The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 47 – Os Guinness

Episode 47: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

This interview with philosopher and author Os Guinness explores the historical and philosophical foundations of the United States, arguing that its core principles of ordered freedom are derived not from the Enlightenment, but from the Old Testament, specifically the Hebrew covenant in Exodus. Guinness contrasts this with the legacy of the French Revolution, which he claimed produced the modern threat of cultural Marxism.

He discusses how this ideology undermines objective truth, leading to societal decay, which he termed “cultural climate change.” The conversation also touches on Guinness’s personal background, the importance of the Old Testament for Christians, the failure of secular ideologies to provide mercy or true justice, and the unique power of the gospel to offer both personal purpose and a framework for national healing.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show, available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Edifi, Liftable, and wherever you get your podcasts. On this show, I interview major thought leaders from many fields of influence to show how our worldview changes everything.

Our guest today is a well-known philosopher who has published over 30 books and joins us today to talk about the search for meaning and answers that give us a fulfilled life and how the Old Testament of the Bible relates even to how the United States of America was founded, what the threats are, what the dangers are. We are going to cover so much ground. You won’t believe it. Welcome Os Guinness to the show. Os Guinness, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Os Guinness (00:47):
Thank you for having me. A great privilege.

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:50):
I’m really looking forward to our conversation. I know you mentioned that you’re stranded in Long Island because of the snow and the environment is not ideal, but I really appreciate your taking time to be with us today. Now, you are one of my book heroes. You’ve written more than 30 books and I haven’t been able to count them all, but you are one of the most important voices in our culture at this time.

And there are a couple of books that you’ve written recently that I want to focus on because I think they’re going to be fascinating for the people in our audience who are wondering, how does America fit into this big picture of what God is doing and the whole history of Israel? And there’s so much that we’re going to be able to cover. So I’m really looking forward to it.

Os Guinness (01:32):
Well, it’ll be fun. I think so highly of Summit, so it’s a special pleasure.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:39):
Now, your family, when people see your name, Os Guinness, I know one of the first questions they ask you is, are you related to the Dublin Brewer Guinness? And the fact is you are the great, great grandson of Arthur Guinness. Is that right?

Os Guinness (01:54):
No, that’s right. And I’m very proud and grateful to be a part of the family that’s kept the faith since the beginning because Arthur Guinness, my great-great-grandfather, came to faith through the revival under John Wesley. And so it was out of that, he built generosity and social care and education, all sorts of things into the business from the beginning. They were friends, for example, of William Wilberforce, friends and supporters. And so I’m grateful to be a part of the family. Not all the family has kept the faith, but mine has.

Dr. Jeff Myers (02:29):
Os, as you talk about that, now I know that you grew up in China, but you are Irish. Your heritage is Irish. And we always hear about the Protestant versus Catholic troubles. We hear about the potato famine and those kinds of things, but I think the Protestant versus Catholic issue was one of the trickiest. And I’m just really curious how your family, especially your great-great-grandfather, navigated some of that.

Os Guinness (03:00):
Well, he was evangelical openly, having come to faith through John Wesley, but as a Protestant and they were the minority, that was a challenge in the business. But he was one of the first to insist on giving full political rights to the Catholics. Of course, the government was English and therefore Protestant too, which the Catholics resented. But my great-great-grandfather was solidly in favor of religious liberty for all and human rights for all.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:36):
Now, then your parents became missionaries. Is that right? So you grew up in China.

Os Guinness (03:43):
Well, my grandfather and earlier his sister went out to China as missionaries. In fact, my grandfather’s older sister married Hudson Taylor’s son. So we’re connected to Hudson Taylor by marriage. But my grandfather went out as a doctor, Cambridge educated doctor at the end of the 19th century and survived the boxer rebellion, miraculously extraordinary story we haven’t time for, and then founded what was one of the first Western hospitals in China.

So he found himself in his mid-twenties as the only doctor in the province of Hernan, no nurses, no dentists. He was the only doctor with an area to look after that size. But my parents were born in China, and I was born in China during World War II. And at one stage, we were in an area with the Japanese army on one side, the communist army above us, and the nationalist army supposedly protecting us.

(04:46):
And there was a terrible famine in which five million died in three months, including my two brothers. I nearly died. My mother nearly died. After that was over, we moved to Nanking, Nanjing today, which of course was the capital of so-called free China. So I remember as a seven-year-old being told, Jankaishaka’s abandoned the city and were at the mercy of the red army. And within three months, they came and the reign of terror began.

So that’s part of the thinking behind the Magna Carta, because as I tell in the book, years later, when I was a graduate student at Oxford University, I had dinner one night with Sir Isaiah Berlin. And as we talked, he had been a seven year old in the Russian Revolution, and I’d been a seven year old in the Chinese Revolution, the two great Marxist revolutions of the 20th century.

(05:45):
As we talked, we thanked God for the English-speaking people and their stance for freedom, but we could not have envisaged, this is the early 1970s, that America would be troubled by radical socialism or cultural Marxism as it is today.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:06):
I want to focus on that for a moment because it’s of great concern to the people who are watching and listening to this podcast. Give us some of the lessons there that you learned. And a little bit of the history is that Mao was coming to power. There was this war between his forces and the forces of Chengkaishak who you actually met at one point, and then Chengkaishak was eventually pushed to Taiwan. Is that right?

Os Guinness (06:38):
That’s right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:39):
And that established a government there, which the nation of China does not recognize to this day.

Os Guinness (06:47):
But people think of the challenge of communism or Marxism in its classical form, and that’s not the American danger. And as I say in the book, you need to see the French Revolution as a volcanic explosion, only lasted 10 years in France, and then came Napoleon who said the revolution is over.

But it had three great lava flows. The most obvious in the 20th century, starting in the 19th, was communism, Marxism. But what we’re facing in America is the third and the less known lava flow, which is cultural Marxism. I live in Virginia and my great friend, Glenn Youngkin is now the governor, partly held by the explosion among the parents of concern over critical race theory.

(07:40):
But many people now thinking of CRT only understand its roots in the 1970s in the Harvard Law School with Derek Bell, and that’s incredibly shortsighted. Cultural Marxism goes back to Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s, picked up by the Frankfurt School, brought into this country in a strong way by Herbert Marcusa at the University of San Diego, who was really the godfather of the radical left. And then of course, it overlapped with postmodernism.

And in more recent days, in the 2000s, you’ve got the super funding of people like George Soros. So now you’ve got critical theory working out with critical women’s studies, critical race studies, critical queer studies, critical fat studies, and so on. People think of Black Lives Matter, but it’s equally occupy Wall Street. And they have super funded, ever swarming, morphing protest pop-up groups. And we’ve got to recognize how incredibly dangerous this is because not only the church, but the American Republic are in the sites and they want to replace both.

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:57):
And what you’ve done in the book, and I’ve got a copy of it here, The Magna Carta of Humanity, you can always tell a book that I’ve really enjoyed because of the number of pages that are turned down, and about 20 or so of them are turned down in the book. But in the book, you talk about the difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution. So that’s the background of what you’re saying.

And you’re saying that these three lava flows that came out of the French revolution, the one that we’re dealing with, cultural Marxism, is not just about critical race theory, but it’s about an entire approach of overthrowing the very understanding of truth, the very idea that there is out there outside of us, outside of our own perceptions and feelings, real justice and liberty and equality as eternal concepts, and that these are the things that are under threat. So this isn’t just a disagreement about how we should develop our policy. This is a fundamental worldview issue.

Os Guinness (10:02):
No, absolutely. And people are now focusing, say, on justice. Let me come back to that. But we’ve got to understand this comes out of the French Revolution, whereas the American experiment comes out of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. The Reformation was the 16th century, but the great concern in the 17th century was what they called the Hebrew Republic.

So Thomas Hobbs, who is an atheist, refers to the Bible far more than he does to any other thinker. And people saw in the Hebrew republic, in other words, Exodus, ways are going about politics and freedom that were radical. So Americans don’t realize that the notion of Constitution comes from the Hebrew covenant, or you have in Exodus, the consent of the governed, or you have the notion of the separation of powers, and so on and so on. So Americans and Pablo Christians need to rediscover the biblical roots.

(11:09):
It wasn’t just that many of the early Americans were Christians. Well, they had generally Christian ideas. No, they had very specific ideas that come from Exodus and Deuteronomy. And we who are concerned about freedom today and justice today need to understand where these ideas came from and how they’re incredibly different night and day from the radical left.

Dr. Jeff Myers (11:36):
See, this is so fascinating to me because all of my years growing up, I had heard that, well, the nation that God established for the Hebrews was a theocracy. It was God in charge and everybody else was just sort of a slave. And what you’re saying here is that it was actually a republic on which our founders intentionally modeled the United States.

Os Guinness (12:08):
Yes. We need to clear up the word theocracy. I can’t remember his philo or Josephus Jews who were trying to explain the Israelites system to the Romans. And it was quite different from the Greeks and the Romans. And so he used the word theocracy. And of course, the Jews have had that settle around their neck ever since, and often we do too. But Rabbi Sachs, for example, says, “That’s not right.”

The Israeli system, the Jewish system, is actually a nomocracy. They’re ruled by law, and that’s the important difference. And we should be a law abiding rule ordered society too, because the genius of America is what’s called ordered freedom, freedom within a framework of the covenant, freely chosen, and so on. So we’ve got to understand the incredible originality. It is the greatest view of freedom ever articulated in history, coming straight from the Bible.

(13:10):
So we should be today the champions and the guardians of the highest view of freedom and justice there has ever been.

Dr. Jeff Myers (13:22):
One of the things you said in the book, and I think this is from page 95, you said, “Survey the gods of China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, Persia, Greece, Rome, and the ancient European tribes, and you will find no one and nothing like the God of Sinai. There are none for whom justice is central to their character and their commands.”

Os Guinness (13:45):
You know, say, for the Greeks, they would punish people for transgressing their preserves and so on. It was all personal and so on, but there was no standard of justice for everyone. So you have three key notions in the Old Testament. One, the humans are made in the image of God. We are like the great unlike. So anything that debases human beings is an insult to their maker. And of course, that rings out in the Hebrew prophets.

Historians say, why don’t people in history complain about oppression? And the single strongest answer is that humans are impressed by the spectacle of power and they worship it. But the first great united voices against injustice and oppression are the Hebrew prophets because of that notion of people made in the image of God. And we are the only ones who have that high view today, Jews and Christians.

(14:51):
The second, of course, is truth. Our Lord is a God of truth. Now, truth is always, as C. S. Lewis put it, about something. It’s a claim about something. And what it’s about is actually reality. And so you have the highest view of truth and reality in the scriptures.

So you look at today’s world, it’s post-truth following Friedrich Nietzsche, following the famous economist cover in 2016, and so on America’s post-truth, and all you have left is power, and that’s the danger of the radical left. It only has power, which means its views of justice, flatter to deceive and end up. So I say again and again in the book. If you look at the revolutions, the revolutions never succeed and the oppression never ends. And people who don’t understand that are really blinded by their own naivety today.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:58):
There’s a lot of me to what you just said. And there are a couple of things that come into my mind. I follow statistics a lot about what’s going on with the rising generation because that’s a primary concern of mine. And I found that just about 50% of people say that truth is up to the individual in the United States today, rather than truth is actually knowable and discoverable, that it’s up to the individual.

And then consequently, here’s where we are with this rising generation. 75% of young adults say they have no sense of purpose. 50% struggle with anxiety, depression. Two thirds of them say there is nothing particularly unique about the value of human life. You see the consequences right there in one generation after this postmodern turn.

Os Guinness (16:46):
But this is what I call cultural climate change. Everyone knows about climate change and it is important, but cultural climate change isn’t just about our external environment, it’s about us. And by cultural climate change, I mean philosophical cynicism, no truth, nothing to be trusted. You end up with skepticism and nihilism. Then you have moral corruption. There’s no universal right or wrong. And then you have social collapse. In other words, the bonding that holds society together is becoming unglued, unraveled, and that’s absolutely disastrous.

So far more important than climate change is what’s called cultural climate change. And that will be the ruin of America because it is purely skeptical, purely nihilistic, and will destroy everything true, good, beautiful, honest, and so on. Everything which makes for normal human living at the personal level, but also the great ideals of the American Republic. What we’re seeing is absolutely lethal and all followers of Jesus, but especially young ones, younger ones, students and so on, should really understand where these ideas come from, where they lead to, and not just be negative, the glory, the wonder and the glory of the Christian alternative.

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:23):
Trace something for me for a minute. As I’m thinking through conversations I have with young adults, occasionally I’ll have somebody say to me, “Well, the reason I don’t want to say there is such a thing as truth is because I don’t want to hurt anyone. I don’t want to impose my values on anyone else.” But if what you’re saying is true, to claim that there is no truth creates a vacuum into which evil forces quickly move.

Os Guinness (18:50):
That’s right. Well, you could put it various ways, but put simply, we certainly never want coercion. Freedom means we shift from coercion to persuasion, and our Christian apologetics and advocacy must always be persuasive, and persuasion respects the personhood of the people we’re talking to, and it respects truth and freedom of choice. So persuasion, not coercion, but the deeper part of your question, we’ve got to realize that freedom is both, and here I’m depending on Isaiah Berlin, whom I mentioned, freedom is both negative and positive. Negative freedom is freedom from.

Anyone who’s under any external control, whether a dictator or a bully in the schoolyard or drugs and alcohol, they’re not free. Freedom means freedom from. We have to be set free, including sin, but that’s not the end of it. There’s also positive freedom. Freedom for, freedom to be. Liberty is more than liberation. And you can see the huge amount of American freedom today is purely negative freedom, libertarianism, don’t step on me, and all that sort of stuff.

(20:13):
Now, positive freedom, the freedom for freedom to be obviously requires questions, answers such as, who am I? Are we machines? Are we animals like the other animals? Or are we indeed made in the image of God? You need to have truth to have full freedom. And that’s why, of course, our Lord says, “If you follow my word and you’re my disciples, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” So without truth, there is no freedom. And people will think, “Well, we don’t want to hurt anyone else.” Again, they’re being soft and naive and they’ve been conned by post-modernism.

Dr. Jeff Myers (20:58):
So instead of saying, “I don’t want to proclaim truth because I don’t want to hurt anyone,” they should commit themselves to understanding the biblical perspective, recognizing it’s the power that it brought to our founders and the good that is brought to the United States of America and around the world, and then learn to be persuasive in communicating that to other people.

Os Guinness (21:22):
Exactly. You put it well.

Dr. Jeff Myers (21:24):
Okay. Yeah. I know at the very beginning of the book, and this is how I knew I was going to love this book, you said that nations must be understood and assessed by what they love supremely. America loves freedom. Ordered freedom is the legacy of the Hebrew scriptures and the Hebrew covenant. That idea of ordered freedom is incredible. So you’ve talked about negative versus positive. It’s not just freedom from something, it’s freedom for something. In other words, that liberty was secured so that we could have rights to do what we ought to do.

Os Guinness (22:02):
No, exactly. And then I’m sure most of your students, if they’re in say public or secular universities, you’ve heard the solid general narrative. Where did freedom come from? It was a reaction to the wars of religion and the wars of religion. People got sick of it all, so they had tolerance and then they created freedom. In other words, it’s a child of the 18th century enlightenment, and that is absolute rubbish.

You can read a book like Eric Nelson Harvard, a scholar, his book, The Hebrew Republic. The 17th century was called the Biblical Century because people were fascinated. So if you look back to the early church, the great mistake of the Catholic church when it became the official religion of Rome was to copy Roman structures and Roman structures were hierarchical. You had the Caesar, the consoles, and the senators. And then in the church, you had the Pope, the Cardinals, and the Bishops.

(23:04):
But hierarchical power, and of course the most famous statement was Lord Acton, who was himself a Catholic layman objecting to his own church and its corruption. He said, “All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts, absolutely.” And you can see the awful things like the Inquisition came out of the church being worldly in copying Rome. But the reformation, solo scripture, back to the Bible. They rediscovered covenant. That is the biblical way of having a political structure, not a monarchy per se, not a democracy per se, not an aristocracy, but a covenantal society.

And as you said, that gives you the ordered freedom. And you see Calvin more than Luther, but Calvins, Vingley, Bullinger, John Knox in Scotland, Oliver Cromwell in England, but in England it failed, English civil war it failed. We call it in England the lost cause. But what was the last cause in England became the winning cause in New England and churches had covenants, marriages had covenants.

(24:15):
And then of course when John Adams wrote the Massachusetts Constitution, he calls it a covenant. And in the 18th century, the US constitution is essentially a nationalized, secularized form of the Hebrew covenant.

Dr. Jeff Myers (24:34):
I’m going to just say to everybody who’s watching or listening to this right now, if you’ve decided you want to read a book on history in this coming year, and I hope that you do, I would encourage you to pick up this book, Magna Carta of Humanity, because it lays out all of these things. And something else, Os, that you do in the book I thought was fascinating because I’ve always loved these two guys, is you orbit a lot of the thinking around two prominent 20th century Jewish thinkers, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sax and Abraham Joshua Heschel. Why should we know as a Christian, why should I know about these Jewish thinkers?

Os Guinness (25:14):
Well, too many evangelicals, and I’m an unashamed angelical, read only the New Testament and not the old. And as you know, a year or two ago, one of the first famous megachurch pastors said that we should unhitch the Old Testament from New. That’s absolutely disastrous.

Of course, the gospel of the good news of Jesus is the climax of the scripture, but things like humans made in the image of God and creation, or the high view of truth, the importance of words, the place of freedom, what justice means, that radical originality of peace, these things are in the old and we of course should be the fulfillment of the old. And evangelicals who don’t know their Old Testament are really forgetting the incredible inheritance they have and living like paupers when they should be living like millionaires in terms of ideas.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:17):
They end up communicating a truncated gospel.

Os Guinness (26:20):
Absolutely.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:21):
One that applies only to their personal spiritual condition and their eternal destination rather than to everything.

Os Guinness (26:28):
And Rabbi Sacks used to say that Calvinism and the reformation that came out of it is the closest expression of the Christian faith to Judaism. And I think today at a time when we’re seeing terrible, egregious, vile antisemitism, even in this country, we have to stand with our Jewish friends because the roots are so close in so many areas.

Of course, the New Testament is different from the Old and Jesus is the fulfillment of things that weren’t and needed to be fulfilled in the old, but we should be incredibly grateful to our Jewish people and the greatest sin of a Christian church has been the persecution of the Jews back in the early centuries. And we should really be sorry. I’m personally grateful that evangelicals have no blood on their hands. I’m grateful that my great-grandfather, who we mentioned at the beginning, was a staunch supporter of the Jewish people.

(27:31):
In fact, my great-grandfather, not my great-great-great-grandfather, my great-grandfather wrote a book in the 1870s predicting on the basis of Daniel that the Jews were restored to their homeland in 1917.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:45):
Wow.

Os Guinness (27:46):
And Lord Balfo, who wrote the Balfour Declaration and General Allenby, who liberated Jerusalem, had both read my great-grandfather’s book. And he’d also, people don’t know, evangelicals will be forced to Lord Sharfsbury, people like that. Evangelicals were Zionists, in other words, fighting for the restoration of the Jews to their homeland, even before the Jews were political Zionists. And it was Hertzel, Theodore Hertzel was rather late in the game.

Dr. Jeff Myers (28:22):
Wow. That’s so incredible. And I don’t know how many people know that history, so thank you for sharing that. It reminds me when you’re talking about the influence that your ancestors had in so many significant ways, you’ve connected throughout your lifetime with all kinds of interesting people as well.

I happen to notice in one of your books, you’ve mentioned that you had met Winston Churchill, for example, and I know he’s one of my heroes and a hero for a lot of the people who were watching and listening. Can you tell us a little about him and about some of the other people you’ve met who’ve shaped your thinking as you have the opportunity to help us learn and grow now?

Os Guinness (29:09):
Well, as you make clear, I met Churchill very briefly, I think I was 13 or 14, and I was staying with a friend from school and his father was the rector of the church in the little village where Churchill’s country home Chartwell is. And one day we saw him crossing the village green, and I had the privilege of going up to him, shaking hands, and so on. But he was my first prime minister, and I admire him so much, not just for courage and for saving Britain and much of the West and World War II, but he always had an incredible sense of history, and he was amazingly eloquent.

And I think today, the vacuum I’m living in Washington, DC, the earlier time when you had the troubles we’re having today, when America was deeply divided, just before the Civil War, You and Abraham Lincoln with an incredible sense of history and amazing knowledge of the Declaration of Independence and what he called the better angel of the American nature.

(30:12):
And there is no one like that today. So President Biden talks of restoring the soul of America and President Trump talks about make America great again, but neither of them had any idea, they certainly didn’t speak it, what made America great in the first place?

(30:31):
And that’s what we got to rediscover. And every young follower of Jesus should understand the best and the worst because obviously slavery, racism are a vile sin and hypocrisy in the light of what America was founded to be. And the question today is, can such evils be atoned or are they going to undermine the whole future of the country because of the hypocrisy and the evil?

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:04):
You know, one of the things, and I’m always a little suspicious when people say, oh, so- and-so was a hypocrite, because I have this question in my mind. Are you saying that because you want those historical wrongs to be addressed? Or are you saying that because you want that person’s thinking to be dismissed so that another worldview can come in its place?

Os Guinness (31:24):
No, that’s actually right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:25):
Does that make sense?

Os Guinness (31:27):
Oh, I’m sorry.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:27):
I mean, for instance, John Witherspoon, one of the early presidents of Princeton University, his students were the founders of the United States of America, but he did not speak out against slavery in the way that he could have, even though he taught African-American students and did lift them up in many ways. His family history is one of slavery, but a lot of people today, Os, just say, “Well, just dismiss him.” We can’t have statues of him. We can’t name anything after him. We can’t have him around anymore because of that. How should we be approaching it?

Os Guinness (32:04):
Well, start in the Bible. If you compare the heroes of the Bible to the heroes of Greece and Rome, there’s no airbrushing. So the greatest king in the Bible, as we all know well, was also an adulterer and a murderer. And yet he’s described as, “After my own heart,” the Lord says. And that’s the distinctive way the Bible sees everything. There’s no airbrushing and so on. And we shouldn’t airbrush today. We should look at everyone.

I’m surprised when you said Witherspoon’s family, because he was a Scottsman. And as far as I know, back in Scotland, none of his family had slaves. So that surprises me. He may have tolerated it when he came here to Princeton. But anyway, we should never airbrush our heroes. I greatly admire Winston Churchill, but he had very obvious flaws too. So we praise their best and thank God for it, and we avoid going the way of some of their worst.

(33:09):
But the cancel culture is quite different. Do you know the book, The Madness of Crowds, by Douglas Murray? Yes. He’s an atheist, but he points out, simply, there is no mercy in the radical left. So accused, guilty, unless proven innocent, there’s no time to prove you’re innocent. You’re on the tumoral moving to the guillotine without any other events coming in between. The same today, the shaming, the statue toppling, the cancels, cancellations and so on. The left has no mercy.

Now we’ve got to say that’s understandable because their only principle is power. So you’re setting up a power conflict without end. And as the historians put it, the only result can be logically what the Romans called the peace of despotism, Caesarism.

(34:02):
In other words, an unrivaled power, which can put down all other powers. Now that is autocracy, authoritarianism, in modern form totalitarianism, incredibly dangerous. Now compare that with the gospel. The trouble is we’ve made the gospel purely spiritual or purely individual and personal rather than national too. But you remember the day of atonement was to atone for Israel as a nation of people after the golden calf. So you look at the gospel, you have truth addressed to power prophetically, a call for repentance, confession, forgiveness, reconciliation, restoration.

Now I’ve used single words. You could unpack each of those words in half an hour and you see they’re all connected with freedom. So you put the past behind you, it’s forgiven, gone, and the future becomes the future of a second chance. And so America, the way I put it is this. In the current talk of injustice and the record of slavery, America’s greatest evil is encountering the establishment’s greatest blind spot.

(35:23):
The establishment has no way of knowing how to deal with this because managerial, technocratic, therapeutic approaches don’t work, but meets the establishment’s greatest blind spot, meets the radical left’s greatest fraud and disaster, meets the gospel’s greatest glory, but we’ve got to take the gospel out there, not just individually, but what atonement and these things can mean for America as a whole.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:58):
I hope that there are a lot of history teachers who are watching or listening to this program right now, and that we can all dig deeper. This book is really going to help us, but one thing I’ve also noticed, Os, that you’ve done, and you’ve done this with several different books that you’ve written, for example, The Call, and then this new book that is coming out as soon as paper is available to print it called The Great Quest, you’ve really spoken into the lives of young adults who are wrestling with a sense of purpose.

And in a sense, so many of the people who are watching or listening to this right now are Summit Ministries, graduates who are in their 20s and 30s trying to make their way in the world. I’d love for you to spend a few minutes just speaking to their hearts and to their minds, encouraging them. What are some of the threats they face? What are some of the opportunities that you think they should seize a hold of?

Os Guinness (36:58):
Well, if you think of human life in general, every one of us wants to know, one, who we are, identity. Two, what is our purpose? What’s life all about and our part in that and so on. And that’s why coming to faith and knowing how we can come to faith rationally and responsibly, and then in coming to faith, knowing who we are and what the Lord wants us to do is so important. So you’re right, my bestselling book by far is The Call, but I’ve also loved the whole notion of how people come to faith.

So The Quest, it’s written for seekers, not for Christians, is showing how people can move through the phases of the church and come to faith that’s fully rational and yet more than that because we are more than that. So it’s a book. I hope Christians will read it too and feel free to give it to their friends, but it’s different in many ways.

(38:00):
You remember I said earlier, the church made a mistake of copying Roman structures. Well, historians also say the church at the same time made the mistake of copying Greek ideas uncritically. So if you look at the Greek ideas, they view truth as a system discoverable on the basis of reason, and that’s not the biblical way. The biblical way, you’re viewing truth as a story, as people in their life journey explore and they encounter the Lord who is a person.

In other words, I don’t believe in the so- called theistic proofs. You can sit in an armchair and read the ontological argument or the cosmological argument, and then you’re convinced or not. And if you’re convinced, you can decide if you want to become a Christian or not. I think that’s quite wrong. I’m much closer to the ideas of Blaise Pascal. You remember that incredible night when he met God, he says, “Fire, fire.” The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not the God of the philosophers.

(39:15):
It’s not that philosophy is wrong. Far from it. I studied it too. Philosophy is simply thinking about thinking, and you have good philosophy and bad philosophy, but you can’t on the basis of reason alone argue your way to God. No, we need pointers to push people along the road rather than giving people proofs, as it were, because the deepest things in life can’t be proved. You can’t prove love. You can’t prove freedom. You have to experience them and encounter them.

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:51):
Right. It’s got to tie together in community as well. This is not just an individual search you’re talking about.

Os Guinness (39:58):
Oh, I hope a whole generation will. Now, I haven’t got this in the book, but this is a civilizational moment. But one of the things that’s very interesting, almost all the prophets of the decline of the Western world argue there can be renewal, and even those who are agnostics and atheists see that renewal has to include the spiritual and the religious, as they put it. So for 30 years now, we’ve been hit by the so-called new atheists, Sam Harris, Christa Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and so on.

But you see a lot today, what I call nostalgic atheists, people like Tom Holland and others, who you can see that they are sorry that the West has become a cutflower civilization and the roots of the beauty and greatness of the West were in its faith and without faith there’ll never be a renewal. So these things are not just important for individuals, of course, above all for individuals, but they’re incredibly important for America and for the entire Western world, and I would argue, for the global future.

Dr. Jeff Myers (41:14):
It really sounds like Esther, we have come to a really significant moment for such a time as this.

Os Guinness (41:23):
Oh, absolutely.

Dr. Jeff Myers (41:23):
Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for helping to guide us through this. Os, so grateful for everything that you do. So thankful that you are encouraging other people to get involved with our Summit Ministries program and just thank you. As somebody who’s from outside of the United States of America, you’ve helped shepherd so many of us to think more clearly about the heritage that God’s given us.

Os Guinness (41:50):
But let me thank you too for Summit, because I think it’s one of the most distinctive and constructive and important ministries in the country at this particular moment. So I couldn’t be stronger in my warm recommendation of Summit to many people I meet.

Dr. Jeff Myers (42:10):
Os, thank you for being on the show today. So grateful for your time.

Os Guinness (42:13):
My privilege.

Dr. Jeff Myers (42:15):
Special thanks to my guest, Os Guinness, for appearing on the Dr. Jeff Show today. You can find his books, The Magna Carta of Humanity, which should be your history book for this year, and The Great Quest and all of his other books at osguinness.com and wherever books are sold. Scripture says, “After David served God’s purpose in his own generation, he fell asleep.” May we be able to say too that we have served God’s purposes in our generation. We’ll see you next week.

Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show. It’s a podcast from Summit Ministries, summit.org. Summit is a nonprofit ministry that exists to equip and support the rising generation to embrace God’s truth and champion a biblical worldview for nearly 60 years. Summit Ministries has been training students and those who work with students to develop, deepen and defend a biblical worldview through life-changing conferences, thoughtful church, homeschool and Christian school, curriculum books, free online resources and more.

(43:18):
If you want to live out a biblical worldview in today’s world and you desire to instill a lifelong faith in the rising generation, visit summit.org/thedrjeffshow for more information. Listeners, I want you to know that our podcast is on Edifi, which is a truly powerful app that brings together thousands of the best Christian podcasts in one place for your listening enjoyment. You can download it at edifi.app. Be sure to share the show if you have enjoyed listening to it and leave a review, if you would, on the site where you download the show, that helps more people know about the Dr. Jeff Show, and I’ll look forward to seeing you next week.