Dr. Douglas Johnson, known as DJ, was born on December 31 1904. Because he was so self-effacing, few people realise just how important he was for the revival of evangelicalism in the last century, and how much we owe to his work. He was quietly behind many important developments that we take for granted.
The 1920s were the heyday of a thoroughgoing liberalism that had captured theological education and not only the student Christian movements, but much of the leadership of the churches in Britain. It was the lowest point of the status of biblical evangelicalism for over 100 years. Any confidence in the authority and reliability of the Bible was treated with scorn by many.
DJ, coming from a Christian family and a church where he must have been well taught, entered University College London in 1921 to read history. Noticing someone saying grace at lunch in the canteen, he got in touch and so began the Christian Union there, since they found the existing Christian organisation quite misleading. Transferring, with a scholarship for medicine, to Kings College London in 1924, he took the theology diploma at the same time and saw the dangers of the then dominant theology teaching. He annoyed the full-time theology students by doing better than most of them in exams.
