To Think God as Love

Our Prayers and God’s Almightiness

Posted on 22 July 2010

Why pray? If God is the Almighty confessed in the creed, the all-knowing and all-powerful, and if we are the creatures beset by our own sins and the fracturedness of the world as Scripture insists we are, then how could our prayers possibly matter? Obviously, Scripture and the Christian tradition insist that we should pray, that praying matters — and not only to us as prayers. Further, Christians pray as if they believe that prayer makes a difference in what does or does not happen in the lived world. But is there a way to make theological sense of this conviction? Robert Jenson insists that we can if we begin our thinking of God’s almightiness from God’s self-revelation in Jesus and his availability to us, rather than operating with a sheerly philosophical definition of God.

The criterion of the triune God’s self-identity is Jesus, just in his openness to his fellow human beings. Therefore, that God listens to us and responds to us, far from being a condescension, is the very way he is faithful to himself. God is not God in spite of changing his mind, in spite of answering prayer or failing to do so; he is God because he does and can do such things wholeheartedly. Operatively: unabashed petitionary prayer is the one decisively appropriate creaturely act as over against God. ¹

Although I would nuance what Jenson says about Jesus as ‘criterion’ of God’s self-identity, I do agree with everything he says here. Petitionary prayer is fitting for us just because responding to it is fitting for God. When God says ‘Ask… you shall receive’, God tells us the kind of relationship in which we are in fact engaged. God’s almightiness is the kind that makes room for our participation. We are called to allow our weakness and frailty, our non-almightiness, to be room for God to act, as well.