Open Theist Prayer
Sequence of events
1. Open Theist decides to pray
…unprompted by the indwelling Holy Spirit because that would mean that God knows the future and what He wants the Open Theist to pray about.
2. Open Theist addresses God to get His attention
…which would demand the use of some set formula that God would recognize as coming from a petitioner and placing Him on alert to pay attention.
3. Open Theist begins to tell God the details about which he is going to pray
…this step is important since God does not know the future from the point of view of the petitioner and, therefore, has not “looked ahead” to gain detailed information about the prayer that is forthcoming.
4. Open Theist prays in order to exercise his “authentic power to influence things”[1] in the spiritual realm
…and God is instructed in areas where He is deliberately ignorant by creatures that are inevitably ignorant to establish what may blend in with His desires.
Responses to above
1. This idea stands against the theological virtue of Hope, especially as outlined in Romans 8: 22-28.
2. Perhaps God is too busy counting hairs and checking on sparrows (Matthew 10:29-30) to pay attention to His children. Oops, sorry, I read ahead to verse 31 and discovered that God is continuously aware of me and my circumstances.
3. This point can only pertain to a petitioner who is going to ask God for something that is completely isolated from his own set of needs since the Bible says that “…your Father knows what things you need before you ask Him.” Matthew 6:8. Of course, it seems practically impossible to maintain that one would pray for something and have no personal need involved in the prayer. Isn’t it fundamental that prayer expects God to respond and that expectation is based on personal relationship, not on disinterested advice offered to the manager of the universe? This sort of prayer seems to be best described as analogous to the suggestion box.
However, it may be that the Open Theist can “trick” God by relying on the Holy Spirit to prompt him (see #1). Now he is able to discuss his personal needs with God and, having gained God’s attention, he can sneak in his petitions about the things that are unrelated to his personal needs. The difficulty at this point would be that the Open Theist would have to shift into “scientific mode” in order to deal with God who is not using His exhaustive foreknowledge. The Open Theist could not merely say, “Father I ask that you help Melody to gain acceptance in nursing school.” Such a prayer would presume that God understood the details of the future thoughts of the petitioner before they were uttered. God in his vast (but not quite exhaustive) knowledge, may know of 200 women named Melody who are trying to get into nursing school. Should He presume to know which of those is the one to whom the Open Theist is referring? The burden of exhaustive identification is placed on the Open Theist so that God will be able to sort out His own will regarding the subject of the petition. If the Open Theist objects that God would know to whom he refers without exhaustive explanation, then he would be appealing to Matthew 6:8 or Matthew 10:31 or some other biblical passage that explains God’s knowledge in relational terms. The Open Theist who is true to his philosophy of prayer is constrained to thoroughly identify the person for whom he brings a petition in exacting detail that depends upon past experience and cannot depend on personal relationship. “Father, there was a young lady in Texas Steakhouse on Capital Blvd. (not the one close to the beltline) in Raleigh, North Carolina, whose name was Melody and she served us on the night of December 3, 2004 (according to the time and dating system that is used in the United States of America which is the country that occupies the majority of the land mass between the oceans that we call the Atlantic and the Pacific…) when we had dinner with Jim and Amy and Dwayne and Colleen and I asked her if there was anything that we could pray about in her life and she asked us to pray about her entrance to nursing school. Since you have exhaustive knowledge of the past, you should know the person to whom I am referring. However, since You do not have exhaustive knowledge of the future and have not yet factored what impact her future actions may have on Your plan, then we cannot pray that You will help her gain entrance to nursing school but can only pray that You will help her to be content with the present.” Is this not an exercise in futility?
4. Proverbs 3: 1-10. Influence with God appears to come from submission to the law and the commandments, along with forsaking one’s own ideas of how things are to be. If so, then prayer is repeating God’s thoughts to Him.
John 14:12-18. Jesus establishes the basis of answered prayer in relationship to Him. It even appears that there is no petition that is not initiated and completed by God.
Conclusion: The Open Theist’s concept of prayer is amazingly complex and would have to follow some very strict rules to be certain that one is getting God’s attention. In addition, the Open Theist’s position on prayer seems to have no need for Jesus or the Holy Spirit.
Boyd is mistaken when he derogates the common petitioners attitude to prayer as being something impossible to evoke passion. Boyd’s focus on passionate prayer and disdain for “sheer obedience”[2] in prayer is problematic in that it points toward a God who can be deceived by passion, as though He were a man. Rather, God has established that obedience is synonymous with love and not passion; the former being impossible without His own performing it (Isaiah 59) and the latter being judged by the standards of men (2 Peter 2:18).
[1]Gregory A. Boyd, God of the Possible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 96.
[2] Ibid, 95.
