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Stott's chapter on the work of Christ quarries some choice bits from his magisterial exposition, The Cross of Christ(1986), focusing almost entirely upon the doctrine of justification through Christ's substitutionary Atonement. The sinner's need and its remedy in the Cross emerges in clarity, brevity, and power, with no apology to sensibilities offended by the language of sacrifice.

Yet in his commendable glorying in the Cross, Stott perhaps inadvertently downplays the Resurrection as also intrinsic to Christ's work of redemption. He suggests that Christ's "birth looks forward to [the Cross] and prepares for it, while the Resurrection looks back to it and validates it." But surely the Resurrection is much more than a validation of the Cross. Indeed, it is not at all clear what good the Cross would do us if we were not raised also with Christ in his resurrection (so Romans 6, which tightly binds together death and resurrection, both Christ's and ours).

Stott's statesmanship is most evident in his chapter on the work of the Holy Spirit. Here he stands astride a number of rifts in contemporary evangelicalism and pleads for unity in diversity, whether regarding charismatic manifestations, church membership, the sacraments, pastor-laity relations, the place of social action, or competing eschatologies. He shows some resistance to the "signs and wonders" movement, but even here he accentuates what is common and positive among evangelicals.

Among these issues one might expect to find the vexing question of gender, but Stott confines his comments on this subject to the conclusion, in which he lists it among the secondary matters on which evangelicals should simply agree to disagree. (Stott has hardly ignored this issue, however: for years he has encouraged women's leadership, including ordination, in the Church of England.)

In his conclusion, Stott returns to the fundamental question raised by the title of his book: What is truth for evangelicals, and what are the truths most central to evangelical profession? Stott boldly suggests that "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." This criterion of "basic evangelicalism" is one that would resonate with evangelical statesmen back to John Wesley himself.

The book's title raises another question, however. In opting for "truth"—rather than "affirmations," "essentials," "convictions," and "concerns," some of which do show up as synonyms in the book—evangelicalism is implicitly reduced to a set of beliefs. Evangelicals are people who assent to certain propositions about God, the Bible, the Cross, and so on. This rationalistic tendency extends to Stott's characterization of evangelicals as "first and foremost Bible people, affirming the great truths of revelation, inspiration and authority," and of the evangelical faith that rests, he writes, upon "its chief foundation—the rock of holy Scripture, that is, of evangelical truth."

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February 7 2000, Vol. 44, No. 2