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This question raises several important theological issues – from What is the right course to follow when what you've been taught proves to be either patently false or unfalsifiable and therefore meaningless? to What is really faith, as distinct from magic? and, not least, What is the point of intercessory prayer if, on at least some understandings of it, it seems to be quite pointless and/ or a matter of practicing magic instead of really living by faith? Obviously, we could spend our entire time this evening on anyone of these issues -– to say nothing of the others the question also raises. So I shall respond to it by saying only a few things about just one of them -– leaving it to the subsequent discussion to bring out anything else that can and should be said to respond to the question.

The issue to which I shall speak is the third I specifically mentioned: What is the point of intercessonj prayer? The issue of the point of prayer is probably most commonly raised when persons ask, Does prayer work? and, in the case of intercessoT'j prayer, Does petitioning God on behalf of others work? The answer the questioner confesses to having been taught -– along, I suspect, with many of the rest of us -– was, "Yes, intercessory prayer works if you have enough faith and keep on praying." But wherein, exactly does the working of prayer consist? Supposing that, if one has enough faith, one's prayers for others will work, what would be the evidence that, in point of fact, one has had enough faith and that one's intercessory prayers have worked? Would the evidence be that the others for whom one had prayed actually received what one had asked for on their behalf? And is this why, when "nothing happens," as the questioner puts it, it seems that one's incessant intercessory prayers haven't worked and are therefore pointless and/ or just a magical incantation?

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There's an old position on this issue that I take to be -– or, at least, to point to -– the right theological position; and I want now briefly to develop it by way of

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The difficulty with this simple formulation, of course, is that there are so many things that have been said to be "means of salvation." If the term is most commonly applied to such things as preaching the word and administering the sacraments, it has also been applied to the faith by which the grace mediated by both word and sacraments alone becomes effective in our lives. But then it is also often applied to the representative ministry of the church and, by further extension, to the visible church itself, which, in the well-known formula of the Roman Catholic Church's Second Vatican Council, is defined as "sacrament of the salvation of the whole world" (sacramentum salutis totius mundi). More than that: in much contemporary theology, the application of the term has been extended still further to include Jesus Christ himself, who IS said to be the primal sacrament, or means of salvation, the church then being distinguished as the primary means, and all other such things as the church's word, sacraments, and ministry being distinguished as secondary means. My own way of making essentially the same point is to say that faith in God through Jesus Christ, although in its own way a means of salvation and therefore not constitutive of salvation, but only representative, of it, nonetheless is the constitutive such means for Christians -– which is to say, the means that constitutes anything and everything else as properly Christian -– while all other so-called means, be they the primary means of the visible church or the secondary means that the church in turn constitutes, are in no sense constitutive but rather representative means of salvation even for Christians.

Now, clearly, "prayer," as we ordinarily understand it, is -- if a means of salvation at all -- but one of many such representative means that we as Christians recognize and use. I say, "as we ordinarily understand it," because, as we all know, the term "prayer" can also be used in extended senses -- so extended, indeed, that Paul can exhort the Thessalonians, "Pray constantly," or, as the _KJV_ has it, "Pray without ceasing." In the same vein, the great theologian of the ancient church, Origen, can say that "the whole life of the saint \[is\] one great unbroken prayer," and Bishop John A.T. Robinson can write in our own time, in

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Honest to God, "Prayer is the responsibility to meet others with all I have, to be ready to encounter the unconditional in the conditional, to expect to meet God in the way, not to turn aside from the way. All else is exercise towards that or reflection in depth upon it." Clearly, "prayer" is being used in all these cases in so broad a sense that it covers the whole of our Christian existence as an existence in faith working through love and love see!dng justice, and is thus merely another word for our proper worship, or service, of God. But, as we most commonly use the term, "prayer" has the much narrower meaning illustrated paradigmatically by what goes on, or should go on, in the corporate worship of the gathered church. Far from referring to the whole of our existence and activity as Cr-..ristiansChristians, it refers to one activity alongside others, the significance of which-as of all such special "religious" activities (which, of course, are the "all else" of which Bishop Robinson speaks)--is in some way to re-present the ultimate reality understood and responded to in different ways through Christian faith and witness. In that sense, prayer is the re-presentation through appropriate concepts and symbols of the understanding of God, our neighbors, and ourselves to which we are brought insofar as we understand them in the light of God's decisive word to us through Jesus Christ. Prayer in this sense, in other words, is our response or "Amen" to the truth disclosed to us through God's decisive revelation through Christ as mediated through the visible church and all of its other secondary means of salvation. Prayer is our acknowledgment in an outward visible \..yay of the reality of God, our neighbors, and ourselves as this ultimate threefold reality is decisively re-presented to us through Christ and the church.

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