John Stott - Evangelical Truth

INTER-VARSITY PRESS

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John Stott, 2003

John Stott has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

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Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture references are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, niv Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

First published 1999

Reprinted 1999 (twice), 2001, 2002

New edition 2003

Reprinted 2004

Reprinted in this format 2011

New reissue 2015

This edition 2021

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9781789742886

eBook ISBN: 9781783593767

Typeset in Great Britain by CRB Associates, Potterhanworth, Lincolnshire

Printed in Great Britain by Ashford Colour Press Ltd, Gosport, Hampshire

eBook by CRB Associates, Potterhanworth, Lincolnshire

Produced on paper from sustainable sources.

Inter-Varsity Press publishes Christian books that are true to the Bible and that communicate the gospel, develop discipleship and strengthen the church for its mission in the world.

IVP originated within the Inter-Varsity Fellowship, now the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship, a student movement connecting Christian Unions in universities and colleges throughout Great Britain, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. Website: www.uccf.org.uk. That historic association is maintained, and all senior IVP staff and committee members subscribe to the UCCF Basis of Faith.

All the royalties from this book have been irrevocably assigned to Langham Literature. Langham Literature is a ministry of Langham Partnership, founded by John Stott. Chris Wright is the International Ministries Director.

Langham Literature provides Majority World preachers, scholars and seminary libraries with evangelical books and electronic resources through publishing and distribution, grants and discounts. They also foster the creation of indigenous evangelical books in many languages through writers grants, strengthening local evangelical publishing houses and investment in major regional literature projects.

For further information on Langham Literature, and the rest of Langham Partnership, visit the website at .

2021 is the centenary of John Stotts birth. IVP is delighted to celebrate the timeless wisdom and continuing relevance of Stotts teaching. We are pleased to mark the Stott 100 celebrations alongside the organizations he founded, his other publishers and his literary executors.

To find out more about Stotts life, teaching and continuing impact, please visit , or find out more at .

This volume was first published in June 1999 as Evangelical Truth: A Personal Statement . It was reissued, with a few changes and additions, in September 2003 as a volume in the Global Christian Library with the sub-title A Personal Plea for Unity, Integrity and Faithfulness . This new reissue includes a number of minor changes to make this key book accessible for a new generation of readers.

I am not so nave 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.

... 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.

(from the preface to the 2003 edition)

Introduction: Evangelical essentials

Patrick Johnstone, Operation World (OM Publishing, 1996 edition), p. 35.

Michael Saward, Evangelicals on the Move (Mowbray, 1987), p. 1.

David Hare, Racing Demon (Faber, 1990), p. 59.

Culture Wars (HarperCollins, 1991), p. 144.

Martin Luther, A Commentary on St. Pauls Epistle to the Galatians (James Clarke, 1953), p. 53.

Hugh Latimer, Works , vol. 1, pp. 3031.

John Jewel, Works , vol. 2, p. 1034.

The Character of a Methodist (1742), p. 10.

Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham (Harper-Zondervan, 1997), p. 160.

Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Eerdmans, 1947), p. 26.

See Fundamentalism by James Barr (SCM, 1966) and Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism by John S. Spong (Harper, 1991). Harriet A. Harries considers James Barrs critique valid, and develops it. She distinguishes three meanings of the word fundamentalism: (1) a historical movement of the 1920s (in opposition, that is, to modernism), (2) an identity still assumed by old-style separatist fundamentalists, politicized neo-fundamentalists and occasionally also by evangelicals, and (3) a mentality which has affected much of mainstream evangelicalism ( Fundamentalism and Evangelicals , OUP, 1998, p. 313). It is clearly important to distinguish between the history, the identity and the mentality, and Harriet Harriess thorough study deserves careful evaluation. But evangelicals will resist the continuing attempt to identify them with fundamentalists or to accuse them of having a rationalistic, fundamentalist mind-set (e.g. pp. 1115).

C. F. H. Henry, op cit., pp. 3637.

Rowland Croucher, Recent Trends among Evangelicals (Albatross-Marc, 1986), p. 7.

Clive Calver and Rob Warner, Together We Stand (Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), pp. 128130.

From a chapter entitled Lausanne Between Berlin and Geneva in Reich Gottes oder Weltgemeinschaft , ed. W. Knneth and P. Beyerhaus (Verlag der Liebenzeller Mission, 1975), pp. 307308.

The Evangelical Anglican Identity Problem: An Analysis , by J. I. Packer (Latimer House, Oxford, 1978), pp. 1523. Dr Alister McGrath adopted and expounded these six fundamental or controlling principles in his book Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity (Hodder and Stoughton, 1994), pp. 4988.

D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1930s to the 1980s (Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 3. Dr Bebbington elaborates these four characteristics, with many historical examples, on pp. 319. They have been widely accepted. Clive Calver and Rob Warner adopted them in their book Together We Stand , although Rob Warner added two further characteristics, namely Christocentric and longing for revival (see pp. 94105). Dr Bebbingtons quadrilateral is also quoted by John Martin in Gospel People? (SPCK, 1997), pp. 9 and 13, although he changed the order and added the search for holiness.