Preface to the Second Edition (1990)
Preface to the Second Edition (1990) Six years have passed since the publication of Issues Facing Christians
Today, and in this brief period the world has witnessed many changes.
Detente between the superpowers has dawned, and disarmament has begun. Freedom and democracy, undreamed of only a year ago, have taken root in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, even while brutal repression has trampled on these tender plants in China. Old debates (like the nuclear threat) have moved on, while new debates (like the AIDS epidemic) have arisen.
Hence the need for a second and revised edition of this book. The statistics on armaments, human rights violations, other religions, unemployment, divorce, and abortion have all been brought up to date. It has been necessary to read and reflect on newly published books on almost every issue. A number of these have been written by evangelical authors, which , is an encouraging sign of our developing social conscience. Another sign of this is the merger of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity with the Shaftesbury Project for Christian Involvement in Society in order to form "Christian Impact," and so combine research, education, and thought with action. Yet other signs are the stronger commitment to social action explicit in the Manila Manifesto, which was adopted at the conclusion of the second Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization (1989), and the "Salt and Light" project sponsored by the British Evangelical Alliance.
This second edition of Issues Facing Christians Today also incorporates new material on many topics—on the rapid growth of the green movement and its warnings about ozone layer depletion and the greenhouse effect; on the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, and its concept of "sustainable development"; on the burdens of debt borne by many nuclear families in the West and—to a crippling degree—by Third World countries; on three important Christian documents recently published in South Africa; on further thinking by evangelical Christians about the role, ministry, and leadership of women; on human fertilization and modern reproductive technologies; on the theological, moral, pastoral, and educational aspects of AIDS; and on the effectiveness of Christian social protest and witness. tt
Preface to the Second Edition I express my cordial thanks to Toby Howarth and Todd Shy, my former and present study assistants, for painstakingly rereading the whole book and making numerous suggestions; to Marty Eden, Elaine Storkey, Roy
McCloughry, Maurice Hobbs, John Wyatt, and Stephen Rand for perusing individual sections or chapters and proposing changes; and to Frances
Whitehead for much retyping and some really skilful "scissor-and-paste" editing.
In conclusion, I feel the need to restate what I wrote in the Preface to the first edition, namely, that Issues represents the struggles of a person who lays no claim to infallibility, who is anxious to go on increasing his Christian integrity over against the pressures of a largely secular society, and who to that end is continuously seeking fresh light from Scripture. i2