Quotes from Os Guinness

In a world congenial to skepticism, skeptics love to play the skeptic's card nonchalantly as if it were the royal flush that trumped all other cards and could not be countered. For many, it has become the skeptics' way of hanging out a "Do Not Disturb" sign. Simply raise a skeptical objection and retire from all argument. But of course, the simplest response is to turn such skepticism back on itself.

The faithfulness principle (of the conservative) and the flexibility principle (of the liberal) are two sides of the same coin. They are both necessary if Christians are to follow their instructions and remain simultaneously "in" the world but not "of" it.

Christian advocacy always goes wrong when we become the focus of our efforts, rather than the Lord. For when we are the focus, we subtly come to believe that God is no more certain than our defense of him. Argue and defend God well, and the world of faith appears unshakable. Defend him badly, and doubts creep in or crash down on top of us.

There is no question that the Four Spiritual Laws have been remarkably fruitful as a way of evangelism, but they are not good for everyone.

The first level of understanding necessary to faith is becoming critically aware of our dilemma in life without God.

The Christian faith contributed to the rise of the modern world, but the Christian faith has been undermined by the modern world it helped to create. The Christian faith thus becomes its own gravedigger.

As John Wesley advised his young preachers in his day (when the Bible still shaped the horizon of most people's lives), "Preach the Law until they are convicted, then preach Grace until they are converted.

Religion was once life's central mystery, its worship life's most awesome experience, its beliefs life's broadest canopy of meaning as well as its deepest guarantee of belonging. Yet today, where religion still survives in the modern world, no matter how passionate or committed the believer, it amounts to little more than a private preference, a spare-time hobby, and a leisure pursuit.

Whenever apologetics is needed, it should precede evangelism, but while apologetics is distinct from evangelism, it must always lead directly to it. The work of apologetics is only finished when the door to the gospel has been opened and the good news of the gospel can be proclaimed.

When a friend told Francis Bacon that he would prefer not to have an eternal soul than to live in eternal torment, the painter replied with a grim realism that people are "so attracted to their egos that they'd probably rather have the torment than simple annihilation.

Erudition lends conviction to self-deception.

To most people at the time it was unthinkable that religion might ever not be what it was then. However, Bryce mused, if religion in America were ever to lose its strength and authority, the result would be "the completest revolution of all." The strongest bonding in American society would have gone, and unbounded freedom would run amok and work to cause its own undoing.

Thinking Christians think in believing and they believe in thinking.

This book focuses on a narrower issue and a simple problem: We have lost the art of Christian persuasion and we must recover it.

Don't trust anyone over thirty," the 1960s radicals cried. "Don't trust anyone under three hundred," came Thomas Oden's wise reply.

everyone is now in the business of relentless self-promotion—presenting themselves, explaining themselves, defending themselves, selling themselves or sharing their inner thoughts and emotions as never before in human history.

If ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt. If doubt is eventually justified, we were believing what clearly was not worth believing. But if doubt is answered, our faith has grown stronger. It knows God more certainly and it can enjoy God more deeply.

Man's love of truth is such that when he loves something which is not the truth, he pretends to himself that what he loves is the truth, and because he hates to be proved wrong, he will not allow himself to be convinced that he is deceiving himself. So he hates the real truth for what he takes to his heart in its place.

In his famous novel 1984, O'Brien states frankly, "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. . . . The object of power is power.

We have pointed to the way of Jesus, and then through our behavior we have stood squarely in the path of anyone who might like to join it. Plainly, there is a time in our arguments to confess, and confession and changed lives have to be a key part of our arguments. When it comes our responding to hypocrisy, words will never be enough.

For anyone who understands freedom, it is simply inescapable that freedom requires truth, a shared sense of truth, and therefore trustworthiness and trust.

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." Rochefoucauld's maxim

by what criteria? By those of modern

Pascal and his brilliant exposition in Pensées. "I have often said," Pascal wrote, "that the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his own room."46