Part one see: https://dayanandbharati.in/the-tale-of-two-converts-2/
Timothy Dudley-Smith, John Stott: The Making of a leader, England, IVP, (1999) 2002.
…Nearly ten years after his tribute to Bash {E.J.H. Nash}, he was interviewed for the Christian Bookseller and spoke of his father’s attitude at this time:
He really couldn’t take having a pacifist son, so he didn’t actually speak to me for two years. My mother was very torn, because we were an affectionate family.
When in the holidays I would turn to embrace my father, he would turn away from me. My mother wanted to be loyal to my father while at the same time wanting to be understanding towards me.
She wrote several long letters begging me to join up.{Terry Lovell, ‘The Times and Travels of an Ordinary Christian’, The Christian Bookseller, May/June, 1992}
It is not hard to see how such an experience would leave its mark upon a man. Although after the war a better relationship with his father was gradually restored, it was never on quite the same footing of mutual affection and confidence. Looking back, John felt in later life that he had been ‘very insensitive in the way I handled it with my parents’ {Taped interview, 3/32} and certainly it is not difficult, reading the correspondence that remains, to feel deeply for Arnold Stott, faced with intransigence and what must have seemed perilously like blind willful obstinacy and self-delusion in his son.[emphasis added]—p. 162
A few days later, with no immediate prospect of being able to talk with his father face to face, John Stott wrote a long personal letter … I have made up my mind’…..
The reasons for my decision are as follows:
- Obedience to my call. Whatever you may think of it, I have had a definite and irresistible call from God to serve Him in the Church. During the last three years I have become increasingly conscious of this call, and my life now could be summed up in the words ‘separated unto the gospel of God’. There is no higher service; I ask no other.
Mummy said recently in one of her letters: ‘At present other things come first’. This to me is where her argument breaks down. In my life other things do not and cannot come first. I am not at liberty to put other things first, for I am ‘separated unto the gospel of God’.
As for the family’s idea that a matter of 2 or 3 years ‘cannot make all that difference’ – do you think that 2 or 3 years during which I reject my most sacred calling really ‘makes no difference’? It is largely a matter of principle. Were I to do any service, good or bad, which is not directed towards the one object of ‘preaching the gospel’ in days to come & I should be laying aside the authority of God.
- Service to my country. This may sound paradoxical at first, but let me explain: Mummy said in another letter: ‘give prior claim to service to the country’. Do you then think that I would not be serving my country by going on with my course for ordination? The Government have said the contrary, and it seems self-evident to me that I should be serving my country for the following reasons: (p.165)
(i)….The Times said on 16.1.41: ‘A recent letter … reaffirmed the truth that no scheme of national reconstruction can be adequate which does not include such changes in our system of national education as will make it … definitely Christian in purpose.’ Who is to effect this if it isn’t men trained for the purpose? … Wavell said in December: ‘After final victory will come the real struggle to build up a world worthy of the principles we are fighting for – freedom and truth and peace and goodwill.’ Who is to set forth these principles if it isn’t men who have clung to them and are trained and willing to preach them whatever the cost?
(ii) The country is best served if its citizens are obeying God. The country’s best place is in the centre of God’s will, and it will not attain that place unless its individual citizens are fulfilling God’s will in their own lives: I have already told you how this affects me.
(iii) You are fighting a physical war against ‘flesh and blood’ in order that man may have peace with man. I am fighting a spiritual war against ‘principalities and power’ in order that man may have peace with God. If man is in a state of ‘peace with God’, it follows inevitably and at once that he is in a state of peace with his fellow-men, because ‘the fruit of the Spirit is love’. But even if men were in a state of peace with each other it would not necessarily follow that they would be in a state of peace with God, except in so far as men cannot live in peace with each other unless they are right with God, which is of course the fundamental cause of the chaos in Europe today. I have been called to the one war, you no doubt to the other. Both are service to our country. I respect you for your service; will you respect me for mine?(p. 166) (italics original)
….But even while the news of his exemption eluded him, his father was still unrelenting over the question of further financial support. Lily {Stott’s mother} sent him a pencilled letter the following week:
….Johntie, he feels that his conscience will not allow him to continue paying for your education at Cambridge after this term. I’m afraid, dear one, that the whole family thinks that you should do some form of definitely national service in country’s emergency. A capable, fit, and talented man like you should not continue your life as it is when so many others are having to give up everything for the time being. I still hope that you may come round to this point of view – the war has touched you not at all yet – it is so full of tragedy for so many people – there is much that you could do to help….(p.172) As I have said before – the work nearest your heart can be continued alongside the national work – I can’t help feeling that later you will regret it very much if now you detach and shut yourself away from any participation in the world’s crisis….(p. 173)
April 27th was John Stott’s twentieth birthday. His mother sent a cake made with five eggs….John Stott wrote to his father to thank him for a cheque for ₤71 to meet his college bills….: (p.173)
… You are very anxious, I know, along with the rest of the family, and that I should do some sort of national service, and I have sought to show you all from the beginning that I do not feel able to do this….(p…)
This means that I should be called up, brought before a military tribunal as a conscientious objector, and would be ordered to do one of three things:
- Fight
- Do non-combatant service
- Return to Cambridge.
I would agree to the third, but would refuse to do (a) and (b), and that, unpleasant as it may be to all of us, would mean prison. Therefore the alternative before me is not
National Service or Cambridge but Cambridge or Prison.
2.Service to the Country. Here let me answer a point Mummy raised in a recent letter. She said that the Church and both archbishops advocated the doing of national service. This however only states half the truth. The Church and the Government are agreed about the position of ordinands, that they should continue uninterrupted their ordination course so that the country may not be destitute of such men in years to come….(p.174)(italics original)
….But Daddy I want you to realise that I must follow my call. Men down the ages have had to face similar problems, and those who have yielded to the will of the majority have often gone under and never come to the surface again. And I know enough history to know that it’s the men who have stood up for their ideals and championed their cause, come weal come woe, that have left the world a better place. I would not presume to claim equality with the might, but I am seeking to follow their example in my own sincere and humble way. I can do no more, and I ask to be respected.
Think not that I am going to live a normal, peaceful, comfortable, secluded life. I’m going to throw myself body and soul into the struggle for right. My desire is to see the world a better place, and I will not spare myself in this endeavour….
As for finance – you may not feel able to go on supporting me. But were you to be tolerant and magnanimous enough to do it, there will never lack gratitude in your
Ever loving son,
John47 (p. 175) (italics original)
Finally, on 19 May, John Stott received by priority telegram the long-awaited answer as to his father’s continuing support:
AM CONSENTING BUT WITH GREAT RELUCTANCE AND UNHAPPINESS. STOTT. (p.176)
…For the father, moving every day among the causalities of war, and with both his daughters active in the service of their country, it is not surprising that grief and frustration at his son’s continuing obstinacy should be a cause of bitterness and alienation. Granted that they had few opportunities of seeing each other, John Stott’s recollections of how his father would not speak to him for two years, and would even reject the natural advances of affection to which father and son had been accustomed, still make painful reading fifty years later. To an undergraduate inevitably insecure, isolated in what seemed to him a stand for conscience’s sake (and perhaps tempted to dramatize his situation), caught unwittingly in the toils of the Government war-machine, living week by week with hope deferred, it must have been a searing experience….(p.176)
…John Stott became a member of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship. But the day would come when his own study of the Scriptures would carry him beyond any simplistic viewpoint and he would resign his membership because he no longer believed that the pacifist position was the only possible one for a Christian. The issue was sharpened for him by the thermo-nuclear debate of the 1960s; and in wrestling with these issues he came to believe that ‘we cannot say that war is wrong in itself. War has sometimes been, and may again be, the weapon of God’s wrath and righteous judgment.’{JRWS papers. Letter dated 4 November 1939} Twenty years later, because of the indiscriminate nature of nuclear weapons, he wrote and spoke unequivocally as a ‘nuclear pacifist’, though admitting the moral and political anomalies of such a position.56 Had a biblical theologian been able to unfold to him in (p.177) his days at Trinity the apostolic teaching on the authority of the State, and the Christian theory of the ‘Just War’, then perhaps all this estrangement, loneliness and heart-ache might have been avoided. But history is shaped, not by what might have been but by what was. And in the over-ruling providence of God, it is hardly fanciful to see in these fiery trials the forging of a character fitted to meet a lifetime of challenges ahead.[emphasis added](p.178)
- See, for example his interview with Alex Mitchell, ‘Struggling with Contemporary Issues’, Third Way, February 1982; Stott, ‘Nuclear weapons change the possibility of war’ in Kirk (ed.) (Kirk, Andrew. Handling Problems of Peace and War, London: Marshall Pickering, 1988), p. 46. John Stott expounds the theory of the ‘Just War’ in ‘Calling for Peacemakers in a Nuclear Age’, All Souls Papers, 11 November 1979; but most recently in chapter 5, Stott (The Cross of Christ, Leicester: IVP, 1988).—p.475
Timothy Dudley-Smith, John Stott: The Making of a leader, England, IVP, (1999) 2002.
…Nearly ten years after his tribute to Bash {E.J.H. Nash}, he was interviewed for the Christian Bookseller and spoke of his father’s attitude at this time:
He really couldn’t take having a pacifist son, so he didn’t actually speak to me for two years. My mother was very torn, because we were an affectionate family.
When in the holidays I would turn to embrace my father, he would turn away from me. My mother wanted to be loyal to my father while at the same time wanting to be understanding towards me.
She wrote several long letters begging me to join up.{Terry Lovell, ‘The Times and Travels of an Ordinary Christian’, The Christian Bookseller, May/June, 1992}
It is not hard to see how such an experience would leave its mark upon a man. Although after the war a better relationship with his father was gradually restored, it was never on quite the same footing of mutual affection and confidence. Looking back, John felt in later life that he had been ‘very insensitive in the way I handled it with my parents’ {Taped interview, 3/32} and certainly it is not difficult, reading the correspondence that remains, to feel deeply for Arnold Stott, faced with intransigence and what must have seemed perilously like blind willful obstinacy and self-delusion in his son.[emphasis added]—p. 162
A few days later, with no immediate prospect of being able to talk with his father face to face, John Stott wrote a long personal letter … I have made up my mind’…..
The reasons for my decision are as follows:
- Obedience to my call. Whatever you may think of it, I have had a definite and irresistible call from God to serve Him in the Church. During the last three years I have become increasingly conscious of this call, and my life now could be summed up in the words ‘separated unto the gospel of God’. There is no higher service; I ask no other.
Mummy said recently in one of her letters: ‘At present other things come first’. This to me is where her argument breaks down. In my life other things do not and cannot come first. I am not at liberty to put other things first, for I am ‘separated unto the gospel of God’.
As for the family’s idea that a matter of 2 or 3 years ‘cannot make all that difference’ – do you think that 2 or 3 years during which I reject my most sacred calling really ‘makes no difference’? It is largely a matter of principle. Were I to do any service, good or bad, which is not directed towards the one object of ‘preaching the gospel’ in days to come & I should be laying aside the authority of God.
- Service to my country. This may sound paradoxical at first, but let me explain: Mummy said in another letter: ‘give prior claim to service to the country’. Do you then think that I would not be serving my country by going on with my course for ordination? The Government have said the contrary, and it seems self-evident to me that I should be serving my country for the following reasons: (p.165)
(i)….The Times said on 16.1.41: ‘A recent letter … reaffirmed the truth that no scheme of national reconstruction can be adequate which does not include such changes in our system of national education as will make it … definitely Christian in purpose.’ Who is to effect this if it isn’t men trained for the purpose? … Wavell said in December: ‘After final victory will come the real struggle to build up a world worthy of the principles we are fighting for – freedom and truth and peace and goodwill.’ Who is to set forth these principles if it isn’t men who have clung to them and are trained and willing to preach them whatever the cost?
(ii) The country is best served if its citizens are obeying God. The country’s best place is in the centre of God’s will, and it will not attain that place unless its individual citizens are fulfilling God’s will in their own lives: I have already told you how this affects me.
(iii) You are fighting a physical war against ‘flesh and blood’ in order that man may have peace with man. I am fighting a spiritual war against ‘principalities and power’ in order that man may have peace with God. If man is in a state of ‘peace with God’, it follows inevitably and at once that he is in a state of peace with his fellow-men, because ‘the fruit of the Spirit is love’. But even if men were in a state of peace with each other it would not necessarily follow that they would be in a state of peace with God, except in so far as men cannot live in peace with each other unless they are right with God, which is of course the fundamental cause of the chaos in Europe today. I have been called to the one war, you no doubt to the other. Both are service to our country. I respect you for your service; will you respect me for mine?(p. 166) (italics original)
….But even while the news of his exemption eluded him, his father was still unrelenting over the question of further financial support. Lily {Stott’s mother} sent him a pencilled letter the following week:
….Johntie, he feels that his conscience will not allow him to continue paying for your education at Cambridge after this term. I’m afraid, dear one, that the whole family thinks that you should do some form of definitely national service in country’s emergency. A capable, fit, and talented man like you should not continue your life as it is when so many others are having to give up everything for the time being. I still hope that you may come round to this point of view – the war has touched you not at all yet – it is so full of tragedy for so many people – there is much that you could do to help….(p.172) As I have said before – the work nearest your heart can be continued alongside the national work – I can’t help feeling that later you will regret it very much if now you detach and shut yourself away from any participation in the world’s crisis….(p. 173)
April 27th was John Stott’s twentieth birthday. His mother sent a cake made with five eggs….John Stott wrote to his father to thank him for a cheque for ₤71 to meet his college bills….: (p.173)
… You are very anxious, I know, along with the rest of the family, and that I should do some sort of national service, and I have sought to show you all from the beginning that I do not feel able to do this….(p…)
This means that I should be called up, brought before a military tribunal as a conscientious objector, and would be ordered to do one of three things:
- Fight
- Do non-combatant service
- Return to Cambridge.
I would agree to the third, but would refuse to do (a) and (b), and that, unpleasant as it may be to all of us, would mean prison. Therefore the alternative before me is not
National Service or Cambridge but Cambridge or Prison.
2.Service to the Country. Here let me answer a point Mummy raised in a recent letter. She said that the Church and both archbishops advocated the doing of national service. This however only states half the truth. The Church and the Government are agreed about the position of ordinands, that they should continue uninterrupted their ordination course so that the country may not be destitute of such men in years to come….(p.174)(italics original)
….But Daddy I want you to realise that I must follow my call. Men down the ages have had to face similar problems, and those who have yielded to the will of the majority have often gone under and never come to the surface again. And I know enough history to know that it’s the men who have stood up for their ideals and championed their cause, come weal come woe, that have left the world a better place. I would not presume to claim equality with the might, but I am seeking to follow their example in my own sincere and humble way. I can do no more, and I ask to be respected.
Think not that I am going to live a normal, peaceful, comfortable, secluded life. I’m going to throw myself body and soul into the struggle for right. My desire is to see the world a better place, and I will not spare myself in this endeavour….
As for finance – you may not feel able to go on supporting me. But were you to be tolerant and magnanimous enough to do it, there will never lack gratitude in your
Ever loving son,
John47 (p. 175) (italics original)
Finally, on 19 May, John Stott received by priority telegram the long-awaited answer as to his father’s continuing support:
AM CONSENTING BUT WITH GREAT RELUCTANCE AND UNHAPPINESS. STOTT. (p.176)
…For the father, moving every day among the causalities of war, and with both his daughters active in the service of their country, it is not surprising that grief and frustration at his son’s continuing obstinacy should be a cause of bitterness and alienation. Granted that they had few opportunities of seeing each other, John Stott’s recollections of how his father would not speak to him for two years, and would even reject the natural advances of affection to which father and son had been accustomed, still make painful reading fifty years later. To an undergraduate inevitably insecure, isolated in what seemed to him a stand for conscience’s sake (and perhaps tempted to dramatize his situation), caught unwittingly in the toils of the Government war-machine, living week by week with hope deferred, it must have been a searing experience….(p.176)
…John Stott became a member of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship. But the day would come when his own study of the Scriptures would carry him beyond any simplistic viewpoint and he would resign his membership because he no longer believed that the pacifist position was the only possible one for a Christian. The issue was sharpened for him by the thermo-nuclear debate of the 1960s; and in wrestling with these issues he came to believe that ‘we cannot say that war is wrong in itself. War has sometimes been, and may again be, the weapon of God’s wrath and righteous judgment.’{JRWS papers. Letter dated 4 November 1939} Twenty years later, because of the indiscriminate nature of nuclear weapons, he wrote and spoke unequivocally as a ‘nuclear pacifist’, though admitting the moral and political anomalies of such a position.56 Had a biblical theologian been able to unfold to him in (p.177) his days at Trinity the apostolic teaching on the authority of the State, and the Christian theory of the ‘Just War’, then perhaps all this estrangement, loneliness and heart-ache might have been avoided. But history is shaped, not by what might have been but by what was. And in the over-ruling providence of God, it is hardly fanciful to see in these fiery trials the forging of a character fitted to meet a lifetime of challenges ahead.[emphasis added](p.178)
- See, for example his interview with Alex Mitchell, ‘Struggling with Contemporary Issues’, Third Way, February 1982; Stott, ‘Nuclear weapons change the possibility of war’ in Kirk (ed.) (Kirk, Andrew. Handling Problems of Peace and War, London: Marshall Pickering, 1988), p. 46. John Stott expounds the theory of the ‘Just War’ in ‘Calling for Peacemakers in a Nuclear Age’, All Souls Papers, 11 November 1979; but most recently in chapter 5, Stott (The Cross of Christ, Leicester: IVP, 1988).—p.475
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