279 - The Struggle of Prayer

The Struggle of Prayer
By Donald G. Bloesch
San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1980. 180 pp. $9.95.

When it comes right down to it, we pray because we have to. As his designated "saints of evangelical faith" did, the author tells us that people turn to God in the anguish of their spirit (cf. Job 7:11) and find a God who will not let them alone (cf. Job 7:17-20; 9:14, 32). The reader and pray-er may find this kind of attention from God comforting and this kind of pursuit by God distressing. So be it, for the paradoxical nature of the prayer experience, including both consolation and challenge, is precisely the focus of this fine book. For balance, though, Bloesch may well have attended more to the "struggle," "crisis," and "labor" elements than to the more comforting components of prayer.

This well-organized study of the differences and convergences between mysticism and biblical personalism claims an indebtedness to Martin Luther, Richard Sibbes, 16th and l7th century Puritan preacher in England, and Peter Taylor Forsyth, British Congregationalist minister and theologian. Its debt noted, it is impressive and delightful to see how widely and appropriately this book extends in its other sources: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Jacques Ellul, Brother Lawrence, Friedrich Heiler, Jonathan Edwards, Francois de La Fénelon, David Willis, Mother Basilea Schlink, and Thomas Merton among them.

This kind of scope amply supports well-planned thematic chapters ("Prayer and Mysticism," "Prayer and Action," "The Goal of Prayer," etc.) with uncommon breadth and sensitivity to an event which at its best moments is less an activity and more a discovery of the Holy Spirit dwelling within. Such a discovery, situated and developed in a biblical context, should be enough to commend this book as a distinguished achievement in a field crowded with lesser rivals on the same subject.

Doris Donnelly
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, N.J.