George Arthur Buttrick's book, Prayer (1942) starts with a chapter about the necessity of prayer in view of the imminent danger surrounding us. Prayer for him is inseparable from the belief in the existence of God. If God does not exist, prayer is an act of self-deceit and the worst kind of delusion. But if God exists, which in fact He is, prayer then is the primary task of the children of God.
He believes that just as the Spirit of God brought order out of the formless and empty condition of primitive earth, only prayer can bring order amidst chaos that characterize modern life. He describes evidences of this chaotic condition through widespread scientific agnosticism, rampant skepticism, suicidal knowledge and skills, and war. Life in modern city and scientific research illustrate such current chaos.
Life in modern city crushes the spirit of man. His description of city life remains contemporary:
"Steam-heated apartments, sex-heated novels, brick chasms filled with gasoline fumes, the tension of a moving belt in factories, the grotesque disparities of wealth and poverty, the uncertainty of toil, the shadow of hunger, the frenzied pleasures, and the fratricidal strife - these are unfair odds for the spirit of man" (p. 19).
Also his description of scientific research:
"The scientist and his research are under imminent threat from the every weapons he has given...His gases could have been an anesthesia, his bacteria a healing serum, his electricity a light and warmth...But perversely, his gases are also poisonous fumes, his bacteria the pollution of wells, his electricity a leaping death" (ibid. ).Buttrick's description of the world remains true even he wrote these words more than 70 years ago. Maybe, parts of his analysis are inaccurate, but the dangers he mentioned are more relevant now than ever before. If the church will not respond to the call of God to call upon Him in the most critical stage of human history, we do not know from where solution will come to the present predicaments resulting from man's declaration of independence from God.
