Augustine noted that the best way to define a people is by the loved thing held in common. Fifteen hundred years ago, St. Reminiscent of The Light and the Glory, A Free People’s Suicide begins with a critique of contemporary culture. Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times.Not Os Guinness. The Last Christian on Earth: Uncover the Enemys Plot to Undermine the Church.
And so we can retire from a job, but we never retire from a calling. And all that matters is what we've been before the Lord. And we all know that the day will soon come, when there won't be a single memory of us on the earth. Because I think it's a kind of secular way of proving yourself.
I don't think that's the meaning. You had to sort of pack more and more—OG: You know, more efficient. I used to think of that in terms of time and motion studies. And I, I used to think, you know, it says redeeming the time, in Ephesians, and so on. He holds the Doctor of Philosophy degree in social sciences from Oxford University.I pray daily, Lord make, help me to count my days to make my days count. That's what I hope for.For decades now Os Guinness has been on the front lines as an evangelical author, speaker, and also as social analyst.
Now, am I overstating that? I, that's what I am groping to think the Lord of Paul means in Ephesians, and so on. So by our obedience and trust and faithfulness, in responding to our times and our generation, somehow, I don't know how, we are redeeming the times in which we live. It's the same word used of our Lord on the cross. And the word redeem, and I can't understand this.
His 1973 book The Dust of Death had been out a few years by then, and it was making the rounds among young Christian intellectuals. You can watch Kelsie’s story at samaritan ministries dot org slash world podcast.WS: I first encountered Os Guinness when I was in college. While she had many decisions to make, how she was going to pay her medical bills was not one of them, and she had the freedom to choose the treatment that was best for her. Members like Kelsie who was diagnosed with breast cancer. His new book is The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai’s Revolutionary Faith and The Future of Freedom.Support for Listening In comes from Samaritan Ministries, a community of Christians who care for one another spiritually and financially when a medical need arises.
He has published nearly a book a year since his 70th birthday, and—in my opinion—those books have been among his best. And, for those of you “of a certain age,” shall we say, consider this: Os Guinness is now 79 years old. He shook us out of the false dichotomies of “left and right” and “conservative and liberal” and encouraged us to go deeper with our thinking, and with our engagement with God, with each other, and with the world.He has continued to challenge Christians to “go deep” for more than a half century.
But why? Is it the coastals against the heartlanders? Is it responses to the social media or the previous president? I argue the deepest division is routine, those who understand the Republic and I don't mean democracy, the Republic, from the perspective of the Scriptures, which were the roots of the American Revolution. Everybody agrees with that. And to really contribute to the way forward.WS: And how would you define the present crisis?OG: America's deeply divided. But also be constructive, because this is time for Christians to get off the backfoot. Worth, Texas.WS: In, you know, I don't want to say 25 words or less, but just in a summary nutshell, what's the book about?OG: Well, I wanted to write something that's bang on the present crisis, because I think a lot of people aren't analyzing it deeply enough.
But then going back, you also talk about the if can I put it this way, the Sinai revolution as well, that that, that Moses, the law giver, Moses, the one who brings the people of Israel in the world face to face with the one true God is a true that's a true truly revolutionary idea in its day as well. And, and so there's that the French Revolution, the American Revolution, on the one hand. You say, and you and you make that comparison because you say, in comparison, in contrast, there is great clarity. That's kind of the more modern juxtaposition. But the one is the model of the American Revolution versus the French Revolution.
So you think of the first political document in America, which is the Mayflower Compact, it's a covenant. And the great goal was to understand the so called Hebrew Republic, which came out of the covenant. You know, the 17th century is described by historians as the Biblical century. The American Revolution and the English revolution are both because of the Reformation and sola scriptura.
But it is a biblically rooted revolution.WS: Well and because as you said, the first American document was the Mayflower Compact. And we shouldn't airbrush the revolution, including the terrible contradiction and hypocrisy of slavery. Now, of course, the Bible never airbrushes its heroes. So Americans need to understand the system came through the Reformation from the Bible.
The three are actually integrally linked, but the deep one is the philosophical cynicism. Now, I argue that we're facing three problems: Philosophical cynicism, which you've just described, moral corruption, and social collapse. You say over and over in your book that words really are important, and we've got to take them seriously and that one of the problems that we face today is, you know, after folks like Derrida and Foucault and others, deconstruction and post modernism, words don't really have agreed upon meaning anymore.OG: No, you're exactly right. One of the implications of that, or maybe even, maybe I've got the cause and effect reversed here, maybe maybe that is one of the effects of a greater of a more fundamental cause, which is that words matter.
And words can destroy the world. Incredibly, a Word created the world. So American democracy and republic has to be reformed in terms of truth, and in terms of words, because you know, biblically, words are commitments. So I would argue that while the elite complained about the populist conspiracy theories, like QAnon, they're just the populist reflection of the elite fake news and radical bias. You have a radical indeterminacy. Things that are totally undecidable.
You say words created the world. But you mentioned one of them just now that I want to drill down a little bit more. I'm just kinda in some way scratching, scratching the surface in some things that particularly jumped out at me.
So you think of our recent president and many of his policies, I supported strongly, they were good. And, you know, the rabbinic idea that evil speech is tantamount almost to murder. And that this idea of of the efficacy of words to create and to sustain, is we've got to recover that idea, it seems to me.OG: And the negative, it can destroy. But in some ways, it's an it's an idea that is sort of hiding in plain sight to modern sensibilities, that that we, even evangelicals, even those of us who are evangelicals, we we will often have an understanding maybe of theology, but not really a great understanding of, anthropology, what it means to be made in God's image, what it means to be man in relationship to God.
In other words, American restoration has to start with truth. I mean, the press are just as bad on the other side. President, I support X, Y, and Z. And Christians should have said publicly, Mr.
And in fact, you you give him credit throughout—WS: You dedicated the book to him. One of them is Rabbi Jonathan Sachs. That reminded me that you spend a lot of time in this book, talking about two particular rabbis. And with words,WS: You mentioned the rabbinic, not ‘saying’, but the rabbinic idea that gossip and false words are the equivalent of murder or evil.
That's not only wrong theologically, it's profoundly stupid. I mean, you remember a famous pastor last year or two years ago, talk about unhitching the Old Testament. Is that is that is that—OG: Deliberate. But in some ways, it's almost as if you are translating Rabbi Sachs to the evangelical American, this British rabbi to the American.
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