Calvin: Prayer is for us

“You may well ask why, if God already knows our difficulties and what is best for us, we need to plead with him in prayer.  It is as if he were aslep and had to be woken up by the sound of our voices!  This argument ignores he reason the Lord has taught us to pray.  It is not for his sake, but ours.  He wants us, rightly, to give due honour to his name by acknowledging that everything comes from him.  But even in this, the benefit is ours.”  (Calvin’s Institutes, as edited by Lane and Osborne, p.204)

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5 Responses to “Calvin: Prayer is for us”

1. Marty Stacy says:

   February 20, 2009 at 2:45 am

   Or maybe, just maybe, Calvin’s got it wrong on how God works with us. Look at the gospels and who was healed. The idea that the future is already locked that Calvin espouses doesn’t correlate with a lot of things in the Bible. Look at Nineveh for example. He (Calvin) senses it in the prayer issue and amazingly turns prayer IMHO into some sort of therapy. Robert Schuller, Oprah and others would be proud. The word “prayer” means asking for something in a legal setting. Calvin doesn’t get it.
2. Calvin on Prayer says:

   February 26, 2009 at 8:41 am

   [...] Friend Erik Raymond recently shared a quote from John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion on the subject of prayer. Have a look. [...]
3. Marty Stacy says:

   March 2, 2009 at 4:47 pm

   Calvin did not understand that God could not give things to us without us asking for them because it would violate God’s nature and ours. Calvin’s theology was weak on the doctrine of ontological separation between God and his creation, in particular, the human being. You can search the net and find quite of bit of commentary on Calvinisim and its tendency to pantheism. Even today when some evangelicals mention that God is limited by human response the charge of heresy follows.

   Clearly in Scripture, however, man is endowed with his separate but dependent existence, and as a part of being created in the image of God has the ability to create. One aspect of that is asking God in prayer for things just as Jesus did.

   Daniel (in Daniel 9) very intensely asked God to keep his promise about the restoration of Jerusalem. According to Calvin’s view Daniel’s prayer would be foolish for a couple of reasons. One, God had already promised it and two, God had already predestined/decreed it in eternity past.

   Daniel didn’t hold that view, however, as is apparent in his prayer in Daniel 9. Daniel is very, very serious about his prayer and an angel was immediately sent to Daniel in response to his prayer. The angel ran into trouble getting there, so Daniel probably was in contrition longer than he would have been otherwise.

   Noteworthy as well is that Daniel, one of the most righteous men in the Old Testament, did not use the name it and claim it principle so often advocated in modern times by, typicially, the Charismatic crowd.

   So either Calvin and the Name It and Claim It crowd are mistaken on the nature of God’s relationship to circumstances, or Daniel was.

   Having heard a number of Calvinists maintain that God requires us to pray even though He could give us things but does not because He (only) wants to teach us and give Him glory, and having heard many Name and Claim people and their view of prayer, I think I’ll side with Daniel and insist with James that we have not– because we don’t ask, not because God is trying to teach us or promote his own glory and withholds things from us if we don’t comply. God needs us to ask for some things and cannot provide them otherwise.

   Calvin’s view as excerpted in the original quote above (and much of the Name and Claim doctrine) contradicts Daniel and many other biblical saints’ recorded dealings with God.
4. Erik says:

   March 3, 2009 at 10:37 am

   Marty, I encourage you to read Calvin himself on these things rather than many of the (unfair) characterizations that pervade the web. If you read the Institutes, for example, you can’t help but be impressed with how hard he seemed to work to be balanced in his thinking and how hard he struggled with his own mind’s tendency to run beyond what it is written.
5. Marty Stacy says:

   March 3, 2009 at 11:34 pm

   What makes you think I haven’t read Calvin?

   I agree that he was more “balanced” than many of his followers, nonetheless, he made the will of God the controlling factor in his theology, the controllilng attribute of divine essence:

   “Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves…. nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone.

   God’s is the only efficient will in the universe, and so He is the one ultimate causal reality.

   Nothing happens but what He has knowingly and willingly decreed; All the changes which take place in the world are produced by the secret agency of the hand of God; Not heaven and earth and inanimate creatures only, but also the counsels and wills of men are so governed as to move exactly in the course which He has destined.”

   I am not the first (or last) to point out that Calvin’s conceiving of absolute will as the primary attribute of God owes more to William of Occam than the B-I-B-L-E.

   In Daniel 9 above, I attempted to show the paradigm that Calvin seeks to force on the Bible doesn’t conflate with the biblical text: Daniel prays, God sends the angel to answer, the angel is interrupted, the angel answers. Calvin must insist that God also willed the impediment to His own answer. Likewise Calvin and Calvinism would have to deny that Daniel’s prayer was the effectual cause of God keeping his promise. We have real choice and real will that affects what God does or does not do.

   Characterizing Calvin’s god as absolute “will” and showing that the paradigm biblically doesn’t work isn’t unfair or mean-spirited (or heretical). The basis of our faith is the revelation of God in Christ as revealed in the Bible, not a philosophical system.

   Regards,