As I type this I realize I’d better to have limited it to say RCC as “official Christian” is going to be contradictory in the case of some flavors of Protestantism without Popes and such.
But . . . is there a definitive pronouncement on whether (a) good/bad acts; (b) prayer, lead to different tangible, factual, physical outcomes in this life than if you had done/thought y instead of x? Or is it left vague with a hazy implications that most/all of the “answers” to your prayers/good acts will (a) be inchoate, as in “increased tranquility after you pray;” or (b) come in another plane, later on?
This is my GQ version (try to keep it that way) of a thread I was musing on “why do I keep doing x thinking it will karmically influence factual outcome y in an unrelated context” MPSIMS thread I was mulling.
The “official” position is delibertly vague. Clearly, there are many cases where a devout believer prayed asking for something sincere and non-selfish (“please God, my husband is missing after 9/11 and please let him be found alive”) which were not answered; and the church can’t deny that prayers didn’t change that.
The official positions sidestep the question: “God works in mysterious ways, prayer is good for the soul and relieves your burdens regardless of whether there are temporal consequences, etc”.
Even the bible itself is remarkably weasel-worded about it – I don’t recall the chapter and verse, but I remember as a child in Sunday school marvelling at one of the verses of the new testament which was something like “Anything you pray for that is in accordance to God’s will, will be granted by God”. Even at the tender age of 8 years old when I didn’t know what the words “tautology” or “cop-out” meant, even then I still realized that verse was pretty meaningless.
Well, canonization requires at least one miracle to be attributed to the proto-saint, and I don’t know how one would attribute a miracle to someone unless that person had been appealed to for help.
Found the verse I was looking for. From the New International Version of the bible:
“This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.” – John 5:14
Which is about as official as you’re going to get. Prayers do get answered – but only in cases when God was already planning on doing the thing you asked for anyway.
If you think about it, it’s rather arrogant to think prayer could change God’s mind. After all, he’s omnipotent, so he knows better than you. If he does something, it’s for a good reason, and your opinion shouldn’t be able to override that. To think that God sits there saying, “Well I was going to let this person die of cancer, but now that someone prayed asking otherwise, NOW i’ll intervene to save the life” is trivializing the very idea of God.
Is the reverse true? If it is God’s will that something be done, but people fail to actually ask for it, will it still be done?
In which case is there any point to prayer at all, assuming one just trusts in God, and has faith that no matter what happens, God secretly knows the reason why it’s the best outcome even if you can’t figure it out?