ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a chapter from Vincent Brümmer’s book What Are We Doing When We Pray?. Brümmer holds that the fact that human beings can enter into personal relations with God implies that no deterministic account of God’s power over human beings can be accepted, and that, because personal relations are necessarily temporal relations, God is in time.
It is argued in response that issues of personal relations and indeterminism are unconnected, and that Brümmer’s assumption that coercion or manipulation is logically incompatible with every personal relation is unsupported. In fact, it is argued that coercion is actually constitutive of some personal relations and that personal relations are consistent with predictability. The first section of the chapter concludes by arguing for the positive thesis that a relation is personal only when it is exercised through the perceived structure of belief and desire of each party, and this exercise is non-manipulable in that it does not rely upon physical coercion or psychological compulsion.
The next section responds to Brümmer’s criticism of Aquinas that no prayer can be truly impetratory if it is divinely decreed. It is responded, on Aquinas’s behalf, that responsiveness on God’s part to our prayers is in fact part of the essence of a personal relationship.
The following section argues, contrary to Brümmer, that it is not necessary for there to be a personal relation that God be responsive and in time.
The final sections consider, firstly, prayers for those matters that will happen unconditionally, where it is argued that the predictability of God’s willingness to honour his promises in fact ensures that his relationship with his people conforms to the paradigm of a personal relationship, and, secondly, intercessory prayer, where it is argued that on Brümmer’s view the responsibility for the continuation of known evil falls solely upon the intercessors because they have not prayed sufficiently fervently, or sincerely, or at length, for its removal.
