Preface
Preface
Nobody likes being labelled. For the labels which other people stick on us are usually uncomplimentary. Their object is often to restrict us to, even imprison us in, a rather narrow stereotype. Yet labels are useful for purposes of identification, and others are sure to affix one to us if we decline to wear one ourselves.
Certainly in the scientific world labels are indispensable. For some 250 years successive generations of scientists have been grateful to the Swedish botanist Linnaeus for developing his binomial system of classification.
Theological taxonomy is considerably more difficult, however! One could attempt it, I suppose. How, for example, would you label me? Perhaps ‘genus: Christian, species: Evangelical, subspecies: Anglican’. But one would soon get stuck. For to classify organisms according to their structure demands a high degree of precision, whereas to classify human beings according to their beliefs would be a much more flexible and fluid task.
Biologists themselves are sometimes divided into ‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’, according to their tendency either to unite racial forms into a single species or to separate them into several. ‘Lumping’ and ‘splitting’ also goes on in the Christian community. Yet both processes become unhealthy if they are taken too far. Some Christians go on everlastingly splitting until they find themselves no longer a church but a sect. They remind me of the preacher described by Tom Sawyer, who ‘thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving’.1 Others lump everybody together indiscriminately until nobody is excluded.
Avoiding both extremes, we recognize that there is still some genuine overlap between the Catholic, liberal and evangelical streams of Christendom. Let me give two examples which, even if specifically Anglican, illustrate the point.
Michael Ramsey (Archbishop of Canterbury from 1961 to 1974) called himself an Anglican Catholic. He was nevertheless committed to the gospel of justification by faith only, which, as I will argue later, is an essential evangelical belief. He went further and affirmed that during the fifty years between 1889 and 1939 ‘the cardinal convictions of the Reformation’ were unhesitatingly held by ‘all typical Anglicans’, namely ‘that works cannot earn salvation, that salvation is by grace alone received through faith, that nothing can add to the sole mediatorship of the cross of Christ, and that Holy Scripture is the supreme authority in doctrine’.2
My second example comes from the pen of John Habgood (Archbishop of York from 1983 to 1995) in his book Confessions of a Conservative Liberal. He writes that ‘liberal’ for him ‘represents an openness in the search for truth which I believe is profoundly necessary for the health of religion . . . It is essentially about honesty.’ At the same time it is honesty ‘rooted in what God has given, both in revelation and in the created world. Hence “conservative”.’3 Although John Habgood has sometimes applied to evangelical Christians the rather rude epithet ‘biblicist’, his sketch of the tension between the given and the open, humility and honesty, revelation and tradition, ‘the believing heart and the critical mind’ (p. 9), is one which – at least in principle – all evangelicals should be able to endorse.
I try not to forget, therefore, in what I go on to write, that the three broad Christian schools of thought (Catholic, liberal and evangelical) are not always mutually exclusive, for along with their divergences there are points of convergence. Indeed, we rejoice and give thanks that the great majority of Christian believers affirm the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creeds, and that the great majority of Protestants still affirm many Reformation truths. In other words, not all evangelical essentials are evangelical distinctives. At the same time, biblically and historically, there are some truths which evangelical Christians have always emphasized, and which they see themselves (with due modesty, I hope) as holding in trust for the rest of the church.
While preparing this edition for inclusion in the Global Christian Library, I have been conscious that most of my references belong to a British or North American context and may on that account seem inappropriate to an international readership. So I could have eliminated them. But I decided to retain them for two reasons. First, each of them makes a point which is applicable to Christians in every culture. Secondly, the fact is that I am white and Western, indeed English and Anglican. To forget or deny this would breach my personal integrity. Besides, readers should not have any great difficulty in transposing to their own culture what I write and quote. For ‘evangelical’ is a noble word; it transcends culture.
Why then do I offer a new edition of this small book to a global readership? Readers have the right to expect authors to take them into their confidence regarding their reasons for writing. Is it merely that I suffer from what I believe Juvenal called the insanabile cacoëthes scribendi (the incurable itch to write)? I hope not. I have at least two conscious motives.
First, I continue to be profoundly grieved by our evangelical tendency to fragment. During the last half-century the evangelical movement worldwide has grown out of all recognition in numbers, church life, scholarship and leadership – but not, I think, in cohesion. Nowadays people refer to the multiple ‘tribes’ of evangelicalism, and like to place a qualifying adjective in front of ‘evangelical’. There are many to choose from: conservative, liberal, radical, progressive, open, Reformed, charismatic, postmodern, etc. But is this really necessary? While holding with a good conscience whatever our particular understanding of the evangelical faith may be, is it not possible for us to acknowledge that what unites us as evangelical people is much greater than what divides us? Must we for ever remain what Bishop Stephen Neill called ‘obstinate individualists’4 and consequently, in the words of Archbishop Sir Marcus Loane of Sydney, ‘have as much internal cohesion as the proverbial rope of sand’?5
I am not so naïve as to imagine that this little book will solve the problems of our uncertain evangelical identity or our debilitating evangelical disunity, or will provide a flag under which we can all rally. Yet I do hope and pray that it will lay some misunderstandings to rest and will help us to combine a commitment to essential evangelical truth with an authentic generosity of mind and spirit.
Secondly and more personally, as I approach the end of my life on earth, and as I complete more than sixty years of privileged Christian discipleship, I would like to leave behind me, as a kind of spiritual legacy, this little statement of evangelical faith, this personal appeal to the rising generation. Of course I have changed over the last six decades. Yet I hope these changes have been not the denial of anything I previously affirmed, but rather the enrichment of what was inadequate, the deepening of what was shallow, and the clarification of what was obscure. The great evangelical truths remain. This is how I would wish to be remembered and judged, as I prepare to stand before the judgment seat of Christ.
John Stott
New Year, 1999 (revised 2002)