Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

by Os Guinness

The term paradigm shift is common currency today,

broadly used to describe a revolutionary change in the pattern or framework of people’s thinking.

Paradigm shift is undoubtedly the most popular term, but many who bandy it around forget its background. Thomas Kuhn first introduced it to describe complete revolutions in scientific thinking, but he acknowledges that he borrowed the idea from the language and experience of Christian conversion.

paradigm shift, in other words, describes the ultimate reversal: the complete change of heart and mind that the New Testament calls metan...

It signifies the complete about-face of heart, mind, thought and life that that triggers conversion and initiates the migration from one reality to another—from the...

The Greek word metanoia literally means “to perceive afterwards,” in contrast to the related term for “perceiving ahead.” In other words, “to see afterwards” is to repent because we see that the way we thought or lived before was wrong and needed changing.

Repentance speaks of the challenge to a change of mind and purpose that is for the better, but that turns on a frank acknowledgment of being previously wrong and for the worse.

the Latin word used for metanoia is resipisco, which means “to recover one’s senses” and “to come to a right understanding”—as opposed to a wrong one.

Persuasion is ultimately about the way we witness to the reality of the ultimate Presence in the universe. It is our witness to the story that invites people to come to know the Great “I AM,” “He who is,” the one who comes down to earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, before whom the only legitimate response is “My Lord and God.”

The first type of fool in the Bible is the character that might be called the fool proper.

The Hebrew word for “fool” is very close to the Hebrew for “noble,” with only one letter different, and it is sometimes only in the outcome of their lives that the people considered noble by the people of their time are shown up as fools or pronounced as fools by God.

The second type of fool in the Bible is quite different and takes us significantly closer to the secret of persuasion. This is the fool bearer, the person who is not actually a fool at all, but who is prepared to be seen and treated as a fool—the “fool for Christ’s sake.”

If the specific words “fools for Christ’s sake” go back to Paul’s letter to Corinth, the idea of the fool bearer goes back earlier still.

King David,

the prophet Jeremiah

contemporary accounts of Western intellectuals leave the myth of the dispassionate truth seeker in tatters. The real situation is frequently the opposite. Many thinkers are truth twisters.

It is a sad if understandable fact that the extraordinary popularity of C. S. Lewis in the English-speaking world of apologetics has led to the eclipse of other great Christian advocates who deserve equal attention. And surely among the foremost would be Blaise Pascal, Søren Kierkegaard and G. K. Chesterton.

Chesterton’s approach is an example of the first of two broad responses to the anatomy of unbelief outlined in chapter five: the broadly negative strategy of “table turning.”

This strategy turns on the fact that all arguments cut both ways. It therefore proceeds by taking people seriously in terms of what they say they believe and disbelieve, and then pushing them toward the consequences of their unbelief.

“signal triggering.” This strategy proceeds by making people aware of their human longings and desires, and what these passions point to.

we have to face up to two equal and opposite errors. One is the apologist’s temptation, which is to emphasize apologetics at the expense of evangelism, and the other is the evangelist’s temptation, which is to do the opposite and emphasize evangelism at the expense of apologetics.

Against the first error, we must be clear that, while apologetics as pre-evangelism must often be used to precede evangelism, we must never divorce the two tasks. They should be joined seamlessly.

C. S. Lewis admitted “that my own work has suffered very much from the incurable intellectualism of my approach. The simple emotional appeal (‘Come to Jesus’) is still often successful. But those who, like myself, lack the gift for making it, had better not attempt it.”

As C. S. Lewis admitted, I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result, when you go away from that debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar. That is why we apologists take our lives in our own hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments . . . from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself.

Yes!!

Julian even calculated that, counting on Christian hypocrisy, he could use toleration to deliberately foster Christian disunity. So when he became emperor, he called the Christian bishops together and told them to sort out their differences and live in peace—knowing that was probably the best way to intensify their differences and destroy their unity.

he remarked to those around, that “no wild beasts are as dangerous to man as Christians are to each other.”

But while the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church, the battles of the faithful are the scandal of the faith.

When Christians fight with Christians, there is an important sense in which both are defeated already.

Scholars can add further subtleties to this discussion, but the heart of the issue remains the same. Philosophers, for example, have identified the “genetic fallacy.” There is an important difference between the source of a truth claim and the standard by which it should be assessed.

It is therefore wrong to reject a claim just because of the character and condition of its source.

Uncomfortable though it can be, avoiding the genetic fallacy reminds us of the important notion of “truth baggage.” Just as a parent throws out the bathwater and not the baby, and a woman wears a pearl around her neck and not the oyster, so a truth claim needs to be distinguished from the baggage carried by those who affirm the claim.

This is an important truth! A pearl may be worn by a pig, but it is still a pearl.

The issue is always truth, and truth is not a matter of where someone is “coming from” or how oddly or shabbily they have behaved in the past before making the claim.

It may sound odd, and perhaps it is even dangerous for people who take virtue seriously and do so in an age that doesn’t, to admit that hypocrisy has its benefits.

“Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.”

prideful self-love slavishly copies true self-love out of self-interest.

The plain fact is that vice will always mimic virtue to gain the approval it seeks to validate itself and its prideful self-love. But it will do so only so long as virtue is esteemed as virtue, and virtue is therefore fashionable and worth flattering.

If the day ever comes that virtue is no longer fashionable, self-love and vice can drop their mask and be open about their interests and their agendas.

To “do good because we know it is good” is different from “doing good only because we know we are seen,”

Hypocrisy still cares enough about virtue to want to pretend to be virtuous, or at least it recognizes that the society around still prizes virtue enough to make it worth flattering.

When neither of those conditions can be assumed, as in times of open Sodom-and-Gomorrah decadence, the world is in deep trouble.

That in fact is a prime way through which people have rejected the gospel in history. And we must face the humbling fact that again and again the major defections from the church are the result of vehement rejections of unfaithful and corrupt expressions of the Christian faith in different periods of history.

For example, the multiple angry assaults on the “traditional family” are the rotten fruit of Christians corrupting the beauty and strength of the “covenantal family” of the Bible into the hated “hierarchical family” of the stereotypes so loved by feminists and others.

The inner, the real and the unseen are irrelevant in today’s world.

It was not always so. The Bible insists that God does not see as humans see, for “man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Sam 16:7).

If unbelievers seek to suppress the truth in order to avoid God, and in the process become truth twisters, we who by grace are now believers seek to be true to the truth in every area of our lives, and so to become truth seekers and truth livers—those who walk in the light and are committed to live in the truth.

Where unbelievers fend off the truth as a deliberate action of their unbelief, we as believers should pursue and adhere to the truth as the deliberate action of our faith.

Truth is therefore essential for both countering the charge of hypocrisy and escaping the life of hypocrisy. God is the God of truth. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. The Scriptures are the truth. The gospel is the word of truth. Conversion is a turnaround triggered by truth. Discipleship is the way of life that is living in truth. Confession is a realignment with the truth. Spiritual growth is life formation through the power of the Spirit of truth. And the Last Judgment is the final vindication and restoration of truth for humanity and for the very cosmos itself.

Jesus represents history’s most powerful assault on hypocrisy, and offers the world’s strongest counter and remedy. Without truth there is no freedom, and without truth there is no freedom from hypocrisy.

No one has ever seriously accused Jesus of hypocrisy, no one has ever been more severe on hypocrisy than Jesus, and no one has ever offered a sterner but more gracious and effective cure to hypocrisy than Jesus.