Quotes by Os Guinness
Os Guinness (b. 1941) — Apologet, Soziologe, Kulturkritiker und Autor · evangelikal · Großbritannien
Der 1941 geborene britische Soziologe, Publizist und Kulturkritiker Os Guinness wirkt seit mehreren Jahrzehnten im evangelikalen Spektrum vor allem in den USA. Bekanntheit erlangte er durch Veröffentlichungen über christliche Berufung, Analysen moderner Gesellschaften sowie sein Engagement für weltweite Religions- und Gewissensfreiheit. Bibellesern vermittelt sein Werk Impulse für ein intellektuell reflektiertes Glaubenszeugnis im säkularen Raum, wobei er sowohl fortschreitende Säkularisierung als auch die parteipolitische Vereinnahmung des Evangeliums kritisiert.
Era: Today
Recurring topics: Wisdom & Understanding, Ethical Questions, Church & Congregation, Faith & Trust, Freedom & Truth, Meaning & Identity, Humility & Pride, God, Jesus & the Holy Spirit
Quotes by Os Guinness
Christianity is the only religion whose God bears the scars of evil.
Os Guinness
Christ is the only way to God, but there are as many ways to Christ as there are people who come to Him.
Os Guinness
The Christian faith is not true because it works; it works because it is true.
Os Guinness
In terms of distance, the prodigal's pigsty is the farthest point from home; in terms of time, the pigsty is the shortest distance to home, because it is there that he comes to his senses.
Os Guinness
Either we conform our desires to the truth or we conform the truth to our desires.
Os Guinness
Calling is not only a matter of being and doing what we are but also of becoming what we are not yet but are called by God to be.
Os Guinness
The story of Christian reformation, revival, and renaissance underscores that the darkest hour is often just before the dawn, so we should always be people of hope and prayer, not gloom and defeatism.
Os Guinness
We cannot find God without God. We cannot reach God without God. We cannot satisfy God without God, which is another way of saying that our seeking will always fall short unless God's grace initiates the search and unless God's call draws us to him and completes the search.
Os Guinness
The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
Os Guinness
An open mind can be an empty head, and tolerance can be indistinguishable from believing nothing.
Os Guinness
Although a Christian should believe simply, he should not “simply believe.”
Os Guinness
God is the ultimate source of all power. All human power is therefore derived, limited, unstable and transient.
Os Guinness
Just as to a man with a hammer, everything is a nail, so in the age of science and technology, everything is a scientific and technical matter to be solved by scientific and technical means.
Os Guinness
Balaam's ass is the patron saint of apologists.
Os Guinness
All good thinking is a matter of asking and answering three elementary questions. What is being said? Is it true? What of it?
Os Guinness
The age of the Internet, it is said, is the age of the self and the selfie. The world is full of people full of themselves.
Os Guinness
The key to changing the world is not simply being there, but an active, transforming engagement of a singularly robust and energetic kind.
Os Guinness
We betray our modern arrogance and forget the place of mystery in God's dealing with us.
Os Guinness
Idolatry may not involve explicit denials of God’s existence or character. It may well come in the form of an over-attachment to something that is in itself perfectly good… An idol can be a physical object, a property, a person, an activity, a role, an institution, a hope, an image, an idea, a pleasure, a hero, anything that can substitute for God.
Os Guinness
There is no problem with the wider culture that you cannot see in spades in the Christian Church.
Os Guinness
Neither secular progress nor secular progressives have brought the West where they once promised. Nor can they.
Os Guinness
We are never freer than when we become most ourselves, most human, most just, most excellent, and the like.
Os Guinness
If Jesus Christ is the head of the church and hence the source and goal of its entire life, true growth is only possible in obedience to Him. Conversely, if the church becomes detached from Jesus Christ and His Word, it cannot grow however active and successful it may seem to be.
Os Guinness
Quite simply, it is a fact of history that the church of Christ has not experienced any major nationwide revival under the conditions of advanced modernity. On the other hand, modernity undercuts true dependence on God’s sovereign awakening by fostering the notion that we can effect revival by human means. On the other hand, modernity makes many people satisfied with privatized, individualistic, and subjective experiences that are pale counterfeits of true revival.
Os Guinness
Whenever evangelicals have an experience of direct, personal access to God, we are tempted to think or act as if we can dispense with doctrine, sacraments, history, and all the other “superfluous paraphernalia” of the Church and make our experience the sum and soul of our faith. We are still attracted to movements that replace thinking and theology by other emphases relational, therapeutic, charismatic, and managerial (as in church growth). Whatever the other virtues of these movements and the unquestionable importance of piety, we must courageously repudiate anti-intellectualism for the sin it is.
Os Guinness
In distinct contrast to the widespread conservative fallacy of the eighties, the sharpest challenge of modernity is not secularism, but secularization. Secularism is a philosophy; secularization is a process. Whereas the philosophy is obviously hostile and touches only a few, the process is largely invisible and touches many. Being openly hostile, secularism rarely deceives Christians. Being much more subtle, secularization often deceives Christians before they are aware of it, including those in the church-growth movement. How else can one explain the comment of a Japanese businessman to a visiting Australian? “Whenever I meet a Buddhist leader, I meet a holy man. Whenever I meet a Christian leader, I meet a manager.”
Os Guinness
Sources: wikipedia.org, osguinness.com, eppc.org, theocca.org
All quotes · lumen.bible