By Karl Johnson
Let me start with an odd story, the first of three.
One night last summer I woke to a loud series of knocks at my front door. WHACK. WHACK. WHACK. It was about 3:00 am and I could not understand why someone would want to enter my house; it was just a Tuesday. WHACK. WHACK. WHAK. The persistence and volume of the knocks troubled me. After about the 7th series of knocks I was forced to consider four competing hypotheses: [1] the source of the noise was a person who did not realize that no one is willingly awake at 3:00 am; [2] the source of the noise was an animal or something mechanical—perhaps a metal pipe had broke and was banging the wall; [3] the source of the noise was a supernatural being, like a dread spirit trying to enter the house; [4] the noise was only a product of my imagination. In any case, with each knock I knew I could not stay still—left to my hypothesizing, I would go insane.
During an unusually long pause between the knocks I got up from my bed and walked to the door. Upon entering the foyer, I immediately recognized a dark, human-shaped figure in the door’s window, behind the drape. I will never forget that image, in my sleepy delirium it nearly made my heart stop. My second hypothesis immediately was disproved, and I was forced to reckon with the fact that I was now confronting either an insanely desperate person (considering the neighborhood I live in, probably a homeless man, or a burglar of sorts), some supernatural being, or—and hopefully—just a shading of light that made the appearance of a figure. WHACK. WHACK. WHACK. I took another step forward.
What happened next deeply imprinted itself on my psyche—when I touched the door handle, the figure quickly retreated from behind the drape and fled out of sight. My anxiety skyrocketed. The figure had responded to my movement, which meant that I was not just imagining something (there goes my fourth hypothesis). Moreover, this subject could now be known by my relation to it—I ostensibly had caused it to act. Insofar as I could acknowledge myself as a real person acting in a real world, it was the subject’s response to my person that dragged it into this world of the real—and for that reason I hardly slept that night.
My experience resembles a familiar scene of call and response—it was a sleepy Marco-Polo game, if you will. Awoken by a noise that was initially undiscernible, it was only after I made a direct and persistent move toward that noise that I was able to meet the noisemaker to confirm and share in its reality. I think prayer works something like this.
There are many descriptions and examples of prayer in Scripture, and there are correspondingly many different applications of prayer recognized by the Church today, including but not limited to prayers of blessing and adoration, prayers of thanksgiving, and prayers of petition. Among these select three it is undoubtable that petitionary prayer is the hardest to wrap one’s head around; it commits the most to paradox. If God is both omnipotent and omniscience—that is, he always knows all things (past and future) and can freely will events into existence—how can the future course of events be rerouted through our incoherent whimpering? Would the noisemaker still have moved had I never reached for the door?
Let us, for a moment, avoid resolving that paradox and instead consider a seemingly easy-way-out alternative: deism. For the deist, God is only an indifferent and first-cause machine—unwilling to participate in our reality, and certainly not interested in knocking on our door at 3:00 am. Deism is a comfortable fit. While indifference can be treacherously silent in times of suffering, this is compensated for by the room it allows for God-given existential meaning without the bothersome intervention that could limit us from living free lives (God forbid we must attend any silly religious ritual); it would have been much easier to sleep, and certainly less horrific of a night, had I forced myself to believe hypothesis 4. Furthermore, if we are to be honest, and without over-philosophizing the matter, deism is a highly probable hypothesis on the religious table—a posture famously advanced by Epicurus and his followers and then leaders of the Enlightenment. By it questions of theodicy (why does God allow evil?) are painlessly dealt with—for why should this deistic god not be capricious in his indifference? It offers, moreover, a sufficient explanation for the origin and order of the natural world, and hopes of a transcendent afterlife are not completely wanting, either. It is simple, elegant, and a priori more plausible than not: both Occam’s razor and the Turing machine we live within every day advance the argument for a machine deity. But, with deism, there can be no personal conversation between man and God, and there is certainly no room for petitionary prayer.
This deistic conception diverges significantly from the God of the Bible. Indeed, Christians are often challenged to interact with the tricky personhood of God—call and response capacities included. Consider, then, a second story—a parable told by Jesus. It is a parable that stretches the bounds of petitionary prayer and adds weight to our already burdensome paradox:
Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’ “For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’” And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly” – Luke 18:1-8 (what version?)
This story is often labeled the Parable of the Persistent Widow; I would like to momentarily rename it Against Deism.
“Will he keep putting them off?” Given the preceding dialogue, the care wrapped within this rhetorical question is clearly not deistic in nature. Far from it. For those “who cry out to him at night,” justice is given. Period. If this is not already an absurd and otherworldly cause and effect, please let it be so. It is as if the God referenced in this story is so desperate to answer his creatures that he stays up the whole night on call, including at 3:00 am.
Returning to our paradox, in every way the parable’s judge initially resembles a deistic god—he is bound to the uniformity of the future and unwilling to respond to petitions from the present. And yet our heroine of the story, against all odds and intuition, persists in her plea. Miraculously, through this persistence she comes to the awesome reality that this judge is in fact not indifferent to her plea, and that she does have stake in the future of her reality. Justice would not have been granted had she not pleaded. To deny this conclusion is to deny both the essence of the parable and the possibility that mankind can have such an intimate relationship with reality and indeed with God Himself. The testimony of our heroine is not so much a resolution of our paradox, but a sufficiently functional road to move forward along. Pray, then see what happens. Indeed, this is how so many of Jesus’s paradoxical teachings are: not easy and impersonal problems to be calculated out, but lived realities to be discovered. Listen and understand—over and against the limit of our own intuition—transforms into come and see.
This parable is not only for the Christian, and I do not think it is even firstly for the Christian. Recognize the imperative purpose and application of the parable, it was “a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up… he will see that [those who cry out day and night] get justice, and quickly.” This application is inherently an experiment. The null hypothesis: deism at best; the alternative hypothesis: quick, responsive justice; the methods: always pray and never give up. We are told nothing of the character, religious convictions, or prior knowledge of our heroine, only the persistence with which she petitioned. Amidst the constraints of paradox, she moved forward along the only road that bore hope, and it is for this alone that she received justice.
Our culture, particularly here at Hopkins, is one that glorifies the scientific process. When cornered by unresolved paradox in a field there is a noble and persistent effort to conduct further tests and propose alternative hypotheses. Standing on the shoulders of giants, a new generation of scientists responds to the challenge and advances the field. It is rare that this process, however glorified in its own right, extends beyond the realm of natural and social sciences. Yet the concept of prayer we just witnessed in Against Deism unapologetically calls to mind such a spirit. Over and against our materialistic intuition, this story reminds us that we may be both body and soul, and that either realm is liable to a set of call-and-response, testable realities. Christianity becomes, contrary to some timeless canon of wise sayings, a historical religion, occurring—and revealing itself—within time, responsive to our inputs and actions. To deny this possibility—to treat it as just a possibility—is to be unscientific and never experiment at all.
To be sure, there are ways of miscalculating if not abusing this kind of experimentation. If fact, the truth is that what I had imagined to be some dread apparition turned out only to be a desperate, drunk friend who had forgotten his keys at my house. His movement away from the door—an act of defeat—was merely coincidental with mine towards it. My third hypothesis never had a chance. Yet in the moment, separated by the veil of a window drape and accompanied by a strong imagination, it was the spiritual possibility that won me over. As it is with prayer. For my case, and indeed the case for us all, there does seem to be a veil separating a clear discernment of two competing conclusions and often all we are given is ambiguous shades of light. Amidst this difficult shading, some people work very hard to retrospectively fit theological narratives into past events when a secular answer may be more fitting. But that, in and of itself, is no reason to stop experimenting, especially when we are still young. For to be fair, the scientific process as applied in every other discipline is privy to the same kind of miscalculations. The history of science is a history of competing hypotheses continually being proposed, tested, found wanting, then radically revolutionized until a new paradigm of understanding is reached, one filled with its own new paradoxes only to be re-challenged and re-revolutionized, repeatedly. Should one conclude that science is a broken process or that the alchemist of the 17th century, in his or her inaccurate and wanting conclusions about chemistry, was epistemologically desperate? What else could he or she do and what would chemistry have become without rudimentary, initial experiments?
I leave you with a third and final story. In Franz Kafka’s parable “Before the Law” (found in The Trial), a man “from the country” arrives at a gate seeking entrance to “the Law”—a destination left ambiguous, yet a place that “everyone strives after.” Upon his arrival he is met by the doorkeeper who, despite the countryman’s begging, claims that the countryman cannot enter now: “‘It is possible,’ answers the doorkeeper, ‘but not at this moment.’” After witnessing the countryman get a hopeful glimpse of what may exist on the other side, the doorkeeper sardonically explains, “If you are so strongly tempted, try to get in without my permission. But note that I am powerful. And I am only the lowest doorkeeper.” To this, the traveler is despondent, believing that “the Law…should be accessible to every man and at all times.” Nevertheless, and out of fear, the countryman concludes that he “better wait until he gets permission to enter.” Planted outside the gate, he makes minor attempts to persuade the doorkeeper over the next many years, including by handing over of all his possessions. In response to the countryman’s attempts at persuasion “the doorkeeper often engages him in brief conversation…but quite impersonally,” and to countryman’s bribery the doorkeeper honestly remarks, “‘I take this only to keep you from feeling that you have left something undone.’” At the end of his life, and as a weary man, a question occurs to the countryman: “‘Everyone strives to attain the Law… how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?’” The parable ends with the doorkeeper’s response, “‘No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.’”
This is a tragic story of a man who never overcame an obstacle that only ever truly existed in theory. The man became paralyzed, unable to move away from the gate for fear that he would miss out, and also unable to pass the doorkeeper for fear that he would be harmed. While his patience was noble and his caution reasonable, his fear inhibited him from entering the reality he so desired and indeed was intended for—a truth he only recognized when it was too late.
Three stories, three very different conclusions: my response toward the knocking outside the door and what followed was ultimately coincidental and secular; the persistent plea of the widow was efficacious and divinely approved; and the countryman missed the life he was meant to have. Indeed, these three stories correspond to the only possible results when asked to experiment with prayer: an empty deism, the responsive theism of Jesus, or a lifelong unknown. Perhaps the world we inhabit is one of infinite sleep, never to be aroused by anything but drunk friends; perhaps there is a judge, but he simply is too busy or impersonal to hear the pleas of his petitioners; perhaps the gatekeeper is as powerful and uncompromising as he claims. But perhaps not. To this I say Against Deism--as certainly the most hopeful conclusion—is as much a positive defense of a God who responds to petitionary prayers as it is a rebellion against settling for a default reality without passionately pursuing competing alternatives. This rebellion begins with daily and nightly prayer, and persists until either it succeeds or it has been tragically exhausted and one is—like the widow before her plea is answered—left with no one to respond to his cries, beaten by the doorkeeper’s power, crushed by the weight of paradox, and—for all time—asleep.
One night last summer I woke to a loud series of knocks at my front door. WHACK. WHACK. WHACK. It was about 3:00 am and I could not understand why someone would want to enter my house; it was just a Tuesday. WHACK. WHACK. WHAK. The persistence and volume of the knocks troubled me. After about the 7th series of knocks I was forced to consider four competing hypotheses: [1] the source of the noise was a person who did not realize that no one is willingly awake at 3:00 am; [2] the source of the noise was an animal or something mechanical—perhaps a metal pipe had broke and was banging the wall; [3] the source of the noise was a supernatural being, like a dread spirit trying to enter the house; [4] the noise was only a product of my imagination. In any case, with each knock I knew I could not stay still—left to my hypothesizing, I would go insane.
During an unusually long pause between the knocks I got up from my bed and walked to the door. Upon entering the foyer, I immediately recognized a dark, human-shaped figure in the door’s window, behind the drape. I will never forget that image, in my sleepy delirium it nearly made my heart stop. My second hypothesis immediately was disproved, and I was forced to reckon with the fact that I was now confronting either an insanely desperate person (considering the neighborhood I live in, probably a homeless man, or a burglar of sorts), some supernatural being, or—and hopefully—just a shading of light that made the appearance of a figure. WHACK. WHACK. WHACK. I took another step forward.
What happened next deeply imprinted itself on my psyche—when I touched the door handle, the figure quickly retreated from behind the drape and fled out of sight. My anxiety skyrocketed. The figure had responded to my movement, which meant that I was not just imagining something (there goes my fourth hypothesis). Moreover, this subject could now be known by my relation to it—I ostensibly had caused it to act. Insofar as I could acknowledge myself as a real person acting in a real world, it was the subject’s response to my person that dragged it into this world of the real—and for that reason I hardly slept that night.
My experience resembles a familiar scene of call and response—it was a sleepy Marco-Polo game, if you will. Awoken by a noise that was initially undiscernible, it was only after I made a direct and persistent move toward that noise that I was able to meet the noisemaker to confirm and share in its reality. I think prayer works something like this.
There are many descriptions and examples of prayer in Scripture, and there are correspondingly many different applications of prayer recognized by the Church today, including but not limited to prayers of blessing and adoration, prayers of thanksgiving, and prayers of petition. Among these select three it is undoubtable that petitionary prayer is the hardest to wrap one’s head around; it commits the most to paradox. If God is both omnipotent and omniscience—that is, he always knows all things (past and future) and can freely will events into existence—how can the future course of events be rerouted through our incoherent whimpering? Would the noisemaker still have moved had I never reached for the door?
Let us, for a moment, avoid resolving that paradox and instead consider a seemingly easy-way-out alternative: deism. For the deist, God is only an indifferent and first-cause machine—unwilling to participate in our reality, and certainly not interested in knocking on our door at 3:00 am. Deism is a comfortable fit. While indifference can be treacherously silent in times of suffering, this is compensated for by the room it allows for God-given existential meaning without the bothersome intervention that could limit us from living free lives (God forbid we must attend any silly religious ritual); it would have been much easier to sleep, and certainly less horrific of a night, had I forced myself to believe hypothesis 4. Furthermore, if we are to be honest, and without over-philosophizing the matter, deism is a highly probable hypothesis on the religious table—a posture famously advanced by Epicurus and his followers and then leaders of the Enlightenment. By it questions of theodicy (why does God allow evil?) are painlessly dealt with—for why should this deistic god not be capricious in his indifference? It offers, moreover, a sufficient explanation for the origin and order of the natural world, and hopes of a transcendent afterlife are not completely wanting, either. It is simple, elegant, and a priori more plausible than not: both Occam’s razor and the Turing machine we live within every day advance the argument for a machine deity. But, with deism, there can be no personal conversation between man and God, and there is certainly no room for petitionary prayer.
This deistic conception diverges significantly from the God of the Bible. Indeed, Christians are often challenged to interact with the tricky personhood of God—call and response capacities included. Consider, then, a second story—a parable told by Jesus. It is a parable that stretches the bounds of petitionary prayer and adds weight to our already burdensome paradox:
Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’ “For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’” And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly” – Luke 18:1-8 (what version?)
This story is often labeled the Parable of the Persistent Widow; I would like to momentarily rename it Against Deism.
“Will he keep putting them off?” Given the preceding dialogue, the care wrapped within this rhetorical question is clearly not deistic in nature. Far from it. For those “who cry out to him at night,” justice is given. Period. If this is not already an absurd and otherworldly cause and effect, please let it be so. It is as if the God referenced in this story is so desperate to answer his creatures that he stays up the whole night on call, including at 3:00 am.
Returning to our paradox, in every way the parable’s judge initially resembles a deistic god—he is bound to the uniformity of the future and unwilling to respond to petitions from the present. And yet our heroine of the story, against all odds and intuition, persists in her plea. Miraculously, through this persistence she comes to the awesome reality that this judge is in fact not indifferent to her plea, and that she does have stake in the future of her reality. Justice would not have been granted had she not pleaded. To deny this conclusion is to deny both the essence of the parable and the possibility that mankind can have such an intimate relationship with reality and indeed with God Himself. The testimony of our heroine is not so much a resolution of our paradox, but a sufficiently functional road to move forward along. Pray, then see what happens. Indeed, this is how so many of Jesus’s paradoxical teachings are: not easy and impersonal problems to be calculated out, but lived realities to be discovered. Listen and understand—over and against the limit of our own intuition—transforms into come and see.
This parable is not only for the Christian, and I do not think it is even firstly for the Christian. Recognize the imperative purpose and application of the parable, it was “a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up… he will see that [those who cry out day and night] get justice, and quickly.” This application is inherently an experiment. The null hypothesis: deism at best; the alternative hypothesis: quick, responsive justice; the methods: always pray and never give up. We are told nothing of the character, religious convictions, or prior knowledge of our heroine, only the persistence with which she petitioned. Amidst the constraints of paradox, she moved forward along the only road that bore hope, and it is for this alone that she received justice.
Our culture, particularly here at Hopkins, is one that glorifies the scientific process. When cornered by unresolved paradox in a field there is a noble and persistent effort to conduct further tests and propose alternative hypotheses. Standing on the shoulders of giants, a new generation of scientists responds to the challenge and advances the field. It is rare that this process, however glorified in its own right, extends beyond the realm of natural and social sciences. Yet the concept of prayer we just witnessed in Against Deism unapologetically calls to mind such a spirit. Over and against our materialistic intuition, this story reminds us that we may be both body and soul, and that either realm is liable to a set of call-and-response, testable realities. Christianity becomes, contrary to some timeless canon of wise sayings, a historical religion, occurring—and revealing itself—within time, responsive to our inputs and actions. To deny this possibility—to treat it as just a possibility—is to be unscientific and never experiment at all.
To be sure, there are ways of miscalculating if not abusing this kind of experimentation. If fact, the truth is that what I had imagined to be some dread apparition turned out only to be a desperate, drunk friend who had forgotten his keys at my house. His movement away from the door—an act of defeat—was merely coincidental with mine towards it. My third hypothesis never had a chance. Yet in the moment, separated by the veil of a window drape and accompanied by a strong imagination, it was the spiritual possibility that won me over. As it is with prayer. For my case, and indeed the case for us all, there does seem to be a veil separating a clear discernment of two competing conclusions and often all we are given is ambiguous shades of light. Amidst this difficult shading, some people work very hard to retrospectively fit theological narratives into past events when a secular answer may be more fitting. But that, in and of itself, is no reason to stop experimenting, especially when we are still young. For to be fair, the scientific process as applied in every other discipline is privy to the same kind of miscalculations. The history of science is a history of competing hypotheses continually being proposed, tested, found wanting, then radically revolutionized until a new paradigm of understanding is reached, one filled with its own new paradoxes only to be re-challenged and re-revolutionized, repeatedly. Should one conclude that science is a broken process or that the alchemist of the 17th century, in his or her inaccurate and wanting conclusions about chemistry, was epistemologically desperate? What else could he or she do and what would chemistry have become without rudimentary, initial experiments?
I leave you with a third and final story. In Franz Kafka’s parable “Before the Law” (found in The Trial), a man “from the country” arrives at a gate seeking entrance to “the Law”—a destination left ambiguous, yet a place that “everyone strives after.” Upon his arrival he is met by the doorkeeper who, despite the countryman’s begging, claims that the countryman cannot enter now: “‘It is possible,’ answers the doorkeeper, ‘but not at this moment.’” After witnessing the countryman get a hopeful glimpse of what may exist on the other side, the doorkeeper sardonically explains, “If you are so strongly tempted, try to get in without my permission. But note that I am powerful. And I am only the lowest doorkeeper.” To this, the traveler is despondent, believing that “the Law…should be accessible to every man and at all times.” Nevertheless, and out of fear, the countryman concludes that he “better wait until he gets permission to enter.” Planted outside the gate, he makes minor attempts to persuade the doorkeeper over the next many years, including by handing over of all his possessions. In response to the countryman’s attempts at persuasion “the doorkeeper often engages him in brief conversation…but quite impersonally,” and to countryman’s bribery the doorkeeper honestly remarks, “‘I take this only to keep you from feeling that you have left something undone.’” At the end of his life, and as a weary man, a question occurs to the countryman: “‘Everyone strives to attain the Law… how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?’” The parable ends with the doorkeeper’s response, “‘No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.’”
This is a tragic story of a man who never overcame an obstacle that only ever truly existed in theory. The man became paralyzed, unable to move away from the gate for fear that he would miss out, and also unable to pass the doorkeeper for fear that he would be harmed. While his patience was noble and his caution reasonable, his fear inhibited him from entering the reality he so desired and indeed was intended for—a truth he only recognized when it was too late.
Three stories, three very different conclusions: my response toward the knocking outside the door and what followed was ultimately coincidental and secular; the persistent plea of the widow was efficacious and divinely approved; and the countryman missed the life he was meant to have. Indeed, these three stories correspond to the only possible results when asked to experiment with prayer: an empty deism, the responsive theism of Jesus, or a lifelong unknown. Perhaps the world we inhabit is one of infinite sleep, never to be aroused by anything but drunk friends; perhaps there is a judge, but he simply is too busy or impersonal to hear the pleas of his petitioners; perhaps the gatekeeper is as powerful and uncompromising as he claims. But perhaps not. To this I say Against Deism--as certainly the most hopeful conclusion—is as much a positive defense of a God who responds to petitionary prayers as it is a rebellion against settling for a default reality without passionately pursuing competing alternatives. This rebellion begins with daily and nightly prayer, and persists until either it succeeds or it has been tragically exhausted and one is—like the widow before her plea is answered—left with no one to respond to his cries, beaten by the doorkeeper’s power, crushed by the weight of paradox, and—for all time—asleep.
