You can read chapter two here.

As we established in the previous post, there is no way of proving that God completely ignored Neva Winnecoup-Rogers. Rather, what we know is that He did not stop Jeff Weise from killing her. We do not know what else He might have done that day, or how He might have been working within Neva’s heart and mind.

The question is a good one though: Why didn’t God protect Neva Winnecoup-Rogers’ life? And I am going to say right now that I have absolutely no idea. What I disagree with is not that this question isn’t troubling; I think it is deeply troubling and something we need to wrestle with both intellectually and emotionally. What I disagree with is the assertion that the honest wrestling with this question (call it intellectual integrity or rationality, if you like) makes disbelief in God the only viable option. That is the claim I will be disputing throughout.

The question of unanswered prayer (particularly in light of Jesus’ promises mentioned in this chapter) is troubling. I have personally seen God do some incredible things in response to prayer (remove a boil off a man’s leg overnight, cause a girl’s scars from self-mutilation to completely fade overnight, heal a waitress’ wrist so she could work without pain or a brace, heal my crossbite to the extent that I no longer require surgery, etc.) And yet, I have also seen many of my prayers go unanswered (healing for my wife’s chronic pain conditions, healing for a friend’s bum knee, good sleep for a friend suffering from insomnia, etc).

I have seen enough that cannot reasonably be considered coincidence or chance that I cannot rationally doubt that God is alive and active in this world. Even so, there have been enough times where God did not do what I thought He should do that I sometimes wrestle with whether or not God is all-powerful or perfectly good.

I do not fall into the camp that wants to use God’s “hidden will” as an excuse for unanswered prayer. Andrew Murray in his book “With Christ In The School of Prayer” does a fantastic job of showing that “God’s will” as it occurs in verses like 1st John 5:14 is not talking about God’s hidden will but His revealed will (i.e. what we know about His nature and character). Thus, we pray expectantly for God to heal amputees (or whatever) because it has been revealed that He is a God who delights in healing and restoration.

I do, however, want to understand Jesus’ promises in context. It is a basic principle of exegesis that we understand the part in reference to the whole (in this case, we understand Jesus’ promises in light of the Old and New Testaments). We also want to understand Jesus’ promises in light of everything else He says and does.  The Principle of Charity (see here) requires that we give Jesus (and everyone else!) the best reading possible, meaning we assume a logical consistency among everything He says and does unless there is no interpretation that allows us to do so. Finally, it is important to understand how early Christians interpreted Jesus’ promises, because they give us a big clue about how His audience would have understood Him.

With that in mind, I’d like to mention the following:

• The Old Testament is full of unanswered prayers and wrestling with the mystery/hiddenness of God.
• There’s an entire literary genre in the Old Testament (Psalms of Lament) devoted to this very thing.
• The Jews of Jesus’ time had been crying out for years and years to God for deliverance from the Romans with no apparent answer.
• Jesus, like most rabbis, used hyperbole as a rhetorical teaching device (Luke 14:26 is a clear example).
• Jesus says that true belief is necessary (Mark 11:24), and that the answered prayer must glorify the Father (John 14:12-14).
• Jesus had at least one of His prayers go unanswered (Luke 22:42).
• The New Testament talks regularly about the possibility of unanswered prayer.
• Unanswered prayer and miraculous answers to prayer were both part of the normal experience and teaching of early Christians. You’ll find no theologian or teacher (as best as I can tell) in the early church who understood Jesus to be saying that every prayer will be answered exactly how we want it to each and every time. (If there was someone who did, this was certainly not the dominant interpretation).

So, one cannot reasonably interpret Jesus’ promises as do the author(s) of the website. We only get this interpretation if we take the words at face value independent of context (this is often called the “literal” reading, though that’s a bit of a misnomer).  I understand this is an approach to the Bible that some Christians take, but it has always been the minority view and has little to no grounding in the interpretations of early Christians.

This leaves us with the question of what exactly Jesus is talking about. In light of Jesus’ Resurrection and the fact that we can be filled with the Holy Spirit, His promises seem to be an encouragement for believers to use the power and authority they have in Christ to pray for healing, deliverance/exorcism, etc. This would signal a change from the Old Testament, would line up with the totality of what Jesus said and did, and affirms the experience of the early church where miracles happened frequently (Athanasius’ “On The Incarnation” is a wonderful example of this).

Thus, both Christianity and atheism are logically consistent with the fact of unanswered prayer, but only some sort of theism can explain answered prayer (where it can’t reasonably be considered coincidence or chance). There are a great many times where what people claim are miracles could be explained by coincidence (which doesn’t mean it isn’t God – it just means we don’t know that it is). However, there seem to be times where that explanation won’t hold (in the case of the fading scars I mentioned earlier, for instance).

I realize that many aren’t convinced that there are such things as true miracles, and bemoan the fact that they haven’t seen one that is empirically-verifiable. The natural question is: If God is still in the business of miracles, why won’t He prove it (and Himself) in a way that would be accepted by all?

My answer to this question, in the end, will once again be, “I don’t know.” However, later I will get into the question of whether this is a reasonable expectation to have of God, and whether we need a proof of this kind to rationally justify belief in Him. The author(s) of the website go(es) into this in a later chapter, so I’ll save my thoughts for then.

As far as Steve’s miracle and the questions the author(s) ask(s), they are good ones. God could have easily saved all the houses, but He chose not to. Presumably He had a reason, but the best attempts we can muster all seem pretty . . . well, lacking (not logically, but emotionally). It’s clear Biblically that God is not the author of evil, but He seems to allow a lot of it to happen.

With the author(s) I ask, “Why is God so mysterious?”