A plea for evangelical Christianity
By John Stott

It is not unusual to hear people use the term "evangelical" as if it were a synonym for "evangelistic." One of my colleagues received a letter of instructions about a speaking engagement he had soon to fulfill. His correspondent informed him that, because they were all Christians in their group, they did "not want anything evangelical!" He meant, of course, that they were not asking for an evangelistic address. But the words "evangelical" and "evangelistic" should not be confused.

The adjective "evangelistic" describes an activity, that of spreading the gospel, so that we speak of evangelistic campaigns and evangelistic services. "Evangelical," on the other hand, describes a theology, what the apostle Paul called "the truth of the gospel." Ideally, of course, the two words belong to one another, because they both contain the "evangel," the gospel. Since, strictly speaking, an "evangelical" is a person who believes the doctrines of the gospel, and "evangelist" is a person who proclaims them.

If "evangelical" describes a theology, that theology is biblical theology. It is the contention of evangelicals that they are plain Bible Christians. Their intention is not to be partisan. That is, they do not cling to certain tenets for the sake of maintaining their identity as a "party."

If evangelical theology is biblical theology, it follows that it is not a new-fangled "ism," a modern brand of Christianity, but an ancient form, indeed the original one. It is New Testament Christianity. The points at issue in Christ's controversies with his contemporaries, notably with the Pharisees and the Sadducees, are still burning issues today, and that evangelicals are simply trying to be faithful to the principles which he enunciated.

The same is true of the apostles who further elaborated these principles. It is our claim that the evangelical faith is the apostolic faith. At least we accept the unique authority of the apostles of Jesus Christ and desire to submit to their teaching. We observe that they made their own instruction the rule by which men's opinions were to be tested. Paul expected obedience from his readers. He tells the Thessalonians to note and to shun anybody who is not living "in accord with the tradition that you received from us" and who "refuses to obey what we say in this letter" (2 Thessalonians 3:6,14).

Similarly, John, writing to a church or churches troubled by false teachers, warned them that "any one who goes ahead and does not abide in the doctrine of Christ does not have God; he who abides in the doctrine has both the Father and the Son" (2 John 9). It is likely that the false teachers were Gnostics who claimed for themselves a special, esoteric enlightenment. In their opinion they were the advanced thinkers-the progressives.

This appeal of the New Testament authors to their readers to be loyal to the primitive apostolic teaching is frequent and urgent. The writers refer to a certain body of revealed teaching which is variously described as "the good news," "the faith," or (more fully) "the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints," "the truth," "the sound doctrine," "the traditions," "the pattern of sound words," "what you have heard from the beginning," and "the deposit."

This was the message which the apostles had "preached," "delivered," "taught," and "entrusted" to the church, so that the early Christians could be said to have "heard," "received," "learned," and "believed" it, to "know" it and "have" it, to "stand" in it, to be "established" in it, and to be in the process of being "saved" by it. Now the New Testament authors write to the churches to "remind" them of this original message. They urge them to "recall" it, not to "drift" from it but to "pay close attention" to it, to "stand firm" in it, to "follow" it, to "continue" in it and let it "abide" in them, to "hold" it fast, to "guard" it as a precious treasure, and to "contend" for it earnestly against all false teachers.

This harking back to the past fills many of our contemporaries with dismay. It seems to them to condemn the Christian church to stagnation and the Christian faith to sterility. They desire to move with the times, they say; to be modern in their views, not ancient; and to be flexible also, not set forever in the same old mold.

Indeed, there has probably never been a generation more suspicious of the old and more confident in the new than the present generation. It is a generation in revolt against what it has inherited from the past (in many cases understandably and justifiably so). It hates tradition and loves revolution.

Such a wholesale repudiation of what is old is, to say the least, extremely naïve. Nevertheless, the opposite tendency of resistance to all change is equally mistaken. Time does not stand still. History is change. Far from impeding progress, for example in scientific discovery and social justice, Christians should be in the vanguard of advance.

The Christian's welcome to change must be discriminating, however. It does not include the apostolic doctrine of the New Testament. Our responsibility towards this is not to abandon it but to hold it fast, not to modify it but to maintain it in its pristine purity.

Although the "oldness" of the Christian faith is a stumbling-block to many, it is a stumbling block which cannot be removed. Christianity is Christ himself, together with the prophetic and apostolic witness to Christ. It depends on a historical event (the birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and Spirit-gift of Jesus) and on a historical testimony by eyewitnesses. In the nature of the case neither the event nor the witness can be changed or superseded. We live in the twenty-first century, but we are tethered to the first. What Jesus Christ said and did was unique and final. So is the interpretative teaching of the apostles, his chosen eyewitnesses and ambassadors. In him, the word made flesh, and in the apostolic witness to him, God's self-revelation was brought to its completion. This completed revelation, by God's providence preserved for us in Scripture, the church of every age is called to hold fast.

It is in this sense that every Christian is (or should be) "conservative," because it is his duty to conserve the truth which has been handed down to him from Christ and the apostles. In everything else, however-in social and ecclesiastical structures, in patterns of ministry and liturgical forms, in Christian living and missionary outreach, and in much else besides-the Christian is obliged to be as radical as Scripture commands and is free to be as radical as Scripture allows.

So Christianity is old, and is getting older every year. Yet it is also new, new every morning. We must investigate this "newness" further.

First, what is old needs to be freshly understood. When we said that God's revelation reached its climax and completion in Christ and in the apostles' teaching about Christ, we neither said nor meant that we have no more to learn. The Holy Spirit has continued and still continues to teach the people of God. But his continuing instruction is rightly conceived in terms of illumination, not revelation. Revelation is the historical unveiling of God in Christ; illumination is the unveiling of men's minds to see what God has disclosed in Christ. God intends no new revelation for the church, but rather a progressive understanding of the old. Indeed, it is precisely this which he has given down the centuries. Step by step, often through painful conflict and controversy, the Holy Spirit of truth has enabled the church to increase its grasp of the biblical faith and so to clarify its belief and message.

Secondly, what is old needs to be freshly applied. Christianity is often dismissed as irrelevant. The fault does not lie with Christianity, however, whose truths and principles have an eternal validity, but with the church which has frequently failed to reapply them to the modern situation. Those who study Scripture carefully are constantly impressed with its contemporary relevance. And it is the task of Christian preachers and teachers to demonstrate this relevance. Preaching includes the application as well as the exposition of Scripture. To preach is to relate God's never-changing word to man's ever-changing world.

Third, what is old needs to be freshly experienced. The Jesus of history is the Christ of faith, whom we know and love, trust, and obey. After every fresh experience of the saving power of Christ, the Christian can say that Christ has "put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God" (Psalm 40:3). The truth is that everything old has to be freshened if it is to remain new. Old silver must be polished, old friendships kept in good repair, old memories revived, old resolutions repeated, and (in the same way) old truths recovered.

Every Christian knows the tendency to spiritual staleness. Only by a fresh appropriation of our inheritance in Christ can the old faith be new to us and seem new to others. As P.T. Forsyth expressed it in Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, the preacher "must be original in the sense that his truth is his own, but not in the sense that it has been no one else's. You must distinguish between novelty and freshness. The preacher is not to be original in the sense of being absolutely new, but in the sense of being fresh, of appropriating for his own personality, or his own age, what is the standing possession of the Church, and its perennial trust from Christ."

Loyalty to the Apostolic Faith

We have considered how what is old must be ever freshly appropriated and applied; we must now emphasize the need while striving to speak relevantly to modern man, to remain loyal to the old, the original, the apostolic faith.

Every true reform movement has involved a return at some point to the New Testament norm. The most notable example is the sixteenth-century Reformation, which was a radical attempt under God to purge the church of its medieval accretions and corruptions. The Reformers understood their task quite clearly. They were neither iconoclasts nor innovators. Their ambition was to reform the church by conforming it to the requirements of God's word. As Lancelot Andrewes was to say at the beginning of the seventeenth century: renovators modo sumus, non novatores, "we are renovators not innovators."

It is particularly interesting to note that their recovery of original New Testament truth was nevertheless condemned by their opponents as a dangerous innovation. This charge they vigorously denied. Thus, in his commentary on Galatians, Luther could write: "We teach no new thing, but we repeat and establish old things, which the apostles and all godly teachers have taught before us."

The English Reformers were equally clear. Hugh Latimer cried: "But ye say, it is new learning. Now I tell you it is the old learning." Bishop John Jewel insists much on this point in his famous Apology (1562). For example, "it is not our doctrine that we bring you this day; we wrote it not, we found it not out, we are not the inventors of it; we bring you nothing but what the old fathers of the church, what the apostles, what Christ our Savior himself hath brought before us."

The same controversy over what is old and what is new was revived by the liberal theology of the nineteenth century. In 1907 a Congregational minister named R.J. Campbell published a book entitled The New Theology. Influenced by the so-called "new science" and especially by evolutionary theories, he expounded an almost pantheistic concept of God, denied the uniqueness of the incarnation (arguing that God was to some degree incarnate in every man), and repudiated the miraculous. Charles Gore, at that time Bishop of Birmingham, replied in the same year in The New Theology and the Old Religion, "I am sure.that the self-disclosure of God which reached its culmination in Jesus Christ is final, and that by the very necessity of the case. That is to say, if Jesus Christ is God incarnate, no fuller disclosure of God in terms of manhood than is given in his person is conceivable or possible."

And now, history is repeating itself yet again. The evangelical quarrel with the modern fashion of radical theology, which boasts of a "new reformation," a "new theology," a "new morality," even a "new Christianity" is precisely what it claims to be! It is "new." It is not a legitimate reinterpretation of old first century Christianity, for from this it deviates at many vital points. It is a modern invention.

Evangelical believers, on the other hand, while recognizing the necessity of restatement and reinterpretation, are determined to remain loyal to the historic faith which they desire to restate and reinterpret. What is needed is a translation of the gospel into the language, idiom, and thought forms of the modern world. But a genuine translation is never a fresh composition; it is a faithful rendering into another language of something which has already been written or said.

It is perverse, therefore, to accuse evangelicals of having introduced some new-fangled religion, when our whole aim is to recover primitive Christianity-not the religion of the Reformers merely, nor of the early church Fathers, but of the New Testament itself.

Dr. John Stott is Rector Emeritus of All Souls Church, Langham Place, London and Founder President of the Langham Partnership International.    This article is adapted from Christ the Controversialist: A Study in some Essentials of Evangelical Religion, by John R.W. Stott, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois, 1970. The royalties from John Stott's books are assigned to the Langham Literature Program, one of the three programs of John Stott Ministries established to assist the cause of effective, biblical preaching throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America and other countries of the Majority World. For more information about these programs, go to www.johnstott.org.