Quotes from Os Guinness

On the one hand, for each of us, sin is the claim to the right to myself, and so to my way of seeing things, which—far more than class, gender, race and generation—is the ultimate source of human relativity. On the other hand, sin is the deliberate repudiation of God and the truth of his way of seeing things. If my way of seeing things is decisive, anyone who differs from me is wrong by definition—including God. No

In losing God the Western world had lost its soul and its center. It had become "weightless"—groundless, centerless, meaningless, insignificant and immaterial, with an "unbearable lightness of being.

The fact is that without God, we cannot know God. For a start, we are incapable of knowing God by ourselves, so he has to disclose himself—in revelation. But beyond that, God is a person and not an object, so if we are to know him, he must keep on showing himself to us—in relationship. Knowing God therefore begins and ends with God, and it is a gift whose name is grace.

Worldliness is always a spiritual myopia. It falls for the spirit and system of the age and fails to correct itself through the correcting lenses of the perspective of the global (the Church in other continents), the historical (the Church in other centuries), and above all, the eternal (the Word of God across all places and times). Over

When cultures reject God, they cut themselves off from the ultimate ground of reality

This strategy proceeds by making people aware of their human longings and desires, and what these passions point to. These are longings and desires that are innate and buried in their lives. In particular, the strategy draws their attention to what have been called the "signals of transcendence" that are embedded in their normal, daily experience.

The opposite of the weightlessness that leads to a nation's collapse is revival, a return to the glory and therefore the reality and weightiness of God.

Jean Jacques Rousseau was at least right about this: better to face up to one's chains than to deck them with flowers and pretend they are not chains." ? Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

Thus a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices. ST. AUGUSTINE, CITY OF GOD

As Francis Schaeffer pointed out (and his whole apologetics turned on this point), "The more logical a non-Christian is to his own presuppositions, the further he is from the real world; and the nearer he is to the real world, the more illogical he is to his presuppositions."41 There

Truth is dead, and everything is relative at best and at worst a matter of the will to power. Nothing is what it appears to be. If truth was once the stated goal of intellectuals, it is now easy to read between their scholarly lines and see the petty egos and the dirty ambitions behind the lofty aspirations for truth. Truth is finally undecidable, as the postmodern philosophers express it. At best, truth is simply the compliment you pay to sentences that you happen to agree with.

what matters for each of us is the adequacy and truth of what we come to believe is the meaning of life—and therefore the source from which we derive our sense of identity, purpose, ethics and community.

What a mystery, what an absurdity if not true, and if true what a wonder!

they have become notable features of the heart of modern darkness: no givens, no rules and no limits.

A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame or money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.

More importantly, they show that the best answer to the challenge is not through improved technology but through deeper theology.

To flout the will of God openly will therefore be the fast track to social and national failure for Western nations.

True seekers are different. On meeting them you feel their purpose, their energy, their integrity, their idealism, and their desire to close in on an answer. Something in life has awakened questions, has made them aware of a sense of need, has forced them to consider where they are in life. They have become seekers because something has spurred their quest for meaning, and they have to find an answer.

But there is no McTheory when it comes to persuasion. There is no such thing as McApologetics, though it is significant that the nearest one-size-fits-all approach—the Four Spiritual Laws—was also created at the same time and in the same place as the first flourishing of McDonald's as we know it and the first theme park run by Walt Disney: 1950s California.

What is the difference between God disguising himself and deceiving us? That is where the principle of suspended judgment operates. Face to face with mystery, and especially the mystery of evil, the faith that understands why it has come to trust must trust where it has not come to understand. Faith does not know why in terms of the immediate, but it knows why it trusts God who knows why in terms of the ultimate.

Love is "the alpha and the omega of apologetics," in the sense that all we say must come from love, and it must lead to love and to the One who is love—in

use questions to raise questions

There is a time for stories, and there is a time for rational arguments, and the skill we need lies in knowing which to use, and when.

In the same way, metrics can record the frequency of our church attendance, the regularity of our Bible reading and the exact amount of our tithing, but they can never gauge the genuineness of any of them, or whether they are any better than "the noise of the solemn assemblies" against which the prophets fulminated.