The Colson Way, by Owen Strachan, models, urges and inspires a new generation of courageous Christians to engage and to lead. Wanted: Torch-bearers in the lineage of Augustine, Luther, Wilberforce, Bonhoeffer, Schaeffer, Henry and Colson. (Where does one stop naming names of heroes? Earl Palmer, Bill Edgar, Os Guinness, Nancy Pearcey, Dallas Willard, Stan Mattson and countless more).

Give this book to young people wise enough to be mentored. What was Chuck Colson’s “way”? It was the way of courageous, creative and articulate love in a hurting world. It is the singular hope of the gospel for those in the darkest jail cells and in the most corrupted seats of power.

Chuck was foremost about the Kingdom of God, and it follows that he also loved America. We might think of him as a Christian patriot, a loving gardener, who rightly stewarded the culture and time in which God placed him.

Chuck Colson with President George W. Bush after receiving the Presidential Citizens Medal, December 20, 2008.
Image: Chris Greenberg / Wikimedia Commons.

Chuck was a thoroughly converted man who contended for biblical truth as the highest love for human beings. As every gardener knows, where we leave a void, something less than the gospel fills it. Chuck stood God’s ground in public debate with Christian wisdom, grace and truth — because of love.

Sometimes silence is golden. More often, silence is yellow. Cowards too often give up the ground of culture to more aggressive challengers, and to the destruction of human lives. This tendency must be reversed, and this book can help do it.

Because of love, Chuck was found in the darkest prisons, where Jesus would be shining light, touching the forgotten with warmth and hope.

Because of love, and again like Jesus, Chuck also entered the institutions of power so that people would learn to think and act in ways that do not lead them and others to prison. Love leads. It is proactive. He went to universities where ideas form the minds and thus the lives of students. He went to Capitol Hill to discuss policies that shape lives and society. He created the Centurions program to teach Christian worldview and truth for human flourishing.

In 2008, I began to study the forces at work behind the “fundamental transformation” of America, and my mind exited the ivory tower for the real world. As I traveled, I would sincerely say to Christian leaders, “The Muslim Brotherhood has a strategic plan for America. The so-called Progressive movement is one hundred years into their plans for America. So, what is the Church’s strategic plan for America? How can I volunteer?” What normally followed was a blank stare.

Kelly M. Kapic, A Little Book for New Theologians: Why and How to Study Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2012), 126 pages.

Kelly Kapic, Professor of Theological Studies at Covenant College, instructs the student of theology and offers a perspective of wisdom. As the name implies, it is a little book; my first leisurely reading took less than two hours, which is a welcome sign for any novice of theological studies. However, while it is small in size and pages, it is rich and understandable in content. Kapic drops the names of more than fifty theologians and includes a very brief quote from each; quotes that generally emphasize the heart-changing aspect of theology, rather than the intellectual-enrichment or argument-building aspects of theology.

“One of the great dangers of theology is making our faith something we discuss, rather than something that moves us.” –Kelly Kapic

I write this review as a Pentecostal Bible College professor who is always looking for textbooks for his students and I think I have found one here. This is one textbook that should be required reading for the first week of any first college theology course, because it sets the stage with wise advice. Kapic writes, “One of the great dangers of theology is making our faith something we discuss, rather than something that moves us” (64). He counsels the reader to keep faith, reason, and lived experience braided together in order that the student might not become arrogant, argumentative, or disassociated from how authentic theological ideas should inform our lived-out faith. The overarching theme Kapic presents can be viewed as a philosophical how-to approach to the study of theology. He emphasizes the importance of humility, as the principle prerequisite for the study of God, because our understanding will always be less than perfect. In this regard, he urges the student-reader to stretch the boundaries of the understanding to make room for the theological tensions that suspend theological ideas, often times frustrating our human desire to know in full; he challenges us to humbly make room for the mystery of God. Likewise, he also challenges the freshman theologian to be careful to not take their head-filled knowledge back home to sit in judgment of the their lowly church or Sunday school classrooms, as if they now have gained a much superior intellectual vantage point in one short semester. He challenges us all that genuine theology is found more in virtue than in knowledge.

Reviewed by John R. Miller

Publisher’s page: www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=3975