Prayer & the Cross

Here is an excerpt from a helpful article by Laureen F. Winner entitle “Prayer and the Cross” that reviews Philip Yancy's book, Prayer: Does it Make Any Difference, and David Crump's book, Knocking on Heaven's Door, in Books & Culture, January/February 2007, page 9:

In the last chapter, Crump draws together several overarching, constructive conclusions: the Bible tells us that we pray to a personal God, who responds to our prayers. Indeed, the New Testament suggests an intimate relationship with God, a God who cares even about the small details of our lives. Crump insists that God is "personally available to hear and to respond to each individual's requests in a two-way relationship of personal give and take." Those who charge that such a view somehow undoes God's sovereignty are themselves, says Crump, captive to a "Neoplatonic theological prejudice that substitutes … philosophical smoke and mirrors for the truth plainly revealed in Scripture."

Crump dwells on the eschatological emphasis of New Testament prayer. Jesus taught us to pray "thy will be done," a petition that underscores the fact that we live, and pray, in in-between times, and most New Testament prayers focus on "things that matter for eternity." Paul's intercessions, for example, typically found him praying that others would be eschatologically formed and eschatologically minded, that they would finish the race well, and come to the throne of Christ where they could hear the praise, "Well done, good and faithful servants." Taken as a whole, the New Testament—which is filled not with requests for miracles so much as pleas for endurance during times of trial—seems to suggest that "suffering [is] the norm for God's people." Today, many of the prayers that go unanswered are prayers that, one way or another, ask to evade suffering. Hence in his last few paragraphs, Crump offers a radical affirmation of the centrality of the Cross to Christian prayer. Powerful prayer, he says, is not prayer that leads to bodily healing and riches. Rather, the Bible's model of powerful prayer is Paul's petition, in prison, that we "may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ."

One wishes only that Crump's provocative concluding remarks were not so brief. His clearly circumscribed purpose is to address prayer as it appears in the New Testament, not as it appears in people's homes and churches today—yet, his words about eschatology and suffering are so unsettling that one wishes he had teased out more explicitly the implications of New Testament prayer for the lives of ordinary Christians in the 21st century.

Perhaps the implications for us are this: without dissenting from the notion that prayer can make a difference in human events, we can, as Crump suggests, affirm that the essential shape of our prayer is cruciform. When we suffer, a miraculous answer to prayer is not out of the question, but our hopes for a miracle ought to be secondary. The primary hope with which we pray, in our sufferings and our darkness, is the hope of the Resurrection.


Read the complete article at:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/001/2.8.html