Quotes from Os Guinness

Being general, the categories never address us as individuals. At best our individuality is lost in the generality. At worst, it is contradicted and denied. Such categories force us to lie on their Procrustean bed, and anything about us that doesn't fit they lop off. They trim the picture of our personalities to fit their mass-produced frames.

With the excesses of the gender revolution the revolt against terms and categories becomes a revolt against reality, and all the rest of us are pressured to deny the obvious, believe in the incredible, and go along with the charade of the emperor's new clothes. ("Only a woman can get pregnant," but such truisms are now held to be false and offensive.)

Reality rebounds, and things turn out the opposite of what they seem and what people expect. Strength becomes weakness; love becomes pornography; pleasure becomes boredom; and so on.

As Pascal wrote long ago, "Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

Something has surely gone terribly wrong when Christians are the best atheist arguments against the Christian faith and Christendom their best argument for atheism.

Don't trust anyone over thirty," the 1960s radicals cried. "Don't trust anyone under three hundred," came Thomas Oden's wise reply. "Vox temporis" (the voice of the times) is no more trustworthy than "vox populi" (the voice of the people) when set against "vox dei" (the voice of God).

Today, we know that in the era of the Internet, focused attention has become the rarest commodity in the world. Everyone is speaking, no one is listening, and the resulting familiarity breeds inattention. It is therefore difficult to break through the many levels of resistance and make fresh sense to people.

calling in the Bible is a central and dynamic theme that becomes a metaphor for the life of faith itself.

Not only do Christians believe, they are those who "think in believing and believe in thinking," as Augustine expressed it. The world of Christian faith is not a fairy-tale, make-believe world, question-free and problem-proof, but a world where doubt is never far from faith's shoulder.

God calls people to himself, but this call is no casual suggestion. He is so awe inspiring and his summons so commanding that only one response is appropriate—a response as total and universal as the authority of the Caller. Thus

With the ability to produce more goods than people need, consumer capitalism has to make children into consumers earlier and keep them at it longer. Hence contemporary America, a culture of perennial adolescents.

If Sparta and Rome perished," Rousseau wrote, "what state can hope to endure for ever?

one of the more unfortunate side effects is that much apologetics has lost touch with evangelism and come to be all about "arguments," and in particular about winning arguments rather than winning hearts and minds and people. Our urgent need today is to reunite evangelism and apologetics, to make sure that our best arguments are directed toward winning people and not just winning arguments, and to seek to do all this in a manner that is true to the gospel itself.

To see apologetics only as technique is an insult to the gospel and to the high importance of what God is saying and doing in Jesus. From the humblest pun to the greatest double entendre of all time—the incarnation—the Bible is full of stories, parables, drama, ploys and jests that serve the ultimate purpose of the gospel and are shaped by the truth and logic of the message of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.

Faith desires to let God be God. Sin has framed God, whether by the ultimate insults that he, the creator of all things, does not exist, or that he, the white-hot holy One, is responsible for the evil and suffering that humans have introduced into his good creation.

all human desires, longings and aspirations point beyond themselves and toward God. The full range and depth of our desires are simply not fully covered by our unbelieving faiths and philosophies; and therefore they are not fully satisfied by what our unbelieving minds insist is true.

The truth is that we are a generation that has too much to live with and too little to live for.

The West is cutting off its Jewish and Christian roots and destroying the entire root system of its culture

Our urgent need today is to reunite evangelism and apologetics, to make sure that our best arguments are directed toward winning people and not just winning arguments, and to seek to do all this in a manner that is true to the gospel itself.

Disciples are not so much those who follow as those who must follow.

To make the choice of career or profession on selfish grounds, without a true sense of calling, is "probably the greatest single sin any young person can commit, for it is the deliberate withdrawal from allegiance to God of the greatest part of time and strength.

Calling is the truth that God calls us to

This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.

Biography can overwhelm philosophy in the best of us.