John Stott’s political friends

In his book Godly Ambition author Alister Chapman, Associate Professor of History at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California, says that as John Stott’s evangelistic renown began to fade in the 1970s, he stayed on the leading edge of conservative evangelicalism by joining the charge toward social and political involvement. Stott’s decision that Christ’s commission to his followers included a mandate to reform society made a great deal of sense.[i] Chapman explains Stott’s political agenda. He writes: ‘Stott started to drift left. Both in England and aboard, the debates Stott entered were dominated by voices with a socialist timbre. In the developing world, where Stott spent more of his time after 1970, anti-colonialism was alive and kicking. Marxism was in vogue among those who lambasted the capitalist imperialism of the West.… By the mid-1970s, Stott was making use of the Marxist language that was becoming more common in universities worldwide. He spoke of churches in Europe and North America ‘which are more bourgeois than Christian, and exhibit not the revolutionary ethic of the kingdom of God but the prudential ethic of middleclass “respectability”. He led at least one mission under the title “The Revolution of Jesus Christ”. As he opened his eyes to global poverty, he was to hear the critique of Western capitalism that non-Western Christians made… All this placed him on the left of most American evangelical leaders, who were keen to defend capitalism during the Cold War. Billy Graham’s wife and mother-of-five Ruth Bell Graham saw this peripatetic bachelor’s call for Christians to live more simply as “bit self-righteous and precious”.’[ii]   Chapman continues: ‘In England too, Stott gravitated to the left and thought he saw opportunities for evangelism. Speaking on Radio Merseyside in 1973 Stott argued that many of the views of Jimmy Reid, the Communist leader of Glasgow’s shipyard workers, were very Christian, before suggesting that there were things that Jesus could offer that Marx could not… In the end, this pushed him to the left of most Anglican evangelicals: he read the left-leaning Guardian while they read the reliably conservative Daily Telegraph.’[iii] [i] Alister Chapman, Godly Ambition, pp120 [ii] Alister Chapman, Godly Ambition, p121 [iii] Alister Chapman, Godly Ambition, pp121-122   We now examine three examples of John Stott’s drift to the political left.

 1. Rev Jim Wallis

Rev Jim Wallis, a prominent advocate of left-wing ideology, during his student days started a magazine called the Post American, that later to became Sojourners. Wallis writes thus of his first meeting with John Stott: ‘My story with John Stott started very early in our history. He had come to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, the seminary where Sojourners started, to teach for the fall semester in 1972. He started to hear things about “the radicals” — the term our fledgling group of seminarians came to be called. He said he wanted to meet with us for an evening of discussion in his faculty apartment. We were a little surprised that this very famous evangelical leader wanted to meet with us, but we saw it as a great opportunity. I will never forget that first meeting and our conversation with John Stott. We were all sitting around in his living room, and he asked me to tell him about our concerns and our vision for Christian faith. Here we were a very rag-tag group of young Christians committed to what we called “radical discipleship.” We suddenly had an evening to share our concerns with an evangelical leader on the level of John Stott. I started speaking, sure he wouldn’t agree with much of what we believed, but determined to give him an earful from the next generation! I talked about the war in Vietnam, American racism, the poverty in our cities and rural areas that people like him, from England and around the world, didn’t know and probably couldn’t imagine — and that these were all issues of faith for us. I spoke about the cultural conformity of the American churches and how that undermined the integrity of the gospel’s presentation. I went on and on, and I’m sure I was over the top several times, being full of youthful passion and self-confidence. Balance, nuance, and humility were sometimes lacking in those early days. Stott just sat in his chair, looking at me intently, but saying nothing as I toured the world of injustice into which a radical gospel must be addressed. Finally, I ran out of things to say. Stott asked, “Are you finished?” Stumbling for a moment, I replied with, “Well, yes, I think I am.” Then he rose from his chair and approached mine. With him standing tall, right front of me in a way that commanded a response, I stood to meet him. John Stott put both his hands on my shoulders and looked me straight in the eyes with a look that captured my full attention. “Jim,” he said, “I believe that you are going to have a great impact for the kingdom of God, and that what your group wants to do will come to have a very significant influence on the church. So I want to support you and stand by you. Please use my name in any way that would be helpful to you.” We had just started publishing the predecessor of Sojourners, called the Post American, and John Stott became one of our very first “Contributing Editors”.’ In 1974, at the Lausanne Congress for World Evangelization, Jim Wallis, together with Ronald Sider, was a part of an ad hoc group of evangelical radicals who drafted the report ‘Theological Implication of Radical Discipleship’, a report that was supported by John Stott.

 2. José Miguez Bonino

In the mid-1970s, Stott set up a London series of annual lectures ostensibly to help his followers develop a Christian worldview. The first set of lectures, delivered by Professor José Miguez Bonino, a Methodist pastor from Argentina, dealt with the topic of ‘Christians and Marxist – the mutual challenge to revolution’. Miguez Bonino was a renowned ecumenist and one of the founders of liberation theology in Latin America. He was committed to a political ethic that focused on the poor, and the defence of human rights. He served as a WCC president from 1975 and 1983, and was one of the editors of the Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement. The political credentials described above appeared to have a great appeal to Stott. The lectures delivered to the London gatherings were later published as a book Christians and Marxist – the mutual challenge to revolution (1976). Miguez Bonino saw both Christianity and Marxism as worldwide religions, and believed that as socially concerned human beings, Christians and Marxists find themselves involved in a common struggle. So Christians and Marxists have to learn to listen to each other, and develop a strategic alliance that responds to a common concern. For Bonino this strategic alliance served the church well for it places the needs of the poor at the centre. He argued that sociological analysis, historical interpretations and the revolutionary ethos of Marxism are indispensible for the revolutionary changes needed in society.[2] Bonino firmly believed that we must “demythologize” the Marx question. He wrote: ‘On this basis I have found it possible to work together with Marxists and others – on questions of human rights, for instance – with clarity and mutual respect.’[3] http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1747 When José Míguez Bonino died in June 2012, Olav Fykse Tveit, general secretary of the WCC wrote:

‘We honour at his death a man of great impact and inspiration for the World Council of Churches, Prof. Dr José Míguez Bonino. He has a very special place in the work of integrating contextual theology and liberation theology into ecumenical theology, and for the coherence and integrity of the WCC.’

Epimedium helps super generic viagra stimulate sexual activity by stimulating the production of androgen hormones. Working of male sex amerikabulteni.com levitra on line enhancement tablets: – The supplements as prescribed by the doctors so as to increase the blood circulation in your body and you will get the picture. one in all these areas, as an example, fungal infection may lead to infectious disease, that causes inflammation and swelling of the lining around the brain and the spinal cord. Physiotherapy has long been a form of treatment ideal for people who have disabilities and viagra tablets 20mg dysfunctions. Erectile dysfunction straight from the source generic levitra from india is said to have spoiled so many lives of so many men. Stott had great sympathy for the ideas of José Míguez Bonino and so provided a London platform from which he could propagate his liberation ideology.

 3. Ronald Sider

Another theologian who had a highly significant impact on the thinking and political views of John Stott was Professor Ronald Sider, the founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, a USA think tank which aims to develop solutions to social and economic problems. Sider’s political views are expressed in Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (1977), which Christianity Today described as one of the most important books of the 20th century. Sider’s views struck a chord with Stott, and this allowed the two men to work closely together in the late 1970s on the Lausanne international consultation on simple lifestyles. The basic premise of Rich Christians is that Third World poverty is caused by the selfishness and exploitation of Christians in the rich West. Sider asserted that Christians in the affluent West have become entangled in a complex web of institutional sin. In Sider’s simplistic view all Christians in the West are trapped in sin, for the economic system that has made them affluent (capitalism) is a system that produces systematic injustice. Sider used Scripture to cultivate the idea that God is on the side of the poor. In his chapter on ‘God and the Poor’, he raises the impertinent question in bold capitals: ‘IS GOD A MARXIST?’ He then discusses, in some detail, how ‘the God of the Bible wreaks horrendous havoc on the rich’, but he does not answer his own question. So the reader is left with the outrageous suggestion that perhaps God is a Marxist, or at least sympathetic to Marxist ideology. Theologian John Robbins of the Trinity Foundation, in his essay ‘Ronald Sider – Contra Deum’, addresses the question: Is Sider a Marxist? Robbins writes:

 ‘It should be obvious that Sider’s agenda is not that of Paul or Christ, but that of Marx or Shaw. His books are full of Marxist terminology such as “economic violence,” “exploitation,” “proletariat,” “social justice,” “structural change,” and “new international economic order.” He even entitles a section in Rich Christians “Is God a Marxist?” His answer is obviously yes, although he hasn’t the honesty to say it, for the “God of the Bible wreaks horrendous havoc on the rich” because “the rich regularly oppress the poor and neglect the needy.” Moreover, “God is on the side of the poor.”

 The Simple Lifestyle Consultation

In March 1981, the Rev Leighton Ford, Chairman of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, wrote to John Stott to share his initial reaction to a draft of the Simple Lifestyle Report. Ford had a number of profound reservations about the radical nature of the document. He wrote: ‘There seems to me to be a pronounced anti-Western bias. On a very quick scan I found over 20 direct or implied references to the West. Most often they appear in the context of a negative judgment. The fewer Third World references are almost uniformly positive. By contrast, I note the omission of any reference to socio-economic problems connected with Marxist countries… I fear the commentary may be thought to have fallen prey to the guilt reaction typical of many Western liberals and to the kind of selective criticism which has distorted the pronouncements of the WCC for years. There appears to me at points to be quite a strong bias against business in the free enterprise system… Western businesses are largely held responsible for the problems of the rest of the world.’ Leighton Ford also expressed his concern that in the Report evangelism was seen as secondary. ‘I have noted that throughout the document as a whole references to justice, relief and development outnumber references to evangelism by about three to one… in the section dealing with our responsibility to the poor, there is strangely no reference to the scriptural statements about preaching the gospel to the poor.’ Leighton Ford was concerned about ambiguities of language. ‘Several of these have referred to the “call for a new international economic order”… This has been taken to be a call for socialism… it has left room for those who wish to be critical to suggest that the statement implies a socialist or Marxist bias…’ The comments of the Rev Leighton Ford, Chairman of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, are remarkable, for they imply that the Simple Lifestyle Report is seeking to promote not evangelical Christianity but Marxist ideology. John Stott’s political alliances with Jim Wallis, José Miguez Bonino and Ronald Sider illustrate his drift to the political left and tell us much about his socialist agenda. [1] Alister Chapman, Godly Ambition, pp120-121 [2] Journal of the American Academy of Religion Volume XLVI, Issue 1, Pp. 97-98. http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/content/XLVI/1/97.extract [3] For Life and Against Death: A Theology That Takes Sides by Jose Miguez-Bonino