Dear friends

Somewhere in the years 1968-1970 when I was ministering as a Staffworker on Australian tertiary campuses, I attended an Intervarsity Fellowship (IVF) annual conference at Bathurst Teachers’ College (one of my almas mater, by the way, and the place I met my future wife Janice Higgs!).

John Stott – the world’s ‘Mr Evangelical’ – was the keynote speaker, and he and I had a long lunch together where we discussed what was then called ‘the charismatic movement’. He’d written his earlier booklet on the subject of the Holy Spirit, and later wrote ‘Baptism and Fullness’. We corresponded a little after that meeting, and perhaps all that was one influence of many which changed the great man’s thinking on this whole subject. You be the judge!

Shalom! Rowland Croucher

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John Stott – “BAPTISM AND FULLNESS’ (A book review by Rowland Croucher)

Subtitled “The Work of the Holy Spirit Today” this excellent book is an expanded revision of Stott’s earlier booklet “The Baptism and Fullness of the Holy Spirit” (1964). Stott has not changed his basic stance on the person and work of the Holy Spirit in the later work, but simply expanded his former booklet in the light of the burgeoning “Charismatic movement”.

The whole church, says Stott, is a “charismatic community”. Every member of the community has a ‘charisma’, and in some cases more than one. The so-called “charismatic movement” has arisen, he suggests, as a protest against clericalism (the clerical suppression of the laity) and is a plea for the liberation of the people of God for those roles for which God has gifted them. Far too often the church may be likened to a bus (one driver, many drowsy passengers) than of a body (each member contributing actively to the health of the whole).

Spiritual gifs are given “to edify” others, so some gifts are more valuable than others. Paul urged the Corinthians to desire earnestly “the higher gifts” (1 Cor 12:31), i.e. those that “build up the church” (I Cor 14:12). By this criterion the teaching gifts have the highest value, for nothing builds up Christians like God’s truth; thus it is not surprising to find a teaching gift or gifts at the top of each of the five NT lists. And says Stott, “all over the world today churches are spiritually undernourished owing to the shortage of biblical expositors” (p112).

What, then, about the gift of “tongues”? Stott believes the “tongues” phenomenon in Acts and that in Corinth are the same: a linguistic gift for multilingual situations. All gifts are “service-gifts”, he says. “What would one think of a believer with a teaching gift who uses it only to give himself private instruction, or of someone with a healing gift who healed none but himself? ….. So it seems to me that there must be a note of irony. If not of sarcasm, in Paul’s voice as he writes of the tongue-speaker edifying himself”.

The key pages vis-à-vis the so-called “charismatic movement” are 73-74. Stott has “an exhortation” first to those sometimes called “charisphobiacs”: “It would be easy, through fear or pride or envy to question or even deny the validity of such (perhaps “deeper’ unusual) experiences when claimed by others. But is would be wrong for us to do so… Provided that there is nothing in the claimed experience which is contrary to Scripture, and provided that the fruits of the experience seem to be beneficial to the believer and edifying to the church, we must be humbly ready to recognise the unusual operation of the Holy Spirit in others… We all need in these days in which the Holy Spirit seems to be stirring, to be sensitive to what He may be saying an doing among us.”

Then to those who have been given some unusual visitation of the Spirit, Stott offers this wise advice: “It is understandable that you should want to bear witness to what God has done for you. But I beg you not to seek to stereotype everybody’s spiritual experience, or even to imagine that the Holy Spirit necessarily purposes to give to others what he has given to you. It is the spiritual graces which should be common to all Christians, not spiritual gifts or spiritual experiences. In a word, let your experience lead you to worship and praise; but let your exhortation to others be grounded not upon your experiences but upon Scripture. More particularly, I would appeal to you not to urge upon people a ‘baptism in the Spirit’ as a second and subsequent experience entirely distinct from conversion, for this cannot be proved from Scripture.”

Wesley, of course, was a proponent of the “crisis” rather than the “process” idea in holiness. Actually in some sense he advocated both: “There is a slow growth in the womb before birth and there is the long growth after birth, but birth itself is sudden .It is like that in the things of the Spirit. There is a maturing before the moment, and there can be long development after the moment, but the moment (for spiritual holiness) is a moment – and that moment can be now!”

Many of my Pentecostal and “charismatic” friends are finding an increasing affinity with Wesley’s views.

I would strongly urge everyone to get hold of Stott’s book, and read it carefully. Perhaps it could be the basis for useful group discussions between persons with differing views on the whole question. It still seems a pity to me that this issue is divisive: surely we ought to be big enough to listen to each other, and grant that the sovereign Spirit can work today in diverse ways, as he always has!

Rowland Croucher

Baptism and Fullness by John R W Stott (IVP November 1975, 119 pages)