Livingston ThompsonTHE BELIEF that we can entreat God for intervention in our crisis is central to Christian and Jewish belief and piety. As examples from the Bible will show (e.g. Genesis 18:23-33; II Kings 20:1-6), God is prepared to change His intention and His mind if we ask.
For this reason we pray that people who are ill will be healed; we pray for change in the realities of our lives, communities, country and the world. Entreaty and supplication evidences our belief in the omnipotence of God who loves all creation. Thanksgiving and adoration are given to God when we recognise God's unmerited grace and favour. When we believe God has answered our prayers we rejoice.
However, Hurricane Ivan has exposed an area of popular Christian thought that we must revise if the Christian religion is not to crumble under the weight of its own implausibility. The area that needs to be revised is the popular approach to prayer. There is a perception that prayer is the speaking of right words or the right speaking of words that make a sufficiently convincing appeal to God, who then responds on account of the prayer. This gives praying a kind of magical character.
PROBLEMS OF PRAYER THEORY
After the recent hurricane, several churchmen and women, most of whom do not live in the hurricane ravaged areas of Clarendon, Manchester and St. Elizabeth, began to claim that the path Hurricane Ivan took was due to their prayer.
Others were less preposterous and argued that the path of the hurricane was God's action in response to their prayer for Jamaica to be saved. What people seem to mean is that words were spoken in such a manner that God was led to respond. That approach to prayer is not only a popular Christian habit. In both Islam and Hinduism, for example, there is also a lot of emphasis on the repetition of right words or the right speaking of words.
The claim that the hurricane behaved in response to the words of our prayer is problematic on two grounds.
First, to say the result was an answer to prayer, suggests that what happened to Jamaica was only a warning and that the damage in the southern parishes was only a slap on the wrist - never mind the fact that several hundred persons lost all their belongings. (The members of the New Broughton United Church, which was totally destroyed, the Nazareth Moravian Church that was severely damaged, or the Ocean View Bible Camp with over $30 million of damage would hardly call their damage a slap on the wrist).
On the basis of that argument, we would have to say that those persons whose properties were lost or partially destroyed are bearing the burden of the sin of the rest of the nation that was not affected. We are then left with having to explain why those who suffered were the chosen ones is it because they are the only righteous ones?
Secondly, to claim that the result was God's actions in response to our prayer suggests that one must then argue that the damage to Haiti was due to ineffective prayer.
In talking with one leading churchman on this matter, I found out that he and others do actually believe that the damage to Jamaica is less than to Haiti because people in Jamaica know how to pray but the people of Haiti do not. I wonder what the Christians in Grenada and the Cayman Islands think of such an unjustifiable, self-serving theological position. One does not have to strain far to see its problematic nature.
The position of this writer is that we ought not to make any association whatsoever between our prayer and the results of the passage of the hurricane or any disaster from which we are spared. For all who have lived through this or any other disaster our attitude should simply be that of thanksgiving that we were spared although we do not know why.
Similarly, if we believe God has healed a sick person, we should not claim that God was under the duress of our prayer and so responded because there are too many sick people that are still around after our prayers. We simply do not know why certain things happen to human beings or to events in nature. There is nothing wrong in admitting that we do not know.
So our attitude should be thankfulness and wonder. This is not to say we should not entreat God in the face of the hurricane, an illness or some impending disaster, since God is God. However, we should not try to bend and press the outcomes into the strait-jacket of our ignorance about the intentions of God and the processes of nature.
GIVE THANKS AND WONDER
An attitude of thanksgiving and wonder relieves us of the difficulties associated with having to justify the existence of evil, suffering and disaster in the world when we believe in God who is good, gracious, omnipotent and perfectly benevolent. When one takes an attitude of thanksgiving and wonder, there is no need to respond to those who believe that the contradictions of the world, the spread of evil and vice prove that God does not exist because the existence God does not depend on disaster not occurring.
We are realising more and more that even so-called natural disasters, illness, as well as the crime in our society are all related to human action or inaction. Rather than rejoicing in the powerful effect of our words we should endeavour to act wisely and in love to minimise the disastrous effects of the powerful human and natural forces. We all should always entreat God because the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous person is to much avail (James 5:16).
However, when by the grace of God we are spared we know not how or why we should not say it is our prayer. We should simply give thanks to God and wonder.
Livingston Thompson, PhD, is president of the executive board of the Moravian Church. E-mail: moravianchja@cois.com
