The Gospel

John Stott

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780830864461
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

How can Christians effectively engage today's world while staying true to Scripture? Calling us to listen well to both the Word and the world, John Stott shows how Christianity can preserve its authentic identity and remain relevant to current realities. With the God's Word for Today series, pastor Tim Chester has updated Stott's classic book The Contemporary Christian and made it accessible to new generations of readers. In The Gospel, Stott declares that Christianity is not a religion but God's good news for the world. To present the gospel faithfully, we must emphasize both the human need for true freedom and the historical work of Christ. Beginning with the question "What does it mean to be human?" Stott explains a biblical perspective on the human paradox: our dignity and our depravity. He then considers common objections to the gospel message, the importance of Jesus' physical resurrection, and what affirming that Christ is Lord means for all of life. The gospel is truth from God that has been committed to our trust. This book offers a trustworthy guide for readers to understand the essence of the Christian faith and share the good news in a way that connects with people around us.

1

The human paradox

What does it mean to be human?

Twice this question is posed in the Old Testament – in Psalm 8:3–4 and Job 7:17. And on both occasions the writer expresses surprise, even incredulity, that God should pay so much attention to his human beings. For we are insignificant in comparison to the vastness of the universe, and impure in contrast to the brightness of the stars.

There are at least three major reasons why this question is important.

Personally speaking, to ask ‘What is humanity?’ is another way of asking ‘Who am I?’ There is no more important field for search or research than our own personal identity. Until we have found ourselves, we can’t grow into personal maturity, nor fully discover anything else. ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Do I have any significance?’ are universal cries.

Professionally, whatever our work may be, we are inevitably involved in serving people. Doctors and nurses have patients, teachers pupils, lawyers and social workers clients, members of parliament constituents, and business people customers. How we treat others in our work depends almost entirely on how we view them.

Politically, the nature of human beings is central to any political theory. Do human beings have an absolute value because of which they must be respected? Or is their value only relative to the state because of which they may be exploited? More simply, are institutions servants of the people, or are the people servants of institutions? As John S. Whale has written, ‘ideologies . . . are really anthropologies’; they are different doctrines of humanity.1 Answers to the question ‘What is humanity?’ tend to be either too naive in their optimism, or too negative in their pessimism, about the human condition.

Secular humanists are generally optimistic. Although they believe that Homo sapiens is nothing but the product of a random evolutionary process, they nevertheless believe that human beings are continuing to evolve, have limitless potential, and will one day take control of their own development. But such optimists do not take seriously enough the moral failings of humanity and our self-centredness, which have constantly undermined progress and led to disillusionment in social reformers.

Existentialists, on the other hand, tend to be extremely pessimistic. Because there is no God, they say, there are no values, ideals or standards any more. And, although we need somehow to find the courage to be, our existence has neither meaning nor purpose. Everything is ultimately absurd. But such pessimists overlook the love, joy, beauty, truth, hope, heroism and self-sacrifice which have enriched the human story.

What we need, therefore, to quote J. S. Whale again, is ‘neither the easy optimism of the humanist, nor the dark pessimism of the cynic, but the radical realism of the Bible’.2

Our human dignity

The Bible affirms the intrinsic value of human beings from the first chapter onwards.

Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’

So God created mankind in his own image.

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’3

There has been a long-standing debate about the meaning of the divine ‘image’ or ‘likeness’ in human beings, and what it is that distinguishes us from other animals. Keith Thomas collected a number of suggestions in his book Man and the Natural World.4 He points out that a human being was described by Aristotle as a political animal, by Thomas Willis as a laughing animal, by Benjamin Franklin as a tool-making animal, by Edmund Burke as a religious animal, and by James Boswell, the gourmet, as a cooking animal.5 Other writers have focused on some physical feature of the human body. Plato made much of our erect posture, so that animals look down, and only human beings look up to heaven. Aristotle added the peculiarity that only human beings are unable to wiggle their ears.6 A seventeenth-century doctor was greatly impressed by our intestines, by their ‘anfractuous circumlocutions, windings and turnings’, whereas in the late eighteenth century Uvedale Price drew attention to our nose: ‘Man is, I believe, the only animal that has a marked projection in the middle of the face.’7

Scholars who are familiar with ancient Egypt and Assyria, however, emphasize that in those cultures the king or emperor was regarded as the ‘image’ of God, representing him on earth, and that kings had images of themselves erected in their provinces to symbolize the extent of their authority. Against that background God the Creator entrusted a kind of royal (or at least vice-regal) responsibility to all human beings, appointing them to ‘rule’ over the earth and its creatures, and ‘crowning’ them with ‘glory and honour’ to do so.8

In the unfolding narrative of Genesis 1 it is clear that the divine image or likeness is what distinguishes humans (the climax of creation) from animals (whose creation is recorded earlier). A continuity between humans and animals is implied. For example, they share ‘the breath of life’9 and the responsibility to reproduce.10 But there is also a radical discontinuity between them, in that only human beings are said to be ‘like God’. This emphasis on the unique distinction between humans and animals keeps recurring throughout Scripture. The argument takes two forms. We should be ashamed both when human beings behave like animals, descending to their level, and when animals behave like human beings, doing better by instinct than we do by choice. As an example of the former, people are not to be ‘senseless and ignorant’ and behave like ‘a brute beast’, or ‘like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding’.11 As an example of the latter, we are rebuked that oxen and donkeys are better at recognizing their master than we are,12 that migratory birds are better at returning home after going away,13 and that ants are more industrious and make better provision for the future.14

Returning to the early chapters of Genesis, all God’s dealings with Adam and Eve presuppose their uniqueness among his creatures. He addresses them in a way that assumes they can understand. He tells them which fruit they may eat and not eat, taking for granted an ability to discern between a permission and a prohibition, and choose between them. He planted the garden, and then put Adam in it ‘to work it and take care of it’,15 thus initiating a conscious, responsible partnership between them in cultivating the soil. He created them male and female, pronounced solitude ‘not good’, instituted marriage for the fulfilment of their love, and blessed their union. He also ‘walked in the garden in the cool of the day’, desiring their companionship, and missed them when they hid from him.16 It is not surprising, therefore, that this cluster of five privileges (understanding, moral choice, creativity, love and fellowship with God) are all regularly mentioned in Scripture, and continue to be recognized in the contemporary world as constituting the unique distinction of our ‘humanness’.

To begin with, there is our self-conscious rationality. It is not only that we as humans are able to think and to reason. There is a lot of talk today of ‘artificial intelligence’. And it is true that computers can process vast quantities of data much faster than we can. They have a form of memory (they can store information) and a form of speech (they can communicate their findings). But there is still one thing (thank God!) they cannot do. They cannot originate new thoughts; they can only ‘think’ what is fed into them. Human beings, however, are original thinkers. More than that. We can do what we (author and reader) are doing at this very moment: we can stand outside ourselves, look at ourselves, and evaluate ourselves, asking ourselves who and what we are. We are self-conscious and can be self-critical. We are also restlessly inquisitive about the universe. True, as one scientist said to another, ‘Astronomically speaking, man is infinitesimally small.’ ‘That is so,’ responded his colleague, ‘but then, astronomically speaking, man is the astronomer.’

Next, there is our ability to make moral choices. Human beings are moral beings. It is true that our conscience reflects our upbringing and culture, and is therefore fallible. Nevertheless, it remains on guard within us, like a sentinel, warning us that there is a difference between right and wrong. It is also more than an inner voice. It represents a moral order outside and above us, to which we sense an obligation. We have a strong urge to do what we perceive to be right, and feelings of guilt when we do what we believe to be wrong. Our whole moral vocabulary (commands and prohibitions, values and choices, obligations, conscience, freedom and will, right and wrong, guilt and shame) is meaningless to animals. True, we can train our dog to know what it is allowed and forbidden. And when it disobeys, and cringes from us by a reflex action, we can describe it as looking ‘guilty’. But it has no sense of guilt; it knows only that it is going to be punished.

Third, there are our powers of artistic creativity. God not only calls us into a responsible stewardship of the natural environment, and into partnership with himself in subduing and developing it for the common good, but he has also given us innovative skills through science and art to do so. We are ‘creative creatures’. That is, as creatures we depend upon our Creator. But having been created in our Creator’s likeness, he has given us the desire and the ability to be creators too. So we draw and we paint, we build and we sculpt, we dream and we dance, we write poetry and we make music. We are able to appreciate what is beautiful to the eye, the ear and the touch.

In the next place, there is our capacity for relationships of love. God said, ‘Let us make man in our image . . . So God created man in his own image . . . male and female he created them.’ Although we must be careful not to deduce from this text more than it actually says, it is surely legitimate to say that the plurality within the Creator (‘Let us make man’) was expressed in the plurality of his creatures (‘male and female he created them’). It became even clearer when Jesus prayed for his own people ‘that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you’.17 And this unity of love is unique to h...