Over the last week politicians and pundits across the globe, some religious some not, have offered their \u201cthoughts and prayers\u201d for the Ukraine. President Biden opened\u00a0his statement<\/a> on the unprovoked Russian invasion saying:<\/p>\n The prayers of the entire world are with the people of Ukraine tonight as they suffer an unprovoked and unjustified attack by Russian military forces.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In the English-speaking world, offering up thoughts and prayers in the wake of a public tragedy has become a type of political ritual. However, the phrase \u201cthoughts and prayers\u201d is ambiguous. When invoked, it leaves it to the hearers as to what kinds of thoughts they should be having toward the victims or what they should think about the conditions that lead to the tragedy being endured.<\/p>\n The assumption seems to be that the thoughts thought will be ones of compassion and empathy for the victims and those closest to them. Perhaps having such thoughts, one might further assume, will remind us of the things that really matter in our own lives. Perhaps having such thoughts might even motivate us to action. After all, one usually has to think before one acts\u2013 even if often it seems like we do not.<\/p>\n With regard to lifting up \u201cprayers,\u201d this too is ambiguous. It leaves it up to the hearer to interpret to whom or to what those prayers should be directed. Further, the contents of the prayers are unspecified. One could offer prayers and invocations to the God of the Bible, to Mary the mother of Jesus, to Krishna, to Allah or even to the<\/em> Satan of the Bible. They could be prayers asking God or Allah to punish evildoers, for Mary to mitigate the emotional pain of the victims or, I suppose, for the Satan to reward those perceived<\/em> as evildoers and increase the suffering of those perceived<\/em> as victims. Again, the term \u201cprayers\u201d and the intent behind it are vague and ambiguous.<\/p>\n Therefore, given the wide variety of god-concepts (or real \u201cgods\u201d that modern man only assumes are unreal) which exist in a pluralistic, globalized society, the contents of thoughts and aim of prayers in the wake of human destruction could vary quite drastically. Because of this, it is worth examining the invocation of \u201cthoughts and prayers\u201d more closely.<\/p>\n The ambiguity of the phrase \u201cthoughts and prayers\u201d often leads many, especially atheists who, in a sense, can only do the thinking part, to become suspicious and even cynical about this seemingly trite phrase. One often finds them reacting angrily on social media<\/a> to the invocation of \u201cthoughts and prayers,\u201d seeing the phrase as a copout for not engaging in some moral action deemed necessary. For these skeptics, \u201cthoughts and prayers\u201d act as a pale substitute for trying to remedy the concrete conditions that lead to the tragedy or to getting one\u2019s hands dirty in the aftermath of a tragedy.<\/p>\n Whether or not these skeptics are correct in their assessment is not the point of this article, although one does wonder how well \u201cthoughts and prayers\u201d deniers do in living up to their own call for action. Moreover, one could point out that their critique is only partially legitimate. After all, clearly one can invoke the need for thoughts and prayers, do the actual thinking and praying and subsequently engage in the concrete work of responding to tragedy. In fact, thinking and praying prior to acting may lead to a more effective, and more prudent, response. It is at least worth considering that thoughts and prayers may act as a deterrent to impetuous action. Nevertheless, one resonates with \u201cthoughts and prayers\u201d skeptics when one sees its invocation used as a mere platitude\u2013platitudes being by definition banal.<\/p>\n Given all of this, however, Christians should have a clear conception of what it means to think about pain and suffering and how to pray for those in the midst of it. After all, in America at least, it does seem that \u201cthoughts and prayers,\u201d when invoked, are more or less aimed at the God of the Bible\u2013or, minimally, to some kind of theistic creator God (the old, liberal \u201cFatherhood of God, brotherhood of man\u201d type of god).<\/p>\n Christians especially, therefore, should be able to fill in the otherwise empty phrase with some real content. The thinking part should engage the Christian mind, focusing it on the theological and moral ramifications of the tragedy and what one could possibly do about it. The prayer part should have some sense of what to pray for and, most certainly, Whom to call upon in prayer.<\/p>\n Regarding prayer, however, there are a few things that Christians should be praying for that are likely quite counterintuitive to what most non-Christians think of when our politicians and celebrities call for \u201cthoughts and prayers.\u201d Some of these prayers may be in fact so counterintuitive to the popular conception of \u201cthoughts and prayers\u201d that they will be considered outright scandalous. But so be it, let the scandalous abound if that is what the circumstances require. Scandalous prayers, or prayers perceived as such, may be exactly what we need. Popular opinion or convention should not be the determining factor in what we pray for or about.<\/p>\n Safe prayers, therefore, are far more likely to be prayers shaped by a certain cultural norm than by the Bible with its \u201cantiquated\u201d notions about human nature and history. In contrast to culturally safe prayers, prayers shaped in accordance with biblical truths should rouse in us something which forces us to question our cultural and moral assumptions. Today the Church needs more scandalous prayers and far less safe ones, and not just in its reflections on war.<\/p>\n As I have argued before<\/a>, a Church that does not subvert the cultural instinct that arises so naturally within us, is a Church not worth dedicating our lives to<\/a>. Prayers that are mere echoes of cultural moods or expressions of its norms can hardly be prayers of great import or power. Even prayers offered to the one true God can be so grotesquely distorted by cultural sentiment<\/a> that one could only hope they not only go unanswered by Yahweh, but that the one invoking God\u2019s name have their incantation turned back against them.<\/p>\n This is not to say that everything in culture is antagonistic to the Christian ethic or that the Christian ethic is antagonistic to everything in the culture. It is just to say that the cultural norm and the Christian norm are never one and the same. Because of this, the true Church is always a reforming agent in the culture, even while acting as a protector of the status quo at the same time.<\/p>\n Alasdair MacIntyre, in his 1968 treatise on Marxism and Christianity, points out this necessary tension between religion and culture:<\/p>\n The great historical religions, as some Marxist writers have seen, have been rich enough both to express and to sanction the existing social structure and to provide a vision of an alternative, even if it was an alternative that could not be realized within the present world\u2026.<\/p>\n But religion is only able to have this latter transforming function because and insofar as it enables individuals to identify and to understand themselves independently of their position in the existing social structure. It is in the contrast between what society tells a man he is and what religion tells him he is that he is able to find grounds both for criticizing the status quo and for believing that it is possible for him to act with others in changing it.<\/p>\n Alasdair MacIntyre. \u201cMarxism and Christianity.\u201d Apple Books.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Part of Christianity is Christian prayer. Indeed it is a necessary part. For Christian prayer to lead to the transformation of the culture, and those within it, it must act subversively in relation to the culture\u2019s understanding of prayer. As the Church\u2019s theology must tell man what he is and what is his purpose\u00a0more so<\/em> than the culture does (or can), so too must Christian prayer address that deeper identity and purpose. If it does not address man\u2019s true nature and his actual purpose, then it is a prayer of the culture in which the Church resides and not a prayer of the Church, the mystical body of Christ that transcends all culture.<\/p>\n Most people would want Ukrainians to escape the current horror of the Russian invasion. They would want Russia to put down its guns and for Ukranian citizens to be able to go back to life as normal. They would pray that no one else would die or be gravely injured. They would pray that the ordinary rhythm of life would be restored and that some degree of peace and modicum of prosperity could be salvaged in the wake of a cruel and gratuitous aggression. They would pray that families would be reunited, children spared, schools reopened, businesses restarted and social life resumed.<\/p>\n Further, if they were honest, they might also pray for the punishment of the guilty parties. Perhaps they would want to see Vladimir Putin on trial (and they would be right to want that), or maybe even hanged from the highest gallows (debatable, but at least understandable).\u00a0No one would be wrong to pray for all these things\u2013the alleviation of pain and punishment of wrongdoing. Roughly these sentiments seem to be the assumed contents of \u201cthoughts and prayers\u201d when invoked by the leaders of our western democratic nations\u2013those nations that retain the affective aspect of Christian morality, even if they ignore the moral content of the Bible.<\/p>\n For biblical<\/em> Christians, however, these things in themselves are superficial. None of the things thought about or prayed for by most of us when \u201cthoughts and prayers\u201d are invoked by our leaders are of ultimate value on a biblical worldview. Longevity of life, physical health, able-bodiedness, material prosperity and even social harmony and emotional peace are of no ultimate value if separated from the spiritual realties that underlie them all. Yet we fail to see this, even in the Church.<\/p>\n But why is this the case?<\/p>\n One problem is that we live in a culture so imbued with a consequentialist idea of ethics that even the culture\u2019s churches can no longer recognize anything other than a pleasure versus pain calculus as the standard for moral goodness or moral badness. Pain in this culture is an intrinsic evil. Pleasure, its opposite, an intrinsic good. Worked out in actions, these utilitarian values are considered the standard by which an act is deemed to be moral or not. If the consequences of an action increase the degree or quality of a pleasure, it is morally good. If it increases the degree or intensity of a pain, it is morally bad.<\/p>\n However, long before films like\u00a0The Matrix <\/em>or\u00a0Total Recall<\/em>\u00a0(the 1990 version), even secular novelists like Aldous Huxley and philosophers like Robert Nozick imagined dystopian futures<\/a>\u00a0or dystopian states<\/a>, where all of the material, social and emotional goods of consequentialism were guaranteed. Yet the conclusions of Huxley\u2019s\u00a0Brave New World\u00a0<\/em>or Nozick\u2019s \u201cThe Experience Machine,\u201d have been considered far more unsettling than appealing\u2013and for good reason.<\/p>\n The idea of mapping out our moral and existential lives onto some pleasure versus pain matrix and finding some means to engineer that reality becomes incredibly distasteful, even horrifying, to us rather quickly. As Nozick points out in a longer 1989 version of \u201cThe Experience Machine,\u201d what we all really want is not just pleasure or a maximizing of it, what we want is a deep connection to reality, even a reality that can hurt:<\/p>\n We care about more than just how things feel to us from the inside; there is more to life than feeling happy. We care about what is actually the case. We want certain situations we value, prize, and think important to actually hold and be so. We want our beliefs, or certain of them, to be true and accurate; we want our emotions, or certain important ones, to be based upon facts that hold and to be fitting. We want to be importantly connected to reality, not to live in a delusion<\/em>.<\/p>\n Robert Nozick,\u00a0The Examined Life\u00a0<\/em>[emphasis added]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In some very real way,\u00a0we all know it is better for Ukrainians and Russians to be fighting right now in a gruesome and unjust war, than for all Russians and Ukrainians to be hooked up to some \u201cpleasure machine\u201d or living in a totally euphoric, yet drug-induced, state. Right now, perhaps more than ever, Ukrainians and Russian alike (and everyone else in Ukraine) are experiencing aspects of reality, even deeper connections to it, than they otherwise would not have experienced (see my caveat to this below), and that many of us sitting in \u201csafe\u201d confines are actually longing for<\/a>.<\/p>\n This too must be taken into account when Christians offer up their thoughts and prayers. For while we certainly can and do pray for the alleviation of pain and the mitigation of violence, we must also take into account how that pain may be transforming people\u2019s lives right now. It may not always be for the worse from a spiritual perspective. Our prayers cannot be offered up from within a consequentialist framework that takes pleasure and pain into account, but nothing else.<\/p>\n Even the condemnation or sentencing of the cruel and unusual by a human court are of no ultimate consequence if there is no ultimate justice\u2013 the measure of human justice never equaling the tremendous nature of man\u2019s cruelty to man. We\u00a0know that only an eternal and transcendent context could ever justify the horror of a Ukrainian invasion, a Rwandan genocide, or of some particularly mundane malevolence\u00a0like this one.<\/a>\u00a0The depth and power of evil simply cannot be deeper than that of goodness.<\/p>\n But this is not just a statement of sentimentalism or wishful thinking. We all recognize that real evil and genuine goodness have a quality to them that make their existence highly implausible on an atheistic, materialistic worldview. Clearly the horrors of the Holocaust are not reducible to mere molecules in motions, just as their counterparts in virtue are not exhausted by an analysis of atomic structures driven by random natural forces. The phenomena of evil and supererogatory acts provide strong evidence for the transcendent and the eternal.<\/p>\nSkepticism About \u201cThoughts and Prayers\u201d<\/h2>\n
The Scandal of Christian Prayer<\/h2>\n
Subversion and The Status Quo<\/h2>\n
Good, But Insufficient Prayers<\/h2>\n
Calculating Horrors: The Problem With Our Utilitarian Prayers<\/h2>\n
Prayers And The Eternal Frame<\/h2>\n