by Andrew T. Walker
A new book captures the heart of Chuck Colson’s message: love your country, but love your God more.
Reading Owen Strachan’s newest work, The Colson Way: Loving Your Neighbor and Living with Faith in a Hostile World, was like retracing the pathway that gave rise to my vocation and convictions, convictions I deeply cherish to this day.
I first heard of Chuck Colson from a tattered copy of Born Again that my parents gave to me when I was in high school. Quite frankly, I didn’t pay attention to who the author was. I just read a collection of encouraging testimonies about how meeting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior transformed people into new creatures with a new set of goals and values. Of course, Colson’s story was told within that book, and as a young, politically interested teen, I was struck that a man of such immense power and intellect had been captured by the gospel.
In college, while at Focus on the Family’s Leadership Institute, I was assignedHow Now Shall We Live? In that volume, Colson clearly demonstrates that the gospel is a public truth with very public implications. Reading that book helped me see that the gospel not only transforms hearts, but can transform societies, too.
But what I loved most about Colson is that he put first things first: gospel first, public life second. It’s not that he saw public life as unimportant. It was all where the accent lay; with Colson, the accent lay first with the gospel. Colson simply emphasized that a right society begins first when its people possess a right relationship with God.
For Roman Catholics, the brilliant and eloquent Richard John Neuhaus set a paradigm for political and social engagement. According to Owen Strachan, evangelicals need a Neuhaus-like figure of their own—someone who can cast a vision for evangelical social engagement. As he writes, “Many of us might point to a Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Martin Luther King, Jr., but is there anyone in the last forty years who comes to mind?”
Charles Colson is that man. In The Colson Way, Strachan, associate professor of Christian theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, offers an introduction to Colson—President Nixon’s “Hatchet Man”—whose conversion to Christianity was as unlikely and profound as was Colson’s enormous impact on an engaged, public Christianity.
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Read more: www.thepublicdiscourse.com
A new book captures the heart of Chuck Colson’s message: love your country, but love your God more.
Reading Owen Strachan’s newest work, The Colson Way: Loving Your Neighbor and Living with Faith in a Hostile World, was like retracing the pathway that gave rise to my vocation and convictions, convictions I deeply cherish to this day.
I first heard of Chuck Colson from a tattered copy of Born Again that my parents gave to me when I was in high school. Quite frankly, I didn’t pay attention to who the author was. I just read a collection of encouraging testimonies about how meeting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior transformed people into new creatures with a new set of goals and values. Of course, Colson’s story was told within that book, and as a young, politically interested teen, I was struck that a man of such immense power and intellect had been captured by the gospel.
In college, while at Focus on the Family’s Leadership Institute, I was assignedHow Now Shall We Live? In that volume, Colson clearly demonstrates that the gospel is a public truth with very public implications. Reading that book helped me see that the gospel not only transforms hearts, but can transform societies, too.
But what I loved most about Colson is that he put first things first: gospel first, public life second. It’s not that he saw public life as unimportant. It was all where the accent lay; with Colson, the accent lay first with the gospel. Colson simply emphasized that a right society begins first when its people possess a right relationship with God.
For Roman Catholics, the brilliant and eloquent Richard John Neuhaus set a paradigm for political and social engagement. According to Owen Strachan, evangelicals need a Neuhaus-like figure of their own—someone who can cast a vision for evangelical social engagement. As he writes, “Many of us might point to a Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Martin Luther King, Jr., but is there anyone in the last forty years who comes to mind?”
Charles Colson is that man. In The Colson Way, Strachan, associate professor of Christian theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, offers an introduction to Colson—President Nixon’s “Hatchet Man”—whose conversion to Christianity was as unlikely and profound as was Colson’s enormous impact on an engaged, public Christianity.
...................
Read more: www.thepublicdiscourse.com
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