Evangelical Truth

A Personal Plea for Unity, Integrity and Faithfulness

John Stott

Global Christian Library Series

Series Editor: David Smith

Consulting Editor: Joe Kapolyo

accompanied by The Cape Town Commitment

© John R. W. Stott, 2003

Published 2013 by Langham Global Library

an imprint of Langham Creative Projects

Langham Partnership

PO Box 296, Carlisle, Cumbria, CA3 9WZ, UK

www.langham.org

ISBNs:

978-1-907713-03-3 print

978-1-907713-52-1 Mobi

978-1-907713-51-4 ePub

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

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or the Copyright Licensing Agency.

Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. First published in Great Britain in 1979. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton, a division of Hodder Headline Ltd. All rights reserved. ‘NIV’ is a trade mark of International Bible Society. UK trade mark number 1448790.

The Cape Town Commitment is copyright of The Lausanne Movement. The Cape Town Commitment may be reproduced in whole or in part without permission. When reproducing the text should remain unchanged and acknowledgment should be included - © The Lausanne Movement www.lausanne.org

First published 1999 by InterVarsity Press, ISBN: 978-0-85111-988-5

This edition 2013 by Langham Global Library

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Stott, John R. W. (John Robert Walmsley), 1921-2011

Evangelical truth : a personal plea for unity, integrity and faithfulness.

1. Evangelicalism. 2. Trust in God. 3. Christian life. 4. Trinity.

I. Title

230’.04624-dc23

ISBN-13: 9781907713033

Cover & typesetting: projectluz.com

Converted to eBook by EasyEPUB

Contents

Cover

Foreword

Preface

Introduction Evangelical Essentials

Three disclaimers

Fundamentalism and evangelicalism

Evangelicalism’s tribes and tenets

The trinitarian gospel

Suggested further reading

1 The Revelation of God

Revelation

Inspiration

Authority

Three more words

Two clarifications

Suggested further reading

2 The Cross of Christ

Our acceptance with God

Our daily discipleship

Our mission and message

Suggested further reading

3 The Ministry of the Holy Spirit

Christian beginnings

Christian assurance

Christian holiness

Christian community

Christian mission

Christian hope

Suggested further reading

Conclusion The Challenge of the Evangelical Faith

The call for evangelical integrity, or to live a life that is worthy of the gospel

The call for evangelical stability, or to stand firm in the gospel

The call for evangelical truth, or to contend for the faith of the gospel

The call for evangelical unity, or to work together for the gospel

The call for evangelical endurance, or to suffer for the gospel

Suggested further reading

Postscript The Pre-Eminence of Humility

Notes

The Cape Town Commitment: A Confession of Faith and a Call to Action

Foreword

Preamble

Part I For the Lord we love: The Cape Town Confession of Faith

1. We love because God first loved us

2. We love the living God

3. We love God the Father

4. We love God the Son

5. We love God the Holy Spirit

6. We love God’s Word

7. We love God’s world

8. We love the gospel of God

9. We love the people of God

10. We love the mission of God

Part II For the world we serve: The Cape Town Call to Action

Introduction

IIA. Bearing witness to the truth of Christ in a pluralistic, globalized world

IIB. Building the peace of Christ in our divided and broken world

IIC. Living the love of Christ among people of other faiths

IID. Discerning the will of Christ for world evangelization

IIE. Calling the Church of Christ back to humility, integrity and simplicity

IIF. Partnering in the body of Christ for unity in mission

Conclusion

The Lausanne Movement

‘The spirit of Lausanne’

Recommended titles for study of The Cape Town Commitment

Langham Partnership

Other titles available in the Global Christian Library Series

Foreword

It may seem an impertinence to dare to write a Foreword to a classic book by a world-renowned author like John Stott. And it may seem even more bold to do so posthumously, when the author cannot let us know whether he approves or not! For several reasons, however, I believe John Stott would be delighted to see the re-publication of this book in its new format and that he would agree with what I am about to write.

First of all, Evangelical Truth, though published on its own in 1999, was incorporated as the first in a new series that John Stott himself had initiated through Langham Partnership – the Global Christian Library. That series, now expanded and expanding still within the wider framework of the Langham Global Library, seeks to serve the church worldwide with short and accessible books on major Christian doctrines and themes, written by evangelical scholars from every continent. John Stott would rejoice that his original idea has borne good fruit and that Langham Literature continues to commission, publish and distribute the series, with his own volume as a model.

Secondly, it is very fitting that his original text has now been supplemented in this volume with The Cape Town Commitment, the document produced from the Third Lausanne Congress in Cape Town, South Africa, in October 2010. The Global Christian Library has as its defining mission, ‘to provide inter-cultural exposition and application of the Christian faith, within the framework of the Lausanne Covenant, by authors from the international evangelical community’. As is well known, John Stott was the chief architect of the Lausanne Covenant, the fruit of the First Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in 1974 – a document that has come to have a defining status across a broad spectrum of evangelicals worldwide. In this book, he also quotes from the Manila Manifesto, the document of the Second Lausanne Congress in 1989. By the time of Cape Town 2010, John Stott was already into the last year of his life on earth (he died in July 2011). His failing health and strength meant that he was unable to read, but when The Cape Town Commitment was published in early 2011 he insisted on having it read to him slowly by a close friend, in short sections over many days. He gave it his unqualified approval and rejoiced to affirm that it expressed a remarkable degree of evangelical unity – one of the key things he pleads for in this book. So I have no doubt that he would have approved of the idea of including it together with his own text in this combined volume.

Thirdly, the two documents (Evangelical Truth and The Cape Town Commitment) share a similar objective and go about it in a similar way. In his Preface, John Stott says that he wanted to provide a simple statement of evangelical faith, both as a personal testament to his own convictions, and also as what he hoped could be a unifying statement of evangelical essentials around which there could be agreement, even in the midst of the wide range of differences among us on all kinds of other issues. Likewise, in the year or so before Cape Town, it was urged that Lausanne should once again (as in 1974) provide a clarifying statement of core evangelical confession that could command broad acceptance. The question common to both is simply, ‘What does it mean to be evangelical?’

Interestingly, John Stott decided that some of the existing definitions of evangelical identity include too much of what we might call the human factor – what kind of experiences evangelicals claim, what kind of activities they get involved in, etc. In other words, there is a social and cultural dimension to evangelicalism, as there is with any human movement. And we would have to admit (as John Stott hints from time to time) that there are some fairly radical cultural, social, political and economic differences to be found among people around the world who would self-identify as evangelicals. So what he chooses to concentrate on are the great biblical and Trinitarian truths about God – the essential components of evangelical commitment to the revelation of God the Father in scripture, the redeeming work of God the Son through the cross of Christ, and the work of the Holy Spirit in the believer and the church.

When I was invited to facilitate the process that eventually led to the production of The Cape Town Commitment, in response to the call for a ‘clear statement of evangelical identity and faith’, I looked to see how the Lausanne Covenant had used or defined the word ‘evangelical’. I was surprised to find that it does not. The word is not used at all. The Covenant simply begins, not by pointing to ourselves as evangelicals, but simply with the words, ‘We, members of the Church of Jesus Christ from more than 150 nations . . .’ Then its first paragraph is ‘The Purpose of God.’ In the same way, and for the same reason, The Cape Town Commitment simply begins, ‘As members of the worldwide Church of Jesus Christ . . .’ It then goes on to affirm our love for God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – for God’s word, God’s world, the gospel, the church and the mission God has invited us to share, highlighting along the way the many practical demands of such love. The focus, then, is not on who we are (as evangelicals) and what we do, say or think, but simply on the truths and convictions we share about who God is and what God has done. The whole point of the exercise (for John Stott and for the Commitment – especially Part 1), is not to say ‘Here we are, do you like us?’ (to which many ambivalent answers might be given), but rather to say ‘Here is the living God, do you love him?’ (to which only one answer is called for).

Fourthly, the combination of the two texts is appropriate not only for historical reasons. I said above that John Stott’s original book is ‘supplemented’ here with the text of The Cape Town Commitment. But a better way to put it would be to see it not merely as a supplement (something tacked on as an extra), but as richly complementary. The Commitment fills out a number of issues on which John Stott’s book has less to say. This is by no means a criticism: it is impossible to be comprehensive in a short book and John Stott traverses enormous territories with his customary clarity and economy. The fact that he expressed total agreement with the Commitment leads me to have confidence that he would fully agree with the following points.

• John Stott locates his discussion of the authority of the Bible (as a core element in evangelical confession) within the self-revelation of God the Father. That is perfectly apt. However, the Bible has much more to say (as John Stott would be the first to agree) about God as Father, especially as Creator. The Commitment fills out a fuller perspective on God’s purpose in and for creation, the responsibility of creation care as part of Christian mission, and the ultimate destiny of new creation. This is the framework (the biblical pillars of Genesis 1-2 and Revelation 21-22) within which the great redemptive work of God the Trinity properly fits in its fullest accomplishment. Evangelicals affirm the redemption of creation, not our redemption out of creation.

• In his chapter on the redeeming work of God the Son, through the cross, John Stott focuses primarily on its personal significance. With him, we rejoice with eternal gratitude for the grace that finds and saves the lost, that justifies guilty sinners through faith in Christ’s substitutionary death for us, and that reconciles us to God now and for all eternity. The Commitment, fills out other massive realities that the Bible tells us Christ accomplished through his death and resurrection (and stresses the necessity of both). These include: the defeat of all powers of evil, human and satanic (Col. 2:15); the reconciliation of enemies in a new humanity (Eph. 2:14-16); the destruction of death itself (Heb. 2:14); and the ultimate redemption, healing and restoration of all creation (Col. 1:15-20). Evangelicals affirm the gospel, not merely as the means and assurance of personal salvation, but as the good news of the whole Bible story (Old and New Testaments) of all that God has done, not only to deal with the guilt of individual sinners and reverse the calamity of Genesis 3, but also to reverse the calamity of Genesis 11 by filling the new creation, freed from the curse, with people redeemed from every nation, tribe and people and language who enjoy the ‘healing of the nations’, in fulfilment of his promise to Abraham.

• In the area of Christian mission, John Stott was possibly too optimistic in hoping that the relationship between evangelism and social action was ‘an area of conflict . . . no longer’. Sadly disagreements have continued in this area in spite of the abundance of fine theological work done during the 1980s under John Stott’s own leadership. The Cape Town Commitment affirms an understanding of integral mission, in which the gospel and evangelism are central – not ‘central’ in a way that makes everything else peripheral and less important, but rather in the way a hub is central to a wheel. It connects (and integrates) the power of the engine (what God has done in Christ to save the world), to the rim (the contextual engagement of transformed and obedient living in the world). Hub and rim are both essential and integrated parts of the whole. Such a theology of mission in Part 1 prepares the way for the detailed ‘Call to Action’ in Part 2.

Finally, Evangelical Truth and The Cape Town Commitment are wholly agreed in insisting that, in fully biblical terms, ‘truth’ is not just something you say you believe, but something you do. In fact, without the doing, faith claims are empty. The gospel is not only the gracious gift of salvation calling for our faith, it is also the transforming power of God demanding and generating our obedience (Paul spoke of ‘the obedience of faith’, and ‘obeying the gospel’). The Bible not only reveals truth to be received and believed, but also reveals a way of life to be followed. Two quotes will sharpen the point and prepare us, as we read both texts, not only to be fed and enriched in our mind and heart by the great truths of our faith, but also to be challenged and motivated in our will and character to live in the light of them, in integrity and humility.

The hallmark of authentic evangelicalism is not subscription but submission. That is, it is not whether we subscribe to an impeccable formula about the Bible, but whether we live in practical submission to what the Bible teaches.

John Stott

The Bible portrays a quality of life that should mark the believer and the community of believers. From Abraham, through Moses, the Psalmists, prophets and wisdom of Israel, and from Jesus and the apostles, we learn that such a biblical lifestyle includes justice, compassion, humility, integrity, truthfulness, sexual chastity, generosity, kindness, self-denial, hospitality, peacemaking, non-retaliation, doing good, forgiveness, joy, contentment and love – all combined in lives of worship, praise and faithfulness to God.

We confess that we easily claim to love the Bible without loving the life it teaches – the life of costly practical obedience to God through Christ. Yet ‘nothing commends the gospel more eloquently than a transformed life, and nothing brings it into disrepute so much as personal inconsistency. We are charged to behave in a manner that is worthy of the gospel of Christ and even to ‘adorn’ it, enhancing its beauty by holy lives.’[1] For the sake of the gospel of Christ, therefore, we recommit ourselves to prove our love for God’s Word by believing and obeying it. There is no biblical mission without biblical living.

The Cape Town Commitment I.6d

Christopher J.H. Wright

International Ministries Director

Langham Partnership

www.langham.org

1.

. The Manila Manifesto Paragraph 7; Titus 2:9-10

Preface

Nobody likes being labelled. For the labels which other people stick on us are usually uncomplimentary. Their object is often to restrict us to, even imprison us in, a rather narrow stereotype. Yet labels are useful for purposes of identification, and others are sure to affix one to us if we decline to wear one ourselves.

Certainly in the scientific world labels are indispensable. For some 250 years successive generations of scientists have been grateful to the Swedish botanist Linnaeus for developing his binomial system of classification.

Theological taxonomy is considerably more difficult, however! One could attempt it, I suppose. How, for example, would you label me? Perhaps ‘genus: Christian, species: Evangelical, subspecies: Anglican’. But one would soon get stuck. For to classify organisms according to their structure demands a high degree of precision, whereas to classify human beings according to their beliefs would be a much more flexible and fluid task.

Biologists themselves are sometimes divided into ‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’, according to their tendency either to unite racial forms into a single species or to separate them into several. ‘Lumping’ and ‘splitting’ also goes on in the Christian community. Yet both processes become unhealthy if they are taken too far. Some Christians go on everlastingly splitting until they find themselves no longer a church but a sect. They remind me of the preacher described by Tom Sawyer, who ‘thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving’.1 Others lump everybody together indiscriminately until nobody is excluded.

Avoiding both extremes, we recognize that there is still some genuine overlap between the Catholic, liberal and evangelical streams of Christendom. Let me give two examples which, even if specifically Anglican, illustrate the point.

Michael Ramsey (Archbishop of Canterbury from 1961 to 1974) called himself an Anglican Catholic. He was nevertheless committed to the gospel of justification by faith only, which, as I will argue later, is an essential evangelical belief. He went further and affirmed that during the fifty years between 1889 and 1939 ‘the cardinal convictions of the Reformation’ were unhesitatingly held by ‘all typical Anglicans’, namely ‘that works cannot earn salvation, that salvation is by grace alone received through faith, that nothing can add to the sole mediatorship of the cross of Christ, and that Holy Scripture is the supreme authority in doctrine’.2

My second example comes from the pen of John Habgood (Archbishop of York from 1983 to 1995) in his book Confessions of a Conservative Liberal. He writes that ‘liberal’ for him ‘represents an openness in the search for truth which I believe is profoundly necessary for the health of religion . . . It is essentially about honesty.’ At the same time it is honesty ‘rooted in what God has given, both in revelation and in the created world. Hence “conservative”.’3 Although John Habgood has sometimes applied to evangelical Christians the rather rude epithet ‘biblicist’, his sketch of the tension between the given and the open, humility and honesty, revelation and tradition, ‘the believing heart and the critical mind’ (p. 9), is one which – at least in principle – all evangelicals should be able to endorse.

I try not to forget, therefore, in what I go on to write, that the three broad Christian schools of thought (Catholic, liberal and evangelical) are not always mutually exclusive, for along with their divergences there are points of convergence. Indeed, we rejoice and give thanks that the great majority of Christian believers affirm the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creeds, and that the great majority of Protestants still affirm many Reformation truths. In other words, not all evangelical essentials are evangelical distinctives. At the same time, biblically and historically, there are some truths which evangelical Christians have always emphasized, and which they see themselves (with due modesty, I hope) as holding in trust for the rest of the church.

While preparing this edition for inclusion in the Global Christian Library, I have been conscious that most of my references belong to a British or North American context and may on that account seem inappropriate to an international readership. So I could have eliminated them. But I decided to retain them for two reasons. First, each of them makes a point which is applicable to Christians in every culture. Secondly, the fact is that I am white and Western, indeed English and Anglican. To forget or deny this would breach my personal integrity. Besides, readers should not have any great difficulty in transposing to their own culture what I write and quote. For ‘evangelical’ is a noble word; it transcends culture.

Why then do I offer a new edition of this small book to a global readership? Readers have the right to expect authors to take them into their confidence regarding their reasons for writing. Is it merely that I suffer from what I believe Juvenal called the insanabile cacoëthes scribendi (the incurable itch to write)? I hope not. I have at least two conscious motives.

First, I continue to be profoundly grieved by our evangelical tendency to fragment. During the last half-century the evangelical movement worldwide has grown out of all recognition in numbers, church life, scholarship and leadership – but not, I think, in cohesion. Nowadays people refer to the multiple ‘tribes’ of evangelicalism, and like to place a qualifying adjective in front of ‘evangelical’. There are many to choose from: conservative, liberal, radical, progressive, open, Reformed, charismatic, postmodern, etc. But is this really necessary? While holding with a good conscience whatever our particular understanding of the evangelical faith may be, is it not possible for us to acknowledge that what unites us as evangelical people is much greater than what divides us? Must we for ever remain what Bishop Stephen Neill called ‘obstinate individualists’4 and consequently, in the words of Archbishop Sir Marcus Loane of Sydney, ‘have as much internal cohesion as the proverbial rope of sand’?5

I am not so naïve 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.

Secondly and 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.

John Stott

New Year, 1999 (revised 2002)

Introduction

Evangelical Essentials

‘The harvest of people into the Kingdom of God in recent years has been unprecedented. Never in history has such a high percentage of the world’s population been exposed to the gospel, nor the increase of evangelical Christians been so encouraging.’ In particular, ‘the growth of evangelical believers in the Third World has accelerated dramatically since World War II . . .’1

Yet in spite of this worldwide expansion (even explosion), evangelical believers have often suffered from a bad press, being misunderstood and misrepresented.

John Peart-Binns, for example, called the popular, jolly and godly Bishop John Taylor Smith, who was Chaplain-General of the British forces during the First World War, ‘a rabid pietistic Evangelical of the narrowest of views and most rigid of minds’.2

Canon Michael Saward (formerly of St Paul’s Cathedral) tells the story of a pretty but ignorant Press Association reporter, who turned to him in Church House one day and asked, ‘These Evangelicals, are they . . . snake worshippers?’3

A bit more accurate, but still unfriendly, is David Hare’s portrait of the Rev. Tony Ferris in his book and play entitled Racing Demon. He attributes people’s different theological views to their social class. ‘Educated clerics don’t like evangelicals’, he writes, ‘because evangelicals drink sweet sherry and keep budgerigars and have ducks in formations on their walls . . . Yes, and they also have the distressing downmarket habit of trying to get people emotionally involved.’4

Turning to the North American scene, Professor James Davison Hunter of the University of Virginia gives his readers a rich sample of contemporary slander. Leading academics, he writes, apparently describe evangelicals as ‘right-wing zealots’, ‘religious nuts’, ‘a misanthropic cult’, ‘fanatics’, ‘demagogues’, ‘anti-intellectual and simplistic’, while our message is considered ‘vicious’, ‘cynical’, ‘narrow’, ‘divisive’ and ‘irrational’.5

What then is evangelical Christianity or the evangelical faith, which arouses such a combination of popularity and unpopularity, which on the one hand is growing so rapidly and on the other provokes so much scorn? Let me begin by telling you what it is not.

Three disclaimers

First, the evangelical faith is not a recent innovation, a new brand of Christianity which we are busy inventing. On the contrary, we dare to claim that evangelical Christianity is original, apostolic, New Testament Christianity. The very same claim and counterclaim were made during the sixteenth century. The Reformers were often dubbed innovators by the Roman Catholic Church, but they refuted the accusation. It was the medieval schoolmen who were the innovators, they maintained, whereas the Reformers were renovators, seeking to go back to the beginning and recover the authentic, original gospel. ‘We teach no new thing,’ wrote Luther, ‘but we repeat and establish old things, which the apostles and all godly teachers have taught before us.’6 Hugh Latimer, the popular preacher of the English Reformation, made the same claim: ‘Ye say it is a new learning. Now I tell you it is the old learning.’7 More eloquent still was the insistence of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury from 1560, in his famous Apology (1562): ‘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 Saviour himself hath brought before us.’8

The same criticism that evangelical Christians are innovators has been heard in every generation, and the same rebuttal too. John Wesley, for example, was often accused of introducing new doctrines into the Church of England. He vigorously denied it: ‘It is the plain old Christianity that I teach,’ he insisted.9

Towards the beginning of Billy Graham’s astonishing evangelistic career, he was accused not of novelty but of being hopelessly out of date, setting back the cause of religion a hundred years. Yet his rejoinder was the same. ‘I replied that I did indeed want to set religion back – not just 100 years but 1900 years, to the Book of Acts, where first century followers of Christ were accused of turning the Roman Empire upside down.’10

Secondly, the evangelical faith is not a deviation from Christian orthodoxy. It is neither an eddy nor a backwater but mainstream Christianity. Evangelical Christians have no difficulty in reciting the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed, without mental reservations, and without needing to cross their fingers while doing it. ‘Evangelical’, in spite of the antipathy it has aroused, is in fact a proud word with a long and honourable pedigree.

It came into widespread use only in the early eighteenth century, in relation to the so-called ‘Evangelical Revival’ associated with John Wesley and George Whitefield. But in the seventeenth century it had been applied both to the Puritans in England and to the Pietists in Germany, and in the sixteenth century to the Reformers. They called themselves evangelici, short for evangelici viri, ‘evangelical men’, a designation which Luther adopted as die Evangelischen.

Even this was not the beginning, however. In the fifteenth century John Wycliffe, sometimes described as the ‘Morning Star of the Reformation’, was called doctor evangelicus. Earlier still we acknowledge as proto-evangelicals all those other Christian leaders who attributed ultimate authority to Scripture and salvation to Christ crucified alone. This could include even the great church father Augustine, who proclaimed divine grace as the only remedy for human guilt. From him it is but a short step back to the New Testament itself, and to its gospel or ‘evangel’, from which evangelical Christians derive their name.

It is in more recent church history, however, that the terms ‘evangelical’ and ‘evangelicalism’ became current. In nineteenth-century Britain, for example, a number of evangelical leaders gained national prominence. Charles Simeon, Vicar of Holy Trinity, Cambridge, for fifty-four years (1782–1836), had an enormous influence on generations of students through his expository preaching. William Wilberforce, who campaigned for forty-five years on behalf of African slaves, along with his allies achieved the abolition first of the slave trade in 1807 and then of slavery itself in 1833. Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (1801–85), found inspiration for his many social reforms in his evangelical convictions. And J. C. Ryle, Bishop of Liverpool from 1880 to 1900, was an able, outspoken champion of evangelical truth over against the tendencies he called ‘Romanism’ and ‘scepticism’.

There were also prominent nineteenth-century evangelical leaders in North America. Charles G. Finney (1792–1875), for example, was committed equally to evangelism and to social reform. He founded a whole series of ‘benevolent societies’ for every conceivable kind of philanthropy, and one of his disciples was Theodore Weld, who dedicated his whole life to the anti-slavery struggle. D. L. Moody (1837–99) is well known too for his effective evangelism in both Britain and America. But he was also committed to education, and his personal influence was extremely widespread. Another educationist was Charles Hodge (1797–1878). A professor at Princeton Theological Seminary for fifty-six years, he not only championed evangelical orthodoxy but is said to have taught over 3,000 students. Mention should also be made of the brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan, successful businessmen, who generously funded social reform, missions and evangelism, Bible distribution, Christian education and the anti-slavery movement.

It was in 1846 that the so-called World Evangelical Alliance came into being in Britain, although it was a misnomer from the start because it was a British, not an international, body. So in 1951 the World Evangelical Fellowship was founded, while at the same time the World Evangelical Alliance adopted the more modest (and more accurate) name British Evangelical Alliance and became one of the founding members of the World Evangelical Fellowship.

Thirdly, the evangelical faith is not a synonym for fundamentalism, for the two have a different history and a different connotation.

‘Fundamentalism’, which today is frequently used as a theological smear word, had very respectable origins. It arose from a series of twelve paperbacks entitled The Fundamentals, which were distributed between 1909 and 1915 by Lyman and Milton Stewart, brothers from Southern California. Each booklet contained several papers by different authors. They circulated free of charge in their millions. The ‘fundamentals’ concerned included basic Christian truths like the authority of Scripture, the incarnation, the deity, virgin birth, atoning death, bodily resurrection and personal return of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, sin, salvation and judgment, worship, world mission and evangelism. The word ‘fundamentalist’ was coined to denote anybody who believed the central affirmations of the Christian faith. The authors of The Fundamentals were all from Britain or North America, and included such evangelical stalwarts as R. A. Torrey, B. B. Warfield, A. T. Pierson, James Orr, Campbell Morgan, and Bishops J. C. Ryle and Handley Moule.

Fundamentalism and evangelicalism

Originally, then, ‘fundamentalist’ was an acceptable synonym for ‘evangelical’. Take as an example Dr Carl Henry’s influential little book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, published in 1947. In it, while complaining that ‘evangelical Christianity has become increasingly inarticulate about the social reference of the Gospel’, he drew no distinction between fundamentalism and evangelicalism.11 Gradually, however, fundamentalism became associated in people’s minds with certain extremes and extravagances, so that by the 1950s evangelical North American leaders like Carl Henry himself, Billy Graham and Harold Ockenga were promoting what they called ‘the new evangelicalism’ in order to distinguish it from the old fundamentalism which they had rejected.

Because of this, evangelical Christians are understandably dismayed by such books as Fundamentalism by Professor James Barr and Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism by Bishop Jack Spong, which, whether from ignorance, misunderstanding or malice, perpetuate the old identification. They write as if the only choice before the church is between an enlightened liberalism and an obscurantist fundamentalism.12

But let it be said here and now, with clarity and conviction, that the great majority of evangelical Christians (at least in Europe) repudiate the ‘fundamentalist’ label, because they disagree with many self-styled fundamentalists at a number of important points.

The difficulty in establishing what these points are is due to the fact that fundamentalism has never clearly defined itself over against evangelicalism or published a broadly acceptable doctrinal basis. In seeking now to do the opposite, namely to distinguish evangelicalism from fundamentalism, I shall no doubt be guilty of generalizing and caricaturing. But I ask my readers to bear in mind that what I am attempting to portray below is not identifiable individuals or groups, but certain contrasting tendencies. I fully recognize that my portrait of fundamentalism may fit an old-style American version, but not some of our contemporaries who retain the label while rejecting some of the substance. Similarly, my portrait of evangelicalism is idealized, for alas! some contemporary evangelicals claim the name but do not live up to the ideal.

There seem to me to be at least ten tendencies to consider.

1. In relation to human thought, fundamentalists of the old school give the impression that they distrust scholarship, including the scientific disciplines; some tend towards a thoroughgoing anti-intellectualism, even obscurantism. Authentic evangelicals, however, acknowledge that all truth is God’s truth, that our minds are God-given, being a vital aspect of the divine image we bear, that we insult God if we refuse to think, and that we honour him when, whether through science or Scripture, we ‘think God’s thoughts after him’ (Johann Kepler).

2. In relation to the nature of the Bible, fundamentalists are said by the dictionaries to believe that ‘every word of the Bible is literally true’. This is surely a slander, since the adverb ‘literally’ is used here too sweepingly. Yet it cannot be denied that some fundamentalists are characterized by an excessive literalism. Evangelicals, however, while believing that whatever the Bible affirms is true, add that some of what it affirms is figuratively or poetically (rather than literally) true, and is meant to be interpreted thus. Indeed, not even the most extreme fundamentalist believes that God has feathers (Ps. 91:4)!

3. In relation to biblical inspiration, fundamentalists have tended to regard it as having been a somewhat mechanical process, in which the human authors were passive and played no active role. Thus the fundamentalist view of the Bible, as having been dictated by God, resembles the Muslim view of the Qur’an as having been dictated by Allah in Arabic through the angel Gabriel, while Muhammad’s only contribution was to take down the dictation. In this way, the Qur’an is believed to be an exact reproduction of a heavenly original. Evangelicals emphasize, however, the double authorship of Scripture, namely that the divine author spoke through the human authors while they were in full possession of their faculties.

4. In relation to biblical interpretation, fundamentalists seem to suppose that they can apply the text directly to themselves as if it had been written primarily for them. They then ignore the cultural chasm which yawns between the biblical world and the contemporary world. At least in the ideal, however, evangelicals struggle with the task of cultural transposition, in which they seek to identify the essential message of the text, detach it from its original cultural context, and then recontextualize it, that is, apply it to our situation today.

5. In relation to the ecumenical movement, fundamentalists tend to go beyond suspicion (for which indeed there is ample justification) to a blanket, uncritical, even vociferous rejection. The most strident expression of this attitude was seen in the American Council of Christian Churches, which was founded by Carl McIntyre in 1941. Many evangelicals, however, although critical of the liberal agenda and frequently unprincipled methodology of the World Council of Churches, have tried to be discerning, affirming in ecumenism what seems to them to have biblical support, while claiming the freedom to reject what has not.

6. In relation to the church, fundamentalists have tended to hold a separatist ecclesiology, and to withdraw from any community which does not agree in every particular with their own doctrinal position. They forget that Luther and Calvin were very reluctant schismatics, who dreamed of a reformed catholicism. Most evangelicals, however, while believing it right to seek the doctrinal and ethical purity of the church, also believe that perfect purity cannot be attained in this world. The balance between discipline and tolerance is not easy to find.

7. In relation to the world, fundamentalists have tended sometimes to assimilate its values and standards uncritically (e.g. in the prosperity gospel) and at other times to stand aloof from it, fearing contamination. By no means all evangelicals escape the charge of worldliness. Nevertheless, at least in theory, they seek to heed the biblical injunction not to conform to this world, and are also anxious to respond to the call of Jesus to penetrate it like salt and light, in order to hinder its decay and illuminate its darkness.

8. In relation to race, fundamentalists have shown a tendency – especially in the United States and in South Africa – to cling to the myth of white supremacy and to defend racial segregation, even in the church. Racism without doubt lingers among evangelicals too. Yet there is a widespread desire to repent of it. Most evangelicals, it can be claimed, proclaim and practise racial equality, originally by creation and supremely in Christ, who broke down the walls of racial, social and sexual separation in order to create a single, united humanity.

9. In relation to the Christian mission, fundamentalists have tended to insist that ‘mission’ and ‘evangelism’ are synonyms, and that the vocation of the church is simply to proclaim the gospel. Evangelicals, however, while continuing to affirm the priority of evangelism, have felt unable to sunder it from social responsibility. As in the ministry of Jesus, so today, words and deeds, proclamation and demonstration, good news and good works supplement and reinforce one another. Their separation, wrote Carl Henry, is ‘Protestantism’s embarrassing divorce’.13

10. In relation to the Christian hope, fundamentalists tend to dogmatize about the future, although to be sure they hold no monopoly on dogmatism. But they often go into considerable detail about the fulfilment of prophecy, divide history into rigid dispensations, and also espouse a Christian Zionism which ignores the grave injustices done to the Palestinians. Evangelicals, however, while affirming with eager expectation the personal, visible, glorious and triumphant return of our Lord Jesus Christ, prefer to remain agnostic about the details on which even firmly biblical Christians have differing viewpoints.

Evangelicalism’s tribes and tenets

While expounding my three disclaimers, I have no doubt been too negative so far. It is high time to be positive. We have considered what the evangelical faith is not. So what is it? Before trying to answer this question, it is important to recognize that, as the evangelical movement has grown throughout the world, so too has it diversified, not least among Anglicans. During or after the second National Evangelical Anglican Congress, held at Nottingham University in 1977, Canon Colin Craston remarked that Anglican evangelicals were now no longer a party but a coalition.

Several attempts have been made to classify the different evangelical ‘tribes’. In a playful mood in April 1998 the Editor of the Church of England Newspaper suggested that there were ‘57 varieties of evangelicals’ (corresponding to the famous 57 varieties of Heinz grocery products). Rowland Croucher in Australia mentions an unnamed Californian seminary professor who claimed he could identify sixteen kinds of evangelical,14 while Clive Calver writes about the twelve tribes of evangelicalism.15 Other observers have reduced this number by half.

In 1975, the year following the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, Professor Peter Beyerhaus of Tübingen distinguished six different evangelical groupings:

1. The New Evangelicals (including Billy Graham himself), who distance themselves from fundamentalism’s science-phobia and political conservatism, and strive for the greatest possible collaboration.

2. The Strict Fundamentalists, who are uncompromising in their separatist attitude.

3. The Confessing Evangelicals, who attach importance to a confession of faith and a rejection of contemporary doctrinal error.

4. The Pentecostals and the Charismatics.

5. The Radical Evangelicals, who acknowledge a sociopolitical commitment and strive to unite evangelistic witness and social action.

6. The Ecumenical Evangelicals, who are developing a critical participation in the ecumenical movement.16

Nearly twenty years later, in his book Ecumenical Faith in Evangelical Perspective (Eerdmans, 1993), Gabriel Fackre of Andover Newton School of Theology published his similar list of six categories: fundamentalists (‘polemical and separatist’), old evangelicals (emphasizing personal conversion and mass evangelism), new evangelicals (acknowledging social responsibility and apologetics), justice and peace evangelicals (sociopolitical activists), charismatic evangelicals (stressing the work of the Spirit in tongue-speaking, healing and worship) and ecumenical evangelicals (concerned for unity and cooperation). It is an interesting classification of trends, some of which overlap with one another.

We still have to ask what tenets evangelical Christians have in common. For if it is true that a certain continuity of evangelical belief and practice can be traced down the centuries of church history, burning now brightly, now dimly, of what does this continuity consist? Of course there has been development, and, as the challenges have changed, so have the responses. Nevertheless, most observers agree that a genuine consensus has become discernible.

In particular, a careful study of essential evangelicalism has been made by two British scholars, the one a theologian and an Anglican, the other a historian and a Baptist. I am referring to J. I. Packer’s monograph entitled The Evangelical Anglican Identity Problem (1978) and to D. W. Bebbington’s comprehensive survey, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (1989).

Dr Packer’s ‘anatomy of evangelicalism’ was characteristically thorough. It consisted of four general claims and six particular convictions. The claims were that evangelicalism is ‘practical Christianity’ (a lifestyle of total discipleship to the Lord Christ), ‘pure Christianity’, indeed ‘mere Christianity’ (since ‘you cannot add to the Christian faith . . . without subtracting from it’), ‘unitive Christianity’ (seeking unity through a common commitment to gospel truth), and ‘rational Christianity’ (over against the popular preoccupation with experience).

Following these four general claims, Dr Packer identified six evangelical fundamentals as follows (the headings are his, the brief parenthetical summaries mine):

1. The supremacy of Holy Scripture (because of its unique inspiration).

2. The majesty of Jesus Christ (the God-man who died as a sacrifice for sin).

3. The lordship of the Holy Spirit (who exercises a variety of vital ministries).

4. The necessity of conversion (a direct encounter with God effected by God alone).

5. The priority of evangelism (witness being an expression of worship).

6. The importance of fellowship (the church being essentially a living community of believers).17

About a decade later, Dr David Bebbington’s magisterial survey Evangelicalism in Modern Britain was published. In it he outlined what he regarded as evangelicalism’s four ‘main characteristics’. Here they are: ‘conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and what may be called cruci-centrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross’. ‘Together’, David Bebbington concluded, these ‘form a quadrilateral of priorities that is the basis of Evangelicalism.’18 Dr Derek Tidball concludes that the Bebbington quadrilateral ‘has quickly established itself as near to a consensus as we might ever expect to reach’.19

We may not particularly relish Dr Bebbington’s four rather esoteric ‘ism’ words. But we cannot fail to notice his selection of the Bible and the cross, evangelism and conversion, which Dr Packer had also stressed. It illustrates David Bebbington’s judgment that, although evangelicalism has been continuously ‘moulded and remoulded by its environment’,20 it nevertheless has ‘a common core that has remained remarkably constant down the centuries’.21

At the same time, as I have reflected on these two similar lists of evangelical distinctives, I confess to a certain uneasiness. Is it altogether appropriate, I ask myself, that an activity like evangelism, an experience like conversion and an observation like the need for fellowship, even with their theological underpinnings, should be set alongside such towering truths as the authority of Scripture, the majesty of Jesus Christ and the lordship of the Holy Spirit? They seem to belong to different categories. Perhaps I am asking for no more than a reshuffling of the cards. Yet it seems to me important, when we are trying to define our essential evangelical identity, that we distinguish between divine and human activity, between the primary and the secondary, between what belongs to the centre and what lies somewhere between the centre and the circumference.

For this reason I take the liberty of suggesting an adjustment. In the list of evangelical essentials proposed by Jim Packer and David Bebbington, the first three relate (deliberately, without doubt) to the three persons of the Trinity – the authority of God in and through Scripture, the majesty of Jesus Christ in and through the cross, and the lordship of the Holy Spirit in and through his manifold ministries. But the next three evangelical characteristics (conversion, evangelism and fellowship) are not so much an addition to the first three as an elaboration of them. For it is God himself, the Holy Trinity, who causes conversion, promotes evangelism and creates fellowship. It would therefore, in my view, be a valuable clarification if we were to limit our evangelical priorities to three, namely the revealing initiative of God the Father, the redeeming work of God the Son, and the transforming ministry of God the Holy Spirit. All our other evangelical essentials will then find an appropriate place somewhere under this threefold or trinitarian rubric.

The trinitarian gospel

Let me put it another way. In seeking to define what it means to be evangelical, it is inevitable that we begin with the gospel. For both our theology (evangelicalism) and our activity (evangelism) derive their meaning and their importance from the good news (the evangel). And whenever we are thinking about the gospel, three fundamental questions and answers are bound to formulate in our minds regarding the origin, the substance and the efficacy of the gospel. They occur in 1 Corinthians 2:1–5, where Paul states his position over against the false teachers who were disturbing the Corinthian church.

When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. ²For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. ³I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. ⁴My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, ⁵so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.

The origin of the gospel

Question: Where does the gospel come from?

Answer: It is not a human invention or speculation, but the revelation of God. It is not ‘human wisdom’ (1 Cor. 1:17) or ‘the wisdom of the world’ (1 Cor. 1:20; cf. 2:6); on the contrary, Paul calls it ‘God’s wisdom’ (1 Cor. 1:24; 2:7).

There are several uncertainties about the correct translation of 1 Corinthians 2:1. Certainly Paul is describing his proclamation when he arrived in Corinth. But is he calling it a ‘testimony’ (martyrion) or a ‘mystery’ (mysterion)? The Greek readings are fairly evenly balanced. Also, is his genitive subjective (God’s testimony or mystery) or objective (a testimony or mystery about God)? Although we are not sure how to answer these questions, it does not really matter. What does matter is that in either case Paul identifies his message as truth, indeed as revealed truth. The gospel is God’s good news for the world.

The substance of the gospel

Question: What does the gospel consist of ?

Answer: In the eyes of the non-Christian world it is not wisdom, but foolishness; not power but weakness. It does not flatter human beings. It gives us nothing to boast about. Nevertheless, it is God’s wisdom and God’s power. Where are these to be found, then? Only in ‘Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (verse 2).

We note that Paul ‘resolved’ to proclaim nothing but Christ and the cross. This implies that he had endured a previous period of irresolution. Why was this? It was Sir William Ramsay who popularized the theory that Paul’s preceding visit to Athens had been a failure, because he had preached creation instead of the cross; and that on his way to Corinth he ‘resolved’ not to repeat his mistake. But there is no evidence that his mission in Athens had been a failure or a mistake. Certainly Luke does not give this impression. On the contrary, he records Paul’s speech to the Athenian philosophers as a fine example of his gospel approach to thoughtful Gentiles. In any case, he must have preached the cross, since he proclaimed the resurrection (Acts 17:31), and one cannot preach either without the other. Luke also tells us that there were a number of converts.

So the explanation of Paul’s firm decision to proclaim only Christ and him crucified was different. It is to be found not in Athens, but in Corinth; not in a past failure but in a future challenge. He knew that the inhabitants of Corinth were proud, idolatrous, materialistic and immoral. He also knew that such people would not be friendly to the gospel. For the gospel of the cross is folly to the intellectually arrogant and a stumbling-block to the morally self-righteous. It humbles vanity and condemns idolatry. It calls the covetous to contentment and sinners to repentance and self-denial. No wonder Paul needed to make a firm decision to limit his message in Corinth to ‘Jesus Christ and him crucified’. Apprehensive about the reception he would get, he arrived ‘in weakness and fear, and with much trembling’ (verse 3).

The apostle was still focusing on the same gospel of the cross near the end of his first letter to the Corinthians, as he had been near its beginning. He made a formal statement about it:

Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. ²By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

³For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ⁴that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, ⁵and that he appeared . . . (1 Cor. 15:1–5a)

Six aspects of the gospel are noteworthy.

1. The gospel is Christological. The heart of the Christian message is that ‘Christ died for our sins . . . [and] that he was raised’. The gospel is not limited to these events, but they are its priority truths, which are ‘of first importance’ (verse 3). The gospel is not preached if Christ is not preached, and the authentic Christ is not proclaimed if his death and resurrection are not central.

2. The gospel is biblical. The Christ Paul proclaimed was the biblical Christ, who died for our sins ‘according to the Scriptures’ and who was also raised ‘according to the Scriptures’ (verses 3–4). Which Old Testament scriptures he has in mind Paul does not tell us, but no doubt they will have included those which Jesus had used when ‘he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself ’ (Luke 24:25–27; 44–46), those which Peter had used on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:25–31), and notably Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53. The first Christian evangelists made much of the fact that the death and resurrection of Jesus were corroborated by two witnesses – the prophets and the apostles, or, as we would say, the Old Testament and the New Testament.

3. The gospel is historical. We need to notice the reference both to Jesus’ burial and to his appearances. For the burial testified to the reality of his death (since we bury the dead, not the living), while the appearances testified to the reality of his resurrection. Moreover, what was raised was what had been buried. In other words, it was the body of Jesus which was raised and changed. The resurrection was also a datable historical event, since it took place ‘on the third day’.

4. The gospel is theological. The death and resurrection of Jesus were not only historical events; they had a theological or saving significance. He not only died, but ‘died for our sins’. Since sin and death are related to one another throughout Scripture as an offence and its just reward, and since Jesus committed no sins of his own for which he needed to die, he must have died for our sins. The sins were ours, but the death was his. He died our death. He bore our penalty. Only thus could we be ‘saved’ (verse 2). This points clearly to the substitutionary nature of the cross, to which we will return in chapter 2.

5. The gospel is apostolic. That is to say, it is an essential part of the authentic message received and transmitted by the apostles. It belongs to the apostolic tradition. In verse 11 Paul concludes, ‘Whether, then, it was I [Paul] or they [the Twelve], this is what we [all the apostles] preach, and this is what you [the church] believed.’ This cluster of personal pronouns (I, they, we, you) is extremely impressive. It indicates a unity of faith between Paul and the Twelve, and between the apostles and the church, indeed between the first generation of believers and all subsequent generations.

6. The gospel is personal. That is, the death and resurrection of Jesus are not just history and theology but the way of individual salvation. The Corinthians had received it, taken their stand on it, and been saved by it, so long as they continued to hold firmly to it (verses 1–2).

The efficacy of the gospel

Question: how does the gospel become effective?

Answer: it does not require the contrived, flowery eloquence of the Greeks to make it work. Paul had renounced both philosophy and rhetoric. In place of philosophy he had preached ‘Christ and him crucified’; in place of rhetoric he trusted in the Holy Spirit. For he put no confidence in his own wisdom or power. On the contrary, because of his personal ‘weakness, fear and trembling’, he looked for ‘a demonstration’ (apodeixis, ‘proof ’) of the Spirit’s power.

This does not mean that Paul rejected apologetics. For when he reached the Greek city of Corinth, according to Luke’s account in Acts, he was still reasoning with people and ‘trying to persuade Jews and Greeks’ (Acts 18:4). It is quite wrong to set human reasoning and trust in the Holy Spirit over against each other as if we have to choose between them. As the Spirit of truth, he brings people to faith in Christ not in spite of the evidence but because of it, when he opens their eyes to attend to it. What happened in Corinth was that he spoke in human weakness and trepidation, and that the Holy Spirit took his feeble words and carried them home with divine power to the mind, heart, conscience and will of their hearers.

To sum up, the origin of the gospel was not speculation but revelation; its substance was not the world’s wisdom but Christ’s cross; and its efficacy was due not to rhetoric but to the Holy Spirit’s power. Thus, the gospel comes from God, centres on Christ and his cross, and is confirmed by the Holy Spirit.

Hapax and mallon

At this stage we need to pause and reflect. The first two of the trinity of evangelical essentials belong closely together, and there are striking parallels between them. They relate to the basic topics of every religion, namely the questions of authority (by what authority do we believe?) and salvation (by what means can we be saved?); or in evangelical terms they allude to revelation and redemption, the Bible and the cross. Both were key issues to the Reformers, who referred to sola Scriptura (Scripture alone for our authority) as the ‘formal’ principle of the Reformation, and to sola gratia (grace alone for our salvation) as its ‘material’ principle.

Next, both are due to the gracious initiative of God, who speaks and acts. Both focus on Christ, in and through whom God has spoken and acted. Moreover, both are hapax (once and for all), expressing the finality in Christ of God’s revelation (his word has been spoken) and of God’s redemption (his work has been done).

With regard to God’s revelation, Jude wrote, ‘I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all [hapax] entrusted to the saints’ (Jude 3). It was against the background of serious false teaching that Jude wrote. Jude’s readers would be able to refute them only by defending God’s revealed truth which had been committed to them once and for all.

With regard to God’s redemption, Paul, Peter and the writer to the Hebrews all apply the adverb hapax not only to Christ’s first coming in general but specifically to his cross, from which he cried out in triumph, ‘It is finished.’ Here are some examples:

Paul: The death he died, he died to sin once for all [hapax] (Rom. 6:10).

Peter: Christ died for sins once for all [hapax], the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God (1 Pet. 3:18).

Hebrews: Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. He sacrificed for their sins once for all [hapax] when he offered himself (Heb. 7:27; cf. 9:12, 26–28; 10:10–12).

It is because we have grasped the finality of what God has said and done in Christ that we evangelical people are determined to hold both fast. It is inconceivable to us that any truth could be revealed that is higher than what God has revealed in his own incarnate Son. It is equally inconceivable that anything should be deemed necessary to our salvation in addition to the cross. To add any word of our own to God’s completed word in Christ, or to add any work of our own to God’s finished work in Christ, would be gravely derogatory to the unique glory of Christ’s person and work. It would be to imply that God’s word and work are imperfect, and that we need to supplement, improve and even perfect them. No, we are fully content with what God has said and done in Christ; he has nothing more to say or do, at least in this life.

Our critics immediately pounce on this insistence on the finality of the incarnation and the atonement. They accuse us of restricting God’s saving activity to the first half of the first century AD, and of relegating Christianity to a historical museum. ‘Does God have no ministry today?’ they ask incredulously. ‘Is he imprisoned in the Bible and the cross?’

Questions like these can be asked, however, only by those who have overlooked the contemporary ministry of the Holy Spirit as the third evangelical essential. In one sense his coming too was hapax, for the Day of Pentecost was as unique and unrepeatable as Christmas Day, Good Friday, Easter Day and Ascension Day. That is to say, Jesus Christ was born once, died once, rose once, was exalted once and poured out the Holy Spirit once, as the final act of his saving career (Acts 2:33). Yet, although the Holy Spirit was given once and for all, to be with us ‘for ever’ (John 14:16), yet his ministry is continuous and contemporary.

So the appropriate adverb to describe the Holy Spirit’s activity today is not hapax (‘once and for all’) but mallon (‘more and more’). For the Holy Spirit is constantly, and indeed increasingly, showing Christ to us and forming Christ in us. The once-forall bestowal of the Holy Spirit on the church has vital ongoing implications in relation to God’s revelation and redemption through Christ. It is the Holy Spirit who, as ‘the Spirit of wisdom and revelation’ in our knowledge of Christ (Eph. 1:17ff.), opens our eyes to see ever more of what God has revealed in him.

It is also the same Spirit who enables us to inherit the full riches which are already ours through union with Christ (Eph. 3:14ff.). In this way we ‘grow in grace’, so that ‘from the fulness of his grace’ we receive ‘one blessing after another’ (2 Pet. 3:18; John 1:16). Also, we ‘are being transformed into the same image [sc. of Christ] from one degree of glory to another’ by the Holy Spirit (2 Cor. 3:18, NRSV). The same truth of gradual transformation into the image of Christ is implied in Paul’s metaphor of ‘the fruit of the Spirit’ (Gal. 5:22–23), for fruit ripens slowly, and so does Christian character. Here, then, are some Pauline verses in which the adverb mallon is applied to our Christian behaviour.

This is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more [mallon] in knowledge and depth of insight. (Phil. 1:9)

Finally, brothers, we instructed you how to live in order to please God, as in fact you are living. Now we ask you and urge you in the Lord Jesus to do this more and more [mallon]. (1 Thess. 4:1)

Now about brotherly love we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other. 10And in fact, you do love all the brothers throughout Macedonia. Yet we urge you, brothers, to do so more and more [mallon]. (1 Thess. 4:9–10)

So in the two fundamental duties of pleasing God and loving one another there must be no complacency. On the contrary, we are to be constantly growing. For although our justification is hapax (once and for all), our sanctification is to be mallon (more and more).

Thus the essentials of evangelicalism may be encapsulated in the combination of the two adverbs hapax and mallon.

God has spoken hapax in Christ (including the biblical witness to Christ), revealing himself and committing his revelation to the church. Yet our responsibility is to delve ever more deeply (mallon) into what he has revealed. Similarly, God has acted hapax in Christ, giving his Son to die for us. Yet our responsibility is to enter ever more fully (mallon) into the benefits of his death.

God has no more to teach us than he has revealed hapax in Christ; but we have much more to learn, as the Holy Spirit witnesses to Christ, not least through the multicultural fellowship of the church, and so enables us to understand God’s revelation ever more fully (mallon).

And God has no more to give than he has given us hapax in Christ; but we have much more to receive, as the Holy Spirit enables us to appropriate God’s gifts ever more fully (mallon).

This recognition of the need for mallon is well expressed in the bishop’s prayer in the 1662 Confirmation Service:

Defend, O Lord, this thy Child with thy heavenly grace, that he [or she] may continue thine for ever; and daily increase in thy Holy Spirit, more and more, until he come unto thy everlasting kingdom.

We have considered in this introduction the three essentials to which evangelical people are determined to bear witness. They concern the gracious initiative of God the Father in revealing himself to us, in redeeming us through Christ crucified, and in transforming us through the indwelling Spirit. For the evangelical faith is the trinitarian faith.22 This is why evangelical Christians place such emphasis on the Word, the cross and the Spirit. We now devote a separate chapter to each.

Suggested further reading

David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (Unwin Hyman, 1989)

Derek J. Tidball, Who Are the Evangelicals? (Marshall Pickering, 1994)

The Revelation of God

The primary question in every religion relates to the topic of authority: by what authority do we believe what we believe? And the primary answer which evangelical Christians (whether Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist or other) give to this question is that supreme authority resides neither in the church, nor in the individual, but in Christ and the biblical witness to him.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore this aspect of our evangelical identity. Why do evangelicals attribute authority to Scripture? And what are the consequences of this belief ?

Perhaps the most helpful way to delve into the evangelical view of Scripture is to consider the cluster of three words which lie at the heart of it, namely ‘revelation’, ‘inspiration’ and ‘authority’.

Revelation

The English word ‘revelation’, derived from the Latin revelatio, an unveiling, describes an objective action by which something previously hidden by a veil is unveiled and so disclosed to view. Evangelical Christians begin their thinking with a recognition of the obvious, logical reasonableness of revelation. Since God is our Creator, infinite in his being, while we are finite creatures of time and space, it stands to reason that we cannot discover him by our own researches or resources. He is altogether beyond us. And since in addition he is the all-holy God, while we are fallen, sinful and under his just judgment, there is a chasm between him and us which we from our side could never bridge. Being both finite and fallen, we cannot reach him. We could never know him (unless he should take the initiative to make himself known), and all the altars in the world, like the one Paul stumbled across outside Athens, would be inscribed TO AN UNKNOWN GOD (Acts 17:23). He would remain to us both incomprehensible and inaccessible. This double fact is the basic premise of divine revelation, and a major theme of Paul’s first letter to Corinth:

For it is written:

‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;

the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.’

²⁰Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached [sc. the kērygma, the gospel] to save those who believe. (1 Cor. 1:19–21)

Again,

. . . we speak of God’s secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. ⁸None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. ⁹However, as it is written:

‘No eye has seen,

no ear has heard,

no mind has conceived

what God has prepared for those who love him’ –

¹⁰but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit. (1 Cor. 2:7–10a)

Both these eloquent statements contrast the wisdom of God with the wisdom of the world. On the one hand, Paul declares the failure, indeed the inability, of human wisdom to find or to know God. On the other hand, he states the corresponding necessity of divine wisdom which is unattainable by the human eye, ear and imagination, but has been revealed by God, proclaimed by the apostles and is of saving efficacy to believers.

Four kinds of revelation are mentioned in Scripture. They describe the various ways in which God has revealed himself, and in some ways still does.

General or natural revelation

‘General revelation’ is so called because it is made to everybody, to the generality of humankind. It is also called ‘natural’ because it is made through nature, through the created order. One example from each Testament will perhaps suffice.

The fullest Old Testament reference to general revelation comes in the first six verses of Psalm 19. ‘The heavens declare the glory of God.’ Their proclamation is made both continuously and universally, for their message goes out ‘day after day . . . night after night’ and reaches ‘to the ends of the world’, especially as the sun makes its daily circuit across the sky. And although, literally speaking, ‘there is no speech or language’, yet metaphorically the heavens ‘pour forth speech’. Indeed, so does the earth, for ‘the whole earth is full of his glory’ (Is. 6:3).

For the clearest statement on general revelation in the New Testament we turn to Paul and his Roman letter. He insists that ‘God has made plain’ to human beings what may be known about him because throughout history (‘since the creation of the world’) God’s invisible attributes of power and divinity have been clearly seen ‘from what has been made’ (Rom. 1:19–20).1 That is, the created world is a visible disclosure of the invisible God. Just as artists reveal themselves in their art, so the Creator reveals himself in his creation. In addition, we know something of the moral order through our conscience (Rom. 1:32 – 2:2).

Still today by creation and conscience God continues to bear witness to himself. The rationality, intricacy and beauty of the world on the one hand, and our sense of right and wrong, of duty and failure, on the other, speak to us of God. But the tragedy is that we have suppressed this truth in order to go our own self-centred way. In consequence we are guilty and without excuse (Rom. 1:20; 2:1). So general revelation cannot save us; it can only condemn us. We cannot read the way of salvation in the stars. We see God’s glory in the created order; for his grace we need another revelation.

Special or supernatural revelation

There are at least six differences between ‘general’ and ‘special’ revelation.

 General revelation
 Special revelation

1. It is ‘general’ because it is made to everybody everywhere.

1. It is ‘special’ because it was made to particular people in particular contexts.

2. It is ‘natural’ because it is made through nature

2. It is ‘supernatural’ because it was made through miracle (the inspiration of the Scriptures and the incarnation of the Son).

3. It is ‘continuous’ because it never ceases.

3. It is ‘final’ because it was completed in Christ and the biblical witness to Christ.

4. It is ‘glorious’ because it reveals God’s glory in creation.

4. It is ‘gracious’ because it reveals God’s grace in salvation.

5. It is ‘visible’ because through it we see God’s works.

5. It is ‘audible’ because through it we hear God’s words.

6. It is ‘judging’ because those who accept it are condemned.

6. It is ‘saving’ because those who accept it are saved.

Of these differences, it is the second which concerns us now, namely that God’s general revelation was made through nature (heaven and earth proclaiming his glory), whereas his special revelation was made through miracle (inspiration and incarnation). This combination of inspiration and incarnation is vital. We evangelicals have often made the mistake of isolating and elevating the Bible. But the climax of God’s revelation was his incarnate Son, the Word made flesh: ‘but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son . . .’ (Heb. 1:2a).

The Son is further described as the agent of creation, the sustainer and heir of the universe, the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, who had provided purification for our sins and was now enthroned at God’s right hand (Heb. 1:1–3).

But how do we know all this about Jesus Christ? His incarnate life lasted only about thirty years, and we were not there to see it. How then could it benefit later generations and not be lost in the mists of antiquity? The answer lies in the apostles. They were chosen and equipped in order to record and explain what God had said and done through Christ. Only in that way could people in subsequent centuries have access to him. The only authentic Christ is the biblical Christ. What Scripture has done is to capture him, in order to present him to all people at all times in all places. The climax of God’s revelation should be described as the historic, incarnate Christ and the total biblical witness to him.

In God’s purpose of special revelation, event and testimony went together. This is important because it used to be fashionable among liberal (especially neo-orthodox) scholars to insist that God’s revelation was personal, not propositional. This is a false distinction, however. God’s self-revelation was indeed mostly personal – through acts of salvation and judgment. But how could such events be beneficial to those not involved in them unless there were witnesses to record and interpret the events? For example, many tribal migrations were taking place in the Middle East at the time of the exodus. How could anybody have known that Israel’s exodus from Egypt was special, unless God had raised up Moses and the prophets to say so? Again, many crucifixions took place during the years that Rome occupied Palestine. How then could anybody have known that the crucifixion of Jesus was special, let alone the turning-point of human history, if God had not appointed and prepared the apostles as witnesses? Thus God’s special revelation was usually a combination of deed and word, event and testimony.

We should not therefore perpetuate the myth that God’s revelation could be personal without being propositional too, deeds without words. We should not share in the modern disenchantment with words. Words matter. Even images need words to explain them. And God has chosen the model of human speech to illustrate his communication with us. We are familiar with such claims as these: ‘The word of the LORD came to me, saying . . .’ (e.g. Jer. 1:4). ‘Hear the word of the LORD’ (e.g. Is.1:10). ‘When you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe’ (1 Thess. 2:13). Language is the most sophisticated means of communication we have. We cannot know each other’s minds until and unless we speak to one another. We sometimes talk about ‘mind-reading’, but it is impossible. If you were to remain silent, and assume a poker face, I would not have the foggiest notion what you were thinking about. If then we cannot read each other’s minds, how much less can we read God’s?

‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the LORD.

⁹‘As the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways

and my thoughts than your thoughts.

¹⁰‘As the rain and the snow come down from heaven,

and do not return to it without watering the earth

and making it bud and flourish,

so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,

¹¹so is my word that goes out from my mouth:

It will not return to me empty,

but will accomplish what I desire

and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.’

(Is. 55:8–11)

Notice how the prophet moves from thoughts to words, from the thoughts in the mind to the words in the mouth. He begins with a firm statement that God’s thoughts and ways are not the same as ours. Indeed, God’s thoughts and ways are as much higher than ours as the heavens are higher than the earth, which is infinity. It is absolutely impossible, therefore, for us to climb up into the infinite mind of God. There is no ladder by which to reach him, no bridge by which to cross the chasm between us. If he were to remain silent, we would never know (and could never even guess) what he is thinking.

But this is not the situation, for God has spoken, the prophet continues. He makes a second reference to the heavens and the earth. Having reminded us that heaven is infinitely higher than earth, he points out that both snow and rain bridge the gap. They both ‘come down from heaven’, and they do not return ‘without watering the earth’. Just so, he continues, as the rain makes the earth productive, so God’s word goes out from his mouth. It does not return to him empty, but accomplishes his purpose. Thus the thoughts in God’s mind are inaccessible to us until and unless they are communicated by the words of his mouth, at which point they become effective in the fulfilment of his purpose.

Does this emphasis on words mean that evangelicals believe in the verbal inspiration of the Bible? Many are quick to say that they do not. They draw a distinction between the words and the sense, and like to quote the great missionary Henry Martyn. Asked in Persia by a high-ranking Muslim whether he believed in the verbal inspiration of the Bible, as his questioner did of the Qur’an, Martyn replied, ‘The sense is from God, but the expression [is] from the different writers of it.’2 It sounds like a useful distinction, until one examines it. The fact is that one cannot separate the meaning of a text from the words which constitute and communicate it. Words are the building-blocks of speech. It is impossible to frame a precise message without constructing precise sentences composed of precise words. Here is what Charles Kingsley wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century:

These glorious things – words – are man’s right alone . . . Without words we should know no more of each other’s hearts and thoughts than the dog knows of his fellow dog . . . for, if you will consider, you always think to yourself in words, though you do not speak them aloud; and without them all our thoughts would be mere blind longings, feelings which we could not understand ourselves.

More important still, consider the claim which the apostle Paul made for himself and his fellow apostles: ‘This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit . . .’ (1 Cor. 2:13).

Progressive revelation

To believe in divine revelation does not mean we suppose that God revealed everything to his people at once. No, he taught them gradually as they were able to assimilate it, ‘a little here, a little there’ (Is. 28:13), ‘in partial and various ways’ (Heb. 1:1, NAB). This is particularly obvious in regard to the relation between the Old and the New Testaments. Thus, the elaborate sacrificial cultus of the Old Testament had taught Israel indispensable truths, such as that atonement was made by the shedding of blood (Lev. 17:11). But the animal sacrifices were discontinued in the New Testament because they had been fulfilled in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Wise parents do not teach their children lessons that they subsequently contradict; instead they amplify them. Otherwise they lose credibility.

Perhaps the doctrine of the Trinity is the best example. The Trinity is not explicitly taught in the Old Testament. To be sure, there are hints and adumbrations of it. When we read God’s word ‘Let us make man’ we interpret the plural as trinitarian. It is the same when we overhear the threefold shalom of the Aaronic blessing (Num. 6:22ff.) or the ‘Holy, holy, holy’ of the heavenly choir (Is. 6:3; Rev. 4:8). Christian ears pick up these allusions, but Jewish ears do not. For the great emphasis of the Old Testament is on the unity of God, in contrast to the crude polytheism of Israel’s neighbours. For example, ‘the LORD our God, the LORD is one’ (Deut. 6:4). It was only after God’s people had firmly grasped his unity that they were ready for the further revelation that he is one in three.

What we see throughout the Old Testament, Alec Motyer has written, is ‘a true cumulative progression’. ‘There is no abandonment of the early in favour of the late, the primitive in favour of the developed, but a gathering and maturing body of truth which, by the end of the Old Testament, is also truth tensed up for its brilliant dénouement.’3

Personal revelation

It is conducive to clear thinking when we distinguish between two ministries of the Holy Spirit and refer to them as ‘revelation’ and ‘illumination’ respectively. ‘Revelation’ in this context describes an objective event, the Holy Spirit unveiling the glory of God in nature or in Scripture. ‘Illumination’, on the other hand, describes a subjective event, the Holy Spirit enlightening our eyes so that we now see what he has revealed.

Both processes are indispensable if we are ever to know God. Supposing we had met for an unveiling ceremony, for example the unveiling of somebody’s portrait. Supposing too that we had invited a blindfolded person to accompany us. Before we can all see the portrait, two processes are necessary. First, the picture must be unveiled, which illustrates the objective event called ‘revelation’. But still our blindfolded friend cannot see. A second process is necessary in his case. His bandages have to be removed, which illustrates the subjective event called ‘illumination’.

But because it involves the removal of a veil from our eyes or minds, this illumination is sometimes also called a ‘revelation’.

Jesus himself used this language. On one occasion he thanked his Father that he had hidden his truths from the intellectually arrogant and had ‘revealed them to little children’ (Matt. 11:25), that is, the humble. On another occasion, when Peter first identified Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus responded, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven’ (Matt. 16:17). What was true of Peter was equally true of Paul. His experience of conversion and commissioning on the Damascus road was so evidently due to the initiative of God’s grace that he could write, ‘God . . . was pleased to reveal his Son in me’ (Gal. 1:15–16). And having experienced this heavenly illumination himself, he naturally desired it for others. He prayed for the Ephesians that ‘the Spirit of wisdom and revelation’ would enlighten the eyes of their heart to know the fullness of God’s purpose for them (Eph. 1:17ff.).

Here then are four aspects of divine revelation – general and special, progressive and personal. Evangelical Christians emphasize that without revelation the knowledge of God is impossible. God himself is veiled, and so are our minds, until by his grace and power both veils are torn off. Evangelical Christians also emphasize that what God has revealed is true, and that our only reaction must be to listen, to believe and to obey.

How blessed we are that God did not abandon us to grope in thick darkness, to flounder in deep water, or even to make do with human philosophy! No, he has given us his Word as a lamp to our feet and a light for our path (Ps. 119:105), indeed ‘a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns’ (2 Pet. 1:19).

The evangelical emphasis on truth, revealed by God and therefore absolute, binding and universal, is not at all compatible with the mood of postmodernity. But then it was not compatible with the previous mood of modernity either. A Christian mind should respond to contemporary culture neither with a blanket rejection nor with an equally indiscriminate acquiescence, but with discernment.

Evangelical Christians could never come to terms with modernism, that is, with the Enlightenment – its replacement of revelation with reason, its proclamation of the omni-competence and autonomy of the human mind, and its glorification of objective science as the basis for its confidence in the inevitability of moral progress. It was high time this bubble burst, and we may be thankful that postmodernity has pricked it.

Professor Diogenes Allen of Princeton Theological Seminary has written optimistically that with the collapse of the Enlightenment vision there is now ‘a new possibility of God’ and therefore ‘a new openness for faith’. He shows how the four major pillars of Enlightenment confidence are all crumbling. The Enlightenment declared the following.

1. The universe is self-contained and God is superfluous, whereas now both philosophy and cosmology are exhibiting a new openness to God.

2. Morality is self-evident and revelation is unnecessary, whereas now we cannot reach a consensus for moral action or even discussion.

3. Progress is inevitable because of science, whereas now we are faced with our failure to solve social problems.

4. Knowledge is inherently good, whereas now we have to confess that knowledge is often misused for evil ends.

All this indicates that ‘the embargo on the possibility of God is lifted’ and that the gospel has a fresh relevance.4

And yet, alongside this new openness to faith, postmodernism is the sworn enemy of claims to absolute truth. Dr Os Guinness describes the collision between postmodernism and modernism:

Where modernism was a manifesto of human self-confidence and self-congratulation, post-modernism is a confession of modesty, if not despair. There is no truth, only truths. There are no principles, only preferences. There is no grand reason, only reasons . . . If postmodernism is correct, we cannot even aspire after truth, objectivity, universality and reality.5

But the evangelical faith cannot capitulate to this pluralism and relativism. We must continue to argue that truth is truth. Dr Peter Cotterell has put it well, as it confronts the Christian mission:

Truth is not a matter of pride or humility. It is a matter of fact. Islam says Jesus wasn’t crucified. We say he was. Only one of us can be right. Judaism says Jesus was not the Messiah. We say he was. Only one of us can be right. Hinduism says that God has often been incarnate. We say only once. And we can’t both be right.6

Inspiration

If the word ‘revelation’ indicates that God has taken the initiative to make himself known, the word ‘inspiration’ indicates how he has done so, at least in special revelation, namely by speaking to and through the human authors. In this sense the Bible is a unique book; no other book resembles it. For it is God’s word through human words. It thus has a double authorship (divine and human), which on that account demands a double approach – reverent because it is the Word of God, ‘critical’ (to be defined later) because it is the word of human beings.

The double authorship of Scripture

Evangelical Christians are anxious to avoid the opposite extremes of fundamentalism and liberalism. So-called ‘fundamentalists’ (at least of the old school), as we have seen, declare that the Bible is the Word of God. They tend to regard the human authors as having been entirely passive, their human faculties having been suspended by divine inspiration. They sometimes liken the Bible’s human authors to musical instruments or dictating machines, no longer living persons but lifeless toys in the hand of the Spirit. So-called ‘liberals’, by contrast, declare that the Bible is the word of human beings, originating in their minds and ennobled by only occasional flashes of divine inspiration.

But neither of these accounts of Scripture will do, because neither is the account which the Bible gives of itself. There is a third way, best designated the double authorship of Scripture. It is both the Word of God and the word of men, indeed the Word of God through the words of human beings. Examples abound. The Pentateuch is called in the same passage ‘the Law of Moses’ and ‘the Law of the Lord’ (Luke 2:22–23), and Jeremiah introduces his prophecy as ‘the words of Jeremiah’ into whose mouth Yahweh had put his words (Jer. 1:1–9). Similarly, we read in the New Testament both that ‘God spoke . . . through the prophets’ and that ‘men spoke from God’ (Heb. 1:1; 2 Pet. 1:21). In consequence, it could be said equally that ‘the mouth of the LORD has spoken’ and that he spoke ‘through the mouth of his holy prophets’ (e.g. Is. 1:20; Acts 3:21, literally). So out of whose mouth did the prophetic oracles come? The divine mouth or human mouths? The only possible answer is both. God spoke out of his mouth, but through the mouths of the human authors. We must now consider these two truths separately.

First, the Bible is the Word of God. The familiar clause in the Apostles’ Creed about the Holy Spirit affirms that he ‘spoke through the prophets’. They regularly introduced their oracles with the claim that the word of the Lord had come to them. And the apostles made the same claim, even though they did not use the prophetic formulae.

The classic statement of the Holy Spirit’s work in the inspiration of Scripture remains 2 Timothy 3:16: ‘All Scripture is given by inspiration of God’ (AV), or literally is God-breathed (theopneustos). The word means neither that God breathed into the writers, enabling them to write his word, nor that he breathed into the writings, transforming them from human words into divine words, but rather that what they wrote was breathed out of the mouth of God.7 This reference to the breath of God is congruous with references elsewhere to his mouth and his words. For in speech our breath communicates our words out of our mouths. It is not literal, of course. Since God is Spirit he has no body, and since he has no body he has neither mouth nor breath. Yet human speech is a readily intelligible model of divine inspiration, since it conveys the thoughts of our minds in words out of our mouth by our breath. It is in this sense that Scripture may accurately be described as ‘God-breathed’.

Secondly, the Bible is also the words of men. Some famous Christian leaders have supplemented the model of speech with other models, giving the impression that the process of inspiration was mechanical, and that the human authors played no significant role in it. For example, Tertullian said that the Scriptures were ‘dictated by the Holy Spirit’; Athenagoras of Athens wrote that ‘the Spirit used the writers as a flute-player might blow into his flute’; Augustine called them ‘pens of the Holy Spirit’, and Calvin his ‘amanuenses’. But Dr J. I. Packer has shown that these metaphors were used not to define the process of inspiration, for which they would have been inappropriate, but to indicate the result, namely that Scripture is the Word of God.8

The phenomena of Scripture demonstrate quite clearly that the human authors were active and not passive in the process of inspiration. I am referring to the inclusion within the biblical text of history, literature and theology.

1. Historical narrative. A substantial amount of both Old Testament and New Testament, in fact approximately a half, consists of narrative – much of the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges and Ruth, the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, Ezra, Esther and Nehemiah, and in the New Testament the Gospels and the Acts. We do not imagine that the Holy Spirit revealed this history supernaturally. No. The authors had access to historical documents from which they quoted and which on occasion they incorporated into their text, like the decree of Cyrus the Persian in Ezra 1. Also Luke tells us in the preface to his Gospel about the painstaking investigations in which he had engaged (Luke 1:1–4). So there was no passivity here. Doubtless the Holy Spirit superintended their work, but his inspiration did not make their research unnecessary.

2. Literary style. If inspiration had been a mechanical process (the Holy Spirit dictating the biblical text), we would expect to find a uniformity of style and vocabulary. Instead, we find the opposite, an extraordinary diversity of literary genre (narrative, legal code, poetry, prophetic oracle, psalms, proverbs and other wisdom literature, Gospels, letters and apocalypses), of literary styles (ranging from the refined and elegant to the popular and even vulgar), and of language (each author having his favourite words and phrases). These literary characteristics (genre, style and language) were not ironed out by inspiration.

3. Theological emphasis. In this library of sixty-six books that we call the Bible, there is a broad spectrum of theological emphasis, some of which (especially in the wisdom literature) was evidently the fruit of prolonged reflection. Indeed, it is specifically stated that ‘the Teacher . . . pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs’ and ‘searched to find just the right words’ (Eccles. 12:9–10). Thus, we believe it is not an accident that in the Old Testament Amos was the prophet of God’s justice, Hosea of his love, and Isaiah of his sovereignty, or that in the New Testament Paul was the apostle of grace and faith, James of works, John of love and Peter of hope. The Holy Spirit did not obliterate the individual personality of the human authors, any more than their literary style. On the contrary, the Holy Spirit prepared and fashioned the biblical authors (their temperament, genetic inheritance, cultural background, upbringing, education and experience) in such a way as to communicate through each a distinctive and appropriate message. For example, it was through the tragedy of Hosea’s broken marriage that God taught Israel about his steadfast covenant love, and through Luke’s global horizons as a Gentile and a traveller that God emphasized the universality of the gospel.

Thirdly, the Bible is the Word of both God and human beings. We must now bring the two authorships – divine and human – together, and insist on each without thereby contradicting the other.

On the one hand, the Bible is the Word of God. For God spoke through the human authors in such a way as to determine what he intended to say, yet not in such a way as to violate, let alone smother, the personality of the human authors he chose to pen his words.

On the other hand, the Bible is the word of men. For ‘men spoke from God’ in such a way as to use their faculties freely, yet not in such a way as to distort, let alone destroy, the message of the divine author.

God spoke his words through their words in such a way that their words were simultaneously his. As a result, what they say God says.

We have no liberty to declare such a combination impossible. To say so, as Jim Packer states with clarity, indicates

. . . a false doctrine of God, here particularly of his providence. For it assumes that God and man stand in such a relationship to each other that they cannot both be free agents in the same action. If man acts freely (i.e. voluntarily and spontaneously), God does not, and vice versa. The two freedoms are mutually exclusive. But the affinities of this idea are with Deism, not Christian Theism.9

‘The cure for such fallacious reasoning’, Dr Packer continues later, ‘is to grasp the biblical idea of God’s concursive operation in, with and through the free working of man’s own mind.’10

In order to clarify this further, various writers (ancient and modern, Roman Catholic and Protestant) have developed an analogy between the two authorships of Scripture and the two natures of Christ. To be sure, no analogy is perfect, and it is always perilous to argue from an analogy. In this case the imperfection is evident, for the Bible has no intrinsic deity as Christ has. Nevertheless, there is in both Christ and Scripture such a combination of the divine and the human that we must affirm each without denying the other. We must preserve each without sacrificing the other.

Thus, Jesus is both God and man. We must neither affirm his deity in such a way as to deny the reality of his humanity, nor affirm his humanity in such a way as to deny his deity. Somewhat similarly, the Bible is both divine and human in its authorship. Therefore we must neither affirm its divine origin in such a way as to deny the free activity of the human authors, nor affirm their cooperation in such a way as to deny that through them God spoke his word.

To say that ‘Jesus is the Son of God’ is true, but a dangerous half-truth. It might even be the heresy of docetism (God pretending to be human) unless we add that Jesus is also the Son of Man.

To say that ‘the Bible is the Word of God’ is also true, but a dangerous half-truth. It might even be the heresy of fundamentalism (God dictating mechanically) unless we add that the Bible is the Word of God through the words of men.

The Bible is equally the Word of God and the word of men. This is the double authorship of the Bible.

The double approach to Scripture

The double authorship demands a double approach. Because of the kind of book the Bible is, we must approach it in two distinct yet complementary ways. Because it is the Word of God, we must read it as we would read no other book – on our knees, in a humble, reverent, prayerful and submissive frame of mind. But because the Bible is also the word of men, we must read it as we would read every other book, thoughtfully and in a ‘critical’ frame of mind. Because we evangelicals tend to neglect the latter, I will take it first.

The ‘critical’ approach to Scripture

The very mention of ‘biblical criticism’ is calculated to send shivers up the average evangelical spine. There are two reasons for this reaction, both of which need to be exorcized.

First, the word ‘criticism’ is often misunderstood. People assume that biblical critics criticize the Bible and pass uniformly negative, even destructive, judgments on it. But ‘criticism’ does not necessarily have this meaning. For example, a literary critic is not someone who criticizes literature and finds fault with everything he reads, but a scholar who reviews and assesses books. It is the same with an art or drama critic. Similarly, a biblical critic is not necessarily someone determined to discredit the biblical documents, but a scholar who examines and evaluates them from different points of view. In these spheres, ‘criticism’ means not destruction but investigation, not judgment but evaluation.

The second reason for our evangelical suspicion of biblical criticism is that the first critics about 250 years ago were extremely sceptical scholars, products of the so-called ‘Age of Reason’ or European Enlightenment. They were rationalistic and unbelieving in their approach to Scripture and consistently destructive in their conclusions. One of the earliest and worst offenders was the eighteenth-century deist Hermann Reimarus, Professor of Oriental Languages in the University of Hamburg. He was outspoken in his rejection of revelation, miracles, and the deity, atoning death and resurrection of Jesus. He also drew attention, almost with glee, to the discrepancies which he believed were to be found in the resurrection narratives. He and others like him gave biblical criticism a bad name.

But just as ‘criticism’ does not necessarily mean ‘judgment’, so its practitioners (‘biblical critics’) are not necessarily all unbelievers. Many are devout and reverent believers. Greatly to oversimplify a complex subject, we may say that there are four main types of biblical criticism. First, there is textual criticism, whose admirable goal is to establish the authentic text of Scripture. Secondly, there is historical criticism, which is concerned both to study the historical circumstances in which the biblical books were composed and to evaluate the historical element in the text itself. Thirdly, literary criticism examines both the sources which the author had at his disposal and the forms in which oral material was preserved and made available to them. The fourth, redaction criticism, is valuable because it recognizes that the biblical authors and editors (redactors) had a theological motivation behind their writing. By using these critical tools in our study, we are acknowledging the human aspects (literary, historical and theological) of the biblical text.

In all four kinds of biblical criticism the most important question concerns the presuppositions with which the critic approaches the text: are they Christian or sub-Christian? His conclusions will be determined largely by this. The three commonest sub-Christian presuppositions, which have led to disastrous conclusions, are as follows:

1. History is a closed continuum of cause and effect, with no possibility of divine intervention or prophecy.

2. The universe is a self-contained system, in which miracles are impossible.

3. Religion is a human phenomenon, which has evolved over the centuries from primitive animism through polytheism to monotheism. There is no such thing as revelation.

These presuppositions are not Christian. They reflect a thoroughgoing scepticism which is incompatible with biblical faith. Those who hold them will come into continuous collision with the Bible and with its very different understanding of history, cosmology and religion.

The ‘reverent’ approach to Scripture

Having considered the ‘critical’ approach to Scripture, we come now to the ‘reverent’ approach. They complement and do not exclude or contradict one another. For in the ‘critical’ approach we scrutinize Scripture, while in the ‘reverent’ approach we invite Scripture to scrutinize us.

Because we believe that Scripture is ‘God’s Word written’ (Anglican Article XX), it is unlike every other book. We therefore approach it as we approach no other book. We kneel – not because we worship the Bible, but because we worship the God of the Bible and desire to humble ourselves before him. We remember the words of Jesus that God actively hides himself from some (the arrogant), while revealing himself to babies (NIV ‘little children’, Matt. 11:25), that is, those who are humble in their approach. So we sit at our Master’s feet, like Mary of Bethany, listening to his words (Luke 10:39). We pray like the boy Samuel, ‘Speak, for your servant is listening’ (1 Sam. 3:10). We cry to the Holy Spirit, who is the divine author of the book, to be its interpreter also, and to illumine our darkened minds. We ask God to break through our defences, until we are ready to hear not the soothing echoes of our own cultural prejudice but the thunderclap of his Word. I fear this risky humility before God is tragically absent in many biblical critics, and also in some evangelical preachers.

Just as, for a true and balanced understanding of Scripture, we must combine its divine and human elements and see it as God’s Word through the human authors, so also, for a true and balanced approach to Scripture, we must combine the critical and the reverent, and come to it with both diligent study and earnest prayer. I conclude this section with two examples, one from the Old Testament and the other from the New.

When Daniel was granted a vision beside the River Tigris, the heavenly being who appeared said to him: ‘Do not be afraid, Daniel. Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to them’ (Dan. 10:12).

Similarly, when Paul was anxious that Timothy would understand and obey the instructions he was giving him, he urged him to combine his own reflection with dependence on the Lord for illumination, that is, study and prayer. ‘Reflect on what I am saying, for the Lord will give you insight into all this’ (2 Tim. 2:7).

Authority

If the word ‘revelation’ emphasizes God’s initiative in making himself known, and ‘inspiration’ denotes the process he employed, then ‘authority’ indicates the result. Because Scripture is the revelation of God by the inspiration of the Spirit, it has authority over us.

But our day detests authority. We are searching for freedom, and it is everywhere assumed (though falsely) that all authority will inhibit our quest, indeed that authority and freedom are incompatible. Ever since the 1960s, when the Free Speech movement erupted at the University of California, Berkeley, and the students took to the barricades on the streets of Paris, a strong anti-authority mood has prevailed. Every authority figure and every established institution is called into question. A ‘radical’ is precisely somebody who refuses to accept anything merely because it is laid down from on high or inherited from the past.

Moreover, this revolt against authority in the world has been accompanied by a loss of authority in the church. Consider the multiplicity of Protestant denominations, and our tendency to go on splintering; the competing factions in the ancient churches of the East and the West, as cracks appear in those mighty monoliths; the controversies in and about the World Council of Churches, whose doctrinal basis is good but minimal; and the unedifying spectacle on television of church leaders either not knowing what they believe or, if they do, then disagreeing with one another about it. It is a state of theological confusion, even chaos. And its basic cause is the lack of agreement on how to agree, that is, on the question of authority.

In theory, all Christians confess that ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’ (e.g. Phil. 2:9–11), for after his resurrection he claimed that ‘all authority in heaven and on earth’ had been delegated to him (Matt. 28:18). The whole New Testament takes it for granted that the church is under the authority of the risen Lord Jesus. Charles Lamb, the nineteenth-century British essayist, is reputed to have said, ‘If Shakespeare were to enter this room, we would rise with respect to greet him; but if that person [meaning Jesus] were to come in, we would fall down and try to kiss the hem of his garment.’

For myself I think we would do more than kiss his clothing; we would confess with Thomas, ‘My Lord and my God!’ If Jesus Christ were to appear visibly in such a way that no-one would question his identity, and if he were to speak audibly in such a way that no-one would mistake his meaning, it is charitable to suppose that the church would listen, believe and obey. But Jesus Christ will not appear like that and address his church, at least not until he comes on the last day, and then it will be too late.

So how does the Lord Jesus exercise his authority and govern his church today? Four main answers have been given to this question.

1. The Roman Catholic answer is that Christ rules his church through the magisterium, the teaching authority given to the Pope and his college of bishops both in the present and through past tradition. The Orthodox churches also stress tradition, specially through the first seven ecumenical councils.

2. The liberal answer is that Christ rules his church through the individual reason and conscience, illumined by the Holy Spirit, or through the consensus of educated opinion. They sometimes add experience to reason, wanting to unite the rational with the emotional, and the authority of experience is stressed by Pentecostal and charismatic Christians too.

3. A popular Anglican answer is that Christ rules his church through the ‘threefold cord’ of Scripture, tradition and reason. In other words, authority is dispersed, not centralized. It is typical of the so-called ‘sweet reasonableness’ of Anglicanism to avoid polarizations and opt for a via media. But in practice the threefold cord is unworkable. For what happens if and when the three authorities are in conflict with one another? Then Scripture must take precedence. Richard Hooker, to whose Ecclesiastical Polity (1593–7) Anglican leaders often appeal, did not in fact teach that Scripture, tradition and reason are equal authorities. Hooker wrote:

What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth.11

4. The evangelical answer is that Christ rules his church through Scripture. Scripture is the sceptre by which King Jesus reigns. Tradition is important, for it includes the teaching of the early councils and the creeds. We evangelicals should develop a deeper respect for tradition, since it is the church’s interpretation of Scripture down the ages, as the Holy Spirit has enlightened it. Not of course that all tradition correctly interprets Scripture. But to ignore it altogether is to behave as if we thought the Holy Spirit began his teaching ministry, and even came into existence, only when we appeared on the scene! Nevertheless, Jesus himself subordinated tradition to Scripture, calling the former ‘the traditions of men’ and the latter ‘the word of God’ (Mark 7:1–13). We must do the same, assigning to tradition a secondary place, including the traditions of the evangelical elders.

Reason and experience are also important, for God has made us both rational and emotional creatures. But the proper place of reason is not to stand in judgment upon Scripture, but instead to sit in humility under it, seeking to elucidate and apply it; and the experience of the burning heart is a major way by which the Holy Spirit attests the truth of his Word (Luke 24:32).

There is one particular promise of Christ which these four groups – Roman Catholics, liberals, Anglicans and evangelicals – all claim for themselves! It is his promise that, when the Holy Spirit has come, the Spirit of truth, ‘he will guide you into all truth’ (John 16:12–13). Roman Catholics apply it to their bishops as the supposed successors of the apostles. Liberals insist that it is the individual whom the Spirit leads into the truth, or the contemporary church. A brash statement to this effect was recently made by Frank Griswold, Presiding Bishop of the American Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church has certainly gone beyond Scripture, he conceded. How is this justified? Because ‘Jesus talked about the Spirit guiding the church into all truth’. C. E. Bennison, Bishop of Pennsylvania, has gone even further. ‘Because we wrote the Bible’, he has said with bland self-confidence, ‘we can re-write it.’ But we did not write the Bible. In the New Testament letters, for example, the church was not writing in its own name. On the contrary, the apostles addressed the church in the name of Christ.

Let us return to Christ’s promise that the Spirit of truth will lead ‘you’ into all the truth. Who is this ‘you’? It is a crucial hermeneutical question. I venture to say that both Catholics and liberals are wrong, for the ‘you’ cannot possibly refer to them. It refers rather to the apostles. Consider the context. Jesus said, ‘I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth . . . he will tell you what is yet to come’ (John 16:12–13). The first two ‘you’s’ unquestionably refer to the apostles, who during the earthly ministry of Jesus were unable to assimilate all he had to teach them. So the third and fourth ‘you’ must refer to them too. We cannot change the identity of the ‘you’ in the middle of the sentence. What Jesus promised was that the Spirit of truth would accomplish after Pentecost what Jesus had not been able to accomplish during his public ministry. The promise was fulfilled in the writing of the New Testament.

The reason why the church has historically submitted to Scripture, and why evangelicals continue to do so, is that our Lord Jesus himself did. Thus the authority of Christ and the authority of Scripture belong together. The church has no liberty to repudiate what her Lord has affirmed.

Of course Jesus lived between the two Testaments. He looked back to the Old Testament, which was already complete, and he looked forward to the New Testament, which had not yet begun. So the way in which he affirmed them was necessarily different. He confirmed the authority of the Old Testament by endorsing it. He obeyed its moral commands, responding to temptation with a firm gegraptai gar (‘because it stands written’); he accepted its teaching about his messianic mission as the Son of Man and the servant of the Lord (‘The Son of Man must suffer . . .’); and in his public debates with both Pharisees and Sadducees he made Scripture the final court of appeal (‘This is why you are wrong, that you don’t know the Scriptures . . .’). His own attitude of humble submission to Scripture is incontrovertible; and it is inconceivable that his disciples should have a lower view of it than their Master.12

The case for the authority of the New Testament is different. The argument now is that Jesus not only foresaw the writing of New Testament Scripture, parallel to the Old Testament, but intended it for the same reason (to record and interpret what God was doing). So Jesus made provision for it by appointing and equipping his twelve apostles. Their threefold uniqueness lay in their personal authorization by Jesus, their eyewitness experience of him (Paul being added as a witness to the resurrection) and their extraordinary inspiration by the Holy Spirit. In consequence, they spoke and wrote in the name of Christ with the self-conscious authority of his apostles. Paul even thanked God for the Galatians in these terms: ‘you welcomed me as if I were an angel of God, as if I were Christ Jesus himself ’ (Gal. 4:14). I am thankful that the Anglican bishops, gathered for their Lambeth Conference in 1958, stated that the New Testament books ‘were recognised as giving the witness of the apostles to the life, teaching, death and resurrection of the Lord and the interpretation by the apostles of these events. To that apostolic authority the church must ever bow.’13

So then our Lord Jesus Christ repeatedly endorsed the authority of the Old Testament by appealing to it and submitting to it. He also deliberately provided for the writing of the New Testament by appointing and equipping his apostles. In this way both the Old Testament and the New Testament, although in different ways, bear the stamp of his authority. Therefore, if we wish to submit to the authority of Christ, we must submit to the authority of Scripture, since the authority of Scripture carries with it the authority of Christ.

Three more words

We have concentrated so far, for our understanding of Scripture, on the three words ‘revelation’, ‘inspiration’ and ‘authority’, although with the addition of ‘supremacy’ to indicate that the authority of Scripture is supreme over lesser authorities like tradition, reason and experience. Now, for the sake of completeness, we need to consider three more words, which also belong to the evangelical view of the Bible.

Perspicuity

The ‘perspicuity’ of Scripture was much insisted on by the Reformers. They meant that it has a ‘per-spicuous’, ‘see-through’ or transparent quality. They did not mean by this that everything in Scripture is plain. How could they, when the Ethiopian confessed his need of a teacher to explain things to him (Acts 8:31), and when Peter confessed that Paul’s letters contained ‘some things that are hard to understand’ (2 Pet. 3:16)? If one apostle could not always understand another apostle, it would hardly be modest for us to claim that we can! No, the Reformers’ insistence was that the essence of the biblical message, the way of salvation in Christ by grace through faith, is simple enough for even the uneducated to grasp. Hence their determination to put a vernacular Bible into the hands of the lay people. The perspicuity of Scripture was well defined in the Westminster Confession (1643–6):

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or another, that not only the learned but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them (1.7).

Sufficiency

The ‘sufficiency’ of Scripture (sola Scriptura) was another Reformation concern. The Reformers did not mean by it that Scripture is sufficient for education, but that it is sufficient for salvation. They did not suppose that Christians should read nothing but the Bible. Following the invention of printing, they encouraged people to educate themselves, to read other books, and to develop a broad culture. But for salvation only one book was necessary. The sufficiency of Scripture is due to the sufficiency of Christ to whom it witnesses.

Anglican Article VI puts the matter succinctly:

Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.

The article was framed with the Church of Rome in mind, since she required (and still requires) her members to accept a number of traditions, which have no biblical warrant.

Today the challenge comes rather from some Pentecostal and charismatic church leaders who claim that God is again giving apostles and prophets to his church, and that their teaching supplements Scripture. All evangelicals will want to agree that there are today both apostolic ministries (e.g. pioneer missionaries, church planters and church leaders including bishops) and prophetic ministries (e.g. in addressing specific situations with wisdom from God). But evangelicals should also be able to agree that there are no apostles or prophets today who have an authority comparable to that of the biblical apostles and prophets, whose teaching is the foundation of the church (Eph. 2:20). If there were, their teaching would need to be added to Scripture and the principle of its sufficiency would have been breached.

Inerrancy

The ‘inerrancy’ of Scripture is a third word requiring elucidation. Since the publication in 1976 of Dr Harold Lindsell’s book Battle for the Bible, the battle among American evangelicals has really been over the word ‘inerrancy’, whose equivalent in British debate has been ‘infallibility’.

There are at least five reasons why the word ‘inerrancy’ makes me uncomfortable. First, God’s self-revelation in Scripture is so rich – both in content and in form – that it cannot be reduced to a string of propositions which invite the label ‘truth’ or ‘error’. ‘True or false?’ would be an inappropriate question to address to a great deal of Scripture.

Secondly, the word ‘inerrancy’ is a double negative, and I always prefer a single positive to a double negative. It is better to affirm that the Bible is true and therefore trustworthy. J. I. Packer clarifies in his lectures that what inerrantists are essentially concerned about is ‘total trustworthiness as a consequence of entire truthfulness’.14 And with that all evangelicals would (or should) agree.

Thirdly, the word ‘inerrancy’ sends out the wrong signals and develops the wrong attitudes. Instead of encouraging us to search the Scriptures so that we may grow in grace and in the knowledge of God, it seems to turn us into detectives hunting for incriminating clues and to make us excessively defensive in relation to apparent discrepancies.

Fourthly, it is unwise and unfair to use ‘inerrancy’ as a shibboleth by which to identify who is evangelical and who is not. The hallmark of authentic evangelicalism is not subscription but submission. That is, it is not whether we subscribe to an impeccable formula about the Bible, but whether we live in practical submission to what the Bible teaches, including an advance resolve to submit to whatever it may later be shown to teach.

Fifthly, it is impossible to prove that the Bible contains no errors. When faced with an apparent discrepancy, the most Christian response is neither to make a premature negative judgment, nor to resort to a contrived harmonization, but rather to suspend judgment, waiting patiently for further illumination to be given us. Many former problems have been solved in this way.

When some 650 American evangelical leaders gathered in 1989 for a consultation on ‘Evangelical Affirmations’, co-sponsored by the National Association of Evangelicals and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, they issued a fine, comprehensive statement. Here is part of their affirmation about the Bible:

We affirm the complete truthfulness and the full and final authority of the Old and New Testament Scriptures as the Word of God written. The appropriate response to it is humble assent and obedience.

Then, as part of their conclusion they wrote:

Evangelicals hold the Bible to be God’s Word and therefore completely true and trustworthy (and this is what we mean by the words infallible and inerrant).15

Two clarifications

When evangelicals affirm that Scripture is God’s Word, they have two vital clarifications in mind. First, they are referring to Scripture as originally given. For example, the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) affirms the inspiration of Scripture in its doctrinal basis ‘as originally given’. We do not claim authority for any particular text or translation, but only for the original text as it was written down by its author. Our critics begin at this point to smile and snigger, because of course all the biblical autographs have been lost. What is the point, they ask, of assigning authority to a text which does not exist? But we evangelicals are ready to face our critics’ mockery, for this first qualification is very important to us. We know that the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts which have come down to us, even the great codices of the fourth century AD, contain some copyists’ errors. But we do not claim divine inspiration for their mistakes! On the contrary, evangelicals are committed (as we have already noted) to the science of textual criticism, which compares manuscripts, versions (translations) and citations (quotations by the church fathers) with a view to establishing the original text. This remains one of the church’s vital responsibilities.

Secondly, we are referring to Scripture as correctly interpreted. Just as we do not claim divine authority for copyists’ mistakes, so we do not claim divine authority for interpreters’ mistakes. Moreover, in seeking to discover the true interpretation of a text, the most important principle concerns the intention of its author: ‘a text means what its author meant’.16

Therefore, to ‘banish the original author as the determiner of meaning’ is to ‘reject the only compelling normative principle that could lend validity to an interpretation’.17 Postmodernists, however, ‘deconstruct’ texts, that is, detach them from their authors and expect their readers to determine their meaning as they wish.

Evangelicals must not surrender to this novel and disastrous deconstructionism. We prefer the Lausanne Covenant, which describes Scripture as ‘without error in all that it affirms’.18 This qualifying clause is essential. Just as the words ‘as originally given’ commit us to the discipline of textual criticism, so the words ‘in all that it affirms’ and ‘as correctly interpreted’ commit us to the discipline of hermeneutics. Two examples may be helpful.

First, we must not imagine that all Old Testament characters are presented to us as good examples to be imitated, for some set a bad example which is rather to be avoided (see 1 Cor. 10:1–11). In some passages we are told explicitly whether a story is recorded as a ‘warning’ for us (1 Cor. 10:11) or as an ‘encouragement’ (Rom. 15:4). At other times no moral judgment is passed, and we are left to make up our own minds in the light of the rest of Scripture. In a third kind of narrative we are given both positive and negative signals simultaneously, not least during that dark age presided over by the judges. True, Samson and Jephthah are celebrated among the heroes of faith in Hebrews 11:32, since they were loyal to Yahweh even when surrounded by Baal worship. But some of their conduct was deplorable. Samson behaved like a mixed-up, overgrown adolescent without self-control, and Jephthah should definitely not have sacrificed his daughter to his vow, since human sacrifice was one of the main evils for which God had said that the land would ‘vomit out’ its inhabitants. Although the writer does not clearly condemn the prevailing morals, he hints at his disapproval by his repeated refrain that ‘in those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit’ (Judg. 17:6; 21:25; cf. 18:1 and 19:1).

A second question concerns the Gospels. We must not impose on them our standards of computer accuracy, and expect them to conform to it. Take chronology as an example. Matthew and Mark both place Jesus’ visit to Nazareth (together with his synagogue sermon and his rejection by his own people) in the middle of his public ministry. But Luke places it at the very beginning, immediately after his baptism and temptations (Luke 4:14ff.). There is no need, however, to accuse Luke of error. He evidently sees the Nazareth incident as forecasting Jesus’ ministry and rejection. So he puts it at the beginning as a kind of signpost, deliberately presenting his chronology to make a theological point. We must allow every biblical author to lay down his own theological emphases and literary principles, and to abide by them.

Here then are the two important clarifications. While affirming the entire truthfulness and trustworthiness of Scripture, we are referring to Scripture (a) as originally given and (b) as correctly interpreted. It will mean more work for us as we labour to interpret and apply Scripture accurately, and it will remove from us some of the easy certainties which our critics suggest we are longing for. But it will enable us to guard our integrity. For although we sometimes disagree on our interpretations, the biblical text itself remains normative, and we have the permanent duty and right to keep returning to it, to keep scrutinizing all interpretations in the light of it, and to keep revising them accordingly.

I hope that this rather long chapter has demonstrated that we evangelical people are first and foremost Bible people, affirming the great truths of revelation, inspiration and authority. We have a higher view of Scripture than anybody else in the church. Our use of it should therefore correspond to our view of it.

Like everybody else, Bible people are busy people, and there is never enough time to do everything we ought or want to do. Nevertheless, we must struggle to make time every day for some personal Bible reading, since our spiritual life, health and growth are nurtured by it. And although family prayers at the breakfast table may nowadays be impossible for most, with the adults dashing to work and the children to school, yet a Christian family should be able to manage a little time together round the Bible every week, perhaps on Saturday or Sunday. As for the church, if we are pastors, I hope we will recommit ourselves to the wholesome discipline of biblical preaching, and if we are lay people encourage our pastors to do so. The conscientious exposition of the Word of God from the pulpit remains an essential characteristic of evangelical churches.

The words of Jesus, quoting Deuteronomy, still come to us across the centuries, that human beings do not live by bread only, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God (e.g. Mark 4:4).

Suggested further reading

Kenneth S. Kantzer and Carl F. H. Henry (eds.), Evangelical Affirmations (Zondervan, 1990)

Alec Motyer, Look to the Rock (IVP, 1996)

J. I. Packer, Knowing God (Hodder and Stoughton, 1973); ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God (IVF, 1958); God has Spoken (Hodder and Stoughton, 1979)

John Stott, Understanding the Bible (Scripture Union, 1972)

The Cross of Christ

If the first essential of evangelical Christianity is the revelation of God in the Bible, the second is the cross of Christ, together with all the glorious benefits he achieved by it.

I invite you to reflect with me in this chapter on one of the most extraordinary statements which the apostle Paul ever made – which is to claim a great deal, since he made a good many astonishing statements. The one I am referring to is Galatians 6:14 (REB):

God forbid that I should boast of anything but the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world is crucified to me and I to the world!

There is no exact equivalent in English, or I believe in many other languages, to the Greek verb kauchasthai. It may be translated ‘to boast in’, ‘to glory in’, ‘to take pride in’, ‘to revel in’, even ‘to live for’. In a word, our kauchēma is our obsession. It engrosses our attention, it fills our horizons, it dominates our mind. For Paul this was the cross. The cross of Christ was the centre of his faith, of his life and of his ministry; it should equally be the centre of ours. Let others be obsessed with money, success, fame, sex or power; those who follow Christ should be obsessed with him and with his cross.

This was not, however, a peculiarity of Paul’s. On the contrary, the cross was central to his mind, because it had been central to the mind of Christ. Did Jesus not repeatedly predict the necessity of his suffering, saying that ‘the Son of man must suffer many things and be rejected . . . and be killed’ (Mark 8:31; cf. 9:12, 31; 10:34, 45)? Did he not speak of his death as the ‘hour’ for which he had come into the world (e.g. John 12:23, 27)? Did he not give instructions for his own memorial service, telling his disciples to eat bread and drink wine in memory of him? Further, since he called the bread his body ‘given’ for them, and the wine his blood ‘shed’ for them, it is evident that he intended death, not life, to speak from both the elements. It was therefore by his death that he wished above all to be remembered.

So the church was right in its choice of symbol for Christianity. There were many options. It could have chosen the crib in which the baby Jesus was cradled (emblem of the incarnation), or the carpenter’s bench at which he worked in Nazareth (emblem of the dignity of manual labour), or the boat on the lake of Galilee which he used as a pulpit (emblem of his teaching ministry), or the towel which he tied round him when he washed and wiped his disciples’ feet (emblem of humble servitude), or the tomb in which his body was laid and from which he rose (emblem of his resurrection), or the throne which he occupies today at the Father’s right hand (emblem of his supreme sovereignty), or the dove, the wind or the fire (emblems of the Holy Spirit). Any one of these could have been an appropriate symbol for the religion of Jesus Christ.

But the church passed them by and chose the cross instead. We see it everywhere – in the great cathedrals of medieval Europe, whose nave and chancel deliberately display a cruciform ground plan, on the necklaces of Christian women and on the lapels of Christian men.

For the Christian faith is the faith of Christ crucified. In this faith we were baptized, and in some traditions signed with the sign of the cross, traced with water on our forehead. In this faith we are called to live, to serve and to die, and after our death our family and friends may well erect a cross over our grave.

Of course we must never separate the crucifixion from the incarnation and the resurrection of Jesus. His death would have had no efficacy if it had not been preceded by his unique birth and followed by his unique resurrection. Only the God-man could die for our sins, and only the resurrection could validate his death. Paul notably bears witness to this by bringing the three great events together. ‘There is one God’, he wrote to Timothy, ‘and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all men’ (1 Tim. 2:5–6). In this one short sentence Jesus is named ‘mediator’, ‘man’ and ‘ransom’, for he was incarnate as man, he died as a ransom, and he has been exalted as our heavenly mediator. The three are linked together inextricably.

Nevertheless, although none is effective without the others, it is the death which is central. For the birth looks forward to it and prepares for it, while the resurrection looks back to it and validates it. Consider some of the great apostolic pronouncements about the death of Jesus Christ:

While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Rom. 5:8)

Christ died for our sins. (1 Cor. 15:3)

[He] gave himself for our sins. (Gal. 1:4)

In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins. (Eph. 1:7)

Since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus . . . let us draw near to God. (Heb. 10:19–22)

Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. (1 Pet. 3:18)

God . . . loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 4:10)

You are worthy . . .

because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God.

(Rev. 5:9)

This is only a selection of texts. But here are the principal writers of the New Testament (Paul, Peter, John, the writer to the Hebrews and the author of the Revelation) all bearing witness to the same central truth, namely that it was by the shedding of his blood, that is, by his sacrificial and violent death on the cross, that Jesus dealt with our sins and won our salvation.

Moreover, the centrality of the cross has been widely recognized during the last hundred years or so. I share a few striking statements with my readers.

Here is J. C. Ryle, the great evangelical Bishop of Liverpool from 1880 to 1900:

If you have not yet found out that Christ crucified is the foundation of the whole volume, you have read your Bible hitherto to very little profit. Your religion is a heaven without a sun, an arch without a keystone, a compass without a needle, a clock without spring or weights, a lamp without oil . . . Beware, I say again, of a religion without the cross . . .1

P. T. Forsyth, the Congregationalist theologian, who died in 1921, wrote three perceptive books on the cross. Here are two quotations – a statement and a warning:

Christ is to us just what his cross is. All that Christ was in heaven or on earth was put into what he did there . . . You do not understand Christ till you understand his cross.2

On this interpretation of the work of Christ [sc. Paul’s doctrine of reconciliation] the whole church rests. If you move faith from that centre, you have driven the nail into the church’s coffin. The church is then doomed to death, and it is only a matter of time when she shall expire.3

We owe much to Dr Leon Morris of Melbourne, Australia, for his three or four characteristically comprehensive books on different aspects of the cross. In one he gave his carefully considered opinion: ‘the cross dominates the New Testament’.4

But why is the cross central? In particular, why did Paul glory only in the cross? In the Graeco-Roman world of the first century the cross was regarded as an object of distaste, even of disgust. How could Paul glory in this symbol of shame? Can we elaborate what he meant? Yes, we can. It is a basic hermeneutical principle that we must allow the context to determine the meaning of the text. And since Galatians 6:14 belongs to the conclusion of his letter to the Galatians, the rest of it, and specially its references to the cross, will help us to understand Paul’s meaning.

Our acceptance with God

First, we glory in the cross for our acceptance with God. Indeed, there is no other way of acceptance with him.

Some years ago, when I was in Durham, in the north of England, I worshipped on Sunday morning in the massive Norman cathedral which dominates the city and university. The preacher during that service was Professor H. E. W. Turner, a well-known New Testament scholar at that time. I was arrested when in the middle of his sermon he asked himself a personal question (for it is not the custom in Britain for university professors to ask themselves embarrassing questions in public!). This was what he asked himself: ‘How can I, a lost and guilty sinner, stand before a just and holy God?’

Good question! It is arguably the most important of all questions which confront human beings. If we have never asked ourselves this question, we must be very short-sighted indeed. For one thing is certain: we can never enter the holy presence of God, either in this life or in the next, in the tattered rags of our own morality. We are unfit even to approach him. All those who have been granted even a momentary glimpse of his majesty have not been able to bear the sight. They have either shrunk from him in shame like Moses at the burning bush (Exod. 3:6) or fallen prostrate at his feet like Ezekiel in the Old Testament and John in the New (Ezek. 1:28; Rev. 1:17). If we were to penetrate his presence, unbidden and unprepared, we would shrivel up and be consumed.

This sense of our sinfulness, of the blinding holiness of God, and of the absolute incompatibility of the one with the other, is an essential evangelical characteristic, without which our understanding of the necessity and the nature of the cross is bound to be skewed. It is why Bishop Ryle gave as the second leading feature of evangelical religion (the first being the supremacy of Scripture) ‘the depth and prominence it assigns to the doctrine of human sinfulness and corruption’. ‘We hold’, he continued, ‘that a mighty spiritual disease like this requires a mighty spiritual medicine for its cure.’5

Yet it is precisely here that our detractors criticize us. In 1945 Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, commissioned a group of Anglican Catholics to examine the causes of Catholic–Protestant deadlock and to consider whether synthesis, or at least coexistence, might be possible. Two years later their report Catholicity was published.6 They accused evangelicals of ‘grievous distortion’, ‘radical error’ and ‘a catastrophic pessimism concerning the results of the Fall, formulated in the doctrine of man’s “total depravity”, and the complete destruction of the imago Dei in human nature’.7

It was an extraordinarily inept and inaccurate criticism, however, as a group of Anglican evangelicals, commissioned by Geoffrey Fisher in 1947, had no difficulty in showing. It is true, they agreed, that ‘by sin man’s whole nature is perverted, and infected with self-will and self-love’, but the divine image in us, though defaced, has certainly not been destroyed (see Gen. 9:6; Jas. 3:9). Further, ‘ “total depravity” means not that there is no good in man but that even his best acts and characteristics are subtly and deeply tainted with pride’.8 Evangelicals insist on this, and one hopes that Catholics do too.

This debate is of the utmost importance. I will not mince my words. To make light of sin is inevitably to make light of salvation and so of the cross. To deny the just judgment of God is a characteristic of false prophets, ‘who say “peace, peace” when there is no peace’. They are like bad builders whose remedy for a flimsy wall about to collapse is to apply a coat of whitewash. They are like bad doctors who dress a deep wound superficially, as though it were not serious.9

But our human condition without Christ is extremely serious. We are ‘lost and guilty sinners’, as Professor Turner rightly said. This is why we set ourselves resolutely against the human potential movement, which has become so widespread and done such damage, especially in the United States. It accuses us of a morbid obsession with guilt. In fact, it deplores all mention of sin, guilt, judgment, atonement and repentance as inimical to our mental and spiritual health. It then tries to reinterpret salvation in terms of a recovery of our self-esteem.

In response, although we acknowledge that there are such things as false guilt and inferiority feelings, and although we should never attempt to induce these in people artificially, yet guilt for objective wrongdoing must be acknowledged as a reality, and confessed. Otherwise we will never flee to Christ crucified for forgiveness and a new start. To wallow in guilt is pathological; to cry to God for mercy is the beginning of health.

Do not let us be deceived, then, by those false teachers who minimize the sinfulness of sin. Biography and autobiography often reveal unsuspected corruption beneath the surface of respectability. Many historical examples could be given. I content myself with two. The first is Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations, a deeply committed public servant, described by W. H. Auden as ‘a great, good and lovable man’. But he had a very different opinion of himself. He bemoaned what he called ‘that dark counter-centre of evil in our nature’, and in particular the perversity which ‘makes our unselfish service of others the foundation of our own self-esteem’.10

My second example is Cyril Garbett, who was Archbishop of York from 1942 to 1955. Writing in his diary on his eightieth birthday, he felt the need to distinguish between the public persona and the private reality:

People have been undeservedly kind, they have formed an ideal picture of myself – the devoted pastor, the kindly old gentleman, and the courageous prophet!! They don’t see me as I really am, selfish, self-centred, seeking and enjoying the praise of men, lazy, possessive, and timid.11

Which of us, if given the chance to write an autobiography, would not express the same paradox? Sin is self, and Luther was on target when he described fallen and unregenerate man as homo in se incurvatus (‘man curved in on himself ’). In his lectures on Romans, he wrote that ‘our nature has been so deeply curved in upon itself ’, that ‘it even uses God himself to achieve’ its own ends. Again, ‘this curved-ness is now natural for us’.12 Emil Brunner, the Swiss theologian, was not exaggerating when he dubbed ‘a superficial person’ anybody who ‘has not yet perceived that evil is entwined with the very roots of his personality’.13 As Jesus said, it comes out of the heart (Mark 7:20–23).

Not yet, however, have we plumbed the depths of human evil. There is worse to come. It is not just that our fallen nature is crookedly bent, twisted, self-absorbed and self-obsessed. It is also, as perceptive theologians like Emil Brunner have observed, that we have risen up in active rebellion against a holy God. We have certainly not loved him with all our being. Instead, as Brunner wrote in his Christian anthropology Man in Revolt, we have been guilty of ‘defiance, arrogance, the desire to be equal with God’.14

Even more outspoken was Brunner’s definition of sin: ‘Sin is the desire for the autonomy of man; therefore, in the last resort, it is the denial of God and self-deification: it is getting rid of the Lord God, and the proclamation of self-sovereignty.’15

When sin is stripped of all its disguises, and is seen in its ugly nakedness as the attempt to dethrone God and enthrone self, it is evident that we are incapable of doing anything to gain acceptance with God. To be sure, the ethnic religions assure us with one voice that it is perfectly possible to do so, to accumulate merit, and to commend ourselves to God. For example, in a lecture during the first Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, Swami Vivekananda, the Hindu reformer and founder of the Ramakrishna Mission, said:

The Hindu refuses to call you sinners. Ye are the children of God; the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth, sinners? It is a sin to call a man a sinner. It is a standing libel on human nature.16

In another essay he wrote, ‘Silly fools tell you, you are sinners . . . You are all God.’17

So there is the stark alternative. Either we are God or we are rebels against God. Only the Bible, of all the world’s holy books, insists not just that we are sinners, but that in consequence we are under the judgment of God, that self-salvation is impossible, and that our only hope is in the cross.

At last now, after this long but necessary excursus on the reality and horror of sin, we are ready to return to Galatians, and to the cross as the only way of acceptance with God:

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.’ (Gal. 3:13)

These words have been described as ‘startling, almost shocking’. They declare that the only way by which we can be redeemed from the curse of the law (that is, from the judgment which God’s law pronounces on those who disobey it) is that Christ bore it in our place; that he became a curse instead of us; that he endured in his own innocent person the condemnation we had deserved. This is called ‘penal substitution’. Dr J. I. Packer has justly called it ‘a distinguishing mark of the world-wide evangelical fraternity’.18 Only because Christ bore the curse can we inherit the blessing (Gal. 3:6–14).

Of course we must protect this doctrine from misunderstanding and hedge it round with every possible safeguard. We must never suggest, for example, that God the Father was reluctant to come to our rescue, and that Jesus Christ was a third party who intervened between God and us. No, no! It was God himself who took the initiative in his holy love for us. ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself ’ (2 Cor. 5:19, REB). Yet what God did in and through Christ was to take our place, to bear our sin, to endure our curse, and to die our death, so that we might be forgiven.

Moreover, the Christian life continues where it begins, at the foot of the cross of Jesus. The cross is not an elementary stage which we later grow out of. We never graduate from the school of Calvary. And the Lord’s Supper continuously brings us back to it.

For several pages now we have been reflecting on human depravity and the centrality of the cross. We are hell-deserving sinners. The expression is archaic but accurate. Do we really think that in ourselves we are fit to be admitted into God’s holy presence? Of course not! The very idea is preposterous. In this case we are fit only to be excluded. Yet in spite of what we are, God loves us. Indeed, he has proved his own unique love for us in that, while we were sinful, ungodly, helpless and even the enemies of God, Christ died for us (Rom. 5:6–10). It is all but unbelievable. Yet it is true. To deny it is to constitute ourselves ‘enemies of the cross of Christ’ (Phil. 3:18); to confess it is to join the company of those who will spend eternity worshipping ‘the Lamb, who was slain’ (Rev. 5:12).

Justification by faith

The cross was a multifaceted achievement, and has many different meanings. It is the ultimate revelation of God’s love and justice. It is the decisive conquest of evil. It is the ground of our salvation. It is the supreme example of self-sacrifice. It is the most powerful inspiration to Christian devotion. Moreover, the salvation won by the cross is illustrated in the New Testament by a variety of metaphors like propitiation, redemption and reconciliation. But evangelical Christians have always insisted that the richest model is justification.

‘Justification by faith’ was the watchword of the Protestant Reformation. Luther called it ‘the principal article of all Christian doctrine, which maketh true Christians indeed’.19 And Cranmer wrote in his eloquent Homily ‘of the Salvation of Mankind’:

This faith the holy Scripture teacheth: this is the strong rock and foundation of Christian religion: this doctrine all old and ancient authors of Christ’s church do approve: this doctrine advanceth and setteth forth the true glory of Christ, and beateth down the vain glory of man: this whosoever denieth is not to be counted for a true Christian man, nor for a setter forth of Christ’s glory, but for an adversary of Christ and his gospel, and for a setter forth of men’s vainglory.20

To these sixteenth-century statements I add a statement of some contemporary Anglican evangelicals:

Justification by Faith appears to us, as it does to all evangelicals, to be the heart and hub, the paradigm and essence, of the whole economy of God’s saving grace. Like Atlas, it bears a world on its shoulders, the entire evangelical knowledge of God’s love in Christ towards sinners.21

So what is justification? It is of course a legal word, borrowed from the law courts, and the opposite of condemnation. When God justifies sinners, he declares a verdict, in anticipation of the last day, that he has not only forgiven all their sins but has also granted them a righteous standing of acceptance in his sight.

There are five aspects of justification in the New Testament which we need to keep clear in our minds.

First, its source. We are ‘justified freely by his grace’ (Rom. 3:24). God’s grace is his free and spontaneous love, undeserved, undesired and unsolicited. So what grace gives it gives gratis, ‘for nothing’, as Augustine often repeated. Grace-gifts are gratis-gifts.

Secondly, its ground. We have been ‘justified by his blood’ (Rom. 5:9), that is, on account of his sacrificial death. The reason why ‘there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’ (Rom. 8:1) is that God ‘condemned sin’ in Jesus (Rom. 8:3). We are justified because he was condemned. The law has no claims on us because they were all met at the cross.

Thirdly, its sphere. We are ‘justified in Christ’ (Gal. 2:17). This is a neglected phrase. It means that we are justified only when we are united to Christ, and of course when we are united to Christ we are part of his new community and committed to living a new life.

Fourthly, its means. We are ‘justified by faith’. This is the most frequently repeated of the expressions about justification in Paul’s letters.22 It was a sure instinct of Luther’s to add the word ‘alone’ to his translation of the Greek of Romans 3:28, as several early church fathers had done before him. Since our justification is altogether ‘apart from observing the law’, it must be by faith alone. In saying so, however, we must be careful not to turn our faith into another work. We are indeed justified by God’s grace and by Christ’s blood, but only through faith. To say ‘justification by faith alone’ is another way of saying ‘justification by Christ alone’. Faith has no function but to receive what grace freely offers. As the judicious Hooker put it with his usual precision, ‘God doth justify the believing man, yet not for the worthiness of his belief, but for his worthiness who is believed.’23 Faith is nothing but the hand which takes the gift, the eye which beholds the giver, and the mouth which drinks the water of life.

Fifthly, its fruit. We are saved unto good works. ‘For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith . . . not by works, so that no-one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works . . .’ (Eph. 2:8–10). These verses make abundantly plain the place of good works in justification. Justification is not by works but unto good works. Put differently, salvation is through faith, but faith works through love (Gal 5:6).

Here then is the grand doctrine of justification. Its origin is God’s grace and its ground Christ’s blood. The sphere of its enjoyment is Christ, its means is faith, and its fruit good works. It was of such central importance to Paul that he was prepared even to suffer the acute embarrassment of a public showdown with his brother apostle Peter rather than compromise what he called ‘the truth of the gospel’, which we might call ‘the evangelical faith’ (Gal. 2:11–17).

If justification by faith was one of the watchwords of the Reformation, it was also one of its chief points of debate with Rome. Roman Catholics were (and still are) disturbed by the Reformers’ teaching. In particular, they disagreed with the Reformers’ insistence that justification denoted a legal pronouncement and not a moral change. This seemed to them a legal fiction, which left the sinner unchanged, and which therefore was antinomian in tendency. So the Council of Trent, summarizing the Counter-Reformation, taught that justification includes both forgiveness and renewal, and that the baptized person is cleansed from all sins (both original and actual) and is simultaneously infused with a new and supernatural righteousness.

The controversy continues. Evangelicals maintain that their doctrine is not antinomian but the opposite. It generates righteousness. While still insisting that ‘to justify’ means ‘to declare’ and not ‘to make’ righteous, evangelicals emphasize that justification is always accompanied by regeneration. Everybody whom God justifies he simultaneously regenerates. Moreover, this new birth leads inevitably to a new life, this justification to sanctification. It would certainly make for clarity if we remembered five fundamental differences between justification and sanctification, which the Puritans used to emphasize.

First, justification is God’s judicial verdict, declaring a sinner righteous; sanctification is his moral activity, making a sinner righteous.

Secondly, God justifies sinners through the death of his Son, but sanctifies them through the regeneration and indwelling of his Holy Spirit.

Thirdly, justification is instantaneous. It takes place immediately God pronounces the sinner righteous. Sanctification, however, is gradual. It begins the moment we are justified, but then it grows as the Holy Spirit transforms us into the image of Christ (2 Cor. 3:18).

Fourthly, justification is complete. It has no degrees. We shall not be more justified on the day of our death than we were on the day of our conversion. Sanctification, however, is incomplete. Although it begins when we are converted and regenerated, it continues throughout our life on earth and will be complete when Christ appears. Only then ‘we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (1 John 3:2).

Fifthly, justification is by faith only without works. It is entirely the work of Christ. But sanctification is by faith and works. In addition to trusting God, we are told to watch and pray, to sanctify and purify ourselves.

To sum up, God declares us righteous through the death of his, Son, by faith only, so that our justification is both instantaneous and complete. But God makes us righteous through the indwelling of his Spirit, by faith and works, so that our sanctification is both gradual and incomplete.

Our daily discipleship

We now return to our text (Gal. 6:14, REB) ‘God forbid that I should boast of anything but the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world is crucified to me and I to the world!’

It is evident that we glory in the cross not only for our acceptance with God, but also for our daily discipleship. For the cross is the way of holiness as well as the way of forgiveness.

Notice that, although Paul mentions only one cross, he refers to three crucifixions on it. First, there is of course the crucifixion of Jesus. Secondly, ‘the world has been crucified to me’. Thirdly, ‘I [have been crucified] to the world’. Thus Jesus Christ, the godless world and we ourselves have all been crucified on the same cross.

Paul has already introduced us to this notion in earlier verses of his letter. In Galatians 2:20 he has written, ‘I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.’ Then in Galatians 5:24 he has written, ‘Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the [that is, their] sinful nature with its passions and desires.’ Although there are different nuances between these statements, they express the same fundamental truth. I would express it like this: Christ died as our substitute, instead of us, so that we might not have to die for our sins (as the New Testament obliges us to affirm), but he also died as our representative, so that when he died we died with him.

This is Paul’s elaboration of the call of Jesus to take up our cross and follow him (e.g. Mark 8:34). If we had lived in those days in Palestine, when the country was occupied by Roman soldiers, and if we had seen a man walking down the road carrying a cross, or at least the patibulum or cross-bar, we would not have needed to run up to him, tap him on the shoulder, and say, ‘Excuse me, Sir, but what on earth are you doing?’ No, we would have recognized him at once as a condemned criminal on his way to execution. For the Romans compelled any man they condemned to the cross to carry it to the scene of crucifixion.

Now Christ calls us to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him. If then we are carrying a cross and following Christ, there is only one place to which we can be going, namely to death. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor, who himself died in a concentration camp in April 1945, wrote in his justly famous book The Cost of Discipleship, ‘When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.’24

Thus cross-bearing and crucifixion were Jesus’ dramatic images of self-denial. They come into direct collision with the human potential movement, to which I have already referred, with its teaching about self-actualization and self-esteem, and indeed with every form of self-centredness. To be sure, Jesus did teach that his followers would find themselves and fulfil themselves. But he added that the only road to self-discovery is self-denial, the only way to find ourselves is to lose ourselves, and the only way to live is to die to our own self-centrednesss.

This teaching is extremely important today, because the church has a constant tendency to trivialize Christian discipleship. People think of it as if it means nothing more than becoming a bit religious, and adding a thin layer of piety to an otherwise secular life. Then scratch the surface or prick the veneer, and underneath there is the same old pagan. Nothing fundamental has changed.

But no! Becoming and being a Christian involves a change so radical that no imagery can do it justice but death and resurrection with Christ, namely dying to the old life of self-indulgence and self-will, and rising to a new life of self-control and self-giving, in which the world has been crucified to us and we have been crucified to the world.

We glory in the cross for our discipleship.

Our mission and message

The Christian church is called to mission, but there can be no mission without a message. So what is our message for the world? It centres on the cross, on the fantastic truth of a God who loves us, and who gave himself for us in Christ on the cross.

Consider what Paul has written earlier. He has described his earlier ministry in Galatia in these terms: ‘Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified’ (Gal. 3:1). That is, the cross had been the focus of his message. He had placarded Christ crucified before their eyes as if on a public billboard. The Galatians had not of course seen Christ die. They lived about a thousand miles by land from Jerusalem. So far as we know, Paul had not seen him die either. But through the preaching of the cross the apostle had brought the past into the present and made the historical event of the cross a contemporary reality to them. This is also what the Lord’s Supper or the Eucharist does. The technical word for it is anamnēsis, or remembrance, as word and sacrament together dramatize verbally and visually the unique, epoch-making event of the cross.

In consequence of his striking presentation, Paul had enabled the Galatians to see the cross in their imagination, to understand that he had died for their sins, to kneel before the cross in great humility, and to receive from the hands of the crucified Saviour the gift of eternal life, which was absolutely free and utterly undeserved.

But this preaching of the cross, as Paul was later to elaborate in 1 Corinthians, is a stumbling-block to human pride. It undermines our self-righteousness. It insists that we cannot achieve our salvation by anything that we do. Indeed, we cannot even contribute to it. How we would love to be able to do so! How we would enjoy strutting round heaven like peacocks, displaying our gorgeous plumage! If only we could claim salvation as a well-deserved prize! But no, salvation is a totally non-contributory gift. As William Temple put it, ‘All is of God; the only thing of my very own which I can contribute to my own redemption is the sin from which I need to be redeemed.’25 We find the cross humiliating, as it strips us naked and declares us bankrupt before God.

It is in this connection that Paul contrasts himself with those false teachers we call the Judaizers. They ‘preached circumcision’ (which is apostolic shorthand for self-salvation by obedience to the law), and so they escaped persecution for the cross of Christ. He, on the other hand, preached Christ crucified (that is, salvation through the cross alone), and so was always being persecuted (5:11; 6:12).

The same choice confronts all Christian communicators today. On the one hand, we can flatter people and tell them what they want to hear, namely that they are fine people and can win salvation by their own effort. We develop what could be called a pussycat ministry, for we stroke them until they purr with pleasure. Or, on the other hand, we can tell them the truth which they don’t want to hear, about sin, guilt, judgment and the cross, and so arouse their hostility. In other words, either we are unfaithful in order to be popular, or we are willing to be unpopular in our determination to be faithful. I doubt very much if it is possible to be faithful and popular at the same time. I fear that we have to choose.

It is extraordinary how much hostility there is to the gospel of the cross. One example is the late Professor Sir Alfred Ayer, Oxford philosopher, exponent of logical positivism, author of Language, Truth and Logic, and outspoken critic of the Christian faith. He wrote in 1979 that there was quite a strong case for considering Christianity the worst of the religions of historical importance. Why? Because it rests ‘on the allied doctrines of original sin and vicarious atonement, which are intellectually contemptible and morally outrageous’.26

My thesis has been that for our acceptance with God, for our daily discipleship, and for our mission and message to the world, we like Paul should glory in nothing but the cross.

We human beings are born boasters. There seems to be something in our inherited constitution which inclines us to boasting. We seem to need to glory in something, in order to inflate our ego. In consequence, we boast of our education, our possessions, our success, our reputation, even our piety. We find it hard to learn C. H. Spurgeon’s dictum ‘Be not proud of race, face, place or grace.’

But in the last resort there is only one alternative before us. Either we glory in ourselves and in our own achievements, or we glory in Christ and in his achievement on the cross. There is no possibility of compromise. A hallmark of authentic evangelical Christianity is that we glory only in the cross.

Suggested further reading

Ajith Fernando, I Believe in the Supremacy of Christ (Hodder and Stoughton, 1997)

Michael Green, The Empty Cross of Jesus (Hodder and Stoughton, 1984)

Alister McGrath, Making Sense of the Cross (IVP, 1992)

John Stott, The Cross of Christ (IVP, 1986)

The Ministry of the Holy Spirit

We looked in the Introduction at four or five different attempts to summarize the leading features of evangelicalism. Each began with the supremacy of Scripture and the majesty of Christ, particularly of his cross. Some continued with the lordship of the Holy Spirit. Others added one or more of the following five distinctives: the necessity of conversion, the priority of evangelism, the importance of fellowship, the longing for revival and the search for holiness.

My own concern is to establish a firm trinitarian base for the evangelical faith, and then to add the other five concerns relating to conversion, evangelism, fellowship, revival and holiness not as extras but as aspects of the ministry of the Holy Spirit, for they are all certainly his concerns. Thus the Bible, the cross and the Spirit become the fundamental triad of evangelical essentials. Or, put differently, in such a way as to honour the three persons of the Trinity, the evangelical faith focuses on the revelation of God, the cross of Christ and the ministry of the Spirit. Further, alluding to a distinction made in the Introduction, the Bible and the cross belong to the category of the hapax (‘once for all’), while the Spirit also belongs to the mallon (‘more and more’). It is he who enables us to enter ever more fully into what God has said and done in Christ.

The Holy Spirit has sometimes been referred to as the ‘neglected’ member of the Trinity. But, at least among evangelical and Reformed people, this is not an altogether accurate judgment. Evangelicals have always sought to honour the Spirit. Calvin has been called the theologian of the Spirit. And two of the finest and fullest treatises ever written on the work of the Spirit were Pneumatologia: A Discourse concerning the Holy Spirit (1674) by the great Puritan leader John Owen and The Work of the Holy Spirit (1900) by the Dutch Reformed theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper.

The twentieth century, however, witnessed an unfortunate disagreement among evangelical Christians about the work of the Holy Spirit, with the rise of modern Pentecostal churches at the beginning of the century, and of the charismatic movement in the mainline churches since the 1950s. Evangelical leaders have been divided over these phenomena, and in consequence it has become a very sensitive subject. On the one hand, there is the recognition that Pentecostalism is today the fastest-growing Christian movement in the world, providing abundant evidence of God’s blessing upon it. On the other hand, there is genuine anxiety that it is often growth without depth, so that there is much superficiality everywhere. My personal conviction is that what unites evangelicals in our doctrine and experience of the Holy Spirit is considerably greater than what divides us, and my concern in this chapter is to concentrate on the former while not concealing the latter.

I see that in the previous paragraph I have used the two adjectives ‘evangelical’ and ‘charismatic’ without defining them in relation to each other. The purpose of this book is of course to define the word ‘evangelical’; but what does ‘charismatic’ mean? In a general sense all Christians are charismatics, inasmuch as the church is the charismatic body of Christ, each member of his body having been endowed with a spiritual gift (charisma) or gifts (charismata). In particular, however, the term ‘charismatic’ is applied to those members of mainline denominations (a) who claim a ‘charismatic’ experience, subsequent to conversion, which is usually called ‘the baptism of the Spirit’, (b) who lay special emphasis on three supernatural gifts, namely tongues, healing and prophecy, and (c) who develop a style of public worship which is exuberant, spontaneous, participatory and demonstrative.

It will be seen, therefore, that not all evangelicals are charismatic (since some emphasize the new birth rather than subsequent experiences, and point out that the gifts mentioned in the New Testament number more than twenty, not all of which are supernatural), while not all charismatics are evangelical (since some are Anglican Catholics or Roman Catholics). It is important to remember in the rest of this chapter that ‘evangelical’ and ‘charismatic’ are not synonyms.

We begin with the statement that all evangelical Christians firmly believe in the Holy Spirit, the gracious and glorious third person of the Trinity. We believe that he is God, and therefore worthy of worship. We also believe both that he was active in creating all things (Gen. 1:2) and that he is active in sustaining, animating and renewing all things (Ps. 104:30). We believe that in Old Testament days he was both regenerating the people of God, for otherwise they could not have loved God’s law (cf. Ps. 119:97, 103; Rom. 7:22; 8:7), and equipping special people for special tasks (e.g. Exod. 35:30ff. and 2 Pet. 1:21). As for New Testament days, in which we are privileged to live, we strongly affirm that the ministry of the Holy Spirit is literally indispensable, since no aspect of our Christian faith, life, worship, fellowship, service or mission would be possible without him, as this chapter will seek to demonstrate.

Another introductory emphasis which needs to be made is that we should avoid any tendency – voluntary or involuntary – to separate the Holy Spirit from the Father or the Son. We declare again that the evangelical faith is the trinitarian faith, and the more we learn to think and act as trinitarian Christians, the more authentically evangelical we shall be.

Although it is impossible for our finite minds to understand the precise relations between the three persons of the Trinity, it is essential to remember that they enjoy both equality within the Godhead and distinct roles. For example, the Holy Spirit loves to efface himself in order to honour the Father and the Son – which is not surprising since he is called both ‘the Spirit of God’ and ‘the Spirit of Christ’ (e.g. Rom. 8:9; Gal. 4:6). Thus, it is he who, when we pray, enables us to cry, ‘Abba, Father’, and so to appreciate our filial relationship to him (Rom. 8:15–16). It is also he who enables us to cry, ‘Jesus is Lord.’ Indeed, ‘no-one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit’ (1 Cor. 12:3). This truth that the Spirit delights to witness to the Son is much stressed in the New Testament, not least by Jesus himself. He said, ‘He [sc. the Spirit of truth] will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and make it known to you. All that the Father has is mine, and that is why I said, “He will take what is mine and make it known to you”’ (John 16:14–15, REB).

So then, a reliable test of the genuineness of every person and movement claiming the endorsement of the Holy Spirit is whether they honour the Lord Jesus Christ, draw attention to him and promote his glory. Several recent authors have illustrated this by calling the ministry of the Holy Spirit a ‘floodlight’ ministry. The essence of good floodlighting is to illuminate a building, while keeping the lamps concealed. Just so, the Holy Spirit witnesses to Christ while himself remaining hidden.

Perhaps the best way to grasp the indispensability of the work of the Spirit is to consider in turn the six main stages or aspects of Christian discipleship, beginning with the new birth and ending with the Christian hope, and to show how each would be impossible apart from the operation of the Holy Spirit.

Christian beginnings

Some Christian historians and commentators, as we have seen, regard ‘conversion’ or ‘conversionism’ as one of evangelicalism’s main distinctives. Some even talk about ‘an evangelical conversion experience’, as if there were a stereotype – probably like that of Saul on the Damascus road – to which everybody is expected to conform. We must emphatically reject this. Although every true conversion includes a personal encounter with Jesus Christ, several aspects of Saul’s conversion (e.g. the blinding light, the fall to the ground, and the voice speaking Aramaic) were atypical.

My decided preference, when thinking about Christian beginnings, is to refer to regeneration as an evangelical essential, rather than conversion. Although the two may coincide, they are fundamentally different, in that conversion is a human work (although possible only by the enabling grace of God), whereas regeneration is entirely a work of God. Conversion denotes that turn from sin and idolatry which we call repentance, together with that turn to God and to Christ which we call faith. The resulting equation is that repentance plus faith equals conversion.

Regeneration or new birth, however, is different. Unfortunately the subject has recently been trivialized, especially in the United States, so that statistics are now published of those claiming to be ‘born-again Christians’. Yet the birth metaphor gives us several important clues, leading to a correct understanding.

First, the new birth is a work of God. As with physical birth, so with spiritual birth, nobody has ever given birth to himself. Regeneration is not self-generated. So the new birth is not merely a moral reformation, although it leads to one. In his night-time conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus twice spoke of being born anōthen, an adverb which could mean either ‘from the beginning, again’ or ‘from above’ (John 3:3, 7). The latter is regarded as more probable in this context. In this case Jesus was referring not to a new beginning from below by human effort, but to a new birth from above by the power of God. In fact, the new birth is birth of the Spirit (John 3:5–8).

Secondly, the birth metaphor also indicates that the new birth is sudden. For although human birth is preceded by nine months of gestation, and is followed by years of development into maturity, yet birth itself is a more or less instantaneous event. So with the new birth. Months may precede it, in which the Holy Spirit is convicting of sin (John 16:8–11), pricking the conscience (see Acts 26:14) and illumining the mind. And years of Christian growth will follow. But the actual new birth (or passage from death to life) is instantaneous.

Thirdly, the new birth is not necessarily a conscious experience, although it is for some. Conversion, the turning process, is likely to be conscious, but not the moment when God puts life within us. Again the birth metaphor demonstrates this. We were not conscious of our own birth experience. We would not know our birthday unless our parents had told us; we were not aware at the time what was happening. Similarly, many Christians do not know their spiritual birthday.

Fourthly, the new birth is not identical with baptism. To identify them is a mistake often made by Catholics (both Anglican and Roman) who imagine that, because they have been baptized, they must have been born again.

Now baptism is very important. Jesus himself instituted and commanded it (Matt. 28:19). So evangelicals do not (or should not) minimize it. But we strongly insist that baptism must never be confused with the new birth. Indeed, if Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus was historical (as we believe it was), then his reference to being ‘born of water and the Spirit’ (John 3:5) cannot possibly have been an allusion to Christian baptism, since at that time it did not exist. It is more likely to have alluded to John’s baptism and call to repentance, since at that very time John the Baptist was himself making the distinction between water and Spirit (Matt. 3:11), between his baptism with water and Jesus’ baptism with the Spirit.

So then, although baptism is a sign (or ‘sacrament’) of the new birth, we must not confuse the sign with the thing signified. The new birth is a deep, inward, radical change, worked by the Holy Spirit in the inner recesses of the human personality, by which we receive a new life, a new heart, a new beginning. Baptism, however, is a visible and public dramatization of this inward and secret reality of the new birth.

Further, baptism does not automatically effect what it signifies. Evangelical Christians reject a mechanical view of either of the two gospel sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The administration of water in baptism does not convey the new birth, nor do the bread and wine of Communion convey the body and blood of Christ. True, the Council of Trent pronounced an anathema on anybody who ‘shall affirm that grace is not conferred by these sacraments . . . by their own power [ex opere operato]’.1 But this is exactly what we do affirm. As Richard Hooker put it later, ‘all receive not the grace of God who receive the sacraments of his grace’.2 For if the sacraments are to benefit us, they must be received ‘rightly’ (see Articles XXVI and XXVII), and ‘rightly’ means ‘by faith’. It is important for members of free and new churches to understand that, for Anglican evangelicals, baptism (whether of infants or of adults) lacks efficacy if it is not accompanied by faith. I do not know anybody who has put this more forcefully than James Ussher, who became Archbishop of Armagh in 1625:

As baptism administered to those of years is not effectual unless they believe, so we can make no comfortable use of our baptism administered in our infancy until we believe . . . All the promises of grace were in my baptism estated upon me, and sealed up unto me, on God’s part; but then I come to have the profit and benefit of them when I come to understand what grant God, in baptism, hath sealed unto me, and actually to lay hold on it by faith.3

Finally, before we leave the topic of Christian beginnings, we note that the lesson most emphatically taught by Jesus in his conversation with Nicodemus was the indispensable necessity of the new birth. Nicodemus was a Jew (belonging to God’s covenant people), a Pharisee (committed to righteousness), a leader (a member of the Sanhedrin), a teacher (a person of culture), and polite and appreciative in his evaluation of the ministry of Jesus. He was religious, moral, educated and courteous. Yet it was to him that Jesus said, ‘You should not be surprised at my saying, “You must be born again”’ (John 3:7).

Evangelical Christians have always tried to be loyal to this teaching of Jesus, and to insist both that the new birth is indispensable if we are ever to see or enter God’s kingdom, and that baptism is no substitute for it.

Christian assurance

The Holy Spirit does not bring about the new birth and then abandon us. He knows, as all parents know, that newborn babies need careful nurture. So he stays with us. Better still, he dwells in us. In consequence, birth of the Spirit is followed by life in the Spirit.

We now consider some of the blessings of this new life, and in particular the blessing of Christian assurance.

During his last evening on earth, surrounded by his apostles, Jesus said:

Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate [or ‘Counsellor’, NIV] will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. (John 16:7, NRSV)

Here is Jesus’ plain statement that the ministry of the Holy Spirit would be more advantageous to the apostles than his own earthly ministry had been. Many people are utterly astonished by these words. How could it possibly be to the apostles’ advantage, or in their best interests, that he should go away and leave them behind? We look on the apostles with envy. If only we could have been with Jesus, as they were! If only we could have seen the beauty of his face and heard the music of his voice! If only we could have watched him feed the hungry, heal the sick, still the storm, and raise the dead! If only we could have sat at his feet like Mary of Bethany or leaned on his breast like John the beloved disciple! What can Jesus have meant?

Well, the apostles experienced two major disadvantages during Jesus’ earthly life, which would be overcome by the arrival of the Spirit. First, while Jesus was with them on earth, his presence was localized. In consequence, they were sometimes separated from him, for example when he was in Jerusalem and they were in Galilee, or when he was praying on the mountain and they were in the boat. They could not enjoy uninterrupted fellowship with Jesus. His presence was limited to one place at a time. But what the Holy Spirit has done is to universalize the presence of Jesus, to make him available to everybody everywhere.

The apostles’ second disadvantage, while Jesus was with them on earth, was that his presence was external to them. He was not able to enter their personality and change them from within. He could not get at the source of their thoughts, motives and desires. But later he would, he said. For ‘he lives with you, and will be in you’ (John 14:17). Thus the Holy Spirit internalizes the presence of Jesus, so that now he dwells by his Spirit in our hearts (Eph. 3:16–17) and our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19).

This indwelling of the Holy Spirit is the most marvellous privilege. It has always been emphasized by evangelical Christians, and it is also the chief difference between his Old Testament and his New Testament ministries. Although the Old Testament people of God were regenerate, it does not seem that the Spirit indwelt them. At least they looked forward to the messianic age as the time when God would fulfil his promise, ‘I will put my Spirit in you’ (Ezek. 36:27). It is this promise which Jesus confirmed.

I think all evangelical Christians agree and affirm that the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit is the chief distinguishing mark of the people of God today, so that ‘if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ’ (Rom. 8:9). Paul also urges us not to grieve the Holy Spirit, with whom we have been ‘sealed’ for the day of redemption (Eph. 4:30). Thus, the Holy Spirit within us is God’s seal, branding us as belonging to him.

This emphasis on the inwardness of the Spirit’s work enables us to say that evangelical religion is heart religion. ‘The fourth leading feature in Evangelical Religion’, wrote Bishop J. C. Ryle (after the supremacy of Scripture, the depth of human sinfulness and the salvation of Jesus Christ), ‘is the high place which it assigns to the inward work of the Holy Spirit in the heart of man.’4

There is of course a place for externals in religion. But throughout history there has been a constant tendency for religion to degenerate into an empty show. God complained through Isaiah, ‘These people come near to me with their mouth, and honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me’ (Is. 29:13). And what Yahweh said to eighth-century Israel, Jesus reapplied to the Pharisees of his own day (Mark 7:6), and we need to reapply to ourselves today. Too much of our religion is ritual without reality, the mouth without the heart, ‘having a form of godliness but denying its power’ (2 Tim. 3:5).

One of the main ministries of the indwelling Spirit is to give God’s people an assurance of their saving relationship to him. The doctrine of assurance is, in fact, a specifically evangelical emphasis.5 Those of catholic or liberal persuasion tend to regard what we call assurance as a synonym for a horrid form of presumption. And, to be honest, we evangelical people do need to repent of our rather cocky, self-assured and even triumphalist attitudes. We need to heed the warnings of John’s first letter, to the effect that all our claims to know God and to be his children are bogus unless we are characterized by righteousness and love in addition to Christological orthodoxy.

Yet the constant repetition in John’s first letter of statements like ‘we know that we have come to know him’, ‘we know we are in him’, ‘we know that we have passed from death to life’, and ‘we know that we are children of God’6 leaves us in no doubt that God intends us to know, in other words to have assurance, that we belong to him.

Christian assurance rests first and foremost on the cross. It is because Christ bore our sins in our place, and because his sin-bearing was finished and complete, that we may know we have been forgiven. For Christ made on the cross ‘by his one oblation of himself once offered’ what the 1662 Prayer Book calls ‘a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world’.7

To this objective ground of our assurance the Holy Spirit adds his own subjective testimony. The clearest statements of it are given in Romans. In 5:5 we are told that through the Holy Spirit given to us God has poured out his love in our hearts. In 8:15–16 we are told that when we cry, ‘Abba, Father’, it is the Spirit himself who is witnessing with our spirit that we are God’s children. Thus the indwelling Spirit assures us deeply in our hearts that God is our Father and that he loves us. Moreover, the context makes it plain that this inward experience of the outpoured love of our Father is a privilege which should be common to all his children, although surely different Christians receive this assurance in different degrees at different times.

Since many have linked these experiences with the so-called ‘baptism of the Spirit’, this may be an appropriate place in which to broach the subject. It is a divisive issue. Pentecostal and charismatic Christians tend to insist that the baptism of the Spirit is a necessary second experience, subsequent to the new birth, and that it is normally validated by speaking in tongues. NonPentecostal people believe rather that the baptism of the Spirit is identical with the gift of the Spirit (Acts 1:5; 2:33, 38–39), and that it is given to all believers, although subsequent experiences of different kinds are often given.

Is it really necessary for evangelical Christians to be divided on this issue by an excess of rigidity? Pentecostal Christians need to ask themselves whether they must insist on a two-stage stereotype. Non-Pentecostal Christians, who claim to have received the Spirit once for all at their conversion, need to ask themselves whether they are sufficiently open to further and fuller experiences of him. Would it not be possible for both sides to agree (a) that all Christians have received the Holy Spirit; (b) that the New Testament emphasis is on this initial reception of the Spirit, associated with the vocabulary of new birth, new creation and resurrection from the dead; (c) that the process of sanctification follows this; and (d) that during this process many richer, deeper, fuller experiences of the Spirit may be granted?

I venture to close this section with a personal anecdote. I have several times been the privileged guest of the Anglican diocese of Singapore. During a visit there in 1987 I was speaking with my host, Bishop (later Archbishop) Moses Tay, a well-known charismatic evangelical. I asked him what in his view the essence of ‘renewal’ was. He replied, ‘It’s a new experience of the presence of God.’ I was immediately struck by this, because I had recently read Dr J. I. Packer’s book Keep in Step with the Spirit (1984), and had come across his expression ‘a fresh assurance of the love of God’.

There seems to me very little difference between ‘a new experience of the presence of God’ and ‘a fresh assurance of the love of God’. I found myself wondering if this could be the basis for greater mutual understanding and respect.

Christian holiness

One of the major purposes of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling of his people is to change or sanctify them. God’s Old Testament promise, ‘I will put my Spirit in you’, continued, ‘and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws’ (Ezek. 36:27). In fact, God’s two most direct Old Testament promises were these:

I will put my Spirit in you. (Ezek. 36:27)

I will put my law in their minds. (Jer. 31:33)

There is no fundamental difference between these promises, since what the Spirit does when he is put within us is to write God’s law there (cf. Rom. 8:3–4).

Paul emphasized the same indissoluble link between the Holy Spirit and the holy people he indwells when he wrote that the God who calls us ‘to live a holy life’ also ‘gives [us] his Holy Spirit’ (1 Thess. 4:7–8). With the Holy Spirit holiness is essential; without the Holy Spirit holiness is impossible. So we must not underestimate what he can do in effecting real change, giving us new ambitions, new standards, new ideals and new values.

But how does such change come about? It is here that Paul introduces us, in both Galatians 5 and Romans 8, to the unrelenting inner conflict which we experience between ‘the flesh’ and ‘the Spirit’. By ‘the flesh’ he means our fallen, self-indulgent nature, and by ‘the Spirit’ the indwelling Holy Spirit himself. The secret of holiness, he tells us, lies in our adopting right attitudes to both. Our negative attitude to ‘the flesh’ is properly called ‘mortification’, the process of putting it to death. It is a much neglected practice among us. ‘I am more and more convinced’, wrote Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, ‘that most people get into trouble in the living of the Christian life because of their molly-coddling of themselves spiritually.’8 That is, we pamper our selfish nature instead of executing it.

Here is Paul’s most outspoken statement of the alternative before us:

For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live. (Rom. 8:13)

Here are set over against each other a kind of life which issues in death and a kind of death which issues in life. First, the alternative lifestyles are ‘living according to the sinful nature’ (which is indulgence) and ‘putting to death the misdeeds of the body’ (which is mortification). Secondly, the alternative consequences are death and life: if we indulge ourselves we will die, but if we mortify ourselves we will live. And thirdly there are alternative combatants: on our own we indulge ourselves, but through the Spirit we mortify ourselves. In other words, we are called to a radical, uncompromising rejection of everything we know to be evil in God’s sight. It is our responsibility; we are to do it. But we cannot do it by ourselves, only through the power of the indwelling Spirit.

But what does this mean? It is pious, orthodox language, no doubt. But how in everyday experience does the Holy Spirit work within us? I have found it helpful, in my own thinking and struggling, to spell out a ‘5-D’ formula, that is, five steps or stages in the sanctifying activity of the Holy Spirit. He operates first in our mind, enabling us to discern the will of God; secondly in our conscience, enabling us to distinguish between right and wrong; thirdly in our heart, enabling us to desire God’s way ardently; and fourthly in our will, enabling us to determine resolutely to follow God’s will. The fifth ‘D’ (do) can only then take place.

The apostle also writes of holiness as ‘the fruit of the Spirit’, nine graces which together constitute ‘Christ-likeness’ of character and conduct. As ‘fruit’ they ripen naturally, under the indwelling influence of the Spirit. Christian holiness is not a Christmas-tree phenomenon, whose decorations are tied on artificially; it is fruit-tree holiness, that is, natural development, provided that we ‘walk in the Spirit’ (Gal. 5:16, AV), responding to his promptings and living under his control.

There has been a long-standing emphasis on holiness in the Catholic tradition, so that evangelicals cannot in any way claim a monopoly of it. We can say, however, that the history of evangelicalism has been a history of the search for sanctification. We find it in every century – in the Reformers, the Puritans, the Pietists, the Methodists and, more recently, in such movements as that associated with the Keswick Convention. No one type of holiness teaching has predominated among evangelical Christians.

Sometimes a perfectionist movement has developed, promising the ‘eradication’ of our fallen nature or ‘entire sanctification’ or ‘perfect love’. And one can only admire the resolve to take seriously those New Testament passages which either command perfection (e.g. Matt. 5:48; 2 Cor. 7:1) or state that those born of God ‘do not’, even ‘cannot’, sin (1 John 3:6, 9; 5:18). John Wesley wrestled long with such texts and wrote his conclusions in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (definitive edition, 1777). The tradition continues today in the Free Methodist, Nazarene and Pentecostal churches.

But most evangelicals, interpreting ‘perfectionist’ texts in their context, are convinced that neither the eradication of evil nor the possibility of sinless perfection is promised in the New Testament for this life. Rather, we are on a journey, pilgrims heading for the celestial city. Like Paul we have not yet arrived, nor ‘been made perfect’, but we are pressing on ‘to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of [us]’ (Phil. 3:12).

Handley Moule, who was the first Principal of Ridley Hall in Cambridge, and who later became the evangelical Bishop of Durham, succeeded in maintaining a biblical balance in his little book entitled Thoughts on Christian Sanctity (1888). Under the heading ‘Aims’, he wrote:

We aim at nothing less than to walk with God all day long; to abide every hour in Christ; to love God with all the heart and our neighbour as ourselves . . . to ‘yield our selves to God’ . . . to break with all evil, and follow all good . . . We are absolutely bound to put quite aside all secret purposes of moral compromise; all tolerance of besetting sin . . . We cannot possibly rest short of a daily, hourly, continuous walk with God, in Christ, by the grace of the Holy Ghost.9

Under ‘Limits’, however, Bishop Moule went on to write:

I hold with absolute conviction, alike from the experience of the church and from the infallible Word, that, in the mystery of things, there will be limits to the last, and very humbling limits, very real fallings short. To the last it will be a sinner that walks with God.10

With these ‘aims’ and ‘limits’ in mind, and seeking the continuous fullness of the Spirit (Eph. 5:18), evangelical Christians ‘hunger and thirst for righteousness’ (Matt. 5:6).

Christian community

Evangelical Christians have the reputation of being rugged individualists, and so of having an inadequate doctrine of the church. It is certainly true that, since the Reformation, we have insisted both on ‘the right of private judgment’ (the privilege of making up our own mind from Scripture) and on ‘the priesthood of all believers’ (the privilege of an immediate, individual access to God through Christ).

But we also know that the New Testament has a very high doctrine of the church; that the church is at the centre of the eternal and historical purpose of God; and that the church is part of the gospel. The church also enjoys a direct continuity with Old Testament Israel. It is not therefore strictly correct to refer to the Day of Pentecost as ‘the birthday of the church’. For the church as the covenant people of God came into being some 2,000 years previously with Abraham. What happened at Pentecost was that the people of God became the Spirit-filled body of Christ. It is also called ‘the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’ (2 Cor. 13:14; cf. Phil. 2:1) because it is our common participation (koinōnia) in him which constitutes us the church. The term koinōnia does not occur in the Gospels. Its first appearance is in Acts 2:42, Luke’s description of the Jerusalem church, because there could be no koinōnia before the Spirit came.

There has always been a degree of disagreement and tension within the evangelical movement about the nature of the church. Some affirm that it is essentially a visible and geographical community, consisting of all those in each locality who profess and call themselves Christians.

Other evangelicals stress that the church is a gathered community, consisting only of those who are judged to be born again, and who have subscribed to a full evangelical confession of faith.

These two visions of the church are not entirely incompatible, and we should avoid a neat polarization. There are at least two significant convictions which we share.

First, all evangelicals accept the difference between the visible and the invisible church. It becomes specially important when we are thinking and talking about church membership. We agree that God reserves as his prerogative the right to admit people into his true (invisible) church, and he does so when they exercise faith in Christ. But he delegates to pastors the responsibility to admit people by baptism into the visible church, and they do this on the profession of faith.

This distinction leads us to insist that church membership does not guarantee salvation. Paul warns the Corinthians not to imitate the Israelites in the desert. They had all been ‘baptized into Moses’, and had all been partakers of the same spiritual food and drink. In other words, they were the Old Testament equivalent of baptized, communicant members of the church. ‘Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them.’ Their church membership did not ensure their immunity to his judgment (1 Cor. 10:1–5).

Secondly, all evangelicals regard the purity of the church (doctrinal and ethical) as a proper, God-appointed goal. We differ in our methods of securing it. Some resort to almost Draconian measures, and are quick to excommunicate even mild offenders. Others acknowledge New Testament teaching about church discipline,11 but they also remember Jesus’ parable of the weeds and the wheat, and that ‘in the visible Church the evil be ever mingled with the good’ (Anglican Article XXVI). They are therefore reluctant to resort to excommunication or secession.

It is within this discussion of the purity of the church that a mention of the concept of ‘comprehensiveness’ belongs. The Church of England has been much to blame in boasting of its so-called ‘glorious comprehensiveness’, without recalling that from the beginning a clear distinction was made between ‘principled’ and ‘unprincipled’ comprehensiveness.

Bishop J. C. Ryle, in his introduction to Principles for Churchmen,12 had lamented the ‘universal toleration’ which he saw in the Church of England at the end of the nineteenth century. He wrote with a touch of sarcasm, ‘What more likely to provide peace and stop quarrelling, than to declare the church a kind of Noah’s ark, within which every kind of opinion and creed shall dwell safe and undisturbed, and the only terms of communion shall be willingness to come inside and let your neighbour alone?’13

The authors of The Fulness of Christ (1950) wrote similarly, ‘there are limits to the principle of comprehension in the Church . . . The truth of God revealed in Christ may be flexible, but it is not infinitely flexible.’14 Then in 1957 Dr Alec Vidler rejected ‘an unprincipled syncretism’ in favour of ‘the principle of comprehension’ by which ‘a church ought to hold the fundamentals of the faith and at the same time allow for differences of opinion and of interpretation in secondary matters . . .’15

In 1973 Dr J. I. Packer clearly distinguished between ‘the virtue of tolerating different views on secondary issues on the basis of clear agreement on essentials’ and ‘the vice of retreating from the light of Scripture into an intellectual murk where no outlines are clear, all cats are grey, and syncretism is the prescribed task’.16

Having reflected on evangelical views of the nature of the church, we are ready now to consider how the Holy Spirit equips the church for her ministry. I begin with the ordained ministry. Evangelicals are agreed from their reading of the New Testament that episkopē, pastoral care of some kind, is God’s provision for his people. So Paul exhorted the elders of the Ephesian church to keep watch over themselves and over all the flock of which the Holy Spirit had made them overseers (episkopoi, Acts 20:28). Thus the Holy Spirit had delegated to them the pastoral care of the church.

‘Pastors’ is therefore the biblically correct name for the leaders of the local church, while ‘priests’ is incorrect and misleading. It is never used of them in the New Testament. To be sure, the English word ‘priest’ is harmless, because it is only a contraction of the word ‘presbyter’ (meaning ‘elder’). That is why the Reformers retained the word. But few people can manage the mental gymnastic of saying ‘priest’ while meaning ‘presbyter’. It would be much clearer for all Anglicans to follow the wisdom of the churches of South India, North India and Pakistan, which have a threefold ministry of ‘bishops, presbyters and deacons’. We should also be consistent in all the language we use. Catholic priests may offer a sacrifice on an altar; evangelical pastors serve a supper from a table.

Although in practice some evangelical leaders have been extremely autocratic, in theory they have rejected a ‘clericalism’ which reserves all ministry to the clergy and denies responsibility to the laity. On the contrary, evangelicals have always believed not only in the priesthood of all believers, but in the ministry of all believers as well. And recently, partly through the influence of the charismatic movement, the Pauline vision of the ‘every-member ministry of the body of Christ’ has become widely accepted.

Evangelicals are not altogether agreed which of the charismata (spiritual gifts) are available today, or which are more important than others. But it should be possible for us to agree (a) that the nature of the gifts is very varied (some being quite prosaic, like sharing our money and doing acts of mercy); (b) that the purpose of the gifts is the common good, to build up the church in both size and depth; and (c) that the criterion for evaluating the gifts is the degree to which they build the church. As Paul wrote, ‘try to excel in gifts that build up the church’ (1 Cor. 14:12).

Christian mission

Mission has always been an evangelical preoccupation, not least the worldwide mission of the church. Evangelicalism and evangelism, as the words themselves indicate, are inevitably interlocked. And one of our evangelical emphases in evangelism is that the Holy Spirit is the chief evangelist. He is a missionary Spirit, and Pentecost was a missionary event.

John V. Taylor, when he was Bishop of Winchester, began his book about the Holy Spirit (entitled The Go-Between God) with these words: ‘The chief actor in the historic mission of the Christian church is the Holy Spirit. He is the director of the whole enterprise.’17

Then the Manila Manifesto, produced during the Second International Congress on World Evangelization in 1989, included this paragraph headed ‘God the Evangelist’:

The Scriptures declare that God himself is the chief evangelist. For the Spirit of God is the Spirit of truth, love, holiness and power, and evangelism is impossible without him. It is he who anoints the messenger, confirms the word, prepares the hearer, convicts the sinful, enlightens the blind, gives life to the dead, enables us to repent and believe, unites us to the body of Christ, assures us that we are God’s children, leads us into Christ-like character and service, and sends us out in our turn to be Christ’s witnesses. In all this the Holy Spirit’s main preoccupation is to glorify Jesus Christ by showing him to us and forming him in us.18

Our Lord Jesus himself, during his ministry on earth, clearly taught the missionary nature of the Holy Spirit, notably in John 7:37–39. It was the last and greatest day of the Feast of Tabernacles. Jesus stood forth in a prominent place in the temple, and said in a loud voice (to emphasize the solemnity of his words): ‘“If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” By this he meant the Spirit [ John commented], whom those who believed in him were later to receive.’

Notice his two distinct references to water – first to drinking-water (verse 37, ‘If anyone is thirsty . . .’) and secondly to flowing water (verse 38, ‘streams of living water will flow . . .’). Indeed, the two pictures are fused in a remarkable combination. It is only if we take water into us that it will then flow out from us. When we drink, we take in only small sips. But by the extraordinary operation of the Holy Spirit within us, these sips are transformed into rivers, and drinking-water becomes flowing water. The world is likened to a barren desert, and the Holy Spirit to the irrigation which causes the desert to blossom.

Archbishop William Temple, in his Readings in St. John’s Gospel, wrote about Jesus’ words, ‘No-one can possess (or rather be indwelt by) the Spirit of God, and keep that Spirit to himself. Where the Spirit is, he flows forth; if there is no flowing forth, he is not there.’19

This link between the Holy Spirit and Christian mission is indissoluble. To neglect mission is to contradict the very being of the Spirit. In consequence, an essential mark of a Spirit-filled church is both its compassionate outreach into its local community and its serious commitment to global mission. Harry Boer expressed this with considerable force:

When the church tries to bottle up the Spirit within herself, she acts contrary both to her own and to his nature. For it is the nature of the church ever to be enlarging her borders, and it is the nature of the Spirit to transmit his life to ever-widening circles. When the church does not recognise this law of her being and of the being of the Spirit, the Spirit is quenched and he withdraws himself, and the deposit of religiosity that is left becomes a putrefaction in the lives of those who have grieved him.20

Before we leave this section on the Holy Spirit and mission, three further aspects of it need to be touched upon.

First, there is the question of evangelism and social action. This used to be an area of conflict in the evangelical constituency, but seems to be so no longer. The Grand Rapids Report (1982) defined the relationship between the two in the following terms:

1. Social activity is a consequence of evangelism, because converts manifest their new life in service.

2. Social activity can be a bridge to evangelism, because it often gains a hearing for the gospel.

3. Social activity is a partner of evangelism, so that they are ‘like the two blades of a pair of scissors or the two wings of a bird.’ For, as in the public ministry of Jesus, so now, words and deeds, proclamation and demonstration, good news and good works go hand in hand.21

Secondly, we need to consider evangelism and miracles. Should miracles accompany the preaching of the gospel today? During the last decades of the twentieth century a ‘signs and wonders’ movement developed, pioneered specially by the late John Wimber and his Vineyard churches. In his two books Power Evangelism (1985) and Power Healing (1986) he argued that signs and wonders were ‘everyday occurrences in New Testament times’ and should be in our time too. The theological basis of his reasoning was that, since the kingdom of God was inaugurated by Jesus, and its arrival was demonstrated by his miracles, we should also expect them regularly today.22 Moreover, some observers have hailed the claimed outbreak of signs and wonders as the ‘third wave’ of the pentecostal movement in this century. How should we respond to this teaching? To begin with, we should avoid the extreme and opposite reactions of scepticism and credulity.

On the one hand, to deny even the possibility of miracles, whether from theological prejudice or scientific secularism, borders on the absurd. Since we believe that God is the sovereign creator of the universe, he is certainly able to intrude into his own world. We have no liberty either to lock him up in one of our neat little boxes or to dictate to him what he is permitted to do. One of the most brash examples of such unbelief took place in France towards the end of the eighteenth century. Because the Jansenists were claiming that remarkable miracles were being performed at Abbé Paris’s tomb, the Roman Catholic authorities first walled up the tomb and then fixed on the wall the peremptory order De par le roy défense à Dieu de faire miracle en ce lieu (By command of the king, God is forbidden to perform miracles here)! ‘Absurd’ is not too strong an epithet for such folly.

At the opposite extreme are those who, in John Wimber’s words, regard signs and wonders (especially healing miracles) as characterizing ‘the normal Christian life’.23 But this cannot be so, for several reasons. First, whatever our definition of ‘miracle’ may be, it must be the abnorm, not the norm. That is, it is a deviation from God’s usual activity. For the God of the Bible is primarily the God of nature, not of supernature. He is the God who gives sun and rain, sustains the world, clothes the flowers, feeds the birds, and provides his creatures with life, breath and all things. This is where the biblical revelation of God begins. Miracles neither precede nor supersede it. Their principal purpose in Scripture has been to authenticate each fresh stage of revelation – the law of Moses, the ministry of the prophets from Elijah onwards, the teaching of Jesus and the authority of the apostles.24

In the second place, if (as John Wimber taught) God ‘has given us the authority to work the works of Jesus’,25 why should these be limited to healing? Why should we not also multiply loaves and fishes, and so solve the problem of world hunger? And why should we not also be able to still storms, and so rescue people whose lives are threatened by flood?

In the third place, reality does not fit the claims. To promise miraculous healing to all who believe is to cause disillusion, and then to attribute failure to unbelief can only be described as cruel.

To sum up, we should certainly be open to miracle (because God is the Creator), but we have no right to expect miracles with the same frequency with which they occurred in special biblical periods (because ours is not an epoch of revelation). Moreover, we are living in between times, between the ‘already’ of the kingdom inaugurated and the ‘not yet’ of the kingdom consummated.

Charismatic and non-charismatic evangelicals should be able to agree with the balanced statement of the Manila Manifesto (1989): ‘. . . we have no liberty to place limits on the power of the living Creator today. We reject both the scepticism which denies miracles and the presumption which demands them.’26

Thirdly, there is the topic of evangelism and revival. ‘A longing for revival’, as we saw earlier, is another evangelical characteristic. We talk about it, tend to know about some of the great revivals in church history, and pray for it. So what does it mean? Most evangelicals would agree that revival is an altogether supernatural visitation by the sovereign Spirit of God, so that a whole community becomes aware of and awed by his holy presence.27 The unconverted are convicted of sin, repent and cry to God for mercy, often in large numbers and without any human agency. Backsliders are restored. The half-hearted are reinvigorated. And all the people of God, overwhelmed with a sense of his majesty, display the nine-fold fruit of the Spirit and devote themselves to good works.

Christian hope

The Old Testament looked forward to the outpouring or gift of the Spirit as the principal, indeed the defining, blessing of the messianic age. The messianic age would be the age of the Spirit. So when the Holy Spirit came in power on the Day of Pentecost, God’s expectant people knew that the new age had dawned, and that the kingdom of God had broken into history. They also knew, however, that this coming of the kingdom was only partial; and that a final fulfilment of God’s promise was yet to come. So the gift of the Holy Spirit was both the beginning of the end-time and the divine assurance that the rest would follow at some future time. It was ‘both a fulfilment of the promise and the promise of fulfilment’.28

This double perspective is expressed in the New Testament by the use of three metaphors: commercial (two instalments of a purchase), agricultural (two stages of a harvest), and social (two courses of a feast).

First, the gift of the Spirit is like the down-payment in a transaction; it is both the first instalment and the guarantee that the full purchase money will follow. For God has ‘put his Spirit in our hearts as a deposit [arrabōn], guaranteeing what is to come’ (2 Cor. 1:22; cf. 5:5; Eph. 1:14).

Secondly, the gift of the Spirit is like the reaping of the firstfruits; it is both the beginning of the harvest and the guarantee that the rest will follow (Rom. 8:23).

Thirdly, the gift of the Spirit is like the first course of a banquet, sometimes called an ‘appetizer’ or (especially in the United Kingdom) a ‘starter’; it is both the foretaste and the guarantee that the rest of the meal will follow (Heb. 6:4–5).

In each case the Holy Spirit is both gift and promise, both initial experience and future hope.

We evangelical Christians do not agree with one another in the details of our eschatology, and we continue to debate questions relating to the tribulation, the rapture and the millennium. But we all believe in the personal, visible and glorious return of Jesus Christ, in the resurrection of our bodies, and in the new heaven and new earth. Moreover, of these future certainties we also believe that the Holy Spirit is God’s pledge.

For we are living ‘in between times’, between the first and second comings of Christ, between kingdom come and kingdom coming, between present reality and future destiny. And it is the Holy Spirit whose indwelling spans the gulf between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’. As the apostle Paul expressed it, ‘we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies’ (Rom. 8:23).

Here are three affirmations. First, ‘we groan inwardly’, because we share in the fallenness of the whole creation. Secondly, ‘we have the firstfruits of the Spirit’, the divine pledge of our final inheritance. Thirdly, ‘we wait eagerly’ for our bodily redemption. We also ‘wait for it patiently’ (verse 25).

All Christians find it difficult to hold these three perspectives together in balance. Some are so preoccupied with future glory and with the Spirit who guarantees it, that they never groan, never admit the incompleteness of their present salvation. Others groan all right, and wait eagerly for the glory to come, but forget that already they have its foretaste in the Spirit. Others are perplexed by the present tension between the Spirit and the pain, and forget to wait patiently until the tension is resolved.

Moreover, the waiting to which we are called is to be both eager (verse 23) and patient (verse 25) simultaneously. It is another equilibrium hard to maintain. We are neither to wait so eagerly that we lose our patience, nor to wait so patiently (even lethargically) that we lose our expectancy. Rather, both eagerness and patience are to characterize our waiting.

Many of our evangelical divisions, not least between charismatics and non-charismatics, it seems to me, are due to our failure to keep the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ in balance.

Reviewing this chapter, we have seen that from beginning to end, from our initiation into Christ until his return, the Holy Spirit has a unique and indispensable role to fulfil. Evangelical Christians remain divided in some matters, especially in our precise understanding of the ‘baptism’ of the Spirit and the ‘gifts’ of the Spirit. But we all recognize that the new birth is a birth of the Spirit; that Christian assurance is due to the inner witness of the Spirit; that holiness is the fruit of the Spirit; that the church is the fellowship of the Spirit; that the Christian mission owes its impetus to the Spirit; and that the Christian hope is kindled by the gift of the Spirit, who is the first instalment of our final inheritance.

We are immensely privileged that the Lord Jesus, who was born and died for us, who was raised from the dead and exalted to the Father, then sent his Spirit to live and work in us. The Christian life is life in the Spirit. Without his indwelling presence and power it would be both inconceivable and impossible. In this evangelical Christians are agreed.

Suggested further reading

Sinclair B. Ferguson, The Holy Spirit (Apollos, 1996)

J. I. Packer, Keep in Step with the Spirit (IVP, 1984)

J. C. Ryle, Holiness (Evangelical Press, 1979)

Conclusion

The Challenge of the Evangelical Faith

We have been preoccupied throughout much of this book with the trinitarian shape of the evangelical faith, that is, with the initiative of God in revealing himself, the love of Christ in dying for our sins, and the ministry of the Holy Spirit in facilitating every aspect of our Christian discipleship. More simply, we have focused on the Word, the cross and the Spirit as three essential evangelical emphases.

To be an evangelical Christian, however, is not just to subscribe to an orthodox trinitarian formula. The evangelical faith reaches beyond belief to behaviour; it brings with it a multifaceted challenge to live accordingly.

An outstanding example of this was given by the apostle Paul at the end of the first chapter of his Philippian letter. He refers to ‘the gospel of Christ’ (verse 27a) and to ‘the faith of the gospel’ (verse 27b), that is, to the evangelical faith, and he begs his readers to live appropriately.

Whatever happens, conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ. Then, whether I come and see you or only hear about you in my absence, I will know that you stand firm in one spirit, contending as one man for the faith of the gospel ²⁸without being frightened in any way by those who oppose you. This is a sign to them that they will be destroyed, but that you will be saved – and that by God. ²⁹For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him, ³⁰since you are going through the same struggle you saw I had, and now hear that I still have. (Phil. 1:27–30)

There is something profoundly moving about this appeal. The apostle is a prisoner, either in Rome (as traditionally thought) or in Ephesus (as some hold). In either case he is under house arrest, his liberty is curtailed, and he is unable either to visit the churches he has planted or to engage in more pioneer evangelism. Moreover, his future is full of uncertainty. He realizes that he may be approaching death. Indeed, he feels torn between life and death. His personal desire is ‘to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far’. The churches still need him, however, so that he is fairly sure he will be released and will resume his apostolic labour. Yet beyond both options he longs for the glory of Christ: ‘so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death’ (1:20–26).

‘Whatever happens’, he continues (verse 27), that is, whether he lives or dies, his principal concern is not what will happen to him, but what will happen to the gospel; not for himself and his personal survival, but for the survival and spread of the gospel. It is in the light of this concern that he issues to the Philippians (and so to us) a stirring fivefold summons.

The call for evangelical integrity, or to live a life that is worthy of the gospel

The verb politeuomai, which occurs only twice in the New Testament, meant originally to live as the citizen (politēs) of a city state (polis). Paul may have chosen the word because Philippi was a Roman colony (as Luke correctly stated in Acts 16:12), and its inhabitants as Roman citizens had special privileges and responsibilities. The Christians in Philippi must therefore ensure that their manner of life as citizens was worthy of the gospel. But Paul is surely also referring to their heavenly citizenship. ‘Our citizenship is in heaven,’ he will remind them in 3:20. This gave them even greater privileges and higher responsibilities.

Christians are, in fact, the citizens of two kingdoms. An anonymous defence of Christianity, dating from the middle of the second century, known as The Letter to Diognetus, expressed well this paradox of the Christian life, namely our dual citizenship:

Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humanity by country, language or custom . . . But while they live in both Greek and barbarian cities . . . and follow the local customs in dress and food and other aspects of life, at the same time they demonstrate the remarkable and admittedly unusual character of their own citizenship. They live in their own countries, but only as aliens; they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners . . . They live on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven . . . In a word, what the soul is to the body, Christians are to the world.1

I have entitled this first summons ‘the call for evangelical integrity’ because the concept of living a life that is ‘worthy’ expresses not merit but correspondence. Our conduct is to be in keeping with our calling, with our repentance, with our Lord, and with the God who calls us into his kingdom and glory.2 There is to be no dichotomy between what we profess and what we practise, between what we say and what we are, but rather a fundamental consistency.

The alternative is set before us with great plainness of speech in Paul’s letter to Titus. On the one hand, inconsistent Christian conduct gives people cause to ‘malign the word of God’ and so hinders evangelism. On the other hand, consistent Christian conduct ‘will make the teaching about God our Saviour attractive’ and so will promote evangelism (Titus 2:5, 10). More briefly, bad behaviour discredits the gospel, while good behaviour adorns and so commends it.

Our evangelical forebears went in hot pursuit of what they called ‘scriptural’ or ‘practical’ holiness. They took with great seriousness the frequently repeated command of God to his covenant people ‘Be holy, because I am holy.’ Today, however, some evangelical people seem to acquiesce in low moral standards, which are indistinguishable from those of the world. Others have allowed the quest for holiness to be displaced by the search for social justice or for religious experience. These things are important, but not at the expense of the hunger and thirst for righteousness.

The call for evangelical stability, or to stand firm in the gospel

‘Then, whether I come and see you or only hear about you in my absence, I will know that you stand firm in one spirit . . .’ (verse 27b). The reference to unity we will consider shortly; now we will concentrate on the call to stability. It was this which concerned Paul most. He longed to know (whether by sight or by hearsay) that they were standing firm.

Stability is important in every sphere. We talk about the need for a stable government and a stable economy, about stable buildings and stable characters. And Christian stability obviously meant much to the apostles. So, Luke tells us, they revisited the cities they had evangelized, ‘strengthening’ or establishing the converts (Acts 18:23). They knew the strength of satanic opposition – intellectual (false teaching), moral (temptation) and physical (persecution). Yet God’s ability to ‘establish’ his people was a vital ingredient of Paul’s gospel (Rom. 16:25). So he exhorted them to stand firm. He used the same verb in relation to Christian soldiers, who were to fight against the principalities and powers of evil, to put on the armour of God, and so (four times in Eph. 6:10ff.) to ‘stand’.

Yet stability in both doctrine and ethics is in short supply today. Instead, we seem like fragile boats in an ocean storm, ‘tossed about by the waves and whirled around by every fresh gust of teaching’ (Eph. 4:14, REB). It is much easier to drift with the stream than to swim against it. It takes much less effort to bend like reeds, shaken by the winds of public opinion and political correctness, than to stand firm and immovable like rocks in a mountain torrent. The call to evangelical stability is much needed today. Its chief foundation is the rock of Holy Scripture, that is, of evangelical truth, to which we now turn.

The call for evangelical truth, or to contend for the faith of the gospel

Evidently we are not only to stand firm in the gospel ourselves, but to fight for it in the public arena as well. ‘Contending for the gospel’ might be described as a combination of evangelism and apologetics. It is not enough to proclaim the good news; we have also to defend it and confirm it (verses 7 and 16). The apostles did not separate these tasks. Nor must we. There was a strong element of apologetics in all their evangelism. The apostle Paul could even sum up his ministry by two Greek words which can be translated ‘we persuade people’ (cf. 2 Cor. 5:11). And Luke describes him doing so – arguing the gospel, reasoning with people out of the Scriptures, and convincing them of its truth.

The contemporary church needs to follow the apostolic example. We must be able to say what Paul said to the procurator Festus: ‘I am not insane, most excellent Festus . . . What I am saying is true and reasonable’ (Acts 26:25).

Moreover, we should never set arguments and the Holy Spirit over against each other, declaring that if we are really trusting the Holy Spirit, we will not need arguments, whereas if we do develop arguments, our trust is plainly in them, not in him. This is a grievously false antithesis. For the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, who cares about the truth, teaches the truth and bears witness to the truth. Consequently, truth and the Holy Spirit are entirely compatible, and it is perfectly possible to trust both simultaneously. He brings people to faith in Jesus Christ through our words and arguments, when he enlightens their minds to perceive the truth and feel the force of our own message.

The call for evangelical unity, or to work together for the gospel

Unity is one of the main themes of this letter of Paul’s to the Philippians. There seems to have been some serious discord in the church. We are not told why, but there may be a clue in the three notable conversions which took place during Paul’s missionary visit (Acts 16:11ff.). It would be hard to imagine a more disparate trio, as these converts differed from each other nationally and socially, and perhaps temperamentally as well. Lydia was a wealthy businesswoman from the province of Asia; the anonymous slave girl came from the opposite end of the social spectrum; while the Roman gaoler, probably a retired soldier, might be described as belonging to the respectable middle class. These were three foundation members of the Philippian church. It is wonderful that they could have been welcomed by baptism into the Christian community without any discrimination. Perhaps there were other converts from similarly different backgrounds. Is it possible that the old tensions of race, class and personality resurfaced after their conversion and caused some conflict?

At all events we note the apostle’s exhortations. He begs his readers to ‘stand firm in one spirit, contending as one man for the faith of the gospel’ (verse 27). He goes on to urge them, ‘make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose’ (2:2).

It is important to observe, however, what kind of unity Paul is commending. It is neither unity at any price, even compromising fundamental truths in order to attain it, nor unity in every particular, separating from anybody who fails to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’ as we do. It is rather unity in the gospel, in evangelical essentials, ‘standing . . . side by side in the struggle to advance the gospel faith’ (verse 27, REB).

Today, however, many of us evangelical Christians acquiesce too readily in our pathological tendency to fragment. We take refuge in our conviction about the invisible unity of the church, as if its visible manifestation did not matter. In consequence, the devil has been hugely successful in his old strategy to ‘divide and conquer’. Our disunity remains a major hindrance to our evangelism.

In particular, we need a greater measure of discernment, so that we may distinguish between evangelical essentials which cannot be compromised and those adiaphora (‘matters indifferent’) on which, being of secondary importance, it is not necessary for us to insist. Perhaps our criterion for deciding which is which should be as follows. Whenever equally biblical Christians, who are equally anxious to understand the teaching of Scripture and to submit to its authority, reach different conclusions, we should deduce that evidently Scripture is not crystal clear in this matter, and therefore we can afford to give one another liberty. We can also hope – through prayer, study and discussion – to grow in our understanding and so in our agreement.

What could be regarded today as belonging to the category of the adiaphora? A long list could be compiled. Here are twelve suggestions. I will frame them as questions.3

1. Baptism: should we baptize only adult believers or their infants as well? And by immersion or affusion?

2. The Lord’s Supper: how should we define our sharing in the body and blood of Christ (1 Cor. 10:16)?

3. Church government: should it be episcopal, presbyterian or congregationalist?

4. Worship: is there a place for liturgy, or should all public prayer be extempore? Can we combine the formal and the informal?

5. Charismata: are any not available today? And of those which are, which are the most important?

6. Women: are all ministries open to them or does Scripture preclude certain functions? What does masculine ‘headship’ mean, and how does it apply today?

7. Ecumenism: what degree of involvement with non-evangelical churches is appropriate?

8. Old Testament prophecy: how are we to understand its fulfilment?

9. Sanctification: what degree of holiness is possible for the people of God on earth?

10. The state: what should be the relations between church and state?

11. Mission: are ‘mission’ and ‘evangelism’ synonymous? What is the place of the quest for social justice?

12. Eschatology: how do we understand the tribulation, the rapture, the millennium, the parousia and our final destinies?

This list could be considerably extended. It should include all doctrines and practices in which there is a sincere disagreement among evangelical believers about what the Bible teaches or implies.

But these secondary matters, in which we can afford to give each other freedom of conscience, leave primary Christian truths intact, especially those which relate to the person and work of Christ, as defined in the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, together with the great Reformation emphases on the supreme authority of Scripture, the atoning death of Christ, the justification of sinners by grace alone through faith alone, and the indispensable ministry of the Holy Spirit. On these we must insist. For according to the apostles, to deny the divine-human person of Jesus Christ is anti-Christ (1 John 2:18ff.; 4:1ff.) and to deny the gospel of free grace is to deserve the judgment of God (Gal. 1:6ff.).

This combination of unity in the primary truths and freedom in the secondary, while preserving love in all situations, is often summarized in proverbial form; for instance, ‘In truth unity, in doubtful matters liberty, in all things charity.’ This epigram is sometimes (though inaccurately) attributed to Augustine. But its true author seems to have been one Rupert Meldenius, whose name turned out to be an anagram of Petrus Meuderlin, a Latinized form of Peter Meiderlin, a seventeenth-century Lutheran theologian. In a Latin treatise (c. 1620), which defended Lutheranism but pleaded for peace, he wrote, ‘If we would but observe “unity in essentials, liberty in non-essentials, charity in all things”, our affairs would certainly be in the best possible situation.’

In the English-speaking world, however, it was the great Puritan Richard Baxter who popularized the proverb by quoting it in his book The Reformed Pastor (1656). It is said to have been his ‘favourite quotation’.4 It could profitably be ours as well. It would help us to develop the ‘culture of civility’, for which Professor Alister McGrath pleads within evangelicalism. ‘Can we give up our personality cults,’ he asks, ‘petty rivalries, historical feuds and personal agendas for the greater good of the movement?’5 I hope we can answer his question in the affirmative.

The call for evangelical endurance, or to suffer for the gospel

Paul’s summons to the Philippians to ‘contend’ for the gospel faith implies the existence of adversaries. To these he now comes. He exhorts his readers, as they battle for the truth, not to be in any way ‘frightened’ by their opponents. The apostle uses a strong term, ‘unique in the Greek Bible and denoting the uncontrollable stampede of startled horses’.6 The Philippian experience of opposition to the gospel, together with their refusal to be intimidated by it, would convey a double message. It would be a clear sign from God to their opponents ‘that they will be destroyed’, but to them that they ‘will be saved’ (verse 28).

For, Paul further explains, the Philippian Christians had been granted on behalf of Christ two privileges, ‘not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him’ (verse 29). He is not referring to pain and suffering in general, but in particular to suffering for the gospel. It is truly remarkable that faith and suffering (faith in Christ and suffering for Christ) should be bracketed in this way as two gifts of God’s grace. Of course all Christians are believers. But are they also all called to suffer? And can suffering be regarded as being as much a gift or privilege as is faith? Yes, this is the consistent teaching of the New Testament.

Each of Jesus’ eight beatitudes, with which his Sermon on the Mount began, depicts a different characteristic of the citizens of God’s kingdom, so that the eight together portray a rounded Christian disciple. And the eighth pronounces God’s blessing on those ‘who are persecuted because of righteousness’ (Matt. 5:10ff.; cf. John 15:18ff.). So the early Christians were not surprised by the opposition they experienced. Instead they rejoiced ‘because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name’ (Acts 5:41). Paul wrote that ‘everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted’ (2 Tim. 3:12), while Peter declared suffering to be a part of the Christian calling and told his readers to rejoice that they were privileged to share in Christ’s sufferings (1 Pet. 2:21; 4:13). No wonder then that Paul saw the Philippians as ‘going through the same struggle’ which they had seen him experience in Philippi (flogging, imprisonment and the stocks), and which they now heard he was still experiencing (verse 30). Disciples are called to share their Master’s sufferings, and also the sufferings of the apostles. It is an inevitable aspect of the apostolic succession – a succession not of order, or even of doctrine or mission, but of suffering.

This noble succession, moreover, reaches down to the present day. Those of us who live in the West may not be called upon to suffer much, or not physically, although faithfulness to the gospel, because it undermines human pride and selfishness, always arouses opposition. But in other parts of the world there is much physical persecution for truth and righteousness. Indeed, it is reliably calculated that the number of Christian martyrs was greater in the twentieth century than in any previous period of church history.

It was appropriate, therefore, that the ten niches above the west door of Westminster Abbey in London, which had been vacant for more than 500 years, should in July 1998 have been filled with the statues of twentieth-century Christian martyrs, representing different denominations and every continent. These include well-known names like Dietrich Bonhoeffer (victim of Nazi tyranny), Martin Luther King (civil-rights campaigner) and Archbishop Janani Luwum (assassinated by the Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin), but also comparatively unknown martyrs like Esther John, a Pakistani convert from Islam, who was brutally murdered in her bed, and Wang Zhiming, a Chinese pastor who was publicly executed during the cultural revolution.7 To each martyr Jesus surely said, ‘Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life’ (Rev. 2:10).

We can hardly fail to be stirred by the apostle’s summons at the end of Philippians 1, as it comes to us across the centuries. He calls us to live a life that is worthy of the gospel, to stand firm in it, to contend for it earnestly, to struggle for it together and to be willing to suffer for it. All this is involved in the challenge to maintain the evangelical faith today.

Suggested further reading

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (SCM, 1959)

David Jackman, Understanding the Church (Kingsway, 1987)

Alister McGrath, ‘I Believe’: Exploring the Apostles’ Creed (IVP, 1997)

Postscript

The Pre-Eminence of Humility

I make so bold as to claim, in this brief postscript, that the supreme quality which the evangelical faith engenders (or should do) is humility. Already I think I can see the wry smile on my readers’ faces. For we have to confess that our reputation is very different. Evangelical people are often regarded as proud, vain, arrogant and cocksure.

What I mean, however, is that the principal tenets which evangelical Christians cherish, if they are correctly understood, inevitably tend towards humility. As Cranmer’s Homily on Salvation put it, evangelical convictions set forth the true glory of God, and are bound therefore to beat down the vainglory of human beings. Let me explain further.

I have been at pains to argue that evangelical Christianity is trinitarian Christianity. We hold the three ‘Rs’ – revelation, redemption and regeneration, associating revelation with the Father, redemption with the Son and regeneration with the Holy Spirit. We desire above all else to bear witness to the supreme authority of the Word of God, the atoning efficacy of the cross of Christ and the indispensable ministries of the Holy Spirit.

Yet the more the three persons of the Trinity are glorified, the more completely human pride is excluded. To magnify the self-revelation of God is to confess our complete ignorance without it. To magnify the cross of Christ is to confess our utter lostness without it. To magnify the regenerating, indwelling and sanctifying role of the Holy Spirit is to confess our abiding self-centredness without it.

The Word, the cross and the Spirit, as we have seen, have a special place of honour in our thinking. We kneel before God the Father, with the Bible open before us, emphatically not because we are bibliolaters, but because we desire humbly to hear God’s word. We kneel in imagination at the feet of the crucified and resurrected Lord (as when we come to the Communion table) because we desire humbly to receive that full and free forgiveness which only he can give. We kneel also before the Holy Spirit, because we desire humbly to ask him to fill our emptiness and to cause his fruit to ripen in our lives.

Without the Bible we would grope and stagger in thick darkness. Without the cross we would flounder in the deep waters of guilt and alienation, with no mercy, no redemption, no forgiveness and no hope. Without the indwelling Spirit we would be the helpless victims of indwelling sin, of pathetic self-effort and so of unremitting failure.

It is in this way that we understand why Jesus gave us the model of a child’s humility.

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’

²He called a little child and had him stand among them. ³And he said: ‘I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. ⁴Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’ (Matt. 18:1–4)

Many people are perplexed by Jesus’ references to the ‘humility’ of a child. For in our experience children are usually headstrong and proud. So Jesus was alluding not to the character or conduct of children, but their status. Everything children possess they have been given, and everything they know they have been taught. It is right therefore to call them ‘dependants’.

Just as children depend totally on their parents, so we depend on God, not least in the three spheres mentioned.

First, on one occasion Jesus said, ‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children’ (Matt. 11:25). This is not obscurantism. It is rather to acknowledge that God hides from the intellectually arrogant and reveals himself only to ‘babies’ (as the word here means), that is, to those who are sincere and humble in their approach.

Secondly, on another occasion, when Jesus invited children to come to him, he added that ‘anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it’ (Mark 10:13–16). Thus the kingdom of God, a synonym in Jesus’ teaching for salvation or eternal life, could not be earned or deserved. It could only be ‘received’, as a child receives a gift, freely and gratefully – not like an adult who proudly insists on paying for it.

In the case of our third dependency, namely for holiness, Jesus did not use the simile of the child, but he taught the same truth differently. In developing his allegory of the vine he said, ‘apart from me you can do nothing’ (John 15:5). This ‘nothing’ cannot be interpreted as an absolute, for people can do many things without abiding in Christ or relying on the Holy Spirit. Unregenerate people get up, wash and dress, have their breakfast and go to work, without any conscious dependence on Christ or his Spirit. His ‘nothing’ must therefore be interpreted in relation to its context of ‘fruitfulness’. It is logically impossible to bear the fruit of the Spirit if we are not indwelt by the Spirit whose fruit it is.

There is here a fundamental conflict between liberal and evangelical Christianity. During the 1960s, under the influence of extreme liberals like Bishop John Robinson (UK) and Paul van Buren (USA), a so-called ‘secular’ theology was born, which proclaimed that ‘man has come of age’ and can therefore dispense with the traditional notions of God and of salvation. But it is impossible to reconcile this call to independence with Jesus’ teaching about our dependence on God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

At least in our Christian hymnody, if not always in our theology, we express our humble dependence on the Trinity. Our dependence on God and his Word:

Word of the ever-living God,

Will of his glorious Son,

Without thee how could earth be trod

Or heaven itself be won?

Lord, grant that we aright may learn

The wisdom it imparts,

And to its heavenly teaching turn

With simple, childlike hearts.

(Bernard Barton, 1784–1849)

Our dependence on Christ and his cross:

Nothing in my hand I bring;

Simply to thy cross I cling;

Naked, come to thee for dress;

Helpless, look to thee for grace;

Foul, I to the fountain fly,

Wash me, Saviour, or I die.

(Augustus M. Toplady, 1740–78)

Our dependence on the Holy Spirit and his work:

And every virtue we possess,

And every victory won,

And every thought of holiness

Are his alone.

Spirit of purity and grace,

Our weakness, pitying, see;

O make our hearts thy dwelling-place,

And worthier thee.

(Harriet Auber, 1773–1862)

Worship on earth anticipates worship in heaven. For throughout eternity the redeemed will attribute their salvation to him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb. There is no place for human boasting. ‘Let him who boasts boast in the Lord’ (1 Cor. 1:31). Our place is on our faces, prostrate before God, and our only appropriate anthem is the Gloria:

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

Notes

Preface

1. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876; Penguin, 1986), p. 37.

2. From the Epilogue to From Gore to Temple 1889–1939 by A. M. Ramsey (Longmans, 1960), p. 166.

3. John Habgood, Confessions of a Conservative Liberal (SPCK, 1988), pp. 2–3.

4. S. C. Neill, Anglicanism (1958; Penguin, 1982), p. 190.

5. From his 1980 Presidential Address to the Sydney Synod.

Introduction: Evangelical Essentials

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

2. John S. Peart-Binns, Wand of London (Mowbray, 1987), p. 29.

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

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

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

6. Martin Luther, A Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (James Clarke, 1953), p. 53.

7. Hugh Latimer, Works, vol. 1, pp. 30–31.

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

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

10. Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham (HarperZondervan, 1997), p. 160.

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

12. See Fundamentalism by James Barr (SCM, 1966) and Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism by John S. Spong (Harper, 1991). Harriet A. Harries considers James Barr’s 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 Harries’s 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. 11–15).

13. C. F. H. Henry, op cit., pp. 36–37.

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

15. Clive Calver and Rob Warner, Together We Stand (Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), pp. 128–130.

16. From a chapter entitled ‘Lausanne Between Berlin and Geneva’ in Reich Gottes oder Weltgemeinschaft, ed. W. Künneth and P. Beyerhaus (Verlag der Liebenzeller Mission, 1975), pp. 307–308.

17. The Evangelical Anglican Identity Problem: An Analysis, by J. I. Packer (Latimer House, Oxford, 1978), pp. 15–23. 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. 49–88.

18. 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. 3–19. 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. 94–105). Dr Bebbington’s 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’.

19. Derek J. Tidball, Who Are the Evangelicals? (Marshall Pickering, 1994), p. 14.

20. D. W. Bebbington, op. cit., p. 276.

21. Ibid., p. 4.

22. In The Radical Evangelical: Seeking a Place to Stand Nigel Wright also writes of the primacy of the Trinity in evangelical religion (SPCK, 1996).

Chapter 1: The Revelation of God

1. Cf. Acts 14:17; 17:24–5.

2. Quoted by D. W. Bebbington, op cit., p. 86.

3. Alec Motyer, Look to the Rock: An Old Testament Background to our Understanding of Christ (IVP, 1996), p. 182.

4. Diogenes Allen, Christian Belief in a Post-modern World: The Full Wealth of Conviction (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989), pp. 1–9. Several other books published in the 1990s have examined the interaction between evangelicalism and postmodernism. Among them are the following: Revisioning Evangelical Theology: A Fresh Agenda for the 21st Century by Stanley J. Grenz (IVP, Downers Grove, 1993); The Post-Evangelical by Dave Tomlinson (SPCK, 1995); Truth is Stranger Than it Used to Be: Biblical Faith in a Post-modern Age by J. Richard Middleton and Brian J. Walsh (SPCK, 1995); and Picking up the Pieces: Can Evangelicals Adapt to Contemporary Culture? by David Hilborn (Hodder and Stoughton, 1997). The Evangelical Left: Encountering Post-conservative Evangelical Theology by Millard J. Erickson (Baker, 1997) offers a fair evaluation, both positive and negative, of North American ‘post-conservatives’.

5. Os Guinness, Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don’t Think and What to Do about it (Baker, 1994), p. 105.

6. Peter Cotterell in The London Bible College Review (1989).

7. Some modern versions read that ‘all inspired Scripture is useful’, implying that some Scripture is not inspired and therefore not useful. But (a) the concept of ‘uninspired Scripture’ would have been a contradiction in terms, and (b) the inclusion in the Greek text of kai (‘and’) indicates that Paul is making two statements, first that Scripture is God-breathed, and secondly that it is useful. The essay by B. B. Warfield on the ‘expiration’ of Scripture, and on the meaning and implications of this text has never been either bettered or refuted. See his The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1951), ch. 3.

8. J. I. Packer, ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God (IVF, 1958), pp. 81–82. Dr Packer supplies the references.

9. Ibid., p. 81.

10. Ibid., p. 82.

11. Richard Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593–7), Book V. 8. 11.

12. Note that in the six antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount, ‘you have heard that it was said, but I say to you’, Jesus was not contradicting what was ‘written’ (Scripture) but what was ‘said’ (oral tradition).

13. The Lambeth Conference 1958 (SPCK), part 2, p. 5.

14. Alister McGrath, To Know and Serve God: A Biography of J. I. Packer (Hodder and Stoughton, 1997), pp. 201–202.

15. Kenneth S. Kantzer and Carl F. H. Henry (eds.), Evangelical Affirmations (Academie Books, Zondervan, 1990), pp. 32, 38.

16. E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (Yale University Press, 1967), p. 1.

17. Ibid., p. 5.

18. John Stott (ed.), Making Christ Known: Historic Mission Documents from the Lausanne Movement 1974–1989 (Paternoster, 1997), pp. 13–14. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) elaborated the Lausanne Covenant clause, saying that Scripture ‘is to be believed as God’s instruction in all that it affirms; obeyed as God’s command in all that it requires; and embraced as God’s pledge in all that it promises’.

Chapter 2: The Cross of Christ

1. J. C. Ryle, Home Truths (Thynne, n.d.), pp. 19–20.

2. P. T. Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross (Hodder and Stoughton, 1909), pp. 44–45.

3. P. T. Forsyth, The Work of Christ (Hodder and Stoughton, 1910), p. 53.

4. Leon Morris, The Cross in the New Testament (Paternoster, 1965), p. 365.

5. J. C. Ryle, op. cit., p. 4.

6. Catholicity: A Study in the Conflict of Christian Traditions in the West (Dacre Press, 1947).

7. Ibid., pp. 21–23.

8. The Fulness of Christ: The Church’s Growth into Catholicity (SPCK, 1950), pp. 17, 23.

9. See Jer. 6:14; 8:11; Ezek. 13:10ff.

10. Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings (ET Faber, 1964), especially pp. 128–129.

11. Charles Smyth, Cyril Forster Garbett, Archbishop of York (Hodder and Stoughton, 1959), p. 424.

12. Hilton C. Oswald (ed.), Luther’s Works, vol. 25 (Concordia, 1972), pp. 291, 345.

13. Emil Brunner, The Mediator (ET Westminster Press, 1947), p. 141.

14. Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt (1937; ET Lutterworth, 1939), p. 129.

15. Emil Brunner, Dogmatics, vol. 2, pp. 92–93.

16. Swami Vivekananda, Speeches and Writings, 3rd edition (G. A. Natesan, Madras), pp. 38–39.

17. Ibid., p. 125.

18. Alister McGrath, To Know and Serve God: A Biography of James I. Packer (Hodder and Stoughton, 1997), p. 205.

19. Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1535; James Clarke, 1953), p. 143, cf. p. 101.

20. First Book of Homilies (1547) from Homilies and Canons (SPCK, 1914), pp. 25–26.

21. R. T. Beckwith, G. E. Duffield and J. I. Packer, Across the Divide (Marcham Manor Press, 1977), p. 58. It is true that other contemporary scholars challenge both the centrality of justification in Paul’s theology and its traditional interpretation which, they suggest, owes more to Luther’s dramatic experience than to New Testament teaching. See, for example, What St Paul Really Said by Tom Wright (Lion, 1997). Certainly we agree that justification is only one Pauline metaphor of atonement and salvation. But I have not myself been convinced by this ‘new perspective on Paul’. We must surely hold on to the truth that justification is a gift of God’s grace, which on account of the cross is free and undeserved (e.g. Rom. 3:24; 5:15–17; 6:23).

22. See, e.g., Rom. 3:28; 5:1; Gal. 2:16; Phil. 3:9.

23. From Richard Hooker’s ‘Definition of Justification’, being ch. 33 of his Ecclesiastical Polity (1593–7).

24. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (1937), pp. 8, 73.

25. William Temple, Nature, Man and God (Macmillan, 1934), p. 401.

26. The Guardian Weekly, 30 August 1979.

Chapter 3: The Ministry of the Holy Spirit

1. Council of Trent, Session 7, Canon 8.

2. Ecclesiastical Polity, V, p. 67.

3. James Ussher, The Body of Divinity, ch. 42.

4. J. C. Ryle, Knots Untied (1877; Thynne ‘people’s edition’, 1900), p. 6.

5. It is because of our doctrine of assurance that evangelicals have always opposed the practice of praying for the Christian departed. Of course we continue to remember them; it would be very odd, not to say inhuman, to allow death suddenly to erase them from our memory. And we also thank God for them. Why then do we not pray for them? For two reasons. First, although on innumerable occasions in the New Testament we are exhorted to pray for the living, there is no single New Testament text which bids us pray for the dead. So the practice lacks biblical warrant. Secondly, we are assured that having been justified by faith, ‘we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ’ (Rom. 5:1). In addition, Paul told the Colossians to give thanks to the Father ‘who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light’ (Col. 1:12–14). How then can we pray (using the traditional phraseology) that the souls of the departed may ‘rest in peace’ and that ‘light perpetual may shine upon them’, when we have been specifically assured that God’s redeemed people already enjoy ‘peace’ and ‘light’? To pray that they may be given what we are told they already have is derogatory to the work of Christ and incompatible with Christian assurance.

6. See 1 John 2:3, 5; 3:14, 19; 4:13; 5:19.

7. The Prayer of Consecration in the Communion service.

8. D. M. Lloyd-Jones, The New Man: An Exposition of Romans 6 (Banner of Truth, 1972), p. 264.

9. Handley Moule, Thoughts on Christian Sanctity (Seeley, 1888), pp. 13–15.

10. Ibid., p. 16.

11. See Truth, Error and Discipline (Vine Books, 1978), a pamphlet produced by and for the Church of England Evangelical Council.

12. Fourth edition, revised 1900.

13. In 1981 Dr J. I. Packer picked up Ryle’s memorable phrase and wrote A Kind of Noah’s Ark? The Anglican Commitment to Comprehensiveness, as a companion piece to his earlier study The Evangelical Anglican Identity Problem: An Analysis (Latimer House, Oxford, 1978).

14. The Fulness of Christ: The Church’s Growth into Catholicity, being a report presented to the Archbishop of Canterbury (SPCK, 1960), pp. 7–8.

15. Alec Vidler, Essays in Liberality (SCM, 1957), p. 166.

16. From his essay ‘Taking Stock in Theology’ in Evangelicals Today, ed. John C. King (Lutterworth, 1973), p. 17.

17. John V. Taylor, The Go-Between God (SCM, 1972), p. 3.

18. John Stott (ed.), Making Christ Known: Historic Mission Documents from the Lausanne Movement, 1974–1989 (Paternoster and Eerdmans, 1996), p. 238.

19. William Temple, Readings in St. John’s Gospel (1945; Macmillan, 1955), p. 130.

20. Harry R. Boer, Pentecost and Missions (Lutterworth, 1961), p. 210.

21. In John Stott (ed.), op. cit., pp. 181–182.

22. John Wimber, Power Evangelism (Hodder and Stoughton, 1985), p. 117.

23. Ibid., p. 117.

24. E.g. Exod. 4:1–9; 1 Kgs. 17 – 18; Acts 2:22; 2 Cor. 12:12.

25. John Wimber, op. cit., p. 102.

26. John Stott (ed.), op. cit., p. 238.

27. It will be clear from this definition of ‘revival’ as a supernatural and sovereign visitation of God, that I am not alluding to ‘organizing a revival’ (i.e. an evangelistic mission), a very man-created expression still in use in some southern states of the USA.

28. Johannes Blauw, The Missionary Nature of the Church (1962; Eerdmans, 1974), p. 89.

Conclusion: The Challenge of the Evangelical Faith

1. The Letter to Diognetus, V. 5. 8.

2. Eph. 4:1; Luke 3:8; Matt. 10:37; Col. 1:10; 1 Thess. 2:12.

3. Rob Warner enlarges on some of these, and on others, in his chapter entitled ‘Fracture Points’ in Together We Stand by Clive Calver and Rob Warner (Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), pp. 60–93.

4. So John T. Wilkinson in his introductory essay to The Reformed Pastor (Epworth ed., 1939), p. 31. The original Latin version of the proverb was in necessariis unitas, in non-necessariis libertas, in omnibus caritas.

5. Church of England Newspaper, 17 April 1998.

6. R. P. Martin, Philippians, Tyndale New Testament Commentary (IVP and Eerdmans, 1959), p. 86.

7. A full account of the ten martyrs is given in Andrew Chandler (ed.), The Terrible Alternative (Cassell, 1998).

The Cape Town Commitment: A Confession of Faith and a Call to Action

Foreword

The Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization (Cape Town, 16-25 October 2010) brought together 4,200 evangelical leaders from 198 countries, and extended to hundreds of thousands more, participating in meetings around the world, and online. Its goal? To bring a fresh challenge to the global Church to bear witness to Jesus Christ and all his teaching – in every nation, in every sphere of society, and in the realm of ideas.

The Cape Town Commitment is the fruit of this endeavour. It stands in an historic line, building on both The Lausanne Covenant and The Manila Manifesto. It is in two parts. Part I sets out biblical convictions, passed down to us in the scriptures, and Part II sounds the call to action.

How was Part I shaped? It was first discussed in Minneapolis in December 2009, at a gathering of 18 invited theologians and evangelical leaders, drawn from all continents. A smaller group, led by Dr Christopher J H Wright, chair of the Lausanne Theology Working Group, was asked to prepare a final document, ready to be presented to the Congress.

How was Part II shaped? An extensive listening process began more than three years before the Congress. The Lausanne Movement’s International Deputy Directors each arranged consultations in their regions, where Christian leaders were asked to identify major challenges facing the Church. Six key issues emerged. These (i) defined the Congress programme and (ii) formed the framework for the call to action. This listening process continued on through the Congress, as Chris Wright and the Statement Working Group worked to record all contributions faithfully. It was a herculean and monumental effort.

The Cape Town Commitment will act as a roadmap for The Lausanne Movement over the next ten years. Its prophetic call to work and to pray will, we hope, draw churches, mission agencies, seminaries, Christians in the workplace, and student fellowships on campus to embrace it, and to find their part in its outworking.

Many doctrinal statements affirm what the Church believes. We wished to go further and to link belief with praxis. Our model was that of the Apostle Paul, whose theological teaching was fleshed out in practical instruction. For example, in Colossians his profound and wonderful portrayal of the supremacy of Christ issues in down-to-earth teaching on what it means to be rooted in Christ.

We distinguish what is at the heart of the Christian gospel, ie primary truths on which we must have unity, from secondary issues, where sincere Christians disagree in their interpretation of what the Bible teaches or requires. We have worked here to model Lausanne’s principle of ‘breadth within boundaries’, and in Part l those boundaries are clearly defined.

All through this process we were delighted to collaborate with the World Evangelical Alliance who partnered with us in each stage. The leaders of the WEA are in full agreement with both the Confession of Faith and the Call to Action.

While we speak and write from the evangelical tradition in The Lausanne Movement, we affirm the oneness of the Body of Christ, and gladly recognize that there are many followers of the Lord Jesus Christ within other traditions. We welcomed senior representatives from several historic churches of other traditions as observers in Cape Town, and we trust The Cape Town Commitment may be helpful to churches of all traditions. We offer it in a humble spirit.

What are our hopes for The Cape Town Commitment? We trust that it will be talked about, discussed and afforded weight as a united statement from evangelicals globally; that it will shape agendas in Christian ministry; that it will strengthen thought-leaders in the public arena; and that bold initiatives and partnerships will issue from it.

May the Word of God light our path, and may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each one of us.

S Douglas Birdsall – Executive Chairman

Lindsay Brown – International Director

Preamble

As members of the worldwide Church of Jesus Christ, we joyfully affirm our commitment to the living God and his saving purposes through the Lord Jesus Christ. For his sake we renew our commitment to the vision and goals of The Lausanne Movement.

This means two things:

First, we remain committed to the task of bearing worldwide witness to Jesus Christ and all his teaching. The First Lausanne Congress (1974) was convened for the task of world evangelization. Among its major gifts to the world Church were: (i) The Lausanne Covenant; (ii) a new awareness of the number of unreached people groups; and (iii) a fresh discovery of the holistic nature of the biblical gospel and of Christian mission. The Second Lausanne Congress, in Manila (1989), gave birth to more than 300 strategic partnerships in world evangelization, including many that involved co-operation between nations in all parts of the globe.

And second, we remain committed to the primary documents of the Movement – The Lausanne Covenant (1974), and The Manila Manifesto (1989). These documents clearly express core truths of the biblical gospel and apply them to our practical mission in ways that are still relevant and challenging. We confess that we have not been faithful to commitments made in those documents. But we commend them and stand by them, as we seek to discern how we must express and apply the eternal truth of the gospel in the ever-changing world of our own generation.

The realities of change

Almost everything about the way we live, think and relate to one another is changing at an accelerating pace. For good or ill, we feel the impact of globalization, of the digital revolution, and of the changing balance of economic and political power in the world. Some things we face cause us grief and anxiety – global poverty, war, ethnic conflict, disease, the ecological crisis and climate change. But one great change in our world is a cause for rejoicing – and that is the growth of the global Church of Christ.

The fact that the Third Lausanne Congress has taken place in Africa is proof of this. At least two thirds of all the world’s Christians now live in the continents of the global south and east. The composition of our Cape Town Congress reflected this enormous shift in world Christianity in the century since the Edinburgh Missionary Conference in 1910. We rejoice in the amazing growth of the Church in Africa, and we rejoice that our African sisters and brothers in Christ hosted this Congress. At the same time, we could not meet in South Africa without being mindful of the past years of suffering under apartheid. So we give thanks for the progress of the gospel and the sovereign righteousness of God at work in recent history, while wrestling still with the ongoing legacy of evil and injustice. Such is the double witness and role of the Church in every place.

We must respond in Christian mission to the realities of our own generation. We must also learn from that mixture of wisdom and error, of achievement and failure, that we inherit from previous generations. We honour and lament the past, and we engage with the future, in the name of the God who holds all history in his hand.

Unchanged realities

In a world which works to re-invent itself at an ever-accelerated pace, some things remain the same. These great truths provide the biblical rationale for our missional engagement.

• Human beings are lost. The underlying human predicament remains as the Bible describes it: we stand under the just judgment of God in our sin and rebellion, and without Christ we are without hope.

• The gospel is good news. The gospel is not a concept that needs fresh ideas, but a story that needs fresh telling. It is the unchanged story of what God has done to save the world, supremely in the historical events of the life, death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus Christ. In Christ there is hope.

• The Church’s mission goes on. The mission of God continues to the ends of the earth and to the end of the world. The day will come when the kingdoms of the world will become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ and God will dwell with his redeemed humanity in the new creation. Until that day, the Church’s participation in God’s mission continues, in joyful urgency, and with fresh and exciting opportunities in every generation including our own.

The passion of our love

This Statement is framed in the language of love. Love is the language of covenant. The biblical covenants, old and new, are the expression of God’s redeeming love and grace reaching out to lost humanity and spoiled creation. They call for our love in return. Our love shows itself in trust, obedience and passionate commitment to our covenant Lord. The Lausanne Covenant defined evangelization as ‘the whole Church taking the whole gospel to the whole world’. That is still our passion. So we renew that covenant by affirming again:

• Our love for the whole gospel, as God’s glorious good news in Christ, for every dimension of his creation, for it has all been ravaged by sin and evil;

• Our love for the whole Church, as God’s people, redeemed by Christ from every nation on earth and every age of history, to share God’s mission in this age and glorify him for ever in the age to come;

• Our love for the whole world, so far from God but so close to his heart, the world that God so loved that he gave his only Son for its salvation.

In the grip of that three-fold love, we commit ourselves afresh to be the whole Church, to believe, obey, and share the whole gospel, and to go to the whole world to make disciples of all nations.

Part I

For the Lord we love: The Cape Town Confession of Faith

1. We love because God first loved us

The mission of God flows from the love of God. The mission of God’s people flows from our love for God and for all that God loves. World evangelization is the outflow of God’s love to us and through us. We affirm the primacy of God’s grace and we then respond to that grace by faith, demonstrated through the obedience of love. We love because God first loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.[1]

a. Love for God and love for neighbour constitute the first and greatest commandments on which hang all the law and the prophets. Love is the fulfilling of the law, and the first named fruit of the Spirit. Love is the evidence that we are born again; the assurance that we know God; and the proof that God dwells within us. Love is the new commandment of Christ, who told his disciples that only as they obeyed this commandment would their mission be visible and believable. Christian love for one another is how the unseen God, who made himself visible through his incarnate Son, goes on making himself visible to the world. Love was among the first things that Paul observed and commended among new believers, along with faith and hope. But love is the greatest, for love never ends.[2]

b. Such love is not weak or sentimental. The love of God is covenantally faithful, committed, self-giving, sacrificial, strong, and holy. Since God is love, love permeates God’s whole being and all his actions, his justice as well as his compassion. God’s love extends over all his creation. We are commanded to love in ways that reflect the love of God in all those same dimensions. That is what it means to walk in the way of the Lord.[3]

c. So in framing our convictions and our commitments in terms of love, we are taking up the most basic and demanding biblical challenge of all:

(1) to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength;

(2) to love our neighbour (including the foreigner and the enemy) as ourselves;

(3) to love one another as God in Christ has loved us, and

(4) to love the world with the love of the One who gave his only Son that the world through him might be saved.[4]

d. Such love is the gift of God poured out in our hearts, but it is also the command of God requiring the obedience of our wills. Such love means to be like Christ himself: robust in endurance, yet gentle in humility; tough in resisting evil, yet tender in compassion for the suffering; courageous in suffering and faithful even unto death. Such love was modelled by Christ on earth and is measured by the risen Christ in glory.[5]

We affirm that such comprehensive biblical love should be the defining identity and hallmark of disciples of Jesus. In response to the prayer and command of Jesus, we long that it should be so for us. Sadly we confess that too often it is not. So we re-commit ourselves afresh to make every effort to live, think, speak and behave in ways that express what it means to walk in love – love for God, love for one another and love for the world.

2. We love the living God

Our God whom we love reveals himself in the Bible as the one, eternal, living God who governs all things according to his sovereign will and for his saving purpose. In the unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God alone is the Creator, Ruler, Judge and Saviour of the world.[6] So we love God – thanking him for our place in creation, submitting to his sovereign providence, trusting in his justice, and praising him for the salvation he has accomplished for us.

a. We love God above all rivals. We are commanded to love and worship the living God alone. But like Old Testament Israel we allow our love for God to be adulterated by going after the gods of this world, the gods of the people around us.[7] We fall into syncretism, enticed by many idols such as greed, power and success, serving mammon rather than God. We accept dominant political and economic ideologies without biblical critique. We are tempted to compromise our belief in the uniqueness of Christ under the pressure of religious pluralism. Like Israel we need to hear the call of the prophets and of Jesus himself to repent, to forsake all such rivals, and to return to obedient love and worship of God alone.

b. We love God with passion for his glory. The greatest motivation for our mission is the same as that which drives the mission of God himself – that the one true living God should be known and glorified throughout his whole creation. That is God’s ultimate goal and should be our greatest joy.

‘If God desires every knee to bow to Jesus and every tongue to confess him, so should we. We should be “jealous” (as Scripture sometimes puts it) for the honour of his name – troubled when it remains unknown, hurt when it is ignored, indignant when it is blasphemed, and all the time anxious and determined that it shall be given the honour and glory which are due to it. The highest of all missionary motives is neither obedience to the Great Commission (important as that is), nor love for sinners who are alienated and perishing (strong as that incentive is, especially when we contemplate the wrath of God) but rather zeal – burning and passionate zeal – for the glory of Jesus Christ. . . . Before this supreme goal of the Christian mission, all unworthy motives wither and die.’[8] John Stott

It should be our greatest grief that in our world the living God is not glorified. The living God is denied in aggressive atheism. The one true God is replaced or distorted in the practice of world religions. Our Lord Jesus Christ is abused and misrepresented in some popular cultures. And the face of the God of biblical revelation is obscured by Christian nominalism, syncretism and hypocrisy.

Loving God in the midst of a world that rejects or distorts him, calls for bold but humble witness to our God; robust but gracious defence of the truth of the gospel of Christ, God’s Son; and prayerful trust in the convicting and convincing work of his Holy Spirit. We commit ourselves to such witness, for if we claim to love God we must share God’s greatest priority, which is that his name and his Word should be exalted above all things.[9]

3. We love God the Father

Through Jesus Christ, God’s Son, – and through him alone as the way, the truth and the life – we come to know and love God as Father. As the Holy Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children, so we cry the words Jesus prayed, ‘Abba, Father’, and we pray the prayer Jesus taught, ‘Our Father’. Our love for Jesus, proved by obeying him, is met by the Father’s love for us as the Father and the Son make their home in us, in mutual giving and receiving of love.[10] This intimate relationship has deep biblical foundations.

a. We love God as the Father of his people. Old Testament Israel knew God as Father, as the one who brought them into existence, carried them and disciplined them, called for their obedience, longed for their love, and exercised compassionate forgiveness and patient enduring love.[11] All these remain true for us as God’s people in Christ in our relationship with our Father God.

b. We love God as the Father, who so loved the world that he gave his only Son for our salvation. How great the Father’s love for us that we should be called the children of God. How immeasurable the love of the Father who did not spare his only Son, but gave him up for us all. This love of the Father in giving the Son was mirrored by the self-giving love of the Son. There was complete harmony of will in the work of atonement that the Father and the Son accomplished at the cross, through the eternal Spirit. The Father loved the world and gave his Son; ‘the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me.’ This unity of Father and Son, affirmed by Jesus himself, is echoed in Paul’s most repeated greeting of ‘grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins . . . according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.’[12]

c. We love God as the Father whose character we reflect and whose care we trust. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus repeatedly points to our heavenly Father as the model or focus for our action. We are to be peacemakers, as sons of God. We are to do good deeds, so that our Father receives the praise. We are to love our enemies in reflection of God’s Fatherly love. We are to practise our giving, praying and fasting for our Father’s eyes only. We are to forgive others as our Father forgives us. We are to have no anxiety but trust in our Father’s provision. With such behaviour flowing from Christian character, we do the will of our Father in heaven, within the kingdom of God.[13]

We confess that we have often neglected the truth of the Fatherhood of God and deprived ourselves of the riches of our relationship with him. We commit ourselves afresh to come to the Father through Jesus the Son: to receive and respond to his Fatherly love; to live in obedience under his Fatherly discipline; to reflect his Fatherly character in all our behaviour and attitudes; and to trust in his Fatherly provision in whatever circumstances he leads us.

4. We love God the Son

God commanded Israel to love the LORD God with exclusive loyalty. Likewise for us, loving the Lord Jesus Christ means that we steadfastly affirm that he alone is Saviour, Lord and God. The Bible teaches that Jesus performs the same sovereign actions as God alone. Christ is Creator of the universe, Ruler of history, Judge of all nations and Saviour of all who turn to God.[14] He shares the identity of God in the divine equality and unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Just as God called Israel to love him in covenantal faith, obedience and servant-witness, we affirm our love for Jesus Christ by trusting in him, obeying him, and making him known.

a. We trust in Christ. We believe the testimony of the Gospels that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, the one appointed and sent by God to fulfil the unique mission of Old Testament Israel, that is to bring the blessing of God’s salvation to all nations, as God promised to Abraham.

(1) In Jesus, conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, God took our human flesh and lived among us, fully God and fully human.

(2) In his life Jesus walked in perfect faithfulness and obedience to God. He announced and taught the kingdom of God, and modelled the way his disciples must live under God’s reign.

(3) In his ministry and miracles, Jesus announced and demonstrated the victory of the kingdom of God over evil and evil powers.

(4) In his death on the cross, Jesus took our sin upon himself in our place, bearing its full cost, penalty and shame, defeated death and the powers of evil, and accomplished the reconciliation and redemption of all creation.

(5) In his bodily resurrection, Jesus was vindicated and exalted by God, completed and demonstrated the full victory of the cross, and became the forerunner of redeemed humanity and restored creation.

(6) Since his ascension, Jesus is reigning as Lord over all history and creation.

(7) At his return, Jesus will execute God’s judgment, destroy Satan, evil and death, and establish the universal reign of God.

b. We obey Christ. Jesus calls us to discipleship, to take up our cross and follow him in the path of self-denial, servanthood and obedience. ‘If you love me, keep my commandments,’ he said. ‘Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not do the things I say?’ We are called to live as Christ lived and to love as Christ loved. To profess Christ while ignoring his commands is dangerous folly. Jesus warns us that many who claim his name with spectacular and miraculous ministries will find themselves disowned by him as evildoers.[15] We take heed to Christ’s warning, for none of us is immune to such fearful danger.

c. We proclaim Christ. In Christ alone God has fully and finally revealed himself, and through Christ alone God has achieved salvation for the world. We therefore kneel as disciples at the feet of Jesus of Nazareth and say to him with Peter, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God,’ and with Thomas, ‘My Lord and my God.’; Though we have not seen him, we love him. And we rejoice with hope as we long for the day of his return when we shall see him as he is. Until that day we join Peter and John in proclaiming that ‘there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.’[16]

We commit ourselves afresh to bear witness to Jesus Christ and all his teaching, in all the world, knowing that we can bear such witness only if we are living in obedience to his teaching ourselves.

5. We love God the Holy Spirit

We love the Holy Spirit within the unity of the Trinity, along with God the Father and God the Son. He is the missionary Spirit sent by the missionary Father and the missionary Son, breathing life and power into God’s missionary Church. We love and pray for the presence of the Holy Spirit because without the witness of the Spirit to Christ, our own witness is futile. Without the convicting work of the Spirit, our preaching is in vain. Without the gifts, guidance and power of the Spirit, our mission is mere human effort. And without the fruit of the Spirit, our unattractive lives cannot reflect the beauty of the gospel.

a. In the Old Testament we see the Spirit of God active in creation, in works of liberation and justice, and in filling and empowering people for every kind of service. Spirit-filled prophets looked forward to the coming King and Servant, whose Person and work would be endowed with God’s Spirit. Prophets also looked to the coming age that would be marked by the outpouring of God’s Spirit, bringing new life, fresh obedience, and prophetic gifting to all the people of God, young and old, men and women.[17]

b. At Pentecost God poured out his Holy Spirit as promised by the prophets and by Jesus. The sanctifying Spirit produces his fruit in the lives of believers, and the first fruit is always love. The Spirit fills the Church with his gifts, which we ‘eagerly desire’ as the indispensable equipment for Christian service. The Spirit gives us power for mission and for the great variety of works of service. The Spirit enables us to proclaim and demonstrate the gospel, to discern the truth, to pray effectively and to prevail over the forces of darkness. The Spirit inspires and accompanies our worship. The Spirit strengthens and comforts disciples who are persecuted or on trial for their witness to Christ.[18]

c. Our engagement in mission, then, is pointless and fruitless without the presence, guidance and power of the Holy Spirit. This is true of mission in all its dimensions: evangelism, bearing witness to the truth, discipling, peace-making, social engagement, ethical transformation, caring for creation, overcoming evil powers, casting out demonic spirits, healing the sick, suffering and enduring under persecution. All we do in the name of Christ must be led and empowered by the Holy Spirit. The New Testament makes this clear in the life of the early Church and the teaching of the apostles. It is being demonstrated today in the fruitfulness and growth of Churches where Jesus’ followers act confidently in the power of the Holy Spirit, with dependence and expectation.

There is no true or whole gospel, and no authentic biblical mission, without the Person, work and power of the Holy Spirit. We pray for a greater awakening to this biblical truth, and for its experience to be reality in all parts of the worldwide body of Christ. However, we are aware of the many abuses that masquerade under the name of the Holy Spirit, the many ways in which all kinds of phenomena are practised and praised which are not the gifts of the Holy Spirit as clearly taught in the New Testament. There is great need for more profound discernment, for clear warnings against delusion, for the exposure of fraudulent and self-serving manipulators who abuse spiritual power for their own ungodly enrichment. Above all there is a great need for sustained biblical teaching and preaching, soaked in humble prayer, that will equip ordinary believers to understand and rejoice in the true gospel and to recognize and reject false gospels.

6. We love God’s Word

We love God’s Word in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, echoing the joyful delight of the Psalmist in the Torah, ‘I love your commands more than gold . . . Oh how I love your law.’ We receive the whole Bible as the Word of God, inspired by God’s Spirit, spoken and written through human authors. We submit to it as supremely and uniquely authoritative, governing our belief and our behaviour. We testify to the power of God’s Word to accomplish his purpose of salvation. We affirm that the Bible is the final written word of God, not surpassed by any further revelation, but we also rejoice that the Holy Spirit illumines the minds of God’s people so that the Bible continues to speak God’s truth in fresh ways to people in every culture.[19]

a. The Person the Bible reveals. We love the Bible as a bride loves her husband’s letters, not for the paper they are, but for the person who speaks through them. The Bible gives us God’s own revelation of his identity, character, purposes and actions. It is the primary witness to the Lord Jesus Christ. In reading it, we encounter him through his Spirit with great joy. Our love for the Bible is an expression of our love for God.

b. The story the Bible tells. The Bible tells the universal story of creation, fall, redemption in history, and new creation. This overarching narrative provides our coherent biblical worldview and shapes our theology. At the centre of this story are the climactic saving events of the cross and resurrection of Christ which constitute the heart of the gospel. It is this story (in the Old and New Testaments) that tells us who we are, what we are here for, and where we are going. This story of God’s mission defines our identity, drives our mission, and assures us the ending is in God’s hands. This story must shape the memory and hope of God’s people and govern the content of their evangelistic witness, as it is passed on from generation to generation. We must make the Bible known by all means possible, for its message is for all people on earth. We recommit ourselves, therefore, to the ongoing task of translating, disseminating and teaching the scriptures in every culture and language, including those that are predominantly oral or non-literary.

c. The truth the Bible teaches. The whole Bible teaches us the whole counsel of God, the truth that God intends us to know. We submit to it as true and trustworthy in all it affirms, for it is the Word of the God who cannot lie and will not fail. It is clear and sufficient in revealing the way of salvation. It is the foundation for exploring and understanding all dimensions of God’s truth.

We live however, in a world full of lies and rejection of the truth. Many cultures display a dominant relativism that denies that any absolute truth exists or can be known. If we love the Bible, then we must rise to the defence of its truth claims. We must find fresh ways to articulate biblical authority in all cultures. We commit ourselves again to strive to defend the truth of God’s revelation as part of our labour of love for God’s Word.

d. The life the Bible requires. ‘The Word is in your mouth and in your heart so that you may obey it.’ Jesus and James call us to be doers of the Word and not hearers only.[20] The Bible portrays a quality of life that should mark the believer and the community of believers. From Abraham, through Moses, the Psalmists, prophets and wisdom of Israel, and from Jesus and the apostles, we learn that such a biblical lifestyle includes justice, compassion, humility, integrity, truthfulness, sexual chastity, generosity, kindness, self-denial, hospitality, peacemaking, non-retaliation, doing good, forgiveness, joy, contentment and love – all combined in lives of worship, praise and faithfulness to God.

We confess that we easily claim to love the Bible without loving the life it teaches – the life of costly practical obedience to God through Christ. Yet ‘nothing commends the gospel more eloquently than a transformed life, and nothing brings it into disrepute so much as personal inconsistency. We are charged to behave in a manner that is worthy of the gospel of Christ and even to ‘adorn’ it, enhancing its beauty by holy lives.’[21] For the sake of the gospel of Christ, therefore, we recommit ourselves to prove our love for God’s Word by believing and obeying it. There is no biblical mission without biblical living.

7. We love God’s world

We share God’s passion for his world, loving all that God has made, rejoicing in God’s providence and justice throughout his creation, proclaiming the good news to all creation and all nations, and longing for the day when the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.[22]

a. We love the world of God’s creation. This love is not mere sentimental affection for nature (which the Bible nowhere commands), still less is it pantheistic worship of nature (which the Bible expressly forbids). Rather it is the logical outworking of our love for God by caring for what belongs to him. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.’ The earth is the property of the God we claim to love and obey. We care for the earth, most simply, because it belongs to the one whom we call Lord.[23]

The earth is created, sustained and redeemed by Christ.[24] We cannot claim to love God while abusing what belongs to Christ by right of creation, redemption and inheritance. We care for the earth and responsibly use its abundant resources, not according to the rationale of the secular world, but for the Lord’s sake. If Jesus is Lord of all the earth, we cannot separate our relationship to Christ from how we act in relation to the earth. For to proclaim the gospel that says ‘Jesus is Lord’ is to proclaim the gospel that includes the earth, since Christ’s Lordship is over all creation. Creation care is a thus a gospel issue within the Lordship of Christ.

Such love for God’s creation demands that we repent of our part in the destruction, waste and pollution of the earth’s resources and our collusion in the toxic idolatry of consumerism. Instead, we commit ourselves to urgent and prophetic ecological responsibility. We support Christians whose particular missional calling is to environmental advocacy and action, as well as those committed to godly fulfilment of the mandate to provide for human welfare and needs by exercising responsible dominion and stewardship. The Bible declares God’s redemptive purpose for creation itself. Integral mission means discerning, proclaiming, and living out, the biblical truth that the gospel is God’s good news, through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, for individual persons, and for society, and for creation. All three are broken and suffering because of sin; all three are included in the redeeming love and mission of God; all three must be part of the comprehensive mission of God’s people.

b. We love the world of nations and cultures. ‘From one man, God made all nations of humanity, to live on the whole face of the earth.’ Ethnic diversity is the gift of God in creation and will be preserved in the new creation, when it will be liberated from our fallen divisions and rivalry. Our love for all peoples reflects God’s promise to bless all nations on earth and God’s mission to create for himself a people drawn from every tribe, language, nation and people. We must love all that God has chosen to bless, which includes all cultures. Historically, Christian mission, though flawed by destructive failures, has been instrumental in protecting and preserving indigenous cultures and their languages. Godly love, however, also includes critical discernment, for all cultures show not only positive evidence of the image of God in human lives, but also the negative fingerprints of Satan and sin. We long to see the gospel embodied and embedded in all cultures, redeeming them from within so that they may display the glory of God and the radiant fullness of Christ. We look forward to the wealth, glory and splendour of all cultures being brought into the city of God – redeemed and purged of all sin, enriching the new creation.[25]

Such love for all peoples demands that we reject the evils of racism and ethnocentrism, and treat every ethnic and cultural group with dignity and respect, on the grounds of their value to God in creation and redemption.[26]

Such love also demands that we seek to make the gospel known among every people and culture everywhere. No nation, Jew or Gentile, is exempt from the scope of the great commission. Evangelism is the outflow of hearts that are filled with the love of God for those who do not yet know him. We confess with shame that there are still very many peoples in the world who have never yet heard the message of God’s love in Jesus Christ. We renew the commitment that has inspired The Lausanne Movement from its beginning, to use every means possible to reach all peoples with the gospel.

c. We love the world’s poor and suffering. The Bible tells us that the Lord is loving toward all he has made, upholds the cause of the oppressed, loves the foreigner, feeds the hungry, sustains the fatherless and widow.[27] The Bible also shows that God wills to do these things through human beings committed to such action. God holds responsible especially those who are appointed to political or judicial leadership in society,[28] but all God’s people are commanded – by the law and prophets, Psalms and Wisdom, Jesus and Paul, James and John – to reflect the love and justice of God in practical love and justice for the needy.[29]

Such love for the poor demands that we not only love mercy and deeds of compassion, but also that we do justice through exposing and opposing all that oppresses and exploits the poor. ‘We must not be afraid to denounce evil and injustice wherever they exist.’[30] We confess with shame that on this matter we fail to share God’s passion, fail to embody God’s love, fail to reflect God’s character and fail to do God’s will. We give ourselves afresh to the promotion of justice, including solidarity and advocacy on behalf of the marginalized and oppressed. We recognize such struggle against evil as a dimension of spiritual warfare that can only be waged through the victory of the cross and resurrection, in the power of the Holy Spirit, and with constant prayer.

d. We love our neighbours as ourselves. Jesus called his disciples to obey this commandment as the second greatest in the law, but then he radically deepened the demand (from the same chapter), ‘love the foreigner as yourself’ into ‘love your enemies’.[31]

Such love for our neighbours demands that we respond to all people out of the heart of the gospel, in obedience to Christ’s command and following Christ’s example. This love for our neighbours embraces people of other faiths, and extends to those who hate us, slander and persecute us, and even kill us. Jesus taught us to respond to lies with truth, to those doing evil with acts of kindness, mercy and forgiveness, to violence and murder against his disciples with self-sacrifice, in order to draw people to him and to break the chain of evil. We emphatically reject the way of violence in the spread of the gospel, and renounce the temptation to retaliate with revenge against those who do us wrong. Such disobedience is incompatible with the example and teaching of Christ and the New Testament.[32] At the same time, our loving duty towards our suffering neighbours requires us to seek justice on their behalf through proper appeal to legal and state authorities who function as God’s servants in punishing wrongdoers.[33]

e. The world we do not love. The world of God’s good creation has become the world of human and satanic rebellion against God. We are commanded not to love that world of sinful desire, greed, and human pride. We confess with sorrow that exactly those marks of worldliness so often disfigure our Christian presence and deny our gospel witness.[34]

We commit ourselves afresh not to flirt with the fallen world and its transient passions, but to love the whole world as God loves it. So we love the world in holy longing for the redemption and renewal of all creation and all cultures in Christ, the ingathering of God’s people from all nations to the ends of the earth, and the ending of all destruction, poverty, and enmity.

8. We love the gospel of God

As disciples of Jesus, we are gospel people. The core of our identity is our passion for the biblical good news of the saving work of God through Jesus Christ. We are united by our experience of the grace of God in the gospel and by our motivation to make that gospel of grace known to the ends of the earth by every possible means.

a. We love the good news in a world of bad news. The gospel addresses the dire effects of human sin, failure and need. Human beings rebelled against God, rejected God’s authority and disobeyed God’s Word. In this sinful state, we are alienated from God, from one another and from the created order. Sin deserves God’s condemnation. Those who refuse to repent and ‘do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ will be punished with eternal destruction and shut out from the presence of God.’[35] The effects of sin and the power of evil have corrupted every dimension of human personhood (spiritual, physical, intellectual and relational). They have permeated cultural, economic, social, political and religious life through all cultures and all generations of history. They have caused incalculable misery to the human race and damage to God’s creation. Against this bleak background, the biblical gospel is indeed very good news.

b. We love the story the gospel tells. The gospel announces as good news the historical events of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. As the son of David, the promised Messiah King, Jesus is the one through whom alone God established his kingdom and acted for the salvation of the world, enabling all nations on earth to be blessed, as he promised Abraham. Paul defines the gospel in stating that ‘Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day, according the scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter and then to the Twelve.’ The gospel declares that, on the cross of Christ, God took upon himself, in the person of his Son and in our place, the judgment our sin deserves. In the same great saving act, completed, vindicated and declared through the resurrection, God won the decisive victory over Satan, death and all evil powers, liberated us from their power and fear, and ensured their eventual destruction. God accomplished the reconciliation of believers with himself and with one another across all boundaries and enmities. God also accomplished his purpose of the ultimate reconciliation of all creation, and in the bodily resurrection of Jesus has given us the first fruits of the new creation. ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.’[36] How we love the gospel story!

c. We love the assurance the gospel brings. Solely through trusting in Christ alone, we are united with Christ through the Holy Spirit and are counted righteous in Christ before God. Being justified by faith we have peace with God and no longer face condemnation. We receive the forgiveness of our sins. We are born again into a living hope by sharing Christ’s risen life. We are adopted as fellow heirs with Christ. We become citizens of God’s covenant people, members of God’s family and the place of God’s dwelling. So by trusting in Christ, we have full assurance of salvation and eternal life, for our salvation ultimately depends, not on ourselves, but on the work of Christ and the promise of God. ‘Nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’[37] How we love the gospel’s promise!

d. We love the transformation the gospel produces. The gospel is God’s life-transforming power at work in the world. ‘It is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.’[38] Faith alone is the means by which the blessings and assurance of the gospel are received. Saving faith however never remains alone, but necessarily shows itself in obedience. Christian obedience is ‘faith expressing itself through love.’[39] We are not saved by good works, but having been saved by grace alone we are ‘created in Christ Jesus to do good works.’[40] ‘Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.’[41] Paul saw the ethical transformation that the gospel produces as the work of God’s grace – grace which achieved our salvation at Christ’s first coming, and grace that teaches us to live ethically in the light of his second coming.[42] For Paul, ‘obeying the gospel’ meant both trusting in grace, and then being taught by grace.[43] Paul’s missional goal was to bring about ‘the obedience of faith’ among all nations.[44] This strongly covenantal language recalls Abraham. Abraham believed God’s promise, which was credited to him as righteousness, and then obeyed God’s command in demonstration of his faith. ‘By faith Abraham . . . obeyed.’[45] Repentance and faith in Jesus Christ are the first acts of obedience the gospel calls for; ongoing obedience to God’s commands is the way of life that gospel faith enables, through the sanctifying Holy Spirit.[46] Obedience is thus the living proof of saving faith and the living fruit of it. Obedience is also the test of our love for Jesus. ‘Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me.’[47] ‘We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands.’[48] How we love the gospel’s power!

9. We love the people of God

The people of God are those from all ages and all nations whom God in Christ has loved, chosen, called, saved and sanctified as a people for his own possession, to share in the glory of Christ as citizens of the new creation. As those, then, whom God has loved from eternity to eternity and throughout all our turbulent and rebellious history, we are commanded to love one another. For ‘since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another,’ and thereby ‘be imitators of God . . . and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.’ Love for one another in the family of God is not merely a desirable option but an inescapable command. Such love is the first evidence of obedience to the gospel, the necessary expression of our submission to Christ’s Lordship, and a potent engine of world mission.[49]

a. Love calls for unity. Jesus’ command that his disciples should love one another is linked to his prayer that they should be one. Both the command and the prayer are missional – ‘that the world may know you are my disciples’, and that ‘the world may know that you [the Father] sent me’.[50] A most powerfully convincing mark of the truth of the gospel is when Christian believers are united in love across the barriers of the world’s inveterate divisions – barriers of race, colour, gender, social class, economic privilege or political alignment. However, few things so destroy our testimony as when Christians mirror and amplify the very same divisions among themselves. We urgently seek a new global partnership within the body of Christ across all continents, rooted in profound mutual love, mutual submission, and dramatic economic sharing without paternalism or unhealthy dependency. And we seek this not only as a demonstration of our unity in the gospel, but also for the sake of the name of Christ and the mission of God in all the world.

b. Love calls for honesty. Love speaks truth with grace. No one loved God’s people more than the prophets of Israel and Jesus himself. Yet no one confronted them more honestly with the truth of their failure, idolatry and rebellion against their covenant Lord. And in doing so, they called God’s people to repent, so that they could be forgiven and restored to the service of God’s mission. The same voice of prophetic love must be heard today, for the same reason. Our love for the Church of God aches with grief over the ugliness among us that so disfigures the face of our dear Lord Jesus Christ and hides his beauty from the world – the world that so desperately needs to be drawn to him.

c. Love calls for solidarity. Loving one another includes especially caring for those who are persecuted and in prison for their faith and witness. If one part of the body suffers, all parts suffer with it. We are all, like John, ‘companions in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus’.[51] We commit ourselves to share in the suffering of members of the body of Christ throughout the world, through information, prayer, advocacy, and other means of support. We see such sharing, however, not merely as an exercise of pity, but longing also to learn what the suffering Church can teach and give to those parts of Christ’s body that are not suffering in the same way. We are warned that the Church that feels itself at ease in its wealth and self-sufficiency may, like Laodicea, be the Church that Jesus sees as the most blind to its own poverty, and from which he himself feels a stranger outside the door.[52]

Jesus calls all his disciples together to be one family among the nations, a reconciled fellowship in which all sinful barriers are broken down through his reconciling grace. This Church is a community of grace, obedience and love in the communion of the Holy Spirit, in which the glorious attributes of God and gracious characteristics of Christ are reflected and God’s multi-coloured wisdom is displayed. As the most vivid present expression of the kingdom of God, the Church is the community of the reconciled who no longer live for themselves, but for the Saviour who loved them and gave himself for them.

10. We love the mission of God

We are committed to world mission, because it is central to our understanding of God, the Bible, the Church, human history and the ultimate future. The whole Bible reveals the mission of God to bring all things in heaven and earth into unity under Christ, reconciling them through the blood of his cross. In fulfilling his mission, God will transform the creation broken by sin and evil into the new creation in which there is no more sin or curse. God will fulfil his promise to Abraham to bless all nations on the earth, through the gospel of Jesus, the Messiah, the seed of Abraham. God will transform the fractured world of nations that are scattered under the judgment of God into the new humanity that will be redeemed by the blood of Christ from every tribe, nation, people and language, and will be gathered to worship our God and Saviour. God will destroy the reign of death, corruption and violence when Christ returns to establish his eternal reign of life, justice and peace. Then God, Immanuel, will dwell with us, and the kingdom of the world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ and he shall reign for ever and ever.[53]

a. Our participation in God’s mission. God calls his people to share his mission. The Church from all nations stands in continuity through the Messiah Jesus with God’s people in the Old Testament. With them we have been called through Abraham and commissioned to be a blessing and a light to the nations. With them, we are to be shaped and taught through the law and the prophets to be a community of holiness, compassion and justice in a world of sin and suffering. We have been redeemed through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and empowered by the Holy Spirit to bear witness to what God has done in Christ. The Church exists to worship and glorify God for all eternity and to participate in the transforming mission of God within history. Our mission is wholly derived from God’s mission, addresses the whole of God’s creation, and is grounded at its centre in the redeeming victory of the cross. This is the people to whom we belong, whose faith we confess and whose mission we share.

b. The integrity of our mission. The source of all our mission is what God has done in Christ for the redemption of the whole world, as revealed in the Bible. Our evangelistic task is to make that good news known to all nations. The context of all our mission is the world in which we live, the world of sin, suffering, injustice, and creational disorder, into which God sends us to love and serve for Christ’s sake. All our mission must therefore reflect the integration of evangelism and committed engagement in the world, both being ordered and driven by the whole biblical revelation of the gospel of God.’

Evangelism itself is the proclamation of the historical, biblical Christ as Saviour and Lord, with a view to persuading people to come to him personally and so be reconciled to God . . . The results of evangelism include obedience to Christ, incorporation into his Church and responsible service in the world . . . We affirm that evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of our Christian duty. For both are necessary expressions of our doctrines of God and humankind, our love for our neighbour and our obedience to Jesus Christ . . . The salvation we proclaim should be transforming us in the totality of our personal and social responsibilities. Faith without works is dead.’[54]

‘Integral mission is the proclamation and demonstration of the gospel. It is not simply that evangelism and social involvement are to be done alongside each other. Rather, in integral mission our proclamation has social consequences as we call people to love and repentance in all areas of life. And our social involvement has evangelistic consequences as we bear witness to the transforming grace of Jesus Christ. If we ignore the world, we betray the Word of God which sends us out to serve the world. If we ignore the Word of God, we have nothing to bring to the world.’[55]

We commit ourselves to the integral and dynamic exercise of all dimensions of mission to which God calls his Church.

• God commands us to make known to all nations the truth of God’s revelation and the gospel of God’s saving grace through Jesus Christ, calling all people to repentance, faith, baptism and obedient discipleship.

• God commands us to reflect his own character through compassionate care for the needy, and to demonstrate the values and the power of the kingdom of God in striving for justice and peace and in caring for God’s creation.

In response to God’s boundless love for us in Christ, and out of our overflowing love for him, we rededicate ourselves, with the help of the Holy Spirit, fully to obey all that God commands, with self-denying humility, joy and courage. We renew this covenant with the Lord – the Lord we love because he first loved us.

1.

Galatians 5:6; John 14:21; 1 John 4:9,19

2.

Matthew 22:37-40; Romans 13:8-10; Galatians 5:22; 1 Peter 1:22; 1 John 3:14; 4:7-21; John 13:34-35; John 1:18 & 1 John 4:12; 1 Thessalonians 1:3; 1 Corinthians 13:8, 13

3.

Deuteronomy 7:7-9; Hosea 2:19-20; 11:1; Psalms 103; 145:9, 13, 17; Galatians 2:20; Deuteronomy 10:12-19

4.

Deuteronomy 6:4-5; Matthew 22:37; Leviticus 19:18, 34; Matthew 5:43-45; John 15:12; Ephesians 4:32; John 3:16-17

5.

Romans 5:5; 2 Corinthians 5:14; Revelation 2:4

6.

Deuteronomy 4:35, 39; Psalm 33:6-9; Jeremiah 10:10-12; Deuteronomy 10:14; Isaiah 40:22-24; Psalm 33:10-11, 13-15; Psalm 96:10-13; Psalm 36:6; Isaiah 45:22

7.

Deuteronomy 4 and 6

8.

John Stott, The Message of Romans, The Bible Speaks Today (Leicester and Downers Grove: IVP, 1994) p53

9.

Psalm 138:2

10.

John 14:6; Romans 8:14-15; Matthew 6:9; John 14:21-23

11.

Deuteronomy 32:6, 18; 1:31; 8:5; Isaiah 1:2; Malachi 1:6; Jeremiah 3:4, 19; 31:9; Hosea 11:2; Psalm 103:13; Isaiah 63:16; 64:8-9

12.

John 3:16; 1 John 3:1; Romans 8:32; Hebrews 9:14; Galatians 2:20; Galatians 1:4-5

13.

Matthew 5:9, 16, 43-48; 6:4, 6, 14-15, 18, 25-32; 7:21-23

14.

John 1:3; 1 Corinthians 8:4-6; Hebrews 1:2; Colossians 1:15-17; Psalm 110:1; Mark 14:61-64; Ephesians 1:20-23; Revelation 1:5; 3:14; 5:9-10; Romans 2:16; 2 Thessalonians 1:5-10; 2 Corinthians 5:10; Romans 14:9-12; Matthew 1:21; Luke 2:30; Acts 4:12; 15:11; Romans 10:9; Titus 2:13; Hebrews 2:10; 5:9; 7:25; Revelation 7:10

15.

Luke 6:46; 1 John 2:3-6; Matthew 7:21-23

16.

Matthew 16:16; John 20:28; 1 Peter 1:8; 1 John 3:1-3; Acts 4:12

17.

Genesis 1:1-2; Psalm 104:27-30; Job 33:4; Exodus 35:30-36:1; Judges 3:10; 6:34; 13:25; Numbers 11:16-17, 29; Isaiah 63:11-14; 2 Peter 1:20-21; Micah 3:8; Nehemiah 9:20, 30; Zechariah 7:7-12; Isaiah 11:1-5; 42:1-7; 61:1-3; 32:15-18; Ezekiel 36:25-27; 37:1-14; Joel 2:28-32

18.

Acts 2; Galatians 5:22-23; 1 Peter 1:2; Ephesians 4:3-6; 11-12; Romans 12:3-8; 1 Corinthians 12:4-11; 1 Corinthians 14:1; John 20:21-22; 14:16-17, 25-26; 16:12-15; Romans 8:26-27; Ephesians 6:10-18; John 4:23-24; 1 Corinthians 12:3; 14:13-17; Matthew 10:17-20; Luke 21:15

19.

Psalm 119:47, 97; 2 Timothy 3:16-17; 2 Peter 1:21

20.

Deuteronomy 30:14; Matthew 7:21-27; Luke 6:46; James 1:22-24

21.

The Manila Manifesto Paragraph 7; Titus 2:9-10

22.

Psalm 145:9, 13, 17; Psalm 104:27-30; Psalm 50:6; Mark 16:15; Colossians 1:23; Matthew 28:17-20; Habakkuk 2:14

23.

Psalm 24:1; Deuteronomy 10:14

24.

Colossians 1:15-20; Hebrews 1:2-3

25.

Acts 17:26; Deuteronomy 32:8; Genesis 10:31-32; 12:3; Revelation 7:9-10; Revelation 21:24-27

26.

Acts 10:35; 14:17; 17:27

27.

Psalms 145:9, 13, 17; 147:7-9; Deuteronomy 10:17-18

28.

Genesis 18:19; Exodus 23:6-9; Deuteronomy 16:18-20; Job 29:7-17; Psalms 72:4, 12-14; 82; Proverbs 31:4-9; Jeremiah 22:1-3; Daniel 4:27

29.

Exodus 22:21-27; Leviticus 19:33-34; Deuteronomy 10:18-19; 15:7-11; Isaiah 1:16-17; 58:6-9; Amos 5:11-15, 21-24; Psalm 112; Job 31:13-23; Proverbs 14:31; 19:17; 29:7; Matthew 25:31-46; Luke 14:12-14; Galatians 2:10; 2 Corinthians 8 9; Romans 15:25-27; 1 Timothy 6:17-19; James 1:27; 2:14-17; 1 John 3:16-18

30.

The Lausanne Covenant Paragraph 5

31.

Leviticus 19:34; Matthew 5:43-4

32.

Matthew 5:38-39; Luke 6:27-29; 23:34; Romans 12:17-21; 1 Peter 3:18-23; 4:12-16

33.

Romans 13:4

34.

1 John 2:15-17

35.

Genesis 3; 2 Thessalonians 1:9

36.

Mark 1:1, 14-15; Romans 1:1-4; Romans 4; 1 Corinthians 15:3-5; 1 Peter 2:24; Colossians 2:15; Hebrews 2:14-15; Ephesians 2:14-18; Colossians 1:20; 2 Corinthians 5:19

37.

Romans 4; Philippians 3:1-11; Romans 5:1-2; 8:1-4; Ephesians 1:7; Colossians 1:13-14; 1 Peter 1:3; Galatians 3:26 4:7; Ephesians 2:19-22; John 20:30-31; 1 John 5:12-13; Romans 8:31-39

38.

Romans 1:16

39.

Galatians 5:6

40.

Ephesians 2:10

41.

James 2:17

42.

Titus 2:11-14

43.

Romans 15:18-19; 16:19; 2 Corinthians 9:13

44.

Romans 1:5; 16:26

45.

Genesis 15:6; Galatians 6:6-9; Hebrews 11:8; Genesis 22:15-18; James 2:20-24

46.

Romans 8:4

47.

John 14:21

48.

1 John 2:3

49.

2 Thessalonians 2:13-14; 1 John 4:11; Ephesians 5:2; 1Thessalonians 1:3; 4:9-10; John 13:35

50.

John 13:34-35; 17:21

51.

Hebrews 13:1-3; 1 Corinthians 12:26; Revelation 1:9

52.

Revelation 3:17-20

53.

Ephesians 1:9-10; Colossians 1:20; Genesis 1 12; Revelation 21 22

54.

The Lausanne Covenant, Paragraphs 4 and 5

55.

The Micah Declaration on Integral Mission

Part II

For the world we serve: The Cape Town Call to Action

Introduction

Our covenant with God binds love and obedience together. God rejoices to see our ‘work produced by faith’ and our ‘labour prompted by love’,[56] for ‘we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.’[57]

As members of the worldwide Church of Jesus Christ, we have sought to listen to the voice of God through the Holy Spirit. We have listened to his voice coming to us from his written Word in the exposition of Ephesians, and through the voices of his people around the world. Our six major Congress themes provide a framework to discern the challenges facing the worldwide Church of Christ, and our priorities for the future. We do not imply that these commitments are the only ones the Church should consider, or that priorities everywhere are the same.

IIA. Bearing witness to the truth of Christ in a pluralistic, globalized world

1. Truth and the person of Christ

Jesus Christ is the truth of the universe. Because Jesus is truth, truth in Christ is (i) personal as well as propositional; (ii) universal as well as contextual; (iii) ultimate as well as present.

a. As disciples of Christ we are called to be people of truth.

(1) We must live the truth. To live the truth is to be the face of Jesus, through whom the glory of the gospel is revealed to blinded minds. People will see truth in the faces of those who live their lives for Jesus, in faithfulness and love.

(2) We must proclaim the truth. Spoken proclamation of the truth of the gospel remains paramount in our mission. This cannot be separated from living out the truth. Works and words must go together.

b. We urge church leaders, pastors and evangelists to preach and teach the fullness of the biblical gospel as Paul did, in all its cosmic scope and truth. We must present the gospel not merely as offering individual salvation, or a better solution to needs than other gods can provide, but as God’s plan for the whole universe in Christ. People sometimes come to Christ to meet a personal need, but they stay with Christ when they find him to be the truth.

2. Truth and the challenge of pluralism

Cultural and religious plurality is a fact and Christians in Asia, for example, have lived with it for centuries. Different religions each affirm that theirs is the way of truth. Most will seek to respect competing truth claims of other faiths and live alongside them. However postmodern, relativist pluralism is different. Its ideology allows for no absolute or universal truth. While tolerating truth claims, it views them as no more than cultural constructs. (This position is logically self-destroying for it affirms as a single absolute truth that there is no single absolute truth.) Such pluralism asserts ‘tolerance’ as an ultimate value, but it can take oppressive forms in countries where secularism or aggressive atheism govern the public arena.

a. We long to see greater commitment to the hard work of robust apologetics. This must be at two levels.

(1) We need to identify, equip and pray for those who can engage at the highest intellectual and public level in arguing for and defending biblical truth in the public arena.

(2) We urge Church leaders and pastors to equip all believers with the courage and the tools to relate the truth with prophetic relevance to everyday public conversation, and so to engage every aspect of the culture we live in.

3. Truth and the workplace

The Bible shows us God’s truth about human work as part of God’s good purpose in creation. The Bible brings the whole of our working lives within the sphere of ministry, as we serve God in different callings. By contrast, the falsehood of a ‘sacred-secular divide’ has permeated the Church’s thinking and action. This divide tells us that religious activity belongs to God, whereas other activity does not. Most Christians spend most of their time in work which they may think has little spiritual value (so-called secular work). But God is Lord of all of life. ‘Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men,’[58] said Paul, to slaves in the pagan workplace.

In spite of the enormous evangelistic and transformational opportunity of the workplace, where adult Christians have most relationships with non-Christians, few churches have the vision to equip their people to seize this. We have failed to regard work in itself as biblically and intrinsically significant, as we have failed to bring the whole of life under the Lordship of Christ.

a. We name this secular-sacred divide as a major obstacle to the mobilization of all God’s people in the mission of God, and we call upon Christians worldwide to reject its unbiblical assumptions and resist its damaging effects. We challenge the tendency to see ministry and mission (local and cross-cultural) as being mainly the work of church-paid ministers and missionaries, who are a tiny percentage of the whole body of Christ.

b. We encourage all believers to accept and affirm their own daily ministry and mission as being wherever God has called them to work. We challenge pastors and church leaders to support people in such ministry – in the community and in the workplace – ‘to equip the saints for works of service [ministry]’ – in every part of their lives.

c. We need intensive efforts to train all God’s people in whole-life discipleship, which means to live, think, work, and speak from a biblical worldview and with missional effectiveness in every place or circumstance of daily life and work.

Christians in many skills, trades, businesses and professions, can often go to places where traditional church planters and evangelists may not. What these ‘tentmakers’ and business people do in the workplace must be valued as an aspect of the ministry of local churches.

d. We urge church leaders to understand the strategic impact of ministry in the workplace and to mobilize, equip and send out their church members as missionaries into the workplace, both in their own local communities and in countries that are closed to traditional forms of gospel witness.

e. We urge mission leaders to integrate ‘tentmakers’ fully into the global missional strategy.

4. Truth and the globalized media

We commit ourselves to a renewed critical and creative engagement with media and technology, as part of making the case for the truth of Christ in our media cultures. We must do so as God’s ambassadors of truth, grace, love, peace and justice.

We identify the following major needs:

a. Media awareness: to help people develop a more critical awareness of the messages they receive, and of the worldview behind them. The media can be neutral, and sometimes gospel friendly. But they are also used for pornography, violence and greed. We encourage pastors and churches to face these issues openly and to provide teaching and guidance for believers in resisting such pressures and temptations.

b. Media presence: to develop authentic and credible Christian role models and communicators for the general news media and the entertainment media, and to commend these careers as a worthy means of influence for Christ.

c. Media ministries: to develop creative, combined and interactive use of ‘traditional’, ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, to communicate the gospel of Christ in the context of a holistic biblical worldview.

5. Truth and the arts in mission

We possess the gift of creativity because we bear the image of God. Art in its many forms is an integral part of what we do as humans and can reflect something of the beauty and truth of God. Artists at their best are truth-tellers and so the arts constitute one important way in which we can speak the truth of the gospel. Drama, dance, story, music and visual image can be expressions both of the reality of our brokenness, and of the hope that is centred in the gospel that all things will be made new.

In the world of mission, the arts are an untapped resource. We actively encourage greater Christian involvement in the arts.

a. We long to see the Church in all cultures energetically engaging the arts as a context for mission by:

(1) Bringing the arts back into the life of the faith community as a valid and valuable component of our call to discipleship;

(2) Supporting those with artistic gifts, especially sisters and brothers in Christ, so that they may flourish in their work;

(3) Letting the arts serve as an hospitable environment in which we can acknowledge and come to know the neighbour and the stranger;

(4) Respecting cultural differences and celebrating indigenous artistic expression.

6. Truth, science and emerging technologies

This century is widely known as ‘the Bio-tech Century’, with advances in all the emerging technologies (bio, info/digital, nano, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and robotics). This has deep implications for the Church and for mission, particularly in relation to the biblical truth of what it means to be human. We need to promote authentically Christian responses and practical action in the arena of public policies, to ensure that science and technology are used not to manipulate, distort and destroy, but to preserve and better fulfil our humanness, as those whom God has created in his own image. We call on:

a. Local church leaders to (i) encourage, support and ask questions of church members who are professionally engaged in science, technology, healthcare and public policy, and (ii) to present to theologically thoughtful students the need for Christians to enter these arenas.

b. Seminaries to engage with these fields in their curricula, so future Church leaders and theological educators develop an informed Christian critique of the new technologies.

c. Theologians, and Christians in government, business, academia and technical fields, to form national or regional ‘think tanks’ or partnerships to engage with new technologies and scientific advances, and to speak into the shaping of public policy with a voice that is biblical and relevant.

d. All local Christian communities to demonstrate respect for the unique dignity and sanctity of human life, by practical and holistic caring which integrates the physical, emotional, relational and spiritual aspects of our created humanity.

7. Truth and the public arenas

The interlocking arenas of Government, Business and Academia have a strong influence on the values of each nation and, in human terms, define the freedom of the Church.

a. We encourage Christ-followers to be actively engaged in these spheres, both in public service or private enterprise, in order to shape societal values and influence public debate. We encourage support for Christ-centred schools and universities that are committed to academic excellence and biblical truth.

b. Corruption is condemned in the Bible. It undermines economic development, distorts fair decision-making and destroys social cohesion. No nation is free of corruption. We invite Christians in the workplace, especially young entrepreneurs, to think creatively about how they can best stand against this scourge.

c. We encourage young Christian academics to consider a long-term career in the secular university, to (i) teach and (ii) develop their discipline from a biblical worldview, thereby to influence their subject field. We dare not neglect the Academy.[59]

IIB. Building the peace of Christ in our divided and broken world

1. The peace that Christ made

Reconciliation to God is inseparable from reconciliation to one another. Christ, who is our peace, made peace through the cross, and preached peace to the divided world of Jew and Gentile. The unity of the people of God is both a fact (‘he made the two one’), and a mandate (‘make every effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’). God’s plan for the integration of the whole creation in Christ is modelled in the ethnic reconciliation of God’s new humanity. Such is the power of the gospel as promised to Abraham.[60]

We affirm that whereas the Jewish people were not strangers to the covenants and promises of God, in the way that Paul describes the Gentiles, they still stand in need of reconciliation to God through the Messiah Jesus. There is no difference, said Paul, between Jew and Gentile in sin; neither is there any difference in salvation. Only in and through the cross can both have access to God the Father through the one Spirit.[61]

a. We continue, therefore, strongly to affirm the need for the whole Church to share the good news of Jesus as Messiah, Lord and Saviour with Jewish people. And in the spirit of Romans 14-15, we urge Gentile believers to accept, encourage and pray for Messianic Jewish believers, in their witness among their own people.

Reconciliation to God and to one another is also the foundation and motivation for seeking the justice that God requires, without which, God says, there can be no peace. True and lasting reconciliation requires acknowledgment of past and present sin, repentance before God, confession to the injured one, and the seeking and receiving of forgiveness. It also includes commitment by the Church to seeking justice or reparation, where appropriate, for those who have been harmed by violence and oppression.

b. We long to see the worldwide Church of Christ, those who have been reconciled to God, living out our reconciliation with one another and committed to the task and struggle of biblical peace-making in the name of Christ.

2. Christ’s peace in ethnic conflict

Ethnic diversity is the gift and plan of God in creation.[62] It has been spoiled by human sin and pride, resulting in confusion, strife, violence and war among nations. However, ethnic diversity will be preserved in the new creation, when people from every nation, tribe, people and language will gather as the redeemed people of God.[63] We confess that we often fail to take ethnic identity seriously and to value it as the Bible does, in creation and redemption. We fail to respect the ethnic identity of others and ignore the deep wounds that such long-term disrespect causes.

a. We urge church pastors and leaders to teach biblical truth on ethnic diversity. We must positively affirm the ethnic identity of all church members. But we must also show how our ethnic loyalties are flawed by sin and teach believers that all our ethnic identities are subordinate to our redeemed identity as the new humanity in Christ through the cross.

We acknowledge with grief and shame the complicity of Christians in some of the most destructive contexts of ethnic violence and oppression, and the lamentable silence of large parts of the Church when such conflicts take place. Such contexts include the history and legacy of racism and black slavery; the holocaust against Jews; apartheid; ‘ethnic cleansing’; inter-Christian sectarian violence; decimation of indigenous populations; inter-religious, political and ethnic violence; Palestinian suffering; caste oppression; and tribal genocide. Christians who, by their action or inaction, add to the brokenness of the world, seriously undermine our witness to the gospel of peace. Therefore:

b. For the sake of the gospel, we lament, and call for repentance where Christians have participated in ethnic violence, injustice or oppression. We also call for repentance for the many times Christians have been complicit in such evils by silence, apathy or presumed neutrality, or by providing defective theological justification for these.

If the gospel is not deeply rooted in the context, challenging and transforming underlying worldviews and systems of injustice, then, when the evil day comes, Christian allegiance is discarded like an unwanted cloak and people revert to unregenerate loyalties and actions. Evangelizing without discipling, or revival without radical obedience to the commands of Christ, are not just deficient; they are dangerous.

We long for the day when the Church will be the world’s most visibly shining model of ethnic reconciliation and its most active advocate for conflict resolution.

Such aspiration, rooted in the gospel, calls us to:

c. Embrace the fullness of the reconciling power of the gospel and teach it accordingly. This includes a full biblical understanding of the atonement: that Jesus not only bore our sin on the cross to reconcile us to God, but destroyed our enmity, to reconcile us to one another.

d. Adopt the lifestyle of reconciliation. In practical terms this is demonstrated when Christians:

(1) forgive persecutors, while having courage to challenge injustice on behalf of others;

(2) give aid and offer hospitality to neighbours ‘on the other side’ of a conflict, taking initiatives to cross barriers to seek reconciliation;

(3) continue to witness to Christ in violent contexts; and are willing to suffer, and even to die, rather than take part in acts of destruction or revenge;

(4) engage in the long-term healing of wounds after conflict, making the Church a safe place of refuge and healing for all, including former enemies.

e. Be a beacon and bearer of hope. We bear witness to God who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. It is solely in the name of Christ, and in the victory of his cross and resurrection, that we have authority to confront the demonic powers of evil that aggravate human conflict, and have power to minister his reconciling love and peace.

3. Christ’s peace for the poor and oppressed

The biblical foundation for our commitment to seeking justice and shalom for the oppressed and the poor, is summarized in The Cape Town Confession of Faith section 7(c). On that basis, we long for more effective Christian action on:

Slavery and human trafficking

There are more people all around the world in slavery today (an estimated 27 million) than 200 years ago when Wilberforce fought to abolish the transatlantic slave trade. In India alone there are an estimated 15 million bonded children. The caste system oppresses low caste groups and excludes Dalits. But sadly the Christian Church itself is infected in many places with the same forms of discrimination. The concerted voice of the global Church must be raised in protest against what is in effect one of the world’s oldest systems of slavery. But if such global advocacy is to have any authenticity, the Church must reject all inequality and discrimination within itself.

Migration on an unprecedented scale in today’s world, for a variety of reasons, has led to human trafficking on every continent, the widespread enslavement of women and children in the sex trade, and the abuse of children through enforced labour or military conscription.

a. Let us rise up as the Church worldwide to fight the evil of human trafficking, and to speak and act prophetically to ‘set the prisoners free’. This must include addressing the social, economic and political factors that feed the trade. The world’s slaves call out to the global Church of Christ, ‘Free our children. Free our women. Be our voice. Show us the new society that Jesus promised.’

Poverty

We embrace the witness of the whole Bible, as it shows us God’s desire both for systemic economic justice and for personal compassion, respect and generosity towards the poor and needy. We rejoice that this extensive biblical teaching has become more integrated into our mission strategy and practice, as it was for the early Church and the Apostle Paul.[64]

Accordingly, let us:

b. Recognize the great opportunity that the Millennium Development Goals have presented for the local and global Church. We call on churches to advocate for them before governments, and to participate in efforts to achieve them, such as the Micah Challenge.

c. Have courage to declare that the world cannot address, let alone solve, the problem of poverty without also challenging excessive wealth and greed. The gospel challenges the idolatry of rampant consumerism. We are called, as those who serve God and not mammon, to recognize that greed perpetuates poverty, and to renounce it. At the same time, we rejoice that the gospel includes the rich in its call to repentance, and invites them to join the fellowship of those transformed by forgiving grace.

4. Christ’s peace for people with disabilities

People with disabilities form one of the largest minority groups in the world, estimated to exceed 600 million. The majority of these live in the least developed countries, and are among the poorest of the poor. Although physical or mental impairment is a part of their daily experience, most are also disabled by social attitudes, injustice and lack of access to resources. Serving people with disabilities does not stop with medical care or social provision; it involves fighting alongside them, those who care for them and their families, for inclusion and equality, both in society and in the Church. God calls us to mutual friendship, respect, love, and justice.

a. Let us rise up as Christians worldwide to reject cultural stereotypes, for as the Apostle Paul commented, ‘we no longer regard anyone from a human point of view.’[65] Made in the image of God, we all have gifts God can use in his service. We commit both to minister to people with disabilities, and to receive the ministry they have to give.

b. We encourage church and mission leaders to think not only of mission among those with a disability, but to recognize, affirm and facilitate the missional calling of believers with disabilities themselves as part of the Body of Christ.

c. We are grieved that so many people with disabilities are told that their impairment is due to personal sin, lack of faith or unwillingness to be healed. We deny that the Bible teaches this as a universal truth.[66] Such false teaching is pastorally insensitive and spiritually disabling; it adds the burden of guilt and frustrated hopes to the other barriers that people with disabilities face.

d. We commit ourselves to make our churches places of inclusion and equality for people with disabilities and to stand alongside them in resisting prejudice and in advocating for their needs in wider society.

5. Christ’s peace for people living with HIV

HIV and AIDS constitute a major crisis in many nations. Millions are infected with HIV, including many in our churches, and millions of children are orphaned by AIDS. God is calling us to show his deep love and compassion to all those infected and affected and to make every effort to save lives. We believe that the teachings and example of Jesus, as well as the transforming power of his cross and resurrection, are central to the holistic gospel response to HIV and AIDS that our world so urgently needs.

a. We reject and denounce all condemnation, hostility, stigma, and discrimination against those living with HIV and AIDS. Such things are a sin and a disgrace within the body of Christ. All of us have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory; we have been saved only by grace, and we should be slow to judge, quick to restore and forgive. We also recognize with grief and compassion that very many people become infected with HIV through no fault of their own, and often through caring for others.

b. We long that all pastors should set an example of sexual chastity and faithfulness, as Paul commanded, and teach clearly and often that marriage is the exclusive place for sexual union. This is needed not only because it is the clear teaching of the Bible, but also because the prevalence of concurrent sexual partnerships outside marriage is a major factor in the rapid spread of HIV in the most affected countries.

c. Let us, as the Church worldwide, rise to this challenge in the name of Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit. Let us stand together with our brothers and sisters in areas hardest hit by HIV and AIDS, through practical support, compassionate care (including care of widows and orphans), social and political advocacy, education programmes (particularly those that empower women), and effective prevention strategies appropriate to the local context. We commit ourselves to such urgent and prophetic action as part of the integral mission of the Church.

6. Christ’s peace for his suffering creation

Our biblical mandate in relation to God’s creation is provided in The Cape Town Confession of Faith section 7 (a). All human beings are to be stewards of the rich abundance of God’s good creation. We are authorized to exercise godly dominion in using it for the sake of human welfare and needs, for example in farming, fishing, mining, energy generation, engineering, construction, trade, medicine. As we do so, we are also commanded to care for the earth and all its creatures, because the earth belongs to God, not to us. We do this for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ who is the creator, owner, sustainer, redeemer and heir of all creation.

We lament over the widespread abuse and destruction of the earth’s resources, including its bio-diversity. Probably the most serious and urgent challenge faced by the physical world now is the threat of climate change. This will disproportionately affect those in poorer countries, for it is there that climate extremes will be most severe and where there is little capability to adapt to them. World poverty and climate change need to be addressed together and with equal urgency.

We encourage Christians worldwide to:

a. Adopt lifestyles that renounce habits of consumption that are destructive or polluting;

b. Exert legitimate means to persuade governments to put moral imperatives above political expediency on issues of environmental destruction and potential climate change;

c. Recognize and encourage the missional calling both of (i) Christians who engage in the proper use of the earth’s resources for human need and welfare through agriculture, industry and medicine, and (ii) Christians who engage in the protection and restoration of the earth’s habitats and species through conservation and advocacy. Both share the same goal for both serve the same Creator, Provider and Redeemer.

IIC. Living the love of Christ among people of other faiths

1. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ includes persons of other faiths

In view of the affirmations made in The Cape Town Confession of Faith section 7 (d), we respond to our high calling as disciples of Jesus Christ to see people of other faiths as our neighbours in the biblical sense. They are human beings created in God’s image, whom God loves and for whose sins Christ died. We strive not only to see them as neighbours, but to obey Christ’s teaching by being neighbours to them. We are called to be gentle, but not nave; to be discerning and not gullible; to be alert to whatever threats we may face, but not ruled by fear.

We are called to share good news in evangelism, but not to engage in unworthy proselytizing. Evangelism, which includes persuasive rational argument following the example of the Apostle Paul, is ‘to make an honest and open statement of the gospel which leaves the hearers entirely free to make up their own minds about it. We wish to be sensitive to those of other faiths, and we reject any approach that seeks to force conversion on them.’[67] Proselytizing, by contrast, is the attempt to compel others to become ‘one of us’, to ‘accept our religion’, or indeed to ‘join our denomination’.

a. We commit ourselves to be scrupulously ethical in all our evangelism. Our witness is to be marked by ‘gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience.’[68] We therefore reject any form of witness that is coercive, unethical, deceptive, or disrespectful.

b. In the name of the God of love, we repent of our failure to seek friendships with people of Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and other religious backgrounds. In the spirit of Jesus, we will take initiatives to show love, goodwill and hospitality to them.

c. In the name of the God of truth, we (i) refuse to promote lies and caricatures about other faiths, and (ii) denounce and resist the racist prejudice, hatred and fear incited in popular media and political rhetoric.

d. In the name of the God of peace, we reject the path of violence and revenge in all our dealings with people of other faiths, even when violently attacked.

e. We affirm the proper place for dialogue with people of other faiths, just as Paul engaged in debate with Jews and Gentiles in the synagogue and public arenas. As a legitimate part of our Christian mission, such dialogue combines confidence in the uniqueness of Christ and in the truth of the gospel with respectful listening to others.

2. The love of Christ calls us to suffer and sometimes to die for the gospel

Suffering may be necessary in our missionary engagement as witnesses to Christ, as it was for his apostles and the Old Testament prophets.[69] Being willing to suffer is an acid test for the genuineness of our mission. God can use suffering, persecution and martyrdom to advance his mission. ‘Martyrdom is a form of witness which Christ has promised especially to honour.’[70] Many Christians living in comfort and prosperity need to hear again the call of Christ to be willing to suffer for him. For many other believers live in the midst of such suffering as the cost of bearing witness to Jesus Christ in a hostile religious culture. They may have seen loved ones martyred, or endured torture or persecution because of their faithful obedience, yet continue to love those who have so harmed them.

a. We hear and remember with tears and prayer the testimonies of those who suffer for the gospel. We pray for grace and courage, along with them, to ‘love our enemies’ as Christ commanded us. We pray that the gospel may bear fruit in places that are so hostile to its messengers. As we rightly grieve for those who suffer, we remember the infinite grief God feels over those who resist and reject his love, his gospel and his servants. We long for them to repent and be forgiven and find the joy of being reconciled to God.

3. Love in action embodies and commends the gospel of grace

‘We are the aroma of Christ.’[71] Our calling is to live and serve among people of other faiths in a way that is so saturated with the fragrance of God’s grace that they smell Christ, that they come to taste and see that God is good. By such embodied love, we are to make the gospel attractive in every cultural and religious setting. When Christians love people of other faiths through lives of love and acts of service, they embody the transforming grace of God.

In cultures of ‘honour’, where shame and vengeance are allied with religious legalism, ‘grace’ is an alien concept. In these contexts, God’s vulnerable, self-sacrificing love is not something to be debated; it is considered too foreign, even repulsive. Here, grace is an acquired taste, over a long time, in small doses, for those hungry enough to dare to taste it. The aroma of Christ gradually permeates all that his followers come into contact with.

a. We long for God to raise up more men and women of grace who will make long-term commitments to live, love and serve in tough places dominated by other religions, to bring the smell and taste of the grace of Jesus Christ into cultures where it is unwelcome and dangerous to do so. This takes patience and endurance, sometimes for a whole life-time, sometimes unto death.

4. Love respects diversity of discipleship

So called ‘insider movements’ are to be found within several religions. These are groups of people who are now following Jesus as their God and Saviour. They meet together in small groups for fellowship, teaching, worship and prayer centred around Jesus and the Bible while continuing to live socially and culturally within their birth communities, including some elements of its religious observance. This is a complex phenomenon and there is much disagreement over how to respond to it. Some commend such movements. Others warn of the danger of syncretism. Syncretism, however, is a danger found among Christians everywhere as we express our faith within our own cultures. We should avoid the tendency, when we see God at work in unexpected or unfamiliar ways, either (i) hastily to classify it and promote it as a new mission strategy, or (ii) hastily to condemn it without sensitive contextual listening.

a. In the spirit of Barnabas who, on arrival in Antioch, ‘saw the evidence of the grace of God’ and ‘was glad and encouraged them all to remain true to the Lord,’[72] we would appeal to all those who are concerned with this issue to:

(1) Take as their primary guiding principle the apostolic decision and practice: ‘We should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God.’[73]

(2) Exercise humility, patience and graciousness in recognizing the diversity of viewpoints, and conduct conversations without stridency and mutual condemnation.[74]

5. Love reaches out to scattered peoples

People are on the move as never before. Migration is one of the great global realities of our era. It is estimated that 200 million people are living outside their countries of origin, voluntarily or involuntarily. The term ‘diaspora’ is used here to mean people who have relocated from their lands of birth for whatever reason. Some relocate permanently, and others, like three million international students and scholars, temporarily. Vast numbers of people from many religious backgrounds, including Christians, live in diaspora conditions: economic migrants seeking work; internally-displaced peoples because of war or natural disaster; refugees and asylum seekers; victims of ethnic cleansing; people fleeing religious violence and persecution; famine sufferers – whether caused by drought, floods, or war; victims of rural poverty moving to cities. We are convinced that contemporary migrations are within the sovereign missional purpose of God, without ignoring the evil and suffering that can be involved.[75]

a. We encourage Church and mission leaders to recognize and respond to the missional opportunities presented by global migration and diaspora communities, in strategic planning, and in focused training and resourcing of those called to work among them.

b. We encourage Christians in host nations which have immigrant communities and international students and scholars of other religious backgrounds to bear counter-cultural witness to the love of Christ in deed and word, by obeying the extensive biblical commands to love the stranger, defend the cause of the foreigner, visit the prisoner, practise hospitality, build friendships, invite into our homes, and provide help and services.[76]

c. We encourage Christians who are themselves part of diaspora communities to discern the hand of God, even in circumstances they may not have chosen, and to seek whatever opportunities God provides for bearing witness to Christ in their host community and seeking its welfare.[77] Where that host country includes Christian churches, we urge immigrant and indigenous churches together to listen and learn from one another, and to initiate co-operative efforts to reach all sections of their nation with the gospel.

6. Love works for religious freedom for all people

Upholding human rights by defending religious freedom is not incompatible with following the way of the cross when confronted with persecution. There is no contradiction between being willing personally to suffer the abuse or loss of our own rights for the sake of Christ, and being committed to advocate and speak up for those who are voiceless under the violation of their human rights. We must also distinguish between advocating the rights of people of other faiths and endorsing the truth of their beliefs. We can defend the freedom of others to believe and practise their religion without accepting that religion as true.

a. Let us strive for the goal of religious freedom for all people. This requires advocacy before governments on behalf of Christians and people of other faiths who are persecuted.

b. Let us conscientiously obey biblical teaching to be good citizens, to seek the welfare of the nation where we live, to honour and pray for those in authority, to pay taxes, to do good, and to seek to live peaceful and quiet lives. The Christian is called to submit to the state, unless the state commands what God forbids, or prohibits what God commands. If the state thus forces us to choose between loyalty to itself and our higher loyalty to God, we must say No to the state because we have said Yes to Jesus Christ as Lord.[78]

In the midst of all our legitimate efforts for religious freedom for all people, the deepest longing of our hearts remains that all people should come to know the Lord Jesus Christ, freely put their faith in him and be saved, and enter the kingdom of God.

IID. Discerning the will of Christ for world evangelization

1. Unreached and unengaged peoples

The heart of God longs that all people should have access to the knowledge of God’s love and of his saving work through Jesus Christ. We recognize with grief and shame that there are thousands of people groups around the world for whom such access has not yet been made available through Christian witness. These are peoples who are unreached, in the sense that there are no known believers and no churches among them. Many of these peoples are also unengaged, in the sense that we currently know of no churches or agencies that are even trying to share the gospel with them. Indeed, only a tiny percentage of the Church’s resources (human and material) is being directed to the least-reached peoples. By definition these are peoples who will not invite us to come with the good news, since they know nothing about it. Yet their presence among us in our world 2,000 years after Jesus commanded us to make disciples of all nations, constitutes not only a rebuke to our disobedience, not only a form of spiritual injustice, but also a silent ‘Macedonian Call’.

Let us rise up as the Church worldwide to meet this challenge, and:

a. Repent of our blindness to the continuing presence of so many unreached peoples in our world and our lack of urgency in sharing the gospel among them.

b. Renew our commitment to go to those who have not yet heard the gospel, to engage deeply with their language and culture, to live the gospel among them with incarnational love and sacrificial service, to communicate the light and truth of the Lord Jesus Christ in word and deed, awakening them through the Holy Spirit’s power to the surprising grace of God.

c. Aim to eradicate Bible poverty in the world, for the Bible remains indispensable for evangelism. To do this we must:

(1) Hasten the translation of the Bible into the languages of peoples who do not yet have any portion of God’s Word in their mother tongue;

(2) Make the message of the Bible widely available by oral means. (See also Oral cultures below.)

d. Aim to eradicate Bible ignorance in the Church, for the Bible remains indispensable for discipling believers into the likeness of Christ.

(1) We long to see a fresh conviction, gripping all God’s Church, of the central necessity of Bible teaching for the Church’s growth in ministry, unity and maturity.[79] We rejoice in the gifting of all those whom Christ has given to the Church as pastor-teachers. We will make every effort to identify, encourage, train and support them in the preaching and teaching of God’s Word. In doing so, however, we must reject the kind of clericalism that restricts the ministry of God’s Word to a few paid professionals, or to formal preaching in church pulpits. Many men and women, who are clearly gifted in pastoring and teaching God’s people, exercise their gifting informally or without official denominational structures, but with the manifest blessing of God’s Spirit. They too need to be recognized, encouraged, and equipped to rightly handle the Word of God.

(2) We must promote Bible literacy among the generation that now relates primarily to digital communication rather than books, by encouraging digital methods of studying the scriptures inductively with the depth of inquiry that at present requires paper, pens and pencils.

e. Let us keep evangelism at the centre of the fully-integrated scope of all our mission, inasmuch as the gospel itself is the source, content and authority of all biblically-valid mission. All we do should be both an embodiment and a declaration of the love and grace of God and his saving work through Jesus Christ.

2. Oral cultures

The majority of the world’s population are oral communicators, who cannot or do not learn through literate means, and more than half of them are among the unreached as defined above. Among these, there are an estimated 350 million people without a single verse of Scripture in their language. In addition to the ‘primary oral learners’ there are many ‘secondary oral learners’, that is those who are technically literate but prefer now to communicate in an oral manner, with the rise of visual learning and the dominance of images in communication.

As we recognize and take action on issues of orality, let us:

a. Make greater use of oral methodologies in discipling programmes, even among literate believers.

b. Make available an oral format Story Bible in the heart languages of unreached and unengaged people groups as a matter of priority.

c. Encourage mission agencies to develop oral strategies, including: the recording and distribution of oral Bible stories for evangelism, discipling and leadership training, along with appropriate orality training for pioneer evangelists and church-planters; these could use fruitful oral and visual communication methods for communicating the whole biblical story of salvation, including storytelling, dances, arts, poetry, chants and dramas.

d. Encourage local churches in the Global South to engage with unreached people groups in their area through oral methods that are specific to their worldview.

e. Encourage seminaries to provide curricula that will train pastors and missionaries in oral methodologies.

3. Christ-centred leaders

The rapid growth of the Church in so many places remains shallow and vulnerable, partly because of the lack of discipled leaders, and partly because so many use their positions for worldly power, arrogant status or personal enrichment. As a result, God’s people suffer, Christ is dishonoured, and gospel mission is undermined. ‘Leadership training’ is the commonly-proposed priority solution. Indeed, leadership training programmes of all kinds have multiplied, but the problem remains, for two probable reasons.

First, training leaders to be godly and Christlike is the wrong way round. Biblically, only those whose lives already display basic qualities of mature discipleship should be appointed to leadership in the first place.[80] If, today, we are faced with many people in leadership who have scarcely been discipled, then there is no option but to include such basic discipling in their leadership development. Arguably the scale of un-Christlike and worldly leadership in the global Church today is glaring evidence of generations of reductionist evangelism, neglected discipling and shallow growth. The answer to leadership failure is not just more leadership training but better discipleship training. Leaders must first be disciples of Christ himself.

Second, some leadership training programmes focus on packaged knowledge, techniques and skills to the neglect of godly character. By contrast, authentic Christian leaders must be like Christ in having a servant heart, humility, integrity, purity, lack of greed, prayerfulness, dependence on God’s Spirit, and a deep love for people. Furthermore, some leadership training programmes lack specific training in the one key skill that Paul includes in his list of qualifications – ability to teach God’s Word to God’s people. Yet Bible teaching is the paramount means of disciple-making and the most serious deficiency in contemporary Church leaders.

a. We long to see greatly intensified efforts in disciple-making, through the long-term work of teaching and nurturing new believers, so that those whom God calls and gives to the Church as leaders are qualified according to biblical criteria of maturity and servanthood.

b. We renew our commitment to pray for our leaders. We long that God would multiply, protect and encourage leaders who are biblically faithful and obedient. We pray that God would rebuke, remove, or bring to repentance leaders who dishonour his name and discredit the gospel. And we pray that God would raise up a new generation of discipled servant-leaders whose passion is above all else to know Christ and be like him.

c. Those of us who are in Christian leadership need to recognize our vulnerability and accept the gift of accountability within the body of Christ. We commend the practice of submitting to an accountability group.

d. We strongly encourage seminaries, and all those who deliver leadership training programmes, to focus more on spiritual and character formation, not only on imparting knowledge or grading performance, and we heartily rejoice in those that already do so as part of comprehensive ‘whole person’ leadership development.

4. Cities

Cities are crucially important for the human future and for world mission. Half the world now lives in cities. Cities are where four major kinds of people are most to be found: (i) the next generation of young people; (ii) the most unreached peoples who have migrated; (iii) the culture shapers; (iv) the poorest of the poor.

a. We discern the sovereign hand of God in the massive rise of urbanization in our time, and we urge Church and mission leaders worldwide to respond to this fact by giving urgent strategic attention to urban mission. We must love our cities as God does, with holy discernment and Christlike compassion, and obey his command to ‘seek the welfare of the city’, wherever that may be. We will seek to learn appropriate and flexible methods of mission that respond to urban realities.

5. Children

All children are at risk. There are about two billion children in our world, and half of them are at risk from poverty. Millions are at risk from prosperity. Children of the wealthy and secure have everything to live with, but nothing to live for.

Children and young people are the Church of today, not merely of tomorrow. Young people have great potential as active agents in God’s mission. They represent an enormous under-used pool of influencers with sensitivity to the voice of God and a willingness to respond to him. We rejoice in the excellent ministries that serve among and with children, and long for such work to be multiplied since the need is so great. As we see in the Bible, God can and does use children and young people – their prayers, their insights, their words, their initiatives – in changing hearts. They represent ‘new energy’ to transform the world. Let us listen and not stifle their childlike spirituality with our adult rationalistic approaches.

We commit ourselves to:

a. Take children seriously, through fresh biblical and theological enquiry that reflects on God’s love and purpose for them and through them, and by rediscovering the profound significance for theology and mission of Jesus’ provocative action in placing ‘a child in the midst’.[81]

b. Seek to train people and provide resources to meet the needs of children worldwide, wherever possible working with their families and communities, in the conviction that holistic ministry to and through each next generation of children and young people is a vital component of world mission.

c. Expose, resist, and take action against all abuse of children, including violence, exploitation, slavery, trafficking, prostitution, gender and ethnic discrimination, commercial targeting, and wilful neglect.

6. Prayer

In the midst of all these priorities, let us commit ourselves afresh to pray. Prayer is a call, a command and a gift. Prayer is the indispensible foundation and resource for all elements of our mission.

a. We will pray with unity, focus, persistence, and biblically-informed clarity:

(1) For God to send labourers into every corner of the world, in the power of his Spirit;

(2) For the lost in every people and place to be drawn to God by his Spirit, through the declaration of the truth of the gospel and the demonstration of Christ’s love and power;

(3) For God’s glory to be revealed and Christ’s name to be known and praised because of the character, deeds and words of his people. We will cry out for our brothers and sisters who suffer for the name of Christ

(4) For God’s kingdom to come, that God’s will may be done on earth as in heaven, in the establishment of justice, the stewardship and care of creation, and the blessing of God’s peace in our communities.

b. We will continually give thanks as we see God’s work among the nations, looking forward to the day when the kingdom of this world will become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ.

IIE. Calling the Church of Christ back to humility, integrity and simplicity

Walking is the biblical metaphor for our way of life and daily conduct. Seven times in Ephesians Paul speaks of how Christians should, or should not, walk.[82]

1. Walk in distinctiveness, as God’s new humanity[83]

The people of God either walk in the way of the Lord, or walk in the ways of other gods. The Bible shows that God’s greatest problem is not just with the nations of the world, but with the people he has created and called to be the means of blessing the nations. And the biggest obstacle to fulfilling that mission is idolatry among God’s own people. For if we are called to bring the nations to worship the only true and living God, we fail miserably if we ourselves are running after the false gods of the people around us.

When there is no distinction in conduct between Christians and non-Christians – for example in the practice of corruption and greed, or sexual promiscuity, or rate of divorce, or relapse to pre-Christian religious practice, or attitudes towards people of other races, or consumerist lifestyles, or social prejudice – then the world is right to wonder if our Christianity makes any difference at all. Our message carries no authenticity to a watching world.

a. We challenge one another, as God’s people in every culture, to face up to the extent to which, consciously or unconsciously, we are caught up in the idolatries of our surrounding culture. We pray for prophetic discernment to identify and expose such false gods and their presence within the Church itself, and for the courage to repent and renounce them in the name and authority of Jesus as Lord.

b. Since there is no biblical mission without biblical living, we urgently re-commit ourselves, and challenge all those who profess the name of Christ, to live in radical distinctiveness from the ways of the world, to ‘put on the new humanity, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.’

2. Walk in love, rejecting the idolatry of disordered sexuality[84]

God’s design in creation is that marriage is constituted by the committed, faithful relationship between one man and one woman, in which they become one flesh in a new social unity that is distinct from their birth families, and that sexual intercourse as the expression of that ‘one flesh’ is to be enjoyed exclusively within the bond of marriage. This loving sexual union within marriage, in which ‘two become one’, reflects both Christ’s relationship with the Church and also the unity of Jew and Gentile in the new humanity.[85]

Paul contrasts the purity of God’s love with the ugliness of counterfeit love that masquerades in disordered sexuality and all that goes along with it. Disordered sexuality of all kinds, in any practice of sexual intimacy before or outside marriage as biblically defined, is out of line with God’s will and blessing in creation and redemption. The abuse and idolatry that surrounds disordered sexuality contributes to wider social decline, including the breakdown of marriages and families and produces incalculable suffering of loneliness and exploitation. It is a serious issue within the Church itself, and it is a tragically common cause of leadership failure.

We recognize our need for deep humility and consciousness of failure in this area. We long to see Christians challenging our surrounding cultures by living according to the standards to which the Bible calls us.

a. We strongly encourage all pastors:

(1) To facilitate more open conversation about sexuality in our churches, declaring positively the good news of God’s plan for healthy relationships and family life, but also addressing with pastoral honesty the areas where Christians share in the broken and dysfunctional realities of their surrounding culture;

(2) To teach God’s standards clearly, but to do so with Christ’s pastoral compassion for sinners, recognising how vulnerable we all are to sexual temptation and sin;

(3) To strive to set a positive example in living by biblical standards of sexual faithfulness;

b. As members of the Church we commit ourselves:

(1) To do all we can in the Church and in society to strengthen faithful marriages and healthy family life;

(2) To recognize the presence and contribution of those who are single, widowed, or childless, to ensure the church is a welcoming and sustaining family in Christ, and to enable them to exercise their gifts in the full range of the church’s ministries;

(3) To resist the multiple forms of disordered sexuality in our surrounding cultures, including pornography, adultery and promiscuity;

(4) To seek to understand and address the deep heart issues of identity and experience which draw some people into homosexual practice; to reach out with the love, compassion and justice of Christ, and to reject and condemn all forms of hatred, verbal or physical abuse, and victimization of homosexual people;

(5) To remember that by God’s redemptive grace no person or situation is beyond the possibility of change and restoration.

3. Walk in humility, rejecting the idolatry of power[86]

In our fallenness and sin, power is often exercised to abuse and exploit others. We exalt ourselves, claiming superiority of gender, race, or social status. Paul counters all these marks of the idolatry of pride and power with his requirement that those who are filled by God’s Spirit should submit to one another for Christ’s sake. Such mutual submission and reciprocal love is to be expressed in marriage, family, and socio-economic relations.

a. We long to see all Christian husbands and wives, parents and children, employers and employees, living out the Bible’s teaching about ‘submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ’.

b. We encourage pastors to help believers understand, honestly discuss, and practise the mutual submission that God requires of his children towards one another. In a world of greed, power and abuse, God is calling his Church to be the place of gentle humility and selfless love among its members.

c. We particularly and urgently call Christian husbands to observe the balance of responsibilities in Paul’s teaching about husbands and wives. Mutual submission means that a wife’s submission to her husband is to a man whose love and care for her is modelled on the self-sacrificing love of Jesus Christ for his Church. Any form of abuse of one’s wife – verbal, emotional or physical – is incompatible with the love of Christ, in every culture. We deny that any cultural custom or distorted biblical interpretation can justify the beating of a wife. We grieve that it is found among professing Christians, including pastors and leaders. We have no hesitation in denouncing it as a sin, and call for repentance and renunciation of it as a practice.

4. Walk in integrity, rejecting the idolatry of success[87]

We cannot build the kingdom of the God of truth on foundations of dishonesty. Yet in our craving for ‘success’ and ‘results’ we are tempted to sacrifice our integrity, with distorted or exaggerated claims that amount to lies. Walking in the light, however, ‘consists in . . . righteousness and truth’.[88]

a. We call on all church and mission leaders to resist the temptation to be less than totally truthful in presenting our work. We are dishonest when we exaggerate our reports with unsubstantiated statistics, or twist the truth for the sake of gain. We pray for a cleansing wave of honesty and the end of such distortion, manipulation and exaggeration. We call on all who fund spiritual work not to make unrealistic demands for measurable and visible results, beyond the need for proper accountability. Let us strive for a culture of full integrity and transparency. We will choose to walk in the light and truth of God, for the Lord tests the heart and is pleased with integrity.[89]

5. Walk in simplicity, rejecting the idolatry of greed[90]

The widespread preaching and teaching of ‘prosperity gospel’ around the world raises significant concerns. We define prosperity gospel as the teaching that believers have a right to the blessings of health and wealth and that they can obtain these blessings through positive confessions of faith and the ‘sowing of seeds’ through financial or material gifts. Prosperity teaching is a phenomenon that cuts across many denominations in all continents.[91]

We affirm the miraculous grace and power of God, and we welcome the growth of churches and ministries that lead people to exercise expectant faith in the living God and his supernatural power. We believe in the power of the Holy Spirit. However, we deny that God’s miraculous power can be treated as automatic, or at the disposal of human techniques, or manipulated by human words, actions, gifts, objects, or rituals.

We affirm that there is a biblical vision of human prospering, and that the Bible includes material welfare (both health and wealth) within its teaching about the blessing of God. However, we deny as unbiblical the teaching that spiritual welfare can be measured in terms of material welfare, or that wealth is always a sign of God’s blessing. The Bible shows that wealth can often be obtained by oppression, deceit or corruption. We also deny that poverty, illness or early death are always a sign of God’s curse, or evidence of lack of faith, or the result of human curses, since the Bible rejects such simplistic explanations

We accept that it is good to exalt the power and victory of God. But we believe that the teachings of many who vigorously promote the prosperity gospel seriously distort the Bible; that their practices and lifestyle are often unethical and un-Christlike; that they commonly replace genuine evangelism with miracle-seeking, and replace the call to repentance with the call to give money to the preacher’s organization. We grieve that the impact of this teaching on many Churches is pastorally damaging and spiritually unhealthy. We gladly and strongly affirm every initiative in Christ’s name that seeks to bring healing to the sick, or lasting deliverance from poverty and suffering. The prosperity gospel offers no lasting solution to poverty, and can deflect people from the true message and means of eternal salvation. For these reasons it can be soberly described as a false gospel. We therefore reject the excesses of prosperity teaching as incompatible with balanced biblical Christianity.

a. We urgently encourage church and mission leaders in contexts where the prosperity gospel is popular to test its teaching with careful attention to the teaching and example of Jesus Christ. Particularly, we all need to interpret and teach those Bible texts that are commonly used to support the prosperity gospel in their full biblical context and proper balance. Where prosperity teaching happens in the context of poverty, we must counter it with authentic compassion and action to bring justice and lasting transformation for the poor. Above all we must replace self-interest and greed with the biblical teaching on self-sacrifice and generous giving as the marks of true discipleship to Christ. We affirm Lausanne’s historic call for simpler lifestyles.

IIF. Partnering in the body of Christ for unity in mission

Paul teaches us that Christian unity is the creation of God, based on our reconciliation with God and with one another. This double reconciliation has been accomplished through the cross. When we live in unity and work in partnership we demonstrate the supernatural, counter-cultural power of the cross. But when we demonstrate our disunity through failure to partner together, we demean our mission and message, and deny the power of the cross.

1. Unity in the Church

A divided Church has no message for a divided world. Our failure to live in reconciled unity is a major obstacle to authenticity and effectiveness in mission.

a. We lament the dividedness and divisiveness of our churches and organizations. We deeply and urgently long for Christians to cultivate a spirit of grace and to be obedient to Paul’s command to ‘make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.’

b. While we recognize that our deepest unity is spiritual, we long for greater recognition of the missional power of visible, practical, earthly unity. So we urge Christian sisters and brothers worldwide, for the sake of our common witness and mission, to resist the temptation to split the body of Christ, and to seek the paths of reconciliation and restored unity wherever possible.

2. Partnership in global mission

Partnership in mission is not only about efficiency. It is the strategic and practical outworking of our shared submission to Jesus Christ as Lord. Too often we have engaged in mission in ways that prioritize and preserve our own identities (ethnic, denominational, theological, etc), and have failed to submit our passions and preferences to our one Lord and Master. The supremacy and centrality of Christ in our mission must be more than a confession of faith; it must also govern our strategy, practice and unity.

We rejoice in the growth and strength of emerging mission movements in the majority world and the ending of the old pattern of ‘from the West to the Rest’. But we do not accept the idea that the baton of mission responsibility has passed from one part of the world Church to another. There is no sense in rejecting the past triumphalism of the West, only to relocate the same ungodly spirit in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. No one ethnic group, nation, or continent can claim the exclusive privilege of being the ones to complete the Great Commission. Only God is sovereign.

a. We stand together as church and mission leaders in all parts of the world, called to recognize and accept one another, with equality of opportunities to contribute together to world mission. Let us, in submission to Christ, lay aside suspicion, competition and pride and be willing to learn from those whom God is using, even when they are not from our continent, nor of our particular theology, nor of our organization, nor of our circle of friends.

b. Partnership is about more than money, and unwise injection of money frequently corrupts and divides the Church. Let us finally prove that the Church does not operate on the principle that those who have the most money have all the decision-making power. Let us no longer impose our own preferred names, slogans, programmes, systems and methods on other parts of the Church. Let us instead work for true mutuality of North and South, East and West, for interdependence in giving and receiving, for the respect and dignity that characterizes genuine friends and true partners in mission.

3. Men and women in partnership

Scripture affirms that God created men and women in his image and gave them dominion over the earth together. Sin entered human life and history through man and woman acting together in rebellion against God. Through the cross of Christ, God brought salvation, acceptance and unity to men and women equally. At Pentecost God poured out his Spirit of prophecy on all flesh, sons and daughters alike. Women and men are thus equal in creation, in sin, in salvation, and in the Spirit.[92]

All of us, women and men, married and single, are responsible to employ God’s gifts for the benefit of others, as stewards of God’s grace, and for the praise and glory of Christ. All of us, therefore, are also responsible to enable all God’s people to exercise all the gifts that God has given for all the areas of service to which God calls the Church.[93] We should not quench the Spirit by despising the ministry of any.[94] Further, we are determined to see ministry within the body of Christ as a gifting and responsibility in which we are called to serve, and not as a status and right that we demand.

a. We uphold Lausanne’s historic position: ‘We affirm that the gifts of the Spirit are distributed to all God’s people, women and men, and that their partnership in evangelization must be welcomed for the common good.’[95] We acknowledge the enormous and sacrificial contribution that women have made to world mission, ministering to both men and women, from biblical times to the present.

b. We recognize that there are different views sincerely held by those who seek to be faithful and obedient to Scripture. Some interpret apostolic teaching to imply that women should not teach or preach, or that they may do so but not in sole authority over men. Others interpret the spiritual equality of women, the exercise of the edifying gift of prophecy by women in the New Testament church, and their hosting of churches in their homes, as implying that the spiritual gifts of leading and teaching may be received and exercised in ministry by both women and men.[96] We call upon those on different sides of the argument to:

(1) Accept one another without condemnation in relation to matters of dispute, for while we may disagree, we have no grounds for division, destructive speaking, or ungodly hostility towards one another;[97]

(2) Study Scripture carefully together, with due regard for the context and culture of the original authors and contemporary readers;

(3) Recognize that where there is genuine pain we must show compassion; where there is injustice and lack of integrity we must stand against them; and where there is resistance to the manifest work of the Holy Spirit in any sister or brother we must repent;

(4) Commit ourselves to a pattern of ministry, male and female, that reflects the servanthood of Jesus Christ, not worldly striving for power and status.

c. We encourage churches to acknowledge godly women who teach and model what is good, as Paul commanded,[98] and to open wider doors of opportunity for women in education, service, and leadership, particularly in contexts where the gospel challenges unjust cultural traditions. We long that women should not be hindered from exercising God’s gifts or following God’s call on their lives.

4. Theological education and mission

The New Testament shows the close partnership between the work of evangelism and church planting (eg the Apostle Paul), and the work of nurturing churches (eg Timothy and Apollos). Both tasks are integrated in the Great Commission, where Jesus describes disciple-making in terms of evangelism (before ‘baptizing them’) and ‘teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you.’ Theological education is part of mission beyond evangelism.[99]

The mission of the Church on earth is to serve the mission of God, and the mission of theological education is to strengthen and accompany the mission of the Church. Theological education serves first to train those who lead the Church as pastor-teachers, equipping them to teach the truth of God’s Word with faithfulness, relevance and clarity; and second, to equip all God’s people for the missional task of understanding and relevantly communicating God’s truth in every cultural context. Theological education engages in spiritual warfare, as ‘we demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.’[100]

a. Those of us who lead churches and mission agencies need to acknowledge that theological education is intrinsically missional. Those of us who provide theological education need to ensure that it is intentionally missional, since its place within the academy is not an end in itself, but to serve the mission of the Church in the world.

b. Theological education stands in partnership with all forms of missional engagement. We will encourage and support all who provide biblically-faithful theological education, formal and non-formal, at local, national, regional and international levels.

c. We urge that institutions and programmes of theological education conduct a ‘missional audit’ of their curricula, structures and ethos, to ensure that they truly serve the needs and opportunities facing the Church in their cultures.

d. We long that all church planters and theological educators should place the Bible at the centre of their partnership, not just in doctrinal statements but in practice. Evangelists must use the Bible as the supreme source of the content and authority of their message. Theological educators must re-centre the study of the Bible as the core discipline in Christian theology, integrating and permeating all other fields of study and application. Above all theological education must serve to equip pastor-teachers for their prime responsibility of preaching and teaching the Bible.[101]

Conclusion

God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. God’s Spirit was in Cape Town, calling the Church of Christ to be ambassadors of God’s reconciling love for the world. God kept the promise of his Word as his people met together in Christ’s name, for the Lord Jesus Christ himself dwelt among us, and walked among us.[102]

We sought to listen to the voice of the Lord Jesus Christ. And in his mercy, through his Holy Spirit, Christ spoke to his listening people. Through the many voices of Bible exposition, plenary addresses, and group discussion, two repeated themes were heard:

• The need for radical obedient discipleship, leading to maturity, to growth in depth as well as growth in numbers;

• The need for radical cross-centred reconciliation, leading to unity, to growth in love as well as growth in faith and hope.

Discipleship and reconciliation are indispensable to our mission. We lament the scandal of our shallowness and lack of discipleship, and the scandal of our disunity and lack of love. For both seriously damage our witness to the gospel.

We discern the voice of the Lord Jesus Christ in these two challenges because they correspond to two of Christ’s most emphatic words to the Church as recorded in the gospels. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus gave us our primary mandate – to make disciples among all nations. In John’s Gospel, Jesus gave us our primary method – to love one another so that the world will know we are disciples of Jesus. We should not be surprised, but rather rejoice to hear the Master’s voice, when Christ says the same things 2,000 years later to his people gathered from all around the world. Make disciples. Love one another.

Make disciples

Biblical mission demands that those who claim Christ’s name should be like him, by taking up their cross, denying themselves, and following him in the paths of humility, love, integrity, generosity, and servanthood. To fail in discipleship and disciple-making, is to fail at the most basic level of our mission. The call of Christ to his Church comes to us afresh from the pages of the gospels: ‘Come and follow me’; ‘Go and make disciples’.

Love one another

Three times Jesus repeated, ‘A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.’[103] Three times Jesus prayed ‘that all of them may be one, Father.’[104] Both the command and the prayer are missional. ‘By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.’ ‘May they be brought to complete unity so that the world may know that you sent me.’ Jesus could not have made his point more emphatically. The evangelization of the world and the recognition of Christ’s deity are helped or hindered by whether or not we obey him in practice. The call of Christ and his apostles comes to us afresh: ‘Love one another’; ‘Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.’[105] It is for the sake of God’s mission that we renew our commitment to obey this ‘message we heard from the beginning.’[106] When Christians live in the reconciled unity of love by the power of the Holy Spirit, the world will come to know Jesus, whose disciples we are, and come to know the Father who sent him.

In the name of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and on the sole foundation of faith in God’s infinite mercy and saving grace, we earnestly long and pray for a reformation of biblical discipleship and a revolution of Christlike love.

We make this our prayer and we undertake this our commitment for the sake of the Lord we love and for the sake of the world we serve in his name.

56.

1 Thessalonians 1:3

57.

Ephesians 2:10

58.

Colossians 3:23

59.

For ‘The university is a clear-cut fulcrum with which to move the world. The Church can render no greater service to itself and to the cause of the gospel than to try to recapture the universities for Christ. More potently than by any other means, change the university and you change the world.’ Charles Habib Malik, former president of the UN General Assembly, in his 1981 Pascal Lectures, A Christian Critique of the University.

60.

Ephesians 1:10; 2:1-16; 3:6; Galatians 3:6-8. (See also Section VI on the issue of unity and partnership within the Church.)

61.

Ephesians 2:11-22; Romans 3:23; Romans 10:12-13; Ephesians 2:18

62.

Deuteronomy 32:8; Acts 17:26

63.

Revelation 7:9; 21:3, where the text reads, ‘they will be his peoples’ (plural).

64.

Acts 4:32-37; Galatians 2:9-10; Romans 15:23-29; 2 Corinthians 8 9

65.

2 Corinthians 5:16

66.

John 9:1-3

67.

The Manila Manifesto, Section 12

68.

1 Peter 3:15-16. Compare Acts 19:37

69.

2 Corinthians 12:9-10; 4:7-10

70.

The Manila Manifesto, Section 12

71.

2 Corinthians 2:15

72.

Acts 11:20-24

73.

Acts 15:19

74.

Romans 14:1-3

75.

Genesis 50:20

76.

Leviticus 19:33-34; Deuteronomy 24:17; Ruth 2; Job 29:16; Matthew 25:35-36; Luke 10:25-37; 14:12-14; Romans 12:13; Hebrews 13:2-3; 1 Peter 4:9

77.

Jeremiah 29:7

78.

Jeremiah 29:7; 1 Peter 2:13-17; 1 Timothy 2:1-2; Romans 13:1-7; Exodus 1:15-21; Daniel 6; Acts 3:19-20; 5:29

79.

Ephesians 4:11-12

80.

1 Timothy 3:1-13; Titus 1:6-9; 1 Peter 5:1-3

81.

Mark 9:33-37

82.

Though translated variously, the following texts all use the verb ‘to walk’: Ephesians 2:2; 2:10; 4:1; 4:17; 5:2; 5:8; 5:15

83.

Ephesians 4:16-31

84.

Ephesians 5:1-7

85.

Ephesians 5:31; 2:15

86.

Ephesians 5:15 6:4

87.

Ephesians 5:8-9

88.

Ephesians 5:10

89.

1 Chronicles 29:17

90.

Ephesians 5:5

91.

See also the full text of The Akropong Statement: A critique of the Prosperity Gospel produced by African theologians, convened by the Lausanne Theology Working Group, at: www.lausanne.org/akropong

92.

Genesis 1:26-28; Genesis 3; Acts 2:17-18; Galatians 3:28; 1 Peter 3:7

93.

Romans 12:4-8; 1 Corinthians 12:4-11; Ephesians 4:7-16; 1 Peter 4:10-11

94.

1 Thessalonians 5:19-20; 1 Timothy 4:11-14

95.

The Manila Manifesto, Affirmation 14

96.

1 Timothy 2:12; 1 Corinthians 14:33-35; Titus 2:3-5; Acts 18:26; 21:9; Romans 16:1-5, 7; Philippians 4:2-3; Colossians 4:15; 1 Corinthians 11:5; 14:3-5

97.

Romans 14:1-13

98.

Titus 2:3-5

99.

Colossians 1:28-29; Acts 19:8-10; 20:20, 27;1 Corinthians 3:5-9

100.

2 Corinthians 10:4-5

101.

2 Timothy 2:2; 4:1-2;1 Timothy 3:2b; 4:11-14; Titus 1:9; 2:1

102.

Leviticus 26:11-12; Matthew 18:20; 28:20

103.

John 13:34; 15:12; 17

104.

John 17:21-23

105.

Ephesians 4:1-6; Colossians 3:12-14; 1 Thessalonians 4:9-10; 1 Peter 1:22; 1 John 3:11-14; 4:7-21

106.

1 John 3:11

The Lausanne Movement

The Lausanne Movement was founded following the 1974 Congress on World Evangelization, held in Lausanne, Switzerland. This Congress was convened by the evangelist Billy Graham, working closely with the pastor-theologian John Stott.

Lausanne is a network of leaders, thinkers and reflective practitioners. It serves the body of Christ as a catalyst for engaging major issues by:

• Connecting and convening evangelical leaders (in Christian ministry, and in the secular professions) for discussion, prayer and strategic action on issues which impact the Church and God’s world;

• Communicating ideas and strategy by, for example, publishing books and occasional papers , and using social media, to inform, persuade, and stimulate ideas and action;

• Hosting discussion and resource sharing through the online Lausanne Global Conversation, which provides a forum for ideas, and strategy on mission and evangelization.

The Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization (Cape Town 2010) brought together more than 4,000 participants from 198 countries. The Cape Town Commitment, issuing from this Congress, stands in the historic line of The Lausanne Covenant (1974) and The Manila Manifesto (1989). It opens with a Confession of Faith, framed in the language of covenantal love, followed by a Call to Action. Its Call to Action reflects the voices of all who participated in Congress discussions, in a genuine desire to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit. The Cape Town Commitment forms the basis for Lausanne’s priorities.

The Lausanne Movement is anchored by its Theology Working Group, originally established under the leadership of John Stott, who served as chief architect of The Lausanne Covenant. In addition it has Working Groups on Strategy, Intercession and Communications.

‘The spirit of Lausanne’

The phrase ‘the spirit of Lausanne’ arose out of the 1974 Congress. It captures the Movement’s ideals: dedication to prayer, and to the study of God’s Word; a desire to work in unity and partnership; a clear reflection of the hope of the gospel; and humility in service.

To learn more, and to join the Lausanne Global Conversation on mission and evangelization, go to www.lausanne.org or email info@lausanne.org.

Recommended titles for study of The Cape Town Commitment

Christ our Reconciler (IVP UK 2012. Ed. J E M Cameron, ISBN: 978-1-844745-77-7)

The Cape Town Commitment Study Edition (Hendrickson 2012. By Rose Dowsett, ISBN: 978-1-619700-27-7)

The Cape Town Commitment: Bibliographic Resources (Wipf & Stock, 2013. Ed. Darrell Bock, ISBN: 978-1-62564-003-1)Langham Partnership

Langham Partnership

Langham Partnership is working to strengthen the church in the majority world. We provide doctoral scholarships for future principals and teachers at majority world seminaries and for those who will take up strategic positions of leadership in the church. We send carefully chosen evangelical books, as gifts or at low cost, to church pastors and to teachers at Bible colleges, and we foster the writing and publishing of Christian literature in many regional languages. We also run training workshops and produce materials to raise the standard of biblical preaching and teaching, and work to develop preaching networks locally. For further information see www.langham..org or email global@langham.org

Other titles available in the Global Christian Library Series

Bible and Other Faiths by Ida Glaser, ISBN: 978-1-907713-05-7

Hope for the World by Roland Chia, ISBN: 978-1-907713-06-4

The Holy Spirit by Ivan Satyavrata, ISBN: 978-1-907713-08-8

The Human Condition by Joe M. Kapolyo, ISBN: 978-1-907713-04-0

Salvation Belongs to Our God by Christopher J. H. Wright, ISBN: 978-1-907713-07-1

The Seed and the Soil by Pauline Hoggarth, ISBN: 978-1-907713-09-5

A Time for Mission by Samuel Escobar, ISBN: 978-1-907713-02-6