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Many of the same questions animate Knocking on Heaven's Door, a complex, multilayered, and captivating scholarly study of petitionary prayer by Calvin College's David Crump. Crump seeks to honor both God's sovereignty and the notion that we have a "truly reciprocal relationship" with God, a relationship in which our concerns "make a real difference to God." Crump's way into this mystery is a careful reading of New Testament passages pertaining to petitionary prayer: the parable of the persistent widow; the Lord's Prayer; the early church's prayers in Acts; Paul's prayers and requests for prayer; and so on.
In the last chapter, Crump draws together several overarching, constructive conclusions: the Bible tells us that we pray to a personal God, who responds to our prayers. Indeed, the New Testament suggests an intimate relationship with God, a God who cares even about the small details of our lives. Crump insists that God is "personally available to hear and to respond to each individual's requests in a two-way relationship of personal give and take." Those who charge that such a view somehow undoes God's sovereignty are themselves, says Crump, captive to a "Neoplatonic theological prejudice that substitutes … philosophical smoke and mirrors for the truth plainly revealed in Scripture."
Crump dwells on the eschatological emphasis of New Testament prayer. Jesus taught us to pray "thy will be done," a petition that underscores the fact that we live, and pray, in in-between times, and most New Testament prayers focus on "things that matter for eternity." Paul's intercessions, for example, typically found him praying that others would be eschatologically formed and eschatologically minded, that they would finish the race well, and come to the throne of Christ where they could hear the praise, "Well done, good and faithful servants." Taken as a whole, the New Testament—which is filled not with requests for miracles so much as pleas for endurance during times of trial—seems to suggest that "suffering [is] the norm for God's people." Today, many of the prayers that go unanswered are prayers that, one way or another, ask to evade suffering. Hence in his last few paragraphs, Crump offers a radical affirmation of the centrality of the Cross to Christian prayer. Powerful prayer, he says, is not prayer that leads to bodily healing and riches. Rather, the Bible's model of powerful prayer is Paul's petition, in prison, that we "may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ."
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