Inter-Varsity Press

Extract from Chapter 3 Cambridge in Wartime

With Oliver Barclay he would sing in the choir of Trinity College chapel on Sunday evenings before dining in hall and going on to the CICCU evangelistic sermon in Holy Trinity, Charles Simeon’s old church. On Sunday mornings he would sometimes make his way down Hills Road to St. Paul’s, and once or twice to sit under Graham Hobson at the ‘Round’ Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Academic life was interspersed with fire-drills, ARP training, and occasional night-long vigils on the roof of Trinity chapel. But the greater part of his time as an undergraduate was divided between reading for his degree (with the hopes of his tutor, his parents and himself set on a First), the help he could offer to and derive from the CICCU, and his work for camp. He took half-an-hour’s brisk walk for exercise (he played almost no games) and allowed himself by way of recreation to skim briefly through The Times. John Collins, who was to become John Stott’s first deacon, was in Cambridge fresh from Haileybury, doing a short course with the RAF. He had rooms in Clare Memorial Court, between the University Library and the Backs. Morning by morning he would watch John Stott make his way through the Court to the Library, striding purposefully, gown flowing behind him: ‘One could set one’s watch by him.’

Sundays were different: and apart from church, college chapel and the CICCU, each term would include one or more visits to some school Christian Union, which had links with camp. Bedford was one such school which received regular visits, since it could be reached from Cambridge in time for a meeting before lunch, even on the much-reduced wartime Sunday train timetable. A sixth-former recalled one such meeting in June, 1941:
I had only been a personally committed Christian for a few weeks. Like the other C.U. speakers I had heard, John Stott came over to me as one who seemed to know Jesus personally and who loved Him. They were all such happy, free men with a deep, sincere and very clear Christian message. I was drawn to them in a way that I could not have explained at the time. I knew instinctively that here at last was the Christian message as I had always felt it must be – somewhere … All this hit me during those summer months at Bedford School as I recognised a common ‘something’ in the lives of certain boys at the school and, above all, in these C.U. speakers that we heard week by week. John Stott typified them all. He was real. He cared for us boys. He was honest about our questions. What struck me about him also struck my parents who one day invited him to lunch. They found him very attractive.

Many undergraduates attended the meetings, Bible-readings and evangelistic sermons which CICCU organized without ever becoming members; and John Stott himself never accepted membership:

My father said to me before I went up, ‘When you get to Cambridge, you will find an organisation called …’ and then he fumbled, and I think called it the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Mission, or something like that – but went on to say ‘Don’t join it: a lot of anaemic wets’, that was his phrase; so I said to him ‘All right, I won’t, if you don’t want me to’. So I never did join the CICCU, but I went to most of their meetings.

The technical matter of ‘membership’ could probably have been waived to allow for his leadership and guidance of the Union by attendance at its Executive Committee, but Oliver Barclay, President at the time, had the wisdom to see that while John Stott could always be available for consultation over matters of policy, choice of speakers and so on, his time was better spent out of committee rather than in it:

John Stott was a student from 1940 to 1945 and already showed unusual gifts. The CICCU Exec., however, had the sense to send one of their number to tell him that they would not invite him to join the next committee as they believed he should be free from committee meetings. They wanted him to get on with the evangel-istic and pastoral work in which he was exercising an outstanding ministry. As the Exec. met for a whole evening and a substantial time of prayer on Sunday morning each week, as well as involving members in a range of other obligations, this was a sensible policy. It illustrates the fact that the real work of the CICCU was often not carried out by officials or committees. The whole effectiveness of the CICCU depended on the fact that a high proportion of ordinary members, both then and in almost all periods of its history, were active in personal evangelism and in helping one another in every way. The committee were very much looked up to and their example was influential; but they were not the CICCU …

Oliver Barclay was two years older than John Stott. He came from a well-known evangelical family, and was himself the son of CMS missionaries. His father, J. Gurney Barclay, had worked in the family bank for a number of years, intended for fast promotion to a senior post, but had instead responded to the call to serve God on the mission Weld. After some years in Japan he returned home in 1926 to become Far East Secretary of CMS.

For his undergraduate years Oliver had rooms in Great Court; and then stayed in Cambridge to work for a PhD. Basil Atkinson regarded him as one of the great CICCU Presidents:
No account of the CICCU in wartime would be complete without a reference to the presidency of Oliver Barclay … He had come up in 1938 and was one of the few people in the country who obtained at the local tribunal absolute exemption from conscription, as a conscientious objector. I was present at the hearing of the tribunal and was able to note the respect paid by the chairman to his character and to his name, associated for so many generations with godliness, Quakerism and pacifism. He was left free to do what he liked in the certain knowledge, as the chairman actually said, that it would be something useful. And so it was. He went on after his degree to valuable scientific research.

Although drawn to read English (from a love of modern poetry – Eliot and Auden – at school) in fact Oliver Barclay chose to read Natural Sciences with a Part II in Zoology, and for most of the four years that he and John Stott overlapped at Trinity he was working for his doctorate on the mechanics of walking in animals. His childhood faith had failed him in his teenage years; but he was brought back to a personal commitment to Christ in his last year at Gresham’s School through Frank Houghton, the CIM missionary (and later bishop), the uncle of a school friend. But it was the CICCU that helped him towards a firmly conservative view of biblical authority through the Saturday night Bible-readings and the friendship of other CICCU men in Trinity:
Before the first year was over I had been brought to a confidence in the reliability of Scripture (which had all sorts of practical consequences), the beginning of an understanding of Christ’s death and the dawning of an ability to explain the gospel to my friends. In this process the college Bible studies and the Saturday expositions were very important.
By the time Stott arrived I was orthodox though I had to think hard before signing the Basis to join the CICCU Exec. I was at first amazed to meet very intelligent young people who believed the Bible to be fully inspired and reliable. I had thought that was only the old and unthinking.

Another formative influence in the Cambridge of the 1940s was John Wenham, the remarkable curate of St. Matthew’s. John Wenham was some eight years older than John Stott, and had been one of Bash’s camp officers from the early days under canvas in the Isle of Wight. At this time he was working for a London BD, and serving as part-time curate of St. Matthew’s, ‘probably the ugliest church in Cambridge’. John Stott would occasionally speak or preach in the parish. On one occasion he was asked to take as his theme the Last Things, working from the Scofield Reference Bible which Bash had given him and which is marked by a strong emphasis on dispensational theology and the literal fulfilment of an earthly millennial kingdom: ‘I gave a straight address: that Christ was coming in the clouds, that the Rapture would take place, there were the seven years of tribulation, a thousand years of millennium, and then the great White Throne …’ John Wenham, who had already read theology for part of his Cambridge degree, was horrified ‘and showed me the error of my ways’.

In his developed thinking, John Stott would later attribute to the dispensationalist teaching of J. N. Darby and others, popularized in the Scofield Bible, the emphasis on a future ‘kingdom age’ which contributed to the neglect by many evangelical Christians of a sense of Christian social responsibility wider than personal philanthropy. His Issues Facing Christians Today cites this as one of five reasons for ‘the Great Reversal’ in which evangelical Christians ‘mislaid their social conscience’:
Fourthly, there was the spread (specially through J. N. Darby’s teaching and its popularisation in the Scofield Bible) of the premillennial scheme. This portrays the present evil world as beyond improvement or redemption, and predicts instead that it will deteriorate steadily until the coming of Jesus, who will then set up his millennial reign on earth. If the world is getting worse, and if only Jesus at his coming will put it right, the argument runs, there seems no point in trying to reform it meanwhile.

It might well have been John Wenham who introduced John Stott to the massive two-volume biography of Hudson Taylor, a missionary classic which proved formative in shaping the committed discipleship of many young men and women of the time. Bash himself was guarded in recommending this biography, finding its portrayal of overseas mission-ary work (when his own strategic vision was to this country) rather over-whelming; but of the influence of the book there can be no doubt. John Wenham himself sold the two volumes from the camp bookstall to a young David Bentley-Taylor, who was to become one of the most dis-tinguished among the later generation of missionary leaders in mainland China. It was after reading them during a vacation from Cambridge that Shirley Johnson of the Overseas Missionary Fellowship (later Mrs. Bill Lees) ‘told the Lord I would be a missionary if that was what he wanted’. Fifty years later John Stott reflected on what he had learned from Hudson Taylor’s life and work, portrayed in these 1,100 pages:

I can still remember the impact which was made on me, as an undergraduate at Cambridge University in the forties, when I read Hudson Taylor: The Growth of a Soul and The Man Who Believed God. Hudson Taylor’s example challenged me, then as a student, and later as a pastor, to a greater and a wiser faith. He has always seemed to me to exemplify a robust, reasonable and realistic faith. He taught me four important aspects of Christian faith.
First, faith rests on God’s faithfulness. I remember reading that Hudson Taylor liked to render Jesus’ command ‘have faith in God’ (Mark 11:22) with the words ‘reckon on the faithfulness of God’. This paraphrase, although not exegetically exact, is theologically correct …
Secondly, faith is the trust of a child. God is not only the Faithful One, but our Father too through Jesus Christ …
Thirdly, faith is as necessary in the material realm as in the spiritual, that is, when needing money as much as when seeking converts. One of Hudson Taylor’s best-known aphorisms was ‘God’s work done in God’s way will never lack supplies’ …
Fourthly, faith is not incompatible with the use of means. On his first voyage to China in 1853, the vessel in which Hudson Taylor was sailing was caught in a severe storm, off the coast of Wales. He had promised his mother that he would wear a life-belt. But when the captain ordered passengers to wear them, he felt it would be a sign of unbelief and thereby dishonouring to God. So he gave his away. But as he reflected on his action, he came to see his mistake. ‘The use of means,’ he wrote, ‘ought not to lessen our faith in God, and our faith in God ought not to hinder our using whatever means he has given us for the accomplishment of his own purposes.’

John Stott’s commitment to his academic work left all too little time for Christian reading, since even Sundays tended to be busy days with church, college chapel, and the CICCU. One reason why friendship with Oliver Barclay and a few others was important was the need to wrestle with the intellectual challenge of an uncompromising evangelical faith; in Oliver Barclay’s case from the scientific standpoint at a time when science was widely believed to have discredited many aspects of biblical belief. Like many another, John Stott regularly visited the second-hand book shops of Cambridge, and especially David’s Bookstall in the market-place, where there could sometimes be found out-of-print titles by more conservative scholars. Works of evangelical piety have never been in short supply; but studies whose primary appeal was to the mind in the expounding and defending of biblical evangelicalism were hard to find, even at a fairly popular level, in wartime Cambridge.

John Stott recalled his problems over this when addressing the Christian Booksellers’ Association Convention in Dallas, Texas, in 1992. After a reminder of the Boston Tea Party of 1773, he paid tribute to the work of the Inter-Varsity Press and its strong and positive inXuence in the whole post-war resurgence of evangelical faith and life. He told them:

When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University in the early 1940s (a vulnerable and immature evangelical believer, beleaguered by liberal theologians), there was no evangelical literature available to help me. In those days one had to ransack second-hand booksellers for volumes like A. H. Finn’s The Unity of the Pentateuch, James Orr’s The Problem of the Old Testament, R. W. Dale on The Atonement or works of the Princeton divines. But there was virtually no contemporary evangelical theology and IVP had not yet come into existence.

To say ‘IVP had not yet come into existence’ was technically correct, but the Inter-Varsity Fellowship had published its first booklet in 1928, and Ronald Inchley had been appointed as Literature Secretary (combined with other duties) in 1936. Astonishingly it was agreed in 1939 that he should seek other work since the funds of the Fellowship could not support a married man! The entire range of IVF publications up to that time comprised little more than a small series of booklets, a Bible Study course entitled Search the Scriptures, an early history of the Fellowship and three or four other books, of which In Understanding be Men and Why the Cross? were to form the mainstay of the CICCU bookstall well into the post-war years. But in the early 1940s, war-time paper shortages limited all book production, and the Literature Committee of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship was meeting only occasionally, with its sights chiefly set on plans and policies for after the war:

The department as such was put into mothballs. Existing stocks were transferred to the CSSM and Scripture Union Bookroom which agreed to act as trade agent for the duration of the war. With paper likely to be severely rationed it was thought that little more than a holding operation could be attempted as far as production of new titles was concerned.