pray? Do common ways that people pray make sense for cultivating a stronger relationship with God?
People often pray in order to ask for things. It's a mark of strong friendship that you can ask for things that you really need, and the help will be given. You can rely upon it. And you may strengthen a friendship by showing that you know you can rely on it, and trusting in your friend to help in a time of need. At the same time, asking for things that we merely want, but don't need, can be an abuse of friendship, and weaken it.
Some of this cross-applies to prayer to God, with a few clarifications. First, as to need, our entire lives on earth are, if we but knew it, a time of dire need in which God is our only help. We are fallen, mortal creatures, doomed to die, and it's an intolerable fate for us, contrary to our original nature and our heart's desires, but rendered inevitable by sin and its legacy, unless God rescues us through some unimaginable redemption. And so it is always permissible for us to pray for redemption, for salvation, for eternal life, if we are capable of it. But often, we can't rise to that, because we don't really want it. Our desires don't aim so high. And so we ask for earthly things, money and economic security and health and whatnot, which we probably ought to care about and strive for less than we do.
Still, there's generally no sin in praying for earthly blessings, and there can be some good. It's a good time to supplement the idea of God as our friend with two other ideas: God as our Father, and God as a lover almost as a man loves a woman. The latter metaphor may seem shockingly inappropriate, yet scripture and Christian tradition are full of the idea that first the nation of Israel, and then the Christian Church, are loved by God as a bridegroom loves a bride. It matters here because while material help among friends is a distraction, and dependence of one friend in another is a flaw in a friendship, material help and dependence for parents or lovers is a pleasure. Good parents love to do things for their children, and delight in their dependence, and a lover loves to give and to be needed. God loves to give us what we want. And praying for earthly blessings is good for us. It makes us review what we want and what we are striving for against the divine standard. Some things that we work hard for, we might not be willing to pray for, because as soon as we think about them and God at the same time, we realize that we shouldn't want those things, and that stops our prayer short. Doubtless, there is a sin of praying for frivolous, worldly comforts and pleasures when we have more important duties, but it's not one of the Bible particularly warns against. God can always say no. The key is to be open to the will of God to give or withhold the things we ask for. As long as that's our attitude, the danger of wrong asking isn't too serious.
Even Jesus, on the eve of the crucifixion, showed his humanity by praying that the cup of death which was prepared for him be taken away from his lips. And yet He added, "Thy will be done." We should likewise choose our words and regulate our feelings so that we are making requests and not demands of God. But if we do, we may feel free to pray very frequently, and about the smallest matters.
Again, we might also pray to God for guidance, for help with making decisions, just as we ask friends for advice. It's good to do so. But remember that advice is a perilous business, and fraught with many problems. For example, if a friend gives advice and it is not taken, the friendship tends to incur damage, in a way that it does not if the advice was never requested. Perhaps it's not a sin if we sometimes make decisions without asking God what to do. It's certainly a sin if we pray to God for counsel about what to do, and then, having been answered and found the advice not to our taste, we ignore it. I presume that's one reason why God sometimes doesn't seem to answer prayers for counsel. He doesn't want to make us sin worse by telling us the right thing to do, when we're not willing to do it.
Among friends, too, a request for advice can be refused. A friend might say, "I don't know. Do whatever you want, I guess." But that depends on the tone in which the advice is requested. If the request is made with too much urgency, importunity or insistence, a friend might feel effectively required to give advice even if he's not comfortable. Human friends might be uncomfortable giving advice just because they don't know what should be done. That difficulty presumably doesn't apply to God. But a related problem very decidedly does.
Advice from a friend may be misinterpreted, resulting in a bad decision because acceptance of the advice cut short of process of internal deliberation. Then, when the misunderstood advice causes harm, the friend who accepted the advice may have a grievance, while the friend who gave the advice may suffer damage to his reputation, either with that person only, or perhaps with others as well, if in accepting the advice, the person told others where it came from. This danger is far greater in the case of God, because His advice carries so much authority. Wrong beliefs about the will of God have been one of the greatest sources of evil in human history. God has to be very careful and skillful in dealing with humans to limit the damage of having His mandates misinterpreted.
For the greatest danger of prayer is that it will lead us into spiritual pride and taking the Lord's name in vain. The Third Commandment says:
“You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name." (Exodus 20:7)
Tremendous evil has been done in history by some people urging other people to do things for the sake of God which God really deplores. Jesus was killed as a blasphemer, that is, in an act of misguided service to God. Christians have often been persecuted and killed, as Jesus warned them, by people who thought they were doing God service (John 16:2), and even worse, they have sometimes done the same to others. This may be part of the reason why Jesus wanted people to keep their prayer practices private:
But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. (Matthew 6:6)
And also:
“Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces." (Matthew 7:6)
The secrecy of prayer, and of answers to prayer, doesn't seem to be a hard and fast rule, for Jesus himself prays in company at times, as before the tomb of Lazarus, or at the Last Supper, and the Church has always taught Christians to assemble and pray together. But it should be borne in mind. Jesus sometimes told the beneficiaries of his miracles of healing to proclaim them to others, and sometimes to keep them secret, and while we don't know why, it's easy to imagine all sorts of reasons why each course would be right in different circumstances.
Above all, we see in the parable of the publican and the Pharisee how prayer can be sinful:
To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” (Luke 18:9-14)
The greatest danger of prayer isn't even that we or others are less into wrongdoing by misinterpreting God's answers. The greatest danger is spiritual pride. Just because a relationship of love and confidence between man and God is the highest excellence of human life, the feeling that we have attained it can give rise to the most ruinous kind of pride. And I think it's partly because telling people about one's answered prayers might cause is to feel rather special and chosen and favored by God, and superior in that respect to others, that Jesus warns us to pray in secret. The greatest danger of prayer is that we'll try to make God the accomplice of our own pride, and that danger is heightened as soon as we report our prayers to others. Stories of answered prayer can easily become masks for boasting.
And so it is worth great trepidation that I present one of my own stories of answered prayer. Hopefully the story is sufficiently discreditable to me, not as a great sinner but as rather hapless and cowardly, that it doesn't tempt me to too much pride. It's a very small instance of divine action in the world, too, though great in its impact on me.
There was a time in my life when I had recently turned to Eastern Orthodoxy and had been baptized, but other than that, everything was falling apart. My wife had left me a year before, and four years of elaborate romantic agony had ended in nothing but an irrevocable disillusionment as deep as the world, darkening my imagination, crippling my capacity for hope, and creating a permanent backdrop of pain for all events. Once suicide had been inconceivable to me. I had changed so much that in that time, the lack of at least some inclination towards suicide had instead become to me an inconceivable state of mind.
Professionally, after my Master's degree, I had bounced around among prestigious but unstable consultant roles, then thrown away my earning power temporarily to pursue a PhD which might, just possibly, I thought, help me get a secure professional foothold somewhere, which had so far eluded me. An academic career was a perennial preference of mine which, however, had always seemed unattainable. I had an impression, not quite justified as it turned out, that affirmative action had effectively closed the door to academic careers for white males such as myself. My future was far from hopeless but painfully vague, and my only plans were dreams which I took to be impractical. That's not necessarily such a hardship for a young man of quixotic temperament, but the bleak thing was that it was all I had. Scaling intellectual mountains with only vague and distant hopes of any livelihood was the only real source of meaning in my life, other than my newly acquired faith. And my faith was a halting and stumbling affair. There was so much to learn, so many habits to form, so many attitudes to adjust, so many new and strange claims that I was expected to believe, but couldn't help doubting. I felt like a pretty feeble and second-rate Orthodox Christian.
Most salient from day to day were the elaborate fasting rules of the Orthodox Church. At first, I had remained imperfectly informed and compliant on purpose, not from lack of willpower so much as intellectual skepticism about the need for it. I didn't doubt that some fasting was appropriate, but surely the Church was overdoing it. But I'd started to come around with a feeling that, in spite of everything, God had blessed me tremendously, and if there were anything I could do that might help to show my gratitude, I had better do it, no matter how odd it might seem. Great Lent was approaching, and I was vaguely resolved to do it right this time.
Just then, a disaster struck. Complete and total ruin. I got a message from the IRS. Before my PhD, I have been working for international organizations that didn't do tax withholding in the usual way. I knew quite a bit of economics in the abstract, but practical accounting concerns like doing one's taxes bored me, so I had run through with hastily on some online app and gotten it wrong for 3 years in a row, quite innocently. I had underpaid by about $35,000, I think. I don't remember the exact amount, but it might as well have been a million for my ability to pay it on my dramatically reduced graduate student income. Marital factors and an entrepreneurial excursion had used up the money that should have paid those taxes. My mind ran desperately over quitting school and finding a higher paid job somehow, but I was in that weird trap of being both underqualified and overqualified for all the practical work that people of my intelligence level usually pay the bills with. I'd gotten used to happiness being out of reach, but now survival seemed like practically an impossibility.
On a certain day in the midst of Cheesefare week, as I was waiting helplessly for some financial guillotine to fall on my head, practically listening for the sirens come to haul me off to an IRS dungeon, it came time to renew my driver's license or my car registration or something, I can't remember which. I'd better stop and explain Cheesefare week. Orthodox Christians frequently abstain from meat and dairy to mark certain days for remembrance of the crucifixion, preparation for great feasts, and other purposes. Usually meat and dairy go together. But there is one week of the year, called Cheesefare week, when meat is forbidden but dairy is allowed, before both become forbidden during the long weeks of Great Lent. It's a good time to drink lots of milk, and eat lots of ice cream and cheese.
Anyway, I tore myself away from a mountain of grad school reading, went to the DMV, waited three hours that I couldn't afford, and found I didn't have all the needed papers, and didn't know how to get them. Coming after the IRS blunder, I felt a despairing sense of being hopelessly unfit to survive in an age of bureaucracy and red tape. I was broke, and soon I wouldn't be able to drive legally. On my way home, I went through a Taco Bell drive-thru to get some burritos for dinner. I went home, sat in front of my computer, and started studying, while pulling out a burrito for a working supper.
But it was the wrong burrito! I had ordered something large and meaty, and found myself holding something thin and cheesy. It was another blow buy a spiteful world that seemed to have decided to checkmate me and was driving the point home in every possible way. It wasn't enough food. I would have to go to bed hungry. I thought about going out again but I couldn't spare the time. I had been really looking forward to a full belly, as a bit of momentary comfort as my world fell apart. Why hadn't I noticed the Taco Bell had charged me too little for what I had ordered? It underscored my ineptitude at personal finance, my sense of helpless incompetence. Hour by hour, the world was going more awry, scorning even my humblest dreams and desires.
And then suddenly thrill went through me as I realized what the hand of Providence had done.
I had been about to eat meat during Cheesefare week! I had been about to fail in my plan to follow the Great Lent fast even before I had begun. But God had stopped it, and kept me on track. In my preoccupation, I had completely forgotten that I wasn't supposed to be eating meat that day. I had ordered a meaty burrito, and gotten a cheesy one instead. What were the odds? The surprising thing, of course, wasn't that a fast food restaurant employee should make a mistake, but that they should make that mistake just then, when I needed it most. I was an inadvertent scofflaw in the eyes of the IRS and the DMV, but God was helping me to follow His rules, to fulfill my good resolutions. I had felt worthless, but now suddenly I felt tremendously valued and cared for. All had seemed to be melting into chaos, but suddenly my feet had struck the rock of a sublime new order, and I was no longer falling, but standing. This new source of meaning in my life had come through for me. If I became a bankrupt, I could still, with God helping me, keep the fast.
I'm telling this story as an example of an answer to prayers, yet I don't even remember what prayers I was saying that day. I think they were desperate, flailing prayers, just "Lord, help me," again and again, like a drowning man grabbing for a life ring. As usual in life, I was navigating reality based on a sense of probabilities that I couldn't quantify when I immediately recognized the Taco Bell server's mistake as a miracle. Obviously, I anticipated nothing of the sort as an answer to my prayers, and in spite of telling the story at this length, it's impossible to convey the amazing way in which something going unaccountably right in the divine order met the need in me that sprang from so many things going unaccountably wrong in the order of this world. But the odds were a thousand to one against that particular mistake, unless it were an answer to prayer, in which case it seemed wonderfully suitable.
Even though I've now told it publicly, I consider this story only my own personal, private evidence in favor of faith. To see why, consider what a skeptic would be likely to say about this experience. It does seem surprising that the Taco Bell server would get your order wrong in just that way, helping you to keep the fasting rules that you had forgotten, at a time when you needed encouragement. But what if she hadn't? What if she had gotten your order right, forgotten it wrong in a way that didn't help you keep it fast? You probably wouldn't remember it. You remember it because it struck you as an answer to prayer, and that made it exciting and important. But it's quite likely that in the life of a Christian who is seeking God and trying to discern His will, A few events that are individually unlikely, and it seem like answers to prayer, will occur, simply by chance. With so many Christians on the lookout for such coincidences, and making much of them when they occur, their end up being quite a lot, but it's only a bias a rising from selective memory.
I don't care to argue the point. It's probably reasonable to dismiss my story as chance for someone who doesn't know the full sweep of my life or understand where the critical moments were. I have the impression that this is one of many such apt blessings, moments of beneficent serendipity, the bear the mark of a loving Creator looking after my wayward soul, but I forgotten most of them. I only remember this one because it happened to strike me at some point as a good illustrative example, and so I made a mental note of various details. Perhaps if I'd kept a careful diary of them all, some would be more impressive, or perhaps not. The biblical miracles are more impressive, yet I think they have two features in common: (a) they come in moments of desperation to people who are trying to do good, and (b) they meet the need with peculiar aptness. Anyway, don't bother too much with my answered prayers. Get some of your own.
Two more things before we close the topic of prayer.
First, when you pray, and especially when in prayer you ask God for guidance, you had better be prepared to obey if an answer comes. But this raises a difficulty because you might be unsure if what comes as an answer to prayer or not. What does God seems to be telling you to do one thing, while reason or conscience seem to be telling you to do something else. I won't try to give completely general advice here, and there may be cases where this happens, but in general, I don't think God's answers to our prayers will even seem to go against reason or conscience. If reason and conscience give a single clear verdict about what to do, you probably shouldn't even be praying for guidance about it. One shouldn't pray about whether to steal money through fraud, or whether to commit adultery. Probably if you're conscience is awake enough to make you want to pray at all, you will know perfectly well that you should not do these things, and even to ask God would be a kind of insult. It's when you really don't know what to do, when reason and conscience cannot settle the matter, that people particularly ought to and they're likely to pray for guidance. And then answers to prayer can't go against reason and conscience because reason and conscience are at a loss for what you should do. That limits the danger of misinterpreted answers to prayer. If God seems to be telling you to do something senseless or wicked, you might do well to revisit your reasons for thinking it so, and perhaps you'll find the course of action is better than you thought at first. But if upon reflection it still seems senseless and wicked, don't do it.
Second, we've seen why prayers sometimes initially seem, or perhaps really do, go unanswered. It goes against the grain to talk to the air. And it's hard to keep expecting an answer if none comes. How long should we keep trying? The strange answer is that it's only rational to keep praying your whole life. For the potential reward for forming a relationship with God is infinite, namely eternal life, and to live with Him in bliss forever. Even if it seems unlikely that there is really a God who answers prayers, the slightest chance, possibility, multiplied by the infinite potential reward, always still amounts to a good enough reason to pray a little more.
So keep trying to pray. Pray without ceasing if you can. Pray with humility, but with as much confidence as you can muster. Sooner or later, God will answer. And only in the experience of answered prayer, I think, can Christian conviction become complete. Its claims are too strong and surprising, too hopeful amidst a sad world, to be believed merely as one accepts a theory as probable. The public evidence is enough to lead you to the threshold of faith, but only private evidence and prayer can open the door.