Any opinions on John Stott?

Anglican, evangelical, well-respected, prolific writer, ... but nothing recent... died 2011

Many of his commentaries are in the top ten at BestCommentaries

I've had a copy of his Basic Christianity on my to-be-read shelf for quite a while - other books keep crowding it out.

BST authors (like all other commentators) are committed to a serious study of the text in its own integrity. Although a pre-suppositionless approach is impossible (and all the commentators tend to be recognizably Lutheran or Reformed, Protestant or Catholic, liberal or conservative), yet I have known that my first responsibility has been to seek a fresh encounter with the authentic Paul. Karl Barth, in his preface to the first edition of his famous Römerbrief (1918), called this an ‘utter loyalty’ to Paul, which would allow the apostle to say what he does say and would not force him to say what we might want him to say.
This principle has made it necessary for me to listen respectfully to those scholars who are offering us a ‘new perspective on Paul’, especially Professors Krister Stendahl, E. P. Sanders and J. D. G. Dunn. Their claims that both Paul and Palestinian Judaism have been gravely misunderstood have to be taken seriously, although I note that the most recent commentator, the American Jesuit scholar Joseph Fitzmyer, whose work appeared in 1993 and was hailed by the reviewers as ‘monumental’ and ‘magisterial’, almost entirely ignores this debate. All I have felt able to do is to sketch a brief explanation and evaluation of it in my Preliminary Essay.
But expositors should not be antiquarians, living only in the remote past. Reverting to Barth, it was his conviction that Paul, although ‘a child of his age’, who addressed his contemporaries, also ‘speaks to all men of every age’. So he celebrated the ‘creative energy’ with which Luther and Calvin had wrestled with Paul’s message ‘till the walls which separated the sixteenth century from the first became transparent’. And the same dialectical process between ancient text and modern context must continue today, even though many commentators confine themselves to exegesis without application.
I confess that, ever since I became a Christian fifty-six years ago, I have enjoyed what could be termed a ‘love-hate’ relationship with Romans, because of its joyful-painful personal challenges. It began soon after my conversion, with chapter 6 and my longing to experience that ‘death to sin’ which it seemed to promise. I toyed for many years with the fantasy that Christians are supposed to be as insensitive to sin as a corpse is to external stimuli. My final deliverance from this chimera was sealed when I was invited to give the Keswick Convention ‘Bible Readings’ on Romans 5–8 in 1965, which were subsequently published under the title Men Made New.
John Stott, The Message of Romans, p 8​

Rob

 

Stott was a liberal, the same for Sanders and Dunn.

 

I thought hat he was solid on his works such as The Cross of Christ, but he really erred when he changed to believing that God will destroy the lost instead of there being an eternal hell....

 

He was also a big social libbie.

 

He also had a weak view of scripture.

 

Yeah, when 9Marks Dever was asked to name his five favorite Baptists, he immediately named John Stott:

https://www.5minutesinchurchhistory.com/my-5-favorite-baptists-mark-dever/

 

How so?

 

I thought that he held to them being inspired by God, and to be fully authoritative?

 

He pushed all the current liberal social agenda ie climate change, social justice etc.

 

He always criticized conservatives for a literal interpretation of scripture. He also used to complain of the so called "dictation theory which was a pejorative against what he called "fundamentalists".

 

So he held to more of a limited inspired view, as in genesis was myth/, and that not all historical accounts recorded were really real?

 

He claimed to believe in a literal Adam while also holding to evolution. The two are incompatible..

He believed Genesis spoke to the why rather than the how of creation.

 

Sounds like someone who would have been into Theistic evolution!

 

That's about it and the secular evolutionists laugh at that.

 

I would love to see God do a "Job" on them, and ask them questions on how Universe got here, how life was formed, as per evolutionary thinking!

 

I can't help you as much as I would like.
At the little part-time seminary that I attended, Stott was regarded as suspect for three reasons:
1. He was an Anglican.
2. He opposed Dr Lloyd-Jones back in 1966, when the latter issued a call for evangelicals in mixed denominations to come out of them. This has had bad results for the Church in England to this very day.
3. He wondered aloud about the possibility of annihilation rather than eternal punishment.

So I was discouraged from reading his books and pointed away from the Bible Speaks Today commentaries. However, I have since read one or two of them and would say that they are very sound and ideal if you want a serious, but non-technical, commentary.

Stott's greatest work is The Cross. It is absolutely magisterial and I think all Christians should read it. I was less impressed with Issues facing Christians Today, which seems to me to have a compromising spirit in it.

However, by the time Stott died he had outlived most of the people who were about in 1966, and was generally revered by almost all evangelicals as a sort of national treasure.