Os Guinness Rings the Changes

We Need to Listen

A friend sent me a lovely talk by Os Guinness on YouTube that is worth listening to. Of course, many who listen online will already be fans of his analysis, but even so, it is good to hear the big story of our civilization and the threats to its existence rehearsed, if only to remind us. The vast and roiling web of news threatens to drown rational thought by sheer heat and volume. So a voice like Os’s is valuable.

What caught my attention while I listened was how the increasing recognition of human dignity underlay our civilization’s successes, and the loss of that recognition in various opposing threats. The ideology that would name any group as more valuable than another based on the color of their skin or ethnicity, even to attempt to right historic wrongs, has lost sight of each person’s inherent value as a human being. Likewise, any ideology that wants to tear down class structures and in so doing, take away peoples’ jobs, property, or freedom is likewise gravely in error. Tyranny in the name of equality is something we have seen before. France, Russia, China, and Cambodia are examples. But oppression can come in softer forms, as Oz says.

Of course, I have not mentioned the distortions in our self-understanding that have come about since our civilization went adrift. We understood ourselves in the light of Christianity to be beloved by God and created good, but fallen due to sin. The widening gyre (c.f. Yeats’ The Second Coming) of dissolving values has brought chaos and confusion. We no longer know who we are or what our purpose or meaning is.

The answer will come when those who believe the Judeo-Christian story shed anything of post-modernism in which they have become ensnared, and recover their true meaning and purpose in Christ. He suffered and died for us out of his overwhelming love for us, the ones made in his image. And God does not make human mistakes. We are all of infinite value.

Go watch The Chosen: Season Five in theaters now if you want to see that love acted out on the screen