Every Christian Is An Open Theist When They Pray
By Jesse Morrell
http://www.OpenAirOutreach.com
Every Christian is an Open Theist when they pray. That is because prayer to God presupposes that what you are praying about is still open for God to decide.
As an example, when Jesus said “pray that your flight not be in winter,” this presupposes that whether their flight would be in winter or not was yet open or undecided and that their prayers would help determine it.
And all throughout the Bible we see the power of prayer. Moses interceding for Israel convinced God not to destroy them and to make a nation out of Moses instead. Thus, prayer changed the future. And Hezekiah’s prayer to God resulted in God reversing the prophecy that He gave through Isaiah. And so we see that prayer can change the future, change the mind of God, and contributes in determining what will occur in the future. Prayer, in and of itself, presupposes an open future.
If God simply had an intuitive exhaustive and eternal foreknowledge of everything that will happen, He would be powerless to make plans or to change plans because all must occur as He eternally and intuitively foreknew it to be. And if God decreed or predestined all things in eternities past, then our prayers now could certainly not affect or help determine what is going to happen. Nay, even our prayers themselves would have been eternally predestined.
And so, even the staunchest Calvinist is an Open Theist when he prays because he is assuming or taking for granted that his prayers to God may help God decide what to do, which He would not have done otherwise if he had not prayed, and that the thing being prayed for is something that God is now free to decide to bring to pass or not.
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