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Ask and It Will Be Given to You
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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Consider the following situation. It is the first day of school, and the new third-grade students file into the classroom to be shown to their seats for the coming year. As they enter, the third-grade teacher notices one small boy who is particularly unkempt. He looks to be in desperate need of bathing, and his clothes are dirty, torn and tight-fitting. During recess, the teacher pulls aside the boy's previous teacher and asks about his wretched condition. The other teacher informs her that he always looks that way, even though the boy's family is quite wealthy. The reason he appears as he does, she continues, is that the family observes an odd practice according to which the children do not receive many important things – food, clothing, bathing, even shelter – unless they specifically request them. Since the boy, like many third-graders, has little interest in bathing and clean clothes, he just never asks for them.
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References
1 For example, ‘pray for each other so that you may be healed’ James 5: 16. See also Colossians 4:3, II Corinthians 1:11, Ezra 6:10, John 17:20, and Acts 8:15.
2 Some of the more noteworthy literature includes Joshua Hoffman's ‘On Petitionary Prayer’ and Alston's, William ‘Divine Human Dialogue and the Nature of God’ in Faith and Philosophy, 2, 1 (01 1985),CrossRefGoogle ScholarGeach's, P. T. ‘Praying for Things to Happen’ in his God and the Soul (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 86–99,Google Scholar and Helm's, Paul response to Geach, ‘Omnipotence and Change’, Philosophy, 15 (1976).Google Scholar
3 Morris, Thomas, Making Sense Of It All (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), p. 44.Google Scholar
4 Ibid.
5 James 1:17.
6 Of course one might object here that for the spiritually mature believer prayers of thanksgiving would be sufficient to keep them from idolatry since such a believer realizes that all good things, requested or not, ultimately come from God. While this is so, not all believers are this well positioned and, as a result, God's general policy must provide for both the spiritually mature and the spiritually less mature.
7 What Are We Doing When We Pray?, Vincent Brümmer (London: SCM Press, 1984), p. 45.Google Scholar
8 Those supporters of the first response might go so far as to characterize this as more than ‘good luck’ on the part of the unbeliever. Assuming that God has middle knowledge, it may be the case that He would never choose to actualize a world in which there were no believers praying for their daily bread. In this way, God arranges the world so that He will never have to withdraw the necessary provisions of life and yet still determine petitionary prayer to be ‘strongly’ efficacious.
9 As Brümmer puts the matter, all the events which are realized subsequent to my prayer must be interpreted through some framework. It is only when one sees the world through ‘the eyes of faith,’ i.e., as a place where God is active in the world in response to prayer, that we can ‘see’ events occurring in response to prayer (see Brümmer, pp. 96f.).
10 Stump, , Eleonore, , ‘Petitionary Prayer,’ American Philosophical Quarterly, 16 (04 1979), 81–91.Google Scholar
11 Ibid. p. 87.
12 This part of Stump's argument is very similar to the good that we think occurs when idolatry is avoided. In both cases, the petitioner is reminded that his needs are ultimately fulfilled through God, and not himself.
13 Brümmer, p. 47.
14 Ibid. p. 55.
15 Stump, p. 88.
16 Ibid.
17 David Basinger also discusses this problem with Stump's argument in ‘Why Petition an Omnipotent God’, Religious Studies, 19, 30, although in a different manner. After putting forth the analogy of Bill, who is attempting to intercede on the behalf of the marriage of his two friends, Tom and Sue, he writes that ‘it seems somewhat doubtful that…God…would force a reconciliation between Tom and Sue for any reason. It seems even more doubtful that God would “force” a reconciliation primarily because he was requested to do so by Bill.’
18 A similar idea is advanced by Buttrick, George A. in Prayer (New York: Abington-Cokesbury Press, 1942) and also by Brümmer, pp. 57–8.Google Scholar
19 ST Supp. Q.72, a.2, resp.
20 We thank Eleonore Stump and David Dudrick for some suggestive remarks that gave rise to this second solution.
21 We would like to thank A. A. Howsepian, Eleonore Stump, Thomas Flint, Bruce Reichenbach, Randall Basinger, David Dudrick and the editors of this journal for their many helpful and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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