Luther on Retroactive Prayer — Can you pray for someone in the past?

I was thinking about praying backwards in time when I was praying that something that had already happened, but that I didn’t know the outcome of. I think it was someone else’s driving test.

The classic example is can you pray for your past self to do well on a test. You can definitely pray for the grader to grade it accurately, but can God help you do something in the past if it has already happened. This question arose to me, and has to others, because God is “above time.”

One argument against this idea is that God created humans as temporal beings and to alter their existences across time would be a contradiction.

An argument for the efficacy of retroactive prayer is that theoretically God could answer prayers from the future about an event that is happening in the present because he would know about the future prayer. I think this is possible and when I looked into it, Luther had written about retroactive prayer.

> As for the dead, since Scripture gives us no information on the subject, I regard it as no sin to pray with free devotion in this or some similar fashion: ‘Dear God, if this soul is in a condition accessible to mercy, be thou gracious to it.’ And when this has been done once or twice, let it suffice. For vigils and requiem masses and yearly celebrations of requiems are useless, and merely the devil’s annual fair. (_Luther’s Works_, vol. 37, p. 369)

So he believes that because it is not forbidden in the bible to pray for someone who has already passed away. He wrote more about it specifically referring to prayer for people in their final moments that they accepted God in their heart.

> Far more typical is the loyal Christian woman in a mainline church who loved Christ but always indignantly denied the existence of hell, the occasional church-goer who is put into a coma by a stroke and dies without regaining consciousness, … , the grandmother who slipped into mindless senility years before her death, a son baptized and raised in the faith who was drowned on a canoeing trip with his live-in girlfriend. . . .
(Luther lists 4 others but you get the gist)

> In such cases only simple-minded dogmatists would dare say for sure whether they are in heaven or hell. On what grounds then are we denied the right to pray for those we love, that in their moment of death they might remember the Gospel promise of God in Christ and cling to it? And if God tells us to pray persistently for all the concerns of our heart and especially for the salvation of all (Luke 18; Philippians 4; 1 Timothy 2), how can He be angry when we pray for the thing that weighs most on our hearts, something about which we genuinely do not know His will? And who can be confident denying that the prayers of loved ones, whenever they are offered, before, during, or after death, do not by God’s appointment, comfort and uphold those facing death without preparation and without full knowledge of God’s grace?

He touches on what prayer really is: a relationship with God. God really cares about each person’s life and their feelings. If someone loves another person so much that they want to pray for God to judge them well or for them to turn to Christ just before they pass, then God would welcome this.

But prayer doesn’t really make sense for things like tests that have already happened I don’t think. It is more important to pray for things weighing on your heart in the now, like if you are worrying about a late friend. You may care about the test in the now but it pales in comparison to the importance of someone’s belief in God. The point of a relationship with God is to talk about current and upcoming things. The past is important, but one should thank God for blessings he has imparted on them, not ask for different outcomes. There is no value in asking Him to make you not sin in the past. If He granted this ad infinitum, one could become sinless which is impossible. Jesus was the only human without sin.

Continued in reply…

Continuing from >>2926…

> For these reasons, for many years now I have believed that prayers for the dead (which are really prayers for those in the hour of death) are a true Christian practice, completely consistent with the evangelical faith, and have practiced this. As I have seen, I am not alone in doing so.

So Luther believes it is good to pray for those in their hour of death, even if that hour may have passed. Like I said above praying for events already said and done don’t make sense like praying for the Confederates to have successfully seceded from the Union. This already happened, and God’s will had already been fulfilled at that time. No reason for Him to change it. Humans cannot know if someone makes it into heaven, which means praying for it would be logical.

I thought this stuff was all interesting and I feel like other posters would have stuff to say about this theological discussion. Post your thoughts below. I didn’t look at many arguments against this by the way. (I am a Calvinist as a note. If anyone would like me to pray for them just say so and I’ll dm you.)

The way I understood prayer for the dead is not one of prayer traveling through time, but instead that the particular judgement at the time of death is not the final judgement that comes publicly on judgment day.

So souls still waiting for final judgement can still be assisted by your prayers today.

My personal theology expands this into a view of God as nature/reality itself, and sin is your own separation from God/nature/reality. So at final "judgement" there is no actual external judgement, instead you will be presented with God/nature/reality unfiltered for the rest of eternity. Some souls react to this and only feel bliss, others who see reality is lesser recoil in pain when forced to experience it exactly as is, which will be eternal Hell.

So to pray for someone today is trying to guide there soul to God/nature/reality unfiltered in all its glory so they can feel it as the unending good that it is at the second coming.

I would be happy if someone wants to come along and try to tear my personal theology apart, I would love to find a more correct perspective of God.

Whatever is going on with prayer, the whole concept is staked on “exotic” causality, so time seems no barrier. God already did most or all of his work at the moment of creation, already taking into account your needs and desires and prayers, so why not pray for parts of the past you still don't know? Praying for outright counterfactuals seems to miss the point though.

As i see it, the point is as much or more to put your own soul and will in alignment with God’s will as it is to ask God for an intervention in alignment with your will. The point is to become the kind of person who prays that “your [God’s] will be done” in vivid and concrete detail, that is someone whose will is aligned with God’s will on earth and thinks clearly about what God wants in detail. Pray for your family’s soul because it is God’s will that they be redeemed and justified in Grace. Pray for the test outcome only insofar as you believe that outcome to be God’s will for you. Otherwise pray in concrete detail for wisdom to know what is gods will for you on such matters.

Time is no barrier to that, because it is timeless/eternal. With things that have already happened, praise god for his wisdom or for help understanding it. With things that will happen, pray what you think is His will. This will bring you closest to God.

FWIW, the Catholic idea of prayers for the dead is that it is only applicable to souls in purgatory, i.e., souls of those who died in a state of grace, and so are destined for heaven, but are still in need of spiritual purgation. The prayers help to facilitate the purgation, and so the entrance of the soul to heaven. They have no power to change the ultimate destiny of one already dead. So there is no unusual time stuff going on with it.