You Better Pray

Screwtape talks about twisting prayer, and I know some people have written on the topic of how we should pray, but why? I mean, why should we tackle the issue of how we ought to pray when we haven’t even established the purpose of prayer? Prayer, like many other aspects of the Christian faith, have seemed strange and counter-intuitive to me as of late. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis establishes that God is omnipotent and omniscient, and in many of the books we’ve read, we are told that God exists outside of time and views everything through the lens of eternity. This raises some important questions:

1)If God knows everything, why should we bother praying in a specific way?

2)If God has a plan already, how can anything we say through prayer do anything to change it?

The problem with the first is a smaller hurdle in my eyes. Prayer might be for our benefit, in that it is an act of intentionally acknowledging God’s omniscience. Maybe God wants us to take the posture of humility. These don’t wholly satisfying me.
The second question spins off some pretty massive questions about God’s nature and questions his power. It really comes down to this:

1)If God is going to do something, He’s gonna do it whether we pray or not.

2)If prayer can change God’s mind, humans are elevated to a position above God. We might not have the power of God per se, but we can tap into it. We have trained God to do as we wish.

Frankly, both of these suck. I don’t have any answers, only questions. Honestly, the confidence in the Christian community scares me a little. We have spent centuries building on the foundations of the faith without enough critical thinking about the foundation itself. Oftentimes when talking to people about Christianity, they go off on a rant about election without first defining their terms. Most are content to just assume the starting point is correct. This doesn’t stand up under scrutiny. In examining my own faith, I have taken the position that if a belief can be broken, maybe it ought to be.