You really are a rare jewel and I can’t thank you enough for your presence in the blogosphere, especially among the evangelical seminary students.

This review told me a lot about who you are when I first saw it at Christianity Today and I was deliberately anxious to get to know this guy with a call to Romania. The review shows an incredible ability to 1)let Charles Colson be who he is. He deserves our respect as brothers and sisters in Christ for God has used him to make an enormous contribution in the real world of prison life all over the world. But it also 2)rightly points out as this book so clearly illustrates, a severe out-of-balance that needs to be corrected from other valid positions within the Body of Christ. Which is exactly what you are doing.

We are all out of balance in some ways and that’s one main reason why we need oneanother so much and just can’t be satisfied with staying in one camp all the time. I couldn’t agree more with you about the error that you have fleshed out : “Only a robust reaffirmation of the essentials of Christian doctrine, they say, will provide a firm foundation for political and social engagement.”

This is a self-perpetuating danger that appears in every generation especially among those who are zealous for “the Truth” such as Reformed people are.I will never forget a book I found years ago when I was in Brazil by a former Presbyterian that had rebelled at what he well described as “Right Doctrine” Christianity, that turns out to be exactly the tendency you see in this book.

There are two critical things here for my own ministry of advocating our unity in Christ. First of all the focus is definitely on the wrong “sylable” as in Christian. Our unity is in Christ alone as he is testified to in the Biblical narrative. In a very real sense I can make a outlandish statement (I stole from someone else) without any fear of missing the mark : Nothing really matters in all of Church history once the Canon was closed. The only real essence of Christ is to be found in the inspired testimony of the Father to his Son and this original witness is what must always be what we all ground our faith upon.(Please don’t read this to mean that I don’t listen to Church history-I do as broadly as one man can, and I have learned much from many different traditions)

The second thing is reinforced once again by your faithful example of wrestling with the great truths of the Faith once for all delivered to the Saints. What the very supposition Colson and others like him forget by putting “propositional” truth in the priority,that they are sending a strong message that they don’t trust you. We have to learn to trust oneanother and to trust Him who is the Author and Perfecter of our faith working in us by His blessed Spirit. This has been call the theology of Word (Christ and His Scripture witness) and Spirit(which must never be separated for Christ himself).

I trust you Trevin and every other believer and the work that Christ is doing in that clay pot of yours.

John Paul Todd
e4unity.wordpress.com