Title: BASIC CHRISTIANITY
AUTHOR: JOHN R.W. STOTT
PUBLISHER: OMF LITERATURE INC. PHILLIPINES, 1999
No. of pages: 222
Basic Christianity is a book of facts, which presents the Gospel under the subheadings: 1. Christ’s person, 2. Christ’s work, 3. Man’s need and 4. Man’s response.
The opening line of book is the core premise upon which book is written.
It says, ‘Hostile to the Church, friendly to Jesus Christ.’ These words describe large numbers of people, especially young people, today. The person and teaching of Jesus have not lost their appeal. For one thing, He was Himself an anti-establishment figure, and some of His words had revolutionary overtones. His ideals appear to have been incorruptible. He breathed love and peace where ever He went. And, for another thing, He invariably practiced what He preached.
ゐ But was He true?
ゐ Can we believe that He was also in some sense,’ God’?
ゐ Is not the deity of Jesus a rather picturesque Christian superstition?
ゐ Is there any evidence for the amazing Christian assertion that the carpenter of Nazareth was the unique Son of God?
ゐ Supposing Jesus was the Son of God, is basic Christianity merely an acceptance of this fact?
The answer of these questions is the birth of “Basic Christianity.”
Is basic Christianity the belief that Jesus is the Son of God who came to be the saviour of the World? Author says:
No, it is not even that. To assent to His divine person, to acknowledge man’s need of salvation, and to believe in Christ’s saving work are not enough.
Christianity is not just a creed; it involves action.
Our intellectual belief may be beyond criticism; but we have to translate our beliefs into deeds.
What must we do?
We must commit ourselves, heart and mind, soul and will, home and life, personally and unreservedly to Jesus Christ. We must humble ourselves before Him. We must trust in Him as our Saviour and submit to Him as our Lord; and then go on to take our place as loyal members of the church and responsible citizens in the community.
The book is thought provoking. It is not a collection of pious thoughts but rather historical facts, which proves the historicity of Jesus’ existence. The book will work as a tool for every believing Christian to place Christian fundamental to the non-believers. The book deals on proving various aspects of Christian faiths, which is directly related to Jesus. At this Knowledge worker age our emotion alone is not sufficient in believing but one should be critical about our own belief/ faith. This is what the book envisages for.
Instead of elaborating the ideas from the book I will put main points in systematic order:
ゐ The religion of the Bible is a religion of the initiative of God.
ゐ Before man existed, God acted. Before man stirs himself to seek God, God has sought man.
ゐ God has created. God has spoken. God has acted. These three different spheres form a summary of the religion of the Bible.
ゐ Man comes to know God not through his own wisdom but through God’s word, not through human reason but through divine revelation.
ゐ The Christian good news is not confined to a declaration that God has spoken. It also affirms that God has acted.
ゐ Men needed to be delivered, not from slavery in Egypt or from exile in Babylon, but from the exile and the slavery of sin. It was for this principally that Jesus Christ came. He came as a saviour.
ゐ Christianity is a religion of salvation.
ゐ God has sought us. He is still seeking us. We must seek Him. Indeed, God’s chief quarrel with man is that he does not seek.
ゐ We must seek diligently, honestly, obediently.
ゐ If apathy is a hindrance to some, pride is an even greater and commoner hindrance to others.
ゐ In seeking God we have to be prepared not only to revise our ideas but to reform our lives.
ゐ The Christian message has a moral challenge.
ゐ You cannot fix God at the end of a telescope or a microscope and say ‘How interesting!’ God is not interesting. He is deeply upsetting. The same is true of Jesus Christ. (It is upsetting indeed, where am I?)
ゐ We can know whether Jesus Christ was true or false, whether His teaching was human or divine but it rests on A MORAL condition. We have to be ready not just to believe, but also to obey. We must be prepared to do God’s will when He makes it known.
ゐ We must cast aside apathy, pride, prejudice and sin, and seek God in scorn of the consequences. Of all these hindrances to effective search the last two are the hardest to overcome, INTELLECTUAL PREJUDICE AND MORAL SELF WILL. Both are expressions of fear, and fear is the greatest enemy of Truth. Fear paralysis our search.
ゐ We know that to find God and to accept Jesus Christ would be a very inconvenient experience. It would involve the rethinking of our whole outlook on life and readjustment of our whole manner of life.
ゐ WE DO NOT FIND BECAUSE WE DO NOT SEEK. WE DO NOT SEEK BECAUSE WE DO NOT WANT TO FIND, AND WE KNOW THAT THE WAY TO BE CERTAIN OF NOT FINDING IS NOT TO SEEK. (Have I really accepted Christ?)
ゐ Take Christ from Christianity, and you disembowel it; there is practically nothing left. Christ is the center of Christianity’ all else is circumference.
ゐ He was the Father’s son and that He had come to inaugurate the kingdom. Entry into the kingdom depended on men’s response to Him.
ゐ He did more than issue an invitation; He uttered a command. ‘Come to Me,’ He said, and Follow Me’.
ゐ If to believe in Him was man’s first duty, not to believe in Him was his chief sin.
ゐ He was not just another signpost, but the destination to which the signposts had led.
ゐ Life is an enigma. Whether it is physical life or spiritual, its nature is as baffling as its origin. We can neither define what it is nor state where it comes from. We can only call it a divine gift. It is this gift, which Jesus claimed to bestow.
ゐ We cannot talk of Jesus in comparative, or even superlative terms. To us it is a question not of comparison, but of contrast.
ゐ More the Christian grows in Christlikeness; the more he perceives the vastness of the distance, which still separates him from Christ.
ゐ His birth was natural, but His conception was supernatural. His death was natural, but His resurrection was supernatural. His miraculous conception and resurrection do not prove His deity, but they are congruous with it.
ゐ The Church was founded on resurrection. Disprove the resurrection, and the Church would have collapsed.
ゐ It was the resurrection, which transformed Peter’s fear into courage, and James’ doubt into faith.
ゐ His competence lies in His deity; our need lies in our sins.
ゐ Sin is fundamentally the exaltation of self at the expense of God.
ゐ It is no good approaching to God with our lips if our hearts are far from Him.
ゐ Whenever our behavior is inconsistent with our belief, or our practice contradicts our preaching, we take God’s name in vain.
ゐ The Sabbath is a day of rest and a day of worship.
ゐ The most terrible result of sin is that it cuts us off from God.
ゐ God is not responsible for the cloud. We are.
ゐ Our sins blot out God’s face from us as effectively as the clouds do the sun.
ゐ Sin not only estranges but it enslaves.
ゐ We have high ideals but weak wills. We want to live a good life. But we are chained in the prison of our self-centeredness.
ゐ A lecture will not solve our problem; we need a saviour. The education of the mind is not enough without a change of heart.
ゐ Self-centeredness affects all our behaviour.
ゐ We are always charitable to ourselves and critical of others.
ゐ If only the spirit of self- assertion could be replaced by the spirit of self-sacrifice, our conflicts would cease. And self-sacrifice is what the Bible means by ‘Love’.
ゐ The cross is the symbol of our faith. The Christian faith is ‘the faith of Christ crucified.’
ゐ The inner presence of the Holy Spirit is the spiritual birthright of every Christian. Indeed, if the Holy Spirit has not taken up residence within us, we are not real Christians at all.
ゐ Fundamentally, repentance is a matter neither of emotion nor of speech. It is an inward change of mind and attitude towards sin, which leads to a change of behaviour.
ゐ To make Christ Lord is to bring every department of our public and private lives under His control.
ゐ Which side of the door is Jesus Christ? Is he inside or outside? That is the crucial issue.
ゐ Becoming a Christian is one thing and being a Christian is another.
ゐ The balanced Christian who takes Scripture for his guide will seek to live equally and simultaneously ‘in Christ’ and ‘in World’.
Final note:
The mind has been provoked with the out of the box thoughts/ thinking. The statement that Becoming and being a Christian will make a great difference has challenged me. That Christianity is not a matter of faith alone but our faith in Jesus should be reflected in our actions/ deeds. The book has hit the mind, which I know will surely bring about the change in my attitude and behaviour.
AUTHOR: JOHN R.W. STOTT
PUBLISHER: OMF LITERATURE INC. PHILLIPINES, 1999
No. of pages: 222
Basic Christianity is a book of facts, which presents the Gospel under the subheadings: 1. Christ’s person, 2. Christ’s work, 3. Man’s need and 4. Man’s response.
The opening line of book is the core premise upon which book is written.
It says, ‘Hostile to the Church, friendly to Jesus Christ.’ These words describe large numbers of people, especially young people, today. The person and teaching of Jesus have not lost their appeal. For one thing, He was Himself an anti-establishment figure, and some of His words had revolutionary overtones. His ideals appear to have been incorruptible. He breathed love and peace where ever He went. And, for another thing, He invariably practiced what He preached.
ゐ But was He true?
ゐ Can we believe that He was also in some sense,’ God’?
ゐ Is not the deity of Jesus a rather picturesque Christian superstition?
ゐ Is there any evidence for the amazing Christian assertion that the carpenter of Nazareth was the unique Son of God?
ゐ Supposing Jesus was the Son of God, is basic Christianity merely an acceptance of this fact?
The answer of these questions is the birth of “Basic Christianity.”
Is basic Christianity the belief that Jesus is the Son of God who came to be the saviour of the World? Author says:
No, it is not even that. To assent to His divine person, to acknowledge man’s need of salvation, and to believe in Christ’s saving work are not enough.
Christianity is not just a creed; it involves action.
Our intellectual belief may be beyond criticism; but we have to translate our beliefs into deeds.
What must we do?
We must commit ourselves, heart and mind, soul and will, home and life, personally and unreservedly to Jesus Christ. We must humble ourselves before Him. We must trust in Him as our Saviour and submit to Him as our Lord; and then go on to take our place as loyal members of the church and responsible citizens in the community.
The book is thought provoking. It is not a collection of pious thoughts but rather historical facts, which proves the historicity of Jesus’ existence. The book will work as a tool for every believing Christian to place Christian fundamental to the non-believers. The book deals on proving various aspects of Christian faiths, which is directly related to Jesus. At this Knowledge worker age our emotion alone is not sufficient in believing but one should be critical about our own belief/ faith. This is what the book envisages for.
Instead of elaborating the ideas from the book I will put main points in systematic order:
ゐ The religion of the Bible is a religion of the initiative of God.
ゐ Before man existed, God acted. Before man stirs himself to seek God, God has sought man.
ゐ God has created. God has spoken. God has acted. These three different spheres form a summary of the religion of the Bible.
ゐ Man comes to know God not through his own wisdom but through God’s word, not through human reason but through divine revelation.
ゐ The Christian good news is not confined to a declaration that God has spoken. It also affirms that God has acted.
ゐ Men needed to be delivered, not from slavery in Egypt or from exile in Babylon, but from the exile and the slavery of sin. It was for this principally that Jesus Christ came. He came as a saviour.
ゐ Christianity is a religion of salvation.
ゐ God has sought us. He is still seeking us. We must seek Him. Indeed, God’s chief quarrel with man is that he does not seek.
ゐ We must seek diligently, honestly, obediently.
ゐ If apathy is a hindrance to some, pride is an even greater and commoner hindrance to others.
ゐ In seeking God we have to be prepared not only to revise our ideas but to reform our lives.
ゐ The Christian message has a moral challenge.
ゐ You cannot fix God at the end of a telescope or a microscope and say ‘How interesting!’ God is not interesting. He is deeply upsetting. The same is true of Jesus Christ. (It is upsetting indeed, where am I?)
ゐ We can know whether Jesus Christ was true or false, whether His teaching was human or divine but it rests on A MORAL condition. We have to be ready not just to believe, but also to obey. We must be prepared to do God’s will when He makes it known.
ゐ We must cast aside apathy, pride, prejudice and sin, and seek God in scorn of the consequences. Of all these hindrances to effective search the last two are the hardest to overcome, INTELLECTUAL PREJUDICE AND MORAL SELF WILL. Both are expressions of fear, and fear is the greatest enemy of Truth. Fear paralysis our search.
ゐ We know that to find God and to accept Jesus Christ would be a very inconvenient experience. It would involve the rethinking of our whole outlook on life and readjustment of our whole manner of life.
ゐ WE DO NOT FIND BECAUSE WE DO NOT SEEK. WE DO NOT SEEK BECAUSE WE DO NOT WANT TO FIND, AND WE KNOW THAT THE WAY TO BE CERTAIN OF NOT FINDING IS NOT TO SEEK. (Have I really accepted Christ?)
ゐ Take Christ from Christianity, and you disembowel it; there is practically nothing left. Christ is the center of Christianity’ all else is circumference.
ゐ He was the Father’s son and that He had come to inaugurate the kingdom. Entry into the kingdom depended on men’s response to Him.
ゐ He did more than issue an invitation; He uttered a command. ‘Come to Me,’ He said, and Follow Me’.
ゐ If to believe in Him was man’s first duty, not to believe in Him was his chief sin.
ゐ He was not just another signpost, but the destination to which the signposts had led.
ゐ Life is an enigma. Whether it is physical life or spiritual, its nature is as baffling as its origin. We can neither define what it is nor state where it comes from. We can only call it a divine gift. It is this gift, which Jesus claimed to bestow.
ゐ We cannot talk of Jesus in comparative, or even superlative terms. To us it is a question not of comparison, but of contrast.
ゐ More the Christian grows in Christlikeness; the more he perceives the vastness of the distance, which still separates him from Christ.
ゐ His birth was natural, but His conception was supernatural. His death was natural, but His resurrection was supernatural. His miraculous conception and resurrection do not prove His deity, but they are congruous with it.
ゐ The Church was founded on resurrection. Disprove the resurrection, and the Church would have collapsed.
ゐ It was the resurrection, which transformed Peter’s fear into courage, and James’ doubt into faith.
ゐ His competence lies in His deity; our need lies in our sins.
ゐ Sin is fundamentally the exaltation of self at the expense of God.
ゐ It is no good approaching to God with our lips if our hearts are far from Him.
ゐ Whenever our behavior is inconsistent with our belief, or our practice contradicts our preaching, we take God’s name in vain.
ゐ The Sabbath is a day of rest and a day of worship.
ゐ The most terrible result of sin is that it cuts us off from God.
ゐ God is not responsible for the cloud. We are.
ゐ Our sins blot out God’s face from us as effectively as the clouds do the sun.
ゐ Sin not only estranges but it enslaves.
ゐ We have high ideals but weak wills. We want to live a good life. But we are chained in the prison of our self-centeredness.
ゐ A lecture will not solve our problem; we need a saviour. The education of the mind is not enough without a change of heart.
ゐ Self-centeredness affects all our behaviour.
ゐ We are always charitable to ourselves and critical of others.
ゐ If only the spirit of self- assertion could be replaced by the spirit of self-sacrifice, our conflicts would cease. And self-sacrifice is what the Bible means by ‘Love’.
ゐ The cross is the symbol of our faith. The Christian faith is ‘the faith of Christ crucified.’
ゐ The inner presence of the Holy Spirit is the spiritual birthright of every Christian. Indeed, if the Holy Spirit has not taken up residence within us, we are not real Christians at all.
ゐ Fundamentally, repentance is a matter neither of emotion nor of speech. It is an inward change of mind and attitude towards sin, which leads to a change of behaviour.
ゐ To make Christ Lord is to bring every department of our public and private lives under His control.
ゐ Which side of the door is Jesus Christ? Is he inside or outside? That is the crucial issue.
ゐ Becoming a Christian is one thing and being a Christian is another.
ゐ The balanced Christian who takes Scripture for his guide will seek to live equally and simultaneously ‘in Christ’ and ‘in World’.
Final note:
The mind has been provoked with the out of the box thoughts/ thinking. The statement that Becoming and being a Christian will make a great difference has challenged me. That Christianity is not a matter of faith alone but our faith in Jesus should be reflected in our actions/ deeds. The book has hit the mind, which I know will surely bring about the change in my attitude and behaviour.
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