Time for Truth

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!

John's Epistles & Os Guinness

For the teen class that I have the regular privilege and responsibility of teaching, we have been looking at John's Epistles. We just finished.

One thing that stood out to me is that John never got very far from valuing the truth. The first letter is a bunch of excited blurbs. The second letter is both cryptic and specific. And the third one is very personal. In each letter the truth is always important. The truth is our bond. As you read his letters you'll come across the topics of love and discernment and hospitality; you'll read some vague things and some very specific things. But a blatant promotion for the truth is never far from his pen. It's like he can't get over it and doesn't want his readers to either.

In a different fashion, Os Guinness writes with the same impetus. Here are some examples:

p. 76 "...differences between views of truth - far from being purely theoretical and irrelevant - make an enormous difference."

p. 78 "Belief in something doesn't make it true; only truth makes a belief true...without truth, a belief may be only speculation plus sincerity."

p. 79 "Biblical faith...has a robust view of truth. All truth is God's truth and is true everywhere, for everyone, under all conditions. Truth is true in the sense that it is objective and independent of the mind of any human knower."

p. 82/83 "Without truth we are all vulnerable to manipulation."

It was neat how God put my nose in both places [John's Epistles & Guinness' Time for Truth] at the same time. They dovetailed very nicely.