Jack Keller on petitionary prayer

I wasn't taken by the answers the author provides, but the guy surely raises some good questions. See excerpts below (full text here):

"[The view that God can and does intervene directly in the world for the sake of particular individuals] contains much that is appealing. It surely echoes important voices from Scripture that testify to God's ongoing involvement with the creation, and especially with the people of Israel and with those who follow Jesus. It helps us grasp in concrete ways the basic Christian affirmation that God cares for us and actively seeks our well being. It encourages us to place our concerns and needs before God prayerfully and boldly, assured that God is not indifferent to our plights and that requests made in good faith will be honored.

Yet the reality of innocent suffering has made sensitive people suspicious of this formulation of the doctrine of providence and the corresponding view of prayer. Some months ago Nashville newspapers gave extensive coverage to country-music entertainer Barbara Mandrell's auto accident, in which she suffered a broken leg but escaped serious injury. President Reagan's get-well greetings to Mandrell exemplified the understandings of providence described above: "God must have been watching over you." I wondered when I read that, as I am sure many others did, whether Reagan was aware of the implication of his statement: that God did not care providentially for the young man driving the other vehicle, who was killed instantly in the collision.

More generally, any case of innocent suffering (especially when hundreds, thousands, even millions are victimized) raises the question: what happened to God's providential care? If God can and does respond to prayers by intervening directly in the world for the sake of persons and peoples, why do we run into so many situations in which God does not intervene to prevent evil?

The perception of innocent suffering is the chief factor pushing many Christians to the other side of the theological watershed. Even more than a world view shaped by Newtonian science, the magnitude of evil that falls upon individuals and peoples rules out for these Christians any easy confidence in God's direct control of creation. They see the universe as self-sustaining, law abiding and religiously neutral. The sun rises alike on the evil and the good. The rain falls on the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45). As Jesus tells us, God allows persons to suffer the violence of evil and the havoc of accidents without regard to virtues or vices (Luke 13:1-5). God is personal, but paradoxically has placed us in an impersonal universe. Religiously speaking, the best that can be made of such a world is to see it, as John Hick proposes, as a "vale of soul-making." [...]

This view of providence undermines the practice of petitionary prayers. Once you are convinced that pleas for divine aid are merely soliloquies that serve to clarify your own motives and perhaps to summon up your resolution to act, prayer as a genuine dialogue, a pleading before God, evaporates. Why bother to pray for your needs and those of others -when you know that God does not care enough to do anything about those, needs ? Why not simply think them over by yourself? [...]

If we hold fast to the biblical witness that God does care for us, individually as well as corporately, what must we infer about God and the world that would account for the fact that petitionary prayer sometimes seems futile?

One option would be to suppose that it only seems that God has not answered our prayers; God always answers, but frequently says No. There are times, perhaps, when that is the case. We do not always ask wisely, and God, to be truly loving, must then refuse our requests. But that explanation will not account for the many occasions when there can be virtually no doubt that our requests coincide with God's will. Surely, God intends children to be healthy and happy, yet our prayers for the deliverance of our children from injury or illness do not always bring deliverance. Should we suppose that God's perfect will is sometimes to wreak havoc and misery upon the innocent? There must be a better answer."

Maybe I can postface those excerpts with a few of my own thoughts on petitionary prayer. Basically I don't know how petitionary prayer works, but Scripture tells us to pray for bread and for the recovery of our sick, and that's what I do. I do this in full knowledge that it may never be granted, but I'm not above praying to find my keys when I've lost them (to H.'s absolute horror). After that, I must accept that God knows what God is doing, no matter how incredibly hard it is to walk into Durham Cathedral only to read of countless 14-year-olds whose bodies were crushed in mining accidents.

Painting by Henri O. Tanner