Can a merely unitarian God answer prayer?

Andrew Murray said no. In the 17th chapter of With Christ in the School of Prayer: Thoughts on our Training in the Ministry of Intercession, Murray considers “Prayer in Harmony with the Being of God,” and poses these questions:

One of the secret difficulties with regard to prayer,—one which, though not expressed, does often really hinder prayer,—is derived from the perfection of God, in His absolute independence of all that is outside of Himself. Is He not the Infinite Being, who owes what He is to Himself alone, who determines Himself, and whose wise and holy will has determined all that is to be? How can prayer influence Him, or He be moved by prayer to do what otherwise would not be done? Is not the promise of an answer to prayer simply a condescension to our weakness? Is what is said of the power—the much-availing power—of prayer anything more than an accommodation to our mode of thought, because the Deity never can be dependent on any action from without for its doings? And is not the blessing of prayer simply the influence it exercises upon ourselves?

Murray is a Dutch Reformed theologian with a high view of God’s all-determining sovereingty, and he is quite serious about the objection. He goes on:

In seeking an answer to such questions, we find the key in the very being of God, in the mystery of the Holy Trinity. If God was only one Person, shut up within Himself, there could be no thought of nearness to Him or influence on Him. But in God there are three Persons. In God we have Father and Son, who have in the Holy Spirit their living bond of unity and fellowship. When eternal Love begat the Son, and the Father gave the Son as the Second Person a place next Himself as His Equal and His Counsellor, there was a way opened for prayer and its influence in the very inmost life of Deity itself. Just as on earth, so in heaven the whole relation between Father and Son is that of giving and taking.

So the fact that God eternally exists as Father and Son (in the unity of the Holy Spirit) means that there is an opening, a space prepared, for the structure of asking-and-granting which is prayer:

Just as the Sonship of Jesus on earth may not be separated from His Sonship in heaven, even so with His prayer on earth, it is the continuation and the counterpart of His asking in heaven. The prayer of the man Christ Jesus is the link between the eternal asking of the only-begotten Son in the bosom of the Father and the prayer of men upon earth. Prayer has its rise and its deepest source in the very Being of God. In the bosom of Deity nothing is ever done without prayer—the asking of the Son and the giving of the Father.

What is crucial, for Murray, is to resist the urge to think of some will of God which is antecedent to the Son and the Father, or some decision which was made behind the back of the Trinity, in the oneness of God which is not already triune. There is no such God, so there is no such divine will. The divine will is trinitarian, and is worked out according to the asking-and-granting structure revealed in the Son:

This may help us somewhat to understand how the prayer of man, coming through the Son, can have effect upon God. The decrees of God are not decisions made by Him without reference to the Son, or His petition, or the petition to be sent up through Him. By no means. The Lord Jesus is the first-begotten, the Head and Heir of all things: all things were created through Him and unto Him, and all things consist in Him. In the counsels of the Father, the Son, as Representative of all creation, had always a voice; in the decrees of the eternal purpose there was always room left for the liberty of the Son as Mediator and Intercessor, and so for the petitions of all who draw nigh to the Father in the Son.

I do not know how unitarian theists pray, or how they think the all-determining God can leave open a space in his eternal counsels to take their wills into account. Murray argues that this a real problem for anyone who would approach such a God with petitions or intercessions. But he finds the solution to the problem in the triunity of God, which, far from being the source of intellectual difficulties, is the solution to many problems:

It is in the daybreak light of such thoughts that the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity no longer is an abstract speculation, but the living manifestation of the way in which it were possible for man to be taken up into the fellowship of God, and his prayer to become a real factor in God’s rule of this earth. And we can, as in the distance, catch glimpses of the light that from the eternal world shines out on words such as these: ‘THROUGH HIM we have access BY ONE SPIRIT unto THE FATHER.’

“When matters of great moment are inquired into by men of little ability, they usually make them men of great ability.”

— Augustine, Contra Academicus I.ii.6 (trans. by Denis J. Kavanagh as “Answers to Skeptics” in Writings of St. Augustine, volume 1, in the series Fathers of the Church: A New Translation (NY: Cima Publishing, 1948), p. 112.)

Another translation:

“Really great things, when discussed by little men, can usually make such men grow big.”

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The hardest questions I ever get about the Trinity are from kids. From “where is Jesus and why can’t we see him?” to “are God and Jesus the same person?”, I have learned to fear the kid questions more than anything the graduate students can muster.

So I’m grateful for any help I can get from books and music. Groggy at bedtime and breakfast alike, advanced theological training is nod efense, and I can use as much help as any dad or uncle. Unfortunately most of what’s out there is pretty unhelpful.

But I recently ran across Joey Allen’s little book on the Trinity in his Big Thoughts for Little Thinkers series.

I had nothing to do with this book, and found it by chance. But it is a book after my own heart. Not only does it present the Trinity without ever using any of those analogies that I find so distracting and off-the-subject, but it presents the gospel along the way, as a natural outgrowth of discussing the Trinity. Is that perfect? I actually recommend it for reading with very young children.

The illustrations are professional and, if you have a stomach for the cuteness factor of kids books, sweet without making your teeth ache too bad. I warn you, if you’re not currently living on a steady diet of kid stuff, you won’t be able to handle the narrator character. But if kid lit is your daily fare, this is right in the zone, and the easy, well chosen words are worth it. I read it to my own kids (age 3 and 5) and will gladly use it with nieces, nephews, and friends. I haven’t checked out the other books in the series yet, but the topics are cleverly chosen: gospel, mission, scripture.

I’m also interested in this trilogy, though I haven’t read it yet (and it looks like the Spirit volume isn’t released yet).

On Monday Feb 20, Rudy Carrasco spoke at Biola about his ministry of Christian community development. We actually invited him to speak on the wide-open topic of “social justice,” but he immediately confessed that that term carries too much baggage. Carrasco, who attended Biola for two years in the 8o’s, spent much of the time Monday night sharing about the ministry of John M. Perkins before going on to explain his own work at Harambee Ministries in Pasadena.

It would be hard to explain everything Carrasco said as he spoke for two hours to spellbound students. He launched two or three different speeches, then announced that he was scrapping them, and switched instead to gripping stories about racial reconciliation and community renewal. He got about halfway through explaining the three Rs (relocation, reconciliation, redistribution), but then veered into testimony, stories about his years at Biola, and what I can only describe as very effective stand-up comedy with chairs for props.

One snapshot from the many: When Rudy Carrasco was a young Christian, he and some friends wanted to take a blanket to a homeless person they saw regularly. An elderly man in their church talked them out of it.

Talked them out of it! Carrasco still sounds incredulous when he tells about it.

In retrospect, he can sympathize with the guy. What did he see? Evangelical kids with big hearts rushing out to do something immediate, without considering the structural forces that create the situation. Evangelical kids salving their own consciences with the ultimate short term missions trip. Evangelical kids who see need at their doorstep and are likely to fall into the clutches of liberal or social gospel teachers before they make it to age 20. Evangelical kids getting distracted from the gospel of salvation and putting their attention on temporary fixes of physical problems. Evangelical kids, recent converts, who didn’t have deep enough roots to hold fast when the winds of liberalism come howling.

So Carrasco can see where the guy was coming from, and he can even tell the story with almost (almost!) no anger or bitterness. But the main point is that something is deeply wrong when the natural compassion of the evangelical heart gets truncated before it makes its way to action. I suspect that for evangelicals this truncation is second nature.

Second nature: But it’s not nature. By nature, the gospel spills over into action, and gets all mixed up with the physical and emotional needs of the people it’s proclaimed to. By nature, the gospel makes such a difference that it changes everything.

Richard Alleine wrote a little book in 1665 called Heaven Opened: or, A Brief and Plain Discovery of the Riches of God’s Covenant of Grace. It is high on my list of current favorites. Just look at this opening gambit:

Good news from heaven! the day-spring from on high hath visited this undone world! After a deluge of sin and misery, behold the bow in the cloud! the Lord God hath made and established a new covenant…

Glorious tidings, good news indeed! but what is this covenant? Or what is there that is given and granted therein? Why, in sum, there is all that heaven and earth can afford; all that can be needed or desired; and this, by a firm and irrevocable deed, made over, and made sure to all that will sincerely embrace it.

Particularly, God hath in his covenant granted and made over,

First. Himself.

Second. His Son.

Third. His Spirit.

Fourth. The earth.

Fifth. The angels of light.

Sixth. The powers of darkness.

Seventh. Death.

Eighth. The kingdom.

Ninth. All the means of salvtion.

This is also the outline of the book. I will have to say more about the first three chapters another time.

I credit Narnia with my son Freddy’s sudden awakening to all things medieval, armored, and sword-wielding. Ever since he got his first look at Sir Peter Wolfbane, the knight obsession has spread: Playmobil knights, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, books on fencing, etc. Susan and I let him know that, according to the book 100 Things You Need To Know About Knights, a knight-in-training spends a lot of time studying manners and social graces. Freddy seems willing to undergo that training, as long as there are swordfights at the end of it.

Today’s offering: The Road Runner, armed and ready for his next encounter with the Coyote.

Paul Molnar’s book Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity is now available in paperback.

I just wrote a review of it for Cultural Encounters: A Journal for the Theology of Culture. If you haven’t seen this journal, check it out: it’s new, so ask your school library to pick it up. Editor Paul Louis Metzger is trying to bring together articles that carry on “a biblically informed, Christ-centered trinitarian engagement of contemporary culture.” As a contributing edtior, I’ll be writing a few pieces for it from time to time. To pique your interest, here is an advance look at the review which will be coming out in this summer’s issue.

Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: in Dialogue With Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology By Paul D. Molnar. New York: T & T Clark, 2005. 357 pp. $39.95 paper.

Paul D. Molnar’s important book on the Trinity is probably best understood as a voice of dissent against the prevailing tendency of late twentieth century trinitarian theology. The most influential Trinity books from the decades just past were concerned to emphasize the intimate involvement of the triune God in the world. That concern for intimacy was certainly understandable in itself, and also as a reaction to the widely-bemoaned position of irrelevance and abstractness the doctrine had lapsed into. The doctrine had gone sickly, and re-engagement with the course of human events was the prescription from many doctors: Rahner said in 1967 that “the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and vice versa;” Moltmann in 1980 linked God’s triunity with his suffering and the coming of the kingdom, taking his first steps toward a trinitarian panentheism; Jenson in 1982 went beyond identifying God by his saving acts, to locating The Triune Identity altogether in those actions; Pannenberg in 1988 described God’s “self-actualization in history” as awaiting fulfillment in the eschaton; LaCugna in 1991 taught that “the doctrine of the Trinity is not ultimately a teaching about ‘God’ but a teaching about God’s life with us and our life with each other;” and Peters in 1993 worried that “a Deus in se about which we cannot speak … an eternal God beyond the one we have experienced in the economy of salvation … only hypostatizes a figment of the philosophical imagination that takes our attention away from the God who was present in Jesus and continues to be present in the Spirit.”

Molnar, professor of systematic theology at St. John’s University in New York, was monitoring all of these developments closely.
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On Thursday Feb 16, Dr. Vigen Guroian spoke twice at Biola.

At 5pm he spoke on “The Office of the Child,” and presented a reading of Carlo Collodi’s Pinnocchio that emphasized, in a touching way, the theme of filiality. “Child,” on this account, is not equivalent to “young person,” but carries the whole relational weight of “offspring,” or, more pointedly, “son.” It is funny how we can use the word in the flattened sense that obscures the family. Guroian did just enough work to sensitize the audience to the theme (partly by reading from his own book Tending the Heart of Virtue), and then let Collodi’s text drive home the point.

At 7, Guroian spoke to a larger audience in a lecture entitled “I Believe In the Cross Because of the Resurrection.” This was a more complex lecture, and I’ll just mention one key idea from it. Drawing on his Armenian tradition’s particular emphasis on the unity of the person of Christ, Guroian argued that the crucified Christ should always be confessed as identical with the risen Christ. The point is so basic that it is hard to tease out precisely. The person who, in his appropriated human nature, died on the cross, is the eternal Son of God who rose again. Guroian tried to present this in a way that did not detract from the full humanity of Christ, but also did not let that “full humanity” lapse into “mere humanity.” He used two images to highlight the possibilities. On the one hand, he exegeted an Armenian icon which showed Jesus on the cross, his flesh seeming to merge with the wood of the cross, and his eyes OPEN even though he bears the side wound certifying his death. This strange –and historically impossible– image functions as a signal that we are not looking at simply one more human death. On the other hand, Guroian showed some grisly scenes from Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and criticized its abstractly crucifixion-focused piety.

I have to admit I wash Guroian had continued to develop his points positively rather than polemically, but the polemic did add clarity by way of contrast. As an advocate of that Armenian hyper-Cyrillism (not to say anti-Chalcedonian monophysitism), Guroian did a good job showcasing the strengths of that emphasis: the identity of the crucified one with the eternal Word of God and the risen, exalted Son of Man.

That emphasis is something I hope to put to good use in a forthcoming book, One of the Trinity Died on the Cross, which will be almost Cyrilline enough to satisfy someone like Guroian, but will cling to the old rugged cross rather more resolutely than he might commend.

Come to think of it, I’d like to take a swat at an alternate reading of Pinnocchio, too. Which just goes to show you that Vigen Guroian’s lectures were both thought provoking.

After days of reading aloud the St. George vs. the Dragon story (from a kid’s version of Spenser’s Faerie Queene), I asked Freddy to make a valentine card. Here’s what I got. Open this card and it says “LOVE” inside.

Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, spent a few days at Biola University last week. He spoke in chapel a few times, and he also shared at a luncheon for faculty, hosted by Biola president Clyde Cook.

I don’t think I’m giving away any secrets from his inevitable next book if I report what he chose to say to this audience of evangelical teachers from the whole range of university disciplines. He told us that we have the theological resources to do what nobody else sees as worth doing in the modern world: to affirm the unity of goodness, truth, and beauty. Those transcendental attributes of being (goodness, truth, and beauty) must be held together if they are to be held with permanence. Christians know that. It’s not that we’ve all got the philosophical acumen of Thomas Aquinas, but that even the simplest of us understands that there is one who is the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Knowing that, we can approach our university disciplines with confidence, following the evidence where it leads but keeping the big picture in mind. We can be the scholars who work the connecting territory between ethics, philosophy, art, and the other disciplines that should be gathered around God’s creation and the created sub-creations of the people and cultures who bear his image.

Mohler has said this before elsewhere. And nothing in it was a new idea to me. In fact, I hear (and say) things like that so often that it runs the risk of cliche. I even work in a program that gives its graduates a ring saying BONUM VERITAS PULCHER, in latin that runs the ragged edge of grammatical accuracy in order to underline the point that Christians don’t honor these qualities in the abstract, but as they are made known in the one who is The Good, The True, and The Beautiful.

Maybe it’s Mohler’s attitude, or his conviction, or just hearing it from somebody who came all the way from Kentucky to say it (land of goodness, truth, and beauty). But I was renewed in my confidence in doing my little part for the important work of higher education that is evangelical.

When John Paul II took office, he sounded the keynote of his pontificate with the simple cry: “Fear not. Open wide the doors to Christ and his authority of salvation. Open the frontiers of states, [of] economic and political systems, of broad domains of culture [and] civilisation [and] development.” At Biola in 2006, from the president of a Southern Baptist seminary, I heard the same message. “Fear not.”