What is "double listening"?

This phrase was coined by John Stott in a book, The Contemporary Christian: An urgent plea for double listening, published in 1992.

Double listening concerns Christians listening to what the Bible says while also listening to what the world says. The world is interpreted, affirmed, and critiqued in terms of what the Bible says, while the Bible is interpreted in light of what learns from the world. Everyone does this, whether or not they acknowledge it. However, the challenge is to do it consciously, intentionally, humbly, diligently, creatively, consistently, and constructively.

The idea is helpfully reviewed by Alister McGrath in this lecture.



Here is some of the key text from the Contemporary Christian (p. 27-9).

How, then, can we be both conservative and radical simultaneously, conservative in guarding God’s revelation and radical in our thoroughgoing application of it? How can we develop a Christian mind, which is both shaped by the truths of historic, biblical Christianity, and acquainted with the realities of the contemporary world? How can we relate the Word to the world, understanding the world in the light of the Word, and even understanding the Word in the light of the world? We have to begin with a double refusal. We refuse to become either so absorbed in the Word, that we escape into it and fail to let it confront the world, or so absorbed in the world, that we conform to it and fail to subject it to the judgement of the Word. Escapism and conformity are opposite mistakes, but neither is a Christian option. 

In place of this double refusal we are called to double listening, listening both to the Word and to the world. It is a truism to say that we have to listen to the Word of God, except perhaps that we need to listen to him more expectantly and humbly, ready for him to confront us with a disturbing, uninvited word. It is less welcome to be told that we must also listen to the world. For the voices of our contemporaries may take the form of shrill and strident protest. They are now querulous, now appealing, now aggressive in tone. There are also the anguished cries of those who are suffering, and the pain, doubt, anger, alienation and even despair of those who are estranged from God. I am not suggesting that we should listen to God and to our fellow human beings in the same way or with the same degree of deference. We listen to the Word with humble reverence, anxious to understand it, and resolved to believe and obey what we come to understand. We listen to the world with critical alertness, anxious to understand it too, and resolved not necessarily to believe and obey it, but to sympathise with it and to seek grace to discover how the gospel relates to it. . . . 

‘Double listening’, however, contains no element of self-contradiction. It is the faculty of listening to two voices at the same time, the voice of God through Scripture and the voices of men and women around us. These voices will often contradict one another, but our purpose in listening to them both is to discover how they relate to each other. Double listening is indispensable to Christian discipleship and Christian mission. 

Two other books by John Stott that McGrath mentions are Issues Facing Christians Today and Christian Mission in the Modern World.