Deaf God, Dumb God
Well, here we are at the final two chapters of Crump's book on NT Petitionary Prayer. I've given you a provocative title for this post, and hopefully by then end you'll agree that it fits.
The penultimate chapter deals with the prayer material in the General Letters and Revelation. There's some really good insight into specific issues hidden in this section. For example, there is a restrained but suggestive reading of Hebrews that Jesus struggled in prayer with the necessity of his forth-coming death, and that Jesus did indeed pray with loud cries and tears because like us, he was learning obedience through prayer.
Being the eternal Son of God did not exempt Jesus from enduring life's lesson plan for suffering. But what did he have left to learn, since he had already entered the world in perfect obedience?—the full measure of sustained obedience to the bitter end.1
Deaf God
But what I found most engaging was the discussion of the warnings about things that "stymie prayer's effectiveness". In 1 Peter 3:7, and then v12, Crump draws the clear implication: "men who mistreat their wives lose the ability to communicate freely with God". v12 sets this in terms of "the righteous" vs. "those who do evil", drawing upon the Psalter's dichotomy of these two groups. Similarly, 1 John 4:20 makes just as apparent the interconnectivity between out relationship with God and our relationship with others. James 4:2-3 also connects prayer's efficacy and relationships within the family of God. Motivations that are grounded in personal satisfaction, even more so when set in the context of community dissolution, find deaf ears. "Any petition rooted in the urgency of personal advancement or outperforming another will never be affirmed by the Father."2 So too in James 5, Crump reads the Elijah example through the lens of covenant curse:
James provides a final warning to his readers not to follow Israel's example. They, too, are in danger of becoming a fractured, sinful community, suffering with illness, no longer able to pray.3
In summarising these, Crump notes that they are not 'mechanical or even natural laws about prayer per se" but "restrictions within the realm of personal relationship."4 God, being a good communicator, tells us in advance and clearly the things that break down our communication to him. In summary:
In some cases, failure to ask (James 4:2-3)
God will not bless selfishness.
God does not affirm foolish prayer (and so pray for wisdom!)
God rejects prayers rooted in disobedience.
Persistent, deliberate mistreatment of brothers and sisters in Christ may cause God to turn a deaf ear to us.
If that is sobering, to think that we might pray and find God deaf to us, it should be; and yet he has also told us why he would do so and how to rectify it. God is not inscrutably deaf, he has set relational norms which we violate at our peril.
Dumb God
Prayer is... a problem. Just as much as, why do bad things happen. Does God answer prayers? Does prayer move God? How do we address the question of whether prayer does anything. And how do we do so in light of the simple reality that so often in life we pray, and God seems not to answer. Indeed, his silence is often deafening.
That's where Crump begins in his final chapter. And his attempt at an answer begins with some theological prolegomena which I think is really helpfully expressed, so I'm going to follow the contours of his thought here.
God is revealed in Scripture in a way that is true to who he is. You will never discover that God is contradictory to what has been revealed.
At the same time, there is a hiddenness and surprising quality to God's character.
The suffering, failure, and abandonment exhibited at Calvary is the quintessential instance of a revelation wherein God is most magnificently unveiled while remaining utterly hidden. God is hidden in the cross, not because the crucifixion falsifies or obscures any part of his character, but because the truth revealed in a crucified Savior is inaccessible to anyone who will not look through the eyes of faith.5
Secondly, Crump talks through the parameters of exegesis and theology. In this he draws a distinction between biblical necessity and theological possibility. The Scripture, with interpretation, sets a playing field of what is necessarily the case, for us to hold biblically consistent beliefs. This is the work of exegesis, essentially. Beyond that, there is a range of possible data and beliefs that all accord with the biblical necessities, but aren't themselves necessitated by it. This is really the field of (systemic) theology.
I have sometimes said that, given the biblical data, systemic theology or doctrine is "what must be the underlying reality that makes sense of all these data points". What I like about Crump's distinction is that it helps make sense of the under-determination of the biblical data.
Let me give an analogy and then an illustration. Forgive me if you've heard a sudoku analogy from me recently though. I've become a big fan of the youtube channel Cracking the Cryptic, and the types of sudoku puzzles featured on it - no numbers, just complex rules. A good puzzle has (a) a clear line of logic to go from nothing to solved, without guess-work, (b) a single solution. The Scripture, let me suggest, is not like that. Rather, it's more like a puzzle where you have some data (e.g. some numbers on the grid), and some rules, but multiple solutions could fulfil that data and rule-set.
That Jesus is God Incarnate seems like a biblical necessity. How the incarnation works, is theology. Can we set some theological parameters and say "it must follow these constraints"? Yes, I think that's true too. I do think, for example, that the Chalcedonian Definition (for all its historical issues) 'fences the sandpit' for theological discourse.
This is all prolegomena6 for what Crump wants to get to: what must we affirm from the biblical data, even if other questions remain unanswered or in the realm of possibility?
His answer is this:
1) We pray to a personal God.
We shouldn't miss this—prayer is personal communication and conversation with the supreme person, and we make a misstep when we think more of God as being than person. God is listening, willing to engage in relationship, and capable and desirous of answering.
Crump takes the moment to pause here and offer a devastating critique of that stream of prayer material that talks about steps or method or prayer as power. Those are all mechanistic ways of relating to an impersonal power to get it to do what you want, and they are ultimately not prayer. This is why neither persistence nor passion are 'qualifications' to get what you want out of God. They are qualities of ongoing conversation, not quantities for measurement.
2) A personal God is willing to be moved.
Here is where we really get into a discussion about the future, foreknowledge, sovereignty, and so on. I agree with Crump's major point: the God of the Scripture is a God who is influenced by prayer, and the Scripture talks very much like prayer 'does' something.
How that works is another question. Crump lays out his position along these lines, by using the Iditarod sled dog race as an analogy. That's a multi-leg race where you need to hit certain checkpoints, but it doesn't matter what path you take between them. For Crump, God's overall sovereignty controls the checkpoints, but he's open and flexible about how the course of history gets there.
On the other hand, Crump argues that the strong determinist view, or the pancausation view of someone like Calvin ultimately is (a) exegetical overreach, and (b) renders prayer only as a means to change us, which runs against the grain of the biblical evidence.
I think Crump's critique has some bite on the prayer side of things. And, I would say, I think Crump's view of sovereignty and openness is a theological possibility. I'm not entirely convinced by it, because I think that the relatively intractable problem of what it means for God to be eternal and atemporal in relation to the history of a temporally finite world complicates (to say the least) this notion. I do find the theological picture of a God who is sovereign over all to make sense while holding it in a real tension with the notion that prayer moves God, not just us.
3) “While prayer can at times change God, it should always change the one who prays"
It is, in that sense, 'therapeutic' - it's good for us and changes who we are. That change is not, however, primarily a matter of feelings and emotions and experiences, but in the realm of faith and ethics. And since the Scripture reveals "the greater portion of [God's] will for every one of his children"7, the primary focus of prayers is faithfulness and perseverance. Which leads into the final point
4) We pray between the Times.
Eschatology, the already/not yet nature of the present age, shapes NT prayer especially.
"Both the degree of our personal involvement in the King's future victories and the course of the kingdom's encroachment over the cosmos will be shaped in part by the content and the faithfulness of our petitions"8
NT prayer is focused on "the things that matter for eternity"; "though we live in this world, any prayer life preoccupied with the concerns of this world is a life that has lost its way"9
"intercessory prayer makes a real difference to the spiritual lives of others. Perhaps the greatest gift we can offer anyone is the prayer we make for their encouragement, guidance, patience, faith, peace of mind, conviction, repentance, or spiritual renewal"10
5) Lastly: "suffering remains the norm for God's people"
Yes, faithful prayer is bold to ask for miracles, but they are not common. But the trend of the New Testament material is in the other direction. Prayer and Power in the New Testament is far more oriented towards faithfulness and perseverance through suffering, and we should be wary of any theology that equates prayer with power with miracles. Instead, the theology of the cross teaches us something else - that God's power is made perfect in weakness, and that his glory is hidden in the Messiah's suffering. so too with us.
By faith we know that the Father's intentions for us, as for Jesus are always and only good. By faith we can rest assured that our Father always answers every prayer, however unexpected or even unwanted the reply may be. By faith we believe, as Jesus believed, that the plan of God can reshape the ugliest of life's experiences—the ones from which prayer does not deliver us, the ones that prayer delivers us into—by transforming them into redemptive moments that we would never trade away. These are the lessons of the cross
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Fancy Greek for ‘stuff you have to say before you get to the stuff you want to say’
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