Review: “Renaissance” by Os Guinness

Subtitled “The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times,” the prolific author, speaker, and social critic Os Guinness pulls no punches about the bleakness of the times we live in. In his latest book entitled Renaissance, writes that

“…all civilizations, whatever their momentary grandeur, have an ultimate flimsiness that is paper thin and cannot hold back the barbarism.”

The “barbarism” Guinness refers to is not just the temptation to raw power or animalistic lust, but the underlying “spirit of the age” and our susceptibility to its whisper. And indeed, it’s the moral “barbarism” of our age, our constant drift from True North that, Guinness asserts, has led to the decline of the Western Church.

“…at this juncture, the West has cut itself off from its own Jewish and Christian roots — the faith, the ideas, the ethics and the way of life that made it the West. It now stands deeply divided, uncertain of its post-Christian identity, and with its dominance waning in the global era.”

While some dismiss the importance of Western civilization’s tether to its “Jewish and Christian roots,” Guinness sees the connection (or lack thereof) as  central to the diagnosis of our spiritual plight. In fact, it is our disregard for God and desecration of Western tradition that has led to “decadence,” “desecration,” and “social chaos.”

“Western cultural elites have disregarded God for more than two centuries, but for a while the effects were mostly confined to their own circles. At first, they disregarded God. Then they deliberately desecrated Western tradition and lived in ways that would have spelled disaster if they had been followed more closely. But now in the early twenty-first century, their movement from disregard to desecration to decadence is going mainstream, and the United States is only the lead society among those close to the tipping point.

Soon, as the legalization and then normalization of polyamory, polygamy, pedophilia and incest follow the same logic as that of abortion and homosexuality, the socially destructive consequences of these trends will reverberate throughout society until social chaos is beyond recovery. We can only pray there will be a return to God and sanity before the terrible sentence is pronounced: “God has given them over’ to the consequences of their own settled choices.”

A grim outlook indeed!

So while “the Western church was the single strongest source of ideas that shaped the rise of the modern world,” it has now become “culturally captive to the world to which it gave rise.”

While Guinness clearly writes from an Evangelical perspective, both wings of the Western church — the Left and Right — come under equal scrutiny in his assessment. In both cases, however, it is a move away from the plain, simple teachings of Jesus and an embrace of the “spirit of the age” which makes both the Evangelical and the Progressive contributors in our descent into “advanced modernity.”

“A striking symptom of the church’s problems in the West today is that fact that in a country such as the United States, Christians are still the overwhelming majority of citizens, but the American way of life has moved far away from the life of Jesus — which means simply that the Christians who are the majority are living a way of life closer to the world than to the way of Jesus. In a word, they are worldly and therefore incapable of shaping their culture.”

Ultimately, though Guinness’s assessment is bleak, he seeks to summon hope in the reader, concluding that the Western Church needs nothing short of a new Reformation, one that breaks from the allure of secularism and the Church’s enticement with the spirit of the age. It is less about labels than it is a return to orthodoxy.

“There are many traditions among the followers of Jesus — the Orthodox, Catholic, Evangelical, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Anabaptist and Pentecostal being only the main ones in the West. But an important fact has grown clear over the last generation. Those who are faithful and orthodox in each tradition are closer to the faithful and orthodox in other traditions than to the liberal revisionists in their own tradition. In other words, the closer we are to Jesus,k the less significant the labels that once divided us.” (emphasis mine)

This is a relatively small book (170-some pages) but extremely dense. Each chapter ends with a prayer, reminding the reader that real, long-term change begins with the individual. It is as I move closer to Jesus and further from the enticements of “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” that hope arises, both in me and the world I inhabit. In this sense, Guinness’s central theme is simple, straightforward and hopeful:

“Let there be no wavering in our answer. Such is the truth and power of the gospel that the church can be revived, reformed and restored to be a renewing power in the world again. There is no question that the good news of Jesus has effected powerful personal and cultural change in the past. There is no question too that it is still doing so in many parts of the world today. By God’s grace it will do so again even here in the heart of the advanced modern world where the Christian church is presently in sorry disarray.”