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Date Joined Jun 2001
Total Posts : 516
| Posted 6/28/2001 6:27 PM (GMT -6) |   |
02/08/01 8:38 PM
PRAYER & FREE WILL / rhetoric & manipulation etc
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I just finished reading the “How does God answer prayer without altering the Free Will…” thread, all 58 posts worth. Proverbs I appreciated your original question because it resonated so much with practical issues I’m currently dealing with in the actual, concrete, in the trenches, non-ivory-tower act of prayer. It seemed that the thread initially garnered some practical responses, which I found to be quite helpful, and then quickly turned abstract and philosophical dealing with the ins and outs of free will and determinism that I found quite interesting, but also quite frustrating. It was at this point that everyone started shooting past each other. It seems to me that the OT position and the position of Mephi & LL rest on definitions of terms and paradigm commitments so radically different from one another that attempts at achieving a universal consensus appear as hopeless as achieving agreement between Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomers, or between witch doctors and medical doctors. (Is this what’s called a Rortyian impasse? I’ve only read a little Rorty but from I can make out he has a lot to say about paradigm clashes like this. Help me out if any of you know better.) As a result it was difficult for the two views to stand toe to toe with one another.
Thus RevivalTheology said:
All along, however, LL insists his question was based on mine, or Open Theists', understanding of free will, yet all along the question revolved around comparing apples to oranges.
And Mephi said:
Why don't you INTERACT with what I'm saying about "free will" instead of implicitly acting as if it bears NO weight upon your discussion of "free will" with Lion-Lamb?…ALL I want is for people to truly engage my writing with some cogent argumentation, not vapid assertions. Is this too much to ask? I don't think so.
Each paradigm is like a mechanism in which turning a certain wheel will turn other wheels. But the gears and sprockets of the OT mechanism don’t align themselves with the gears and sprockets of the Calvinist mechanism so no real satisfying dialogue can take place.
Like I said before, the original question struck a cord with me and I really wanted to post something but couldn’t just jump right in without knowing what had already been said and I didn’t have time to read everything until just now. So I would like to revive the issue if I may be allowed to but I want to do so in a restricted way. I would like to avoid the fun stuff and stick strait to the practical implications for prayer. In order to do that we might further need to restrict the thread to just one paradigm but I don’t want to be exclusive and I would like as much insight from as many people as I can get so y’all will have to decide weather or not it’s possible to get away with inclusivism. For my part I’m dealing with some of the practical problems that accepting the open view paradigm has created for me with my relationship to God through petitionary prayer. If you respond try to do so from within that paradigm or make it explicit if you approach it from another. At any rate the practical consequence for each paradigm should be radically different as well. I already enjoyed some of the practical responses that I read on the earlier thread and I’ve a feeling that there is more that hasn’t been tapped into. So I’ll start my first post…
Wislawa
Posted Originally From: Open Theism Information Site
Wislawa
02/08/01 8:45 PM
RE: PRAYER & FREE WILL / rhetoric & manipulation etc
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Before I became an open theist, when I was a little child, I had formulated a little analogy in my head for how I understood the concept of submitting my will to God’s will in prayer. It went like this: When God asks you to pray for whatever you want and you will receive it (implied in small print is---“if it’s MY will”) it’s like when my mother would give me a choice about what vegetable I wanted to eat for dinner. “You have a choice you see,” she would say, “you can either have broccoli or broccoli.” Of course I would answer that I wanted ice cream but that wasn’t one of the choices so I’d always lose the battle and end up gagging down some broccoli. So when God is saying, “ask what ever you want” He really means, “Look buster I’m giving you a choice you can have MY WILL or MY WILL. Got it?” Whenever what I really want to pray for isn’t already what God wants me to want to pray for it’s no use, He’s God and I’ll have to gag down whatever His mysterious will is weather I like it or not. I’ll admit this might not be the most accurate analogy Biblically but it is accurate to my conception of prayer pre OT.
Well now that I’m an OT I view prayer and God’s will in a different way but it has created a few problems. For instance, since I believe that God can change His mind I’ve been praying prayers along the lines of, “Look God since you asked us in scripture to pray for what we want here’s my will. I don’t know what your will is, but if this is not already your will could you change your will to be this way? If not cool, I can’t see all that you can.”
One of the other consequences of practical prayer life under OT is that it has transformed my relationship with God into an economic one. If I behave myself it makes me think that there is a greater chance that God will be willing to change His mind about something. A sort of ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’ sort of economy. Before OT, when I could give lip service to how prayer actually changes things but couldn’t possibly understand how it accomplished this, it didn’t really matter to me how much I prayed or weather I fasted and prayed or what I said in particular because none of it really seemed to matter. I couldn’t understand how anything hung on prayer and the mere belief that somehow something did wasn’t that great of a motivator. But now that I’m an OT a sense of urgency is infused into everything surrounding petitionary prayer. I think things like ‘maybe if I don’t fast it won’t happen and if I do fast it will happen,’ so God’s answering my prayer hangs on adding extras to the pot. And what if I sin? Maybe God won’t act because of sin, so I get even extra anal retentive and legalistic (things I already struggle with). Plus I get a little concerned about the words I use to pray with. Moses for instance in Deuteronomy 9:25-29 crafts a short argument when he prays the prayer that eventually influenced God to change His mind about the destruction He was going to bring upon the Israelites.
"So I lay prostrate before the LORD for these forty days and forty nights, because the LORD had said he would destroy you. And I prayed to the LORD, `O Lord GOD, destroy not thy people and thy heritage, whom thou hast redeemed through thy greatness, whom thou hast brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Remember thy servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; do not regard the stubbornness of this people, or their wickedness, or their sin, lest the land from which thou didst bring us say, "Because the LORD was not able to bring them into the land which he promised them, and because he hated them, he has brought them out to slay them in the wilderness." For they are thy people and thy heritage, whom thou didst bring out by thy great power and by thy outstretched arm.'
Moses basically constructs an argument reminding God of His reputation and wagering that in light of His proposed actions and how the Egyptians might perceive the whole scenario. Did the rhetoric of the prayer have anything to do with it’s success? What if Moses had just said ‘pretty-please’ a couple thousand times? Would it have been as effective? In the end all of this feels a bit like using my spiritual say-so to manipulate God. I know that God can’t be duped so any attempts at manipulation are ill fated from the start but I’m sure He doesn’t appreciate it nevertheless. Add to this that I also struggle with manipulation using my material say-so and now prayer just makes this problem worse, I start trying to manipulate others supernaturally. According to RevivalTheology that places me right in the center of the essence of Witchraft.
RevivalTheology said:
For example, many people not only pray for a future mate, but for a particular person to be their mates. This seems to me the height of presumption. I believe what many people term "prayer" is little more than an attempt at spiritual manipulation - which is really what witchcraft is all about.
I, like Proverbs, am praying for a mate. But unlike Proverbs I have a particular person in mind. Even worse this person is sort of, kind of, almost, not quite in a VERY!!!!!!!!!!!!!! serious relationship with someone else (like as serious as you can get without actually being under the blessing of a legal covenant…yet). AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. I’m powerless in the face of everyone else’s free will, and out of habit when I’m powerless I rely on God’s power. But in this case He too is powerless in light of their free will (sort of. You know what I mean.)
So there you have it. Most of these problems aren’t problems for non OT types but they are for us.
Wislawa
P.S. As soon as you read this send up a quick prayer to God that he would sort of, in a gentle way, brake up that mentioned couple and maybe kind of lead one of them (the one that is the opposite gender from me) over in my direction. Yep that’s how pathetic I am!!! It’s one of those head over heals kind of things with a touch of desperation.
Posted Originally From: Open Theism Information Site
Wislawa
02/08/01 8:57 PM
Poll Question: How many of you actualy prayed the prayer Wislawa requested.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sorry i just needed an excuse to learn how to post a poll But please answer anyway and send up another prayer on my behalf
Me, oh oh oh I did!!!
No, what are you kiding?
Wislawa's a pathetic dork
02/08/01 8:38 PM
PRAYER & FREE WILL / rhetoric & manipulation etc
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I just finished reading the “How does God answer prayer without altering the Free Will…” thread, all 58 posts worth. Proverbs I appreciated your original question because it resonated so much with practical issues I’m currently dealing with in the actual, concrete, in the trenches, non-ivory-tower act of prayer. It seemed that the thread initially garnered some practical responses, which I found to be quite helpful, and then quickly turned abstract and philosophical dealing with the ins and outs of free will and determinism that I found quite interesting, but also quite frustrating. It was at this point that everyone started shooting past each other. It seems to me that the OT position and the position of Mephi & LL rest on definitions of terms and paradigm commitments so radically different from one another that attempts at achieving a universal consensus appear as hopeless as achieving agreement between Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomers, or between witch doctors and medical doctors. (Is this what’s called a Rortyian impasse? I’ve only read a little Rorty but from I can make out he has a lot to say about paradigm clashes like this. Help me out if any of you know better.) As a result it was difficult for the two views to stand toe to toe with one another.
Thus RevivalTheology said:
All along, however, LL insists his question was based on mine, or Open Theists', understanding of free will, yet all along the question revolved around comparing apples to oranges.
And Mephi said:
Why don't you INTERACT with what I'm saying about "free will" instead of implicitly acting as if it bears NO weight upon your discussion of "free will" with Lion-Lamb?…ALL I want is for people to truly engage my writing with some cogent argumentation, not vapid assertions. Is this too much to ask? I don't think so.
Each paradigm is like a mechanism in which turning a certain wheel will turn other wheels. But the gears and sprockets of the OT mechanism don’t align themselves with the gears and sprockets of the Calvinist mechanism so no real satisfying dialogue can take place.
Like I said before, the original question struck a cord with me and I really wanted to post something but couldn’t just jump right in without knowing what had already been said and I didn’t have time to read everything until just now. So I would like to revive the issue if I may be allowed to but I want to do so in a restricted way. I would like to avoid the fun stuff and stick strait to the practical implications for prayer. In order to do that we might further need to restrict the thread to just one paradigm but I don’t want to be exclusive and I would like as much insight from as many people as I can get so y’all will have to decide weather or not it’s possible to get away with inclusivism. For my part I’m dealing with some of the practical problems that accepting the open view paradigm has created for me with my relationship to God through petitionary prayer. If you respond try to do so from within that paradigm or make it explicit if you approach it from another. At any rate the practical consequence for each paradigm should be radically different as well. I already enjoyed some of the practical responses that I read on the earlier thread and I’ve a feeling that there is more that hasn’t been tapped into. So I’ll start my first post…
Wislawa
Posted Originally From: Open Theism Information Site
Wislawa
02/08/01 8:45 PM
RE: PRAYER & FREE WILL / rhetoric & manipulation etc
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Before I became an open theist, when I was a little child, I had formulated a little analogy in my head for how I understood the concept of submitting my will to God’s will in prayer. It went like this: When God asks you to pray for whatever you want and you will receive it (implied in small print is---“if it’s MY will”) it’s like when my mother would give me a choice about what vegetable I wanted to eat for dinner. “You have a choice you see,” she would say, “you can either have broccoli or broccoli.” Of course I would answer that I wanted ice cream but that wasn’t one of the choices so I’d always lose the battle and end up gagging down some broccoli. So when God is saying, “ask what ever you want” He really means, “Look buster I’m giving you a choice you can have MY WILL or MY WILL. Got it?” Whenever what I really want to pray for isn’t already what God wants me to want to pray for it’s no use, He’s God and I’ll have to gag down whatever His mysterious will is weather I like it or not. I’ll admit this might not be the most accurate analogy Biblically but it is accurate to my conception of prayer pre OT.
Well now that I’m an OT I view prayer and God’s will in a different way but it has created a few problems. For instance, since I believe that God can change His mind I’ve been praying prayers along the lines of, “Look God since you asked us in scripture to pray for what we want here’s my will. I don’t know what your will is, but if this is not already your will could you change your will to be this way? If not cool, I can’t see all that you can.”
One of the other consequences of practical prayer life under OT is that it has transformed my relationship with God into an economic one. If I behave myself it makes me think that there is a greater chance that God will be willing to change His mind about something. A sort of ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’ sort of economy. Before OT, when I could give lip service to how prayer actually changes things but couldn’t possibly understand how it accomplished this, it didn’t really matter to me how much I prayed or weather I fasted and prayed or what I said in particular because none of it really seemed to matter. I couldn’t understand how anything hung on prayer and the mere belief that somehow something did wasn’t that great of a motivator. But now that I’m an OT a sense of urgency is infused into everything surrounding petitionary prayer. I think things like ‘maybe if I don’t fast it won’t happen and if I do fast it will happen,’ so God’s answering my prayer hangs on adding extras to the pot. And what if I sin? Maybe God won’t act because of sin, so I get even extra anal retentive and legalistic (things I already struggle with). Plus I get a little concerned about the words I use to pray with. Moses for instance in Deuteronomy 9:25-29 crafts a short argument when he prays the prayer that eventually influenced God to change His mind about the destruction He was going to bring upon the Israelites.
"So I lay prostrate before the LORD for these forty days and forty nights, because the LORD had said he would destroy you. And I prayed to the LORD, `O Lord GOD, destroy not thy people and thy heritage, whom thou hast redeemed through thy greatness, whom thou hast brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Remember thy servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; do not regard the stubbornness of this people, or their wickedness, or their sin, lest the land from which thou didst bring us say, "Because the LORD was not able to bring them into the land which he promised them, and because he hated them, he has brought them out to slay them in the wilderness." For they are thy people and thy heritage, whom thou didst bring out by thy great power and by thy outstretched arm.'
Moses basically constructs an argument reminding God of His reputation and wagering that in light of His proposed actions and how the Egyptians might perceive the whole scenario. Did the rhetoric of the prayer have anything to do with it’s success? What if Moses had just said ‘pretty-please’ a couple thousand times? Would it have been as effective? In the end all of this feels a bit like using my spiritual say-so to manipulate God. I know that God can’t be duped so any attempts at manipulation are ill fated from the start but I’m sure He doesn’t appreciate it nevertheless. Add to this that I also struggle with manipulation using my material say-so and now prayer just makes this problem worse, I start trying to manipulate others supernaturally. According to RevivalTheology that places me right in the center of the essence of Witchraft.
RevivalTheology said:
For example, many people not only pray for a future mate, but for a particular person to be their mates. This seems to me the height of presumption. I believe what many people term "prayer" is little more than an attempt at spiritual manipulation - which is really what witchcraft is all about.
I, like Proverbs, am praying for a mate. But unlike Proverbs I have a particular person in mind. Even worse this person is sort of, kind of, almost, not quite in a VERY!!!!!!!!!!!!!! serious relationship with someone else (like as serious as you can get without actually being under the blessing of a legal covenant…yet). AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. I’m powerless in the face of everyone else’s free will, and out of habit when I’m powerless I rely on God’s power. But in this case He too is powerless in light of their free will (sort of. You know what I mean.)
So there you have it. Most of these problems aren’t problems for non OT types but they are for us.
Wislawa
P.S. As soon as you read this send up a quick prayer to God that he would sort of, in a gentle way, brake up that mentioned couple and maybe kind of lead one of them (the one that is the opposite gender from me) over in my direction. Yep that’s how pathetic I am!!! It’s one of those head over heals kind of things with a touch of desperation.
Posted Originally From: Open Theism Information Site
Wislawa
02/08/01 8:57 PM
Poll Question: How many of you actualy prayed the prayer Wislawa requested.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sorry i just needed an excuse to learn how to post a poll But please answer anyway and send up another prayer on my behalf
Me, oh oh oh I did!!!
No, what are you kiding?
Wislawa's a pathetic dork
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