01.10. PRAYER AND EXPERIENCE

10. PRAYER AND EXPERIENCE

One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples." (Luke 11:1)

Many of the books written on the subject of prayer suggest that the best way to learn about prayer is by actually praying. They say that the best way to learn about prayer (or most other things) is not by talking about it or reading about it, but by doing it. "Learning by doing" is a very popular theory of education, and these books are applying it to the question of how a person should learn to pray. If this theory of learning is correct, then there is limited value in spending hour after hour in trying to construct a biblical theology of prayer; rather, our time is better spent by actually praying. Prayer is best learned by experience.

I disagree. In general, I oppose the theory of learning by doing. In particular, I oppose the idea that anything at all about prayer can be learned by experience.70

It is impossible to learn about prayer by experience because it is impossible to even begin without any previous instructions or assumptions not derivable from experience. What is prayer? Do I pray to someone or something? Who is this someone or something? What are the attributes of this someone or something? What is my relationship with this someone or something? Do I have immediate and direct access to this someone or something, or do I need a mediator to contact this someone or something? Who or what is this mediator, and what are the attributes of this mediator? What is my relationship with this mediator? Does it matter what physical posture or position I assume during prayer? For what or whom should I pray? How often, how long, and how intense should I pray? Should I persist in my requests, or should I present any petition only once? Experience can answer none of these questions, but we need answers to all of them and many others to pray properly. In fact, even to ask the above questions presupposes some knowledge and reflection on the subject.

People tell us that we learn how to pray by experience, and that we can learn more about prayer by doing it than by talking about it or reading about it. But where is the biblical justification for such a claim? They want to give the impression that they are giving this advice because they take prayer seriously, and that they want other people to take it seriously as well. But I would say that their advice is sacrilegious ­ they are treating the presence of God as a place for experimentation rather than a place of worship. If the Bible already gives us many explicit instructions on prayer, then we better do them instead of learn them during prayer. We abuse God’s patience and mercy if we approach him without first learning how to approach him, especially when he has already given us instructions on the matter.

Although God does not always immediately exact judgment upon those who approach him improperly, there are examples in the Old Testament when he struck dead those who failed to follow his instructions for worship. By the principle of trial and error, one could easily become a dead priest before he became an experienced one. Besides insisting that it is impossible to learn anything by experience in the first place, my point is that you should not try to learn from experience what God has already told you by verbal instructions. At the minimum, if you try to learn about prayer by experience, you may end up forming many bad habits and false ideas that may never receive correction. Therefore, we conclude that learning by experience when it comes to prayer is an irreverent and impossible approach. When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, Jesus did not tell them to learn how to pray by doing it, but he taught them how to pray by giving them verbal instructions. The disciples also mentioned that John the Baptist taught his own disciples how to pray, so we know that those disciples also learned about pray by verbal instructions, and not by experience. Thus we understand that prayer can be taught, and that the way to learn how to pray is not by experience, but by words. That is, the biblical way to learn about prayer is indeed by talking about it and reading about it, not by doing it. Since our topic is prayer, I will not take time to explain, but this principle is also true about other aspects of the spiritual life.

We learn by reading, listening, and thinking, and not by doing. To learn by reading, listening, and thinking makes it at least possible that a person would do something correctly at the first try. But learning by doing, experience, or trial and error inserts the necessity of failure in the very principle of education itself. I have shown somewhere else that even if the sensation one receives really corresponds to the object that produces such a sensation, one must make inferences from such a sensation to produce knowledge, and inferences from sensations are always fallacious.71 Therefore, any "knowledge" produced from sensation is always false. Thus learning by experience guarantees failure (indeed it depends on it), and it only produces false "knowledge." For the sake of argument, even if we assume that it is possible to learn from our mistakes,72 how do you know when you have made a mistake in prayer? Again for the sake of argument, even if we assume that you can catch some of these mistakes by experience, can you by experience catch all or even most of them? But you cannot even answer this question by experience, since by experience you cannot know how many mistakes you are making in prayer ­ since, again, you need to learn what is right and what is wrong in the first place, by experience, which is impossible ­ and therefore you cannot tell me if you can catch all or most of your mistakes in prayer by experience. The problem gets worse and worse when we continue to think about it. In fact, it is very likely that you have been making a number of mistakes when you pray but you do not recognize them as mistakes. Rather than being corrected by experience, the more experience you have in prayer in making those mistakes, the more they are reinforced as habits. By experience, can you even know that it is wrong to pray to the angel Gabriel or to the Buddha rather than to God the Father? Many people have been praying to the Buddha for years, and after so much experience, they still have not recognized their error. In addition, what is our justification for forcing God to endure our mistakes in prayer when we can avoid them simply by reading the Bible? If we learn it from the Bible in the first place, we would know not to make those mistakes at all.

If you insist on learning by experience when God has already given you the necessary information by revelation ­ - that is, by the words of the Bible ­ - in effect are you not shaking your fist toward heaven and saying, "I refuse to use your way to learn how to serve you! I will use my own way!"? Just as it is sinful to serve God one way when he has prescribed another way, it is also sinful to try to learn how to serve him when he has prescribed another way. We must submit to God not only in what we think, but also in how we come to think it. The best way to learn about prayer or anything else is by talking about it, reading about it, and thinking about it. Most believers would learn about prayer through this method by reading and listening to instructions delivered by Christian ministers, who are supposed to have studied the Scripture on the subject. However, although the Scripture itself is infallible, human ministers are not. But what at first appears to be a problem only serves to accentuate the advantages of learning through reading and listening. That is, verbal presentations are subject to precise and public scrutiny; they can be the basis for prolonged debate and careful reflection. Through diligent and rigorous discussions on the subject ­ that is, by talking about it, reading about it, and thinking about it, rather than by doing it ­ we may arrive at principles concerning prayer and be confident that they are in accordance with the revealed will of God.