Colson on Gregory Boyd, Woodland Hills Church, St Paul, MN

One more perspective on "Church and Culture"...

...Particularly some younger evangelicals are suggesting that we stay away from divisive issues like abortion and homosexuality altogether and just go back and be like the first-century Church—stay out of politics, tend to our spiritual knitting.

I wonder what early Church they are talking about. Take just the issue of abortion. The early Church was outspokenly pro-life right from the beginning just as the Jews had been. In the second chapter of the Didache, one of the first discipleship books for young Christians written in the first century, was this stern
injunction: “Thou shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born.” Justin Martyr wrote about this in his first apology. And in the second century, Athenagoras wrote a plea to Emperor Marcus Aurelius: “We say that women that use drugs to bring abortion commit murder and will have to give an account to God for the abortion.”

...Life issues, you see, go to the very heart of the Gospel, which is why the
first-century Church cared so passionately. And we can do no less today. The Church does not just have the right to speak about it; it has the duty to do so.