Chuck Colson, as a part of his blog tour for his new book "The Faith", honors my humble little blog today.
TSK: Congratulations on your ambitious yet comprehensive book. Well done!!!!! I know its risky but I admire your efforts to join with the other streams of the holy apostolic catholic church in gaining a wider, fuller more accurate understanding of the faith and I applaud the breadth of those authors you reference. I am familiar enough with your writings to know that "postmodern" is a negative word in your vocabulary, synonymous with "relativism". But I am also close enough to the emerging church scene to recognize that "postmodern" can just as easily mean "committed to context" or "open to the past". However, despite our disparate journeys and the words we chose to define them, I think many of us are finding ourselves on a similar a quest to rediscover the historical foundations of our faith or, as D.H. Williams put it, to "retrieve" the Tradition that has informed our practice through the centuries. So my question is "Why now?"
Chuck Colson: "I do understand the way in which you use the postmodern era. And of course it has some good aspects to it. For one thing, the reliance on experience enables us to make our personal encounters with Christ more relevant to people. But your focus on “retrieving” the tradition is very valid. A lot of the emerging church people get this—they want to go back to our roots; they want to find that original apostolic Christological consensus. I applaud that. You will notice in chapter 4 of the book that I distinguish between the “emergent community” which rejects the Bible, and the “emerging movement.” There’s much about the emerging movement that I applaud."
TSK: Thanks Chuck. Actually, I don't think I have come across an emerging community that rejects the Bible [there probably are some - maybe I should get out more!] but I have found a few that have rejected an overly scientific, reductionist approach to interpreting the Bible reminiscent of Enlightenment thinking, a Scottish common sense realism, or even a semi-gnostic view that is disconnected from time and space. But there are many communities and individuals who have begun to ask how the Christian church has understood the Faith since the beginning, not just the past 400 years. Your book is an encouragement in that quest. Hope the rest of the tour goes well for you. Thanks again for your response.
Check out the whole tour: 
March 5 - A I PowerBlog
March 5 - The Dawn Treader
March 6 - Reasoned Audacity
March 7 - Challies.com
March 10 - Adrian Warnock
March 11 - Tall Skinny Kiwi
March 12 - Mark D. Roberts
March 13 - Rebecca Writes
March 14 - Jolly Blogger
Related:
My thoughts on "postmodernism" if I was to use the word around church folk (i don't any more)
Technorati Tags: charles colson
ORIGINAL POST:
Charles Colson will be turning up here on Tall Skinny Kiwi to chat about his new book called The Faith. March 11. Be here! I am just reading through the book now so I can ask an intelligent question for Charles to answer. He is an interesting guy who was previously known as he "hatchet man" for President Nixon and once described in Slate magazine as the "evil genius behind the evil administration", which sounds to me like a line from an Austin Powers movie. Should be interesting.
I have talked about Colson back in 2003 when he wrote an article on postmodernism and I don't think we saw eye to eye. Later on, things came to a head when Colson wrote Soothing Ourselves to Death and I responded with Reclusing Ourselves to Death? But it sounds like we are all in a happy place now, and its good to see emerging church people quoted in Colson's book. And anyway, he is my guest next month so I will have to be nice to him.
The blog tour is here.
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.
