My good friend Pentamom contributed some more thoughts (hastily composed, she cautioned) on prayer in response to the Not A Talisman post:

Your analysis is certainly sufficient on its own, but it occurs to that there are other reasons why, within the context of Christian theology, this model should not be reliable.

Here’s another one: physical healing from a given condition is not presumptively the highest good in every situation. Maybe that’s just another example of the vending-machine analogy, but I’m thinking of it in a slightly different way from Tom Wright’s usage (though I agree with his application also).

It seems to me that Wright is saying you can’t merely ask for something and expect to get it, as though God had no will of His own. True enough. But there’s also the flip side: Christian theology teaches that God is both loving (He loves His children the way a good father loves his children) and all-wise. Christian theology says, “Maybe God will give you something BETTER than you pray for. He knows better than you do what the best outcome would be.”

Now I want to be careful here: suffering and death are the effect of the fall, and I want to stay away from the glories of a failed angioplasty. Nonetheless, God uses the difficult things to bring about the better things. A failed angioplasty or post-op complications that do not lead rapidly to death may cause some experience of suffering that brings about greater good for the patient and/or his loved ones. Beyond that, from the Christian POV, a failed angioplasty or post-op complications that lead rapidly to death result in a permanent end to suffering and the beginning of an untroubled, unending existence in perfect peace, eventually to be joined by many of those you love best, never again to be separated, in the uninterrupted presence of the God a Christian professes to love. That doesn’t automatically chalk up to “bad outcome,” now does it?

Now, the atheist response I see coming is that this is just an apologetic trick to explain the ineffectiveness of prayer to the ceiling of one’s bedroom. The reason, though, that I don’t think the atheist has a lot of ground to stand on here is that the theology of suffering and the hope of the resurrection aren’t tacked onto Christian theology the way an apologetic “out” would be, but the theology of suffering is is woven very deep into the Christian faith itself, and one might say that the hope of the resurrection is the POINT of the Christian faith. Take away the theology of suffering and the hope of the resurrection from the Christian faith, and you have a very different religion altogether. You have to do more than say “that’s just a trick”–you actually have to disprove the theology of suffering and the hope of the resurrection in order to demonstrate that the atheist’s objection holds water. Only IF those things are not true, is the argument that “a failed angioplasty is not the end of the world” silly on its face.

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another similar principle that guts the study, but in a certain sense, everything about Christian theology that makes it Christian theology causes the study to make no sense. You’ve hit on the broad principles — my intuitive sense is that there are about a hundred corollaries that independently demonstrate it as well.

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• Posted by Tim on Tuesday, November 4, 2003 at 7:50:52 am PST
• Category: Miscellany
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