8. Listening and Engaging
8
Listening and Engaging
John Stott on the Gospel and Our Culture
In this chapter I want to explore one of the most interesting aspects of the theology of John Stott, which has particular relevance to bringing the Christian faith and our secular culture into conversation—namely, the notion of “double listening.” This aspect of the discipleship of the mind is particularly important to Christian apologetics, allowing bridges to be built from the gospel to a wider culture beyond the churches. Yet it also opens up some deep theological questions, each worth exploring in its own right.
Stott is regarded by many—including myself—as one of the greatest and wisest evangelical voices of the twentieth century. In 2005, Time magazine named Stott as one of the one hundred most influential living people in the world. His passing in July 2011 has, I think, helped us to appreciate at least something of his full significance. Too many evangelicals since then have naively assumed that the mere replication of Stott’s style of preaching or the repetition of his theological commitments ensures the same success that he once enjoyed. This, it has to be said, reflects a rather shallow theology, which is lamentably inattentive to the significance of Stott’s personal disposition and his character as a statesman. Stott developed these qualities as part of his personal discipleship, and they were arguably fundamental to his influence. Others may have talked about the realities of the Christian faith; Stott went further and embodied them.
Stott was more than an evangelical statesman, however; he was also one of the most gifted evangelists of his generation, noted for his reflection on the core themes of the gospel and their implementation in the life and witness of the churches. Stott has been a major influence on my own thinking, especially on apologetics and how we might communicate the Christian faith today. One of his finest reflections on this point is to be found in his book Christian Mission in the Modern World, based on a set of lectures given in Oxford in 1975. I first read this work when I was serving in parish ministry in Nottingham in the early 1980s. I read it again in preparation for this chapter and was struck by how little his analysis had dated. Perhaps the examples Stott provides might now need updating; the basic ideas underlying them, however, remain important and helpful.
Stott’s fundamental point is that we need to develop a capacity for “double listening” if we are to avoid “the opposite pitfalls of unfaithfulness and irrelevance, and be able to speak God’s Word to God’s world with effectiveness today.” Stott’s concept of “double listening” invites comparison with the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of the “two horizons.” It demands immersion in both the text of Scripture and the lived realities of the world around us, as a means of bringing the gospel into connection with the world, faithfully and effectively: “I believe we are called to the difficult and even painful task of ‘double listening.’ That is, we are to listen carefully (although of course with differing degrees of respect) both to the ancient Word and to the modern world, in order to relate the one to the other with a combination of fidelity and sensitivity.”
For Stott, there is only one gospel, and we are not at liberty to play around with this. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge what he terms a “solemn responsibility to reinterpret it in terms meaningful to our own culture.” And this involves an act of theological translation, in which the gospel is interpreted in terms that our culture can understand.
Yet before we engage with Stott’s notion of “double listening” more fully, we need to explore some issues that hover in the background of his discussion of the effective yet faithful communication of the Christian gospel. One of the first questions we must address, Stott observes, is whether the New Testament presents us with only one formulation or articulation of the gospel. After assembling his evidence, Stott argues that we must affirm that there is “only one basic apostolic tradition of the gospel,” while at the same time pointing out that “the apostolic approach was ‘situational’”—in other words, that “different situations called forth different treatments.”
In my view, Stott is quite right on both points. The way the New Testament uses the term “gospel” clearly implies that it is something that is shared within and across the Christian communities of the early Christian world. Yet the New Testament also witnesses to a diversity of renderings of the gospel—something that is, I think, especially clear in the sermons recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, which is probably our most important witness to the early Christian preaching of the gospel, as opposed to Christian reflection on the intellectual and practical implications of the gospel, primarily found in the New Testament Letters.
Stott makes this point by inviting us to compare the very different approaches adopted by Paul in his sermon in the synagogue in Antioch and his address to the Areopagus in Athens; I would suggest that this point is made clearer still by comparing both of these with Peter’s great sermon on the day of Pentecost. It is the same gospel that is being proclaimed in each situation, to be sure—but we must note and respect the very different articulations of that gospel, reflecting the different audiences and their situations.
In his Pentecost sermon (Acts 2), addressing a Jewish audience, Peter quotes extensively from the Old Testament and shows how Jesus Christ fulfills its hopes. In his Areopagus speech (Acts 17), addressing a secular Greek audience who knew nothing about the Old Testament, Paul draws on ideas from Greek culture and poetry to convey some central gospel themes. It is indeed the same gospel; yet the mode of articulation is quite distinct, reflecting the different cultural contexts being engaged.
Stott thus considers whether the gospel is to be thought of as “culturally conditioned” on account of the historical and cultural circumstances of its original formulations and whether this requires that we make appropriate cultural adaptations in our own preaching of the gospel today. Stott begins by noting that God’s revelation took place in a specific cultural context and, in order to grasp it properly, we need to be able to “think ourselves back into that culture.” I think this is very clear. We must be careful to read the New Testament in its own context.
Stott’s point is that the New Testament is indeed a revealed document, but it is one that was revealed in a specific historical and cultural location and uses aspects of that cultural context to communicate God’s truth—such as cultural norms and vocabulary. To give an obvious example: we cannot appreciate the full significance of the father’s actions on seeing his son returning in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32) unless we are aware that, in terms of the culture of the day, running to meet someone was seen as undignified. That’s why an ahistorical reading of the New Testament is as impossible as it is meaningless.
Stott immediately and rightly also makes a counterpoint. This does not mean that the gospel is limited to its original historical and cultural context or that we are forced to cut our thinking loose from Scripture in order to connect up with contemporary culture: “It is comparatively easy to be faithful if we do not care about being contemporary, and easy also to be contemporary if we do not bother to be faithful.”
Now I cannot help but think that, while Stott articulates a useful principle, the difficulties really begin to emerge as we try to apply it. I will gladly defend him here, however. Stott helps clarify the parameters of our reflection, identifying the tasks we must undertake. We cannot simply read out the words of the New Testament and expect our readers to understand them; we need to interpret them and translate them into the cultural vernacular. Yet this process of interpretation and translation takes place within a certain framework, which both informs and limits what we can do.
Let us also remember that every act of translation from the Greek of the New Testament into English is an act of interpretation! In trying to translate Paul’s important term dikaiōsis into English, we end up having to interpret it, whether immediately or subsequently. If we translate it as “justification,” we still have to explain what this word means, as most would now understand the normal English sense of that word to mean offering an explanation for our actions or getting the right-hand margins of a document aligned on our computers. If we paraphrase the word, we have to defend the alternative forms of words that we use. You might think of Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of Romans 5:1 in The Message, where he interprets justification as to “set us right with [God], make us fit for him” or the Good News translation—now showing its age—that renders the opening part of the verse as, “Now that we have been put right with God through faith.”
There is indeed a tension between being faithful and contemporary—that is to say, faithful to Scripture and contemporary in our communication. Stott is clearly implying that this is a creative tension, however, that opens up space for us to maintain theological integrity on the one hand and cultural relevance on the other. This, of course, is the basic principle Stott expressed in his notion of “double listening,” which probably received its definitive formulation in his landmark book The Contemporary Christian (1992), the British edition of which was famously subtitled “An Urgent Plea for Double Listening.” (For reasons that I don’t quite understand, the American edition altered this to “Applying God’s Word to Today’s World”—a nice turn of phrase, yet it doesn’t make quite the same point.)
Stott understood “double listening” as embodying an attentiveness toward Scripture on the one hand and the cultural idioms and rational habits of the secular world on the other. His objective was to allow the richness of the Christian gospel to be communicated to the world, in terms that it could understand: “We listen to the Word with humble reverence, anxious to understand it, and resolved to believe and obey what we come to understand. We listen to the world with critical alertness, anxious to understand it too, and resolved not necessarily to believe and obey it, but to sympathize with it and to seek grace to discover how the gospel relates to it.” It is not enough to understand the world of the New Testament; we are called on to connect the gospel with a world outside the church and thus unfamiliar to many who are engaged in professional Christian ministry. This calls for an act of cultural and intellectual empathy, in which the preacher tries to inhabit two worlds and forge bridges between them.
Stott found a precedent for this approach in the writings of Arthur Michael Ramsey (1904–88), archbishop of Canterbury from 1961 to 1974. Ramsey suggested that the Christian churches needed to enter into the minds and souls of whose who had no connection with the church or who had lost whatever connections they once had: “We state and commend the faith only in so far as we go out and put ourselves inside the doubts of the doubters, the questions of the questioners and the loneliness of those who have lost their way.” Although critical of Ramsey at other points, Stott clearly felt that such an act of empathy was both necessary and possible: “Unless we listen attentively to the voices of secular society, struggle to understand them, and feel with people in their frustration, anger, bewilderment and despair, weeping with those who weep, we will lack authenticity as the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth. Instead, we will run the risk (as has often been said) of answering questions no one is asking, scratching where nobody is itching, supplying goods for which there is no demand.”
Christian preachers needed to listen to the world in order to understand its cries of pain and the sighs of the oppressed. Yet this listening demanded skills of those who felt called upon to undertake it, above all a deep immersion in the world of Scripture and secular Western culture.
So how do we “listen to the world”? Stott himself set out two main approaches, both of which were incorporated into his own ministry: first, through private conversations with experts in various fields, which lie behind Stott’s sermons on issues facing Christians today—such as industrial relations and economic issues; second, through reading groups, such as that which Stott began in 1958 at All Souls, Langham Place, and which he developed further during the 1970s. The “reading group” initially consisted of about a dozen young graduates and professional people, “all of whom were modern young men and women anxious to relate the gospel to the modern world.” The books that they read included Richard Dawkins’s Selfish Gene (1976). But how well, we must ask, did they understand it? Reading groups are prone to misread the texts under consideration, especially when these lie outside the group’s cultural and academic competencies. Recent historical study has suggested that the culture represented at All Souls, Langham Place during the late 1960s and early 1970s was sociologically limited. All Souls remained a stubbornly middle-class enclave, and this inevitably affected Stott’s cultural judgments on the one hand and his theological translations into the cultural vernacular on the other.
If Stott’s concept of “double listening” is to be criticized, it is in the manner it was implemented, which in effect (though not in intention) made it dependent on “filters” of the reading groups at All Souls. The aim of listening more attentively and intelligibly to the modern world cannot be faulted. Yet while the questions raised by members of Stott’s reading group might illuminate how these Christians understood secular culture, in particular why they found it so problematic, this does not cast much light on how secular culture (mis)understands Christianity. It has always seemed to me that the best way for Christians to enter into a secular mind-set is not through reading books, but through encouraging Christians to be citizens of both worlds and thus helping their fellow Christians to bridge the gap between the church and the world. Someone who is bilingual does not need a translator.
Stott himself clearly grasped the nettle of translating theology into the cultural vernacular. In my view, one of his best attempts to do this is to be found in his 1982 book Between Two Worlds, in which he explores the role of the preacher as the one who bridges the world of Scripture and the contemporary world, allowing the realities of the gospel to be grasped by the audience. It is an outstanding work of its kind, showing how the significance of Jesus Christ can be “translated” into the idioms of modern culture. A short extract will help illustrate this point: “To encounter Christ is to touch reality and experience transcendence. He gives us a sense of self-worth or personal significance, because He assures us of God’s love for us. He sets us free from guilt because He died for us and from paralyzing fear because He reigns.” All of these statements are thoroughly grounded in the New Testament. Yet Stott has succeeded in “translating” them, not simply in the sense of making them intelligible but in the deeper sense of enabling the gospel to connect with contemporary cultural concerns, moods, and anxieties. In doing this, Stott does not seek to deny or downplay the role of the Holy Spirit in biblical interpretation but simply to carry out the responsibility of the office of the preacher.
So what is this gospel? Stott’s answer is brilliant and arresting in its simplicity: “God’s good news is Jesus.” As the study of Christian history makes clear, each generation has tried to translate the foundational idea that “God’s good news is Jesus” into its own cultural vernacular, while remaining faithful to Scripture. I fully concede that some of those attempts were misguided, some were well-intentioned yet flawed, and others were simply brilliant. Yet all are provisional statements of the gospel within a cultural context; none is final, precisely because culture changes and we cannot leave the gospel stranded by insisting that it be stated in some specific historical form, well adapted to the past but useless on today’s streets.
Christianity needs to be explained. The Bible needs to be interpreted and applied. And both involve us, as active agents, doing our best to translate the realities of the gospel into the categories of the contemporary—not to reduce the gospel to contemporary ideas but to allow it to gain access to people’s minds and lives, so that it can begin its work of transformation and renewal. Stott was a master of the art of cultural translation, seeing this as opening doors for the entry of the gospel into the souls of his audiences.
Let me return to Stott’s landmark statement: “God’s good news is Jesus.” When I first read those words, I was thrilled. I was getting fed up with dry and overintellectualized theories about Jesus Christ that were often presented as if the theories were somehow to be equated with the gospel or represented the totality of the New Testament witness to its central figure. Stott’s reflections on some passages describing early Christian evangelism in Acts led him to this powerful conclusion, which I hope is uncontroversial: “Jesus Christ is the heart and soul of the gospel.” I found this recall to basics to be both refreshing and liberating. And, in my view, Stott’s wisdom at this point must be given due weight in our thinking.
The gospel is about what J. Oswald Sanders (1902–92) called “Christ incomparable”—to borrow the title of his classic devotional work of 1952. As one of the greatest missionary strategists of his day, Sanders knew that Jesus Christ had to be proclaimed in all his radiance, wonder, and glory. There was no place for proclaiming a reduced and impoverished Christ to the world. To challenge and persuade the world, we must proclaim Christ to the world in all his fullness and wonder. Furthermore, Sanders alerts us to the dangers of focusing simply on expository correctness, which can too easily lead to a focus on the biblical text that unhelpfully diverts attention from its substance—the living reality of Jesus Christ.
It’s a point that is made frequently in the writings of C. S. Lewis, who often points out that we risk substituting a theory about Jesus for the living personal reality of Jesus. The gospel is not a theory; it is a person. Now of course we need to explain why this person is so significant, and that involves interpretation. Yet this interpretation is to be added to the personal reality of Christ; what concerns me is that some are reducing the personal reality of Christ to the affirmation of right verbal formulas about him. This represents, as J. I. Packer shrewdly observed, a doctrine of “justification by words”—signaling theological orthodoxy at a purely verbal level.
I see this problem as lying behind one of the more worrying features of British evangelicalism today—a failure to produce devotional works of the caliber of those which so enriched the spiritual lives of earlier generations and helped them in their quest for spiritual growth. I have already mentioned Sanders’s Christ Incomparable; we might easily add other classics, such as Oswald Chambers’s My Utmost for His Highest, published in 1924. A fetish for excessive theological precision and an impoverishing move toward seeing Christ through reductive theoretical frameworks has led to a loss of devotional focus here—not least because it encourages an unhelpful tendency to think of “growth in faith” in terms of familiarization with theological theories rather than with a deepened love for, and commitment to, Jesus Christ. Discipleship is about following Christ, not simply locating him at the right place on a theological map.
Let me make it clear that I write these words as someone who repeatedly insists on the importance of theology and affirms the critical importance of grasping the true identity and significance of Christ, which is safeguarded by the theological framework of the creeds, especially the Nicene Creed. My concern is those who detach doctrines about Christ from the person of Christ, as he is known and encountered through prayer and worship. Rightly understood, such doctrines are walls and fences, designed to preserve what is essential and special about Jesus Christ. Yet the church is called to proclaim Christ, not preach about walls and fences.
It is time to draw the threads of this chapter together. I have often been struck by some words of the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner, in his important reflections on Christian mission. For Brunner, the gospel demanded and deserved constant rearticulation and restatement, without losing sight of its changeless and timeless relevance: “There is indeed an evangelium perennis but not a theologia perennis. . . . The gospel remains the same, but our understanding of the gospel must ever be won anew.” We have work to do, in stating the gospel in terms and genres that can connect with our audiences, listening to them as we try to use their language to express the realities of the gospel. The challenge is to ensure that we navigate a proper trajectory between being faithful to Scripture and capable of connecting with contemporary culture. That, I suggest, is where the real debate lies—how best to do this. And I suggest further that it is part of the process of discipleship, as we try to value the legacy of our past without being locked into a dead and bygone world.
Stott thus sets out an aspect of the discipleship of the mind that seems to me to be of critical importance. As part of our growth in faith, we are called upon to know both the Christian faith and the wider culture that lies beyond the walls of the church, with a view to bringing these into conversation. My own work at the interface of Christianity and the natural sciences has made me aware of the importance of this theme and brought home to me how we need to encourage others to inhabit the borderlands of faith and culture. Stott’s call for a “double listening” remains a wise strategy; we need even greater wisdom today in working out how to implement it in an increasingly complex and fragmented culture.
Based on lectures given at Central Hall, Westminster, London, on April 26, 2013.