John Stott, Basic Christianity, 예수님이 누구신가

John Stott, Basic Christianity, Leiscester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1958

‘In the beginning God.’ The first four words of the Bible are more than an introduction to the creation story or to the book of Genesis. They supply the key which opens our understanding of the Bible as a whole. They tell us that the religion of the Bible is a religion of the initiative of God. You can never take God by surprise. You can never anticipate him. He always makes the first move. He is always there ‘in the beginning’. Before man existed, God acted. Before man stirs himself to seek God, God has sought man. In the Bible we do not see man groping after God; we see God reaching after man. (11)

…for if God has spoken and acted, it is fully and finally in Jesus Christ that he has done so. The crucial issue is this: was the carpenter of Nazareth the Son of God? … The first is that essentially Christianity is Christ. The person and work of Christ are the rock upon which the Christian religion is built. If he is not who he said he was, and if he did not do what he said he had come to do, the foundation is undermined and the whole superstructure will collapse… Christ is the centre of Christianity; all else is circumference. (21)