It had been many years since I had read Basic Christianity, but somehow that didn’t sound right. Are young people—or were they in the 1950s—really opposed to anything that “looks like an institution”? They didn’t seem opposed, for example, to universities back then. So I took down my old copy of the book, a 1971 reprint also published by ­Eerdmans.

Recently I bought a copy of John Stott’s brief and famous exposition of the Christian gospel, Basic Christianity, which I intended to give to a friend. The book was first published in 1958 and has sold several million copies. It is at once simple and refined, gentle and uncompromising, and many people in the Anglophone world can trace their conversions to reading Stott’s little masterpiece. If any “spiritual classics” were published during the second half of the twentieth century, Basic Christianity surely is one.

The copy I bought is a fiftieth-anniversary reprint by Eerdmans and includes a new preface by Stott himself, who died in 2011. I read the preface mainly out of curiosity, not intending to read the book again, and this sentence caught my attention: “It was obviously necessary to update the language, not least by use of a modern translation of the Bible, and to respond to sensitivities relating to gender. We are grateful to Dr. David Stone for taking care of these sensitivities.”

The subject of gendered pronouns has of course become controversial in recent years. Although I myself take an old-school view on the question—“he,” “him,” and “his” for general antecedents, though occasionally “his or her” sounds appropriate to my ear—I was prepared to accept the need to alter Stott’s original text in order to avoid causing offense. The elderly Stott’s “not least” sounded worrisome, but how bad could it be?

Then I read his original preface, the one from 1958, but which in the new edition begins this way:

“Hostile to the church, friendly to Jesus Christ.” These words describe large numbers of people, especially young people, today. They are opposed to anything that looks like an institution.

It had been many years since I had read Basic Christianity, but somehow that didn’t sound right. Are young people—or were they in the 1950s—really opposed to anything that “looks like an institution”? They didn’t seem opposed, for example, to universities back then. So I took down my old copy of the book, a 1971 reprint also published by ­Eerdmans. In that version, the sentence reads: “They are opposed to anything which savours of institutionalism.” Hold on. Opposing institutionalism is very different from opposing institutions. You might as well equate opposing nationalism with opposing nations. The editor hasn’t simply updated the text; he has changed its meaning. And changed it stupidly.

My curiosity aroused, I went through the new book and compared it, sentence by sentence, with the old one. The sheer amount of revision is startling. Two out of every three sentences, I estimate, involve some new wording.

Of course, the general masculine pronouns are gone: “all other men” becomes “everyone else,” and so on. This and other alterations are relatively innocuous—they do no violence to Stott’s meaning—but they lower the quality of the writing. One example among scores: Whereas in 1958 Stott had written, “In brief, we find ourselves citizens of two kingdoms, the one earthly and the other heavenly,” the 2008 version has it, “To put it in a nutshell, we find ourselves citizens of two kingdoms, possessing dual nationality, the one earthly and the other heavenly.” Are we to believe that “To put it in a ­nutshell” improves on “In brief,” and that adding the term “dual nationality” better conveys the idea to a ­modern audience?

A great many of the updates involve syntactical changes that, although stylistically harmless, alter the original’s meaning in odd and unhelpful ways. For instance, in 1958 Stott had written that sexual love is “a fulfillment of the divine purpose and of the human personality.” The updated text refers to sexual love as “bringing God’s purpose to completion and fulfilling the human personality.” The editor seems to have objected to the word “fulfillment” and tried to replace it with “bringing . . . to completion.” But surely no literate person would be stumped by the word “fulfillment,” and in any case the word “­com­­p­letion” introduces the idea of finality or termination that is nowhere in the idea of sexual love as a fulfillment of divine purpose.

Stott was fond of quoting lines from hymns and poems to convey his meaning. Those are gone from the 2008 text. Emphasizing the point that closeness to Christ often results in a heightened awareness of one’s own sin, he had quoted a line from Henry Twells’s “At Even, Ere the Sun Was Set”: “And they who fain would serve thee best / Are conscious most of wrong within.” Deleted. Two verses from Harriet Auber’s hymn “Our Blest Redeemer, Ere He Breathed,” lines teaching that personal holiness is the work of the Spirit—“And every virtue we possess / And every victory won, / And every thought of holiness, / Are his alone”—have been dropped from the updated text. In a paragraph on the centrality of the cross in the Christian life, this sentence had to go: “What the Emperor Constantine is said to have seen in the sky, we can see ourselves in the pages of the Bible. ‘In hoc signo vinces.’” A quotation from a 1585 sermon by Richard Hooker didn’t make the cut, either:

Let it be accounted folly, or frenzy, or fury, or whatsoever. It is our wisdom and our comfort; we care for no knowledge in the world but this, that the man hath sinned and God hath suffered; that God hath made himself the sin of men, and that men are made the righteousness of God.

In 1958 Stott added, “Every Christian can echo these words.” Now, it seems, every Christian can’t.

Read More