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Episode 256: Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom: Os Guinness (Reprise)
Manage episode 426692476 series 3225558
This week's engaging episode features a conversation with Os Guinness, a profound advocate for faith, freedom, truth, reason, and civility. Os is an esteemed author and social critic and the great-great-great-grandson of Arthur Guinness, the famous Dublin brewer. With a bibliography exceeding 30 books, he provides insightful perspectives on our cultural, political, and social environments.
Born in China during World War II to medical missionary parents, Os experienced the height of the Chinese revolution in 1949 and was expelled along with many foreigners in 1951. He later earned his undergraduate degree at the University of London and completed his D.Phil in the social sciences from Oriel College, Oxford. He currently resides in the United States.
In this episode, Jonathan and Os delve into Scripture and discuss Os' latest book, The Magna Carta of Humanity. They explore global perspectives, including Os' views on America's polarization crisis, the recent changes in the UK with the new King, and the evolving role of the “Defender of the Faith” in the monarchy. Os also shares fascinating stories about his remarkable family history, from Christian brewers to pastors to his journey as a Christian author.
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TRANSCRIPT:
The following is a transcript of Episode 256: Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom: Os Guinness (Reprise) for Candid Conversations with Jonathan Youssef.
[00:01] JONATHAN: Today it is my special privilege to have Os Guinness on the program with us. Os is an author and social critic. He’s written untold amounts of books. He’s just like Dad, and it seems you have a new book out every six months or so, Os. Is that sort of the pattern, you get two out a year?
[00:24] Os Guinness: Well, usually one a year, but COVID gave me the chance to write a lot more.
[00:28] JONATHAN: Oh, well, I love it. Many of our listeners will, of course, be familiar with you, but there may be a few out there who don’t. We have somewhat of an international audience, and I know that you have a very international background, having been born in China and raised in China and educated in England. There’s a couple of things. I’m sure people are seeing the name Guinness and wondering is there a connection with the brewery? And of course, there is. But I wonder if you’d tell us a little bit of your family history and then we’ll get to your own personal story.
[01:00] Os Guinness: Well, you’re right. I’m descended from Arthur Guinness, the brewer. My ancestor was his youngest son. He was an evangelical. He came to Christ, to faith, under the preaching of John Wesley in the revival that took place in the late 1730s, early 1740s. So he called himself born again back in those days and founded Ireland’s first Sunday school, which of course, in this days was a rather radical proposition, teaching people who couldn’t go to ordinary schools. And from the very beginning, care for the poor, for the workers and things like that were built into the brewery and the whole family status in Dublin. So that was the ancestor, and I’m descended from a branch of the family that’s kept the faith ever since. My great-grandfather, Arthur’s grandson, at the age of 23, was the leading preacher in the Irish revival of 1859. And we have newspaper accounts of crowds of 25,000, 30,000, and of course no microphone. He’d climb onto the back of a carriage and preach and the Spirit would fall. Ireland was not divided in those days, but in that part of the country, in the year after the revival, there was literally only one recorded crime.
[02:33] JONATHAN: Unbelievable.
[02:34] Os Guinness: This shows you how profound revival can be.
[02:37] JONATHAN: Isn’t it?
[02:39] Os Guinness: His son, my grandfather, was one of the first Western doctors to go to China. He treated the Empress Dowager, the last Emperor, and my parents were born in China so I was born in China. So I’m part of the family that’s kept faith ever since the first Arthur.
[03:00] JONATHAN: You had mention that this is a branch of the family. Is there a branch of the family that’s gone a different trajectory?
[03:08] Os Guinness: Well, for a long time the brewing family was strongly Christian, but then eventually, sadly, wealth probably undermined part of the faith. But as I said, my family has kept it. They often say there are brewing Guinnesses, banking Guinnesses, and then they call them the Guinnesses for God or the poor Guinnesses.
[03:36] JONATHAN: An amazing family lineage, and you’re thinking of just the covenantal family through that line. And so you’ve got a book that came out this year, The Great Quest: Invitation to the Examined Life and a Sure Path to Meaning. And I know in the book you share a little bit of your own search for meaning and finding, because we all know that Christianity is really the only faith you cannot be born into in terms of you can be born into a covenant home and be taught the lessons of Christ and the church, but it’s really a faith that has to become your own. It’s not the faith that is transferred to the child. So tell us a little bit about your own story and your own coming to faith in Christ.
[04:31] Os Guinness: Well, I was born in China, as I said, and my first 10 years were pretty rough with war, famine, revolution, all sorts of things. And I was there for two years under Mao’s reign of terror, and in ’51, two years after the revolution, my parents were allowed to send me home to England and they were under house arrest for another two years. So I had most of my teenage years apart from my parents, and my own coming to faith was really a kind of partly the witness of a friend at school but partly an intellectual search. I was reading on the one hand atheists like Nietzsche and Sartre, and my own hero, Albert Camus. And on the other hand, Christians like Blaise Pascal and G. K. Chesterton, and of course, C. S. Lewis.
And at the end of that time, I was thoroughly convinced the Christian faith was true. And so I became a Christian before I went to university in London, and I’m glad I did because the 60s was a crazy decade—drugs, sex, rock and roll, the counterculture. Everything had to be thought back to square one. You really needed to believe what you believed and why you believed what you believed, or the whole onslaught was against, which is a bracing decade to come to faith.
[05:57] JONATHAN: It really is. I wonder if you could walk me through that a little bit. I’ve read some of Camus and Sartre, and I mean, they’re just such polar opposites about humanity and God. What were some of the things that helped you navigate through that terrain?
[06:17] Os Guinness: Well, I personally never liked Sartre. He was a dull fish. And even later, when I went to L’Abri with Francis Schaeffer, we met people who studied under Sartre and people who had known Camus. Camus was warm, passionate. There are stories, we don’t know whether they’re true or not or just a rumor, that he was actually baptized just before he died in a car crash in January 1960. I don’t know if that’s true or not, or if that’s a kind of death-bed conversion, but certainly his philosophy is profoundly human, and that’s what I loved about so much of it. But at the end of the day, not adequate.
You know his famous Myth of Sisyphus. He rolls the stone up the hill and it rolls down again. Rolls up, it rolls down again, and so on. A gigantic defiance against the absurdity of the universe, but with no real answers. And of course, that’s what we have in the gospel.
[07:19] JONATHAN: That’s right, and it’s sort of the meaninglessness of life, and I know a lot of high school, college students even seminary students have been deeply affected by some of his writing and have certainly felt, I think, what you’re touching into there, which is that deeply personal—there’s a lot of reflection in there that I think resounds with people. But as you said, it leaves you with nothing at the end of the day.
So you’ve written quite a number of books across quite a range of topics. What is it that sort of stokes your fire, that kind of drives you? I know the Bible uses passion in a very negative, sinful sense, but it’s a word we use a lot today. What is the passion that’s driving you in your writings and your speaking?
[08:12] Os Guinness: Well, you can never reduce it easily, but two things above all. One, making sense of the gospel for our crazy modern world. On the other hand, trying to understand the world so that responsible people can live in the world knowing where we are. Because in terms of the second, I think one of the things in the Scriptures as a whole which is much missing in the American church today is the biblical view of time. You take the idea of the signs of the times, David’s men or our Lord’s rebuked His generation. they could read the weather but they missed the signs of the times. So you get that incredible notion of Saint Paul talking about King David. He served God’s purpose in his generation. That’s an incredible idea that you so understand your generation that in some small, inadequate way we’re each serving God’s purpose of salt and light and so on in our generation.
But many Americans, and many people around the whole world, they don’t have that sense of time that you see in Scripture. I’m not quite sure why; maybe growing up in revolutionary China I’ve always had an incredible sense of time.
[09:36] JONATHAN: You know, I think that’s encouraging to hear. In our society, we get so fixated and caught up on the issues but there’s almost this moment of needing to pull back and observe things from a higher perspective. And I think you do such a fantastic job of that.
Let’s walk through some of your more recent books, and then maybe get a peek under the curtain of what’s coming, because I think you’ve got a couple of books that are on their way out. The Magna Carta of Humanity. This idea of Sinai and French Revolution as it sort of relates to the American Revolution. Tell us a little bit about the impetus for this and the thought process towards that.
[10:25] Os Guinness: Well, the American crisis at its deepest is the great polarization today. But many people, I think, don’t go down to the why. They blame it on the social media, or our former president and his tweets, or the coastals against the heartlanders and so on. But I think the deepest things are those who understand America and freedom from the perspective of the American Revolution, which was largely, sadly not completely, Christian, because it went back to the Jewish Torah, and those who understand America from the perspective of ideas coming down from the French Revolution—postmodernism, radical multiculturalism, the cancel culture, critical theory, all these things, the sexual revolution. They come from the ideas descended from Paris, not from anything to do with the Bible, and we’ve got to understand this.
Now, the more positive way of looking at that, many Americans have no idea how the American Revolution came from the Scriptures, how notions like covenant became consitution; the consent of the governed or the separation of powers, going down the line, you have a rich, deep understanding in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. and we’ve got to understand if we know how to champion these things today.
But it’s not just a matter of nostalgia or defending the past. I personally am passionately convinced this is the secret to the human future. What are the deepest views of human dignity, or of words, or of truth, or of freedom, or of justice, peace and so on? They are in the Bible. And we’ve got to explore them. So the idea from a gentleman not too far from you, Jonathan, who said we’ve got to unhitch our faith from the Old Testament, that’s absolute disaster. A dear guy, but dead wrong. You’ve got to explore the Old Testament as never before, and then, of course, we can understand why the new is so wonderful.
[12:46] JONATHAN: You know, Os, just going down that track a little bit, that’s right; you can’t have the New Testament without the Old Testament. The prophecies of Christ, the fulfillment, it all falls apart, the whole argumentation, everything almost becomes meaningless at that point. And I know the argument is that it’s about the event of the crucifixion and the resurrection, but you don’t have those apart from Genesis 3, of course, Genesis 1, all the way through till the end of Malachi. You can’t separate these two testamental periods. It’s ludicrous, and it creates so much damage, as you’ve said.
[13:36] Os Guinness: Well you know, take some of the myths that are around today. They’re very common even in evangelical circles. The Old Testament is about law; the New Testament is about love.
[13:48] JONATHAN: Right.
[13:49] Os Guinness: That’s not right. That’s a slander on the Jews. Read the beginning of Deuteronomy. The Jews, the nation, they are called to love the Lord with all their heart, soul and so on. Why did the Lord choose them? Because He loved them and set His affection on them. And you can see in Deuteronomy there’s a link between liberty and loyalty and love. So right through the Scriptures, those who abandon the truth, apostasy, that’s equivalent to adultery. Why? To love the Lord is to be loyal to the Lord and faithful to the Lord and so on. And we’ve got to see there’s a tremendous amount about love, loyalty connected with liberty.
I mean, a couple of weeks ago, a couple of professors writing in the New York Times said the Constitution is broken and it shouldn’t be reclaimed. We need to move on, scrap it and rebuild our democracy. Now the trouble is constitutions became a matter of lawyers and law courts, the rule of law only in the Supreme Court. No, it comes from covenant. Covenant is all about freely chosen consent, a morally binding pledge. So the heart of freedom is the freedom of the heart, and we’ve got to get back—this is all there in the Old Testament.
Did the Jews fail? Of course. That’s why our Lord. but equally the church is failing today. So we’ve got so much to learn from the best and the worst of the experience of the Jews in the Old Testament. But to ignore the Old is absolute folly.
[15:35] JONATHAN: Well, and thinking about the American Revolution and the impact of men, as you’ve already cited with your own family history, of Wesley and the preaching of George Whitefield in the Americas, which would have had a profound effect on the American psyche, and I think would have contributed a great deal to a lot of the writing of law and constitutional ideology.
[16:02] Os Guinness: Well, the revival had a huge impact on all who created the Revolution. But some of the ideas go back, I think, to the Reformation. Not so much to Luther at this point, but to Calvin and Swingly. In Scotland, John Knox and in England Oliver Cromwell. You know, that whole notion of covenant. I mean, Cromwell said ... A lot of weird ideas came up in the 17th Century, but the 17th Century is called the Biblical Century. Why? Because through the Reformation they discovered, rediscovered, what was called the Hebrew republic—in other words, the constitution the Lord gave to the founding of His own people.
So even someone like Thomas Hobbes, who was an atheist, they are discussing the Hebrew republic—in other words, Exodus and Deuteronomy. It had a tremendous impact on the rise of modern notions of freedom, and we’ve got to understand that.
So the Mayflower Compact is a covenant. John Winthrop on the Arbella is talking about covenant. When John Adams writes the first constitution, written one, in this country, which is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, he calls it a covenant. And the American Constitution is essentially a national somewhat secularized form of covenant. And we who are heirs of that as followers of Jesus, we’ve got to re-explore it and realize its richness today.
[17:44] JONATHAN: Turn on the news today and it feels like we’re quite a distance from that. Even thinking about using a word like justice, you know, all this now it seems, to your point, this ideology from the French Revolution has really come to the forefront, certainly in the 60s, but there seems to be a new revival of this. What’s contributing to that today in America?
[18:17] Os Guinness: Well, James Billington, the former librarian of Congress, and others, have looked at the French Revolution, and remember only lasted 10 years in France, then came dictator Napoleon. But it was like a gigantic volcanic explosion, and out of it came their main lava flows. The first one we often ignore, which is called revolutionary nationalism, in 19th-century France and so on. You can ignore that mostly except it’s very important behind the Chinese today.
But the second one is the one people are aware of. Revolutionary socialism, or in one word, communism. The Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution. We’re actually experiencing the impact of the third lava flow, revolutionary liberationism, which is not classical Marxism, communism, but cultural Marxism or neo Marxism. And that goes back to a gentleman called Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s. Now you mentioned the 60s. it became very important in the 60s because Gramsci’s ideas were picked up by the Frankfurt School in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and the leading thinker in America in the 60s was Herbert Marcuso, who in many ways is the godfather of the new left in the 60s. I first came here in ’68 as a tourist, six weeks. One hundred cities were burning, far worse than 1920, because of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Kennedy.
But here’s the point: The radicals knew that for all the radicalism in the streets, anti-Vietnam protests and so on, they wouldn’t win in the streets, so they had to do what they called, copying Mao Zedong, a long march through the institutions—in other words, not the streets. Go slowly, gradually, win the colleges and universities. Win the press and media. Win what they call the culture industry—Hollywood, entertainment. And then sweep around and win the whole culture.
Now here we are, more than 50 years later, they have done it. Now, in the early days, I’m a European still, I’m not American, people would never have believed that the radical left would influence what were called the fortresses of American conservatism—business, finance, the military—but all of those in the form of woke-ism have been profoundly affected. So America’s at an extraordinary point in terms of the radical left being more power even than the French Revolution.
[21:16] JONATHAN: Okay, so in thinking through that lines of reasoning, the people who are caught up in that today, the radicalism, is this just indoctrination? I guess what my point is, is it all intentional? Is it like Marcuso’s intentionality of going through the halls of academia? Or rather is it that they’ve just been raised to think that this is just the way ... that it’s the most opportune way to get your ideology out there?
[21:56] Os Guinness: No, it’s thoroughly intention. But of course, always there’s a creative minority who eventually win over the majority who are hardly aware of it. You mentioned justice. I was on calls for a California pastor last year and I said to them, “You brothers have drunk the Kool-Aid.” They didn't realize how much of their understanding of justice owed everything to the radical left and nothing to the Hebrew prophets.
So you know how the left operate. It analyzes discourage. How do ordinary people speak? And so you look for the majority/minority, the oppressors/the victims. When you’ve found the victim, which is a group, not an individual, you weaponize them and set up a constant conflict of powers in order to subvert the status quo.
But as the Romans point out, if you only have power, no truth—and remember in the postmodern world God is dead for them, truth is completely dead following Nietzsche, so all that’s left is power. And the only possible outcome, if you think it through logically (which they don’t) is what the Romans call the peace of despotism—in other words, you have a power so unrivaled since you’ve put down every other power, you have peace. But it’s authoritarian. That’s where we’re going increasingly today. You take the high-tech media and so on, a very dangerous moment for freedom of conscience, for freedom of speech, and for freedom of assembly. America is really fighting for its life. But sadly it’s not. Most people are asleep.
[23:43] JONATHAN: Well, and that’s right. That’s sort of the hinge point, isn’t it? So let’s talk just briefly about the education system. We’re thinking sort of elementary, middle school, high school education system. So here in Atlanta there are sort of options that are presented to parents, right? There’s the public school system; there’s the private, often Christian, private school system; and then there’s a home school option. And parents are all trying to navigate this. Now I’m sure you’ve heard arguments that you can send your kids to the public school because if Christians abandon the public school, then where is the witness, where es the influence with the greater population who are just asleep or whatever it is? If you send them out to the private school, your children will be protected, but how much exposure are they getting to thoughts and philosophies that if you sort of rein them in—
And I guess this is really more to the home school spectrum, which is almost like an over-protection. These kids go to university and it’s the first exposure they’ve had to some of these thoughts, and professors are going out of their way to convince these students that the way that they were raised was very fallen, broken; their parents were brainwashing them, etc. Just thinking about some of those differing options and thought process, how do you think through that as a thinker, as a social critic, as a Christian? How do you weigh into that?
[25:17] Os Guinness: Well, you try and sort of isolate some of the different factors. So you’ve been talking rightly about the personal and the family concerns, which are fundamental absolutely. And I think that very much varies with the child. But with all of the words, home schooling, whatever, you want to keep them ahead of the game so they know what’s coming. Francis Schaeffer often used to stress that. So people go to the secular university. Keep them ahead of the game so that they know what’s coming and they know some preliminary apologetics so they know how to make a good stand and be faithful without being washed away.
You’ve also—in other words, what you said is fundamental, I agree with that, but there’s also a national dimension. So the public schools, and I’m not arguing that everyone has to go to them, but they were very, very important because they were the center of passing on the unum of the e pluribus unum, out of man, one. Put it this way. As the Jews put it, if any project lasts longer than a single generation, you need families, you need schools, you need history. It doesn’t get passed on.
So when Moses talked about the night before Passover, he never mentioned freedom, he never mentioned the Promised Land of milk and honey. He told them how to tell their story to children so that freedom could last. Now, the public schools used to do that, so you have people from Ireland or Italy or China or Mexico, it didn't matter because the public schools gave them civic education, the unum. That was thrown out at the end of the 60s. In came Howard Zinn and his alternative views, and more recently the 1619 project. So the public school, as a way of americanizing and integrating, collapsed. And that’s a disaster for the republic.
Now, take the added one that President Biden has added, immigration. As scholars put it, it’s still relatively easy to become an American: get your papers, your ID and so on. It’s almost impossible now to know what it is to be American, and particularly you say the 4 million who have come in in the Biden years, they’re not going to be inducted into American citizenship, so the notion of citizenship collapses through the public schools and through an open border. It’s just a folly beyond any words. It is historic, unprecedented folly, an absolute disaster.
Of course, we’ve got to say, back to your original question, the same is true not only of freedom but of faith. So parents handing on, transmitting to their kids, very, very important.
I would add one more thing, Jonathan. It’s very much different children. My own son, whom I adore, is a little bit of a contrarian. If he’d gone to a Christian college, he might have become a rebel in some of the poorer things of some of them. He went to a big, public university, University of Virginia, and it cemented and deepened his faith because he stood against the tide and he came out with a much stronger faith than when he went in.
[28:59] JONATHAN: I love that. I think you’re right on with that. And I think it’s good for people to hear and know the history and have awareness of this. Now I want to make a very subtle and gentle shift, and if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. But you are a British citizen. Am I correct on that?
[29:18] Os Guinness: I am.
[29:21] JONATHAN: Queen Elizabeth has passed and now it’s King Charles III and there’s much talk about comments he’s made in the past in terms of the Defender of the Faith. I read a quote from Ian Bradley, who is a professor at the University of Saint Andrews, he says, “Charles’s faith is more spiritual and intellectual. He’s more of a spiritual seeker.”
Is this sort of a microcosm of what’s happening in the UK, this sort of shift from the queen, who very much had a very Christo-centric faith, to Charles and sort of emphasis on global warming and different issues of the day? Is this sort of a microcosm of what we’re seeing?
[30:22] Os Guinness: Well, the queen had a faith that was very real and very deep, and she was enormously helped by people like Billy Graham…
[30:29] JONATHAN: John Stott.
[30:30] Os Guinness: --John Stott and so on. So her faith was very, very genuine. His? He’s probably got more of an appreciation for the Christian faith than many European leaders today. So the Christian faith made Western civilization, and yet most of the intelligentsia in Europe have abandoned the faith that made it. So Prince Charles, as you say, a rather New Age spirituality, and he’s extraordinarily open to Islam through money from Saudi Arabia. I don’t have the highest hopes for him, although I must say the challenge of being king will remind him of the best of his mother. Even when the archbishop said in the sermon that he wanted people to know that Prince Charles had a Christian faith, I felt it was a glimmer of the fact he realizes, you know, his mother’s position was wonderful, so it’s very much open.
Now I am an Anglican, as you are. Back in 1937, the greatest of all the Catholic historians on Western civilization predicted—this is 1937, almost a century ago—that the day would come in some future coronation when people would raise the questions, “Was it all a gigantic bluff? Because the power of the monarchy, and more importantly, the credibility of the faith, had both undermined themselves to such an extent it didn't mean anything.”
I think we’re incredibly close to that with King Charles. I also think, sadly, that the Archbishop of Canterbury, who preached wonderfully well yesterday, has done a good job in the celebrations and so on, the pageantry, but does a rotten job in leading the church as the church. And so the Church of England is in deep trouble in terms of its abandoning orthodoxy. It’s a very critical moment. Will Charles go deeper or revert to the way he’s been for the last few decades? I don’t know. I’m watching.
[33:02] JONATHAN: And then sort of just transitioning from there to what you see as faith in the United States. I think you have a new book coming out, Zero Hour America: History’s Ultimatum Over Freedom and the Answer We Must Give. Let’s bridge that gap between trajectory in the UK and now in the United States. What similarities and differences are you seeing?
[33:26] Os Guinness: Well, in Europe the great rival to the Christian faith was in the 18th century, the Enlightenment. And it’s almost completely swept the intelligentsia of Europe. Until recently, America was not fully going that way, and in the last decade or so it has. The rise of the religious nones, etc. etc. So in most areas that are intellectual, America too has abandoned the faith that made it. Of course, part of the American tragedy is the intelligentsia have not only abandoned the faith that made America; they’ve abandoned the Revolution that made America. So you have a double crisis here.
Now, I am, like you, a follower of Jesus. I’m absolutely undaunted. The Christian faith, if it’s true, would be true if no one believed it. So the lies of the nones or whatever just means a lot of people didn't realize in one sense that they’re just spineless. If it’s true, it’s not a matter of popularity or polls. I like the old saying, “Damn the polls and think for yourself.” And Americans are far too other-directed. The polls are often badly formulated in terms of their questions. The question is, is the faith true and what are the answers it gives us to lead our lives well? And I have no question it’s not only good news, it is the best news ever in terms of where humanity is today. So this is an extraordinary moment to be a follower of Jesus. We have the guardianship and the championship of the greatest news ever.
[35:14] JONATHAN: Amen. Well, and let’s make one final link there, which is we talked a lot about Western countries, the UK, the US, but you were born and spent quite a lot of time in China. Let’s think about not necessarily specifically China, but non-Western countries. You travel quite frequently. What are you seeing in those non-Western countries that perhaps is giving you hope or positivity?
[35:47] Os Guinness: God promised to Abraham in him all the families of the Earth will be blessed. DNA is in the heart of the Scriptures, and of course our Lord’s Great Commission. But as we look around the world today, thank God Christian faith is the most populace faith on the Earth. So the one place it’s not doing well is the highly modernized West. It is flourishing in sub-Sahara Africa. Or in Asia, where I happen to be born, in China—nothing to do with me—was the most rapid growth, exponential growth, of the church in 2,000 years. So I have no fear for the faith at all. And of course we believe it’s true.
But the question, Will the West return to the faith that made it? I hope that our sisters and brothers in the global south will help us come back just as we took the faith to them. And I know many African brothers and sisters and many Korean brothers and sisters, Chinese too, that’s their passion. And we must welcome it. I know so many Koreans, what incredible people of prayer. Up at 5:00, thousands of them praying together. When I was a boy in England, prayer meetings were strong in churches. They’re not strong in most American churches today. We’ve become highly secularized, so we’ve got a huge amount to learn from the Scriptures, of course, above all, but from our brothers and sisters in the rest of the world reminding us of what we used to believe and we’ve lost.
[37:33] JONATHAN: What a great reminder. Well, Os Guinness, I know you’ve got a busy schedule and we’re so grateful that you’ve taken the time to be on Candid Conversations. We’ve talked about quite a lot. We’re going to put a link to your website in our show notes, and all fantastic books that you’ve put out and new ones coming out, and we look forward to hopefully having you on again in the future.
[38:00] Os Guinness: Well, thank you. Real privilege to be on with you.
[38:02] JONATHAN: God bless you. Thank you.
262 episodes
Manage episode 426692476 series 3225558
This week's engaging episode features a conversation with Os Guinness, a profound advocate for faith, freedom, truth, reason, and civility. Os is an esteemed author and social critic and the great-great-great-grandson of Arthur Guinness, the famous Dublin brewer. With a bibliography exceeding 30 books, he provides insightful perspectives on our cultural, political, and social environments.
Born in China during World War II to medical missionary parents, Os experienced the height of the Chinese revolution in 1949 and was expelled along with many foreigners in 1951. He later earned his undergraduate degree at the University of London and completed his D.Phil in the social sciences from Oriel College, Oxford. He currently resides in the United States.
In this episode, Jonathan and Os delve into Scripture and discuss Os' latest book, The Magna Carta of Humanity. They explore global perspectives, including Os' views on America's polarization crisis, the recent changes in the UK with the new King, and the evolving role of the “Defender of the Faith” in the monarchy. Os also shares fascinating stories about his remarkable family history, from Christian brewers to pastors to his journey as a Christian author.
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TRANSCRIPT:
The following is a transcript of Episode 256: Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom: Os Guinness (Reprise) for Candid Conversations with Jonathan Youssef.
[00:01] JONATHAN: Today it is my special privilege to have Os Guinness on the program with us. Os is an author and social critic. He’s written untold amounts of books. He’s just like Dad, and it seems you have a new book out every six months or so, Os. Is that sort of the pattern, you get two out a year?
[00:24] Os Guinness: Well, usually one a year, but COVID gave me the chance to write a lot more.
[00:28] JONATHAN: Oh, well, I love it. Many of our listeners will, of course, be familiar with you, but there may be a few out there who don’t. We have somewhat of an international audience, and I know that you have a very international background, having been born in China and raised in China and educated in England. There’s a couple of things. I’m sure people are seeing the name Guinness and wondering is there a connection with the brewery? And of course, there is. But I wonder if you’d tell us a little bit of your family history and then we’ll get to your own personal story.
[01:00] Os Guinness: Well, you’re right. I’m descended from Arthur Guinness, the brewer. My ancestor was his youngest son. He was an evangelical. He came to Christ, to faith, under the preaching of John Wesley in the revival that took place in the late 1730s, early 1740s. So he called himself born again back in those days and founded Ireland’s first Sunday school, which of course, in this days was a rather radical proposition, teaching people who couldn’t go to ordinary schools. And from the very beginning, care for the poor, for the workers and things like that were built into the brewery and the whole family status in Dublin. So that was the ancestor, and I’m descended from a branch of the family that’s kept the faith ever since. My great-grandfather, Arthur’s grandson, at the age of 23, was the leading preacher in the Irish revival of 1859. And we have newspaper accounts of crowds of 25,000, 30,000, and of course no microphone. He’d climb onto the back of a carriage and preach and the Spirit would fall. Ireland was not divided in those days, but in that part of the country, in the year after the revival, there was literally only one recorded crime.
[02:33] JONATHAN: Unbelievable.
[02:34] Os Guinness: This shows you how profound revival can be.
[02:37] JONATHAN: Isn’t it?
[02:39] Os Guinness: His son, my grandfather, was one of the first Western doctors to go to China. He treated the Empress Dowager, the last Emperor, and my parents were born in China so I was born in China. So I’m part of the family that’s kept faith ever since the first Arthur.
[03:00] JONATHAN: You had mention that this is a branch of the family. Is there a branch of the family that’s gone a different trajectory?
[03:08] Os Guinness: Well, for a long time the brewing family was strongly Christian, but then eventually, sadly, wealth probably undermined part of the faith. But as I said, my family has kept it. They often say there are brewing Guinnesses, banking Guinnesses, and then they call them the Guinnesses for God or the poor Guinnesses.
[03:36] JONATHAN: An amazing family lineage, and you’re thinking of just the covenantal family through that line. And so you’ve got a book that came out this year, The Great Quest: Invitation to the Examined Life and a Sure Path to Meaning. And I know in the book you share a little bit of your own search for meaning and finding, because we all know that Christianity is really the only faith you cannot be born into in terms of you can be born into a covenant home and be taught the lessons of Christ and the church, but it’s really a faith that has to become your own. It’s not the faith that is transferred to the child. So tell us a little bit about your own story and your own coming to faith in Christ.
[04:31] Os Guinness: Well, I was born in China, as I said, and my first 10 years were pretty rough with war, famine, revolution, all sorts of things. And I was there for two years under Mao’s reign of terror, and in ’51, two years after the revolution, my parents were allowed to send me home to England and they were under house arrest for another two years. So I had most of my teenage years apart from my parents, and my own coming to faith was really a kind of partly the witness of a friend at school but partly an intellectual search. I was reading on the one hand atheists like Nietzsche and Sartre, and my own hero, Albert Camus. And on the other hand, Christians like Blaise Pascal and G. K. Chesterton, and of course, C. S. Lewis.
And at the end of that time, I was thoroughly convinced the Christian faith was true. And so I became a Christian before I went to university in London, and I’m glad I did because the 60s was a crazy decade—drugs, sex, rock and roll, the counterculture. Everything had to be thought back to square one. You really needed to believe what you believed and why you believed what you believed, or the whole onslaught was against, which is a bracing decade to come to faith.
[05:57] JONATHAN: It really is. I wonder if you could walk me through that a little bit. I’ve read some of Camus and Sartre, and I mean, they’re just such polar opposites about humanity and God. What were some of the things that helped you navigate through that terrain?
[06:17] Os Guinness: Well, I personally never liked Sartre. He was a dull fish. And even later, when I went to L’Abri with Francis Schaeffer, we met people who studied under Sartre and people who had known Camus. Camus was warm, passionate. There are stories, we don’t know whether they’re true or not or just a rumor, that he was actually baptized just before he died in a car crash in January 1960. I don’t know if that’s true or not, or if that’s a kind of death-bed conversion, but certainly his philosophy is profoundly human, and that’s what I loved about so much of it. But at the end of the day, not adequate.
You know his famous Myth of Sisyphus. He rolls the stone up the hill and it rolls down again. Rolls up, it rolls down again, and so on. A gigantic defiance against the absurdity of the universe, but with no real answers. And of course, that’s what we have in the gospel.
[07:19] JONATHAN: That’s right, and it’s sort of the meaninglessness of life, and I know a lot of high school, college students even seminary students have been deeply affected by some of his writing and have certainly felt, I think, what you’re touching into there, which is that deeply personal—there’s a lot of reflection in there that I think resounds with people. But as you said, it leaves you with nothing at the end of the day.
So you’ve written quite a number of books across quite a range of topics. What is it that sort of stokes your fire, that kind of drives you? I know the Bible uses passion in a very negative, sinful sense, but it’s a word we use a lot today. What is the passion that’s driving you in your writings and your speaking?
[08:12] Os Guinness: Well, you can never reduce it easily, but two things above all. One, making sense of the gospel for our crazy modern world. On the other hand, trying to understand the world so that responsible people can live in the world knowing where we are. Because in terms of the second, I think one of the things in the Scriptures as a whole which is much missing in the American church today is the biblical view of time. You take the idea of the signs of the times, David’s men or our Lord’s rebuked His generation. they could read the weather but they missed the signs of the times. So you get that incredible notion of Saint Paul talking about King David. He served God’s purpose in his generation. That’s an incredible idea that you so understand your generation that in some small, inadequate way we’re each serving God’s purpose of salt and light and so on in our generation.
But many Americans, and many people around the whole world, they don’t have that sense of time that you see in Scripture. I’m not quite sure why; maybe growing up in revolutionary China I’ve always had an incredible sense of time.
[09:36] JONATHAN: You know, I think that’s encouraging to hear. In our society, we get so fixated and caught up on the issues but there’s almost this moment of needing to pull back and observe things from a higher perspective. And I think you do such a fantastic job of that.
Let’s walk through some of your more recent books, and then maybe get a peek under the curtain of what’s coming, because I think you’ve got a couple of books that are on their way out. The Magna Carta of Humanity. This idea of Sinai and French Revolution as it sort of relates to the American Revolution. Tell us a little bit about the impetus for this and the thought process towards that.
[10:25] Os Guinness: Well, the American crisis at its deepest is the great polarization today. But many people, I think, don’t go down to the why. They blame it on the social media, or our former president and his tweets, or the coastals against the heartlanders and so on. But I think the deepest things are those who understand America and freedom from the perspective of the American Revolution, which was largely, sadly not completely, Christian, because it went back to the Jewish Torah, and those who understand America from the perspective of ideas coming down from the French Revolution—postmodernism, radical multiculturalism, the cancel culture, critical theory, all these things, the sexual revolution. They come from the ideas descended from Paris, not from anything to do with the Bible, and we’ve got to understand this.
Now, the more positive way of looking at that, many Americans have no idea how the American Revolution came from the Scriptures, how notions like covenant became consitution; the consent of the governed or the separation of powers, going down the line, you have a rich, deep understanding in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. and we’ve got to understand if we know how to champion these things today.
But it’s not just a matter of nostalgia or defending the past. I personally am passionately convinced this is the secret to the human future. What are the deepest views of human dignity, or of words, or of truth, or of freedom, or of justice, peace and so on? They are in the Bible. And we’ve got to explore them. So the idea from a gentleman not too far from you, Jonathan, who said we’ve got to unhitch our faith from the Old Testament, that’s absolute disaster. A dear guy, but dead wrong. You’ve got to explore the Old Testament as never before, and then, of course, we can understand why the new is so wonderful.
[12:46] JONATHAN: You know, Os, just going down that track a little bit, that’s right; you can’t have the New Testament without the Old Testament. The prophecies of Christ, the fulfillment, it all falls apart, the whole argumentation, everything almost becomes meaningless at that point. And I know the argument is that it’s about the event of the crucifixion and the resurrection, but you don’t have those apart from Genesis 3, of course, Genesis 1, all the way through till the end of Malachi. You can’t separate these two testamental periods. It’s ludicrous, and it creates so much damage, as you’ve said.
[13:36] Os Guinness: Well you know, take some of the myths that are around today. They’re very common even in evangelical circles. The Old Testament is about law; the New Testament is about love.
[13:48] JONATHAN: Right.
[13:49] Os Guinness: That’s not right. That’s a slander on the Jews. Read the beginning of Deuteronomy. The Jews, the nation, they are called to love the Lord with all their heart, soul and so on. Why did the Lord choose them? Because He loved them and set His affection on them. And you can see in Deuteronomy there’s a link between liberty and loyalty and love. So right through the Scriptures, those who abandon the truth, apostasy, that’s equivalent to adultery. Why? To love the Lord is to be loyal to the Lord and faithful to the Lord and so on. And we’ve got to see there’s a tremendous amount about love, loyalty connected with liberty.
I mean, a couple of weeks ago, a couple of professors writing in the New York Times said the Constitution is broken and it shouldn’t be reclaimed. We need to move on, scrap it and rebuild our democracy. Now the trouble is constitutions became a matter of lawyers and law courts, the rule of law only in the Supreme Court. No, it comes from covenant. Covenant is all about freely chosen consent, a morally binding pledge. So the heart of freedom is the freedom of the heart, and we’ve got to get back—this is all there in the Old Testament.
Did the Jews fail? Of course. That’s why our Lord. but equally the church is failing today. So we’ve got so much to learn from the best and the worst of the experience of the Jews in the Old Testament. But to ignore the Old is absolute folly.
[15:35] JONATHAN: Well, and thinking about the American Revolution and the impact of men, as you’ve already cited with your own family history, of Wesley and the preaching of George Whitefield in the Americas, which would have had a profound effect on the American psyche, and I think would have contributed a great deal to a lot of the writing of law and constitutional ideology.
[16:02] Os Guinness: Well, the revival had a huge impact on all who created the Revolution. But some of the ideas go back, I think, to the Reformation. Not so much to Luther at this point, but to Calvin and Swingly. In Scotland, John Knox and in England Oliver Cromwell. You know, that whole notion of covenant. I mean, Cromwell said ... A lot of weird ideas came up in the 17th Century, but the 17th Century is called the Biblical Century. Why? Because through the Reformation they discovered, rediscovered, what was called the Hebrew republic—in other words, the constitution the Lord gave to the founding of His own people.
So even someone like Thomas Hobbes, who was an atheist, they are discussing the Hebrew republic—in other words, Exodus and Deuteronomy. It had a tremendous impact on the rise of modern notions of freedom, and we’ve got to understand that.
So the Mayflower Compact is a covenant. John Winthrop on the Arbella is talking about covenant. When John Adams writes the first constitution, written one, in this country, which is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, he calls it a covenant. And the American Constitution is essentially a national somewhat secularized form of covenant. And we who are heirs of that as followers of Jesus, we’ve got to re-explore it and realize its richness today.
[17:44] JONATHAN: Turn on the news today and it feels like we’re quite a distance from that. Even thinking about using a word like justice, you know, all this now it seems, to your point, this ideology from the French Revolution has really come to the forefront, certainly in the 60s, but there seems to be a new revival of this. What’s contributing to that today in America?
[18:17] Os Guinness: Well, James Billington, the former librarian of Congress, and others, have looked at the French Revolution, and remember only lasted 10 years in France, then came dictator Napoleon. But it was like a gigantic volcanic explosion, and out of it came their main lava flows. The first one we often ignore, which is called revolutionary nationalism, in 19th-century France and so on. You can ignore that mostly except it’s very important behind the Chinese today.
But the second one is the one people are aware of. Revolutionary socialism, or in one word, communism. The Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution. We’re actually experiencing the impact of the third lava flow, revolutionary liberationism, which is not classical Marxism, communism, but cultural Marxism or neo Marxism. And that goes back to a gentleman called Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s. Now you mentioned the 60s. it became very important in the 60s because Gramsci’s ideas were picked up by the Frankfurt School in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and the leading thinker in America in the 60s was Herbert Marcuso, who in many ways is the godfather of the new left in the 60s. I first came here in ’68 as a tourist, six weeks. One hundred cities were burning, far worse than 1920, because of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Kennedy.
But here’s the point: The radicals knew that for all the radicalism in the streets, anti-Vietnam protests and so on, they wouldn’t win in the streets, so they had to do what they called, copying Mao Zedong, a long march through the institutions—in other words, not the streets. Go slowly, gradually, win the colleges and universities. Win the press and media. Win what they call the culture industry—Hollywood, entertainment. And then sweep around and win the whole culture.
Now here we are, more than 50 years later, they have done it. Now, in the early days, I’m a European still, I’m not American, people would never have believed that the radical left would influence what were called the fortresses of American conservatism—business, finance, the military—but all of those in the form of woke-ism have been profoundly affected. So America’s at an extraordinary point in terms of the radical left being more power even than the French Revolution.
[21:16] JONATHAN: Okay, so in thinking through that lines of reasoning, the people who are caught up in that today, the radicalism, is this just indoctrination? I guess what my point is, is it all intentional? Is it like Marcuso’s intentionality of going through the halls of academia? Or rather is it that they’ve just been raised to think that this is just the way ... that it’s the most opportune way to get your ideology out there?
[21:56] Os Guinness: No, it’s thoroughly intention. But of course, always there’s a creative minority who eventually win over the majority who are hardly aware of it. You mentioned justice. I was on calls for a California pastor last year and I said to them, “You brothers have drunk the Kool-Aid.” They didn't realize how much of their understanding of justice owed everything to the radical left and nothing to the Hebrew prophets.
So you know how the left operate. It analyzes discourage. How do ordinary people speak? And so you look for the majority/minority, the oppressors/the victims. When you’ve found the victim, which is a group, not an individual, you weaponize them and set up a constant conflict of powers in order to subvert the status quo.
But as the Romans point out, if you only have power, no truth—and remember in the postmodern world God is dead for them, truth is completely dead following Nietzsche, so all that’s left is power. And the only possible outcome, if you think it through logically (which they don’t) is what the Romans call the peace of despotism—in other words, you have a power so unrivaled since you’ve put down every other power, you have peace. But it’s authoritarian. That’s where we’re going increasingly today. You take the high-tech media and so on, a very dangerous moment for freedom of conscience, for freedom of speech, and for freedom of assembly. America is really fighting for its life. But sadly it’s not. Most people are asleep.
[23:43] JONATHAN: Well, and that’s right. That’s sort of the hinge point, isn’t it? So let’s talk just briefly about the education system. We’re thinking sort of elementary, middle school, high school education system. So here in Atlanta there are sort of options that are presented to parents, right? There’s the public school system; there’s the private, often Christian, private school system; and then there’s a home school option. And parents are all trying to navigate this. Now I’m sure you’ve heard arguments that you can send your kids to the public school because if Christians abandon the public school, then where is the witness, where es the influence with the greater population who are just asleep or whatever it is? If you send them out to the private school, your children will be protected, but how much exposure are they getting to thoughts and philosophies that if you sort of rein them in—
And I guess this is really more to the home school spectrum, which is almost like an over-protection. These kids go to university and it’s the first exposure they’ve had to some of these thoughts, and professors are going out of their way to convince these students that the way that they were raised was very fallen, broken; their parents were brainwashing them, etc. Just thinking about some of those differing options and thought process, how do you think through that as a thinker, as a social critic, as a Christian? How do you weigh into that?
[25:17] Os Guinness: Well, you try and sort of isolate some of the different factors. So you’ve been talking rightly about the personal and the family concerns, which are fundamental absolutely. And I think that very much varies with the child. But with all of the words, home schooling, whatever, you want to keep them ahead of the game so they know what’s coming. Francis Schaeffer often used to stress that. So people go to the secular university. Keep them ahead of the game so that they know what’s coming and they know some preliminary apologetics so they know how to make a good stand and be faithful without being washed away.
You’ve also—in other words, what you said is fundamental, I agree with that, but there’s also a national dimension. So the public schools, and I’m not arguing that everyone has to go to them, but they were very, very important because they were the center of passing on the unum of the e pluribus unum, out of man, one. Put it this way. As the Jews put it, if any project lasts longer than a single generation, you need families, you need schools, you need history. It doesn’t get passed on.
So when Moses talked about the night before Passover, he never mentioned freedom, he never mentioned the Promised Land of milk and honey. He told them how to tell their story to children so that freedom could last. Now, the public schools used to do that, so you have people from Ireland or Italy or China or Mexico, it didn't matter because the public schools gave them civic education, the unum. That was thrown out at the end of the 60s. In came Howard Zinn and his alternative views, and more recently the 1619 project. So the public school, as a way of americanizing and integrating, collapsed. And that’s a disaster for the republic.
Now, take the added one that President Biden has added, immigration. As scholars put it, it’s still relatively easy to become an American: get your papers, your ID and so on. It’s almost impossible now to know what it is to be American, and particularly you say the 4 million who have come in in the Biden years, they’re not going to be inducted into American citizenship, so the notion of citizenship collapses through the public schools and through an open border. It’s just a folly beyond any words. It is historic, unprecedented folly, an absolute disaster.
Of course, we’ve got to say, back to your original question, the same is true not only of freedom but of faith. So parents handing on, transmitting to their kids, very, very important.
I would add one more thing, Jonathan. It’s very much different children. My own son, whom I adore, is a little bit of a contrarian. If he’d gone to a Christian college, he might have become a rebel in some of the poorer things of some of them. He went to a big, public university, University of Virginia, and it cemented and deepened his faith because he stood against the tide and he came out with a much stronger faith than when he went in.
[28:59] JONATHAN: I love that. I think you’re right on with that. And I think it’s good for people to hear and know the history and have awareness of this. Now I want to make a very subtle and gentle shift, and if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. But you are a British citizen. Am I correct on that?
[29:18] Os Guinness: I am.
[29:21] JONATHAN: Queen Elizabeth has passed and now it’s King Charles III and there’s much talk about comments he’s made in the past in terms of the Defender of the Faith. I read a quote from Ian Bradley, who is a professor at the University of Saint Andrews, he says, “Charles’s faith is more spiritual and intellectual. He’s more of a spiritual seeker.”
Is this sort of a microcosm of what’s happening in the UK, this sort of shift from the queen, who very much had a very Christo-centric faith, to Charles and sort of emphasis on global warming and different issues of the day? Is this sort of a microcosm of what we’re seeing?
[30:22] Os Guinness: Well, the queen had a faith that was very real and very deep, and she was enormously helped by people like Billy Graham…
[30:29] JONATHAN: John Stott.
[30:30] Os Guinness: --John Stott and so on. So her faith was very, very genuine. His? He’s probably got more of an appreciation for the Christian faith than many European leaders today. So the Christian faith made Western civilization, and yet most of the intelligentsia in Europe have abandoned the faith that made it. So Prince Charles, as you say, a rather New Age spirituality, and he’s extraordinarily open to Islam through money from Saudi Arabia. I don’t have the highest hopes for him, although I must say the challenge of being king will remind him of the best of his mother. Even when the archbishop said in the sermon that he wanted people to know that Prince Charles had a Christian faith, I felt it was a glimmer of the fact he realizes, you know, his mother’s position was wonderful, so it’s very much open.
Now I am an Anglican, as you are. Back in 1937, the greatest of all the Catholic historians on Western civilization predicted—this is 1937, almost a century ago—that the day would come in some future coronation when people would raise the questions, “Was it all a gigantic bluff? Because the power of the monarchy, and more importantly, the credibility of the faith, had both undermined themselves to such an extent it didn't mean anything.”
I think we’re incredibly close to that with King Charles. I also think, sadly, that the Archbishop of Canterbury, who preached wonderfully well yesterday, has done a good job in the celebrations and so on, the pageantry, but does a rotten job in leading the church as the church. And so the Church of England is in deep trouble in terms of its abandoning orthodoxy. It’s a very critical moment. Will Charles go deeper or revert to the way he’s been for the last few decades? I don’t know. I’m watching.
[33:02] JONATHAN: And then sort of just transitioning from there to what you see as faith in the United States. I think you have a new book coming out, Zero Hour America: History’s Ultimatum Over Freedom and the Answer We Must Give. Let’s bridge that gap between trajectory in the UK and now in the United States. What similarities and differences are you seeing?
[33:26] Os Guinness: Well, in Europe the great rival to the Christian faith was in the 18th century, the Enlightenment. And it’s almost completely swept the intelligentsia of Europe. Until recently, America was not fully going that way, and in the last decade or so it has. The rise of the religious nones, etc. etc. So in most areas that are intellectual, America too has abandoned the faith that made it. Of course, part of the American tragedy is the intelligentsia have not only abandoned the faith that made America; they’ve abandoned the Revolution that made America. So you have a double crisis here.
Now, I am, like you, a follower of Jesus. I’m absolutely undaunted. The Christian faith, if it’s true, would be true if no one believed it. So the lies of the nones or whatever just means a lot of people didn't realize in one sense that they’re just spineless. If it’s true, it’s not a matter of popularity or polls. I like the old saying, “Damn the polls and think for yourself.” And Americans are far too other-directed. The polls are often badly formulated in terms of their questions. The question is, is the faith true and what are the answers it gives us to lead our lives well? And I have no question it’s not only good news, it is the best news ever in terms of where humanity is today. So this is an extraordinary moment to be a follower of Jesus. We have the guardianship and the championship of the greatest news ever.
[35:14] JONATHAN: Amen. Well, and let’s make one final link there, which is we talked a lot about Western countries, the UK, the US, but you were born and spent quite a lot of time in China. Let’s think about not necessarily specifically China, but non-Western countries. You travel quite frequently. What are you seeing in those non-Western countries that perhaps is giving you hope or positivity?
[35:47] Os Guinness: God promised to Abraham in him all the families of the Earth will be blessed. DNA is in the heart of the Scriptures, and of course our Lord’s Great Commission. But as we look around the world today, thank God Christian faith is the most populace faith on the Earth. So the one place it’s not doing well is the highly modernized West. It is flourishing in sub-Sahara Africa. Or in Asia, where I happen to be born, in China—nothing to do with me—was the most rapid growth, exponential growth, of the church in 2,000 years. So I have no fear for the faith at all. And of course we believe it’s true.
But the question, Will the West return to the faith that made it? I hope that our sisters and brothers in the global south will help us come back just as we took the faith to them. And I know many African brothers and sisters and many Korean brothers and sisters, Chinese too, that’s their passion. And we must welcome it. I know so many Koreans, what incredible people of prayer. Up at 5:00, thousands of them praying together. When I was a boy in England, prayer meetings were strong in churches. They’re not strong in most American churches today. We’ve become highly secularized, so we’ve got a huge amount to learn from the Scriptures, of course, above all, but from our brothers and sisters in the rest of the world reminding us of what we used to believe and we’ve lost.
[37:33] JONATHAN: What a great reminder. Well, Os Guinness, I know you’ve got a busy schedule and we’re so grateful that you’ve taken the time to be on Candid Conversations. We’ve talked about quite a lot. We’re going to put a link to your website in our show notes, and all fantastic books that you’ve put out and new ones coming out, and we look forward to hopefully having you on again in the future.
[38:00] Os Guinness: Well, thank you. Real privilege to be on with you.
[38:02] JONATHAN: God bless you. Thank you.
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