PRAYER183The many forms of prayer include:
repentance, confession, and prayers for
forgiveness; praise and thanksgiving;
petition and intercession; and meditation
and contemplation.
“True repentance” is a genuine sharing
of God’s sorrow, rather than merely feel-
ing sorry for oneself, or attempting to pay
one’s dues. Confession is articulation of
the ways one understands oneself to be
falling short of God’s will. “Private con-
fession” is made by an individual to a
priest and is accompanied by a request
for forgiveness and absolution (the
absolving of one’s sins). Corporate con-
fession is made within the context of a
congregational liturgy and is followed by
a prayer of absolution pronounced upon
the congregation.
Praise can take inarticulate forms, such
as glossolalia (speaking in tongues), or
articulate forms that marvel at the natural
world insofar as it has no seeming rele-
vance to human concerns. Thus, praise, as
with all prayer, moves us from the center
of our concerns. Thanksgiving is related:
to thank is to think truly, to know that
one’s life is given and sustained by others.
Petitionary prayer is prayer in which
desires are presented to God. Intercessory
prayer is made on behalf of others. At face
value, both types of prayer seem to be
impetratory (“impetrate” is a theological
term meaning to obtain things by request).
The conviction behind impetratory
prayer is that God gives us some things
not only as we wish, but because we wish
and ask for them.
This conviction raises a number of
dilemmas in relation to traditional con-
cepts of God. If God is immutable, prayer
cannot change God’s will or God’s nature.
If God is omniscient, omnibenevolent,
and omnipotent, prayer cannot supple-
ment God’s knowledge, beneficence, or
power in order to assist God in bringing
about the good. Indeed, God ought to
bring about the good regardless of prayer;
otherwise God’s own goodness is com-
promised. The doctrine of divine time-
lessness or eternality has been employed
to address the dilemmas of immutability.
Aquinas argued that by petitionary
prayer those things are obtained that God
has ordained to be obtained by prayer.
The freely offered prayers of human
beings therefore do not change God, but
are taken up into God’s dealings with the
world, where God has ordained that this
should be so. Alternative, post-Hegelian
models of prayer emphasize divine imma-
nence and abandon traditional concepts
of immutability and timelessness. They
present a temporal God who chooses to
be influenced by the prayers of creatures.
These models, such as are found in
process theology, modify divine omnipo-
tence, and configure God as persuading
the world in a certain direction, aided by
the free prayers of human beings insofar
as they fall in with God’s will.
Therapeutic models of prayer get
around the theological dilemmas by
interpreting impetration in terms of the
effects it works within those who pray
(and perhaps within those who know