Since I've been involved in more discussion about the prayer and healing study lately in classes, I thought I should update my thoughts. Perhaps you will be less defensive about the fact that prayer did not work in the study. (See two posts down to learn a little more about the research study) I hope you don't mind it is in bullet form; I thought that would save readers some time.
Ok here are some possible "solutions":
1) Healing worked predominantly when the person being healed had faith. Jesus often acknowledged the faith of those he healed. That faith is not assured in a research experiment.
2) Healing occurs primarily through touch and relationship. When it occurred over a distance it took much more faith, as seen in Jesus' healing of the Roman centurion's servant. In my opinion, praying for someone you have never met, who you only know as a name, lacks the relationship that Jesus incorporated into his healings.
3) Non-religious people might be disturbed by the thought of being prayed for because it might bring up bad memories of church experiences. These people may have bitterness over the prospect of being prayed for and therefore might have poorer outcome.
4) Some also, as the study suggested, feel performance anxiety over having to perform for the prayer. Participants might want to prove that prayer is effective and it could cause them extra stress. This may be unique to a research setting where those praying have no personal relationship - but also might suggest that telling a person that countless people are praying for them might be rather daunting.
And here are some assumptions that cause the problems:
1) Supernatural healing is different from medical healing. A surgeon's job often is to just make careful incisions, at some level the surgeon just trusts that the body will repair itself. Perhaps we need to consider the spread of medical technology and knowledge to be God's way of healing the sick. We should be wary of the temptation to believe that the more we know, the less God is doing.
2) Healing should always occur at our demand. Although one troubling fact about the study was that many patients who were prayed for (and knew they were being prayed for) actually did worse, our typical assumption is that, if we have enough faith God will heal the person. We know that God wants to heal the sick. But we also know that suffering is part of life and can't simply just go away. God never promises to heal every sick person.
3) God ought to work our way. This is really the underlying problem. We often are concerned that this or that doesn't work the way we want to. But that is not how faith works. Faith believes in outcomes more than processes. The humble conclusion is that we need to just be patient and believe.
b4G-prayer
2 comments:
yes, we make so many assumptions. my 'quote of the week' is by george bernard shaw and seems appropriate here:
"God made man in his own image: unfortunately we have returned the favour."
I would add another point made my advisor: there are many Christians who make intercessory prayer for healing for people they do not know. Perhaps the occurrence of healings as often as they already occur depends on their prayers. Should we expect that a few more anonymous (to the patient) people praying would do much more?
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