If only I could believe

IF ONLY I COULD BELIEVE
By Wim Rietkerk
Solway. 170 pages, £6.99
ISBN 1 900507 36 6

Dr. Wim Rietkerk, a pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church, helps to lead the Dutch branch of the L'Abri Fellowship. His book is an apologetics book with a difference.

Its underlying thesis is that although it was intellectual presuppositions and problems which needed to be primarily dealt with in bringing people to Christ or helping people with their faith in the 1950s, things have moved on since then. Now hindrances to faith have much more to do with emotions and what we might call subconscious feelings.

So, while showing intellectual rigour, this book becomes almost a counselling manual slanted towards apologetics. It deals with doubt, disappointment, anxiety, guilt, shame and suffering from the point of view of how these things impinge on faith in Christ. The author relies fairly heavily on people like Os Guiness and Larry Crabb for some chapters. The great emphasis is that human beings are integrated personalities and cannot be treated as disembodied minds who can be simply argued out of trouble. Life is a journey which involves many dimensions.

It may assume a little too much biblically to hand cold to secularised non-Christians, but it will be of tremendous value to those who have been hanging around church for a long time yet somehow have never felt able to believe.

John Benton

© Evangelicals Now - November 1997
Please consider supporting this ministry by subscribing.

• Request Free Sample

Main Articles

• Mission on our doorstep
  Ministry among Asians in Britain
• Using the Bible (Bulldog for November)
  The Bible must permeate all aspects of church life
• Standing in the gap in Washington
  The Promise Keepers
• Our own parliament
  Scottish devolution
• Watch your language
  Gender-related language in Scripture
• Minding my Ps and Qs
  On gender-related language in Scripture
• Church and Zeitgeist
  Lessons from the experience of the church in Germany in the 1930s
• The backslider's return
  Christian backsliding (with reference to Jonah 1 & 2)
• Why did Paul restrict the ministry of women?
• Post-abortion syndrome
  Interview with Grace Kirkham
• Mr Rotavator
  Meeting and witnessing to non-Christians on an allotment
• Brief lives: Mary Slessor
• The chicken sandwich that changed my life
  Guidance
• Evangelism on wheels
  Use of a bus as a means of Christian outreach
• How to save your homegroup
  Ideas for revitalising a housegroup

Other articles

• Is God good for women?
• Against empire
• One world, two minds
• A family tree - 1 Chronicles simply explained
• A window to heaven
• Hated without a cause?
• Evangelicals in Central Europe - SEN research paper
• The Lost World
• Evangelicalism in Britain 1935-1995
• In defence of miracles
• If only I could believe
• The way everlasting - A study in Psalm 139
• Keep a quiet heart
• The father to the man
• The sacred diary of Adrian Plass aged 45 and 3/4
• Facing depression
• The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church