Renaissance Quotes

“God is the ultimate source of all power. All human power is therefore derived, limited, unstable and transient.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“The key to changing the world is not simply being there, but an active, transforming engagement of a singularly robust and energetic kind.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“Neither secular progress nor secular progressives have brought the West where they once promised. Nor can they.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“The West has beaten back the totalitarian pretensions of both Hitler’s would-be master race in Germany and Stalin’s would-be master class in the Soviet Union. But it now stands weak and unsure of itself before its three current menaces: first, the equally totalitarian, would-be master faith of Islamism from the Middle East; second, the increasingly totalitarian philosophy and zero-sum strategies of illiberal liberalism; and third, the self-destructive cultural chaos of the West’s own chosen ideas and lifestyles that are destroying its identity and sapping its former strength.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“Our task is to focus on our individual callings in engaging with the world, to trust that others are following theirs too, and to leave to God the masterminding of the grand outcome.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“Prayer O Lord, great Creator of our great universe and all its splendors, and lover of all that is true and good and beautiful, we give thanks for all your works and for your giving us the privilege of being creators too under you. Forgive us that, made in your image, we have represented you so poorly, and we have been such irresponsible stewards in the world that you gave us to order and to enjoy. Grant that even now we may become such faithful agents of your kingdom and entrepreneurs of your calling, that the fruit of your gifts, and the schemes of our minds and the works of our hands may once again produce a way of life that is true to our calling and worthy to represent you. In the name of Jesus, Amen.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“What we also need is a constructive overarching vision of Christian engagement in today’s advanced modern world, one that is shaped by faith in God and a Christian perspective rather than by current wisdom, and one that can inspire Christians to move out with courage to confront the best and worst that we may encounter.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“After half a millennium of dominance, the West is being eclipsed in the global era, the United States as the lead society in the West stands on the verge of relative if not absolute decline, and much of the Christian Church in both Europe and North America is in a sorry state of weakness, confusion, unfaithfulness and cultural captivity.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“For 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.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“Behind every civilization lies a vision and a worldview, and none is greater or more lasting than the strength of its vision.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“The truth is that the greatest enemy of the Western church is not the state or any ideology such as atheism, but the world and the spirit of the age. Anything less than a full-blooded expression of the Christian faith has no chance of standing firm against the assaults and seductions of the advanced modern world. So when the church becomes worldly, she betrays her Lord, and she also fails to live up to her calling to be dangerously different and thus to provide deliverance from the world by a power that is not of the world.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“There still remains only God to protect man against man. Either we will serve him in spirit and in truth or we shall enslave ourselves ceaselessly, more and more, to the monstrous idol that we have made with our own hands to our own image and likeness. Etienne Gilson, 20th century”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“we may observe several things in the early church that we have forgotten, distorted or misunderstood to our loss—supremely the position and power of the Holy Spirit—and we should always be quick to learn from them and gain from such rediscoveries. But as a period neither that age, nor any other age before our own, is the decisive model or standard for us. The only perfect model and the sole decisive standard is Jesus himself—his character, his teaching, his commands and his endorsement of the authority of the Scriptures to his followers.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“we Christians are not practicing what we preach, we cannot expect our society to enjoy the fruits of the way of life of Jesus, and our Christian faith is likely to be implausible and off-putting to the wider world.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“A striking symptom of the church’s problems in the West today is the 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 from the way of 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.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“It is a peculiar modern superstition that to achieve success in any area we have to make that area the be all and end all of our lives—and live and breathe for that alone. (Vince Lombardi: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”) Down that way lies the path to idolatry, obsession, restlessness, cut-throat rivalry, and a life marked by either arrogance or bitter regrets. If our best strivings are to remain truly human, they need a goal and a standard outside us to challenge us always to aim higher, but also to bring in fresh air and keep life in perspective. Our goals, tasks and missions are never themselves God. If we try to make them so, they will be idols. Only God is God, and therefore such a goal and standard above all our endeavors. Again, we are to “seek first His kingdom . . . and all these things will be added to you.”20”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“In the same way, metrics can record the frequency of our church attendance, the regularity of our Bible reading and the exact amount of our tithing, but they can never gauge the genuineness of any of them, or whether they are any better than “the noise of the solemn assemblies” against which the prophets fulminated.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“Or again we might say that we are at a Daniel-like moment, for Daniel and his three friends faced a challenge unlike that of most of the Jews before them. The world as the Jews had known it for hundreds of years from Joshua onward had gone. Not since the captivity in Egypt had Jews been strangers in a strange land as they found themselves when defeated and deported as exiles to Babylon in the sixth century B.C.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times