Prayer -- Participating with God

Continuing the posts on prayer, I want to now suggest that prayers of petition are important in our lives for a second reason. In the previous post, it was argued that prayers of petition are crucial as reminders to us of our ongoing dependence upon God's personal providence. Furthermore, I tried to make the case that expressing our needs to God (even though God may know them) is critical because communing (from which we get the idea of communication) is the essence of the being made in God's image. But you can read that presentation for yourself.

Here I want to make another point about why we pray prayers of petition unto God.

We pray in this supplicative fashion because we are participating in God's own activity. Recall the words of St. Paul in Romans 8:

26In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. 27And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will.

Here's an intriguing question, then (at least in my mind). Why in the world would the Spirit himself intercede for us, if God's will is going to be done in our lives anyway. Perhaps the Spirit's intercession for us, "with groans that words cannot express" is God's own crying out to God. One has to wonder whose "groans" the Spirit expresses -- our human groanings or God's own.Of course, Paul could merely be speaking in some poetic fashion, but then these words would have no revelatory or theological significance.

Whatever else it means, when we pray we are actually joining with God's own activity for us and in us. So, perhaps one of the reasons we practice intercessory petitionary prayer is that we might learn how to pray as the Holy Spirit prays.

Prayer -- The First Ministry of Dependence.

Without doubt, St. Augustine's Confessions is one of the greatest books written in the entire literary history of the West. This prayer for his departed parents (especially his mother), which comes at the end of Book 9, drips with spiritual pathos, even as it confesses faith. It is a good prayer to reflect upon for the first post of the mini-series (see below) on prayer that I shall offer.

Thus now, O my Praise and my Life, O God of my heart, forgetting for a little her good deeds for which I give joyful thanks to thee, I now beseech thee for the sins of my mother. Hearken unto me, through that Medicine of our wounds, who didst hang upon the tree and who sittest at thy right hand "making intercession for us.". . I beseech thee also to forgive her debts, whatever she contracted during so many years since the water of salvation. Forgive her, O Lord, forgive her, I beseech thee. . .

Indeed, I believe thou hast already done what I ask of thee, but "accept the freewill offerings of my mouth, O Lord." [She] only desired to have her name remembered at thy altar, where she had served without the omission of a single day, and where she knew that the holy sacrifice was dispensed by which that handwriting that was against us is blotted out.

Who will repay him the price with which he bought us, so as to take us from him? Thus to the sacrament of our redemption did thy hand maid bind her soul by the bond of faith. Let none separate her from thy protection. . . .

Therefore, let her rest in peace with her husband. . . And inspire, O my Lord my God, inspire thy servants, my brothers; thy sons, my masters, who with voice and heart and writings I serve, that as many of them as shall read these confessions may also at thy altar remember Monica, thy handmaid, together with Patricius. . . .

The following line represents the mystery of prayer, for so many of us:

"Indeed, I believe thou hast already done what I ask of thee, but "accept the freewill offerings of my mouth, O Lord."

So, why do we pray? It seems to me that the first reason (although there are more) that we make petitionary prayer is because we are completely dependent upon God. This is true whether we know it or not.

However, Christians know the God upon whom we depend is clearly personal, rather than merely some force that undergirds reality. In the Triune Godhead immanently we have Three Persons in eternal communion. The Son is eternally begotten-- the Word of God (John 1); and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (hat tip to the East). The theology of orthodoxy is clear that the Three-One God is a communion of persons.

We would not be far afield if we were to say that the Trinity is the eternal source of personal communication; although in so speaking we must not think that we speak univocally about Triune communication and our paltry speaking of thoughts to and with one another. But, our capacity to formulate thought and express ourselves in reason and love is surely a reflection of our bearing God's Image. So, speaking to express and share our very selves is one of the ways we are, by an unspeakable grace, most like God in our creatureliness.

When we address God in petitionary prayer, therefore, we are acknowledging two vitally important realities. The first already allude to: our utter dependence upon God who made us in the Divine Image. To ask God for things or for God to do things is to identify for ourselves the source of our lives and the hope of the welfare of ourselves and our family and friends. But, this reminding is only complete when we "speak" it. (Even if we "think" it we are "speaking" it, whether oral utterances are produced or not.) This act of speaking out petitions is completing, because our dependence is upon the Tri-Personal God.

But this brings us to a second consideration. Speaking in petition to God in Christ is personal communication. Rooted as it is in the Triune Life, speaking petitionary prayer involves acknowledging our dependence upon God who is Personal Reality. Petitionary prayer, therefore, is an act that is rooted in the belief that God oversees and interacts with the world. And it considers expressing our needs and wishes to God a vital part of what it means to be in the care of this kind of God. Where as many philosophies and religious outlooks allow for conceptualizing -- as the Stoics of old would have -- about one's lot in life, petitionary prayer affirms that Trinitarian Providence is first and foremost personal involvement. The Incarnation is both the most sublime sign of this and the most powerful means.

Hence, because Trinitarian Providence is Personal, it is also contingent but not arbitrary. It is rooted completely in God's good purposes for Creation and for us as children of the Father in Christ who live by the presence and power of the Spirit. Nothing imposes itself upon us in God's providence as a necessity. Christian theology has even contended (Leibinitz's view of sufficient reason not withstanding) God's goodness to be free, even if it comes from God's own nature and unchanging character.

So, nothing is fate. In other words, no concept of Kharma can be reconciled with petitionary Trinitarian-personal prayer, for nothing is determined for us by the circumstances of our lives. (Consider even the prayers of Ninevah, who turned to God in repentance and were spared from the prophecy.) As the Psalmist says, "our help is in the Lord." And as St. Paul says in Colossians, "All things hold together in Christ" [alone, we could add].

Petitionary prayer, therefore, is first of all a ministry of the children of God in the life of the Church to one another. The very act of doing it declares to us and reminds us of our dependence upon the Triune personal source of our lives,. We are reminded, thereby, that our lives are in His hands not controlled by laws or circumstances. And when we pray we are reminding ourselves that our dependence is upon the Triune One who listens when we pray, because we bear the image of a God who commune-icates in His own Triune life.

Why *do* we pray?

ICON OF ST SERAPHIM PRAYING.

FROM JOHN WESLEY'S -- On Christian Perfection

God's command to "pray without ceasing" is founded on the necessity we have of his grace to preserve the life of God in the soul, which can no more subsist one moment without it, than the body can without air.

Whether we think of; or speak to, God, whether we act or suffer for him, all is prayer, when we have no other object than his love, and the desire of pleasing him. All that a Christian does, even in eating and sleeping, is prayer, when it is done in simplicity, according to the order of God, without either adding to or diminishing from it by his own choice.

Prayer continues in the desire of the heart, though the understanding be employed on outward things. In souls filled with love, the desire to please God is a continual prayer.

As the furious hate which the devil bears us is termed the roaring of a lion, so our vehement love may be termed crying after God.

God only requires of his adult children, that their hearts be truly purified, and that they offer him continually the wishes and vows that naturally spring from perfect love. For these desires, being the genuine fruits of love, are the most perfect prayers that can spring from it.

One of the great pastoral mysteries is prayer, especially petitionary prayer. In the Church, all acknowledge its importance, yet few practice it regularly. One wonders, why.

Some might decry the laxness in prayer as evidence of spiritual ennui; and it might certainly be. Others could complain of the lack of pastoral instruction to the faithful about how to pray; such would not be far afield.

I suggest that one reason that we fail to pray is that we have no real theology of prayer. There are all kinds of postions, of course. The "name-it-and-claim-it" crowd, if they have an operative theology, seem to assume that God sits back and awaits our instructions, because he desires to be instructed to bless us. In the past few years, Open Theism -- much more theological than the previously mentioned crew, has suggested that God's will is underdetermined regarding the future, because the future is non-existing and hence radically open. Human prayerful interaction with God does make a vast difference.

On the other hand, there are another set of Christians who hold a diametrically opposite view; our prayers change nothing about God's actions, as all that God has determined to do God will do. In this senario, prayer is more about aligning our wills to God's than making actual petition. And lastly there are those who simply say, it is a mystery. Well, no doubt............

So, I am wondering, how would we best begin to articulate a theology of prayer? As I see it, there are at least four related theological/pastoral issues that must be addressed. First, what is the character of God's providence, i.e. how determined is it? Second, what role are human persons designed to play in God's providential oversight, as bearers of God's image with a role of shepherding creation for him(Genesis 1-2)? Third, how does the Church understand itself in the work of redemption in the world, since Jesus (at least in John's Gospel) suggests that the Church would "do what he had been doing," and "could ask in his name" and expect the Father to hear and answer? Fourth, how does our eschatology inform our concepts of prayer and its efficacy?

I'll be posting on this issue during this next week or so, but I would love to have a bit of a conversation among the few of you who read my ramdom and eclectic musings from time to time. Until later. . .

What We Know About. . . .Anything

During the last 150 years vast improvements have been brought to our world through the efforts of scientists and researchers. Hooray!

And yet, in some fields of scientific inquiry there is an ongoing resistance to ideas that challenge the accepted wisdom. The most obvious of these, I think, is in the area of biological origins, where neo-Darwinism has reigned supreme. That is, until recently. Beginning with Paul Johnson's book, Darwin on Trial, a new movement was launched publicly -- Intelligent Design Theory. Since then there has been a firestorm about the new conclusions (which are quite old actually) of IDT.

In the upcoming edition of National Review Magazine, George Gilder has an article entitled "Darwin and Me." He describes among other things in this excellent essay the way that neo-Darwinian theory fails to account for the way that the very existence of DNA information in living beings undercuts the main tenents of the reigning orthodoxy in science.

I came to see that the computer offers an insuperable obstacle to Darwinian materialism. In a computer, as information theory shows, the content is manifestly independent of its material substrate. No possible knowledge of the computer’s materials can yield any information whatsoever about the actual content of its computations. In the usual hierarchy of causation, they reflect the software or “source code” used to program the device; and, like the design of the computer itself, the software is contrived by human intelligence.

As I pondered this materialist superstition, it became increasingly clear to me that in all the sciences I studied, information comes first, and regulates the flesh and the world, not the other way around. The pattern seemed to echo some familiar wisdom. Could it be, I asked myself one day in astonishment, that the opening of St. John’s Gospel, In the beginning was the Word, is a central dogma of modern science?

In raising this question I was not affirming a religious stance. At the time it first occurred to me, I was still a mostly secular intellectual. But after some 35 years of writing and study in science and technology, I can now affirm the principle empirically. Salient in virtually every technical field — from quantum theory and molecular biology to computer science and economics — is an increasing concern with the word. It passes by many names: logos, logic, bits, bytes, mathematics, software, knowledge, syntax, semantics, code, plan, program, design, algorithm, as well as the ubiquitous “information.” In every case, the information is independent of its physical embodiment or carrier.

Biologists commonly blur the information into the slippery synecdoche of DNA, a material molecule, and imply that life is biochemistry rather than information processing. But even here, the deoxyribonucleic acid that bears the word is not itself the word. Like a sheet of paper or a computer memory chip, DNA bears messages but its chemistry is irrelevant to its content. The alphabet’s nucleotide “bases” form “words” without help from their bonds with the helical sugar-phosphate backbone that frames them. The genetic words are no more dictated by the chemistry of their frame than the words in Scrabble are determined by the chemistry of their wooden racks or by the force of gravity that holds them.

This reality expresses a key insight of Francis Crick, the Nobel laureate co-author of the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Crick expounded and enshrined what he called the “Central Dogma” of molecular biology. The Central Dogma shows that influence can flow from the arrangement of the nucleotides on the DNA molecule to the arrangement of amino acids in proteins, but not from proteins to DNA. Like a sheet of paper or a series of magnetic points on a computer’s hard disk or the electrical domains in a random-access memory — or indeed all the undulations of the electromagnetic spectrum that bear information through air or wires in telecommunications — DNA is a neutral carrier of information, independent of its chemistry and physics. By asserting that the DNA message precedes and regulates the form of the proteins, and that proteins cannot specify a DNA program, Crick’s Central Dogma unintentionally recapitulates St. John’s assertion of the primacy of the word over the flesh.

By assuming that inheritance is a chemical process, Darwin ran afoul of the Central Dogma. He believed that the process of inherita The Origin of Species, though, Gregor Mendel showed that genes do not blend together like chemicals mixing. As the Central Dogma ordains and information theory dictates, the DNA program is discrete and digital, and its information is transferred through chemical carriers — but it is not specified by chemical forces. Each unit of biological information is passed on according to a digital program — a biological code — that is transcribed and translated into amino acids. . . . .

After 100 years or so of attempted philosophical leveling, however, it turns out that the universe is stubbornly hierarchical. It is a top-down “nested hierarchy,” in which the higher levels command more degrees of freedom than the levels below them, which they use and constrain. Thus, the higher levels can neither eclipse the lower levels nor be reduced to them. Resisted at every step across the range of reductive sciences, this realization is now inexorable. We know now that no accumulation of knowledge about chemistry and physics will yield the slightest insight into the origins of life or the processes of computation or the sources of consciousness or the nature of intelligence or the causes of economic growth. As the famed chemist Michael Polanyi pointed out in 1961, all these fields depend on chemical and physical processes, but are not defined by them. Operating farther up the hierarchy, biological macro-systems such as brains, minds, human beings, businesses, societies, and economies consist of intelligent agents that harness chemical and physical laws to higher purposes but are not reducible to lower entities or explicable by them.

Materialism generally and Darwinian reductionism, specifically, comprise thoughts that deny thought, and contradict themselves. As British biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote in 1927, “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” Nobel-laureate biologist Max Delbrück (who was trained as a physicist) described the contradiction in an amusing epigram when he said that the neuroscientist’s effort to explain the brain as mere meat or matter “reminds me of nothing so much as Baron Munchausen’s attempt to extract himself from a swamp by pulling on his own hair.”

A GREAT ARTICLE, so read it all HERE

Those who find the insights of men like Gilder and other ID Theorists should remember that the history of scientific research is dotted with resistance to new scientific conclusions. Consider the following from "The World Question Center."

The Hungarian surgeon Ignaz Semmelweiss in 1847 reduced the death rate in his hospital from twelve to two percent, simply by washing hands between operations -- a concept that today would be advocated by a four year old child. When Semmelweiss urged his colleagues to introduce hygiene to the operating rooms, they had him committed to a mental hospital where he eventually died.

When Louis Pasteur stated that bacteria could cause disease, colleagues treated the idea as "an absurd fantasy'!

Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, only eight years before Orville and Wilbur Wright left the ground in an aeroplane, remarked: "Machines that are heavier than air will never be able to fly!"

The Perils of Cloning

That's the title of an excellent and infomrative article in Time.com.

Here's a conclusion about the impossibility of safe cloning by one prominent cloning scientist.

But the fact that clones have defects--however minor--only bolsters the arguments that scientists have made against human cloning. Based on his studies of the faults introduced by reprogramming, Jaenisch, for one, thinks human cloning is now out of the question. "I think we cannot make human reproductive cloning safe," he says. "And it's not a technological issue. It's a biological barrier. The pattern of methylation of a normal embryo cannot be re-created consistently in cloning

Read the whole thing.


I predict that one of the great side benefits, for Christian believers, from the whole lust after cloning by the scientific community will be further proof of the vast complexity of creating life as we have it on this planet. Will that ever prove to the already convinced that we just couldn't have accidentally arrived out of nothing? Probably not, but all the same....

What to do when the Supreme Court gets it wrong?

I concur with the opinion of those like John Yoo, who in this column, suggests that the Supreme Court got things exactly wrong in the Hamdan case that deals with the "right" to a "fair trial" by those who are held as prisoners capatured in the war on terror.

What the justices did would have been unthinkable in prior military conflicts: Judicial intervention in the decisions of the president and Congress on how best to wage war. They replaced his wartime judgment and Congress' support with their own speculation that open trials would not run intelligence risks. Their decision to impose specific rules and override political judgments about military necessity mistakes war — inherently unpredictable, and where our government must act quickly and sometimes secretly to protect national security — for the familiarity of the criminal justice system.

I think that one of the things that will occur as a part of the new situation that President Bush's vigorous and edgy execution of the WOT will produce is a strain on the "separation of powers" clause in the Constitution.

If folks like John Yoo are correct, that the high court has overstepped it bounds, how are we to expect the court to correct itself? Of course the Court has imposed its reach where it has no Constitutional business! So, I think (humbly, modestly, mildly) that the Congress should not only act to pass the legislation that the Court is calling for regarding the creation of statues to guide the Executive Branch in the trying of these enemies of our country.

They should also exercise their powers that the Constitution grants them the power to set the jurisdiction of the courts.

Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution grants the Legislative Branch this "check and balance" over the Judicial Branch. It reads:

Section 2. The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority;--to all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls;--to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction;--to controversies to which the United States shall be a party;--to controversies between two or more states;--between a state and citizens of another state;--between citizens of different states;--between citizens of the same state claiming lands under grants of different states, and between a state, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens or subjects.

In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.

In other words, the Congress can make specific that the Supreme Court has not jurisdiction in the matters of the question of the execution of the constitutional authority of the President to carry out the Legislative instructions to wage conflict (and all that entails).

The framers of the Constitution wrote this into the checks against the Judicial Branch, because they wanted to ensure that The United States would always be a nation of laws democratically enacted through the people's representatives and never a nation of laws enacted by the "wisdom" of non-elected and unaccountable judges. If people do not like the way that the WOT is being waged, then vote out the Republicans and elect different leaders in the White House and the Congress. But don't be happy when the Supreme Court oversteps it bounds.

So, let the Congress act to remind the Supremes that "we the people" not they the people's judiciary are the sovereign authority under the constitutional provisions by which our lives are ordered.

The Vatican Announces. . . . . . . Embryonic Stem-Cell Researchers---------EXCOMMUNICATED

Hat Tip to Drudge. The UK Telegraph is reporting the story here.

Here's an interesting reaction from a researcher who will be affected.

But the threat was shrugged off yesterday by Italy's leading expert on cloning, Prof Cesare Galli, of the Laboratory of Reproductive Technologies in Cremona, who was the first scientist to clone a horse.

Prof Galli likened the Vatican to the Taliban and added: "I can bear excommunication. I was raised as a Catholic, I share Catholic values, but I am able to make my own judgment on some issues and I do not need to be told by the Church what to do or to think."

SOME THOUGHTS BY A METHODIST (aka ME).

What strikes me as very intriquing about Prof Galli's response is his confused and contradictory reasoning. He says two things that can't be reconciled: 1)"I share Catholic values;" and 2) I am able to make my own judgement on some issues."

Fair enough, on one level. Certainly he can make judgements for himself on a large variety of issues. But, if he rejects a central Catholic teaching about the nature of human life and the continuity of human existence and worth from conception to death, how can he say that he "shares Catholic values." He might share a kind of Catholic aesthetic sensibility of a generally Catholic religious world-view. But, he surely does not embrace Catholic moral teaching.

Further, he says he "shares" the values. That way of putting the issue reveals that he conceives of himself as being theologically, philosophically, ethically, and spiritually on the same axiological footing as the magesterium. The "values" of the Catholic, as I understand them as a Protestant, are not to be shared, but to be embraced (not merely surrendered to, but thoughtfully and faithfully embraced). The language of sharing implies that he has values that might or might not be taught by the Church, but he nonetheless shares some of the Catholic values.

Finally, when he says that he can "make his own judgement" on some issues, I wonder a couple of things. First, why only some issues. In fact, if he jettisons values as he sees fit he is essentially making his judgement the trump card on all issues. Second, on what basis would he make up his own mind. The fact is we reason about things (all things) based on some particular presupposed primary perspective about the way the "way things are." As Stanley Hauerwas, of Duke Divinity School would say -- our reasoning is always based on some narrative account of the value of the world, our place in the world, and what we should be doing ultimately. So, as Prof Galli "makes his own judgement" he owes it to other Catholics (especially those he teaches) to reveal the world-view that is shaping his own reasoning. It could be that he has embraced an intellectual perspective that is, indeed, antithetical to the Catholic world.

P.S. if he can so blithely dismiss the threat of excommunication, he really no longer believes in the saving ministry and soul-guiding ministry of the Church, anyway. Again, fair enough, but don't pretend to "share" Catholic values.