Guinness Impossible People

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8308-9338-6
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 239 Seiten

- ECPA 2017 Christian Book Award Finalist The church in the West is at a critical moment. While the gospel is exploding throughout the global south, Western civilization faces militant assaults from aggressive secularism and radical Islam. Will the church resist the seductive shaping power of advanced modernity?More than ever, Christians must resist the negative cultural forces of our day with fortitude and winsomeness. What is needed is followers of Christ who are willing to face reality without flinching and respond with a faithfulness that is unwavering. Os Guinness describes these Christians as 'impossible people,' those who have 'hearts that can melt with compassion, but with faces like flint and backbones of steel who are unmanipulable, unbribable, undeterrable and unclubbable, without ever losing the gentleness, the mercy, the grace and the compassion of our Lord.'Few accounts of the challenge of today are more realistic, and few calls to Christian courage are more timely, resolute-and hopeful. Guinness argues that we must engage secularism and atheism in new ways, confronting competing ideas with discernment and fresh articulation of the faith. Christians are called to be impossible people, full of courage and mercy in challenging times.

Os Guinness (DPhil, Oxford) was born in China and educated in England. He is the author of more than thirty books, including The Call, Renaissance, Fool's Talk, Impossible People, and Last Call for Liberty. He has been a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow at the EastWest Institute. A frequent speaker and prominent social critic, he has addressed audiences worldwide. A passionate advocate of freedom of religion and conscience for people of all faiths and none, he was the lead drafter for both the Williamsburg Charter and the Global Charter of Conscience. He lives with his wife, Jenny, in the Washington, DC, area.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Guinness, Os

Leseproben

Introduction

Found Faithful

How on earth, it is often asked, could German Christians have caved in so weakly to the allure and coercions of National Socialism in the 1930s? The answer is plain: All too easily, if you understand the temper of the times in which they lived. Just so, many Western Christians are caving in weakly before the challenges of our own times, whether through the general seductions and distortions of advanced modernity, the tempting thinking behind the sexual revolution or a failure to understand the significance of the hour and appreciate the implacable hostility of some of the forces against us—and so blunting our witness and betraying the lordship and authority of Jesus. And all this at a time when momentous events across the world are running at a floodtide.

The present stage of history and the character of the advanced modern world have combined to throw down a gauntlet before the church in the West that is as decisive as Rome’s demand that Christians offer incense to Caesar as lord. As we shall see, the challenge to the Western church is subtle but unprecedented in its scale, and it must be answered with a courageous no to everything that contradicts the call of our Lord—whatever the cost and whatever the outcome. Is Jesus Lord, or are the forces of advanced modernity lord? The church that cannot say no to all that contradicts its Lord is a church that is well down the road to cultural defeat and captivity. But the courage to say no has to be followed by an equally clear, courageous and constructive yes—to the Lord himself, to his gospel and his vision of life, humanity and the future, so that Christians can be seen to live differently and to live better in the world of today.

Christians in the West are living in a grand clarifying moment. The gap between Christians and the wider culture is widening, and many formerly nominal Christians are becoming “religious nones.” In many ways we are in the Thursday evening of Holy Week. The cock has not yet crowed, but the angry crowd who would like to see the end of our Lord in the Western world has already seen and heard enough of our early betrayals to believe that it can count on more, and harry us toward ignominious surrender. So this is no time for cowards, for fence sitters or for those who wish to hedge their bets until they hear the judge’s verdict on the contest.

We face a solemn hour for humanity at large and a momentous showdown for the Western church. At stake is the attempted completion of the centuries-long assault on the Jewish and Christian faiths and their replacement by progressive secularism as the defining faith of the West and the ideology said to be the best suited to the conditions of advanced modernity. The gathering crisis is therefore about nothing less than a struggle for the soul of the West and the place of faith—any faith—in the life of advanced modern societies. The crisis can be expressed in terms of the interplay of four sets of challenges.

First, the primacy of the Jewish and Christian faiths as the defining faiths of the West has been weakened and almost overcome by two forces: the assault of progressive secularism and the weakening caused by the shaping power of the world of advanced modernity.

Second, within the West itself the near victory of progressive secularism has opened up a further struggle between two post-Christian forces: on one side, nihilism, degeneration and barbarism, which would spell the decline and fall of the West as it falls apart from within; and on the other, the hubris and soaring self-confidence of progressive secularism or evolutionary humanism, which would overreach in trying to lead the West in an entirely new direction and attempting to open up a stunning new world for humanity at large.

Third, the overthrow of the Jewish and Christian faiths as the soul of the West has opened the door at the global level to two powerful post-Christian alternatives vying for dominance in the world at large: aggressive secularism and radical Islam.

Fourth, the overall situation raises a double challenge for all the Christian churches across the Western world: Can Christians so witness to their Lord and live out their faith that Christian faith can prevail over the shaping power of the advanced modern world and its institutions? And can Christians, who in some Western countries are still a substantial majority, overcome the militant assaults and ways of life of progressive secularism so as to remain in a position themselves to contribute decisively to the human future?

The major focus of this book is on the challenges of the advanced modern world to the church in the advanced modern world, but they cannot be understood in isolation. Put all these challenges together and take a general’s eye view, and the stakes become very clear. For if the anti-Christian forces prevail, they represent nothing less than a return to the philosophy, the ethics and the lifestyles of the pagan world that Christians overcame originally. In other words, today’s challenge rivals that of the fateful clash of the early church with the Caesars in the first three centuries and the menace of the sultans of Ottoman Islam in the sixteenth.

The details of this grand strategic challenge will unfold as the argument proceeds, but let me summarize a key part of it in advance: the challenge of advanced modernity is much more than a matter of ideas. To be sure, Christians in the West are certainly facing powerful opposition created by the convergence of several streams of ideas that have created a raging flood that threatens to overwhelm the Christian faith in its deluge. This flood is the result of four infamous S factors that have built up over several centuries: Secularism, reinforced by secularization, has been empowered by separationism, and the outcome is a new and formidable form of statism. (A fifth S might be added, the Sixties, as there is no question that in both Europe and America the 1960s had a watershed cultural significance.) Each of these terms and trends are different, and we will need to define and distinguish them and understand the connections between them as we go forward. More importantly, they all need to be resisted with courage and overcome by faith. But if the forces of advanced modernity have weakened the church, these other forces are now threatening to complete the overthrow of the Jewish and Christian faiths as the working faith of the West.

The challenge described here amounts to a grand showdown for the Western church as a whole. This book is therefore addressed primarily to Christians throughout the Western world, for they are in the thick of the crisis. But it is also urgent that Christians and others outside the West appreciate the strategic global importance of the crisis of the West and the Western church and their vital part in responding to it. For one thing, the same challenge is coming to the rest of the world, for everyone will soon face similar problems as their own countries and regions modernize. And Western Christians need the help of their sisters and brothers from around the world, and their contributions to the West may well prove critical. Sometimes far less numerous in their own countries and usually far less wealthy than Western Christians, Christians in other parts of the world are often better off because they are further behind in terms of modernity. They have not yet become as deeply contaminated by modernity as many Western Christians have been. Like the apostle Peter, they may have less in terms of “silver and gold,” but what they have is the faithfulness, the courage, the boldness and the supernatural power that the Western church so often lacks and so badly needs.

In many ways the book is also a quiet tribute to our friends in the Jewish community. As many Jewish leaders have recognized, Jews are facing their own severe crisis today because of defections from Judaism under the conditions of advanced modernity, and this time not primarily because of anti-Semitism or persecution. In the words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “When it was hard to be a Jew, people stayed Jewish. When it was easy to be a Jew, people stopped being Jewish. Globally, this is the major Jewish problem of our time.”1

But while the Jewish crisis is evident, it is also true that we are living in what may be called the Jewish hour. First, more than half the world’s inhabitants are followers of one of the three faiths that trace their origins to Abraham. Second, it is time to appreciate the incalculable debt the Western world has long owed to Jewish beliefs and ideas—above all for the gifts of human dignity, freedom and the importance of covenant for political systems that prize freedom. And third, it is time for Christians to appreciate how the secret of the miraculous survival of the Jews in history offers very practical lessons in how Christians are to remain faithful in a post-Christian age. The simple fact is that many of the first things of Judaism are the same first things that many Christians are in danger of forgetting. But they are the very things we must hold fast to if we are to remain faithful to our Lord and demonstrate our own capacity to endure.

All that said, the main focus of this book will be on the American church for several reasons, principally because the United States still represents the world’s lead society and therefore experiences the...