How Now Shall We Live, Student Edition

This important book explores a wide range of ethical and cultural issues. Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey show how the truth of Christianity can change the world. Internationally known author Charles Colson believes this to be the most significant book of his career. It carries a profound message needed by the church today and by individual Christians. The central theme is that faith in Jesus Christ is more than a private relationship with God; it's a way of seeing, understanding, and changing the world. Christian faith brings with it basic ideas and beliefs that are the answers and counters to the world's philosophies. Christians often feel a loss of confidence in the face of secular philosophy as expressed in the culture of our age. The claims of scientists, New Age beliefs, shifting morality and so on can confuse. The authors provide the tools to interpret and confront the false, bankrupt ideas of the world and to use the truth of Christianity to make a difference for good. They help their readers to evaluate their own lives and values. Colson and Pearcey offer the challenge -- How Now Shall We Live? This is a message for the church in the new millennium. Change in the world and in culture will not be achieved chiefly through political or social means, but by individual Christians knowing their faith and daring to be agents of God's grace.

How Now Shall We Live was the heart cry of a people who lived during the Jewish exile from the Promised Land, yet it is no less the unspoken prayer of the faithful today. As author Chuck Colson puts it, "We live in a culture that is at best morally indifferent ... in which Judeo-Christian values are mocked ... in which violence, banality, meanness, and disintegrating personal behavior are destroying civility and endangering the very life of our communities." It is no small wonder that Colson--the founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries and author of several renowned Christian works--considers this book the most important work of his life.

America, Colson states, is now in a post-Judeo-Christian era. Technically, this is what "postmodernism" means. In a generation in which the most respected brands of thought about reality declare that "God is dead," it is clear that a faith-based worldview does not prevail. So how do we teach our children that belief in God is respectable and intelligent? How do we fulfill our mandate to make "disciples of all nations" when friends and coworkers find the Christian perspective foolhardy and--in terms of rational thought--almost insane? Most important, how do we renew our entire culture, especially as it infects the global community, with the "common grace" of reinstating a prevailing belief in God and in His moral order?

These questions' implications are far-reaching, and Colson's thorough inquiry is a ready match for the challenge. In effect, this book delivers a logical, more than just "because the Bible says so" framework for interpreting the Gospel to the postmodern world, while also illustrating the vision for a culture based entirely on Biblical principles--powerful tools, indeed.

Christians are taught to love God with all their hearts, all their strength, and all their minds. How Now Shall We Live emphasizes that not to use one's mind in this idea-saturated culture is to abandon dying neighbors to bleed by the side of the road while going about one's religious way. As Colson puts it, "turning our backs on the culture ... denies God's sovereignty over all of life." It's this compassionate severity and prodding intelligence that make this book not only a good read, but a life-changing one as well. --Courtenay Gebhardt