01.C 04. Prayer and Predestination
IV PRAYER AND PREDESTINATION “Known unto Him are all His works from the beginning of the world.” — Acts 15:18.
There Is still another difficulty. Are not all things that are going to occur predetermined in the mind of God? And if everything has been eternally foreknown and predestinated, does not any later arrangement of events because of prayer, or for any other reason, involve God in a hopeless contradiction and reflect therefore upon His perfect character? How, then, can prayer have any influence with God in bringing to pass the things that are to take place? This is, we admit, after all a serious perplexity. It is, in fact, the only serious perplexity, and it is at this point the subject passes more fully beyond the grasp of finite reason than at any other. It practically brings up the old bone of contention between the advocates of God’s sovereignty on the one hand and those of man’s free will on the other.
Once more our advice would be, Trust God and pray on as He has told you to do. If God has told us that He will answer our prayers, He w411 take care of His sovereignty. Anyhow, after we have done all our reading and all our thinking upon this enigma we will be left pretty much where we are now, namely, looking along two seemingly parallel lines of thought, both of which seem to be true and yet apparently contradictory, but which, after all, must meet at some point in God’s own plan of perfect wisdom far beyond the vision of any finite intelligence.
There are three explanations in each of which millions of Christians have found encouragement to pray.
Each of these explanations teach that prayer and predestination are scriptural truths.
They might be distinguished as Absolute Predestination, Conditional Predestination, and Limited Predestination. The first explanation declares that everything which comes to pass is first predetermined in the mind of God. It declares that God’s predestination precedes His foreknowledge as the ground of certainty for human action. God only foreknows that which He has predetermined to take place. The second explanation, while admitting that God absolutely predetermines some things, contends that such things as respect the government of his free moral agents are only conditionally predetermined. God purposes to do under certain conditions, which depend upon the free agency of man, what He would not do under other conditions. This explanation further declares that God’s foreknowledge precedes His predestination.
God only predetermines that which He foreknows will take place and the foreknowledge of human action has no influence upon its taking place; it does not necessitate the action. The third explanation denies that God’s foreknowledge is necessarily all-comprehending.
We will think for a while about these explanations.
1. Suppose we accept the first one. We remark in passing that if the foreordination of events be a sufficient reason for not praying, it is an equally sufficient reason for not doing anything else. As well might one say, “If it be ordained that I shall live, it is not necessary for me to eat,” as to say, *’If it be ordained that I shall obtain any good, it is not necessary for me to pray for it.” But it is very evident that such reasoning is a swift and sure road to the starkest fatalism. If foreordination be a valid objection against praying, it is also a valid objection against every other form of human activity.
Still the question confronts us, What use to pray if God has eternally settled all things? In answer to this we propose another question. If God encourages us to pray, does it not seem reasonable to suppose that somehow in His eternal planning He made allowance for it? And close on the heels of this question comes another. What if God foreordained our prayers and embraced them within His plan as predestinated factors toward the accomplishment of His purposes in the world? What if God so arranged the succession of events as to give due place and influence to prayer in bringing them about.” In other words, what if God foreordained the means as well as the end? To illustrate: Suppose that God foreordained that a certain temporal blessing should be yours as a result of some prayer, which prayer He also foreordained as the influence with Him in securing the blessing? The former, I am aware, you might call a provisional predestination, but since it depends upon predestinated means it is, after all, as absolutely certain as it otherwise could be. The perplexity is a stubborn one. One can easily wish for still clearer light; yet the foregoing explanation is that given by scores of the closest thinkers in every portion of the church, and so general has been the satisfaction it has given that by many it is considered as the accepted creed of Christendom. And if such explanation be accepted, then so far from God’s unchangeableness being an objection to prayer, it becomes the sure ground of our confidence in prayer; for so far from it being necessary that God should change His will in order to answer prayer, it becomes absolutely necessary that His will should not be changed.
Fail to answer He cannot without a reversal of His decree and a contradiction of His own perfect nature.
2. Suppose we accept the second explanation. Now if some events are predestinated only upon certain conditions, which you or I as free moral agents may or may not fulfill, and if prayer be made in Scripture to be one of these conditions, then the influence which prayer has with God is plainly manifest. But you ask, “ If God foreknows everything, as this theory also admits, does He not then also foreknow that the particular prayer in question will be made, and if so, is not both the prayer and the supposed consequent event made certain from all eternity? Wherein, then, does this explanation differ from the other?” In this reply the exponents of this explanation, that while the predetermination of an event necessitates its occurrence, God only predetermines what He fore knows is going to occur and the foreknowledge of an occurrence does not necessitate it, for the plain reason that it is mere knowledge and not influence, and so has no effect upon the freedom or certainty of the action. This theory is best set forth in “Whedon on the Will” (Part II, Sec. 3, Chap. 11). He shows us how that God’s foreknowledge is not so much “a foreknowledge of a peculiar kind of event, as a knowledge in Him of a peculiar quality existent in the free agent.” God “understandeth the thoughts of man afar off.” He so understands the temperament and disposition of every one of His creatures as to be altogether sure of how each of them will act under any given circumstances; and when we are told that God’s foreknowledge must be to some degree uncertain unless He has Himself predetermined the action in question, the advocates of this second explanation are at once by our side to say, “not unless any person can prove that the Divine prescience is unable to dart through all the workings of the human mind, all its comparison of things in the judgment, all the influences of motives on the affections, all the hesitancies and haltings of the will, to its final choice.” This is the explanation which has appealed to multitudes of the world’s best thinkers. Some of us are doubtless not yet altogether satisfied. Truth seems to lie on either side. But you can pray intelligently and with assurance on the basis of either explanation. We must not forget, however, that this is an attempt of the finite to grasp the infinite, and we have no way of understanding Him “whose ways are past finding out,” except through our own imperfect notions of those attributes and capacities which would seem to be necessary in us to accomplish what we ascribe unto God. But even though we may not with our limited and imperfect notions be able to reconcile God’s absolute predestination or certain foreknowledge with the sovereign will of man, we ought not therefore to lose faith in our God or in His promises, for as the writer just quoted (Thomas Watson) has said, ’* If God has established it as one of the principles of His moral government to accept prayer, in every case in which He has given us authority to ask, He has not, we may be assured, entangled His actual government of the world with the bonds of such an eternal predestination of particular events as either to reduce prayer to a mere form of words, or not to be able Himself, consistently with his decrees, to answer it, whenever it is encouraged by his express engagements.”
3. Suppose we accept the third explanation: the explanation which affirms that God’s foreknowledge and foreordination are not necessarily all-comprehending.
You shrink from an attitude of thought like that toward the Supreme Being. It appears, does it not, to reflect discredit upon His perfection? Yet, let us not be too hasty in our judgment. Many earnest and noted scholars defend the position and strenuously maintain that not only does it not dishonor God, but that it is the only scheme of thought which does not divest Him of the essential attributes of His divinity. The position is quite clearly set forth in W. W. Kinsley’s “Science and Prayer,” one of the required books for the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle. This explanation, if it may be maintained consistently with the perfection of God’s character, relieves us, of course, of the difficulty in question.
It is contended by the advocates of this explanation, that when God created us in His own image and made us equally with Himself of sovereign will (and we know we are free to choose as we will) by His very so doing He surrendered at least partially His control over us and of necessity limited thereby His foreknowledge concerning us. Plainly it is the old time-worn controversy between two great schools of theology; between God’s sovereignty on one side (involving as it does His absolute foreknowledge and predestination) and man’s free will on the other, and between the horns of such a dilemma the only thing to do is to confess a wise ignorance and hang on to both. A controversion of God’s perfect foreknowledge does not set well with most of us, regardless of our denominational bias. The fear, however, of any belittling conception of God its advocates would overcome by showing what the theory of such foreknowledge really involves, leaving us to decide which is the greater injustice, if any, to the all-perfect character of God. The following from the work above quoted on “Science and Prayer” will help us to an appreciation, if so be such is possible, of the position assumed by the advocates of the limited knowledge theory. The author says: “No petitioner can plead with any genuine unction unless he believes that he can actually effect some change in the purposes existing in the divine mind at the time his prayer is offered... If God foreknows everything that will ever come to pass, all His own mental states must necessarily be included in that foreknowledge. A moment’s reflection will convince us that otherwise there is not a single present intention or plan but what is exposed to the possibility of modification. If a single thought or emotion is ever going to spring up in God’s mind unanticipated, God Himself must be as ignorant as we as to what part of His vast plan it will pertain. And so, if we would logically defend a belief in the all-comprehensiveness of God’s foreknowledge, we must affirm that not a single new idea can arise in His mind — not a single new emotion be felt — and that if He is thus limited now He must have been equally so at every moment in all the eternal past, and must be through all the years to come; for if there ever has been, or ever will be, a moment when a new thought caij. thus come, then during all the time preceding that moment the foreknowledge was incomplete. Where does this lead.’’ In what sort of an intellectual or emotional condition does this irrefragable logic compel us to assert God to be continually? Unquestionably that of perfect stagnation. No thought processes can be carried on under such conditions — no succession of ideas, no change of mental state; but God must have been and must still be imprisoned in a hopelessly dead calm... When, then, did He form His plans for creation? Under this supposition there never could have been a time when He began to think about them... If God has had no thought succession, He can have had no feeling; His emotional state having ever necessarily been that of unbroken placidity — of absolute apathy. His heart throbless as a stone. He could experience no change of feeling, for that would involve thought-succession. From all the sources of joy or sorrow of which we can conceive He would be utterly debarred — from pleasurable or painful memories, from hopes and forebodings, from social sympathies, from emotions that accompany changes, contrasts, surprises, from the glow of activity, even from the delights and griefs of contemplation; for they all involve thought-movement. Therefore, under this supposition God can have no emotional activity, for He would have no thought-activity for its background. Thoughts must, of course, come and go, or the heart lies dead.” “Such,” he says, *’are the absurdities in which we become hopelessly entangled the moment we attempt to defend the doctrine of God’s perfect foreknowledge.” No Christian scholar would for one second espouse or teach a doctrine of which he has least suspicion that the character it is in any sense derogatory to God. For the writer it is impossible to conceive of God’s all-comprehending foreknowledge and absolute predestination without including His mental states, for blindly and irrationally He certainly does not act, and because this is true, the conclusions of the above author, some seem to think, are well nigh irresistible.
Again, some things are to be appreciated and not defined. For instance, such a thing is Power. Who can tell you what power is, though definition be piled up mountain high.^ Power is to be appreciated and the simplest child can do it. On the other hand, some things are to be defined and not appreciated. Such a thing is predestination; such and easy is omniscience. These things are easy to define; the very words speak out their own meaning, but who can appreciate them? Who can understand how God can be everywhere at once? or that His mind can reach at the same time every speck of matter in the vast universe, absolutely determining the motion of every dust particle, the juxtaposition of every infinitesimal molecule and its relative position with every other atom in the world, the exact time, direction and rapidity of action of the world’s every mote of moving protoplasm? Yet to just such an extreme and even farther does predestination take us when followed absolutely to the conclusion towards which it points. That such must necessarily be predicated of a Being before He can be worthily thought of as God we have sometimes found ourselves wondering. Could He not quite as well have committed these things to the care of chemical and vital forces the invariable operation of which He has secured by laws which are under His control? Now if, while God prearranged such forces as well as the forces that give us the sustained harmony of the universe and surround us with such providences as meet our probable of the wants, He could leave the action of the human will in uncertainty by delegating to man through all the coming ages the power of free and unhindered choice, and at the same time leave nature with her governing laws in such responsive condition that, having all matter and all force obedient to His bidding, He can, in response to the petition of His confiding child, alter what without such petition would have been otherwise; we have found ourselves wondering if such a view is not, in comparison with that of absolute predestination, equally honoring to God and quite as stimulating to man. To many it seems far more so.
It is not necessary to know which of the three views are seen to be right from the eternal sighting place. Some time we will know what now we do not or cannot know. But if any child of His, who is troubled with the question we have been considering should read these pages, there is one thing we hope he will not fail to see, that whether he prefer the one or the other of the explanations which divide the Christian thought of the world, they are all of them encouragements to prayer, and one can pray trustingly and confidingly, whether he think one way or the other.
We may be sure that if God has told us to pray and that He would answer, that He will make arrangements for that answer, whatever be the difficulties that appear to our little minds to stand in His way. Let us be grateful that it is so, and let us honor Him with a large faith as we take hold of His exceeding great and precious promise to hear us and answer when we pray.