Charles Colson Takes Another Shot

I just love how Charles Colson keeps bouncing back with more articles on the same thing, each time getting closer and closer. It's a life sentence to habitually write these articles and a true act of loving God. What perseverance! The man is certainly born again.

A recent Colson article called Soothing Ourselves to Death inspired me to write Reclusing Ourselves to Death? And a much earlier Colson article called Postmodern Crackup had me write 3 responses to his thoughts: The Official Response [for the suits], The Intuitive Response [for the poets] and my personal favorite, The Cheesy Response, an inconceivable blog post which, despite never mentioning The Princess Bride is nonetheless 'mostly dead'.

Clearlynotchoose2

But Colson's newest is Emerging Confusion and, although tempted to bite the bait, I am retiring from responding to any more Colson's articles – seeing no fruit from these blog posts apart from relieving myself of built-up pressure and having them ignored by Christianity Today who link to every respondent and their dog except for me. Maybe if i removed the humor . . .

Preparetodie

And anyway, I am somewhat relieved that Chuck uses the word "some" emerging churches because that tells me he has run into other emerging churches that don't fit the mold given to us by the media. I wish Colson's "Jim" was a real person so we could deal with him in an intelligent manner but at least he uses a real scholar (Stanley Fish), making it easy for Tony Jones to jump in and sort out the chaff from the wheat.

Maybe Dr Fish was the scholar that D.A. Carson was referring to when he got emotional and blurted out . . .
"DAMN ALL FISH'N'CHIPS'N'CHEESE TO HELL!!"
Or . . wait . . was that "Damn all FALSE ANTITHESES to hell?"
I can't remember.
Uguys
Len says that we need to resort to authority as well as reason. And as Phil Johnson says in response to Colsons article, "One can be involved in contextual missions in urban postmodernity and be committed to articulating a biblically robust faith."

Update: Charles Colson passed away April 21, 2012. I will miss our banter. Much respect to this great man. My thoughts on our conversations here.

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Andrew

Andrew Jones launched his first internet space in 1997 and has been teaching on related issues for the past 20 years. He travels all the time but lives between Wellington, San Francisco and a hobbit home in Prague.

13 Comments

  • brian Orme says:

    Christianity Today has missed out…
    Great graphics, Andrew, don’t take away the humor…don’t sell-out to the publishing monsters. Haha
    peace

  • Ed C says:

    TRUTH???
    “I do not think that word means what you think it means.”
    ABSOLUTES???
    Inconceivable!

  • Josh says:

    you got any fred savage pics?

  • marc says:

    Colson: “Emerging”
    Montoya: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means”

  • marc says:

    Apologies to Ed for the refinement… 😉

  • Carla says:

    sorry, just submitting a test comment.

  • Alan Cross says:

    The Princess Bride stuff was probably the most brilliant thing you’ve ever written. It was amazing. Thanks for linking back to that.

  • robbymac says:

    Hello.
    My name is Inigo Montoya.
    You kill-a my favourite word.
    Prepare to die.
    Sorry, just couldn’t resist!

  • Ed C says:

    Thanks Marc, I’m a little sloopy on my Princess Bride memorization.
    I’m probably even worse at quoting scripture . . .
    Is that part of the emergent mystique?

  • Timothy Wright says:

    This is one question and may not merit being placed on the web:
    Within Emergent is everything, I mean absolutley everything up for a dialogue on slavery, incest, murder, and if not, who within emergent decides what is worthy of dialogue and what is their criterion?
    Tim

  • andrew jones says:

    do you mean Emergent as in Emergent Village USA or do you mean the international emerging church movement?

  • Timothy Wright says:

    Emergent Village USA or the Emergent Community in the UK? It seems that everything is open season.
    For me, it is like walking into a very dark room and trying to find the wall and then the light switch.
    Trying to get a sense how far back the decontruction goes to get an understanding for the context of the dialogue.
    Could a church that thought slavery was a historical and contextual construct for the early church and maybe slavery was possibly acceptable in certain situations today?
    Tim

  • cindz says:

    hehehehe!!! luv the princess bride adaptations!!! you kill me tsk!!!

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