TF Chapter 6 - This means WAR!

I, again, have to question the idea of using war terminology that Colson is using to represent his religion.  This book was first published in 2008, which is well after another group of fundamentalist religious zealots used war terms and attacked Americans and others in the World Trade Center Towers.  It is as if he wants to be associated with this kind of right wing militarism.

Colson even goes on to compare Christianity to an occupying force:

His [Jesus] own ministry and then by establishing a peaceful occupying force, His Church, which would carry on God's redemption until Christ's return.

There is no definition of occupying force that allows you to include peaceful.  It is impossible.  The idea is that you install your force by, well, force.

Then of course there are the specifics of Christian history.  What was so peaceful about the Crusades, witch hunts, the Peasants' war, St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the Thirty Years' war, and so on?  These altercations involve the groups that Chuck Colson's Christian foundation is built upon, and the foundation that all Christians' faith is built upon.  "For all who draw the sword will die by the sword."

Colson goes on, dropping the military analogies, talking about bringing the Gospel to prisoners.  How the prisoners get excited upon hearing how Jesus will free you.  Then Colson talks about how people are excited when the Bible is translated into other languages, and oppressed people here a redemptive story.  This really doesn't surprise me.  People have an innate sense of justice, including babies. The oppressed want to hear about how at some point in the future they will not be oppressed and how those oppressing them will receive punishment.  The prisoner wants to hear how his "sins" will be washed away and new life can begin in freedom.  The fact the Bible tells them this will happen does not make it true.  That they, prisoners and the oppressed, want this to be true, does not make it true.

The one thing Colson does get right in this chapter is stating that Jesus was not a white Anglo-Saxon.  Jesus would have been Semitic and born in the Middle East.  He would have looked like anyone living on the West Bank today.  He would have looked something like this:

From Religious Tolerance: What did Jesus look like?