What Happens When You Pray?

Extract

The topic of prayer is important to Christians and a number of recent books have been largely concerned with it. One of the latest is Hubert Richards’ What Happens When You Pray? a work that is likely to gain a lot of readers since Richards is now one of the most popular religious writers in Britain. Unfortunately, however, he is also somewhat misguided, and what follows is intended to say why. I do not want to write at length, and much of what I argue needs detailed development that I do not provide. But I still want to hold that more can be said of prayer than Richards allows. If you can begin to see why I am right, my purpose here will have been achieved.

To put things in perspective, it ought first to be agreed that much of what Richards says is, in fact, correct. Take, for example, the following remarks on God:

There is a sense in which God is apart from our world, beyond it, ‘other’ than and ‘different’ from everything else in our experience. He remains the transcendent mystery, and if we don’t give expression to that sometimes, indeed often, we will make him into an idol in our own image and likeness, (p 43)

All of that is thoroughly in order. We have to talk of God in words which are normally applied to objects in the world, and, in doing so, we can often make statements that are perfectly true. But God is not an intelligible subject possessing attributes. He is not a member of a class or genus, not a being among beings. As Aquinas puts it, God ‘is identical with his own godhead, with his own life and with whatever else is similarly said of him’.