Chuck Colson's Senility...

I don't, frankly, know why I continue to do this to myself.

I keep up my subscription to Christianity Today. I guess I do it for the same reason that I spent a semester studying at Fuller while I was pursuing my MDiv at Union--I feel like it's important to listen to voices within the Christian tradition different than your own.

But sometimes CT publishes such crap. Like this recent essay by Chuck Colson in the "marriage" issue.

Where do I begin to engage its crappiness?

In the essay, Colson drags before our eyes tired rhetoric about the "evils of relativism"--an almost laughable phrase employed by modernist evangelicals to describe a set of social transformations that ruffle their conservative tautology that things were better (and simpler and clearer) "back in the day."

What Colson mourns is the rise of postmodernity, but he pretends as though this worldview does not exist. If he has scruples, then engage in intellectually honest debate. There are thousands of faithful evangelicals (and liberals like me) who live in a postmodern worldview and would be happy to have conversation on the pages of CT about what it means for life and faith--why we have chosen this path and rejected modernity as false. Instead, Colson parades around, adorning himself in shrill modernist rhetoric about losing "the truth"--but the emperor's in the buff.

I found myself cheering the courage of the youth Colson describes in the story as they stood up to adult authority figures to name the truth they know. I was thrilled to hear of youth willing to fight for the idea that truth can be seen by each of us, but that it has multiple facets and that none of us see them all. I was ecstatic to hear of youth who are growing up in a religiously plural world and while committed to the Christian way (they signed up for Colson's group, after all!), they are willing to admit that the future of shared life on this planet might demand a more humble and rational epistemological beginning than "I've got the truth and you don't."

Colson may not like to hear this, but the future of the world depends not on arming our children for apologetic warfare, but equipping them for ethical engagement. The ethics of Jesus have always been grounded in a fundamental disposition to love and serve "the other." Call this "the bitch goddess tolerance," but I, and many of the next generation of Christian leaders, call it "the Golden Rule."

If this is what's going on in the church, there is reason to hope.

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In case you have no idea who Chuck Colson is, here's a nice piece on how the architect of the most cynical and corrosive political crime in modern history (Watergate) became a beloved Christian pundit. Ah, forgiveness...