Three ways to hold it, and no verdict

Here's where I tell you I've picked a side, and then don't tell you which one.

I'm fairly sure that if I handed you my answer, you'd take it or leave it in about four seconds and the question would be over for you, and the question has been far more useful to me than any answer I've landed on. So what I can give you is the map. Three ways people have held this together. I've simplified all three; the people who hold them would say more.

1. God doesn't change. Prayer is still a real cause.

This is the oldest Christian answer, and it's more interesting than it sounds. Augustine, writing to a widow named Proba, says God doesn't need to be told what we need, but he asks us to pray so that the asking enlarges our desire, so we can actually receive what he's already preparing to give. Aquinas puts it in one line: we don't pray to change God's disposition, but to obtain what God has disposed to be fulfilled by our prayers. Calvin says prayer was ordained "not so much for his sake as for ours."

Notice that this is not "prayer is performance." On this view, prayer really does cause things. God just decided, from eternity, that some things would come through asking and not otherwise. C.S. Lewis has the sharpest version: the event was settled "before all worlds," but one of the things taken into account in settling it may be the prayer you're praying right now. So, he says, a prayer at noon can be part of the cause of something that happened at ten in the morning. Lewis also liked a line from Pascal, that God established prayer to lend his creatures "the dignity of causality."

(Small side note, because I nearly used it. The famous Lewis quote, "prayer doesn't change God, it changes me," isn't Lewis. It's from the film Shadowlands, written by William Nicholson. Lewis wrote something subtler. Kierkegaard did say something close to it, though.)

2. God is really moved. The future is partly open.

The second answer takes the stories at face value. God entered a real relationship, and real relationships go both ways. When the text says "who knows?" or "perhaps," it's because the outcome wasn't settled yet. Terence Fretheim wrote a whole book on it, The Suffering of God, and Abraham Heschel, reading the prophets as a Jew, called it divine pathos: a God who is affected by what people do.

3. God's character is fixed, and responsiveness is part of it.

The third one tries to stand in the middle, and I'm not fully sure it's a third position rather than one of the first two in different clothes. The idea: what never changes is who God is, the creed of Exodus 34, gracious, compassionate, slow to anger, full of loyal love. And then Jonah and Joel both add a clause to that creed: and relenting from calamity. Relenting is on the list of permanent traits. Jeremiah 18 makes it the rule, not the exception. So God turning toward a people who turn isn't God changing; it's God being exactly what he said he was.

Its hard question is the one I just raised: is this really different from the first two, or just a kinder way of saying one of them?

What I'm left with

A few things I can't get out of my head, and I'm just going to list them, not resolve them.

Every time God relents in the Bible, it's toward mercy. I can't find a case where somebody prays him into being harsher. Jonah tried.

Nobody in the stories prayed with a guarantee. They prayed with "who knows."

Most of the great prayers argue from God's own character back to God. Which looks less like changing his mind and more like holding him to it. Or maybe those are the same thing.

The people who were refused, Moses, David, Paul, Jesus, were not strangers to him.

And the one that actually keeps me up: James says "you do not have, because you do not ask." Ezekiel has God looking for someone to stand in the breach and finding no one. If any of that is true, then there are things in my life, right now, that would have gone differently if I had asked. I don't know which things. I'm not sure I want to.

I gave up on easy answers. I'd rather have better questions. This one, I think, qualifies.