C.S. Lewis and Prayer

Here is a great little essay from "God in the Dock" about prayer. Lewis is so...insightful.

Work and Prayer - C.S.Lewis


Even if I grant your point and admit that answers to prayer are theoretically possible, I shall still think they are infinitely improbable. I don't think it at all likely that God requires the ill-informed (and contradictory) advice of us humans as to how to run the world. If He is all-wise, as you say He is, doesn't He know already what is best? And if He is all-good won't He do it whether we pray or not?'

This is the case against prayer which has, in the last hundred years, intimidated thousands of people. The usual answer is that it applies only to the lowest sort of prayer, the sort that consists in asking for things to happen. The higher sort, we are told, offers no advice to God; it consists only of 'communion' or intercourse with Him; and those who take this line seem to suggest that the lower kind of prayer really is an absurdity and that only children or savages would use it.

I have never been satisfied with this view. The distinction between the two sorts of prayer is a sound one; and I think on the whole (I am not quite certain) that the sort which asks for nothing is the higher or more advanced. To be in state in which you are so at one with the will of God that you wouldn't want to alter the course of events even if you could is certainly a very high or advanced condition.

But if one simply rules out the lower kind two difficulties follow. In the first place, one has to say that the whole historical tradition of Christian prayer (including the Lord's Prayer itself) has been wrong; for it has always admitted prayers for our daily bread, for the recovery of the sick, for protection from enemies, for the conversion of the outside world, and the like. In the second place, though the other kind of prayer may be 'higher' if you restrict yourself to it because you have got beyond the desire to use any other, there is nothing specially 'high' or 'spiritual' about abstaining from prayers that make requests simply because you think they're no good. It might be a very pretty thing (but, again, I'm not absolutely certain) if a little boy never asked for cake because he was so high-minded and spiritual that he didn't want any cake. But there's nothing specially pretty about a little boy who doesn't ask because he has learned that it is no use asking. I think that the whole matter needs reconsideration.

The case against prayer (I mean the 'low' or old-fashioned kind) is this. The thing you ask for is either good - for you and for the world in general- or else it is not. If it is, then a good and wise God will do it anyway. If it is not, then He won't. In neither case can your prayer make any difference. But if this argument is sound, surely it is an argument not only against praying, but against doing anything whatever?

In every action, just as in every prayer, you are trying to bring about a certain result; and this result must be good or bad. Why, then, do we not argue as the opponents of prayer argue, and say that if the intended result is good God will bring it to pass without your interference, and that if it is bad He will prevent it happening whatever you do? Why wash your hands? If God intends them to be clean, they'll come clean without your washing them. If He doesn't, they'll remain dirty (as Lady Macbeth found) however much soap you use. Why ask for the salt? Why put on your boots? Why do anything?

We know that we can act and that our actions produce results. Everyone who believes in God must therefore admit (quite apart from the question of prayer) that God has not chosen to write the whole of history with His own hand. Most of the events that go on in the universe are indeed out of our control, but not all. It is like a play in which the scene and the general outline of the story is fixed by the author, but certain minor details are left for the actors to improvise.

It may be a mystery why He should have allowed us to cause real events at all; but it is no odder that He should allow us to cause them by praying than by any other method.

Pascal says that God 'instituted prayer in order to allow His creatures the dignity of causality'. It would perhaps be truer to say that He invented both prayer and physical action for that purpose. He gave us small creatures the dignity of being able to contribute to the course of events in two different ways. He made the matter of the universe such that we can (in those limits) do things to it; that is why we can wash our own hands and feed or murder our fellow creatures. Similarly, He made His own plan or plot of history such that it admits a certain amount of free play and can be modified in response to our prayers. If it is foolish and impudent to ask for victory in a war (on the ground that God might be expected to know best), it would be equally foolish and impudent to put on a mackintosh - does not God know best whether you ought to be wet or dry?

The two methods by which we are allowed to produce events may be called work and prayer. Both are alike in this respect – that in both we try to produce a state of affairs which God has not (or at any rate not yet) seen fit to provide 'on HIS own'. And from this point of view the old maxim laborare est orare (work is prayer) takes on a new meaning. “What we do when we weed a field is not quite different from what we do when we pray for a good harvest. But there is an important difference all the same.

You cannot be sure of a good harvest whatever you do to a field. But you can be sure that if you pull up one weed that one weed will no longer be there. You can be sure that if you drink more than a certain amount of alcohol you will ruin your health or that if you go on for a few centuries more wasting the resources of the planet on wars and luxuries you will shorten the life of the whole human race. The kind of causality we exercise by work is, so to speak, divinely guaranteed, and therefore ruthless. By it we are free to do ourselves as much harm as we please. But the kind which we exercise by prayer is not like that; God has left Himself a discretionary power. Had He not done so, prayer would be an activity too dangerous for man and we should have the horrible state of things envisaged by Juvenal: ‘Enormous prayers which Heaven in anger grants’.


Prayers are not always - in the crude, factual sense of the word - 'granted'. This is not because prayer is a weaker kind of causality, but because it is a stronger kind. When it 'works' at all it works unlimited by space and time. That is why God has retained a discretionary power of granting or refusing it; except on that condition prayer would destroy us. It is not unreasonable for a headmaster to say, 'Such and such things you may do according to the fixed rules of this school. But such and such other things are too dangerous to be left to general rules. If you want to do them you must come and make a request and talk over the whole matter with me in my study. And then-we'll see.'

Good thoughts on The American Revolution--World Magazine

It's interesting to consider, on a day when we celebrate American independence from England, Peter's admonition that we "honor the king" by submitting to civil authorities. While most interpret that to allow resistance when obedience would require sin, it's a bit of a stretch to claim that armed revolt is a Biblical response to irritating taxes, or even to taxation without representation. There was some talk about state funding for Anglican bishops in the colonies, and fear that this might lead to ecclesiastical courts adjudicated by quasi-papists, but the animating factors in our revolt against the king were economic (taxes) and political (rule by a remote Parliament).

This might have been expected from people sturdy enough to found the colonies and firmly Puritan in background; they had already hacked off the head of one king a century before. The British should have known better than to come marching at a bunch of skilled hunters in straight lines, and let's be honest — anyone dressed in one of those fancy red jackets was just asking to get beat up and have his tea money taken. All in all, being a fan of modern dentistry as well as football played the way the good Lord intended, I'm grateful for that kerfuffle back in the late 18th century.

And yet I wonder about the repercussions of founding a country in rebellion. Not only was our nation established by repelling the civil authorities who originally governed it, but our churches, for the most part, were themselves founded on rejection of other church authorities. The Anglicans rejected the Catholics because Henry VIII wanted a divorce, and the Puritans rejected the Anglicans because too many of them behaved like Henry VIII. Dissent continued to be the guiding ethos in the colonies, with talented performers like George Whitefield chasing out less entertaining pastors during the Great Awakening.

In inculcating among ourselves the notion that we are reliable democratic arbiters of our own church governance, we set the stage for continual schism. Even America's leading theologian of that time, Jonathan Edwards, was eventually judged too tiresome by his own congregation. Today, if you can't find a church to suit your proclivities, you can just turn on your television and be part of a virtual church. There is a church for everyone, and with the advent of Starbucks even the atheist has a comforting spiritual experience available to him on Sunday mornings.

So we confront in our churches, and in our own spiritual lives, the blessing and danger of liberty, which is that we are entirely free to determine for ourselves how we will be preached at, and by whom, and what books we will read, and what songs we will sing, and precisely what our children will be taught about God. What a glorious freedom, should we choose wisely. But how frightening as well, when one reads in Judges: "In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes."

Now that the toothpaste is out of the tube, so to speak, there's no putting it back. With thousands of denominations, and splits within those denominations, and cliques within those splits, and notions like catechesis, covenant, and church discipline all but lost, we look to be permanently in the position of every one of us doing what is right in his own eyes.

And even if we have discernment and knowledge, we face the temptation to rebel every time the pastor says something we don't like, or the music director chooses hymns our teenagers don't relate to, or the first time we are — heaven forbid, in this age of self-affirmation — rebuked or admonished. Anyone on the receiving end of that endangered species — church discipline — has only to pick up the phone and find any number of pastors happy to listen to his half of the story and then welcome him into the fold without so much as a consultation with the pastor he is leaving behind.

So we have the fruit of rebellion: enormous liberty to choose where we will be in communion, and very little guidance about how to do so. There is the Bible, thank God, but one has to be practiced in the craft of reading the thing, after all, and in the interpretation of what one has read, which is precisely where a good Church education can do one some good, but then we have worked ourselves into a circle, where Biblical education is necessary for one to ascertain where he will receive Biblical education.

Viktor Frankl once said that America's Statue of Liberty should be balanced on the opposite coast by a Statue of Responsibility. I wonder if the same might be said for American Christians. Blessed to live in a land of liberty, the price is that we have been raised as well in a culture founded on rebellion against authority. How can we take advantage of our freedom to choose, without falling into the pit of self-satisfaction? When people who identify themselves as Christians can't answer even fundamental questions of dogma, what are we to make of the abundance of churches springing up to serve them as if they are customers in search of a good burger? A hungry person knows how to tell a good burger from a bad one, but what of the spiritually hungry, ill-educated Christian? How is he to find a competent church? How is he to find community that is more than just accidental?

A Christian might be forgiven by his peers for praying the following, not just as it pertains to church life, but to life as an American citizen, as well as citizenship in the kingdom of God: Thank you, Lord, for the blessing of liberty, and please hasten to save us from how we use it.

Pasted from <http://www.worldontheweb.com/2008/07/04/save-us-from-liberty/>

Rationale

I stumble across alot of valuable information on the internet, and alot of commentary on applicable topics. I also, at times, have thoughts of my own. So here I will post articles that I come across that I think are relevant, and you can read them at your leisure.