Os Guinness > Quotes

“I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result, when you go away from that debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar. That is why we apologists take our lives in our own hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments . . . from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself.10”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“Where hearts and minds are hardened, it is the task of apologetics to challenge them and help pry them open. Apologetics therefore starts where the unbeliever is and focuses on what the unbeliever believes, but only because that is what is obscuring the good news of Jesus. Only when the inadequacies of that unbelief have been exposed is the unbeliever in a place to see and hear the good news for what it is. By Their Fruit As we saw, St. Paul describes the heart of all unbelief as a way of “suppressing the truth.” As such, unbelief cannot be other than partly true and partly false, though each unbeliever will have responded to the tension by taking it in either of two”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“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”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“Many lives have a mystical sense, but not everyone reads it aright. More often than not it is given to us in cryptic form, and when we fail to decipher it, we despair because our lives seem meaningless. The secret of a great life is often a man’s success in deciphering the mysterious symbols vouchsafed to him, understanding them and so learning to walk in the true path.”
― Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life

“Freedom means and requires responsibility, but the responsibility of freedom can be a burden and even cause suffering. At some point, down in the dark labyrinths where we humans rationalize our evasions of responsibility, things become twisted. People who desire to evade responsibility get to the point where there appears to be tyranny in freedom, because of its responsibility, and freedom in tyranny, because there is no responsibility required, only dependency. The result grows into a fear of freedom that ends in a desire for freedom from freedom.”
― Os Guinness, The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai's Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom

“The Puritans lived as if they had swallowed gyroscopes; we modern Christians live as if we have swallowed Gallup polls.”
― Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life

“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”
― Os Guinness, The Last Christian on Earth: Uncover the Enemy's Plot to Undermine the Church

“As followers of Jesus, we must not duck the enormity of a simple but shattering fact: with relatively few exceptions, such as some branches of Buddhism, almost all the most militantly secularist societies in history have been the product of Christian societies. The church is a leading spawning ground for atheists.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“We are never more completely ourselves than when we make that decision to trust in God.”
― Os Guinness, Impossible People: Christian Courage and the Struggle for the Soul of Civilization

“As in 1984, so today: war is peace, slavery is freedom, error is truth, evil is good, and if they say so, men are women and women are men. At the more popular level, American freedom has been battered by wave after wave of relativism (there is no objective truth), followed by emotivism (truth is whatever you feel to be true), historicism (each age and now each generation is shaped by its own truth), and then constructivism (“truth” is socially constructed according to what we all together take to be true or make to be true). Yet postmodernism speaks out of both sides of its mouth. It offers relativism as a universal entitlement: “Everyone is entitled to their own truth, so your truth is as good as anyone else’s truth.” But then comes the catch. Postmodernism is also all about power, and therefore the powerful. So, to paraphrase Orwell.”
― Os Guinness, Zero Hour America: History's Ultimatum over Freedom and the Answer We Must Give

“Or again we might say that we are at a Daniel-like moment, for Daniel and his three friends faced a challenge unlike that of most of the Jews before them. The world as the Jews had known it for hundreds of years from Joshua onward had gone. Not since the captivity in Egypt had Jews been strangers in a strange land as they found themselves when defeated and deported as exiles to Babylon in the sixth century B.C.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“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.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“Even the best of pursuits can become the worst of diversions. But whatever the source of the diversion, diversion is the most common reason for what Socrates called the “unexamined life”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“In a post-Christian era many of our friends, neighbors, and colleague will reject God for a score of reasons, but we must live and speak that they reject God for God's sake and not because of what we have said or done that has framed God wrongly.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“Something has surely gone terribly wrong when Christians are the best atheist arguments against the Christian faith and Christendom their best argument for atheism.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“If the logic of God’s truth pulls in one direction and the logic of unbelief pulls in the opposite direction, unbelief will never face the full logic of either. Both destinations would be unthinkable, though for entirely different reasons, as both would mean the end of unbelief. The logic of God’s truth would lead to God, and the logic of unbelief would lead to disaster. Unbelief therefore lives in tension between the two worlds. 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”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“the truth is this: We always have sure and sufficient reasons for knowing why we can trust God, but do not always know what God is doing and why.”
― Os Guinness, God in the Dark: The Assurance of Faith Beyond a Shadow of Doubt

“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.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“time after time the known facts of our lives and of the world may be against God, but one day all the missing facts will be known too, so our task as his people is to trust and prove him now, in the meantime, whatever the odds, whatever the opposition and however agonizing the suffering at the present moment.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“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.”
― Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life

“To flout the will of God openly will therefore be the fast track to social and national failure for Western nations.”
― Os Guinness, Impossible People: Christian Courage and the Struggle for the Soul of Civilization

“Is it still possible in the advanced modern world to build societies with both freedom and order at the same time? To build and sustain communities and nations that demonstrate the highest values of human dignity, freedom, justice, equality, compassion, peace, and stability?”
― Os Guinness, The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai's Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom

“The one aim of the call of God is the satisfaction of God, not a call to do something for Him.”
― Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life

“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.”
― Os Guinness, God in the Dark: The Assurance of Faith Beyond a Shadow of Doubt

“Whatever people may feel about themselves, however humans may treat their fellow humans, and whichever human view of humanity may be dominant in one generation or another, or one society or another, God has made his position clear. He has created human beings in his image, and each one must therefore be seen and treated as unique, precious and the bearer of dignity and worth that is inalienable. It is quite wrong to think that special means speciesism. Even if a person is poor, uneducated, disabled, or mentally impaired, he or she is still created in the image of God and therefore precious and unique. Each individual human is exceptional. None is ever expendable. Made in the image of God, every single human person is special, singular, and significant.”
― Os Guinness, The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai's Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom