Dr Os Guinness: Christian Culture, Apologetics, Politics, and Cultural Revolutions

[Music] hi welcome to more christ today i'm joined by the great dr oz guinness os is a chinese born english author and social critic of irish center must add a descendant of the famous guinness family he's lived and served as a prophetic voice in the united states since 1984. so just to begin then oz can you tell us a little bit about your background and some of the key events in your life that have formed you and your love for christ in his church well as you said mark i come from the guinness family and i'm descended from the youngest son and as you know arthur guinness the first author came to faith in a really personal way through the preaching of john wesley in the 1730s and his faith was very real and that carried down through the family several generations but in my part of the family there's been an almost unbroken line between the first author and my own faith my great-grandfather was quite a character and uh lived in london was a friend of the earl of shawsprey and william booth who founded the salvation army and he had the privilege of sending out 1500 missionaries to places like africa and china and latin america and so on and then my grandfather went as one of the first western doctors a missionary doctor to china so both my parents were born in china and i was too so i come from a strong family in terms of the faith fantastic and um i'd love to hear a bit more about your time in china then and is there anything that you see today that unfortunately that sort of reminds you of your time there i suppose with the cultural revolution that we're undergoing and different things well i start my latest book with the time when i was seven as a boy in nanjing which was then the capital of southern china my dad turned to me and said son we're in trouble chiang kai-shek has abandoned the city and we're at the mercy of the red army and sure enough this is january 1949 sure enough within a few months lin bao and the red army came in and the reign of terror began there were trials every morning parents informing against their children children against their parents and then public executions in the afternoon my father was accused of all sorts of things but the witnesses rather like our lord could never agree and so eventually he was acquitted but after two years under that they were allowed to send me home to england and then they were kept for another two years before they were released so i remember well the first years of communism in china and i will never be naive about what they do [Music] and um do are we being overly pessimistic whenever we caution christians about what might be coming whenever we look to this um cultural revolution and the way things like critical race theory and um gender identity the kind of indoctrination is filtering into schools and things like that and destroying any chance of a well maybe wrong but destroy any chance of a common good according to the judeo-christian worldview or do you think we should be on guard against that well we should be on guard against everything that is undermining freedom justice human dignity and so on and certainly this does now many people look at these things ad hoc in terms of today or yesterday's issue rather than seeing as nietzsche put it everything has a genealogy a history a family tree now if you look at marxism people think only of classical marxism as you have say in the chinese revolution or the russian revolution but what we're facing in the west is not classical marxism but cultural marxism neo-marxism and critical race theory is only one part of a much wider movement it actually goes back to antonio gramsci sitting in jail under mussolini in the 1920s who tried to figure out why marx was wrong revolution didn't happen as he predicted and he shifted things from economics to culture the cultural gatekeepers now his ideas were picked up by the so-called frankfurt school 30s 40s 50s 60s and in the 60s they were very influential in the new left particularly the thinking of herbert marcuza the godfather of the new left in california but at the end of the 60s he and rudy deutschko the red brigade in germany called for a long march through the institutions in other words they wouldn't win in the streets protest alone you had to win the colleges and universities the press and the media and the world of entertainment and uh hollywood and so on and of course 50 years later we can see they've done it in other words post-modernism political correctness the canceled culture identity politics the sexual revolution all these things come [Music] from that cultural marxism and now they're having an enormous impact now nothing's inevitable we believe in freedom which means we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow so nothing's inevitable but to resist it you have to recognize it and really understand where it comes from yeah and i should say too that um your book deeply impressed me well several of your books didn't impress me at that point but i think the dust of death in drawing comparisons with the 60s and now is most fascinating especially the updated edition and how even we understand it is christine's that this is a crisis moment whereas from within that worldview that more marxian worldview you have the notion that different riots and things like that are cathartic and that you show that oftentimes different cultural groups are speaking past one another so we have to understand the kind of total picture of what's going on i think maybe a lot of us are naive to the differences and how that world view presupposes that everything is about power and i think you show that beautifully in your book i should say um then you also contrast it of course with the judeo-christian conception which i want to talk more about but um just before we move on to that i would love to ask you first about it shouldn't be any surprise i suppose but what first prompted your interest then in social analysis and sociology and apologetics then as you're growing up and especially as it pertains to effectively sharing the gospel in line with what we're speaking about there well i said i came out of a missionary background but with my parents in jail in china not in jail but on a house arrest in china i didn't have my parents in my life immediately when i was a teenager and i was in english boarding school and i actually came to faith my last year at school so after a two-year debate in my mind between atheists like friedrich nietzsche jean-paul sartre and my hero at the time albert kemu and on the other side great christian thinkers like pascal gk chesterton and of course c.s lewis and i was eventually convinced the christian faith was true i was at london university as an undergraduate but there was a kind of schizophrenia we were given deep rich faith but almost zero understanding of what was going on in the culture the counter culture swinging london the beatles fellini antonioni and all sorts of things drugs sex rock and roll and it was when i met a man called francis schaefer who who connected all the dots and encourage christians to think freely and christianly about anything and everything now that was revolutionary for my faith but that was looking back what you might call the history of ideas but i realized that in our modern world you need to understand also culture and much of culture is actually not just ideas and so i did my doctorate at oxford on what's called technically the the sociology of knowledge under peter berger so you take something marked like time you know everyone knows we're in a world of 24 7 pressure what's called fast life where does it come from it doesn't come from any thinker philosopher psychologist it comes from clocks and watches in the atomic age you know the old africans saying all westerners have watches africans have time and that fast life is very characteristic of our advanced modern world but to understand that you need to have cultural analysis and not just the history of ideas so i tried to fill out both and i today i try and keep them both going in my mind oh thank god for it um next if we might speak a little bit about your most recent book you're marvelous magna carta of humanity cyanide's revolutionary faith in the future of freedom so i want to ask you then about them what are some of the main contrasts between these secular revolutions such as the french revolution which talk a lot about the book and the faith-led revolution then of ancient israel which is then continued in the church well there's a host of contrasts almost across the board and you begin with their sources the american revolution originally was mostly shaped through the reformation in the bible and the rediscovery in the 17th century of the political significance of the exodus and deuteronomy whereas the french revolution came from the ideas of the french enlightenment russo voltaire diedero and people like that then say their views of humanity the biblical revolutions are very realistic the notion of checks and balances separation of powers why because humans are sinners and we abuse power and you've always got to watch against the abuse of power you take you know lord acton's famous remark that all power tends to corrupt absolute power corrupts absolutely that was a critique of hierarchical institutions which are based on power you go on down the line now this year in america particularly the big difference is justice you take over here the killing of george floyd almost everybody agrees that was terrible the killing of george floyd it was evil hypocritical unjust but while there's an agreement that there is injustice the disagreement and the huge difference comes how you tackle it so the radical left god is dead you remember for them truth is dead so you only have power so what they do is to analyze discourse or speech always looking for who's the victim then you weaponize the victim usually not an individual but a group and then use them weaponized to try and overturn the status quo but you're setting up a conflict of powers that can only end in what the romans call the peace of despotism in other words you have a power in control which can put down all other powers authoritarianism now compare that with the gospel i love the fact that while people puzzle over the fact that why weren't more people disturbed by the abuse of humanity in history they weren't and the reason is probably we worship we're so impressed by the spectacle of power the first great voices against that the hebrew prophets amos michael hozier isaiah jeremiah and so on and of course our lord himself isaiah 61 the prediction luke 4 the fulfillment and those who are followers of jesus are champions of freedom and champions of inju justice but how do we tackle it addressing truth to power we call for repentance and then confession and then forgiveness and then reconciliation and then restoration now i've used just single words there but unpack each of those and you see that you have a radical and lasting remedy whereas the left let me put it bluntly has never ever succeeded and it always ends in oppression and we should never be naive now the tragedy is that christians are on the back foot today for other reasons but we need to get off the back foot not be defensive and with real courage and confidence in the gospel move out and address these public issues yeah i mean and i think to a contrast some secularist myths then i wanted to ask you how has this very rich and humane jujeo-christian understanding manifested itself then in different and diverse communities i should say from ancient israel through to the u.s founding and on to history of african-americans for example and what's the the strand that goes through all of those well if you look at the west as a whole clearly we owe a lot to the greeks considerable amount to the romans above all on governance but supremely the west is the child of the scriptures and the gospel now if we take what we're talking about here the american revolution was not consistent think of slavery and racism but the best of it was rooted in the torah so you take the u s constitution we the people that is a nationalized somewhat secularized form of the jewish covenant and covenantal systems are different from either organic systems like a family or a tribe that are linked by kinship and blood or a hierarchical system like an empire which is linked by force and power but covenantal systems we the people are linked by a common binding agreement of the people so in exodus you have the first example in history of the consent of the governed the lord puts forward the covenant and three times it says in exodus all that the lord says we will do. as one scholar puts it that is an almost democracy but it goes beyond that you have the notion of the reciprocal responsibility of everyone for everyone in other words the idea in history every jew responsible for every jew why all are made in the image of god and all are part of that covenantal responsibility and you can see how extraordinarily significant some of those notions are and the covenantal system guarantees the highest view of freedom and justice the world's ever seen now the trouble is there's a simple problem and all systems have their problems but this one is easy to see we can see it in the bible itself the lord god keeps his word humans don't and when we break our word the covenant breaks down and it needs to be renewed and restored and so on and what we're seeing in america the covenant the constitution is breaking down and i should say too as i've read some critics of your book which i think are unfair so one was along the lines if you're going back to leviticus and or texts from the old testament which were are seen now in modern times as on just towards women and things like that and even though the emphasis on the imago day was there that it wasn't properly incarnated as it were whereas i think your work is actually suggesting that it is incarnated over time and i think maybe maybe you can address that but um parallel to that i think so the gospel is good news for everyone and slavery is abhorrent to god but then people say why didn't that result in christine's abolishing slavery earlier but then we had singapore like that in the fourth century saying say we should be a boss but there was a times a lag in between until wilberforce and those persons some of whom you mentioned abolish slavery later on but that was being true to the gospel itself whereas those older um maybe problems that weren't initiated to the gospel but were actually contravening what christ came to fulfill would you like to speak to that point a little bit or does that make sense yeah well pretty generally if we look at human history slavery is the norm and abolition is the novelty and where does it come from now as historians point out you take something like say paul's letter to philemon paul couldn't get rid of slavery under the roman empire he had zero political influence but what he teaches about the dignity of the human and the brotherhood of the fellow slave and so on is actually like a time bomb which takes a while to go off but when it goes off with freedom it blows slavery apart so who were the great abolitionists you take the great catholic hero bartolome las casas in the 16th century standing against the conquistadores in latin america you take in england and my family was a friend and a supporter of him william oberforce in the 18th century las casas and wilberforce and many others john wollman and many many others it was out of their biblical understanding of humans made in the image of god and of the power of the gospel to bring freedom that was behind the abolition movement and the reform of slavery and that of course will be true in our world today because put it bluntly our atheist friends don't have a high view of either freedom because everything's a matter of chance a necessity or a high view of human dignity whereas you have in the scriptures the highest view in history of both now of course the trouble is that very often christians haven't lived it out so you take some of the influence of the english in ireland or you take some of the influence of the irish even in their own orphanages in other words christian abuse of christian principle is what turns people against the christian faith which is tragic yeah and i think as you suggest there are two alongside what tom holland talks about in his book dominion is that even those who are criticizing or criticizing from the perspective of the victim in a weird twist of the gospel that they've tried to sacrifice but doesn't really make sense as you suggest whenever you accept this underlying presuppositions of the materialist paradigm too so that's most important thanks for that us and um i want to speak to the another wonderful element of your book then would you like to describe a bit about this vision of a morally responsible society of independent free people who are covenanted to one another especially in a time like ours which seems to be so inaudibly focused on expressive individualism and maybe you could describe a bit about rabbi sax's marked influencing work well rabbi sax is passionate about the fact we should shift from i to we but i think the deeper point comes freedom includes responsibility because we're free we're responsible now if you go back to the bible itself it's quite clear that there's a link between sin and irresponsibility adam the woman you gave me cain am i my brother's keeper there's a sin sloughs off responsibility whereas freedom i think for myself i speak for myself i decide for myself and whatever flows out from what i think and speak and act i'm responsible for and so we should link together that idea of freedom and responsibility because today it's all the talk is about rights and entitlement and not duty and responsibility but we've got to recover responsibility now take a simple example leadership people think the leadership is being at the top or out in front the president the king the ceo the captain the conductor of an orchestra not biblically biblically the leader is the person who takes responsibility for the situation they see in front of them now it might be a cup of cold water to someone who's thirsty it might be the good samaritan reaching out or it might be someone like well the jews celebrate a gentleman called nashon who not in the bible but they say he was the first man who had the courage to get into the red sea the lord parted the waters but everyone looked at it and hung back and narshon strode out he took responsibility and that's leadership doing what needs to be done taking responsibility at whatever level we're in at whatever sphere we're in in other words it's not the top or the front it's all of us doing our thing where it needs to be done again just an implication of responsibility hmm most fascinating thank you guys i want to ask you next about something um a certain fault line which i see in line with what your book describes and i want to ask is it possible and if so how to have a notion of the common good of the community today and focus on this um covenantal understanding of our responsibilities whenever the state is so aggressively anti-christian in many ways and this the fissures that we see go down to things even like biological reality itself which i was trying to hit that with the focus on gender identity and things like that and how can we help bring this out as christians well we know that what is true before the lord is therefore what is free and human and just is actually always in the best interests of the common good so we should be unashamed about arguing for a high biblical view of human dignity and so on now the question comes how do we do it because so many christians responding out of the loss of consensus you know the west was christian not long ago and when we lose that consensus and people turn against us a lot of people are insecure and fearful and so they respond in insecure and fearful ways and often in ways that are verbally violent and sometimes with hate which of course is anti-christian we're to love even our enemies now one way we get beyond that of course is through persuasion now as if we know that the christian faith is true and it leads to this idea of justice and that idea of freedom and this idea of human worth we should also have good persuasion or the old-fashioned term apologetics making a case for it so we can argue why this is important it's not just because we believe it or it used to be tradition or whatever no this is the best news ever for humanity and so we should be able to link the common good through a very powerful case made by persuasion yeah wonderful and um i think your work in that sense is similar to dostoevsky's and leading with the beauty of the gospel as you sort of suggested and a little bit beyond me the comparison and i want to ask you there knows about going back to things like critical theory the franco scale that we mentioned i'm wondering to what extent is that new creed really at fault and um to what extent then is the underlying all sufficiency of enlightenment reason and even technology and things like that that were already there even in our now secularist allies like more liberal types who see the evils of the the new left and um how might we stand against this totalitarian impulse alongside those people without i suppose resorting to this notion of it's all about free speech without a clear conception as you suggest of the gospel and how that infiltrates every area of life well we need to make a difference between liberalism and radicalism although they're coming together today in other words a lot of traditional optimism and liberalism and progressivism from the secular side was actually a parasite on the christian faith so you remove god and you count on humans or evolution or the control of history you throw out revelation and count on reason or whatever and that was the 18th century view humans could do it by themselves but in many ways the 20th century was a single century massive contradiction of all that secular hope so the alternatives you see are coming together of liberalism which has been disemboweled it's had its christian foundations cut out and much of its confidence cut out and as that happens it slowly gets pulled more and more towards radicalism and that's the danger we're seeing today but we've got to begin by recognizing that we are responsible for good delivery so you take the french revolution you know the cry of dennis dederow which is picked up by the radical jacqueline we will never be free until the last king is strangled with the guts of the last priest in other words throne and altar church and state were considered one and oppressive and in collusion so the revolution secularism threw off both and that radical animosity to the faith has been at the heart of european and now american and western secularism ever since so solzhenitsy used to say a hatred of god is more basic to marxism even than economics and politics and i think you can see a lot of that today now in america they've never had that the genius of the first amendment where religion flourished not despite disestablishment but because of it but now even that's breaking down because of the inanities of the religious right and you see a mounting animosity towards the christian faith of whatever kind in the radical left and so as liberalism becomes more and more hollow and the radical left becomes more and more animated you see them drawing together both strongly opposed to the christian faith and with all that in mind then as do you think that the american constitutional republic in particular will likely be not to call you to be prophetic in this sense and will likely be restored or replaced or what is your expectation and i know your greater hope beyond that well as you know mark i'm not american i'm an outsider foreign a visitor living in this country and i talk a lot in capitol hill and other places the way i put it this year 2021 is three words revolution question mark oligarchy question mark homecoming question mark revolution we've been talking about the radical left and you can see with critical race theory critical women's study you know occupy wall street as well as anti-far black lives matter and so on and i would say please god no as i said earlier that sort of radical left has never succeeded and has always produced deeper oppression oligarchy what do i mean there what you see and this is actually the greatest contribution i think although this may be heavily controversial the greatest contribution of president trump was that in the disgust and the disdain mustered against him he has shone the light on this consolidation between politics bureaucracy the media the world of entertainment the academy and now woke business so you've got a one-party politics emerging in america which is closer to an oligarchy the rulers of the best and the brightest rather than democracy and again i would say please god no now what i mean by homecoming as you know probably the hebrew meaning of the word repentance teshuva adds something to the well-known greek meaning we know in greek it's metanoia an about turn of heart and mind the hebrew word adds the idea of coming home sin is exile alienation being east of eden genesis 3. so coming back to the lord in faith and obedience is homecoming that word homecoming's common in american people going back in the autumn to their colleges and so on alma mater but i think in a far deeper way america needs to come home to the best of its revolution and those parts of course not slavery and racism and that stuff they were hypocrisies from the very beginning but back to the best of the roots which were in the book of exodus yeah excellent and i think too um in some of your work that you have shown how there's that potential and the potential has been tapped even with figures like dr martin luther king jr who spoke about the promissory note and how you have that i think from my perspective um the african-american heritage is so rich and christians need to be attend to that and not have it hijacked by the radical left who tried to make say the reverend dr king into some sort of a black figure primarily instead of a christian figure which of course he was and that's the primary identity and i think christians should attend to that and um alongside your work no but over here people think of lincoln but if you look at the african-american reformers like frederick douglass harriet tubman booker t washington and as you said martin luther king pastor martin luther king they were all christians and their understanding of tackling injustice was on the basis of the gospel yeah i'm in and um i want to ask you next they knows about maybe some of the impacts that developments in america well are having and might have in countries like ireland and especially i think with the way geopolitical currents seem to be developing especially with the rise of the country that you grew up in china of course you have any um thoughts about how that might play out from america then because as i say it now unfortunately by way i don't know if some sort of cultural colonialism or whatever we might call it from the new left bringing all of their terms over here and um we think along their sector secularist lanes and it's all about black lives matter and different things like even in ireland where those are not our issues and we don't have the same history as america there was never any you know ireland never had colonies or anything even but yet these weird perverse and rarefied notions of whiteness have infiltrated our societies too by virtue of suppose in part of sharing the same language or um do you have any thoughts about other countries like ireland or further field no we irish we're a colony at a more serious level mark keep china on one side from them because what you see in china is classical marxism maoism or totalitarianism we're talking about europe though you know not long ago president macron france warned the french about taking american ideas too seriously but ironically as many people pointed out the american ideas are actually amplified versions of ideas that have come from france they say postmodernism in first world war ii but they have come now the trouble is in britain and in ireland where the church is at low ebb you have a natural reaction against the poverty of the church and in ireland the abuses the orphanages and so on have added to that so that the critique of the radical left is the ideal tool now we need to understand that when we look at the sexual revolution or cultural marxism the ideas go all the way the sexual revolution started in the same place in paris the pale royale as the political revolution did and if you read architects of it like say wilhelm reich who's writing in the 1920s he says our goal is to overturn 3 000 years of civilization and he's quite open about the fact the sexual revolution has two main enemies one parents that's why you want sex education at three and four and two the church now sadly we've given them far too much ammunition in order to attack us but you can see how deadly they are so we must repent for the sins and the abuses of the church but then stand foursquare in confidence and courage on the truths of the gospel over families human dignity and 100 other issues because the radical left is trying to undermine western civilization so sum it up mark this is a civilizational moment after 500 years of power the west is in decline it's a i call it a cut flower civilization the roots are cut this is a civilizational moment so citizens and leaders should really look into this deeply and find out what the issues are make up their minds and stand courageously because this stuff in the radical left is extremely dangerous and what it'll mean for our children and our grandchildren so on spells disaster unless it's turned around hmm and i should say that i think your work does an excellent job critiquing various dominant ideologies not just the new left and it really transcends this kind of secularist social social construction of left and right so um with that in mind i want to ask you next about how are some of the current maybe right-wing agendas then compromising the principles on which um the u.s nation for example was founded and how do they fall short of the gospel then more broadly well the broad challenge is that when you have cultures under stress they tend to turn towards religion and do so in a reactionary way so clear example we'd all agree on is south africa and the way religion the christian faith was used to support apartheid and it was tragic another example we can easily agree on is the american south rather than the abolition which came from the north and from people like william wilberforce we mentioned earlier the south dug its heels in and justified his position through faith which was tragic because now the south is paying for it today maybe a slightly more controversial one closer to your home would be ulster there were styles of faith in the north of ireland which were extremely ugly of course they were counted by styles of faith from the south which were equally ugly which were faith supporting a culture under stress in a reactionary form so the right tends to look for things to bolster its position and make them into idols like nationhood and so on so we've got to critique those yeah fantastic guys thank you and as we said there are your work looks at the undercurrents in many ways beyond the standard left and right models including developments of secular humanism as we mentioned the technological society and the alternatives offered by the counterculture which i think you go through beautifully in the dust of death and you look at radical politics as we mentioned as well as eastern religions and psychedelic drugs as well i want to ask you then um what were some of the main issues affecting both sides then whenever you wrote that book first and are they the same now and are there any cultural trends that you're particularly concerned about say along drug lines or anything like that um this was the question with the opioid crisis i'm a child of the 60s i grew up in the middle of the 60s came to faith in that time and found it absolutely fascinating to try and work out responses that were faithful in the middle of that crazy crazy decade now as we look back though that was a tumultuous decade culturally speaking and it sewed the seas for so much that we've seen later but the west at large america europe was unchallenged whereas today with the rise of globalization the power of china and many many other things the west itself is at stake and we're in a very very different world and things like the cultural marxism we've been talking about are much more radical than anything came up in the 60s they are the extension of those ideas but they're much more radical now and with the weakness of the west they have a much greater chance of really making a difference even overthrowing the west in the future so we're in a very different situation but i thank the lord that i came to faith in the sixties we were thinking wrestling debating exploring you know where i lived in switzerland you could see a crossroads you'd always have four five six hitchhikers of the crossroads one would be reading nietzsche one would be reading herman hesse's siddhartha one would be reading say cs lewis and so on and then they'd be swapping books and talking and debating whereas you know many of your generation don't even read books these days let alone get into what socrates called an examined life you know thinking and caring enough to wrestle with the issues and come to your own position so the 60s was a crazy decade incredibly informative decade i thank the lord that i came to faith in that time because everything had to be thought back to square one you knew what you believed or you gave it up altogether but each time i thought it through back to square one for example i went out to study under a guru and someone said to me you know it'll be subtle spiritually philosophically it might swamp your little boat of faith but actually the deeper i went it was tough but when i saw the difference how contrast is the mother of clarity i came away from the ashram filled with wonder love and praise at the glory of the difference in the gospel from hinduism and i found that same experience with almost everything i've tried to study in death including more recently the cultural left and cultural marxism when you see the differences you just come back praising the lord for the difference he makes thanks be to god and um as we spoke about offline too my own experience dabbling with sanatana dharma and sufi islam and things like that again as you say and that contrast provided such splendid clarity and i've been so grateful ever since for the lord and what he's done for me and um next thing is if we might i want to ask you about how christians maybe might respond to the challenges imposed by say big tech and maybe even the grander problem of transhumanism which wasn't so much of an issue perhaps in the 60s at least in its modern iteration well there wasn't transhumanism in the sixties is something that has come up since then now i think we've got to look at it at all sorts of levels in other words the impulse to have a bodily freedom that may be even merging on immortality you can see the profound impulses now underlying it you can see two religious impulses one is gnostic body bad mind good technology good body weak and so on which is classic gnosticism but the other is just plain old genesis 3 you will be like gods when you get to this in other words you can see that with transhumanism say a book like yuval harari's homo deus manas god he says quite openly as a atheist who's a jew writing from jerusalem he says science will do much better than the old testament god and you have this arrogance that through biology and genetics and various forms in engineering we will improve humanity enough so that now humanity will be perfect so you you see the old gnostic element rising again and now you can see the age-old we should be like gods rising again but of course if you think the glory of humanness you take having a meal with friends a glass of wine or making love or giving someone a hug it's who we are face to face as embodied people not as super technological whatever so we're in an extraordinary world and one of your great irish thinkers c.s lewis he discussed this brilliantly in the abolition of man we're on the verge of the master generation the generation that could possibly shape all future generations but without their consent and we're close to that so we've got to make sure that christians are in the forefront of the big scientific and ethical debates to make sure that these advances do not go wrong and produce what lewis called that hideous strength rather than something profoundly human hmm thank you for that hours and um maybe just to bring us back to where we started as it were then what is it within our stronger christian humanism that provides a real solid basis for our ultimate ideals combining that truth and beauty for those now um maybe even more than previous generations hungarian for meaning and now that we've hit that bottom um wrong returning and going back to that home comment as you suggest well where should we you know i'm intrigued by the fact that almost every big question you pursue will lead you to places where you see that the secular alternatives are bankrupt and some of the notions like hinduism hardly have entered those sort of discussions and then the wonder of the gospel shines out all over again so i mentioned dignity you you take something very simple that's at the heart of the modern problem words in the modern age advanced modern consumerism and so on we have both belittled words words words words we use them was to sell things you know and we trivialize them all the time on the other hand we weaponize words take the social media but look into scripture words created the world words can destroy a world i've argued that president trump whatever the good things he did do and he did quite a fair amount of good things one of the worst things he did was his tweets his use of words he demeaned he insulted people and you know if you look at the rabbis they call evil speech in the old testament tantamount to murder as they said you have a triple murder the one who says the wicked thing the one who hears the wicked thing and the one who's actually abused through the wicked thing that said so a christian view was a jewish christian view of words is very radical very down to earth and incredibly relevant in the age of the social media so we should be at the forefront of the reformation of our countries through the reformation of christian language and standing for something like that so there's almost nothing today we've talked about justice we've talked about freedom we talked about being on things like truth you know any number of these simple straightforward things is profoundly necessary for any country that wants to be deeply human and just and free they're all there in the scripture i mean thank you so much guys and i just want to ask you as we close then is there anything else that you're working there at the moment or that you still feel the passion you get involved with in the future would you like to tell us about it well well that lord gives me energy i hope i'll always be working on something i'm actually during the lockdown of covid i've written three books you've mentioned one of them but i've got two coming out for seekers next january one called the great quest and then one that i worked on i've loved and talked on for years just called signals of transcendence i don't know if you know that term the idea goes back to peter berger who points out that you know everyone at some time even the toughest boiled secularist has an experience that punctures what they believe and points to something else that would have to be true if this is real so you know an obvious irish example is cslo says surprised by joy he was a hard-boiled atheist for more than a dozen years but it was those experiences of joy not happiness not pleasure but joy and unsatisfied desires as he put it more desirable than any satisfaction and it set him off to be a seeker and after more than a dozen years he came to faith but i've got a book that's based on 10 stories of people all had very very different signals but in each case it punctured what they believe and set them off on a journey to search for a deeper answer glory to god and then work in viewers or listeners find out more about you and your work than us oh a little website osgoonist.com fantastic thank you so much guys and uh it's been such a pleasure to speak with you today god bless you a privilege to work with you mark and always a joy to speak primarily to ireland and to see in the back of your picture [Music] you

Channel: More Christ

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Length: 52min 18sec (3138 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 04 2021