Stott on the Christian Life (eBook)

Chapter 2

A Christian Mind

When it was announced that Billy Graham was to lead an evangelistic mission at Cambridge University in 1955, Canon H. K. Luce, the headmaster of Durham School, wrote a letter of concern to The Times newspaper in which he lamented “the recent increase of fundamentalism among university students.” Fundamentalism, he maintained, had no place in an institution that existed for the advancement of learning. He concluded, “Is it not time that our religious leaders made it plain that while they respect, or even admire, Dr Graham’s sincerity and personal power, they cannot regard fundamentalism as likely to issue in anything but disillusionment and disaster for educated men and women in this twentieth-century world?” This provoked a spate of follow-up letters. Michael Ramsey, then bishop of Durham and later archbishop of Canterbury, wrote in support of Luce, describing “the new fundamentalist movement” as “harmful.”1

In a letter published on August 25, Stott himself weighed in. He expressed surprise that so far no one contributing to the debate had paused to define “fundamentalism.” He noted the term’s noble origins as a means to describe those who emphasized the fundamentals of biblical faith. Nevertheless, he recognized that in recent years it had become associated with “certain extremes and extravagances” so that it was almost a synonym for “obscurantism.” “It is . . . in this sense that Dr Billy Graham and others associated with him,” including Stott himself, “have repudiated it,” he wrote. Stott nevertheless affirmed the necessity and authority of divine revelation. “The real point at issue in this controversy . . . seems to be the place of the mind in the perception of divine truth.” He agreed with the statement made by Ramsey that “revelation is essentially reasonable.” But, citing Isaiah 55:9, 1 Corinthians 1:21, and Matthew 11:25, he added, “It is often in conflict with the unenlightened reason of sinful men.” As such, he concluded, conversion is not what Ramsey called “the stifling of the mind” but “the humble (and intelligent) submission of the mind to a divine revelation.”2

Stott’s courteous yet resolute defense of evangelical orthodoxy and biblical authority in the face of its cultural despisers was clear. But also striking was the careful way he distanced himself from an anti-intellectual fundamentalism that stood for “the bigoted rejection of all biblical criticism, a mechanical view of inspiration and an excessively literalistic interpretation of Scripture.”3 Stott actively encouraged other evangelicals to drop the term “fundamentalist”4 and unambiguously aligned himself with “the new evangelicals,” who had begun to distinguish themselves from fundamentalism. While wanting to remain true to traditional Protestant orthodoxy and the authority of Scripture, they rejected what they saw as fundamentalism’s anti-intellectualism and separatism. Though still largely conservative in their politics, they nevertheless deplored fundamentalism’s lack of cultural involvement and apathy over social issues. They spoke of themselves as new evangelicals or neoevangelicals, although, as their influence grew, they were soon thought of as the evangelicals, with fundamentalism becoming regarded as a subculture within orthodoxy.

A number of events helped give the group an identity and bring it to national prominence. In 1942 the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) was established under the presidency of Harold J. Ockenga (1903–1985), pastor of Park Street Congregational Church in Boston. Ockenga then became the first president of Fuller Theological Seminary, founded in 1947 to provide evangelical scholarship of the highest standard and to encourage a more culturally engaged ministry.5 The movement’s leading spokesman was Carl F. H. Henry (1913–2003), who lectured at Fuller Seminary from its beginning and was a founding member of the NAE, as well as an advisor to Billy Graham. In 1956, Henry left Fuller to become the first editor of the new magazine Christianity Today, which became the mouthpiece of the new evangelicals.6 It was avowedly scholarly and orthodox, and yet also popular. Billy Graham aligned himself with the new evangelicals from an early stage, and his growing prominence brought the new evangelicals to the attention of the wider public. The growing confidence of the new evangelicals also marked them off from the more pessimistic fundamentalists. The advent of liberalism and the questioning of orthodoxy had tended to place orthodox believers on the defensive, giving them a separatist, survivalist mentality. Now they were growing in number and producing able scholars capable of defending the faith. Stott shared the perspective of the new evangelicals, including their concern for an intellectually robust Christianity.

A Christian Mind

In the early 1960s, John Stott was asked by James Houston to speak at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada. Stott returned to Regent on a number of occasions and was impressed by its attempts to develop a distinctive Christian approach to a range of secular issues and to train laypeople.7 He was also influenced by Harry Blamires, an Anglican theologian and literary critic who had been mentored by C. S. Lewis. In his book The Christian Mind, Blamires had called for the development of a Christian response to secularism,8 and its influence on Stott is clear from the extensive use he makes of it in his own work. Blamires defines a Christian mind as “a mind trained, informed, equipped to handle data of secular controversy within a framework of reference which is constructed of Christian presuppositions.”9 A Christian thinker, says Blamires, “challenges current prejudices,” “disturbs the complacent,” “obstructs the busy pragmatists,” “questions the foundations of all about him,” and “is a nuisance.”10 Blamires deplores the lack of “a Christian mind” in the contemporary church. “It is difficult to do justice in words to the complete loss of intellectual morale in the twentieth-century Church. One cannot characterize it without having recourse to language which will sound hysterical and melodramatic.”11

Blamires’s approach contrasted with the “simple gospel” espoused by Nash, who was wary of apologetics and doctrine. Oliver Barclay says, “Bash was always frightened of the danger of going ‘intellectual.’”12 Stott never lost his appreciation of Nash’s involvement in his life, but in this respect his own sharp mind and his exposure to other influences reshaped his outlook. And soon he set about reshaping the outlook of British evangelicalism.

In 1972, Stott gave the presidential address at the UK Inter-Varsity Fellowship annual conference and used the occasion to structure his thinking on the place of the mind in the Christian life. His address was later published as Your Mind Matters and is the clearest statement of his concern for a Christian mind, a concern that runs throughout his work.13 His intention was to warn against what he called “the misery and menace of mindless Christianity.”14 Ideas rule the world, he says. So, if we want to win the world for Christ, then we must “destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).

Stott begins by expressing his fear that what Paul said about the Jews of his day is true of contemporary Christians: “They have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge” (Rom. 10:2). Too often, says Stott, evangelicals are “keen but clueless.”15 He also laments a widespread anti-intellectualism in the wider culture of his day. The world no longer asks, “Is it true?” but “Does it work?” Today we might add the question “How does it make me feel?” But the same anti-intellectualism, argues Stott, is in the church. As examples, he cites Catholic ritualism, which substitutes mere performance for intelligent worship; ecumenical social action, which opts for joint activism over a search for doctrinal agreement; and Pentecostal Christianity, which makes “experience the major criterion of truth . . . putting our subjective experience above the revealed truth of God.”16

Stott recognizes the need for both intellect and emotion in Christianity, but, clearly for him, “the greater danger is anti-intellectualism and a surrender to emotionalism.”17 It is a danger he sees in evangelistic preaching that “consists of nothing, but an appeal for decision.”18 It is a danger he sees in “the contemporary hunger for vivid, first-hand, emotional experiences, and in the enthronement of experience as the criterion of truth.”19 It is a danger that, if anything, is more acute now than it was in Stott’s day.

We need to remember that Stott’s emphasis on the mind is largely addressed to evangelical Christians, with a view to correcting their anti-intellectualism. In his dialogue with liberal...