Os Guinness: The Only Way to Save Europe

In this 10-minute video from Apologetics Roadshow, host David Wood highlights and comments on an epochal speech by theologian Os Guinness explaining how Enlightenment secularism turned the West into a desert. The void left behind by arid, close-minded rationalism had real-world consequences: It created the crisis in Europe of Islamic colonization, government censorship, and plummeting birthrates. What’s the solution?

We must look to the Old Testament, where God’s people turned away from Him and ended up in exile. They had to endure tremendous suffering before they were willing to acknowledge their sins, repent of their faithlessness, and return to the faith that created their civilization in the first place and made its progress possible.

Editor’s Note: The transcript that follows was automatically generated and lightly edited, so please be aware there could be typos or other small errors. The Stream is working toward a transcription service that does fast, accurate, and reliable work; thank you in advance for your patience!

00;00;00;11 – 00;00;25;25
David Wood
Imagine you’re in a ship with 100 sailors in the middle of the Atlantic. The captain is drunk, and he fires a cannon at the deck of the ship, blasting a hole straight through the bottom. The ship starts filling with water, so you yell, hey, let’s plug the hole and use these buckets to dump the water overboard. But the sailors are all drunk too, and they yell back, no!

00;00;25;25 – 00;00;48;15
David Wood
Let’s reload the cannon and use it to make more holes in the ship. And let’s use the buckets to fill the ship with even more water, and they reload and fire the cannon at the deck again, while the rest start bailing water into the boat. Totally insane right? You see the problem and you know the only possible solution to the problem.

00;00;48;18 – 00;01;15;15
David Wood
But everyone else is hell bent on making the problem worse. Now you know how anyone with a drop of common sense feels watching Europe destroy itself? The solution is obvious, but the leaders are absolutely obsessed with making the problem worse. Christian theologian and social critic Oz Guinness has been warning Europeans about this for decades. He was born in China during World War Two.

00;01;15;16 – 00;01;44;12
David Wood
His parents were medical missionaries. After the Communist revolution in China, his family was forced out. Spent the next few decades in Great Britain before moving to the United States. The man has seen it all at the recent Art Conference in London. Doctor Guinness pointed out that since the enlightenment, the West has been trying to replace God and Christianity with something else, namely reason.

00;01;44;15 – 00;01;55;04
David Wood
Why do we need God? Why do we need Christianity when we’ve got reason? How is that worked out for Europe?

00;01;55;07 – 00;02;20;25
Oz Guinness
The intended replacement has proved absolutely inadequate. In other words, the enlightenment summed up in one word as reason, was intended to be the in-place replacement for the Christian faith, leading humanity forward with progress under reason and not under God.

00;02;20;27 – 00;02;33;29
David Wood
Now Europe is being confronted by Marxism and Islam, and reason has suddenly become completely unreasonable. So unreasonable that it can’t respond to challenges.

00;02;34;01 – 00;02;54;05
Oz Guinness
But you can see not only from the wave. As I’ve mentioned, the red wave of radical Marxism, but rainbow wave of the radical sexual revolution and the black wave of radical Islamism. But you can also see how secular liberalism itself has failed.

00;02;54;07 – 00;03;01;14
David Wood
What happens when the educated elite use their reason to attack reason itself?

00;03;01;16 – 00;03;17;00
Oz Guinness
Ironically, it started with reason. But now reason understood by postmodernists is European power or masculine power or white power and not universal reason.

00;03;17;03 – 00;03;24;26
David Wood
The educated elite attack religion, but their replacements turn into replacement religions.

00;03;24;28 – 00;03;46;19
Oz Guinness
They tried to replace God, but they produced a series of crazy religions. Take Marxism. It begins by claiming that all criticism begins with the criticism of religion, and it ends as a religion, which stifles all criticism.

00;03;46;22 – 00;03;54;08
David Wood
Liberalism will unite us, and yet liberalism crumbles at the first sign of danger.

00;03;54;10 – 00;04;21;28
Oz Guinness
But you can see, even since October the 17th, how much of liberalism has demonstrably shifted from liberal to post, liberal and even to highly illiberal. And there’s absolutely no question that the intended replacement, the enlightenment secularism, has failed. It will not do the job for Western civilization.

00;04;22;00 – 00;04;36;22
David Wood
Drunk European leaders shot a cannonball through the bottom of their own ship. And now that people are realizing the replacement didn’t work, they’re suddenly looking for something that might actually solve the problem.

00;04;36;24 – 00;04;58;08
Oz Guinness
Second thing equally clear is that while there is only being a relative resurgence of Christian faith in some circles, significant circles to once been much more clear is that the renewal of faith is now seen to be indispensable.

00;04;58;11 – 00;05;06;20
David Wood
It’s indispensable on an individual level and on a civilizational level. First, the individual level.

00;05;06;23 – 00;05;23;06
Oz Guinness
Humans need three things on a personal level, meaning, belonging, and purpose. And there’s no deeper answers than the Christian faith rooted in Judaism.

00;05;23;08 – 00;05;29;02
David Wood
What civilization also needs more than enlightenment reason offers.

00;05;29;04 – 00;05;51;25
Oz Guinness
But what we see now goes far beyond that. Because as we were discussing civilization, you can see that faith is critical. It’s often called the three icons. The roots of civilization. The restraints of civilization, and the renewal of civilization.

00;05;51;28 – 00;06;00;24
David Wood
The renewal part seems like it would come in handy right about now. But that’s not what the secular worldview gives you.

00;06;00;27 – 00;06;20;06
Oz Guinness
For the secular world. You only have. I was saying this at breakfast. Decline and fall. Entropy. There’s no other way. You decline, you will fall. And that’s part of the random rules of the course of history, but not biblically.

00;06;20;09 – 00;06;36;01
David Wood
Decline and fall. Your civilization may be great, but it won’t last forever. It will eventually decline and after a period of decline, it will fall. But the biblical pattern is a bit different.

00;06;36;03 – 00;06;57;07
Oz Guinness
For Jews and for Christians. The natural pairing is not decline and fall, but exile and return. Yes, this exile, when people disobey the ways of the Lord and don’t live as he called us to live, it produces chaos and displacement and finally exile.

00;06;57;10 – 00;07;05;20
David Wood
You can decline, and the decline may lead to exile. But exile isn’t the same as the fall of civilization.

00;07;05;23 – 00;07;28;15
Oz Guinness
But if people return to him, he returns to them and restores their fortunes. And so you have a pairing of exile and Return rather than decline and fall. So even in periods of deep decline, which we’re experiencing now, we have the hope of return. If we return to the Lord properly.

00;07;28;18 – 00;07;56;04
David Wood
From a secular perspective, you look around Europe and say, we’re declining rapidly. Declining collapse seems inevitable from a Christian perspective. You look around Europe and say, we turned away from God, and now we’re in a period of exile, even in our own nations. But we’ve seen this pattern over and over again, and we know God can restore us.

00;07;56;07 – 00;08;11;14
Oz Guinness
We’re at the showdown moment in Western civilization. Will the radical revolutions regenerate societies they promised or not?

00;08;11;16 – 00;08;16;20
David Wood
They will not. I guarantee you they will not.

00;08;16;23 – 00;08;29;11
Oz Guinness
Will the secular enlightenment of liberalism encourage humanity to go forward and progress with reason alone? Without God or not?

00;08;29;13 – 00;08;34;04
David Wood
It will not. I promise you it will not.

00;08;34;06 – 00;08;51;12
Oz Guinness
But also, as the God of Sinai, the God of the burning bush, the God of the burning mountain, and our Lord with all of Galilee. Are these things true or not?

00;08;51;14 – 00;09;26;04
David Wood
They are indeed, sir. So Europeans became drunk on prosperity, a prosperity they achieved because of their religion. And these drunk Europeans then came up with the brilliant idea of replacing their religion. They fired a cannonball through the deck of their own ship. And it’s been taking on water for some time now. The solution is obvious, but instead of returning to God and bringing about the renewal of civilization, they’re busy reloading the cannon and bailing water into the ship.

00;09;26;06 – 00;09;37;25
David Wood
Welcome to human reason. Unaided by faith in the one who created it. If you’d like to watch and share the full speech by us, get us. The link is in the description box.