Os Guinness' book, Time For Truth, is a short, pointed, and descriptive work about the cultural and spiritual times we find ourselves in. From the jacket: "In the West today it appears that truth in any objective form is dead. At best it is relative and at worst it is created. Where does that leave us?" Having heard him a few years ago and having read his well-known book, The Call, I have come to appreciate this intellectual's desire and ability to explain his thoughts and observations and, in turn, to call believers to action. Here are some thoughts that caught my attention:
p.67 "We are told that in the weeks before Thomas Jefferson's death on July 4, 1826, he invited all his grandchildren to Monticello and urged them each to "pursue virtue, be true and truthful." Truth, he ssaw with twilight clarity, was essential to freedom. Yet as one historian observes, Jefferson's belief that "Truth is great and will prevail" (an old Irish saying) is today "more prayer than an axiom."
p.75 "Let me underscore again. I am not countering the postmodern view of truth on behalf of the modern. One is as bad as the other; the postmodern is the direct descendant of the modern and the mirror image of its deficiencies. It is the more dangerous today only because it is more current."
p.115 "...on the one hand the Jewish and Christian faiths join the modern thinker to insist on the objectivity of truth, while on the other they stand with the postmodern thinker to acknowledge the subjectivitity we bring to truth, including our own personal distortions. Within the biblical view, humans are truth-twisters as well as truth-seekers."
p.124 "If we would live free, we must not just know the truth, we must live in truth and we must become people of truth. As Kierkegaard wrote in Training in Christianity: 'The truth consists not of knowing the truth but in being the truth.'"
p.125 "...the biblical...view of truth has the strengths of the modern and postmodern views, the weakness of neither, and just one snag: the cost of its unsparing moral challenge."
I have one more batch of quotes from Guinness' book, Time For Truth, that I'll save for another entry. If any of these jump out at you, positively or negatively, let me know because I'm curious. Have a good one!
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Peter, I like your brain, at least the 1% of it that you keep using. It does seem that in modern v. postmodern discussion the baby is often thrown out with the bath water...by both sides! That comment by Guinness has helped me scale back my frustration with moderns and seek a Bible-centered tone in those conversations.
Guinness' point is that the pursuit and protection of truth will always be worthwhile because truth always has the last word; he wrote the book to provide examples of and encouragement to that fact. He makes a point of saying that standing up for truth is easier than becoming people of truth at the end of the fifth chapter and throughtout the sixth one. The last chapter is about our personal distortions of truth; on page 122 he quotes G.K. Chesterton "When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar." His closing thought is that while our society is full of lies, hype and spin, we have a choice to live free, to be people of truth.
He doesn't have a concrete 1-2-3 plan about this and admits to writing a little book on a big topic, but I'm sure you'd benefit by reading it. It's helped me through this business. Be encouraged, the hard work of sorting things out has great dividends.
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