search

Dear Sir,

Kenneth J. Stewart is right to point out in his July letter that I should have been more careful in my statements about Pietism in the 18th century. All sorts of helpful changes came from this German-based renewal movement and we benefit from them to this day. Church historian G. R. Cragg is similarly positive. He devotes an entire page to its merits in his The Church and the Age of Reason (Pelican 1970).

Dear Editor,

I am largely in agreement with Ranald Macaulay’s concern over the prevalent evangelical tendency to shun engagement with society and its worrisome tendencies (en June ‘Evangelicalism in Crisis’). Yet I believe that his readiness to point the finger at European Pietism as providing an explanation of the origin of this tendency does not bear careful scrutiny.

Dear en,

I was thankful for Chris Wright’s gentle corrective in the April edition. I should have expressed more appreciation for The Cape Town Commitment because it is full of helpful affirmations and observations.

Dear Sir,

Many thanks to Ranald Macaulay for his clear, helpful and important article in the March en.

Dear en,

Ranald Macaulay makes some very valid points in his article ‘Lausanne and the polemical imperative’ (March en). It is sadly true that evangelicals in the past century, with some notable exceptions, have not adequately risen to the challenge of ‘truth decay’, as Douglas Groothuis called it, and it remains a major missiological need. I cannot speak for Lausanne 1974 (except to say that John Stott believed passionately in the crucial importance of the Christian mind), but Ranald is perhaps a little unfair on Cape Town 2010 – even if he is right that the programme did not make it ‘centre stage’. In the sheer scale of what was presented and discussed at Cape Town, arguably nothing was ‘centre stage’.

Dear Sir,

We are glad that Bob Alloway (Nov en) seems to agree with our main point (Oct en) that the image of God in man has to do with our intrinsic nature. He says: ‘… theistic evo-lutionists would agree that (Adam and Eve) were designed – and would say, ‘[human beings] didn’t just evolve by chance’.

Dear Editor,

I found the article ‘It is essential…’ in EN April 2014 by Ranald Macaulay to be very encouraging.