Few people over the past 30 years have brought the insight and wisdom to bear on the church, politics and culture as Chuck Colson.
An Ivy League and law school graduate, a Marine and eventual special counsel to President Nixon — you couldn’t find a more impressive resume. From a worldly perspective, Colson had it all.
Then came Watergate. In the midst of the tumultuous hearings, God used a friend — Raytheon President Tom Phillips — to share with Colson the difference Jesus Christ had made in his life.
To Colson, “Jesus had always been an historical figure.” But as he would later share in his best-selling book “Born Again,” “Tom explained that you could hardly invite Him into your life if you didn’t believe that He is alive today and that His Spirit is a part of today’s scene.”
Soon after their conversation, Colson prayed his “first real prayer”: “God, I don’t know how to find You, but I’m going to try! I’m not much the way I am now, but somehow I want to give myself to You. … Take me.”
And “take” He did.
After serving a seven-month prison sentence, Colson would emerge to start Prison Fellowship in 1976. Colson reached hundreds of thousands of prisoners worldwide with the Gospel. He would receive the Templeton Prize for Religion in 1993 and the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2008.
Along the way, he began to write books and articles that would shape the culture as well — inspiring and changing the lives of the many who read them. Colson’s experience as a Washington insider provided deep insights, as did his grasp of history, as he brought to life the stories of Christian heroes.
Chuck warned me of the “moral relativism” I would face in the classroom from “the educational establishment [that] seeks to instill a passion for intellectual curiosity and openness, but allows for the existence of no truth worth pursing.” It was during my graduate work at Dartmouth that I truly learned to defend my faith, as my beliefs and positions were challenged in every course I took. In one graduate seminar on the Cold War, I challenged the presuppositions of my Marxist professors through the writings of men of faith whom Chuck had introduced to me in his writings — men like Boris Kornfeld, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Laszlo Tokes and Vaclav Havel. Their stories were unknown to nearly all of my classmates.
Colson’s grasp of Christian apologetics is perhaps best demonstrated by his ability to use even his own scandal experience to explain the truth of the Christian faith. In a 2006 BreakPoint radio commentary, he remarked that “it took only two weeks from the time that [Nixon] was first told the extent of the [Watergate] coverup to the time when John Dean, his counsel, went to the prosecutors and made a secret deal to testify against the president in exchange for a lighter sentence.” Even among the inner circle of the world’s most powerful man, he argued, “as I saw up close, the desire to save oneself has a way of overriding loyalty or any idealism.”
But this common human limitation, Colson noted, did not stop Christ’s disciples from carrying on after the resurrection: “What would inspire men to suffer and die for a belief? Only one thing — the absolute certainty that their belief was true. … These apostles would have turned state’s evidence in a heartbeat, copped a plea, unless they had seen the risen Christ in the flesh.”
As St. Peter and St. John shared before the authorities: “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.”
And as Colson concluded, “That makes it a truth worth living — and dying — for.”
May he rest in peace.
John A. Murray is headmaster of the Fourth Presbyterian School in Potomac, Md.
