Jesus Christ and Eschatology (the end of time): A Christian Solution to the Problem of Evil (Part V)

God’s Sovereignty is the Key to Actualizing Christianity’s Eschatology

Traditionally, Christians have believed that God has sovereignly ordained the future in such a way that God knows the future with certainty.  The means by which God knows the future have been heavily debated, especially between Calvinists (God determines the future) and classical Arminians (God simply foresees what will happen in the future), but the eschatological claims (claims about the end times) of the Bible were never in question.  Christians could hope in the eschatological promises of the Bible because God knows for certain that they will come to pass.  Yet, a new trend is rising, called Open Theism, which claims that God does not know the future for certain (see footnote 5 in part I).  Open Theists do not question God’s sovereignty, but believe that God has freely chosen to restrain God’s foreknowledge in the kenotic (outpouring) event of creation.[1]  Open Theists believe their theology lends itself to a strong theodicy because on their view, God lacks definitive foreknowledge of moral evils and cannot be held liable for those evils.  In Brian’s case, they would have no problem answering the charge that God was unfair to lead Brian back home to be hit by a drunk driver.  Based on the knowledge that God had at the time, it may have seemed like it would be a good idea.  Indeed, on an Open Theist scheme, it seems much easier to justify God for particular evils like Brian’s death.[2]  Yet, my contention is that Open Theism gives up too much.   In its attempt to explain the existence of evil in the world today, Open Theism undermines Christian eschatology and makes the future uncertain.

First, God’s promise to work things together for good is undermined by the fact that God cannot work against the free will of God’s creatures.  In Brian’s case, it is conceivable that free agents will stifle the present work of God, making it impossible to bring good out of the situation.  Indeed, on an Open Theist scheme, all moral evil could potentially be gratuitous and devoid of meaning.   Second, it is unclear how Open Theism can guarantee that in the eschaton evil will have no place among the people of God.  Instead, if God does not know how humans will make their choices in the future, it would seem possible that in the eschaton believers may choose to reject God.  Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?  Conceivably, we can, and we may.  Third, it is uncertain that God will gain ultimate victory over the forces of evil.  Unless God chooses to unilaterally override the free choices of humans in the future, it is possible (though unlikely) that every believer may defect from God’s side and join with Satan, waging war for the rest of time against God.  Admittedly, these arguments could be developed even more; nevertheless, I believe they significantly challenge an Open Theist solution to the problem of evil.  So although Open Theism seems to give a comforting view of God and the origin of evil, it ultimately undermines Christianity’s ultimate solution to evil:  an actualized (not just hypothetical) eschatology.

Conclusion

            All things considered, the pain and feelings of loss resulting from Brian’s death remain.  No Christian theodicy or eschatology can change the emptiness that comes from the loss of a loved one.  Yet, Christianity claims to offer a profound solution to the problem of moral evil.  Though philosophical arguments over the origin of evil can be fruitful and sometimes necessary to maintain logical credibility, these arguments ultimately fail to offer a solution to the problem of evil because they do not explain how God is working to overcome evil.  Thus, after establishing Christianity’s logical consistency in the face of moral evil, I moved to show the ways in which God has acted, is acting, and will act to overcome evil.  First, Christ’s work in the incarnation illustrates how God has acted to gain victory over evil.  Second, Christ’s work continues to fight against evil in the lives of believers today by encouraging them to be agents of moral change in the world and by giving them comfort and hope. Third, this hope is grounded in God’s promises for the end of time, when the pain and suffering caused by Brian’s death will be swallowed up in the victorious love of God.  Believers can hope in this future because God has sovereignly determined that it will be so; thus, an open theist solution for evil will not be eschatologically satisfying.  This is the Christian response, rooted in eschatology, to moral evil.

<<Back to Part IV

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[1] See Pinnock, “Constrained by Love,” 151-2.  For creation as kenosis, see Jordan Carson, “The Suffering God and Cross in Open Theism: Theodicy or Atonement?” Perspectives in Religious Studies 37, no. 3 (September 1, 2010): 323-337. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed November 9, 2011).

[2] I am not convinced that this is indeed the case.  For an article critiquing Open Theist theodicies, see Paul Helseth, “On Divine Ambivalence: Open Theism and the Problem of Particular Evils.” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 44, no. 3 (September 1, 2001): 493-511. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed November 14, 2011).

 

Jesus Christ and Eschatology (the end of time): A Christian Solution to the Problem of Evil (Part IV)

The Eschaton (the End):  The Culmination of God’s Answer to Evil

            In the wake of Brian’s death, his family and friends continue to struggle to make sense of their tragic loss.  Christianity affirms that death is an enemy,[1] and it often seems like this enemy is winning.  Though it may seem helpful in theory to comfort the family with the knowledge that God is working their tragedy towards some good end, this comfort seems trite to those in the midst of pain.  The fact of the matter is that as humans who lack the big picture, it is often impossible to understand what good God could be working from such a seemingly pointless tragedy.  The victory of moral evil seems permanent as more time passes without positive results.  Furthermore, even if the family was able to point to some good that resulted from Brian’s death, it is not certain that they would concede that Brian’s death was worth it.

In light of these considerations, the need for a strong eschatology (doctrine of the end) becomes vital to sustain hope that God can bring meaning to moral evil.  Fortunately, a strong eschatology is precisely what Christianity provides.  The Biblical claim for the end times is huge:  “[God] will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.  And he who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’”[2]  God has promised that weeping, death, mourning, and pain will have no share in the end times.  In the same way that God raised Jesus from the dead, God has promised to raise Brian.[3]  Moreover, although Brian’s family and friends can only see what God is doing now in a small part, as though they are looking through a dirty glass, they will one day fully know the perfecting work of God.[4]  In other words, the eschatological claims (claims about the end of time) of these verses affirm that one day Brian and his family will fully understand the meaning behind his death.  So even though the drunk driver may have meant it for evil, they will know that God meant it for good.[5]

Regardless of the solutions offered so far, there may still be some who are holding out for some type of courtroom justice in Brian’s case.  Not surprisingly, Christian eschatology offers exactly that.  For those evildoers who refuse the justice offered in the death and resurrection of Christ, the Bible promises that there will be tribulation and distress.[6]  Indeed, Jesus Himself promised that those who do good will be resurrected to life, and those who do evil will be resurrected to judgment.[7]  Regardless of whether or not there will in fact be salvation for all, the Bible paints a grim picture of what it means to be judged for doing evil.[8]  However, a word of warning is needed here:  Jesus also promises that God will judge people with the same measure that they judge others.[9]  So let us leave the task of judging to God and hope in the promise that in the end, nothing will be able to condemn us or separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.[10]  Our sovereign God has promised to bring it to pass, so let the Bride of Christ say “come.”

<<Back to Part III                                         Proceed to Part V>>

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[1] 1 Corinthians 15:26.

[2] Revelation 21:4-5, ESV.

[3] 1 Corinthians 15.

[4] 1 Corinthians 13:12.

[5] This is a reference to Joseph’s interpretation of the evil intentions of his brothers found in Genesis 50:20.

[6] Romans 2:9.

[7] John 5:29.

[8] Some poignant examples are Matthew 25 and Revelation 21:8-27.

[9] Matthew 7:2.

[10] Romans 8:34-39.

 

Jesus Christ and Eschatology (the end of time): A Christian Solution to the Problem of Evil (Part III)

Jesus Christ:  The Beginning of God’s Answer to Evil

Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate, lies at the center of the Christian message.  Christians declare that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”[1] This doctrine is profound and difficult to understand.  Indeed, the apostle Paul claimed that it is “a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles,”[2] for the incarnation of God implies that the eternal Word, Jesus Christ, “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.”[3]  The followers of Christ have been trying to make sense of these events ever since. 

Athanasius, the great church father who defended what would become known as the orthodox doctrines of Jesus, invested his life in explaining what the Bible means when it says that “the Word became flesh.”  It may be helpful to quote him at length in order to establish the Church’s position on the Incarnation of Christ that has dominated for almost two centuries:

 [The Word of God] saw how the surpassing wickedness of men [sic] was mounting up against them; [the Word] saw also their universal liability to death.  All this He saw and, pitying our race, moved with compassion for our limitation, unable to endure that death should have the mastery … He took to Himself a body, a human body even as our own … Thus taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death in place of all, and offered it to the Father.  This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished.[4]

In this text, Athanasius is mainly concerned with establishing the reasons for the Incarnation, as well as a Christology that asserts not only the eternal, divine nature of Christ, but also Christ’s true humanity.[5]  In other words, Athanasius wants to show that Jesus Christ was truly God and truly human.  This idea has great consequence for the problem of moral evil.  In the above quote, the Word of God, the second person of the Trinity, saw the catastrophic effects of human wickedness – death and corruption – and out of compassion decided to intervene.  Taking a human body, with all of its liability to corruption, the Word died in the place of all, defeating death and allowing humankind to share in His victory.

Here we see the strange message of the Gospel:  the eternally begotten Son of God, in the kenotic (outpouring) event of the Incarnation, became one of us.  Not only that, He became susceptible to the corruption of being human.  Indeed, the Word became the victim of moral evil as He walked the face of the earth.  He confronted the moral hypocrisy of the Pharisees, challenged sinners to repent, abstained from moral evil Himself, and was eventually murdered because of the evil intentions of the Pharisees and Jewish leaders.  Yet in Jesus’ suffering, God was at work, bringing about the redemption of humanity from sin, death, and evil.

But what does this mean for us today?  Specifically, how do the Incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ help solve the problem of moral evil in Brian’s case?  This question may be answered in several different ways.  First of all, the life and death of Jesus Christ provides spiritual comfort to families like Brian’s who wonder if God still loves them and cares for them.  The simple fact that God, through Jesus, entered the human situation and battled evil in Jesus’ own human flesh provides Christians with the enormous comfort that God loves them.  Not only can God empathize with them, but God can sympathize with them in suffering.[6]

Secondly, Christ’s work brings spiritual comfort to the drunk driver, should the driver choose to seek it.  Moral evil affects not only the victims, but the perpetrators as well.  Through Christ’s work on the cross, God was working to be reconciled to the driver:  “through Christ, God reconciled us to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:18, ESV).  Rather than being tortured by a guilty conscience for the rest of this person’s life, God desires that the driver who took Brian’s life would turn to God and receive the reconciliation that God offers.  Having been reconciled to God through Christ, the driver would be free to seek reconciliation with Brian’s family.  After all, God has given all those to whom God has been reconciled the “ministry of reconciliation.”

Third, Christ’s work on the cross gives Brian’s family grounds for forgiveness.  Because God, in Christ, has already performed the work of reconciliation, atoned for the sins of the world (Brian’s sins, the family’s sins, and the driver’s sins included), and will one day judge all according to their deeds (Romans 2), the family may rest in the knowledge that God has already dealt with the driver’s evil and will continue to do so.  Forgiveness is a powerful force that ends cycles of moral evil, and Jesus Christ is the example of that truth.  While being crucified, Jesus cried “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34, ESV).  Though it is difficult, we are now free to do the same.

Fourth, Christ’s suffering provides an example of how Christians should endure suffering.  Peter, the apostle who originally fled the suffering that threatened him during Christ’s trial and crucifixion, was eventually crucified upside-down as he embraced God’s call for him to suffer.  One of the most powerful letters in the New Testament on suffering is attributed to him. 1 Peter 2:21 says that believers have been called to suffering, “because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.”[7]  Following in His steps means believers should live “no longer for human passions but for the will of God.”[8]  Just as Christ entrusted Himself to God, believers should “entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good.”[9]  In other words, Christ’s example of suffering shows us that the proper response to the suffering caused by evil is not to doubt God, but to trust God while continuing to do good.  Admittedly, this task will not be easy.  Thus, it will be helpful to move to the next point.

The final point is that Christ’s work on the cross gives us hope that God can redeem or bring meaning to moral evil.  This point has two parts.  The first is an argument based on induction.  It proceeds thus:  if God is able to bring the greatest good known to humankind through the greatest evil ever committed, namely, the murder of God, then God should be able to use Brian’s death for some greater good as well.  Again, it is helpful to fall back upon the theology of Romans 8:28:  God promises to work all things for good for those who love God.  Moreover, the Bible is full of examples of men and women who suffered great loss, wherein God used their loss to bring about something good.  One thinks of the plight of Joseph in Egypt, the testing of Job, and the death of David and Bathsheba’s child after their infidelity, to name a few.  In each of these examples, God used moral evil for good.  Hearkening back to my argument in the first section, the aim here is not to provide a justification (theodicy) for God’s actions in every situation of evil, including the case of Brian.  Rather, the point is to give believers hope that God can bring about good from seemingly pointless evil.  Indeed, God has promised to do so.  But in what should believers ground their hope?  After all, death is still present, moral evil is still rampant, and it is hard to believe that Christ’s death has done anything to change these facts.  This leads us to the second part of this point, and the third section of this essay:  eschatology.

<<Back to Part II                                                 Proceed to Part IV>>

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[1] John 1:14, ESV.

[2] 1 Corinthians 1:23, ESV.

[3] Apostles’ Creed.

[4] St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation: the Treatise De Incarnatione Verbi Dei (Crestwood, N.Y.: St Vladimirs Seminary Pr, 1998), 34.

[5] Elsewhere Athanasius states “he who is eternally God … had subsequently also become man for our sake.”  Against the Arians III, 29-34 in Documents in Early Christian Thought, ed. Maurice Wiles and Mark Santer, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 54.

[6] Hebrews 4:15:  “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness” (ESV).

[7] All references from 1 Peter are from the English Standard Version.

[8] 1 Peter 4:2, ESV.

[9] 1 Peter 4:19, ESV.

 

Jesus Christ and Eschatology (the end of time): A Christian Solution to the Problem of Evil (Part II)

Exploring the Problem of Moral Evil

              The[1] problem of evil is broad and takes many forms.  It is often divided into two types:  the logical problem of evil and the evidential problem of evil.  Furthermore, the discussion of evil can be divided into problems of natural evil (suffering caused by the laws of nature), moral evil (suffering caused by the actions of human agents), gratuitous evil (evil that seems completely unnecessary on any scheme), and the ontology of evil (whether or not evil really exists), to name a few.[2]  To avoid speaking in broad generalities, this essay will focus on the problem of moral evil, specifically as it concerns the example of Brian and the drunk driver.

Alvin Plantinga

The logical problem of evil posed by my example is strictly concerned with whether or not it is logically possible to assert that the evil of Brian’s death exists in a world supposedly created by an omnipotent, good God, i.e. the Christian God.  While various defenses have been put forward throughout the centuries, it is widely held that Alvin Plantinga’s “Free Will Defense” has sufficiently explained the logical problem, or at least diminished its strength.[3]  As its title suggests, the “Free Will Defense” claims that the existence of evil is compatible with the omnipotent, good God of Christianity because of the nature of free will.   In short, it posits that if God created humans with freedom to make their own choices, then any evil that results from their free choices is the fault of humans, not God.

So in the case of Brian, Plantinga would claim that it is logically consistent to say that God is good and omnipotent, yet did not prevent the evil resulting in Brian’s death.  This statement can be made on the grounds that because God determined at creation to give humans free will, it is always a possibility that they will use their freedom to bring about evil.  The drunk driver presumably chose to drink excessively, get in the car, drive, and not stop after hitting Brian.  This event was possible because God had already determined not to coerce the driver to act against his or her will, and to uphold the consequences of the driver’s free actions.

Nevertheless, it may still be objected that a good God would intervene whenever possible to prevent moral evil if God knew that the evil did not serve some greater good.  So in the case of Brian’s death, if no greater good (such as the repentance and salvation of the driver) resulted, then God was not justified in allowing the evil, and the idea of the Christian God must be modified.  At this point, two replies are possible.  The first would be to claim that is impossible for humans to know and judge the greater good, so we may simply trust that God has ordered this event to bring about some greater good.[4]   But this answer will probably fail to convince those who are already skeptical of Christian claims.  The second response would be to qualify God’s omnipotence by claiming that God cannot do the logically impossible, namely, to arbitrarily go against God’s own decrees to honor human freedom whenever such freedom threatens to bring about evil.  This response may also fail to satisfy the skeptic, but it nevertheless frees Christians from any claim that their worldview is logically inconsistent.

Yet, even though the “Free Will Defense” may give an answer to the logical problem, the evidential problem remains.  The evidential problem is not concerned with logic as much as it is concerned with probability.  Simply put, the evidential problem of evil claims that all of the seemingly gratuitous evil in the world makes it improbable that the omnipotent, good God of Christianity exists.  Yet, to echo the words of the Christian philosopher William Hasker, it may be asked, “[I]mprobable for whom?”[5]  Hasker, who draws upon the work of Alvin Plantinga, asserts that the probability of the Christian God’s existence will depend largely on the probability of the initial propositions used to support God’s existence, which will vary depending on who is making the propositions.  In other words, an atheist and a Christian will arrive at different probabilities due to their differing assumptions.  Nevertheless, Hasker essentially argues that it is incumbent upon the Christian to give the atheist good grounds for changing the probabilities, i.e. to construct a theodicy.  Plantinga, on the other hand, is content with the unresolvable nature of the evidential problem, thinking that a theodicy that gives Christian reasons for evil will remain unconvincing to a skeptic.[6]  Applying his argument to Brian’s case, Plantinga would say that even though reasons may be given by Christians for the evil of Brian’s death, those reasons would probably be rejected by skeptics with different worldviews.  Plantinga makes a good point here:  the Christian’s responsibility lies mainly in showing the logical consistency of Christianity’s truth claims (and it may be added, preaching the gospel, which is nothing less than the eschatological solution to the problem.  This will be explored later).  It is not necessary for Christians to build theodicies and debate probability, though these things may be fruitful.[7]

Plantinga’s explanations for the logical and evidential problems of evil are confirmed by the biblical narrative, as well as the early church fathers.  In the Genesis story of origins, God declared that everything God had made was “very good.”[8]  Evil is nowhere to be found in God’s created world.  Yet, God planted a tree in the Garden of Eden that contained the knowledge of good and evil.[9]  So certainly, the possibility of evil existed.  When Adam and Eve freely chose to eat from this tree, creation was “subjected to futility.”[10]  In Romans 5:12, Paul claims that through Adam’s trespass, sin and death entered the created order and spread to all humans because all humans sin.  Thus, it would seem that the biblical account of creation and human sin explains moral evil along the same lines as Plantinga – evil is a result of the free actions of human beings, not God’s “good” creative act.

Not only can a rough outline of Plantinga’s “Free Will Defense” be found in Scripture, but it can also be found in some of the early church fathers.  Writing in the 2^nd and 3^rd century CE, Origen argues that “the creator granted to the minds that he [sic] made the power of free and voluntary movement, so that the good which was in them might become their own through … their own free-will.  But sloth and weariness in the preservation of good supervened … and so the withdrawal from good began.”[11]  For Origen, evil entered the creation because humans did not use their free will to preserve the good.  Furthermore, by describing evil as the withdrawal from the good, Origen refuses to grant evil its own ontological status.  To do so would require evil either to be a creation of God or some mysterious entity that coexisted eternally with God.

Gregory of Nyssa picks up Origen’s argument and takes it farther.[12]  Gregory claims that humans were created to share in God’s goodness.  Thus, it was necessary for God to bestow on humans God’s own image (Genesis 1:27).  Part of this image included free will, which would allow humans to attain higher forms of excellence as they chose the good.  Yet, this freedom entailed the possibility of withdrawing from the good.  In Plantinga fashion, Gregory concludes that when Adam and Eve withdrew from God’s good plan and ate from the forbidden tree, evil was born.  Gregory states:  “The origin of evil can only be understood as the absence of virtue.”[13] So in Brian’s case, a common interpretation of the Biblical narrative, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Alvin Plantinga all agree the origin of this evil is found in the free will of the drunk driver.

Now that a Christian explanation for the origin of moral evil in Brian’s case has been forwarded, it must be restated that this explanation is different than a solution.  To clarify this point, an analogy may be helpful:  the United States is currently in the midst of an economic crisis.  Explaining the reasons behind why the crisis has developed the way that it has may be helpful as far as mental understanding is concerned, but it is a far cry from a solution to the turmoil.  Though understanding the reasons for the crisis may help in discovering the solution, the solution itself must trace out the path toward recovery andresult in recovery.  Similarly, although explaining the origins of evil may help humans understand their predicament, a real solution will bring resolution to the problem of evil by tracing out how evil can be overcome and by guaranteeing its eradication.   Fortunately, the Christian solution to the problem of evil does precisely that.  Christian eschatology guarantees evil’s defeat, the beginning and end of which is Jesus Christ.  The remainder of this essay will explore how this works.

<< Back to Part I                               Proceed to Part III>>

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[1] According to the theologian John Feinberg, “there is no such thing as the problem of evil.”  Instead, he distinguishes a variety of problems.  Nevertheless, I believe it is safe to proceed under the assumption that the problem is that there are many problems due to evil.  John S. Feinberg, The Many Faces of Evil: Theological Systems and the Problem of Evil, Rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich: Zondervan, 1994), 15.

[2] Feinberg lists others.  Ibid., 15-18.

[3] William L. Rowe, ed., God and the Problem of Evil (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), 76.

[4] Indeed, the claim of Romans 8:28 that “for those who love God all things work together for good” supports this argument in the case of evils perpetrated against Christians.

[5] William Hasker, Providence, 24.

[6] Alvin Plantinga, “The Probabilistic Argument from Evil,” Philosophical Studies 35 (1979), 1-53, referenced in Hasker, Providence, 24 and 41.

[7] For a great collection of essays on theodicy and the evidential problem of evil, see Rowe, God and the Problem of Evil.

[8] Genesis 1:31, English Standard Version (ESV).

[9] The significance of this tree, whether metaphorical or literal, deserves its own essay.  It has been argued by theologians as early as Origen that evil existed before the creation and made its way into God’s good creation via demonic agents.  Regardless of when evil first came about, the fact remains that God’s creation was good, and the first instance of evil inside God’s creation happened through the sin of Adam and Eve.

[10] Romans 8:20, ESV.

[11] Origen. “On First Principles II, 9, 1-6,” in Documents in Early Christian Thought, ed. Maurice Wiles and Mark Santer, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 97.

[12] Gregory’s entire argument can be found in “Catechetical Oration 5-8,” in Documents in Early Christian Thought, ed. Maurice Wiles and Mark Santer, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 101-12.

[13] Ibid., 104.

 

Jesus Christ and Eschatology (the end of time): A Christian Solution to the Problem of Evil (Part I)

Introduction

            About a month ago, an acquaintance of mine from high school, Brian,[1] was jogging early in the morning when he was hit by a drunk driver.  No one knows exactly how it happened because Brian was left to die on the sidewalk while the perpetrator, whom the police say was probably drunk, sped off into the early morning darkness.  Brian was only 25, with his whole life ahead of him.  From what I am told, he loved God, his friends, and his life.  He was quiet, humble, kind, and gifted.  In short, he did not deserve what happened to him that Saturday morning.  Yet, he is gone, and the drunk driver who killed him is still free.  Hundreds of his friends came from across the United States to attend his funeral, and I am sure they were all asking a similar question to mine:  “Why would God allow this evil to happen?”

The picture may be further complicated by adding more details.  Brian was in the midst of changing careers, and had sought God’s will for his life.  He had returned home to see his friends before heading off for his new endeavor.  He was seeking to follow God, and yet God had seemingly led him back to his home town for an early morning rendezvous with a drunk driver.[2]  How do Christians make sense of tragedies like this one?  In other words, if God is perfectly good and omnipotent, then why did this evil happen?

These are the types of questions that Christians must answer as they encounter suffering in the world.  Yet, this essay will contend that if Christians only explain the reasons behind moral evils[3] like this one, they will have failed to give a solution to the problem.  Explanations for evil’s existence simply restate the nature of the problem:  evil exists, and we do not like it.  A proper solution to the problem must explain how evil can be overcome and guarantee the outcome.  Moreover, a good solution will give Brian’s death eschatological meaning (meaning derived from its ultimate, end-of-days purpose).  In this essay, I will argue that the strength of Christianity’s engagement with evil lies in its ability to bring meaning, redemption, and hope to seemingly pointless tragedies like Brian’s death. In other words, Christianity’s main concern is not to justify every instance of evil through philosophical argumentation and theodicy,[4] though doing so can be a rewarding exercise in the context of the Christian worldview.  Instead, Christianity’s unique claim is that although moral evil enters by the free actions of human beings, God is actively working to overcome evil and give it meaning through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.  Furthermore, I will argue that the solution to evil ultimately lies in Christianity’s eschatological claim, namely, its claim that God is actively working all things to the good of those who love God, so that one day they will be adopted as sons, their bodies will be redeemed, and all wrongs judged.  At the basis of this claim is God’s sovereign guarantee that God will bring it to pass.

In order to substantiate this thesis, this essay will proceed in four stages.  First, it will be necessary to explain why the evil of Brian’s death is not logically inconsistent with a Christian worldview.  To show this, a Christian explanation for the origin of evil, including the evil of Brian’s death, will be offered.  However, since explaining the origin of evil is by no means a solution to the problem, I will move to the second step: showing how the Christian God has intervened to fight evil.  Yet, knowing that God is fighting against evil is only half of the solution.  Thus, a third piece is needed to solve the puzzle.  This piece is Christian eschatology (the Christian understanding of what happens in the end). In fact, I will argue that eschatology is perhaps the most important aspect of the Christian solution.  In order to make this clear, the fourth stage will engage an Open Theist[5] perspective on God’s nature to show that without a definite eschatology based in some degree on God’s sovereign knowledge of the future, hope in the Christian solution to the problem of evil is ungrounded.

Proceed to Part II >>

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[1] His name has been changed.

[2] This point will be important in the fourth section of this paper on Open Theism and God’s sovereignty.

[3] The emphasis on moral evil will be explained in the second section.

[4] Theodicy carries different connotations for different philosophers.  I use it in the same sense as the Christian philosopher William Hasker:  “theodicy is an attempt to propose candidates for the reasons that justify God in permitting one or another form of evil in the world.”  William Hasker, Providence, Evil, and the Openness of God (London: Routledge, 2004), 1.

[5] Open Theism is a relatively new perspective on the nature of God’s interaction with the world.  Simply put, open theists believe “God manages the world without enjoying the degree of control over and the foreknowledge of contingent events that have traditionally been ascribed to him [sic] . . . God (or anyone) [cannot] know the future definitely and exhaustively.”  Clark H. Pinnock “Constrained by Love: Divine Self-Restraint according to Open Theism.” Perspectives in Religious Studies 34, no. 2 (June 1, 2007), ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed November 14, 2011), 149.

 

IV. Use[lessness] of Prayer: What if Jesus never really even said that stuff?

This is the fourth part of an exploration on the problem of unanswered prayer.  The problem is straightforward:  Christians pray according to the promises of God revealed in Scripture, but their prayers often don’t get answered.   What do we make of this?  Is Christianity in jeopardy, or by extension, God?  Are the promises of God in Scripture really what they seem to be?  Can the Bible really be trusted?  Were these promises even intended for us?  Are we to blame because our prayers aren’t good enough?  The way we answer these questions and explain the problem of unanswered prayer is significant, not only for our own faith (and sanity), but also for the faith of those who have a hard time embracing Christianity due to the difficulties they see in prayer.  In this post, I want to turn to the 3^rd section of inquiry:  Scripture.  This post will definitely be the most difficult to deal with.

Is the B-I-B-L-E really the book for me?
You probably sang it when you were a kid, right?

The B-I-B-L-E, yes that’s the book for me!
I stand alone on the word of God, the B-I-B-L-E:  BIBLE!

The problem that the children’s song never really addresses is what we do when the scriptures on which we stand seem to give out from underneath us.  For me, it happened as I began to realize that all the pat answers I thought the Bible contained weren’t always very good answers, but problems.  For others, the foundation of Scripture crumbles under historical, literary, and form criticism.  In the context of this post, the Bible may give way as people experience unanswered prayers.  After all, if we agree that God still exists and the promises of Scripture really do claim what they seem to claim (for those of you who didn’t read my last post, I concluded that the Scriptures really are claiming that if we ask God for something, God will give it to us), then the next obvious conclusion is that prayers aren’t answered because the Scriptures aren’t true, regardless of what they claim!  So whereas the last post dealt with interpretation of the source, this post deals with the nature of the source.

Views of Scripture
People dismiss the notion that the Bible is God’s inspired word for a thousand different reasons.  But I’ve never heard of unanswered prayer being one of them.  Regardless, unanswered prayer is a good objection to the inspired nature of Scripture.  In fact, if there was no other way to deal with the seemingly unfulfilled prayer-promises in the Bible, it would be irrational to go on believing that the Bible is God’s inspired word.

At this point, I could go in a couple different directions.  Using a modernistic approach (by which I mean that reason is the ultimate guide, and if I employ it correctly, I can find the truth on my own), I could set out to defend the “inerrancy” of the Bible.  This would entail not only making sense of the prayer-promises, but also defending thousands of other indefensible positions.  Indeed, some people have already tried, and done so more or less convincingly (depending on whom you talk to).  But I have a feeling that if you’re an atheist, agnostic, struggling Christian, or adherent to another faith, these defenses of Scriptural inerrancy seem ingenuous (not ingenious) and unconvincing.

So let us leave defenses and critiques of scriptural inerrancy/inspiration to the scholars.  My aim is not to defend Scripture.  Instead, keeping to a more reachable (and bloggable) goal, I want to make two points:

1. My concern in this series is to wrestle with God’s prayer-promises in Scripture.  As I noted in the opening blog, unanswered prayer does not necessarily indict every agent (God, scripture, etc.) involved in prayer.  If you remember, I showed that unfulfilled prayer-promises may be explained in 6 possible ways.  Faulty Scripture is only one possible explanation.  Thus, if I can succeed in giving another explanation for why prayers remain unanswered (which I intend to do by the end of this series), then the inspiration of Scripture can remain an irrelevant topic in regards to unanswered prayer.  For those of you who were hoping I would dive into a defense of scriptural inerrancy, I’m sorry.  Not only is the task too big, but scriptural inerrancy is a Modern problem that has ceased to interest me.
2. Even if I were to concede to the non-Christian that there is no other explanation for unanswered prayer-promises besides the conclusion that Scripture contains “untruth” (for reasons beyond the scope of this essay, I have avoided using the word “error”), this would by no means disprove Scripture’s inspired nature.  To assume that “untruth” in Scripture implies that the Bible cannot be inspired by God is a Modernistic jump using unsubstantiated reasoning.  In other words, this mindset assumes that God cannot inspire words which do not always prove to be true.  Or I could say that it assumes that God’s inspired words are always inspired for all people at all times.  My contention is that we are not obligated to make this assumption.I simply claim that God has chosen to communicate truths to flawed people in history through the medium of other flawed human beings.  For some reason I’ll never understand, God’s inspired us to teach each other, instead of showing up and dictating the best course of action for every decision in our lives.  So although I can’t always figure God out, I can look at the narrative of Scripture – the stories that have been passed down to me – and try to see how the stories of desert nomads are also my story.  Maybe things that were true for them in their stories, which seemed black and white to them, aren’t true in mine.  Maybe the ways in which these promises of Jesus, which the disciples saw being fulfilled around them, aren’t being fulfilled in the same ways for me.  This approach is called narrative theology, and it has helped me come to grips with the Bible in many ways.

   Similarly, we may decide to stop looking at particular stories in Scripture as though they are universal narratives.  Instead, we can try to see how instances in Scripture of promise, prayer, trial, and miracle are parts of a larger, universal (dare I say meta?) narrative.  This universal narrative is witnessed to by the Bible, but it is not completely contained in the Bible.  It is evident in all our lives, and it allows us to use our experience to help interpret the Scripture.  Thus, for all the prayer-promises that we see contained in Scripture, we can point to instances in our own lives, as well as in other parts of Scripture, where they prove to be untrue.  Thus, we can use the entire canon of Scripture to critique particular phrases and ideas within the canon.  This is a powerful tool that can help us come to grips with seeming anomalies and incidents which don’t seem to measure up to the whole witness of Scripture.  In other words, we can use the Bible to interpret the Bible.  Naturally, this method creates controversy as people tend to place greater emphasis on certain passages which please them more than others.

Nevertheless, in the case of prayer, a canonical reading of these prayer passages enables us to interpret the promises more conservatively than my last blog indicated.  If you remember in my last post on the unconditional nature of the promises, I concluded that interpreting all the passages individually did not allow for a restricted, conditional reading of the promises.  However, we see plenty of examples in the Bible where prayer went unanswered:   Paul had his thorn in the flesh, Jesus died on the cross, Paul was kept from going to Asia, David’s child died, Moses was kept from the Promised Land, Stephen was stoned, Jeremiah saw Jerusalem plundered, and Christians around the globe suffered intense persecutions.   In addition, when taking into account the overall nature of Jesus’ ministry, including His sermons and model prayer (a.k.a. “The Lord’s Prayer”), it is easy to see that something is amiss if one interprets the promises literally.  Instead, as my friend Jonathan Groover suggests, it would seem possible that Jesus was employing hyperbole (exaggeration) when He made these promises, or else He was stating an ideal standard that will only be realized when God’s kingdom comes fully.  So instead of being a hard and fast rule for prayer in general, these promises become an ideal that we should hope in and be encouraged by, while still realizing that they may never be properly fulfilled until God’s kingdom comes fully on the earth.

So in conclusion, I hope I’ve made two things clear:  1) unfulfilled prayer-promises do not necessarily mean that the Bible is untrue; 2) Even if we do concede that the Bible contains untruth, there is no need to assume that it is uninspired, and by implication, that the promises are worthless.  Instead, we should take into account all of Scripture as we realize that it is a narrative about the way God has acted in people’s lives and may also be acting in ours.  The Bible as a whole bears witness to the fact that when the world finally yields to God’s kingdom, we can hope that whatever we ask in Jesus’ name, God will do.

<<Back to Part III

 

IIIb: Use[lessness] of Prayer: Conclusion to Scriptural Study of Prayer Promises

Conclusion (This is the second half of a two-part post in a series on prayer)

In the first part of this post, I walked through the Biblical passages which make promises about prayer.  We saw that many of the prayer promises in scripture are actually conditional promises, i.e. God has only promised to answer our prayers if we do something first.  Combining them all into one long promise, it would look like this:

If you agree with another person about a matter of church discipline,
        OR if you have faith,
        OR if you ask for anything in Jesus’ name,
        OR if you abide in Jesus and Jesus’ words abide in you,
        OR if you have good motives,
        OR if you ask according to God’s will,
        OR if you are obedient,
Then WHATEVER you ask for, God will give to you.

Now that’s a big promise!  Notice, it is not necessary to do all of these things in order for the promise to be valid.  Think of them as options.  They are not dependent on one another, but instead can stand alone (as many of them do).  If you want to stack the promises in your favor, then you could try to meet more than one of the conditions.  Either way, the strength (and difficulty) of the promises lies in the conclusion:  God will give you whatever you ask for.

At this point, it is important to warn the reader of a common fallacy which involves negating the antecedent (the initial condition of the promise).  I hear Christians commit this fallacy all the time, so I’m bringing it up now.  A common example, as alluded to in my last post, goes something like this:  “If you don’t ask according to God’s will, then God won’t do it.”  This sentence negates the condition of the promise (“If you ask according to God’s will), and then concludes that the consequent (“then God will give you what you ask”) should also be negated.  But this is not logically necessary.  A simple example should expose this fallacy:

P1:  If you own a Ford truck, then you own an automobile.

From this statement, it does not follow that:
P2:  If you do not own a Ford truck, then you do not own an automobile.

Hopefully, this example seems obvious to you.  It is possible not to own a Ford truck, but instead to own a Honda Accord, and thus own an automobile.  Likewise, with the promises listed above, it is possible that a person can pray with bad motives and still get what s/he wants.  In other words, it is possible that a person can pray and not meet any of the conditions listed above, and still have his/her prayers answered.

Now here comes the difficult part, which left my family reeling when my mom died.  What the promises above do mean is that if your prayers are not answered, then it was because you failed to meet ALL of the above conditions.  Yes, ALL.  Again, let’s look to our example.

P1:  If you own a Ford truck, or a Honda Accord, or Chevy Astro, etc., then you own an automobile.

From this statement, it logically follows that:
P2:  If you do not own an automobile, then you do not own a Ford truck, NOR do   you own a Honda Accord, NOR do you own a Chevy Astro, etc.

So looking back at our long prayer promise above, we could say that:

If God does not give you something you ask for, then you did not pray:
         In agreement with another person about a matter of church discipline,
         NOR did you have faith,
         NOR did you ask in Jesus’ name,
         NOR did you abide in Jesus and have Jesus’ words abide in you,
         NOR did you have good motives,
         NOR did you ask according to God’s will,
         NOR were you obedient.

I realize the logic may not be easy to follow, but I hope you get the point.  It is not possible to say “I know you asked in Jesus name, but you didn’t have enough faith, so that’s why God didn’t answer you.”  This is the fallacy of radical Pentecostals.  (I’m sure we’ve all heard the horror stories about people whose loved ones died from cancer, and afterwards, some (irrational) Pentecostal tells the family the person died because they did not have enough faith.  That is NOT the way it works.)  My mom and our family not only had faith, but we also prayed in Jesus’ name, abided in Jesus and His words, had good motives, and were obedient to His word.  According to the scripture passages we looked at in the last post, any of these conditions should have been good enough to get God to answer.

I should add that I still haven’t mentioned the unconditional promises.  These promises are kind of like the “catch all” promises.  They don’t require anything from the petitioner at all.  Therefore, if you fail to have faith, or ask in Jesus’ name, or agree with your friend, or have good motives, etc., then you should still be in good shape because Jesus told us that all we have to do is ask and it will be given to us.  These promises do not conflict with the conditional promises above, nor do the conditional promises qualify or limit the unconditional promises.  Instead, all of the promises complement each other in such a way that we should be confident that God will do for us whatever we ask Him.  Period.  That’s what the overall import of these passages is.

Which brings us back to the original question:  My family asked God for my mom’s healing on this earth, but she died anyway.  As far as we could tell, God didn’t keep His promises.

In conclusion, it would seem that there is no good reason, based on the scriptural prayer promises, that God should not answer our prayers how we want Him to.  Therefore, reason #2 for why prayers go unanswered (we have misunderstood the nature of God’s promises) seems to be a dead-end street as well.  As we saw above, those who attempt to solve the problem of unanswered prayers by appealing to scriptural conditions like faith or God’s will are committing a fallacy.  Thus, limiting the scriptural promises is not a valid way out of the problem.

But what else can we do?  Well, the next obvious step is to throw out Scripture all together.  Or, we could sidestep the whole issue by thinking more about the intended audience of the promises.  Maybe scripture wasn’t making these promises to us!  But what if it was?  I’ll deal with these possible solutions in upcoming posts.

<IIIa                                                             Proceed to Part IV>>

 

IIIa. Use[lessness] of Prayer: “You mean you’ll give me ANYTHING I ask for?!”

Matthew 21:22

This is the third installment of a short series on prayer.  It is important because it deals directly with the nature of the Biblical promises for prayer.  This will be a 2-part post because there is so much Biblical evidence to talk about.  In this post, I will review what I’ve talked about so far, and then wrestle with the Biblical promises one at a time.  In the 2nd half of this post, I will summarize my thoughts on what claims the Bible is making.  By the end of these posts, I’m hoping that you’ll be asking why in the world more prayers aren’t being answered!

Recap
The question I am asking in this series is one that has plagued Christianity since the first prayer went “unanswered:”

If (1) God (2) unconditionally promises in (3) Scripture to give (4) people what they (5) request in (6) faith, then why aren’t all faith-filled prayers answered through the giving of whatever people ask for?

In other words, because Christians frequently experience frustration in their prayer-lives due to unanswered prayers, what reason can be given for it?  As far as I can tell, there may be six reasons for unanswered prayer:

1.  God does not exist, or God is the type of God who does not answer prayers.
2.  God’s promises are ALL conditional.  In other words, He only answers certain types of prayers.
3.  Scripture is flawed.
4.  The promises were not intended for everyone reading them, but only a select few.
5.  Our requests are flawed.
6.  We simply don’t have enough faith.

So far, we have covered the first problem, namely, God’s existence and willingness/ability to answer prayer.  In that post, I made no real attempt to prove God’s existence or to prove God’s desire to answer prayer.  Instead, because this series is intended mainly for struggling Christians, I assumed that the God of Christianity is real and cares about our requests, and I encouraged my audience to do the same.  In fact, I made it clear that unanswered prayer may only be used to argue against the Christian God’s existence if I fail to provide a valid reason for unanswered prayer in all of the other 5 areas.  So, if I succeed in providing another reason for unanswered prayer, God’s existence can be safely assumed by the struggling Christian.

In this blog post, I will discuss the second area of inquiry – the nature of God’s promises.

The [Un]conditional Nature of God’s Promises
If you don’t care about reading through my scriptural analysis and only want to hear whether or not God’s promises are indeed unconditional, you should skip to Part b (forthcoming) of this post.

The time has finally come to deal directly with the scripture verses in question.  For the sake of brevity, I will delete duplicate promises in the Gospels.  I will also limit my study of the texts to what they imply in context, not whether or not they work a certain way in reality.  The first group of promises contain specifically stated conditions (If you do X, then God will do Y).  Oddly, most of the conditions are different.  The second group does not contain any explicit conditions.  After each promise, I will give a brief comment about the passage.

Group 1 (conditional promises)

• Condition of Agreement
  • Matthew 18:19  Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven.
  • Analysis:  The condition is easy to see – whenever two people agree about ANYTHING they ask, it will be done for them by God the Father.  But did Jesus literally mean “anything?”  It may be argued that “anything” does not really mean “anything,” since Jesus makes this promise in the context of discerning church action during church discipline.  In fact, the Greek literally renders “any matter.”  In this case, “matter” may be a reference to situations of church discipline.  Thus, the initial strength of this promise is greatly reduced.  Jesus seems to be saying that agreement in church matters is essential to how God works.  Therefore, I wouldn’t be too quick to pull out this promise when praying with your spouse about getting a job . . .    
• Condition of Faith
  • Matthew 21:22 (also Mark 11:24)  And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith (Mark: “believe that you have received it”). 
  • James 1:5-6  “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God . . . and it will be given him.  But let him ask in faith, with no doubting . . .”
  • James 5:15-16  “And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.  Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.”
  • Analysis:  In each of these verses, the key condition to answered prayer seems to be the faith of the person asking.  In other words, if the petitioner has faith, then God will do WHATEVER is asked of Him.  Unlike in the “condition of agreement,” the Greek clearly means “whatever.”  This leaves very little wiggle room for those who would attempt to limit the promise by the surrounding context.  But what does it mean to have faith?  Mark’s and James’ accounts provide the answer:  faith means believing that you’ve already received it, i.e. don’t doubt!  I will discuss faith again when we analyze the 6^th possible reason for unanswered prayer. 
• Condition of Jesus’ name
  • John 14:13-14  Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.  If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.
  • John 15:16 (also verbatim, John 16:23) “. . . whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may (will)  give it to you.”
  • Analysis:  The condition is straightforward:  If we ask ANYTHING in Jesus’ name, Jesus or the Father will give it to us.  Again, the Greek is not ambiguous – Jesus clearly means to say that we can ask ANYTHING in His name, and it will be done.  Context provides no escape for the unqualified word “whatever.”  What does it mean to ask in Jesus’ name?  Presumably, as we see in Acts 3:6 when Peter heals a lame man, it means to say “In Jesus’ name, I ask that you would do X.”  Thus, when we finish our prayers by saying “I pray this in Jesus’ name,” it would seem to me that they should be answered exactly as we desire them to be answered.  One final note:  the purpose statement in John 14:13, “that the Father may be glorified in the Son,” is not a conditional statement.  In other words, it doesn’t mean that God will only answer requests that meet the condition of Jesus receiving glory.  Instead, it means that God will make good on His promises in order that Jesus may be glorified. 
• Condition of Abiding
  • John 15:7  If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.
  • Analysis:  Here we have a strange condition:  if we abide in Jesus AND His words abide in us, then WHATEVER we ask, He will do.  Again, “whatever” means “whatever.”  What does it mean to “abide in Jesus?”  Well unfortunately, the gospel of John never really makes that clear.  Shucks.  However, the gospel does give some attributes of those who are abiding in Jesus:  they come to Jesus (“eating Jesus’ flesh,” Jn 6:35 & 6:56), they believe in Jesus (“drinking Jesus’ blood,” Jn 6:35 & 6:56), they are Jesus’ disciples (Jn 8:31), they keep the commandments (Jn 15:9-10), and they produce spiritual fruit (Jn 15:5).  Presumably, if you do these things, you are abiding in Jesus, and should therefore receive “whatever you wish.”  Don’t want cancer anymore?  Abide in Jesus, use Jesus’ promises (let His words abide in you), and you’ll get what you want . . . right?  Well, that’s what it says.
• Condition of Motive
  • James 4:2-3  “. . . You do not have, because you do not ask.  You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.”
  • Analysis:  There are actually two conditions:  we must first of all ask; secondly, we must ask rightly, which entails not wanting to spend the gift on our own passions.  Thus, in this passage, the motive for asking is the key to unlocking the mystery of receiving.   
• Condition of Praying God’s Will
  • 1John 5:14-15  “ . . . if we ask anything according to his will he hears us . . . we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.”
  • Analysis:  This is the condition that I hear all the time from Christian people – “God only answers prayers that agree with His will.”  Well, that is partly true, though that is NOT what this passage says.  This passage supports the idea that if our requests line up with God’s will, then they will be done.  However it doesn’t say anything about what happens if they don’t line up with God’s will.  In fact, the watered-down Christian version that people quote to me is the equivalent of saying that God will do what God has already decided to do.  I don’t mean to be irreverent, but to me, that idea doesn’t give prayer much teeth.  Then again,  neither does this passage from 1 John.
• Condition of Obedience
  • 1John 3:22 “. . . and whatever we ask we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.”
  • Analysis:  This promise is awkward.  As it stands, it is technically unconditional, i.e. WHATEVER (yes, that means “whatever”) we ask from God we will receive.  However, John says that the reason why God will do this is because we are obeying His commands and pleasing Him.  So although the language is not technically conditional, it is inherent in John’s thought:  God grants requests because we are obeying.  Therefore, if we are not obeying, God has no reason to grant our requests.  Oh, except for all of the other promises which I’ve already gone over…

Group 2:  Unconditional Promises

• Mat 7:7  (also Luke 11:9) Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.
  Joh 16:24 “. . . Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.”
• Analysis:  These are the only truly unconditional promises in scripture.  In these verses, all that a person needs to do is ask for something, and it will be given.  In fact, Jesus goes on to say that the reason we should ask is because God will give us what we ask for, just like an earthly father would give good gifts to his children when they ask him.  So we need not think that our prayers should have some holy motive.  Instead, Jesus says that a good motive for asking is simply a desire to have what we ask for.  Indeed, John 16:24 says that we should ask so that our joy may be full.  Now that is what I call a big promise!  

In the next blog post, I will summarize the promises of group 1 & 2, and show what they imply as a whole.  Hint:  God’s promises really are unconditional as they stand written in Scripture.

<<Back to Part II                                                                                           Proceed to Part IIIb>>

 

II. Use[lessness] of Prayer: “Dear God . . .who are you?”

SUMMARY OF PRAYER’S USELESSNESS

In my first blog on prayer, I shared the most painful way that I have been burned in my understanding of God:  unanswered prayers and the death of my mom.  I used my story to challenge the ways Christians talk and think about prayer.  My challenge proceeded as follows:

1.  Anyone (especially atheists and critics) who has studied the Bible  knows that it promises great things for those who pray.  In fact, scripture claims that God promises to give to people whatever they desire, if they ask in faith.  Attempts to limit or qualify these unconditional prayer promises in Scripture are reading into Scripture (eisegesis) meanings which are not there.

2.  My mom, and hundreds with her, did ask in faith for her healing.  She died.

3.  Therefore, something is wrong with point #1.  If Christians take this problem seriously, then they need to explain one of the following 6 things in such a way that they can resolve the tension:

i)   God
ii)  The unconditional nature of God’s promises
iii) Scripture
iv) Who can receive the promise (who is the audience?)
v)  The nature of our requests
vi) The meaning of “faith”

After writing my first blog, someone rightfully asked me: “What’s your point?”  The point is simple:  failure to satisfactorily explain the logical problem of unanswered prayer will alienate those who see it as a glaring indictment of Christianity, prayer, faith, and the Bible.  My guess is that most Christians reading this blog (yes, all 3 of you) have not thought through this problem enough.  If my conversations with numerous Christians over the years surrounding my mom’s death are any indicator, a majority of nominal Evangelical Christians are happy to go through life throwing up occasional prayers to their magic genie-in-the-sky who promises great things but doesn’t deliver.  Somehow, they’re satisfied with this portrait of God.  Or maybe they have wrestled with this topic, but have finally given up searching for a logical answer.  Instead, they are content to go on believing that prayer works, even in the face of practical contradictions.  Or perhaps they don’t even believe that prayer works, but see it as their Christian duty to continue praying anyway.  If you are one of these Christians, I’m not trying to insult you.  Everyone, no matter their worldview, has to live with tensions between what they believe and what they practice.  Thus, you may rightfully feel no need to resolve this tension for yourself.  But my hope is that in the end, Christianity has more to offer the struggling Christian, critical atheist, or ambivalent agnostic.

You see, as a Christian, it is common to encounter logical problems in your worldview and believe anyway.  But why do you do that?  I would guess that your experience with God has taught you that God is good, loving, wise, sovereign, etc.  In short, you believe God is worthy of your trust.  So when you come across logical tension, you are content to embrace mystery and trust that God has a reason for it.  But what if you lack all of that “Christian experience”?  What if your experience tells you that the world is a dark place, love is a chemical in your brain, and God is judgmental, wrathful, or non-existent?  My guess would be that when you find logical tensions in Christianity, you feel affirmed in rejecting it altogether.  Thus, it is incumbent on the Christian to offer a logical explanation for her faith.  This explanation need not be all-encompassing, but should at least be cogent enough to allow the critic to overcome the tension that is hindering him from considering other aspects of Christianity.  So in regards to prayer, is any such explanation possible?  Can the stumbling block be removed?  I will now turn to the first challenge that must be overcome:  Does God exist, and if so, does God care about prayer?

Challenge 1:  Who is this God we pray to?

When my mom passed away, my first reaction was to wonder how in the world God could exist.  I remember wandering aimlessly through the woods behind my house, tears streaking my face as I cursed God for the silence.  The terrible, lonely, gut-wrenching silence.  ”Why God?!? . . . ”  No answer.  For the first time in my life, a Godless universe made sense.  So I tried to will myself to stop believing.  I didn’t want to believe anymore.  Faith sucked.

Maybe you’ve experienced a similar feeling – things go wrong, prayers don’t get answered, ergo . . . there must not be a God.  If there is, God is a liar, or God is not the type who cares about human suffering.  The argument seems obvious to the atheist or the deist (those who believe God set the world in motion, then stepped back to watch things unfold without getting involved), and for good reason.  The logic is simple:  God makes promises, the promises fail => God is a promise breaker.  Or they may conclude that God didn’t really promise anything, because God doesn’t exist, or is busy with more important matters.

What is the best response to this argument?  Must we throw the Christian God out with the “broken” promise?

Well, I almost did.  But for me, getting rid of God would have only amplified the problem, not solved it.  Furthermore, it would have been unnecessary.  My task in this blog is not to offer reasonable arguments for the existence of God, though I feel up to the challenge.  Instead, my hope is to convince you that redefining God is not necessary . . . yet.

As I mentioned before, I can see at least 6 ways that people can wrestle with this issue.  Redefining God is only one of them.  That means that there are 5 other ways that we can deal with this problem before reverting to atheism.  Only if ALL 5 of these methods prove unfruitful will the skeptic have proven her point.

But what if we can redefine the audience, or faith, or the promises, or the nature of the request, or the way we interpret scripture?  What if we could look past the frustration, anger, resentment, fear, and doubt that have plagued our views of God, hoping that maybe this God does care about our prayers, hurt, and suffering?  Well, we might be on our way to a deeper understanding of prayer . . . and God.

For me, Christian faith has too much to offer to give up on God just yet.  If you don’t agree, I understand.  But for now, I would ask you to dare to hope that God does exist, and that God cares about you and your prayers.  My experience tells me that this is true.  And I’m hoping that you’ll stick around until the end of this short series to find out if we can resolve the tensions in prayer without giving up on God or concluding that our prayers don’t matter.

<< Go Back to Introduction                                                                         Proceed to Part 3>>

 

Introduction: The Use[lessness] of Prayer

Prayer? What are they really doing on this stage?

I include the following very personal story as a backdrop for my confused thoughts on a confusing topic:  prayer.

When my mom died in March 2008, I entered what could only be described as a crisis of faith.  After less than a two year battle with breast cancer, my mom passed away in an agonizingly slow way in my childhood home in Virginia.  As her organs shut down over the last week of her life, she entered a state of confusion and was unable to communicate with us in her last days.  It was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced.

Perhaps what made it so painful were the events and choices that my family made leading up to it.  To make a long story short, my mom, who was a medical professional, knew that chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery are not always surefire ways to beat cancer.  Instead, they can wreak havoc on a person’s body, limiting the quality of life or even making death more painful.  So my mom, after much soul-searching and research, decided to go with homeopathy - and prayer.  The more time passed, the more convinced she became that God wanted to heal her.  Thus, she sought to remove barriers that might be in the way of healing:  she confessed her faults and prayed according to James 5, prayed and accepted the promises of God (more on those later), believed that she was already healed and needed simply to accept God’s healing in faith (Mark 11:24), etc.  She was anointed with oil, “healed” in a charismatic healing service, and faithfully followed a strict diet given to her by nothing less than a modern-day shaman (only this shaman was a Christian).  Family-friends looked on helplessly as we stepped out with charismatic faith . . . and lost.  The night before she died, we continued praying and giving her the homeopathic treatments.  I went to work the next morning, trusting that God would work some sort of miracle.  I reasoned that if I didn’t go to work, it would mean that I didn’t really think God would deliver on the promises.  Well I believed, and God didn’t deliver.  She died while I was at work, trusting that she wouldn’t.  Hence my crisis of faith.  I’m probably being too cynical, but I feel like I have a right to be.  Experience is a powerful teacher.

The cold fact that every Christian reading this story must deal with is this:  prayer (and God) did not heal my mom.  Prayer (and God, depending on your view of sovereignty) killed her.  What I mean is that reliance on prayer and natural healing took the place of other avenues of healing which could have saved her life.  Furthermore, we (family and friends) enabled her death by being supportive of homeopathy and charismatic healing while praying along with her.  Depending on your worldview, you may be muttering something at this point about how it was God’s will, or worse yet, that she’s been “healed in heaven.”  You may be right:  my family has entertained the possibility that she may have died just as quickly by getting surgery and chemotherapy.  But I’m not sure that I believe that anymore.  I had to believe it to get through the first year after her death.  And yes, we find hope in the image of Mom being healed in heaven.  But that wasn’t what we prayed for, and is probably the lamest explanation that I have ever received for God’s “answer” to prayer.  After all, I specifically prayed for her to be healed on this earth.

Another common objection, as alluded to above, is that God has ordained “other avenues of healing” that should work in conjunction with prayer.  I agree with this idea very loosely, but wonder how much the objector really believes that prayer is a necessary part of the equation at all.  If your argument is that my mom was wrong to pursue healing through prayer and diet alone, then I have to wonder how much you really understand or believe the unconditional promises of God in scripture.  Moreover, I wonder how you think prayer actually helps in the healing process.  If you’re the type of Christian who thinks that God requires valid means (in this case modern medicine, but the idea can be extended to other realms) and prayer to heal someone, then I would like for you to explain to me prayer’s role in God’s decision to heal or not heal someone.  After all, atheists get healed through modern medicine just as often as Christians do.  What part does prayer really play in all of this?  Thus, any objection that claims my mom failed to understand the way God works in the modern world falls short.  These questions and this story are the basis for my essay.

Essentially, my challenge is this:  If (1) God (2) unconditionally promises in (3) Scripture to give (4) people what they (5) request in (6) faith, then why aren’t all faith-filled prayers answered through the giving of whatever people ask for?

This challenge is a substantial one to Christianity, for it requires further explanation of the meaning of at least one of the following words:

1.  God (Either God is the type of God who can answer prayer, or God is not.  Or, either God exists, or God doesn’t.  Indeed, go to any militant atheist’s website, and you will see that many reject God based on unanswered prayer.  Their logic is valid, if not convincing).
2.  A straightforward understanding of God’s unconditional promises
3.  Scripture
4.  People (in other words, the promise’s intended audience)
5.  The nature of our requests (what do we actually mean when we pray, and how does God understand it?)
6.  Faith

In future blogs, I will attempt to address each one of these issues in turn (though they are all intimately connected), ending with my thoughts on prayer’s use[lessness].

Disclaimer:  I made several strong statements in this blog that you probably do not agree with, or may even be offended by.  I did so intentionally to get you to think through logical problems you may be comfortably glossing over.  Feel free to challenge anything I’ve written, and don’t worry about the extremely personal nature of this topic.  Any objections you forward are probably objections that I have used in the past, and I won’t be hurt by them.

Proceed to Part II>>