Does God Intervene?

The reality of unanswered prayers is a huge problem. Think of all the people who prayed for deliverance from the Holocaust, all the people who prayed for peace and safety in the midst of war, all the people who prayed for healing—and whose prayers were not answered.... I do not and cannot believe that God is an interventionist.

—Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity

Recently I’ve run across a couple of deep religious thinkers who express the same reservations. And they are unquestionably on to something. The normal responses to such thinking—like “God always answers prayer, but sometimes the answer is no”—are hopelessly glib and inadequate in the face of the Holocaust or 9/11. In these and many other cases, God seems exasperatingly silent.

So is Borg right, then? Not so fast. I see some real problems with a non-interventionist God as well:

1. What do you do with those instances where, from all appearances, someone has prayed and actually received a concrete response? You could chalk up the biblical examples to a spiritual dramatization of actual events. But what about modern-day healings? Not all of them can be attributed to natural causes, like the change in emotional state that prayer sometimes brings.
2. How do we explain the concept of vocation—not just to ministry, but to anything? Isn’t the act of calling someone to do something an intervention in itself?
3. To take it one step further, how do we explain any divine influence on the human soul? Certainly, neuroscience and psychology explain a lot. Still, I have found that by opening myself to the divine presence, I find myself thinking and doing things that I never would have imagined. I’m not saying God is doing brain surgery on us, but can we truly say that God is not involved at all?
   

That still doesn’t make instances of an interventionist God’s non-intervention any less horrifying or impossible to explain. It simply means both viewpoints leave way too many questions unanswered—and unanswerable.

So what do we do? I see no reason why we can’t treat this as we do so many other aspects of God: simply revere it as an ineffable mystery and go about our lives. Even Borg, despite his belief, continues to pray for a variety of reasons—one being that it’s arrogant to refuse to do something because you can’t imagine how it works. And again, in some mysterious way, the practice of prayer seems to open us to God’s presence—and that presence has an equally mysterious way of transforming us from the inside out. That alone is reason to pray all the more.