Prayer in Friendship with God

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IN MANY WAYS there are no problems that are more difficult to think through and therefore live through for the late 20th-century Christian of liberal sensibilities than those raised by the idea of petitionary prayer. In depicting the way we are caught both by mechanistic images of a scientific, closed universe and by our deistic sense that God not only will not but cannot break God's own natural laws, Ronald Goetz describes our dilemma very well. He is equally helpful when he points to our concern that to pray for ourselves or for those close to us may somehow be unethical because it seems to be asking for favored treatment by God. Finally, he states boldly what he believes may be our most painful fear of all, that if we take petitionary prayer seriously, we will find ourselves praying to a God who really is an Unjust Judge: arbitrary and heartless.

Goetz goes on to insist, however, that, as Christians, we cannot reject petitionary prayer outright. Jesus himself prayed that way, after all, and he taught his disciples to pray that way as well. Furthermore, as Goetz points out, if we are to be able to trust that we ourselves have real freedom, and thus ultimately a hope for our own redemption then we also have to be able to believe that God is not so bound by the natural laws of the universe that God cannot intervene on our behalf.

Goetz believes that the solution to our problems lies, first, in our acceptance of the utter sovereignty of God whose …