What are we doing when we Pray?
What Are We Doing When We Pray?
On Prayer and The Nature of Faith
By: Vincent Brummer
England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008, 186 pp.
Brummer’s book is a concise and sophisticated book which addresses the practical question of whether prayer makes a difference in the lives of believers. Brummer addresses a classic difficulty that was initially raised by Kant and other philosophers and theists about whether prayer is only a private mental exercise or something much more than this. Brummer argues that, for believers, prayer has the power to transform the ordinary into something extraordinary. Prayer is more than a bunch of words that believers utter to God. Prayer is a way of opening our lines of communication with God on a deep level by telling God our wishes, desires, deep-seated fears, and disappointments. Prayer is a unique way of communicating with God that isn’t really possible by any other means.
Most believers don’t need to test the claim that their prayers are efficacious. To many, the very idea of such an experiment sounds irreligious and even blasphemous. Only prayers which are offered in faith or are accompanied by a whole-hearted approach are usually answered. Most believers don’t pray to God with the tentative or provisional attitude appropriate to an experiment. Attempts to test the efficacy of prayer experimentally assumes that prayer is a manipulative technique or a form of magic, that God is not a person but an object of manipulation, and that the relation between God and the believer who prays is not a personal relation but an impersonal one at best. Thus, for Brummer, the efficacy of prayer cannot be tested empirically.
Instead, the primary purpose of prayer is to bring about some positive effects for the believer. Church faith can degenerate into a fetish faith if the church does not serve to instill in the believer a sense of moral duty. Believers must persuade God to create in them that moral virtue that is their duty to realize themselves. In genuine prayer, the believer is trying to make himself a better person. Thus, it is best if believers pray with perfect sincerity to God; otherwise, prayer could degenerate into an act of fetish faith.
God is mostly known through His works. It is only through the eyes of faith that we can recognize an event as an act or a work of God. We cannot simply infer divine agency from our empirical perception of the world. It is only with eyes of faith that believers can see Jesus as the son of God in whom the forgiving love of God is manifested and as the son of man, the paradigm of human perfection in fellowship with God. Without the eyes of faith opened in us by the spirit, religious experience can be blind and meaningless.
Religious experience is an experience that is understood in the light of faith. This kind of understanding does not come to us naturally. For believers, the Holy Spirit is held to be the primary agent of our spirituality and our religious experience. It is, therefore, through illumination by the spirit that such spiritual training bears fruit and we become able to see all things with the eyes of faith. Religious experience transforms the way in which believers view things and their attitudes and actions in relation to them. Prayer aims at establishing, developing, restoring or acknowledging a relationship of loving fellowship with God. It is clear that prayer plays an important role in the mystical whose goal is the attainment of such a life-transforming relationship.
Religious experience should be religiously interpreted and, as such, it is not open to empirical verification or falsification. Metaphysical claims about the existence and nature of God are not open to empirical verification or falsification since God is not an empirically observable entity. Such claims about God can be derived from the religious experience that is a fundamental part of our lives and the world in the sense that they are the tacit presuppositions that are constitutive for such experience and of the form of life entailed by it. For believers, the life of faith is not a useful fiction. To live a life of faith is not to live as if there was a God. Believers claim that the constitutive presuppositions of their form of life of faith are true. For them, God is not a mere fiction or an illusion but a reality to whom they relate to in their lives. Such metaphysical claims are reality depicting.
Thus, living faith is not an immutable religious framework of thought but rather a heritage of a tradition handed down from one generation to the next. And prayer is a part of that living faith.It is practice that believers partake in. Prayer is a practice that is honoured by religious believers because God answers our prayers. Although this cannot be empirically verifiable, it is still believed by believers. For others an empirical verification is not necessary for prayer to have significance. What the believer asks for in faith will be granted in God’s time and in God’s way. After reading Brummer’s book, it is possible that more believers will be praying both for guidance and for moral self-improvement.
© Irene S. Roth
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