Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion by Os Guinness

Author:Os Guinness [Guinness, Os]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2015-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

The Power of Life

Berger’s rich discussion of other signals of transcendence is a goldmine for the Christian advocate. It covers such typical human experiences as hope, play, humor, order and judgment.25 His discussion is fresh and invigorating, but we should see it as a brilliant rediscovery rather than as radically new, for this was a powerful theme in the early church. In the third century, for example, Gregory of Nyssa built on the Greek notion of desire and developed it in a biblical direction. His aim was to show how desires and yearning are central to what moves people to know and love God. Such passions prompt the movement to thought and action that leads to the love of God. “We are led to God by desire, drawn to him as if pulled by a rope. . . . Every delight in God becomes kindling for a still more ardent desire.”26

Gregory’s profound teaching serves to keep us as apologists in our place yet again. Our goal is not to teach people to come to know something about God, but to come to know and love him, and to be known and loved by him. How absurd, then, to think that we by ourselves can do what needs to be done, and we can do it simply through words. God is his own best apologist, and it is he himself who draws people to know and love him, and through life and not simply words. All humans have these ceaseless yearnings, Gregory writes, not simply because we are incomplete but because God is infinite. God’s wonder and beauty become overwhelmingly attractive because they are infinite and inexhaustible. “This is what it means to see God: never to have this desire satisfied.” Our other and lesser human desires for food, sleep, sex and pleasure can each be satisfied completely as they arise. “But our yearning to see God will be satisfied only by knowing God more fully and more intimately. The more we know, the more we desire to know.”27

The same understanding of desire blazes in St. Augustine, fanned by his own experience of passionately searching for God. The Christian life itself is “holy desire.” Commenting on the Epistle of John, he writes,

That which you desire you do not yet see; but by desiring you become capable of being filled by that which you will see when it comes. For just as in filling a leather bag . . . one stretches the skin . . . and by stretching it becomes capable of more; so God by deferring that for which we long, stretched our desire; as desire increases it stretches the mind, and by stretching, makes it more capable of being filled.28

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