Why Pray for One Another? By J.E. Rose

A Careful Exploration of Divine Sovereignty and Human Will in Prayer

Over the past years I’ve come to view the intercessory prayers of others as my secret weapon in some new crisis or trial. I have a few people who have proven they will pray for me when I ask–not just a platitude but actually stop and pray for my specific request. I can’t put into words what a source of strength for my own faith this is. 

I think my appreciation of the power of intercessory prayer had to go through some growth-pains over the years, however. I won’t recount the entire story here other than to say that over 50 years of intensifying conviction in God’s sovereignty in every detail of the cosmos (“no rogue particles not under God’s absolute control” – R.C. Sproul). However, the more I camped on this lone theological concept the “law of unexpected consequences” kicked in. Inadvertently, especially philosophically, it began undermining my simple confidence in the power of prayer. I would never have admitted it, but my view of sovereignty was turning into a deadly theological fatalism. If you don’t know, fatalism just describes a mechanical and deterministic universe that makes “human will” a delusion. 

I’m not going to dig deep into the history of this issue in the church and the academy. I’ve been doing so myself but, in all honesty, I’m not sure I could explain it clearly enough to answer my title question. I do need to give a solid theological foundation to build on, however. Here is what my theological confession, Chapter 3 of the Westminster Confession of Faith, says about God's sovereign control: God decrees everything, yet in such a way that:

"...neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established."

For years, I didn’t like this answer. It seemed to be a contradiction. I said I wouldn’t retrace the history, but I need to say simply, the Westminster Confession relied on a concept called “secondary causality” to make this statement. 

Even while God is the “primary cause” of all things in the creation he is not the author of sin or any violence in the creatures because of the existence of another form of causality than primary: secondary. Secondary causality is no gimmick. I used to think it was a bit of theological voodoo used by even the best theologians to avoid God’s absolute sovereign control. But, as Paul said, ‘when I grew to be a man I put away childish things!” I am trying to utterly repudiate my childish (and frankly, arrogant) reason for rejecting secondary causality. I think it was Charles Spurgeon (very reformed and confessional) who said God’s will and ours are like two rails of a railroad. Only beyond the horizon of time do they join into one. C.S. Lewis said something similar about freedom: it was the only lens by which finite creatures can view eternity. 

It was the issue of intercessory prayer that drove me to the brink. 

I thought I could avoid a detailed defense of secondary causality here. Like I said, it would likely spend so much time in the theological weeds we’d miss the simple truth I want to affirm: the power of prayer. I’ll try to avoid the weeds (though I suspect there will be a few along the path). So, here is how I want to frame the next paragraphs in this article: 

"If God has already unalterably scripted every detail of tomorrow, are our passionate prayers genuine conversations that move God’s heart, or just pious lines read by actors who don't know the secret script? 

Well, I have to ask your forgiveness because to move forward I already realize I have to indulge a bit more historical theology. I’ll try to be concise and clear. 

Hundreds of years ago confessional theologians like John Owen and Jonathan Edwards wrote about this issue, carefully distinguishing determinism from secondary causality using the term compatibalism. 

Jonathan Edwards argued that the human will is always free to choose whatever it desires most at any given moment. Read that again: ALWAYS FREE TO CHOOSE. But read it all, WHATEVER IT DESIRES. No one is forced by God or an outside physical pressure to choose tea over coffee. You choose tea because, in that exact split second, your soul prefers it. That is free will in action. 

So, according to Edwards, where does God’s will fit into this coffee decision? God governs the intellect, disposition, and circumstances that have been shaping and forming that desire. God didn’t make you want one or the other. You acted according to your own genuine nature and desires, This makes your choice a real secondary cause. You are doing exactly what you want to do. This completely removes the charge of mechanical fatalism and undermines simple determinism..

If we collapse secondary causes into a simple, flat determinism, we run straight into a theological disaster: God becomes the direct, efficient cause of human wickedness and the literal author of sin.

Jonathan Edwards forcefully rejected this by introducing what theologians call the asymmetry of divine operation. Edwards recognized that while God is sovereign over both good and evil, He governs them in fundamentally different ways.

When humans perform good actions, God operates through active efficiency—this means he imparts holy desires, he sustains virtue and directly generates sustaining virtue, and directly grants grace (common and special) within the human heart. 

But when humans commit evil, God acts through permissive deficiency. God does not inject bad desires into a person; rather, He sovereignly withholds His grace. This is what allows the creature to act out of self-centered and even sinful inclination without God putting that in them. He didn’t have to put it in them. It was there because of the fall. 

Edwards used the illustration of the sun. Just as the sun is the active and primary source of light and warmth, but is only the indirect and secondary cause of darkness and freezing cold when it sets, God is the active origin of all goodness, while human sin springs entirely from creaturely frailty when left to itself.

Indeed, this is the ultimate explanation of history itself, and why God has sovereignly permitted sin for thousands and thousands of years without thwarting his eternal plan.

But how can this really be a “thing?’ That was the question that hung me up for many years because it all sounded like an elaborate theological bait-and-switch. However, it was when I began researching what the Dutch theologian Cornelius Van Til said about the Creature-creator “antithesis” that I realized my deterministic error. 

Within the pre-creation reality, there were no secondary causes. Van Til correctly starts any discussion recognizing what existed before creation: the three-in-one God alone and for this discussion that meant there was only ONE will and ONE causality. 

But the creation of another reality fundamentally required the creation of secondary causes. Van Til said that all created reality exists “analogically” to divine reality. Again, I promised to stay out of the weeds but I at least have to explain that there are only three options for any kind of relationship between God and humanity. 

An Equivocal Relationship - “Equivocal” means that in every conceivable way, the creator is different from the creatures. No relationship or even communication is possible. This has been the view of mysticism and various forms of modern theology. This is the ontological basis for deterministic explanations of will. 

A Univocal Relationship - In a “univocal” relationship there is no distinction at all between creator and creature. It is the basis for all libertarian views of freedom which deny God’s involvement in the human will. 

An Analogical Relationship - Van Til famously drew two circles on the chalkboard. On top was the Creator, beneath it was a separate circle titled, creature. He then drew two vertical lines connecting the circles and titled it, ‘condescension.” Here he put special and general revelation, and, ultimately, the “living revelation” of Jesus Christ. Notice they all have some connection between the two circles. That is what he meant by analogical. 

Professor Cornelius Van Til

Van Til argued from this framework that secondary causes are analogically related to both divine and human will. 

Back to the Main Question

If I haven’t lost you in the weeds and you are still reading, thanks! Now, I want to use all this to answer the main question:  

"If God has already unalterably scripted every detail of tomorrow, are our passionate prayers genuine conversations that move God’s heart, or just pious lines read by actors who don't know the secret script? What happens to secondary causality when  the burden for one to pray is ignored? 

Prayer is part of that “analogical reality” Van Til described. It is a divinely ordained secondary cause in itself.  God decrees the outcome of all prayer, but He decrees to accomplish it through the genuine, earnest prayers of His people born out of the desires in their hearts he has providentially ordained. When we remove secondary causality, prayer collapses into practical problems:

If God acts directly and exclusively without secondary instruments, prayer ceases to be a meaningful means through which God works. It becomes a hollow, passive exercise. Indeed, it utterly  undermines virtually every text and instruction in Scripture about prayer! Intercession has zero causal connection to what happens next.

By the way, at risk of going off the narrow path of purpose here, I have come to believe this explains the more challenging issues in the inspiration of the Bible. Orthodox doctrine rejects any “mechanical dictation” of the Bible. It always maintains the human AND divine authorship. Only secondary causality makes this possible. A deterministic view of divine will makes human authorship impossible. Indeed, I think prayer and inspiration are very interconnected. Inspiring Scripture requires a level of divine supervision and preservation to make it authoritative. The prayers (or even prophecies) of God’s people are not so authoritative or infallible. 

Even so, Scripture is filled with saints who wrestle with God in prayer. Abraham bargained for Sodom, Moses interceded for Israel, David cried out in the Psalms, and Jesus in Gethsemane prayed for the cup to pass. Were these prayers genuine petitions that mattered to God’s eternal plan or merely charades? There is no biblical support for that. All these stories and others assume that creaturely petition matters to God as a real, relational mechanism.

Under hard determinism, wrestling in prayer loses its purpose. If human agency has no secondary causal weight, praying for a sick child or an unbelieving spouse isn't bringing a real instrument to bear on history; it's reduced to a spectator watching an inevitable, isolated act of divine power. 

If we worry that secondary causality undermines God’s sovereignty (and the all important doctrine of divine impassibility which I cannot discuss here), the answer is that God is still in absolute control because he is sovereign over the secondary causes. 

The Last Word

Even more influential in my theological maturation on matters like this has been the work of John Frame. He wrote extensively on a confessional view of compatibilism with direct implications for how we view prayer. 

Frame frequently used the relationship between an author and a story to explain compatibility. In terms of prayer, this means, 

• God is the Primary Author of history, who exhaustively decrees every detail.

• God shapes the desires of some chosen human creatures to be secondary agents within the story of history. In terms of prayer, they pray for someone according to their own genuine desires, motives, and intentions, but those very desires were part of God’s providential rule over every detail of their lives. .

Shakespeare writing Macbeth did not make Macbeth a passive puppet without real choices inside the world of the play. In the story, Macbeth acted on his own desires. But Macbeth was a secondary (created) reality. In a similar way, God’s sovereign decree does not cancel human agency—it establishes it.

Frame rejected the secular or libertarian definition of free will (the "power of contrary choice" completely independent of God). Following his teacher Van Til he defined Christian freedom analogically: 

• Our freedom to pray (or to ignore a prompting to pray) is real, meaningful, and carries full moral responsibility.

• However, that very freedom is derivative and dependent on God’s primary agency. . We make real choices to pray or not according to our strongest desires, but God remains the ultimate condition that gives those desires shape.

Frame was always careful to distinguish Christian compatibilism from  secular, mechanical determinism and fatalism. For determinists, prayer would not be a personal connection between the creator and creature but merely a mechanical transaction. It is hard to see why we would be commanded to pray at all or what would sustain our life of prayer. I think this was eroding my own confidence in prayer over the years. If I was just reading a script did it even matter what I said? 

The truth is, prayer reflects a covenantal relationship between creature and creator. Unlike the prayers of the pagan religions, for us a covenant relationship is real and personal. It is not magic. It is not mere performance. God ordained prayer in that ‘analogical reality” between heaven and earth to build a real relationship with him. Albeit analogical, it is a true connection and the only possible way a connection could exist between the Eternal Triune Person and someone like me; a finite, fallen person in trouble and begging for help.