A Milestone for Stott

The Cross of Christ, by John Stott (InterVarsity, 383 pp.; $14.95, cloth). Reviewed by J. I. Packer, professor of historical and systematic theology at Regent College.

John Stott has been heard to insist that he is not a theologian, but this book refutes any such idea. Written for the golden jubilee of British Inter-Varsity Press, it may fairly be called Stott’s magnum opus. In it he stands revealed as a first-class biblical theologian with an unusually systematic mind, great power of analysis, great clarity of expression, a superb command of his material, and a preacher’s passion to proclaim truth that will change lives. Weightier than Griffith Thomas, though less massive than B. B. Warfield and less metaphysical than Jonathan Edwards, his logical thoroughness, verbal precision, mastery of arrangement, and persistent biblicism put one in mind of all three.

Any fool, they say, can make simple things complicated, but it takes a wise man to make complicated things simple; well, Stott has this wisdom in full measure. Yet his style is free of technicalities, and his easy lucidity hides his learning. He is, in truth, one of the aristocrats of modern Christian exposition.

Arresting and Challenging

This book is something of a milestone, both for Stott and his readers. In one sense, it is unadventurous, for the author is firmly anchored in the conservative evangelical mainstream. In another sense, however, it is highly adventurous, for it ranges over the ethical implications of the Cross for Christians today in a more arresting and challenging way than any I have met so far. As an exposition of all that Scripture says about the Cross, it is more than a treatise on the Atonement. Its four parts deal with the centrality of Christ’s Cross in Christianity, its theological meaning, the achievement of salvation, revelation, victory through it, and the life controlled by the Cross. It is a virtual compendium of Christianity, full of brilliant encapsulations of biblical teaching and searching shafts of application to modern Western Christians. The book is offered as a setting forth not merely of evangelical Christanity but of Christianity itself; for, argues Stott, “the cross … lies at the center of the historic, biblical faith, and the fact that this is not always everywhere acknowledged is itself a sufficient justification for preserving a distinctive evangelical testimony.” (Hear, hear!)

Stott is concerned about the meaning of the Cross. (See the excerpt “No Bargain with the Devil” for both the substance and the flavor.) The theological words satisfaction and substitution, he believes, need to be carefully defined and safeguarded.

Stott sees substitution as explaining the “images” and “metaphors” of propitiation, redemption, justification, and reconciliation, and concludes, most properly, by declaring: “Substitution is not ‘a theory of the atonement.’ Nor is it even an additional image to take its place as an option alongside the others. It is rather the essence of each image and the heart of the atonement itself.” Well said! Though many biblical theologians overlook or dispute this, there is exegetically no room for doubt that Stott here expresses Paul’s true meaning.

Unsatisfied

At two points (yes, only two!) I was left unsatisfied. First, something needed to be said about the particularity (which is bound up with the effectiveness) of Christ’s atoning Cross. For one strand of New Testament witness is that the Cross has secured the salvation, present and future, of particular chosen people. This thought of eternal effectiveness is in fact present whenever Christ is said to have died “for” any, so that knowledge of one’s own particular redemption becomes a basis of assurance—another theme on which Stott might have said more.

Rightly does Stott highlight substitution as the basic category of atonement, and rightly does he define a substitute as “one who acts in place of another in such a way as to render the other’s action unnecessary”; in other words, one who sustains a specific, effective relationship with any whose place he takes. Stott is not, then, an Arminian in the modern sense, making the achievement of the Cross null and void apart from the independent faith of man (except in one strange paragraph where, confessedly lapsing into natural theology—O brother, never do that!—he says that love in God as in man is marked by “risk-taking with no certainty of success” and “in giving his Son to die for sinners, God made himself vulnerable to the possibility that they would snub him and turn away.”) Nor is Stott a modern universalist, seeing the Cross as having actually saved unbelievers no less than those who have faith. The “us” for whom Stott constantly says that Christ died is clearly the “us” of the New Testament letters—believers who know themselves to be individually chosen in and redeemed by Christ. Stott’s thought-mold is plainly particularistic, and I wish he had been explicit about it. I miss the clear declaration that God in sovereign love saves, through a bona fide offer of Christ to all mankind, those for whom, specifically and effectively, Christ substituted himself on the cross.

Second, I query Stott’s thesis of God’s solidarity, through the suffering of Christ, with all human suffering everywhere. That God did and does will to suffer pain for and with his people, and that believers find in Jesus a Savior whose sympathy with them when in trouble is total, are fixed points. But Stott justifies his belief that Christ’s sympathy “is not limited to his suffering with his covenant people” by asking: “Did Jesus not say that in ministering to the hungry and thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the prisoner, we would be ministering to him, indicating that he identified himself with all needy and suffering people?”—and the answer to that question has to be no. Jesus speaks there of what is done to “brothers of mine” (Matt. 25:40), and suffering does not of itself turn unbelievers into children of God. Stott’s exegesis, though conventional, is impossible. Fortunately, the rest of his theodicy, being based on the certainty that God in Christ has shared human suffering up to the limit, does not depend on it.

Apart from these flyspecks, however, I find this a smashing book, theologically, devotionally, and morally. No other treatment of this supreme subject says so much so truly and so well. Sell your shirt to buy it, straight-away.

* * *

A Campaign Of Disinformation

The AIDS Cover-Up? The Real and Alarming Facts About AIDS, by Gene Antonio (Ignatius, 256 pp.; $9.95, paper). Reviewed by Wendell W. Hoffman, M.D., a consultant in infectious diseases in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and clinical assistant professor of medicine at the University of South Dakota School of Medicine.

Aids has dominated the news this past year, and efforts to educate the public have increased greatly. Many of these efforts are welcome. Some, like The AIDS Cover-Up?, by social commentator Gene Antonio, are not.

Recently Mr. Antonio made statements on a national Christian radio program that have greatly intensified the generalized fear of AIDS among believers. Because the role of the church in responding to AIDS is crucial, Antonio’s book must be carefully evaluated.

Unfortunately, neither Mr. Antonio nor his publisher’s alarmist cover copy tell us anything about his qualifications to write on AIDS. What little information is given in the publisher’s catalog hardly justifies his attempt at interpreting the literature on a subject so liable to misunderstanding and hysteria. In spite of his lack of training, however, Antonio does quote medical literature; and this is sometimes misleading, as he unwittingly, I presume, quotes old and speculative information and raises alarmist suppositions.

Paranoia

Paranoia—a blend of suspicion, the instinct for self-preservation, and homophobia—characterizes this book.

Antonio is suspicious, asserting that a concerted “campaign of disinformation about the AIDS virus” has occurred and that key facts about the nature of AIDS have been withheld from the public by both the news media and public health officials. Yet from the beginning, there has been a consistent, rapid presentation of the facts to the medical community by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The conclusions drawn by the CDC’S experts have been carefully thought through in order to establish sound policies for fighting the epidemic. There has hardly been a plot to deceive.

Casual Contamination

Antonio is driven by the instinct for self-preservation, aroused by irrational fears of contagion by casual contact. In chapter 4, the author suggests that the virus may be transmitted via nonsexual household contact, insects, saliva, tears, food preparation, and aerosolization. He then offers this disclaimer: “This chapter does not prove that casual transmission of the AIDS virus is occuring.” Unfortunately, by then the damage has been done through the use of innuendo and the misuse of “facts.”

Actually, the epidemiology of the AIDS virus shows that its mode of transmission has remained very stable—sexual contact, exposure to blood products (largely through contaminated needles), and transplacental contagion during pregnancy. There is no evidence that the virus can be acquired through kissing, coughing, food, doorknobs, or toilet seats.

Even the information regarding medical personnel shows that the AIDS virus is difficult to transmit. With over 1,000 needle-stick exposures reported, only four people have developed an antibody to the virus, making the transmission risk a very low 0.4 percent. Although the virus has been isolated in body fluids other than blood and semen, it must be pointed out, for instance, that only 1 percent of patients with AIDS have the virus recovered from saliva.

Although the author quotes two articles suggesting that the virus is more hardy than originally thought, these studies used concentrations of the virus much higher than those actually carried in the body. The studies to date on nonsexual household contacts of AIDS patients have clearly shown that common use of toiletries and eating utensils does not place people at high risk. The virus itself is very susceptible to a variety of disinfectants (including household bleach). Thus Antonio’s case for casual transmission is extremely weak.

A Promiscuity Problem

Last, Antonio is homophobic. His book goes into graphic and unnecessary detail about the sexual practices of the homosexual. He portrays the homosexual community as “militant,” “sexual terrorists,” plotting to report lies about AIDS transmission. This broad-brush picure will only contribute to fear, anger, prejudice, and despising of homosexuals.

From a world-wide perspective, the AIDS problem is more heterosexual than homosexual. In Africa, five to ten million people are infected—and 50 percent of them are women. AIDS is a problem of sexual promiscuity, and homosexual promiscuity is only one part of the problem. When we lay the blame at the feet of only one group, political and social backlash can only result.

The AIDS Cover-Up? does not contribute to the real issue that faces the church: how to reach out to a growing number of desperate people. Christians will be unlikely to reach out to those they fear, and Antonio has done an excellent job of cultivating fear. He casually mentions compassion, but his inflammatory text destroys that possibility in his readers. AIDS patients are very open to discussing life-and-death issues, as well as where they will spend eternity. What an incredible opportunity Christians have. But we must act on facts—rightly interpreted.

The Issues Of Life

Abortion: Toward an Evangelical Consensus, by Paul Fowler (Multnomah, 225 pp.; $11.95, hardcover), and A Time for Compassion: A Call to Cherish and Protect Life, by Ron Lee Davis with James D. Denney (Revell, 224 pp.; $13.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Michael J. Gorman, author of Abortion and the Early Church (InterVarsity).

Both of these books appear in series devoted to contemporary issues. The series are evidence of not only the increasing concern about social issues among evangelical Christians, but the desire for biblically informed action. Yet the books address this twofold concern in very different ways.

Fowler’s Abortion: Toward an Evangelical Consensus is the work of a professor of New Testament at Columbia Graduate School of Bible and Missions. He is also a member of the board of advisers of the Christian Action Council. Fowler’s goal is to summon evangelicals to the antiabortion consensus that prevailed in the Christian church from its inception until the 1960s. The basis for this summons is Fowler’s well-argued thesis that the beliefs and values underlying every prochoice or proabortion position are antithetical to central themes of Scripture. Fowler also contends that since many evangelicals who say they basically oppose abortion have unknowingly embraced erroneous proabortion beliefs and values, evangelicalism as a whole has been unable to come to the consensus that Scripture mandates: that abortion is always the violent murder of an innocent person.

With clarity Fowler points his readers to the heart of the abortion issue—whether or not the fetus is a “person.” He quotes key passages from influential philosophers and theologians who propose criteria of “personhood” (minimal intelligence, or self-awareness, for example) and then maintain that the fetus, lacking these to any significant degree, is not a “person” with the right to protection from destruction.

Many readers will be startled by the passages Fowler quotes, which either implicitly or explicitly claim, for example, that apes are more like persons than are unborn, newborn, mentally retarded, and senile human beings. Fowler briefly but perceptively points out the serious problems inherent in these attempts to establish criteria for personhood in order to dehumanize the fetus, and he is no less critical of Christians who define the “image of God” in terms similar to these definitions of personhood. When people understand the image of God primarily to mean rationality or conscious relationship to God, they define the fetus at best as a “potential” person, thus opening the door not only to abortion in the hard cases but virtually on demand.

In contrast to both secular and Christian misunderstandings of the status of the fetus and of the taking of its life, Fowler expounds central biblical themes and key texts that indicate that abortion must be considered to be the murder of innocents: God’s concern to protect the weak and defenseless; God’s active involvement in creating and relating personally to people in the womb; the unity of body and soul; and the absolute indefensibility of taking innocent human life. These biblical themes stand in stark contrast to the violence of abortion, and Fowler therefore calls Christians both to oppose abortion and to act compassionately on behalf of its victims—children and women.

This book will be of immense help to people wishing to understand clearly and respond biblically to the key issues in the abortion debate. Its approach to Scripture is responsible, generally emphasizing themes and whole passages rather than proof texts, and its overall thesis is convincing. It is unfortunate, however, that portions of the early chapters contain stylistic and logical flaws that detract from the readability and impact of those chapters. In some places these same chapters appear to be more critical of Christian people and institutions than of their ideas. Therefore, the tone of these passages may not contribute to the consensus the author desires. Furthermore, in a book on consensus among evangelicals, especially by an author who has an obvious concern for the poor and for all life, the author should have discussed the growing Christian movement toward a broader prolife perspective that includes opposition to all forms of violence (for example, nuclear arms and hunger).

Aborting Humanity

The book by Davis and Denney, A Time for Compassion, represents this broader prolife perspective. Although the authors concentrate on abortion, they emphasize that being prolife means much more than being antiabortion. Affirming the sanctity of human life, they contend, affects our attitude not only toward the traditional prolife concerns (abortion, infanticide, and euthansia) but also toward hunger, the arms race, the death penalty, and other social issues. Because every life is sacred, Christians must work to protect and improve life in every way possible.

Davis and Denney portray abortion in our culture not only as the killing of unborn children but also as the aborting of innocence (by making uninformed women both its partners and its victims), the denigrating of life (by denying the unborn’s personhood and promoting death), the aborting of truth (through the prevalence of deceit, propaganda, and euphemism), the aborting of love (by leading to infanticide, child abuse, and euthansia), and, finally, the aborting of humanity itself.

A Time for Compassion is a well-written book, rhetorically and substantially powerful. Although at times repetitive and loosely structured, these features do not detract from, but add to, the weight of the book. The authors weave together stories of women and their decisions, the findings of medicine and the social sciences, penetrating social analysis, and challenging theological reflection. In addition, they to evidence pastoral sensitivity, which makes their observations and arguments all the more compelling. In many ways, this is a classic prolife statement, one of the best now in print.

The authors of both books clearly embody in their own lives the conviction, compassion, and action to which they summon the Christian community. Each book, however, is persuasive. Fowler speaks primarily to the mind, Davis and Denney to the heart; but both speak ultimately to the will. For those seeking a biblical perspective on abortion per se, Fowler’s work is recommended. For those desiring a larger pastoral, theological, and ethical framework within which to understand and act upon the abortion issue, Davis and Denney’s work is mandatory reading. We still await, however, a fully developed, biblically based, consistent prolife book to guide our thinking and living.

Love And Mouthwash

Television: Manna from Hollywood? by Quentin Schultze (Zondervan, 160 pp.; $6.95, paper).

For Calvin College professor Quentin Schultze, television is the major storyteller of our time, reflecting and shaping our visions, values, and world views. “The Cosby Show” and “Dallas” are the Iliad and Odyssey of this century. Even commercials “spin triumphal tales of lonely hearts who have found love apparently by using the right mouthwash or toothpaste.” Stories, whether light or serious, provide legitimate pleasure. They may be an escape from pain, but often we find them pointing us back into our world with new ideas and viewpoints. Public storytelling reaffirms a world view, much as the stories of Passover and other biblical feasts recalled the truths of redemptive history. By expressing views common to the masses, television functions in a way similar to the Bible (and therefore threatens to replace it). Among the beliefs often reaffirmed: Good guys will win, bad guys will come to justice, and human goodness will be displayed.

Schultze explores various TV genres—children’s television, soaps, sitcoms, action shows, westerns, detective stories, rock videos—and examines the world view clash in each between the Christian perspective and the basic beliefs of society. He gives his readers a method for judgment rather than a set of answers about particular shows.

Some of Schultze’s detailed judgments are already out of date, but viewers can still use his methods for their own evaluation of this ever-changing medium.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.