Weekly insights from Chuck Colson and great saints of the past and present

Christianity did not suddenly spring into existence during the last generation. We are people with roots, and unless we reach for our roots and are nourished by them, our Christian faith will certainly wither.

“It may seem odd to rely on the ancient roots of Christianity at a time when progress is so exalted. But progress does not always mean discovering something new. Sometimes it means rediscovering wisdom that is ancient and eternal. We all find our identify in our roots.”
-Chuck Colson, The Faith

“Each famous author of antiquity whom I recall places a new offence and another cause of dishonor to the charge of later generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application to perish through insufferable neglect…”
-Petrarch, Letters

“The world after the fall is no lost planet, only destined now to afford the Church a place in which to continue her combats; and humanity is no aimless mass of people which only serves the purpose of giving birth to the elect. On the contrary, the world now, as well as in the beginning, is the theater for the mighty works of God, and humanity remains a creation of His hand, which, apart from salvation, completes under this present dispensation, here on earth, a mighty process, and in its historical development is to glorify the name of Almighty God.”
-Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism

“The theologian, then, has a direct duty to Christians as such, in helping them to live by an essentially unchanging Gospel in an essentially changing world…Thus, because both the thought-forms and the needs of the concrete situation of Christians in one age differ from those in another, the theologian has a continual duty to relate the unchanging Gospel to the contemporary situation in order that Christians themselves shall understand their faith as adequately as is possible and feel at home in it as contemporary men and women.”
-E. L. Mascall, The Secularization of Christianity

“…judgement is too often, historically speaking, the result of an anachronistic outlook, of necessity unhistorical because it is anachronistic…the object of every historian must be to put himself into touch with the outlook of those whose spiritual experiences he is attempting to unfold.”
-Herbert B. Workman, The Evolution of the Monastic Ideal

So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.
-2 Thessalonians 2:15

For more insight to this subject, get the book, The Victory of Reason, by Rodney Stark, from our online store.

Or read the article, “The Value of Church History, “ by Nick Needham.

Chuck Colson's The Faith can be purchased from our online store.