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This doesn't mean that there is no truth in Father Ted's caricature of evangelical Protestants. Just as evangelicalism in the United States has suffered from the narrowness of vision identified so clearly by Mark Noll in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, so also with our brothers and sisters in Eastern Europe. But many of the students at ETS are aware of this tendency and seek to overcome it.
In this they are encouraged by the perspective of Peter Kuzmic, the president of the seminary, whose faith is ecumenically orthodox. During my week in Croatia, Peter and I participated in a ceremony honoring the publication of a new Croatian edition of Thomas a Kempis's The Imitation of Christ, held in the library of the Catholic university in Osijek. Peter sketched Thomas's life and read some selections with commentary. I talked about the profound influence of The Imitation of Christ on John Wesley, and hence the debt that we as evangelicals owe to Thomas and the church that nurtured his spirituality.
The publisher of this edition, whose list is wonderfully eclectic, was the minister of culture in the last Communist government of Yugoslavia. So it goes in the strange new Europe.
—John Wilson
Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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