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'.
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 . . .
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.
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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