Church Voices

“…your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”
—Matthew 6:8

This Sunday I was talking to my youth minister about a conference at which he spoke over the weekend. I was told weeks in advance he was scheduled to speak but forgot that it was this past weekend. I expressed my regrets about not having prayed for him during the course of the event, which led to him mentioning his belief in retrospective prayer. Retrospective prayer, ordinarily understood, is prayer offered for events which we know have already occurred.¹ I have heard people talk about retrospective prayer before, and am even familiar with several stories where it truly seems like prayer is answered retrospectively.²

But still, it has always seemed sort of nebulous to me. What is it exactly we are praying for? Are we praying that God should bring it about that an event which already occurred did not occur? This would include even slight alterations of events, and so includes bringing it about that an event which already occurred not to have occurred in exactly the same way it did. For if past event e is altered ever so slightly, such would no longer be identical to e but would constitute an entirely new event, e’. If so, we are praying for God to perform a logical contradiction, which is impossible. No acceptable definition of omnipotence allows for God to perform logical contradictions, such as creating a square-circle, making a stone so big not even He could lift it, or causing something to exist and not exist at the same time. Similarly, it is logically contradictory to bring about something which has already occurred not to have occurred. A. J. Ayer explains, “The past is closed in the sense that what has been has been: if an event has taken place there is no way of bringing it about that it has not taken place; what is done cannot be undone.”³ The inalterability of the past is simply a matter of logic.⁴ Indeed, logic is most plausibly grounded in the nature of God Himself. This means that if changing the past is logically contradictory, God acting to change the past would amount to him acting contrary to his own nature, which is absurd. So retrospective prayer cannot involve God altering the past, as it were. So what does it involve?

Instead of God altering the past, how about the possibility of God acting in the present to bring about an event based on his foreknowledge of future prayers? This seems a bit more plausible. On this account, all retrospective prayer amounts to is asking God to have brought something about at an earlier time.⁵ For example, say, I am reminded of my youth minister’s scheduled activities this past weekend. Not yet knowing how they turned out, I pray, asking God to have spoken to the audience through his message. Suppose God grants my request. The sequence would be as follows: God, foreknowing I would pray that, answered my prayer during the time of the event. So my prayer in the present didn’t cause God to produce an event in the past (which would be contradictory), but rather God produced an event in the past (which was then the present) because His foreknowledge of my prayer in the future. Divine foreknowledge, then, is the key to understanding retrospective prayer.

Also on this account we aren’t stuck with affirming the possibility of backward causation, where effects precede their causes, which I take to be impossible. For the truth of present-tense propositions may be based on God’s knowing the truth of future-tensed propositions (as would be the case in retrospective prayer). God doesn’t produce events in the past so that their effects occur prior to their cause. Rather, He produces events in the present which are the effect of future causes.

God’s promise in Isaiah 65:24 says “I will answer them before they even call to me. While they are still talking about their needs, I will go ahead and answer their prayers!” Notice that it says God will “go ahead” and answer prayer. Maybe this is hinting that God answers retrospective prayer by foreknowing the future rather than altering the past. Even though the context of this passage is set in the future, and hence hasn’t happened yet, it nonetheless implies that a retrospective prayer scenario is at least possible for God. Similarly, Daniel 9:20-21 emphasizes that while Daniel was still in prayer, God sent an answer.⁶

One thing that remains unclear to me, however, is that retrospective prayer does seem to necessarily involve ignorance on behalf of the person praying concerning the concrete outcome of the events about which they pray. For if I already knew the concrete outcome of the events about which I pray, the only thing left to pray about would be non-concrete things—things which aren’t disclosed by what we know has in fact happened—things always beyond our immediate knowledge (such as whether God has spoken through someone). When I possess knowledge of how past events have already occurred, I can’t pray for a different outcome. But that does not restrict me from praying about those things which are not disclosed by knowledge of concrete outcome. For example, suppose a woman receives a telephone call and is informed that her husband was involved in a serious car accident. That’s all she knows. Because she is ignorant about the concrete events which have already occurred (namely, whether or not he died), she can retrospectively pray for her husband’s safety. However, if during the telephone call she was informed of her husband’s death, she no longer has the option of praying for her husband’s safety. But she does still have the option of praying for non-concrete things. Suppose her husband wasn’t a Christian. She could still pray that he accepted Christ sometime before his death. Dummett also recognizes this, imagining the following scenario:

…suppose I hear on the radio that a ship has gone down in the Atlantic two hours previously, and that there were a few survivors: my son was on that ship, and I at once utter a prayer that he should have been among the survivors, that he should not have drowned; this is the most natural thing in the world. Still, there are things which it is very natural to say which make no sense; there are actions which can naturally be performed with intentions which could not be fulfilled.

Assuming that I am not asking for a miracle-asking that if my son has died, he should now be brought to life again-I do not have to be asking for a logical impossibility. I am not asking God that, even if my son has drowned, He should now make him not to have drowned; I am asking that, at the time of the disaster, He should then have made my son not to drown at that time. The former interpretation would indeed be required if the list of survivors had been read out over the radio, my son’s name had not been on it, and I had not envisaged the possibility of a mistake on the part of the news service: but in my ignorance of whether he was drowned or not, my prayer will bear another interpretation.⁷

By way of conclusion, it seems retrospective prayer can be coherently stated if God’s foreknowledge is brought into the picture. This doesn’t commit us to praying for logical contradictions, such as altering the past. But it does involve us having some sort of ignorance of the things about which we retrospectively pray (be it of the concrete events themselves or the unknown, undisclosed possibilities which accompany them). Retrospective prayer may even enjoy Biblical support. If not, however, nothing of theological significance is altered.
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1. Of course this act is accompanied by the belief that God can respond in some efficacious way, should he choose.
2. For example, in his book The Only Wise God, (from which I am drawing the main insights expressed here), William Lane Craig recalls, “…working with Campus Crusade for Christ, recruiting students to attend Expo ’72, a conference aimed at training a hundred thousand Christians in personal evangelism. In advance of the conference we heard a speaker tell of how God had used the recruitment drive in the lives of the headquarters staff. As the date for Expo ’72 drew near, he explained, applications were alarmingly low. Finally, in desperation the leadership and staff came together one weekend for intensive prayer for the conference, which at that point looked as if it were going to be a failure. As they prayed together, they experienced a sort of spiritual revival in their own hearts. And on Monday morning applications began to pour in. The speaker was not dull to the implications. ‘Those applications had to have been sent by Thursday in order to reach us Monday morning,’ he explained. ‘Therefore, God, foreknowing that we were going to pray, had already answered in advance, so that the response to our prayers came immediately!’” See The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (1999, Wipf and Stock Publishers), p. 88.
3. A. J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge (1956, Macmillan), p. 189.
4. In the words of Oxford philosopher Michael A. E. Dummett, “…you cannot change the past; if a thing has happened, it has happened, and you cannot make it not to have happened. This is, I am told, the attitude of orthodox Jewish theologians to retrospective prayer. It is blasphemous to pray that something should have happened, for, although there are no limits to God’s power, He cannot do what is logically impossible; it is logically impossible to alter the past, so to utter a retrospective prayer is to mock God by asking Him to perform a logical impossibility.” See Dummett, “Bringing About the Past,” Philosophical Review 73 (1964): p. 341. Though as Craig points out, the inalterability of the past is only true if one assumes what he calls the “common sense view” of time; the A-theory. The Only Wise God, pp. 75-82.
5. This possibility is suggested by Dummett, “Bringing About the Past,” pp. 342-43. Of course this possibility is not open for those who do deny God’s foreknowledge.
6. Pointed out to me by Christian Penrod.
7. Dummett, “Bringing About the Past,” pp. 341-42