John R. W. Stott (1921–2011)

In 1978 John Stott published a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount entitled Christian Counter-Culture. It's a testimony to the insight of Stott's exegesis and, more importantly, to the power of Matthew 5-7 that thirty-seven years later, this is still a counter-cultural document.

Stott had a gift for making complicated things simple. Here he takes not only the Sermon itself, but also a multitude of various interpretative traditions and distills them into neatly numbered lists.

There are show more elements of his interpretation that I would disagree with. For example, on Matthew 6:5-6 Jesus exhorts his followers to pray in private, not like the hypocrites who love to be seen in public. Stott notes that there was nothing inherently wrong with praying on street corners and synagogues "if their motive was to break down segregated religion and bring their recognition of God out of the holy places into the secular life of every day" (133). In the first place, isn't the Synagogue a holy place? More importantly, this statement presumes (anachronistically) that first century Jewish people divided their life into religious and secular spheres—a trademark problem of the Enlightenment.

Yet for every passage that makes me shake my head, there are twenty more that reveal the sort of understanding only a committed follower of Jesus can demonstrate.

In the introduction, Stott wrote:

"Of course commentaries by the hundred have been written on the Sermon on the Mount. I have been able to study about twenty-five of them, and my debt to the commentators will be apparent to the reader. Indeed my text is sprinkled with quotations from them, for I think we should value tradition more highly than we often do, and sit more humbly at the feet of the masters" (9).

John R. W. Stott is now one of the masters he wrote about in 1978. I always benefit from sitting humbly at his feet. show less

There seems to be a plethora of books that run upon the theme of this book: a basic outline of the Christian faith with a plea at the end to give one's life to Christ and then what to do once you have made that step. However this book was originally published a lot earlier than I though since I originally though that it was released sometime in the early 70s, though I now notice that this particular book was released back in the late 50s. It sort of undermines my argument a bit, but I think show more I will still go down that path considering that I will be looking at why so many of these books have been written in the last forty to fifty years when you didn't actually get anywhere near as many published beforehand.
My suspicion is that it is because there was a change in society's attitude during the 50s that suddenly exploded in the 60s, that being the realisation that one did not need to go to church every Sunday, and then the general acceptance that one did not need to be a Christian to be a member of society. Okay, there had been debates for the previous 200 years over the truth of Christianity, however many of the loudest opponents of Christianity were still in the minority. This began to change in the 50s and the 60s with the baby boomers beginning to throw off the shackles of society and beginning to embrace their own freedom.
Up until that point, pretty much everybody went to church, and it was only the die hard academics that would be promoting Atheism. This began to change, and the main reason that it began to change was that the idea of separation of church and state began to grow, a separation that basically said that there should be no national church, and that any church could co-exist within the state. This movement began in the United States and slowly spread across the Atlantic to Europe. Once the acceptance of multiple denominations co-existing had been established, it was a small step to take to accept that people not only did not need to belong to specific national denomination, but did not need to be a Christian, or follow the Christian creed, if they did not want to.
Thus the reason we are seeing pretty much every pastor and his dog writing a tract, book, or bible study, on what Christianity is and what it means to be a Christian, and how to be a Christian, is because people are not going to church any more, and because they are not going to church, they are no longer regularly exposed to Christian teaching. Okay, when people did regularly go to church, a lot of them weren't exposed to such teaching either, however things were beginning to change around the time Stott wrote this book.
As for the book itself, I found that it was very basic and there was nothing here that I had not read before. The book begins with evidence supporting the existence of Christ and his divinity, then goes on to his death and resurrection, and finishes off with how one becomes a Christian and then what one does after one becomes a Christian. However there are a few problems.
First of all, he writes as if Jesus is the only God-man in myth that took human form, died, and rose again. That, frankly, is wrong. Okay, the difference is that Jesus' incarnation and resurrection occurred in history as opposed to legend, but once again he is not the only one. As C.S. Lewis once indicated, the only thing that separates Christianity from the other religions is not the incarnation, the virgin birth, or the resurrection, but grace.
Secondly the thing about living a Christian life is very objective and does not seem to recognise that one's relationship with God, like all other relationships, exists on a subjective level. Okay, the ideas of reading the Bible and regularly praying are helpful, but I get the feeling that the evangelical Anglican movement (in fact the entire evangelical movement) has a very problematic attitude towards subjectivism to the point that the idea seems to scare them, and in respose tries to create a robotic, objective, version of Christianity.
Finally, the idea about sin was particularly harsh. Stott's writing suggests that the world is full of monstrous self-centered individuals, and while I don't accept the idea that everybody by nature is good, I feel that he has gone the opposite direction. Granted, in God's eyes we are all monstrous, but the problem with the teaching is it instils such a huge amount of guilt into people that it can be very difficult to escape. My position is that yes, in God's eyes, we are all monsters, but subjectively, people differ and differ a lot. There are a lot of really nice, helpful, and selfless non-Christians out there, and a lot of greedy, arrogant, and tyrannical Christians (or at least call themselves Christians). Somehow we need to find a way to create some sort of balance with these opposing truths. show less

To understand why we respond to a given work in a particular way we have to know something about ourselves; to tell others why we respond as we do we probably need to tell them at least something of who we are. So to be fair to John Stott and his latest offering [1] I need to say at least something of who I am. Cryptically I could say it all by saying that less than one third of one per cent of my theological books are from the IVP stable. The proportion was once far greater, but times have show more changed.

So I come to John Stott with a sense that it’s been a long time since I’ve been there. The conservative evangelical Christianity of Stott, Watson, Green, Packer and others is something of a blast from a distant past, and I approached The Contemporary Christian with considerable misgiving.

To some extent my misgivings were realised. Stott is, as he should be, unashamedly evangelical, and biblically conservative. Not fundamentalist, to be sure: the scriptures are not tablets from on high, are the work of human hands, but nevertheless their content is “determined by God” (69). I find myself happy to accept that premise.

In fact I find myself happy to accept more and more of Stott’s premises as I go along. Given that (perhaps unintentionally) he has a fairly clear target audience of middle class (143) Protestant (131) evangelicals (193, 227) who have almost inevitably undergone a conversion experience (139), the premises are almost natural. I have no difficulty with the premises.

But I do find myself at times having difficulty with the target audience. I feel hackles rising when Stott blunders into the characteristic evangelical assumption that the apostolic succession runs from Paul (139) through Augustine (54, 227) to Luther (92) to Calvin (97) and the Protestants. And Athanasius gets a Guernsey (26). But other pre-Lutheran Christians seem to be mentioned only as being errant. Tertullian mucked up our theology of ministry/priesthood (275), Arius and Eunomius were heretics, and no one else features. What of the Cappadocians, of Gregory the Great, of Hillary, of Francis, to name just four foci of faith? If we ignore the ancient heroes of our faith we run the risk of becoming Latter Day Saints, substituting Martin Luther for Joseph Smith.

As a non-evangelical – (do these labels really work? I too seek to proclaim the evangel – see 337-355) – I find the language of a personal Satan somewhat unfamiliar, at least as it is presented without any discussion of the questions of theodicy: what is the Satan, what is evil, how does the existence of evil, briefly mentioned at 179, fit into thought about the existence of a good God? I think a book on contemporary Christian life needs to consider these questions more fully before talking about substitutionary atonement (310, though with the welcome mention of God’s identification with humanity on the Cross, too).

The too-easy dismissal of the historic episcopate (182) is overly simplistic: certainly those who see it as a sine qua non of unity (and I think they are probably referring to unions, not unity) are taking a rigorist line, but consistent with the Johannine acknowledgement that structures are necessary (3 John 9-12) as more than merely as “pastoral ideal” (182). And the notion of “religionless Christianity” should have been put into the context of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, surely one of the greatest evangelicals of this [20th] century, rather than applied to (presumably) such extreme liberals as Paul van Buren, who cribbed the phrase second-hand (243).

Stott’s understanding of Catholic and Orthodox sacramental theology is ill-informed: the fact that Catholic clergy live in presbyteries should make clear that the Roman priesthood is a presbyterate, not a sacrificial priesthood. A reading of Schillebeeckx’s Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (or later works) could have helped: “Sacramental symbolic activity, although performed through the church by the mediation of the minister, is fundamentally a personal; act of the Kyrios, who is the actual High Priest throughout the action” (Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament. London: Sheed and Ward, 1963, 98) – Schillebeeckx didn’t get his knuckles rapped for that statement!). Likewise Stott needs to place his explanation of Catholic language of “sacrifice” into the context of anamnesis and “re-presentation” in the light of Kairos -time; reading Louis Bouyer (Eucharist , London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) could have helped him avoid mere Protestant propaganda. And I rest very uneasily with the non-sequitur that “non-evangelical Christians” have “small confidence in scripture” (173). Perhaps Stott hasn’t turned to the commentaries of such a great “non-evangelical” as Raymond Brown? In the light of these misunderstandings, and because Stott gives Catholic missionary Vincent Donovan due credit as a reputable missionary (363), it is clear that he needs to offer a more nuanced reflection of definitions and relationships of “Catholic” and “evangelical.”

So some of my fears were well grounded. Yet Stott’s work – not to mention his great integrity as a Christian – is too great to be ignored. He is not blind to the faults of evangelical Christianity, faults that drove me to more liberal and Catholic views. His critique of evangelical worship is severe: “We who call ourselves ‘evangelical’ do not know how to worship. Evangelism is our speciality, not worship’ (227). That’s far more harsh than I would want to be. I still remember David Penman’s liturgical presence as one of the most worshipful that I have encountered[2], and know how committed the editor of this magazine is to integrity in worship.[3] But Stott is sadly close to the truth: prayer sandwiches, or the type of liturgy that tacks on a Eucharist as an unfortunate afterthought following a sermon, are insulting to God, poor vehicles indeed of the awe and majesty of the one whose evangel we seek to proclaim.

Stott’s critique of evangelical triumphalism is no less telling: “In the evangelical tendency to triumphalism there seems little place for tribulation” (363). Well he has conveyed the message of many of the “third world” delegates to the Manilla World Evangelisation Congress.
Strangely, Stott is perhaps overly harsh in his criticism of the evangelicals’ commitment to social justice and global peace. The first Christian social conscience writers I discovered were evangelical, and they continue to rate amongst the best: Stanley Mooneyham, Alan Storkey, John Yoder, Ronald Sider, David Sheppard come immediately to mind. Tet there is some truth in his assessment.

Stott’s call to be biblically informed is well reasoned and presented, though as one of those liberals that Stott often seems to chastise I find myself in unfamiliar territory when he treats the nature miracles as literal happenings (387), and turns ideological somersaults in order simultaneously to suggest that the “signs and wonders” so beloved of a John Wimber are pre-dominantly a past event, yet remains open to the possibility that they just might occur again today as well. Here he seems to tread a fine and not wholly consistent line between old-fashioned dispensationalism and contemporary Pentecostalism. In doing so he leaves no room for the approach that I would take, that the nature miracles are powerful metaphorical statements as to who Jesus was in the eyes of the evangelists and the early Church, without necessarily being limited to the merely literal.

I also suggest that Stott does not offer any satisfactory explanation for his suggestion that liberation theologians are less accurate in their biblical understanding than evangelicals (351). James Cone seems to me very biblical! But Stott is whimsical on the matter: “I wish evangelical Christians had got in first with a truly biblical theology of liberation. But to equate material ‘liberation’ with ‘salvation’ is to misunderstand and misrepresent Scripture” (351).

In his commitment to mission Stott is exemplary. Having stated well the need to “transpose the word” (though with an old-fashioned confusion of “pro-creational” and “recreational” sex when he attempts to address the question of homosexuality – 205) he presents a case for the uniqueness of Christ that could be compulsory reading for every theological student and every missionary in training. Accepting the value of the study of comparative religions, Stott emphasises that its value lies in helping us to understand the unique nature of the salvation offered in Christ.

Stott has no time for those theologians (and others) who believe that “to absolutize our image of God is idolatry” (302; see all of 298-305), and his criticism of their view is caustic. To remove the absoluteness of God, and to relegate God as revealed in Christ to the one-amongst-many basket is to rob Christianity of any message, Stott emphasizes. He does so always with the understanding that “it is not ‘Christianity’ as an empirical institution or system for which Christians should claim superiority. It is Christ, and only Christ” (367).

Perhaps in his outlining of evangelical exclusivism, Vatican II’s inclusivism, and the pluralism of such liberals as John Hick, William Cantwell Smith, Rosemary Radford Ruether and others (277-298) I would have liked to see a further category[4], Christological Universalism, to which I hold, but which tends to be bracketed with inclusivism. Nevertheless I was able in the end to add my “amen” to those of the evangelicals as Stott champions the uniqueness of Christ, and makes his call to “holistic” and christologically centred mission.

This is a great book, one that for all its misunderstandings of Catholic and some liberal theologies and motivations will offer a healthy challenge to evangelicals and non-evangelicals alike: the challenge to be Christ-centred and proclamatory in all that we undertake. Just don’t expect the budget-priced IVP bindings to last as long as the value of the book’s contents!

[1] This review was originally published in the April 1993 edition of Christian Book Newsletter (Vol. 11, No. 3) in Australia. I might be a little less prolix and perhaps less opinionated today!

[2] David Penman was Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne from 1984 until his untimely death in 1989.

[3] The editor referred to was Charles Sherlock, then a senior lecturer at Melbourne’s Ridley College. A dedicated liturgical scholar, Sherlock is author of inter alia Performing the Gospel in Liturgy and Lifestyle (Melbourne: Broughton Books, 2017).

[4] Stott is following Alan Race’s categories defined in the latter’s Christians and Religious Pluralism (second edition London: SCM, 1993). show less

The strengths of this book are both many and varied. Stott argues that 'preaching is indispensable to Christianity' and to the health of the Christian church. As the title suggests, Stott discribes the work of the preacher as one of bridge-building. Because of the distance and the complexities of the ancient/Biblical world, carefully planned bridges must be built for God's Word to be loudly related to those in the modern world. To do this, the preacher must be a student of each of these show more respective worlds. It is difficult for me to imagine that one could improve upon such a comprehensive treatment to the nature of the task of Christian preaching in few pages that Stott did. With hundreds of assorted quotes, Stott brings a remarkably wide range of reading to the table. Though the author made apology for the inclusion of so many quotes in the introduction (p 10) bibliophiles like me will ooze with envy and delight in the breadth of his reading. Though "Between Two Worlds" was not a preaching method, it provides the reader with a variety of bits of wisdom and antidotes from several humbling decades of preaching at All Souls' Church in London. Though given only cursory treatment, the author does not fail to acknowledge the role of rhetoric and communication in preaching and argues quite practically that all sermons should have a 'single point of persuasion.' Using his broad scope of reading, Stott uses many delightful quotations from sources likely to be unfamiliar to most readers, to make numerous practical suggestions for how to craft illustrations, introductions, and conclusions. These benefits are accompanied by a warm and humble, pastoral tone that encourages aspiring and current preachers to strive for excellence in the both the pulpit and the study. For this reason, I can eagerly recommend this book to anyone who aspires to speak the Word of God to His people. show less