Beeson Podcast, Episode 343
Os Guinness
June 6, 2017

Announcer:	Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.

Timothy George:	Welcome to today's Beeson Podcast. Well you know, the podcast is a special offering of Beeson Divinity School. And occasionally, we like to bring you into the life of our school and share with you what's going on today.

	So this podcast is actually taking place before a live audience. It's our Board of Advisors, their Spring meeting. And we have a very distinguished guest. And the interviewer today is not me, but Collin Hansen, who's a member of our Board of Advisors and works with The Gospel Coalition. So Collin, over to you.

Collin Hansen:	Thank you, Dr. George. Again, our guest today on the Beeson Podcast is the author and social critic Os Guinness, the great-great-great-grandson of Arthur Guinness, the Dublin brewer. He was born during World War II in China, where his parents were medical missionaries. Os has written or edited more than thirty books, including The Call, A Free People's Suicide, and Renaissance. His latest book is Fool's Talk: The Recovery of Christian Persuasion.

	Os has spoken at dozens of the world's major universities, and spoken widely to political and business conferences on many issues, including religious freedom across the world. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Center for Christian Apologetics in Oxford, though he lives with his wife, Jenny, near Washington, DC. Thank you, Os, for joining us on the Beeson Podcast.

Os Guinness:	My pleasure.

Collin Hansen:	Os, nearly 10 years ago in 2008, you spearheaded the Evangelical Manifesto with help from Timothy George. Would you say the issues you raised there, the confusions and corruptions of evangelicals, have improved or worsened since then?

Os Guinness:	I think, sadly, they've deepened. And we're more confused than even then. In other words, that Manifesto was picked up by some, but not by enough.

Collin Hansen:	One of the opportunities we have, essentially, to take stock of ourselves as evangelicals often comes in the aftermath of presidential elections. I'm not sure if that says something positive about us or negative, but historically speaking, evangelicals tend to tie themselves together to being up or down, or good or bad, or anything like that related to the outcome of an election. So what would you say that you learned, perhaps about yourself or about evangelicals, in the aftermath of the presidential election?

Os Guinness:	I'm not sure I learned too much about myself in the election. Evangelicals, though, they were roundly attacked for, say, the 81% who voted in Donald Trump, and I thought unfairly. There's, I think, a lot of misunderstanding surrounding the President. As I understood it, the evangelicals I know, it wasn't that they voted for Trump, because they knew he's an extraordinary character who's got some obvious flaws. But it was more that they voted against not just Hillary, but all the henchmen and women who she would have brought in with her. Because culturally speaking, if that particular party had got in, apart from the grace of the Lord and revival, the culture and its trends in America might have been irreversible.

	So it was a vote against that, rather than for Trump. And the way I put it is I think President Trump is God's wrecking ball, stopping America in its tracks, the direction it's going, and giving the country a chance to rethink. Now we're not putting our hope in the President or in politics, but you have a window to regroup, to rethink. The Church profoundly needs reformation in all sorts of areas. So that is a breathing space.

Collin Hansen:	One of the many things that's been discussed through the election, and the buildup, and then the aftermath has been issues related to class and education, in voting as well as religion. It used to be that evangelicals, in America at least, were regarded as being poor and less educated than Americans in general. But now we've seen, through study after study, that religiosity actually rises with class and degrees. Religious adherence increases with wealth and education. Are you positive, negative, or indifferent to this trend toward the white collar with religion in America?

Os Guinness:	To be honest, my background is sociology. I couldn't care less about those sort of things. The real issue today is faithfulness to our Lord. And it's not a matter of politics, it's not a matter of class, or culture, or education. It's faithfulness to our Lord. So to me, it's ironic that in the year of the 500th anniversary of The Reformation, we should be discussing the Benedict option. Because the Reformation was precisely a reversal on a grand scale of Benedict. And if you look before the Reformation, Benedict was the most powerful figure in most of the church movements. He's incredibly influential. 

	But the Reformation and its rediscovery of the Gospel, notions such as calling, is a direct reversal of Benedict. And I think, let's forget all this talk about culture and politics, and really start asking ourselves, "Are we as faithful to our Lord in the modern world as we should be?" Because you look at the Church, and the Gospel's exploding in the Global South. I happened to be born in China. Where I was born happens to be, nothing to do with me obviously, the epicenter of the fastest growth of the Church in 2,000 years. I was in Uganda last Autumn, incredible number of Christians there. 

	We're not doing well anywhere in the advanced modern world. And the Church in the West has capitulated to the challenges of modernity. It's been distorted, and seduced, and shaped by the modern world. That's the issue, not politics and culture, but faithfulness.

Collin Hansen:	Are there other signs of spiritual vitality that you see, I'd say especially among Christians outside the Church, outside of Church leadership essentially, in that religious area in the broader marketplace? What signs of renewal and hope do you see?

Os Guinness:	Well the way I put it is a lot of the generalizations, which are true, are rather discouraging. But the exceptions are magnificently encouraging. And there are lots of them. Now you take something like the justice movement. International Justice Mission grew out of our church in Washington. You see things like that which are incredibly encouraging. So there an immense number of encouragements, but many of the generalizations are profoundly discouraging. We're not doing well overall. And certainly, much of evangelicalism is in a meltdown.

	I mean, I was at a Christian college which shall be nameless. The first hymn in the chapel, I said to the chaplain afterwards, it could've been sung by Hindus. It could've been sung by spirituality aficionados. It had no biblical, Trinitarian, Christological content at all. And here it was, sung with passionate devotion by this Christian college chapel. It was quite appalling. It was much capitulation to the softness of expressive individualism of today, as say Protestant liberalism in an earlier generation was to the Enlightenment.

Collin Hansen:	One of the things that you've advocated for is effective Christian persuasion in the public sphere. Who would you say are some of the best practitioners of Christian persuasion today, and what can we learn from them?

Os Guinness:	Well ,the Jewish Christian consensus has gone. And if you look at much American evangelism, it still reflects that sort of a world. And all the recipes, the one, two, three, fours, and so on, they reflect that world. But not we're in a world where you have to be able to speak many, many different languages with a huge amount of skepticism. And we really need to go back to profound theological and Biblical apologetics.

	Now of course, there are people doing wonderfully. You take a pastor like Tim Keller, who is superbly on the wavelength, say, of the New York, young, urban professional. He just does it naturally. And there are many others. You have people working, say, with Ravi Zacharias, like Michael Ramsden in England, and others. Absolutely superb at this, but we've got to get that sort of a biblical evangelism with heart and mind back into the DNA of the average church.

Collin Hansen:	What are some specific ways that people listening to this podcast, and in this room, can start to do that in their own churches?

Os Guinness:	Well at the moment, much American and American-style apologetics is very limited. It's considered for intellectuals, and for eggheads, and so on. And we've got to get it back as something that's for every disciple, giving a reason for the hope that's within them. And people have to be taught how to do it biblically, how to do it simply, how to do it with their neighbors, and not in complicated ways that require an understanding of the Kalam argument, or whatever. We've got to get it back to be simple and straightforward.

	Good apologetics starts with love and listening with people. And we should teach every Christian how to understand the anatomy of an unbelieving mind, how it works and how we can approach people.

Collin Hansen:	Which, in a lot of ways, comes naturally for people who've been recently converted, who have just come out of that worldview. So part of it, I guess, is just to, as we evangelize, hopefully some of that will happen naturally as people turn right around and give testimony to the people that they were just among and called out of.

	As we learn ... One of the massive changes we live with in our day is a revolution in terms of communication, how up-to-date and up-to-speed we are on different things around the globe, especially through social media and cable news. But I find that it seems to correspond with an increasing hostility toward other people, other people who are not like us. Maybe we don't really want to know as much about each other as we actually do these days. How do we muster up love for our neighbors next to us and around the world, as Jesus calls us to, and even lay down our lives for them in this atmosphere that breeds such hostility?

Os Guinness:	Well we've got to understand why the fear.  The dominant world emotion is fear. And one of the facts that's created this is what's called pluralization, the explosion of diversity. So you see earlier periods, say the Roman Empire, where you had incredible diversity. And the early Church had no fear of that, but now it's global. In sociology, we say, "Everyone is now everywhere." Well that's a little exaggerated, but you get the point. Which means that you're rubbing shoulders, cheek by jowl, every day with people from all over the world in the big cities of today. And so obviously that creates fear.

	Now we've got to go back to the teaching of Scripture and our Lord. For example, at the heart of covenant is the love of neighbor. Now that's said once in Leviticus. But more than 30 times, it talks about the love of the stranger. And the reason, of course, is the stranger ... You take Aristotle. He told his people to care "for people like us." And that's normal, birds of a feather. The family, the family; the tribe, the tribe; the nation, the nation. But in Scripture, the stranger is not like us. But while he or she may not be like me, he is still in God's image. And so out of that reciprocal responsibility of the heart of the Gospel and the heart of the Scriptures, we as Christians should have a deep love of strangers and so on.

	Now when you start applying that politically, you've got to bring in other factors. So for instance, in the American immigration debate, a lot of Christians said, "Jesus was a refugee," as if that solved everything. Well you had humanitarian issues, human dignity, treatment of refugees and strangers. And that's basic. You had national security issues, and you also had national identity and unity issues. And politically, you had to put all those together.

	A couple of weeks ago, I was in Macedonia, where the President is a Christian. And they had to wrestle with all of those. I had a fascinating time with him and his Council, discussing them all together, not just one or the other.

Collin Hansen:	You credit Francis Schaeffer for teaching you much about apologetics. If you could ask his insight on any particular issue today, public or private, what would it be?

Os Guinness:	Well Schaeffer, in his public commentary, was not always right. I'm actually talking about his apologetics.

Collin Hansen:	Right.

Os Guinness:	He was the greatest one-to-one apologist I've ever seen. Now that was based on his love of individuals. But his understanding of how the unbelieving mind works, going back to passages like Romans 1:18. And he had a very profound understanding.

	Now when you come to some of the public things, I frankly disagree with him. His views, say, on Søren Kierkegaard or Karl Barth, were often a little off-base, I thought. So I don't follow him on everything, not all his ideas. But his apologetics, he was absolutely brilliant in his persuasion and compassion. And I have a great appreciation for him.

Collin Hansen:	For younger people listening here, seminary students who never knew him, what was that like to see that in action, or to be on the other side of that, or ... What was that like?

Os Guinness:	Well, an enormous privilege. And it was an extraordinary age, the late 1960s, with the exploding counterculture. And I happened to be at a time just after I graduated of maximum openness, so it was incredibly powerful and influential in my own sense of calling and so on. So I owe the world to him, and am deeply grateful. Although I don't agree with him on everything. 

	You know, I lived with him for a number of years. And I don't say this often, too publicly, but he didn't read many books. He read magazines. And he had a brilliant, intuitive grasp of putting these together. But he'd read The Listener, or Time, or Newsweek, or whatever. The only book I actually ever saw him read was the Bible. Now, of course, that's the one you should read, the first and the last. But as any of us say, one of the weaknesses of the younger generation of millennials today is they don't read books. They get everything, in their case, from the internet, not magazines. But Schaeffer didn't read that widely of the original sources. Now he obviously did as a student earlier, but not in that extraordinary period. 

Collin Hansen:	That actually leads right into the question that I was going to ask about reading. You think about young seminary students, and all the different genres, and all the different books. We're publishing more books these days than ever before. How would you tell seminary students, or the rest of us in this room, to prioritize our reading? Are there certain authors, certain topics, particularly for this moment, particularly for this age, that you would suggest that we prioritize?

Os Guinness:	I always duck the questions of reading lists, because if you recommend something that should be read by everyone, it has to be a classic. And there are very few of those. And certainly I would urge people to read St. Augustine, Pasqual, G.K. Chesterton, you know, things like that. But everyone's got different callings. And they should read widely of books that touch the specific areas of their callings. And that's what I try and do. 

	I'm not a historian, but I think one way of taking in history, which is so important today, is through biography. Great biographies of early centuries or someone like Winston Churchill, you get a whole period through understanding the great men and women who lived in those periods. So we've got to read much, much more history. But just read, read, read. There's no question that today, the main source of wisdom, of course under the Holy Spirit and under the teaching of the Word, is through books. And we've got to get the younger generation to wean themselves off a reliance only on the internet. 

Collin Hansen:	I mentioned in the introduction you've published or edited more than thirty books. Are there any of yours in particular that you think are especially timely, even if they were written a long time ago, that you might suggest, that's one whose moment is now?

Os Guinness:	You're not asking me to blow my own trumpet, are you? I'm English. I'm not a scholar. I'm sitting in the presence of genuine scholars. I hope I'm a thinker. I'm not an academic, I'm more in the world of journalism and public policy. Some of my books, for instance, "The Global Public Square." That is an urgent world issue of how we live with our deep differences. I think it's still well ahead of the game, and still spot-on in terms of the challenges we face, but not terribly much picked up.

	What I'm speaking on in the chapel this morning, and I'm writing in my next book, I think is addressing the American crisis, where it is at its deepest. But most of my books, I hope, address the moment. 

Collin Hansen:	Yeah. Well you mentioned earlier, I wanted to come back to something that you threw out there. And for those of us who get immersed in the literature on expressive individualism, it is extensive. And once you start to see that ideology, or way of life, or worldview in our culture, it's impossible to not see it. But could you explain a little bit of what that is, and how that's come to characterize our age? And why that's such an urgent problem, I would say, for Christians?

Os Guinness:	Well, you've got great scholars like Christopher Lasch who describe that in his books on narcissism. You've got Christian scholars like Christian Smith, who've described it well. My own thrust is we need to look at the history of ideas, but we also need to look at cultural analysis. Because while ideas shape us ... Take, for instance, the sexual revolution. Christians I know have an incredible confusion about this, partly because they've never looked at the thing as a whole. And when you look at the sexual revolution, and go back to Wilhelm Reich and André Breton, and all the way back to Marquis de Sade and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, no thinking Christian could read the history of all this and come out in favor of it. And the naivety of evangelicals today is because they don't understand the whole.

	But even then, it's just ideas. What most evangelicals miss is cultural analysis, the way consumerism shapes thinking. The way, say, something like fast life shaped by clocks and watches shapes thinking. And American evangelicals could smell a relativist at a hundred yards. There are some hostile ideas they're very, very good at. But when it comes to looking at how modernity shapes us, they're clueless. And modernity is half of our current world.

Collin Hansen:	And one way that I often think about it is that Americans have an expectation that America is the best possible place for Christianity to be able to flourish. And that there's something intrinsic about America and Christianity that go together. And I wonder if that has something to do with the inability to be able to see the way that there are aspects of modernity in America that are very corrosive to faith. Are there ways that Americans can be learning from the global Church, to be able to help give us perspective on some of the things that we struggle with, some of the water that we swim in, not even realizing that we're in it?

Os Guinness:	I love ... Rudyard Kipling once had a line, "What knows he of England who only England knows?" And you always need to have an outside perspective. And so our brothers and sisters in Africa or Asia, they look at us here in America, and they have outside eyes. They go, "You think that's Christian? That's American." But increasingly, as America and the Gospel are parting company, some of these things are clearer. That doesn't mean we don't appreciate ... No country has been more congenial to the Gospel and to the Church than America has been. And of course, it shaped America at its best. 

	But I would argue, as in my book coming out in the next months, that in the 1960s, there was a faithful lurch left. And many of the ideas in America today come from not 1776, the American Revolution, they come from 1789 and the French Revolution. And increasingly, as that divide widens, Christians are seeing that our homeland is not there but it's here. And we've got to be very, very careful. So we appreciate all that the Gospel has done for America, and America's openness to the Gospel. But the gap is widening today.

Collin Hansen:	For future generations, if Jesus does not return, are you optimistic, then, in light of all these things? Or pessimistic? Certainly there are reasons for both in what we've talked about, but how does that balance out?

Os Guinness:	I never use the terms. In other words, optimism and pessimism in America is either psychological (is the glass half full or empty) or it's circumstantial (are the circumstances bullish or bearish). And none of those have any relation to the Gospel. In other words, for me, it's are we hopeful? However, I try to be clear-eyed and realistic in terms of analysis. And then at the end of the day, always to be hopeful. Because the Gospel gives us the grounds for hope. 

	So we're up against an extraordinary challenge today. If you take the challenges within America, I hope Christians are reading about the human future, the stuff like singularity, and transhumanism, and this sort of stuff. We are seeing a refueling of the Babel drive. And you listen to some of the stuff and read some of the stuff coming out of California from Ray Kurzweil, and Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel, and people like this. This is a refueling of the Babel drive, and at the heart of social constructionism. 

	You know the so-called battle of the binaries? Well people are talking about removing the differences between male and female. That's relatively straightforward. But the really big one, they want to remove the gap between humanity and deity. For example, a little book out this year, which is a huge seller instantly, is Yuval Harari's. And you get the whole thing in the title, "Homo Deus." We are the gods on planet Earth, we are the godlings now. And our task is to overcome mortality. And you see the Babel drive in a brazen nakedness. And we've got to take on these things. So there are unprecedented challenges on the agenda facing the Church today.

Collin Hansen:	Last question. You described yourself there as being clear-eyed in your realism and your analysis, and try to be hopeful, as well. Having written and traveled so extensively, do you ever get surprised? Does something ever just genuinely shock you as you're trying to read these signs of the times from that realist but also hopeful perspective?

Os Guinness:	I wouldn't say shocked, but saddened. I mean, you get almost weekly examples of evangelicals caving in needlessly to something. And you go, "Really? How could they do that?" Not so much a shock as a sadness at where we are today in so many instances. A leading brother who became Eastern Orthodox recently. I've never attacked our Orthodox brothers and sisters, but I know enough about Greece and Russia, and just came back from the Balkans. How could anyone who knows true evangelicalism go to something like that? And you see worse examples than that one.

	It's more the sadness at what's happening that's so unnecessary. I can understand that people are turned off by the cultural baggage of evangelicals, the political aspects, the cultural aspects. But to fail to see the glory of it, and to leave it for lesser things, to me, is unbelievable.

Collin Hansen:	My guest here on the Beeson Podcast has been Os Guinness, most recent book, Fool's Talk: The Recovery of Christian Persuasion. What's the title of the book that you're working on now?

Os Guinness:	The working title, Last Call for Liberty.

Collin Hansen:	Excellent, excellent. We'll look forward to that. Thank you, Os, for joining us on the Beeson Podcast.

Os Guinness:	My privilege, thank you.

Announcer:	You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website, BeesonDivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school, training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work, and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson Podcast.