An Evening with Os Guinness

Last week our church had Os Guinness speak and do a question/answer session. He is an interesting guy. His great-great-great grandfather founded the Guinness brewery in the U.K.; both his parents were medical missionaries in China, and he was born in China around the end of WW2. He was sent out of the country during the communist revolution while his parents were under arrest for 3 years, during which time they committed to memory about 75% of the Bible. He has a doctorate in social science from Oxford and has been in the U.S. for much of his adult life, working variously as a BBC reporter, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and now running Trinity Forum. As a young man he spent 3 years at L'Abri with Francis Schaeffer, and his concern about culture and the life of the mind reminds me much of Schaeffer. He has written about 25 books, the most recent of which is about true civility.

It was an affirmation to me to hear him say that civility in America is bad but has been worse, specifically during the Jefferson/Adams presidential race and the entire early 1800's, really until the civil war. I agree...these are very partisan times, but not as bad as those days. He refers to civility as a 'republican' virtue, one that is vital to a healthy republic and for responsible citizenship. The lack of education on what it means to be a responsible citizen is one of his concerns. More importantly, he sees the culture as post-modern and thus the entire Western world must be re-Christianized. We must re-win the West, as it was won when the Goths, Vandals, Celts, Vikings, etc were Christianized centuries ago.

Unfortunately, he sees the modern church becoming post-modern just as post-modernism is being abandoned in the secular academy. He is Anglican in background and admits that the American Episcopal church must now be abandoned since it has abandoned the truth. Similarly, he sees the 'emerging church' and folks like Brian McClaren as also embracing post-modernism and also abandoning the truth. It seems he has debated this topic with McClaren publicly. I agree that the emerging church is soft on the very concept of truth. Interestingly, he also feels that much of the church is focused on some of the wrong things in this matter of truth. He mentioned 14 evangelical believers he knows at Oxford in the area of physics, all of whom he considers strong evangelicals who have no concerns about the science of an old earth
and evolution. He sees those as matters of science that do not contradict scripture and should be settled by believing scientists. His concerns are things like the fact that there are no evangelical journals about serious cultural issues (I think FIRST THINGS is that kind of journal but it comes from a conservative Catholic perspective generally; it has no evangelical equal). There is no evangelical university with graduate programs that are competitive with the better secular or Catholic schools, either. His book FIT BODIES, FAT MINDS deals with these things.  Christian education in general, both home schools and private schools, generally do well to equal the public schools in the area where they are found. Since the whole nations seems to agree that public education is not up to snuff, just keeping up with them is certainly not providing a better option, at least not for content though it may be better in terms of the environment for the child.

As I look around at the church today, I agree with Os that we in the evangelical world continue to be behind the curve on matters of the mind. We do better than the liberal church or the Catholic church on evangelism and relief missions; we do worse on matters of the mind.  Some, like the emerging church, who claim to be evangelical are now waffling on the very idea of 'truth'. If we are to re-win the West we will need to establish that there is such a thing as the Christian Mind.