Dear Editor:

I simply want to add my incredulous dismay to that already expressed by Viola Larson, Casey Jones, James Berkley and others regarding the extemely distorted article on Evangelical Presbyterians written by Dr. R. Milton Winter and published by the Office of the General Assembly. I would certainly consider myself an evangelical pastor in the PCUSA. I have been a board member of the Presbyterian Coalition and our congregation is a Confessing Church. I have also just completed my third term as Moderator of Newark Presbytery and I have twice been a commissioner to General Assembly.

Needless to say I cannot recognize myself or my evangelical friends in Dr. Winter's article. It is so distorted that it fails the basic standard of competent scholarship. Many of its fallacies have been mentioned. However there are so many it would take more time to list them all. Among a few perhaps not previously mentioned, James Barr's 1977 book Fundamentalism (American edition), upon which Dr. Winter bases so many of his criticisms was roundly denounced for its bias and inaccuracies by the noted evangelical journal, Christianity Today when it was first published thirty years ago. If you seek to define your opponent in terms he or she cannot recognize it's hard to take your criticism seriously. If Dr. Winter had read more of John Leith's later writings beginning with his 1990 book, From Generation to Generation he would see that many of the issues raised about the PCUSA by contemporary evangelical Presbyterians were already being stated by Dr. Leith. Would Dr. Winter call John Leith a separatist evangelical? And by the way, Heinrich Bullinger was a major Reformation theologian of the sixteenth, not the seventeenth, century.

If the Office of the General Assembly is to have any credibility they need to publish other more accurate views on Presbyterian evangelicals.

Paul Leggett
Pastor
Grace Presbyterian Church
Montclair, New Jersey