Can a unitarian god answer prayer?

How can we influence through prayer a god who from eternity has already decreed what should happen from the beginning to the end of time?

Andrew Murray believed it could only happen by us entering into the eternal counsel of God, and that is only possible if God is Trinitarian.

If God was only one Person, shut up within Himself, there could be no thought of nearness to Him or influence on Him. But in God there are three Persons. In God we have Father and Son, who have in the Holy Spirit their living bond of unity and fellowship. When eternal Love begat the Son, and the Father gave the Son as the Second Person a place next Himself as His Equal and His Counsellor, there was a way opened for prayer and its influence in the very inmost life of Deity itself. Just as on earth, so in heaven the whole relation between Father and Son is that of giving and taking.

("Harmony with the Being of God" in With Christ in the School of Prayer)

As Fred Sanders comments on Murray:

the fact God eternally exists as Father and Son (in the unity of the Holy Spirit) means that there is an opening, a space prepared, for the structure of asking-and-granting that is prayer

Just as the Sonship of Jesus on earth may not be separated from His Sonship in heaven, even so with His prayer on earth, it is the continuation and the counterpart of His asking in heaven. The prayer of the man Christ Jesus is the link between the eternal asking of the onlybegotten Son in the bosom of the Father and the prayer of men upon earth. Prayer has its rise and its deepest source in the very Being of God. In the bosom of Deity nothing is ever done without prayer—the asking of the Son and the giving of the Father.

Crucial for Murray was to resist the urge to think of some will of God that is antecedent to the Son and the Father, or some decision that was made behind the back of the Tirinity, in the oneness of God that is not already triune. There is no such God, so there is no such divine will. The divine will is Trinitarian and is worked out according to the asking-and-granting structure revealed in the Son:

This may help us somewhat to understand how the prayer of man, coming through the Son, can have effect upon God. The decrees of God are not decisions made by Him without reference to the Son, or His petition, or the petition to be sent up through Him. By no means. The Lord Jesus is the first-begotten, the Head and Heir of all things: all things were created through Him anduntoHim, and all things consist in Him. In the counsels of the Father, the Son, as Eepresentative of all creation, had always a voice ; in the decrees of the eternal purpose there was always room left for the liberty of the Son as Mediator and Intercessor, and so for the petitions of all who draw nigh to the Father in the Son.

(pp. 222-223, Embracing the Trinity)

Incidentally, I once heard James Torrance despair of the lack of books on prayer that were strong on the intercession of Christ. Andrew Murray's book was one of the few he thought was good.

Perichoretic salvation

In my previous post I quoted Fred Sanders who asked:

• Did Good Friday and Easter happen so that Pentecost could benefit us, or
• did Pentecost happen so that Good Friday and Easter could benefit us?

Another way of asking the question is:

• Do we receive the Spirit in us because we are in Christ, or
• are we in Christ because the Spirit is in us?

Yet another way of asking the question would be:

• Is salvation the Trinitarian life of God in the soul of man (ala Scougal), or
• is salvation the soul of man in the Trinitarian life of God?

If we believe that perichoresis (mutual indwelling) of the three persons of the Trinity is not a static state of being, but is a dynamic and continuous activity, then it is never 'or' it is always 'both' - distinct but one.

PS did you like my pompous title?!

The missions of the Son and the Spirit - each of them is a means to the other

Which of the two missions [of the Son and the Holy Spirit] is the means and which is the end? Thinking in terms of redemption accomplished and applied, it is easy to consider the Spirit's work as the means of delivering the Son's work. In that case the Son does the the thing itself - reconciling God and man - and the Spirit serves his work by applying it to individual lives. Pentecost, in this view, happens in order to fulfill and extend Calvary and Easter. On the other hand, when we consider the intimacy of spiritual fellowship that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit involves, it begins to look as if all God's ways lead up to the sending of the Spirit.

If God's goal is to dwell among his people, the atonement was a necessary step to make indwelling possible. The temple of human nature had to be cleansed to make it ready for the Spirit's indwelling. So the Son by incarnation prepared one perfect human temple, his own body, for the Spirit to be present in. And by atonement the Son purified the other temples, preparing them to receive the Spirit on the basis of the Son's finished work. "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us ... so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith" (Gal 3:13-14), Calvary and Easter, in this view, happen in order to make Pentecost possible. If we have to ask whose work is the means and whose is the end, our answer must be either that the question is badly formed, or that each of them is a means to the other. The Spirit serves the Son by applying what he accomplished, and the Son serves the Spirit by making his indwelling possible. Both the Son and the Spirit, together on their twofold mission from the Father, serve the Father and minister to us.

(pp.148-149, Fred Sanders, Embracing the Trinity: Life with God in the Gospel)