How Now Shall We Live? Quotes

“Moral crusaders with zeal but no ethical understanding are likely to give us solutions that are worse than the problems.”
― Charles Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“People who cannot restrain their own baser instincts, who cannot treat one another with civility, are not capable of self-government... without virtue, a society can be ruled only by fear, a truth that tyrants understand all too well”
― Charles Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“Christians who understand biblical truth and have the courage to live it out can indeed redeem a culture, or even create one. This is the challenge facing all of us in the new millennium.”
― Charles W. Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“Genuine Christianity is more than a relationship with Jesus, as expressed in personal piety, church attendance, Bible
study, and works of charity. It is more than discipleship, more than believing a system of doctrines about God. Genuine Christianity is a way of seeing and comprehending all reality. It is a worldview.”
― Charles W. Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“It's not simply that communists are atheists and want to stamp out religion; it's that they cannot tolerate anyone who worships a King who stands above the kings of this world. For that higher allegiance gives a basis for demanding freedom and rights from the earthly king.49”
― Charles W. Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“The Bible teaches that there is a holy God whose law constitutes a transcendent, universally valid standard of right and wrong. Our choice has no effect at all on this standard; our choice simply determines whether we accept it, or reject it and suffer the consequences.”
― Charles W. Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“Finally, the loss of moral authority in the law means we have forfeited the rule oflaw and reverted to arbitrary human rule. The rule of law cannot survive unless there is an unchanging and transcendent standard against which we can measure human laws. Otherwise, the law is whatever the lawmakers or judges say it is-which can only result, eventually, in the collapse of free gov- ernment.43 The postmodernist assault on objective moral truth has put us on the road to tyranny.”
― Charles W. Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“The result of these trends is that today the courts, unrestrained by
higher law and disdainful of majority will, are the dominant force in American politics. As law professor Russell Hittinger writes, in Casey the Court has laid down a "new covenant" by which it agrees to give citizens the right to decide for themselves the meaning of life, to decide what is right and wrong, to do as they please. In exchange for this guarantee, the Court asks only that the people accept the Court's assumption of ultimate power.3S Or as Notre Dame's Gerard Bradley puts it, the Court has said: "We will be your Court, and you will be our people.”
― Charles W. Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“Among fiction writers, Christians should explore the riches of C. S. Lewis, especially his space trilogy and Narnia stories; the romances of George Macdonald (Lewis’s mentor); the detective fiction of Dorothy Sayers; the supernatural novels of Charles Williams; and the fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien, especially his incomparable Lord of the Rings trilogy. On this side of the Atlantic, the works of Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, and Allen Tate represent the Catholic literary renaissance of the 1940s. Among contemporary writers, Christians should get to know Larry Woiwode, Frederick Buechner, Ron Hanson, Annie Dillard, Walter Wangerin Jr., and Stephen Lawhead, to name a few. And we must not ignore the powerful novels of Alexander Solzhenitsyn—works that not only expose the horrors of the Soviet prison camp system but also reveal the response of the human heart to unspeakable suffering.”
― Charles W. Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“The culture war is not just about abortion, homosexual rights, or the decline of public education. These are only the skirmishes. The real war is a cosmic struggle between worldviews-between the Christian worldview and the various secular and spiritual worldviews arrayed against it. This is what we must understand if we are going to be effective both in evangelizing our world today and in transforming it to reflect the wisdom of the Creator.”
― Charles W. Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“S. Lewis, coined the phrase "The”
― Charles W. Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“When morality is reduced to personal preferences and when no one can be held morally accountable, society quickly falls into disorder.”
― Charles W. Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“Clearly, the Fall was not just an isolated act of disobedience that could be quickly mended. Every part of God's good handiwork was marred by the human mutiny. This is why the Reformers described human nature as "totally depraved." They did not mean that human nature is completely corrupted, for in the midst of our sin, we still bear the image of God, just as a child's sweet face shows through smudges of mud and dirt. Total depravity, according to the Reformers, means that every part of our being-intellect, will, emotions, and body-shows the effects of sin. No part remains untouched by the Fall.”
― Charles W. Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“The answer is that if we know we are created by God, then we should live in a state of continuous gratitude to God.”
― Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live?

“Most of all, our failure to see Christianity as a comprehensive framework of truth has crippled our efforts to have a redemptive effect on the surrounding culture. At its most fundamental level, the so-called culture war is a clash of belief systems.”
― Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live?

“It is simply the sum total of our beliefs about the world, the “big picture” that directs our daily decisions and actions.”
― Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live?

“The culture war is not just about abortion, homosexual rights, or the decline of public education. These are only the skirmishes. The real war is a cosmic struggle between worldviews—between the Christian worldview and the various secular and spiritual worldviews arrayed against it.”
― Charles W. Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“The face of evil is frighteningly ordinary.”
― Charles W. Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“(Phil. 4:8). Notice that Paul doesn't limit that principle to spiritual things; he says if anything is excellent. Paul is telling us to train our tastes to love the higher things-things that challenge our mind, deepen our character, and foster a love of excellence-and this includes the music we listen to, the books and magazines we read, the films we watch, the forms of worship we employ.”
― Charles W. Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“The question for the child is not, `Do I want to be good?"' Bettelheim writes, "but Who do I want to be like?”
― Charles W. Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“Capitalism is astonishingly efficient at generating new wealth, but it operates beneficently only
when the market is shaped by moral forces coming from both the law and the culture-derived ultimately from religion.”
― Charles W. Colson, How Now Shall We Live?

“But, the skeptic asks, what about the person who never hears the gospel? The apostle Paul tells us that all are without excuse because "what may be known about God is plain to them" (Rom. 1:19-20). We are accountable for what we know (and by implication not for what we don't know). And when we rebel against what we know to be right and true, we eventually pay the consequences.”
― Charles W. Colson, How Now Shall We Live?