The Body: Being Light in the Darkness,by Charles Colson, with Ellen Santilli Vaughn (Word, 455 pp.; $19.99, hardcover). Reviewed by Roger E. Olson, professor of theology at Bethel College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and coauthor of 20th-Century Theology: God and the World in a Transitional Age (InterVarsity).
More than just another evangelical jeremiad, Chuck Colson’s latest book is a prophetic warning that, if heard and heeded, might rescue the American evangelical church from a new Babylonian captivity. Colson is not content to curse the darkness. He wants to point toward the light—the light of authentic Christian faith that still glimmers here and there in a culture of new barbarianism that threatens to overwhelm and extinguish that light.
Although The Body is, at its core, a book of hope, its warnings are dire: “All too often the twentieth-century church takes its cues and defines its role by the ways of the world. It accommodates a consumer-oriented culture that wants, above all else, to feel good. And it focuses on action at the expense of character, on doing rather than being.” According to Colson, to be the body of Christ in the twentieth-century, the church must recognize, face, and conquer the disease that would destroy it: the subversion of the gospel by culture. To translate the message for better communication in a particular context is one thing; to transform it by accommodating the values and sensibilities of culture is to subvert the message.
Marketing to the pews
But wait! We’ve heard this all before, right? In the seventies, Christians saw secular humanism as the grand subverter; in the eighties, it was the New Age movement. What is different about this latest enemy of the gospel? ...
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