Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

by Os Guinness

everyone is now in the business of relentless self-promotion—presenting themselves, explaining themselves, defending themselves, selling themselves or sharing their inner thoughts and emotions as never before in human history.

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.

Man’s love of truth is such that when he loves something which is not the truth, he pretends to himself that what he loves is the truth, and because he hates to be proved wrong, he will not allow himself to be convinced that he is deceiving himself. So he hates the real truth for what he takes to his heart in its place.33

Augustine’s descriptiom of what we now call cognitive dissonance

By definition the churches will always be “behind” the world and frantically struggling to catch up.

The problem of revisionist theology

Richard Weaver’s maxim that “ideas have consequences” is generally accepted today. Yet oddly, the short-sightedness bred by our secularist culture prevents people from acknowledging what is obvious in the history of civilizations, that “faiths have consequences”

Many Christians have skipped over the question of truth, often unwittingly, and they cover its absence with all sorts of genuine but inadequate answers.

The problem of blind faith

Such faith may be sincere, but it will always be vulnerable. From one side it will be open to doubt, and from the other it will be open to all the accusations of modern skepticism—that faith is only “bad faith,” believed for reasons other than that it is true, and that it fears to face the challenges surrounding truth.