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.
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