For over five decades, Os Guinness has provided the church with thought-provoking reflections on its standing in Western culture and what it can do better. Looking at his life provides many inspiring lessons for scholars and readers seeking to enrich their faith and their minds.
Os Guinness was born in Hsiang Cheng, China, on September 30, 1941. Guinness’s parents, Henry Whitfield Guinness and Mary Taylor, worked as medical missionaries, part of a family heritage of missionary work going back to his great-grandfather, Henry Hattan Guinness. The work was often challenging: his grandfather, Gershom Whitfield Guinness, barely escaped being killed in the Boxer Rebellion. However, Os was born in a particularly brutal time. In a Tennessee Star interview, he said, “I grew up in World War II. Before we lived in the capital Nanking we lived in a part of the country where we are surrounded by a Japanese Army who killed 17 million in their invasion.”
Things became worse in 1942 when the Henan Famine began. Hundreds of thousands died, including Guinness’s twin brothers. Guinness recalled, “They died of dysentery because of the famine. But there was cannibalism and people selling their children for an evening meal. Couples would embrace in the fields and die in each other’s arms. My mother was a surgeon, but there was no medicine and next to no food.”
Guinness’ family eventually left China in 1951 when the Denunciation Movement deported Christian missionaries. He spent the rest of his upbringing in England, eventually studying at Oxford.
While Guinness became a Christian through a friend’s influence and by studying various authors about faith, he cited a key moment in his spiritual development was meeting apologist Francis Schaeffer in 1965. As he explained in a Gospel Coalition interview with Justin Taylor, Schaeffer demonstrated a way to be a Christian who explored social crises: “there I was as a student in the middle of ‘swinging London’ and the exploding Sixties, and no Christians that I knew understood what was going on at all . . . Schaeffer was the first Christian I met who was concerned to, and capable of connecting the dots and making sense of the extraordinary times that puzzled and dismayed most people.”
Guinness published his first book, The Dust of Death, which discusses the counterculture, in 1971. During the next decade, he worked at Schaeffer’s L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland for three years, performed freelance reporting for the BBC, and studied sociology under Peter Berger at Oxford. Since then, he has become known for many books discussing the spiritual side of social questions. For example, The Gravedigger File (revised and republished as The Last Christian on Earth) argues that Christianity provided the values that birthed the modern Western world but “becomes its own gravedigger” when following worldly standards too much. More recent books like The Magna Carta of Humanity have argued that a vision of freedom rooted in biblical ideas made the American Revolution healthy, unlike the anti-Christian French Revolution that came a few years later.
Guinness has also been involved in various think tanks discussing political and social questions that affect the church today. In 1991, he co-founded the Trinity Forum with Alanzo McDonald, a group that encourages Christian leaders to explore the toughest questions of their day. He has also contributed to conservations outside the church about faith’s role in everyone’s lives. For example, he contributed to the Global Charter of Conscience, a document published in 2012 at the European Parliament that advocates for religious freedom.
Over 50 years after The Dust of Death, Guinness continues to be at the forefront of Christian scholarship on social concerns and preparing the church for the future.
1. Having faith does not discount thinking well. Like his contemporary Mark A. Noll, Guinness has spent much of his life exhorting evangelical Christians to think deeply and think well about their faith. Particularly in books like Fit Bodies Fat Minds, he has encouraged them to consider loving God well means not just being pious but loving God with our minds.
2. Legacy informs us more than we realize. In a 2017 talk at Taylor University, Guinness told a surprising story about his family’s faith heritage. During the nineteenth century, one of his ancestors experienced a tragedy, contemplated ending her life, and then became a Christian. Not only that, but “she became a great woman of prayer, and she prayed every day for 12 generations of us. And I am the sixth [generation] . . . the older I get, the more I am aware that I've done very little . . . It's the ways of the Lord and that strength of a heritage that means far, far more.”
3. Trauma can have redemptive effects we don’t expect. Guinness has repeatedly discussed how his family’s terrible experience in China taught him some surprising things about faith. In the Tennessee Star interview, he observed that while his parents experienced great pain, “I never saw them with anything but a very quiet trust in the Lord.”
4. God will use surprising methods to bring us toward him. Guinness reported in an interview with Albert Mohler that he became a Christian after 18 months of studying Christian and secular authors to help him consider his beliefs. The search included “reading people like Nietzsche and Sartre and my own hero then on the atheist side was Albert Camus, and on the other side people like Pascal and Dostoyevsky and G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis.”
5. We can have differences with our heroes. Guinness has balanced talking about the positive ways his influences have informed him and admitting their flaws or the areas where he disagreed with them. Talking about Schaeffer 25 years after his friend’s death, Guinness was upfront about how Schaeffer’s communication style and research could be rough. Yet he also highlighted how much he learned from Schaeffer and how Schaeffer’s rough but visionary work paved the way for many scholars.
6. Small things in our culture inform us more than we think. In several books, Guinness discusses the idea that one of the most important shifts in Western culture was something small: the invention of the watch. The watch meant not just the ability to measure time in small increments but a shift in how we thought about time and priorities.
7. Part of living faith well is knowing our history. One of Guinness’s recurring themes is that we don’t only need to consider small things in our culture that influence us; we need to consider the larger narratives that influence us in ways we don’t expect. Whether it’s his discussions about the biblical ideas that informed America’s founding or the ways that Christian ideas informed Western ideas about religious freedom and civility, he challenges readers to understand the past so they can build a healthier future.
8. Sometimes following God means taking unexpected routes. Guinness opens his book The Call by discussing how he faced a crossroads early in his career. He worked in a church where he spent all his time with other Christians, but he was interested in exploring how secular people understood faith. His later work with L’Abri and his books came from choosing this new route: not staying in exclusive Christian circles but instead applying faith to cutting-edge questions.
9. Christian community should leave room for differences. Guinness has consistently discussed maintaining orthodox theology and his disagreements with denominations or groups that have stayed from orthodoxy. However, he has also affirmed that Christians should be charitable about secondary matters. He warns readers in Fit Bodies Fat Minds, “There is only a short and easy step from ‘This is the Christian way’ to ‘There is only one Christian way’ to ‘Anything different from this way is not Christian’ to ‘All those who differ from my way are not Christians.’ Far too many a letter from one dear Christian to another has begun in reality or in spirit, ‘Dear former brother/sister in Christ.’”
10. Christianity can have a sense of humor. While Guinness isn’t a humorist, he has discussed being influenced by Christian intellectuals like Malcolm Muggeridge and Berger, who embodied humor in their communication. His books Fool’s Talk and The Gravedigger File explore the idea that Christianity enables people to operate like jesters: joyous, seemingly foolish, counteracting people’s expectations to point them toward truth.
1. “ A central fact of modern times is faith’s search for its own lost authority. A central challenge of modern times is faith’s need to recover its integrity and effectiveness.” – Dining with the Devil
2. “As followers of Jesus we are called to live before one audience, the audience of One… there is only one judgment that matters, and one word of approval that counts in the end: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.” – The Impossible People
3. “True faith is unquestionably childlike and simple, but it is never childish or simplistic.” – Fit Bodies Fat Minds
4. “The greatest gift in life is life itself. Your life is not an accident. God wanted you to be. How then are you searching for purpose in your life, your own ultimate why for everything you do?” – The Call
5. “One index of a healthy, free, and democratic society is its ability to deal constructively with differences and disagreements.” – Last Call for Liberty
6. “The first step in reformation is repentance.” – Fit Bodies Fat Minds
7. “God is not only a person, he is the supreme person on whom all personhood depends, not to speak of life itself and our entire existence. That is why to know him is to trust him, and to trust him is to begin to know ourselves. That is why our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” – God in the Dark
9. “… regardless of whether cultures and civilizations acknowledge God, Christians who know God should be among the first to praise and be grateful for truth, for beauty, for goodness and for greatness where it may be found. The Christian should always remember, as St. Augustine wrote, ‘Wherever truth may be found it belongs to its Master.’” – Renaissance
10. “Jesus tells his followers to seek first God’s kingdom, ‘and all these things will be added to you.’ We are to trust and obey God, and to follow his call in every inch or our lives, in every second of our time, and with every gift with which we have been endowed. And we are then to leave the result as well as the assessment to God.” – Renaissance
1. The Dust of Death: The Sixties Counterculture and How It Changed America Forever
2. The Last Christian on Earth: Uncover the Enemy’s Plot to Undermine the Church
3. God in the Dark: The Assurance of Faith Beyond a Shadow of Doubt
4. The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life https://amzn.to/3Ayqrrq
5. Fool’s Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion
6. The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai’s Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom
7. Time for Truth: Living Free in a World of Lies, Hype, and Spin https://amzn.to/3M3Zdf5
8. The Case for Civility: And Why Our Future Depends On It
9. Unspeakable: Facing Up to the Challenge of Evil
10. The Global Public Square: Religious Freedom and the Making of a World Save for Diversity
Photo Credit: Public domain photo via ARC Forum/Flickr
This article is part of our People of Christianity catalog that features the stories, meaning, and significance of well-known people from the Bible and history. Here are some of the most popular articles for knowing important figures in Christianity:
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