I’ve received an advance copy of Chuck Colson’s The Faith from Zondervan to review. I’ll give a more thorough review later, but right now want to mention one interesting contrast.
In crediting his influences, Colson identifies himself as an evangelical and Calvinist with Dutch Reformed influences. That’s where I stand as well. However, my biggest criticism for the book is that, after explaining the faith handed down once and for all, he appears to want to use it as a means to preserve and renew Western culture. His underlying concern, then, appears to be the preservation of Western society against militant Islam, intellectual Atheism made popular through recent books, and the loss of truth from postmodern relativism. While I agree with our need and duty to engage in apologetics, I argue that our reason for doing so is not to preserve our society or expand the boundaries of our culture. Rather, it’s to engage the world, in both the local and global scene, with the Gospel and Apostolic tradition.
So, while I am more aligned theologically with Colson, I find myself agreeing with Gregory Boyd on The Myth of a Christian Nation. The church is part of the eternal kingdom of God, rather than a temporal, earthly kingdom. A recent program on Michael Horton’s “The White Horse Inn”, Political Temptation, dated 1/27/08, (available as a podcaset on iTunes) promotes an understanding of the church as a separate entity from the state – whose job it is to proclaim the Gospel and administer the sacraments – that would be, surprisingly, more akin to Boyd (an Open Theist) than to Colson, a fellow Calvinist.
So you view the West as nothing more than “our society.” Is it not true that the West is uniquely shaped by the Christian faith, and that this accounts for the unique tradition of elevating human dignity that sets Western tradition apart from modern atheism and militant Islam? I totally agree that we should not confuse the heavenly and earthly kingdoms. But surely you can recognize, even in this time of moral and intellectual disarray, the profound and beneficial influence that the heavenly kingdom has had on the Western tradition. To imply that taking a particular interest in preserving the West — which happens to have been a primary vehicle through which the faith has been and continues to be handed down, I might add — is somehow provincial and insufficiently missions-minded seems to me to come dangerously close to denying the transformative effect of the gospel on culture. Even granting the need to re-evangelize the West (with which, again, I totally agree), isn’t your disdain for the preservation and renewal of Western culture profoundly un-Reformed?
I will respond to your comment, MG, in an upcoming post. I’ll work through the book in a series of posts, and so will answer you in one of those. Thank you for your comments.
Christians must be profoundly concerned with their culture, which of course, is comprised of the people in that culture. Preach the Gospel which addresses the root of the problem(s) and the culture will take care of itself – or not – but it’s God’s choice how it turns out.