Chapel: Os Guinness, March 5, 2018

I was asked in the beginning of this my last year as campus pastor who what I really want to have come speak and well you're gonna hear him in just a moment as Guinness has written about 30 books he grew up in China until age 10 did his graduate work at Oxford University and his book on the call on Christian calling is about a said it's the best thing you can get and it's it's kind of a modern classic on Christian vocation that's been used here numerous times at Westmont College it's coming out again a new addition this summer for new chapters and so that's what but his book the dust of death which I read in the early 70s I was just beginning my ministry has affected me ever since then our trajectory was set oz getting us better than anyone I know his can explain the world to us and why it is the way it is and can equip us for our mission in this world I I know no one who does it so well and so I I'm thrilled to have him with you now you'll probably be delighted to know that his great great great grandfather is yes the Guinness who founded the Guinness brewery which I know you've never tasted that or anything like that but you've seen others maybe some faculty once in a while but that's not you guys but anyway it's a well I have I had lunch with my I jokingly ordered again to say well just in honor of your family at no II said well thank you well yeah it is his family but anyway I we were thrilled that you're here I pray that you will as I prayed earlier you'll run down the path that God has set for you you'll teach us about courage and the world we live in oh come on up [Music] I noticed those more applause for beer than for books Thank You Ben it's a real delight to be vacuum Westmont I haven't been for a while but I have been here many times in fact I remember this College so well because it was here that I gave my very first talk in America I came in 1968 with Francis Schaeffer we went to Harvard Berkeley a number of other universities Stanford and then we came to Westmont and Shay foods to give a series but unfortunately he fell ill after I think one maybe and they turned to me and said you've heard him why don't you give what he would have said but probably the most inauthentic talk of my life just literally parroting word-for-word quotation for quotation illustration for illustration exactly what I had heard him say four to six weeks but I'm grateful to Westmont for getting me going but I'm actually here and I accepted this because of my dear friend and brother Ben Chaplin theologian writer mentor many many things but for me those are all too serious I first met Ben in the early 70s he said at what was then youth specialties and they had a certain magazine called the Vinton burg door I came from LaBrie which is one of the quote coolest places in Christendom at the time and he represented one of the funniest parts of christened him at the time and we headed off from the beginning but I admire this friend and brother what a champion for truth and faithfulness and so when he said come I am here and honored to be here some years ago I was speaking to some of the members of the Congress and in the question time one of them put up his hand and he said this was before all that you went through last year he said when I look out on America I think that if there was a flood there'd be a small boy who could put his finger in the dike and be a hero but I lookin out in our situation today and there isn't a flood there is a terrible mudslide and in many ways that summed up how many people see all the things that are going wrong in our country at the moment and the sense of helplessness of many of how you respond to them clearly the American Republic is going through its gravest crisis since the Civil War but we look out in the world and you see our Western civilization called into question the search for a new world order meeting blockage after blockage and as we look down towards the future we see unprecedented challenges for Humanity and many people not surprising that their hearts are failing them for fear but what a time for followers of Jesus to go out with faith and faithfulness with courage and with confidence and play our part at this extraordinary hour and I just wanted a few minutes we have this morning they set out some of the challenges now we can spend a whole time looking at the opportunities but not this morning clearly we are the most numerous faith on the earth many parts of the world the fastest growing faith on the earth and the opportunities before the church are enormous in the 21st century but at the same time we've got to be realistic with a faith that looks at the challenges in the white of the eye and then goes out with confidence and courage so let me just set out before you some of the challenges I see only a selective number first you and your generation must follow the outcome of some of the great questions of our time that have a key dimension of faith and religion there are three above all first and very obviously will Islam modernize peacefully in the end we all know the challenges of Islam most Muslims in the West or in situations where their minority are very clearly peace-loving people but the minority in the advanced modern world and many outside it clearly representing a strong challenge in terms of violence and here we see what's been described as the Dark Alliance of many on the Left liberal side obviously thinking their enemy's enemy as their friend and now espousing Islam little realizing what would happen if Islam were to win obviously the key challenge to Islam and for us relating to Islam is religious freedom freedom of religion and conscience accept that and the world can accept them peacefully deny that as so many of them do and we face nothing but conflict and violence will Islam modernize peacefully in the end the second great question which faith will replace Marxism in China I was in the university discussion in one of the great Chinese academies and the discussion for the day was which faith would replace Marxism the light of the vacuum the China represents the parties in power the ideology Marxism is dead and the word vacuum came up again and again and again and they ran through the options would it be nationalism dangerous for the world would it be Confucianism strong in Chinese history but very elitist would it be Buddhism long history in China although an Indian export but something which today appeals mostly to ordinary people more more importantly Buddhism is essentially world denying whereas our modern world is world affirming and would it be they openly discuss that in twenty years time China could be a majority Christian nation immensely significant obviously for the church but for China and also for the world follow that discussion the third great question will the Western world sever or recover its roots the West today and certainly the American Republic is increasingly a cut flower civilization we are an immense amount to the Greeks and to the Romans but many of the central ideas most of the central ideas human dignity freedom and 100 others go back to the scriptures and yet they're being decisively repudiated we go this way the decline of the West and the end of the American Republic is who is founded are within sight but will there be a restoration that's the question for your generation to decide follow these issues because you can see that while in many intellectual circles religions just discord in fact some of the deepest questions have a religious dimension which is critical to the answers that will come out secondly play your part in the grand global task facing the church in this century the first is to help prepare the global South you know we all know that while the church is not doing well anywhere largely in the West the advanced modern world there is an explosion of the gospel and the growth of the church in the global south sub-saharan Africa Asia where I just happened to be born in north central China is the epicenter of the fastest growth of the church in 2,000 years you know the story it's true it's inspiring it's magnificent encouragement to us with our discouragements in the West but many people don't add the sting in the tail much of the global South is largely pre-modern and what has done in the church in the West is its capitulation to the advanced modern world in other words their challenge is coming the Industrial Revolution may have come to England with spinning jenny's and things like that it's coming to Africa with cell phones in the villages and so on but it's coming and you can see for instance in China the incredible carriage of the church resisting the most cruel brutal systematic persecution ever and yet in strange ways more people are falling away as they move from say rural China to big cities like Shanghai and Beijing it is harder to negotiate big-city living in the advanced modern world than even to survive persecution so you can see their challenge is coming and we in the West have a part to play above all with humility saying brothers and sisters in the global south don't do what we did we helped to create the rise of the modern world but we have succumbed to the very world we helped to create don't do what we did be faithful to our Lord integrate your faith with every part of society and move out and be the salt and light everywhere the third great task for the church win back the Western world now if you think for a minute our Western world is the product the heir of two great early advances of the gospel to missions to the West as it were the first and obvious one is the conversion of Rome amazing the faith that the Romans would have despised those provincial Galileans in three centuries became the faith that replaced the ideology of mighty Rome but of course when the Western Empire fell northeastern lasted another thousand years but when the Western Empire fell so did much of the Western Church and the Dark Ages were truly dark and the second great mission to the west is the so called conversion of the Barbarian kingdoms 5th 6th seventh eighth ninth centuries I'm proud to say as an Irishman that was our great al missionaries and flimsy little coracles from places like Banga came down and you can follow the trail of classes right across France Switzerland northern Italy sand garland for instance in Switzerland was an Irishman and you can see that they and others brought the gospel and the scriptures and literacy and education and they sowed the seeds of what for better or worse became christened 'm now of course many many centuries later we're living in the twilight of that second mission to the west but instead of the gloom and the doom or the totally unbiblical theories like the idea that this as the Sun goes round the world so the gospel goes around the world and the West has had its day and now it's the day of Asia what nonsense the West is our Jerusalem just as the early church was called to witness to Jerusalem and Samaria and finally the uttermost parts of the earth so we and we must never give up on our Jerusalem so our sisters and brothers in Kenya or Korea they to us are the uttermost parts of the earth just as we to them are the other most parts of the earth but shame on us if we give up on winning back our Western world to Jesus and I don't mean a political campaign I don't mean a cultural crusade I mean winning people back through the gospel to follow and to live the way of Jesus the third great task of the 20th century is to contribute to the human future I was saying yesterday we are human beings who living post Auschwitz post Hiroshima and you can spend a lot of time talking about those two and now pre singularity and as you look down towards the future of ultra intelligence and post humanism transhumanism and all these sort of discussions you can see it's calling into play ethical issues understandings of humanity who has the answers to these things where are the answers apart from the depth of them in the scripture and so Christians who follow Jesus and love the scripture and know the deep principles of humanity and freedom and justice which we see in the book of Exodus or in the prophets or wherever we've got to be those four in the forefront of these discussions for the sake of God's creation of humanity and the future of the earth and sadly many Christians are ducking these issues and just leading a little private faith there are Titanic tasks and we must take them on by God's grace thirdly we've got a wrestle with the grand transformations of our advanced modern age some of these are obvious some of these are much discuss let me just mention three one let's discuss than it should be one too much discussed almost one great transformation is what's called the shift from pi road technology to biotechnology in other words from the engineering of fire which has been at the heart of human advance for centuries hundreds of centuries and bio technology the engineering of life in many ways the Industrial Revolution is the climax of the advance of power technology but with the discovery of DNA in the 1950s and various things you can see the engineering of life has now become crucial to the human future now we needn't go into that analysis but what's the significance of it the significance is I think as you follow this discussion that humans are now once again tempted to play being God and discussions of building a human Tower of Babel have come to the fore again and again you only have to read a book like you've all her Ari's homo Deus the title says it all man as God but if you follow the discussion much of it centered on Silicon Valley you can see what we're up against as we move towards the human future the second great transformation much discussed is the shift from the industrial era to the information era in one word globalization globalization is simply a fact a process human interconnectedness is now truly reaching global levels globalism rather different is a philosophy you may not agree with globalism but globalization is simply a fact but again what's its significance the significance is surely that this is created on the one hand Titanic human problems and at the same time put enormous pressure on our willingness and desire to tackle them takes a sex-trafficking when I was a boy sex trafficking pornography was a matter of dirty old men gain CDL raincoats going to the back streets of town and undoubtedly was connected say with small mafia units in London or whatever but relatively tiny compared to today billions and billions and billions pornography sex trafficking a global challenge on an unprecedented scale in all humanity and at the same time globalization means the speed the scale the simultaneity the so-called 3s factors are such that life is fired at us point-blank how on earth do we do more than survive our daily lives my wife and I have friends are one of the campaign managers in one of the previous elections and I was out of town but she had dinner with his family and between grace and desert this Christian brother head of a campaign received 500 emails most of which had to have some answer before he put his head in the pillow that night now that's an extreme case in the campaign but many of us know what it is to be under the pressure of life fired point-blank how do you handle all the things you'd love to handle and with things that are now global in their challenges you can see many people ducking out and leaving it to others the third grand transformation is the shift from what's called a singular modernity to multiple modernity x' what does that mean the modern world trace it back 500 years and you can see the rise of Portugal and Spain and France and the Netherlands and then Britain and the last century was the American Century in other words each power in its turn was the vanguard of the modern world and only needed to look over its shoulder to see who might be threatening it another power in the Western advanced modern world no longer globalisation now means thourough no longer a single modernity but multiple modalities there's an American modernity European modernity Asian modernity within Asia a Japanese Chinese Korean Singaporean you name it in other words many parts of the world interpreting the modern world adapting to the modern world within their own history and within their own values and we need to recognize that now that clearly means for the West and certainly for America humility the idea that globalization equals westernization equals Americanization equals coca colonization as it used to be put is gone and we must be really humble in the way we approach most of the rest of the world which at the moment hasn't dawned on some of our leaders but let me move fourthly to the heart of the challenge we've got to face up to the lethal distortions of the gospel in the advanced modern world Christians in general have angelica's in particular are usually strong in resisting ideas I often think American em jolt would smell a relativist to the hundred yards we recognize the ideas but the fact is the main damage today has not been done by ideas modernity advanced modernity is far more than just I is it's institutions its structures it's things that are all around us in every day way and we don't see that they make up the world and unless we recognize them we can't resist them now none of these things are inevitable I'm not a determinist but we need to recognize them to resist them let me just mention three here first our modern world tends and I underline the word tends our modern world tends to shift us from a stance of authority to a stance of preference we as followers of Jesus are under authority he is our Lord and he put his stamp on the Scriptures and we are under his lordship and under the authority of the word of God the Scriptures we are under Authority carbot used to refer to the binding address of doctrine you believe something and you behave in a certain way and there's an ironclad link between belief and behavior no more one of the central reasons why not is the simple fact of consumerism at the heart of American modern consumerism is simply choice and change you look at the supermarket or a shopping mall and you have a thousand cereals and you move up in life and we have all sorts of endless relationships and we come up the highest thing of faiths and religions and ideologies and once again we have an incredible smorgasbord Supermarket choice of faith Senate undermines the solidity of authority everything is a matter of pick and choose whatever you like whatever you like today to your preference and slowly there's no authority now this touches evangelicalism you can see Angelica's across the board what they prefer now oh we pick and choose Jesus of course Paulding tilt Testament parts of it a little embarrassing throw them out you can see that pick and choose cafeteria style mentality has affected profoundly evangelicalism evangelicalism is suffering a profound crisis of authority confidence in the Lord confidence in His Word the ability to submit ourselves to that authority has done in this pick-and-choose world and no wonder evangelicalism in many parts of this country it's in a meltdown and it's a disgrace before our Lord as Lord and God well take a second example our modern world tends remember the word tends to shift us from an integrated faith to a fragmented faith my wife is from LA one time after we've been here in Santa Barbara for actually a couple of months we were down in LA and I was asked to teach at Bel Air Presbyterian in the time when President Reagan went there and I was in the adult Sunday School for several weeks and I asked them to think of their lives and how they map their worlds in Los Angeles many of them drove 75 miles to church hundred miles to work the next day 50 miles to the beach 25 miles to a sports game whatever and we all know what is La huge sprawling metropolitan area loosely linked by freeways and cars so his faith integrated very very hard and it was in LA or Southern California that Theodore Roszak made the damning comment in the sixties the Christian faith has become privately engaging publicly irrelevant flourished at home you hoga folks and the churches but when you go to Northrop Grumman door Hollywood or wherever it is you have a another way of doing things another way of operating the salt and light was not integrated New Jersey big-city living whether it's LA or London or Shanghai or Beijing or Mexico City it's much harder to negotiate our big modern world in ways where faith makes Christ the Lord everywhere but of course our Lord says if we don't make him Lord everywhere we're not making him Lord at all the third great transformation remember the word 10 the modern world tends to shift us from the supernatural to the secular now the roots of this go far far back further than the modern world and owner distorted but you can see that modernity has changed people's consciousness enormous Lee in the traditional world what was unseen was not unreal in fact the unseen was more real than the real and people understood things very down-to-earth like sex or business or farming in the light of the unseen world whether they're Christians or pagans the unseen was not unreal but a feature of our modern world is that the unseen is unreal as Peter Berger memento says we live in a windowless world a world without windows what's real for us is the world of the five senses what you can see touch taste measure calculate and so on and anything else is not quote the real world and that world real world is not even the world of the Church of whatever it's the world of business and technology and science and and things like that and you can see that many Western Christians are far more secularized than they realized now secularization theory is wrong it's wrong wrong wrong the idea that if the world gets more modern the world gets less religious it doesn't but secularization does happen at certain levels and above all the sense that the supernatural reality is an unreal world compared with the real world we have and many of Angelica's in America are atheists unawares in terms of the way they actually live day to day and that's disastrous now how do we combat these things well you haven't time to go into that depth even just see from what I said your generation needs to be people who really know how to engage with spiritual warfare knowing that the unseen world is the decisive world but you also need to be people who really understand the history of ideas Nietzsche was right at this point to understand ideas you need to know their family tree their genealogy where they come from to many of angelical x' simply respond ad hoc to what comes down the street today you could take post-modernism itself or the sexual revolution i'm appalled that how people deal with them all anecdotally who might a judge my sister my colleague might work or whatever they don't think of what the whole movement means as a whole it's got a history it's got assumptions it's got goals and when you see some of these you look at them where the post-modernism or political correctness or social constructionism or the sexual revolution you look at them with your eyes wide open and the naivety of young evangelicals are falling for these things is absolutely disgrace before the history of the church in our Lord we need to have a living sense of the history of ideas so that we're not foolish enough to succumb to these passing trends but understand them in their depth and complexity the third thing we need is cultural analysis history of ideas deals with ideas Shaffer was strong on that he used of the rubber how ideas washed down in the rain there was history of ideas academic or popular you look at a thinker Nietzsche Hegel Marx whoever it is a thinker their thoughts their books their writings and so on and then the effect in the streets there are many people today who talked about relativism and power not realizing they're almost quoting Foucault or Nietzsche himself it's just washed down in the rain and they're thinking well that's ideas many of the most profound things in our modern world don't come from ideas at all and we need to analyze the culture which is making people think a certain way even with no thinkers involved some you may wonder what on earth I'm talking about let me give an example the clearest example I mentioned earlier that's life life fired point-blank we all know this 24/7 pressure business of the speed of light and so on and so on you know what it is that's our modern way of living where did it come from Nietzsche Hegel none of the above it came from this now of course the clock which is said to be the most powerful Western invention ever was invented around 1300 didn't have that much impact 19th century began to have an impact it coordinated whole continents little puffing steam engines and big fat railway timetables everyone living in the same time but of course that's old-fashioned and now we're living with atomic time digital time read Lewis and Clark your great American explorers they decide to meet at a certain place in a certain day and in their journals they say well they did meet but it was nine days apart from when they intended and they described it relatively punctual could you dock a space station nine days apart nonsense but nanosecond timing that's fast life but it comes from this and many of the things in our world cell telephones television 100 other things they are shaping us and we if we want to understand the world that we're in but not of we've got to have cultural analysis as well as the history of ideas but let me summarize this if you're with me in this and your generation moves out to play your part in the church in the world the central issue is faithfulness faithfulness will you be faithful to our Lord confident in the gospel with a courage to live it out whatever the contempt and the scorn of our times becomes faithfulness john stott came here many times he was a great friend of mine and the mentor I visited him just two weeks before he died he was horizontal in his bed he couldn't even lift up his head in his early 90s and after a wonderful hour and a half I prayed for him and I asked him John how can my wife and I pray for you I didn't know he only had two weeks left but I'll never forget his answer hoarse with barely a whisper lying flat in his back he said pray for me that I will be faithful to Jesus to my last breath now why does that so important one of the stories that always moved me so deeply was the story of an intellectual debate after World War 2 when many of the Christian intellectuals TS Eliot Jacques Maritain others were debating and discussing the state of the church in Europe which is a very bad state put it mildly was then still is today and in the discussion of a months and even years Christopher Dawson the Catholic historian raised a simple question could the church be warmed again a third time first mission to the West second mission to the West warmed again ml Brunner in his answer was candid enough to say I'm not sure the challenges of eternity was so strong and eventually Dawson answered his own question I'm paraphrasing I don't have in front of me but what he said was says can the church be warmed again a third time look at the chaos of our Western Church he said every true Christian would say yes but we must not answer too quickly or too lightly because on the outcome of that question depends the future of humanity you look at our challenges in the modern world where are the other faiths that have answers except for those of us who are Jews and Christians and people of the scriptures and know the Living God who revealed himself to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the prophets and supremely in Jesus where are the other faiths that have answers like those they're not there so this is not a small issue you deal with as you're here at Westmont thinking through your faith leaving this place knowing who you believe what you believe why you believe what you believe and how you're able to communicate these things to your generation and play your part in the world on the outcome of that question depends probably the very future of humanity have faith in God have no fear and the Lord bless you and go with you as you leave this great College thank you [Music]

Channel: Westmont College

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Id: UvoeC1wL5gM

Length: 35min 57sec (2157 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 08 2018