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.
But my focus was on what might be called the ‘Lausanne time-lag phenomenon’. I was simply wondering why, even though ‘truth-decay’ was a major issue confronting the church in 1974 – as he admits – it took the Lausanne movement 36 years before it finally attended to it. Surely, just as an historical fact this is noteworthy, not of course to point the finger at ‘Cape Town’ but to wonder why Evangelicalism’s mission during the previous century was so compromised by theological omissions like the one highlighted in 1974.
Despite his letter, too, I continue to believe that naturalistic science is the major problem today and is still neglected. The Western church was already overwhelmed by it 200 years ago and it now threatens our entire civilisation – yet the Commitment said nothing about it. Though it helpfully critiqued rela-tivism, it overlooked the Scientific Materialism which gave rise to it in the first place. (Only in section IIA6 does the word ‘science’ appear and then mainly to deal with the dehumanising effects of technology). But the global community today is in as serious a bondage to naturalistic science as Luther’s early 16th-century Europe was in bondage to medieval Catholicism. Take the group of Chinese scientists reported in your last edition who had the temerity just to mention God in a scientific journal. Closer to home, evangelical scientists deny cardinal truths about the biblical view of ‘origins’ on the basis of an essentially naturalistic scientific theory. Surely both for reasons of internal security and wider gospel effectiveness Cape Town’s omission here was a mistake.
My conclusion is that Luther was right when he warned the church not to teach every Christian doctrine except the one being attacked by Satan in that particular moment of history. ‘If we do so’, he said, ‘we may be ‘professing the faith but we are not confessing it’. I still think ‘Cape Town’ could have done better here.
Yours sincerely,
