See my post #40. The line between taste and truth can be blurry. I do not like any theology because I do not believe that any religion reflects the complete truth. Peruse the FR threads on Islam, and you'll see that most here (including me) find Islam to be both untrue AND distasteful.
If Colson wants to instill his beliefs in the next generation of children, he doesn't need to re-examine those beliefs, but rather the ARGUMENTS in support of those beliefs. Maybe the majority of kids today finds the usual arguments in support of Christianity incomplete, circular, dogmatic, incomprehensible, or otherwise inadequate. To non-believers, Christianity as a whole, and the many teachings within, are not self-evident. There's a difference between the Declaration of Independence, which reads "WE HOLD these truths to be self-evident" (because not everyone did), and Colson's position, which is basically, "Christianity IS self-evident, and non-Christians are moral relativists." Maybe the kids are uncomfortable - as they should be - with Colson's implication that you can't be a good person unless you're Christian. If he can't adequately explain why, he'll keep losing more and more students.
It is possible for folk to be what is known as a deist, (someone who believes in the Christian message but has arrived at that belief by some kind of rational or logical thought process of reason and/or deduction) but primarily Christianity is a religion that is dependent upon personal revelation. Christians are Christians because Christ calls them and makes them Christians.
You cannot PROVE Christianity is true. That’s not to say that its positions and arguments are not defendable (throught what is known as apologetics) but because the truth of God is dependent upon the wisdom of God, and not that of men, that is really rather irrelevant. Think of it this way. If I cannot argue successfully to you that God exists, does that mean that He doesn’t? Does He promptly disappear in a puff of logic? By the same process, I could argue that YOU don’t really exist, and that all the posts under the name of Freedom_no_exceptions are being made by an alien from Mars. I mean, theoretically that could be true. I don’t know who is sitting behind that screen, neither does anyone else on this board. The only way you could prove you really are you is by coming round to my house and showing me the keyboard scars :) (This is not a challenge incidentally. I’m a believer. I actually DO think you are there!)
I believe Christianity IS true. That doesn’t mean that I think it has a monopoly on truth. If a Buddhist was to say to me “two plus two equals four” I’m not going to go away and abandon all mathematics as heresy. There is “truth” to be found in all religions (and all political theories for that matter) but that doesn’t mean they are all equally valid. Sure, all religions are superficially similar, because they are all asking and answering the same kind of questions (the big ones, life, death the universe - that kind of thing), but to say they are “equally valid” or “the same” is like saying George Bush is the same as Bill Clinton because they are both politicians.
The issue here is moral relativism. If people are being taught that nothing is absolute, and everything is equally valid, then yes, that protects them from bigotry. But what proponents of this approach forget is that if nothing is wrong then by consequence nothing is right either. And that is a VERY dangerous line of thinking to have instilled, either in the body spiritual or the body politic. What this article is really getting at is how far our culture has moved along that road already. You can bet your bottom dollar no mosque is teaching that Islam may not be the only truth.
Of course, even moral relativists do have absolutes - its just that their absolutes are different. They believe absolutely in tolerance and equality, after all :)
Why?
Oh, and did you realize that in the second paragraph of your post you assigned Chuck Colson two positions that he does not hold and has never expressed in any Breakpoint commentary, much less this one we're discussing?