Читать книгу We Evangelicals and Our Mission - Lianna Davis - Страница 9

Almost two thousand years after the coming of Christ and approaching five hundred years since the Reformation, two highly-placed Anglican clerics decided to debate the “essentials” of evangelical Christianity!1 Liberal David L. Edwards, provost of London’s Southwark Cathedral and former editor of the prestigious SCM Press, and evangelical John R. W. Stott, rector emeritus of All Soul’s Church in London and former chaplain to Her Majesty the Queen, were at odds on some of the most basic and defining doctrines of the Christian faith. Pressed by his protagonist, Stott ultimately resorts to some quite crude but illuminating metaphors to illustrate the fundamental difference between the evangelicals and liberals. He writes,

[The liberal] seems to me to resemble (no offence meant!) a gas-filled balloon, which takes off and rises into the air, buoyant, free, directed only by its own built-in navigational responses to wind and pressure, but entirely unrestrained from earth. For the liberal mind has no anchorage; it is accountable only to itself.

The Evangelical seems to me to resemble a kite, which can also take off, fly great distances and soar to great heights, while all the time being tethered to earth. For the Evangelical mind is held by revelation. Without doubt it often needs a longer string, for we are not renowned for creative thinking. Nevertheless, at least in the ideal, I see Evangelicals as finding true freedom under the authority of revealed truth, and combining a radical mind and lifestyle with a conservative commitment to Scripture.2

This book is all about the difference between liberal “gas-filled balloons” and evangelical “kites” viewed in terms of Stott’s metaphors: (1) the “stake” of authoritative Scripture, (2) the “tethers” of doctrinal/creedal statements that tie beliefs and behaviors to Scripture, and (3) the “cords” (or “strings”) that evangelicals employ to control evangelical “kites” of witness and work (my elaboration of Stott’s phrase “tethered to earth”).

1. Edwards and Stott, Evangelical Essentials.

2. Edwards and Stott, Evangelical Essentials, 106 (emphasis mine).