Meaningful
Living—On Purpose
By
John R. Quigley,
Jr.
Shortly after the release of his book, The
Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life (Word Books),
I had the opportunity to visit with Os Guinness. We sat in his office, lined
with bookcases to waist height, at the Trinity Forum in VA. Hanging on the walls
were collections of pictures with autographs including John Wesley, Dorothy
Sayers, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Winston Churchill, and others.
Under the gaze of these inspiring eavesdroppers, Guinness, with his warm
smile, sparkling blue eyes, and unmistakable British accent intact, graciously
answered questions regarding some of the key issues from his book.
JQ:
You state early in The Call that
“out of more than a score of great civilizations in human history, modern
Western civilization is the very first to have no agreed-on answer to the
question of the purpose of life.” Why have Americans lost the answer?
Guinness:
I think there is a double reason. One
is the secular reason. Obviously
secularism doesn’t supply much in the way of answers to the philosophy of
life. The other reason is the relativism and pluralism; There’s a sense where
all those different people with all their different options make up the
supermarket of beliefs. How do I know mine’s any more true than any one
else’s? And maybe nobody’s is true, so we give up on them all. And so
religion just becomes private preference: Do you take milk in your coffee?
Do you like red wine, or white wine? Do you like to have a straight
lifestyle or a gay lifestyle? Are you a Muslim or a Christian? It’s just a
private preference. That’s actually deadly to a traditional sense of meaning.
JQ:
Clearly, The Call is no theoretical
analysis. You write that “No book has burned within me longer or more fiercely
than this one.” What makes this subject so important to you?
Guinness:
Well, on a personal level, this has been more vital to the heart of the gospel
for me than any other truth except the cross. On a sort of more public level , I
have written a book on doubt and have lots of letters and questions about that.
But I’ve probably never had so many questions such as “What is the
meaning of my personal life?” from all around Europe and the English speaking
world at large and certainly here in America.
Now I didn’t put all those stories in the book.
What I did put in the book is that this is the deepest answer to two
great questions. One is the
personal question: the search today; the quest for purpose.
Calling is the ultimate why-the
deepest answer in history as to why individual life has meaning; that each of us
is called by God who knows us uniquely and intimately. We are not just created
by him and left to go about on our own, but he who created us now calls us. As
we respond to him, we rise to be the people that only he knows we can be. So
it’s the deepest answer to our personal longing, which is so powerful today.
The other reason is more public again. We need a
truth of the gospel powerful enough to explode the constrictions of our modern
world which cripple and handicap discipleship. So I see this truth as one of the
very strongest. It’s at the
beginning and the rise of the Jewish movement. It’s there at the rise of the
Christian movement at Galilee. It’s there at the heart of the Reformation.
Historians say it is this truth - through the Puritans - that has put its stamp
on America more than any other single truth.
This truth is explosive; it shapes cultures and influences history.
And when we recover this, it’s deeply personal but explosively public
in culture change.
JQ:
How did you discover God’s calling for your life?
Guinness:
I came to Christ in the early 60’s when it was almost the unspoken idea that
if you were really all out for Christ you went to the mission field or ministry,
maybe evangelism. My parents were
missionaries so I knew I wasn’t cut out for that. I went to work in a church
for nine months and absolutely hated it! I admired the pastor and liked the
people, but it simply wasn’t me. It was out of frustration, realizing that I
wasn’t cut out to be a minister, that I started looking for a better way of
understanding things. I realized when I discovered my calling, that I wasn’t
cut out to be a minister. We all
have different gifts and we are free to pursue the gifts God has given us, and
not to go into the directions that other people want us to.
JQ:
It sounds like your awareness of your calling was being discovered in a negative
sense-that you were learning what you were not
called to?
Guinness:
Yes, there was a definite negative sense. I had to discover what I wasn’t
called to before I discovered what I was called to.
The hard thing was I didn’t even know the notion of calling then. And then someone gave me William Perkins’ treatise on
calling, and I realized the richness of this discussion back then, that I had
never known. That there is a primary call; being called to Christ, and a
secondary call; what we do in response to that. That set me on the path to
discover my own giftedness, and then calling.
JQ:
What other
steps did you take to further delineate your specific calling?
Guinness:
Well basically praying daily “Lord, you are the one who has gifted me. What is
it you have given me and what do you want me to do?”
And then, really thinking back over my life; what were the things I was
good at and actually loved doing whether I was paid for them or not, whether I
was applauded or not? What were the
things that were really the basic gifts I had? And when I began to cotton to
what those were, it took a time of trial and error to clarify those to be able
to state them to myself, and then of course to find a way of living that allowed
me to pursue those. So it was quite
a time of trial and error.
JQ:
You’ve worked with the BBC, L’Abri, the Brookings Institution, and currently
the Trinity Forum. In retrospect, is there a thread that continues through all
those positions?
Guinness:
What was common to them all was that they allowed me to relate my faith to
what’s going on in secular society. Because
I feel that my gift is part analyst and part apologist-analyzing
the world to those inside the church of Christ, and analyzing and proclaiming
the gospel to those outside in the secular world-I
try and find a job that moves comfortably between those.
JQ:
Why is it so difficult to decipher our calling?
Guinness:
I don’t know that it is that difficult. I think the teaching has gone wrong.
In other words, you might say “Is justification by faith difficult?” No,
it’s incredibly simple. But many people five minutes before the reformation
couldn’t see it because they had such a distorted view all around. If you
think of the ignorance and confusion and distortions that surround the notion of
calling today, many people just haven’t a clue. In secular circles they are
using the word calling without a caller, which is absurd. They’ve just
borrowed the word and try and give it a running on its own. In Christian
circles, the word calling has become something spiritual or it’s been confused
with guidance. There’s all sorts of distortions, so much of the book in the
early chapters is trying to define it and show some of the distinctions so that
people can really see what this dynamic doctrine really is and clear away all of
the dead wood.
JQ:
You mention a Catholic and a Protestant distortion of calling.
What are those briefly?
Guinness:
Well, I have to be very clear that many Catholics fall for the Protestant
distortion and vice versa. But the Catholic distortion is the way we create a
kind of spiritual dualism that the spiritual is higher, the secular is lower. So priests and monks and nuns or people in Protestant circles
who are full time in the ministry - they have a calling, lay people don’t.
That’s a dreadful heresy. As I see it, it’s everyone, everywhere, in
everything doing it as unto the Lord.
The Protestant distortion grew out of the remedy for the first one.
Calvin and Luther said that even your work is included in your calling, which is
right. But then slowly about 100-150 years later, the words work, employment and
job became a synonym for calling, and calling became a synonym for work and
employment and job. In other words it was narrowed in a secular direction rather
than a spiritual direction. And so you have phrases now like vocational colleges
and vocational aptitude tests, or people referring to their job as their
vocation. It has been narrowed down to a job, which is a secularized Protestant
distortion of the notion of calling. Both of those distortions are wrong.
JQ:
You have a chapter on Spiritual disciplines. Can you tell us a little about the
spiritual disciplines that mean the most in the life of Os Guinness?
Guinness:
Well, far more importantly than Os Guinness, how about the life of our Lord?
Probably there's no single part of the Bible that many Protestants and most
Evangelicals read and totally miss, than the spiritual disciplines in the life
of Jesus. Partly because we associate it with sort of Catholic traditions. But
in fact, Jesus did not set up a monastery or a convent, and he didn't pursue the
life of contemplation full time. But what you see in Jesus is a rhythm of
engagement and withdrawal, busyness and solitude, crowds and aloneness. Again
and again he goes to the mountain to pray or to fast, obviously at the very
critical times of his ministry, before he chose the twelve disciples, and so on.
But it's a whole rhythm of the way he lived.
My own devotional life comes out of the background of
Oswald Chambers, who was a great friend of my grandparents, who led so rich a
devotional life that that was something I was taught very naturally. But it was
actually Dallas Willard and his brilliant book The Spirit of the Disciplines that really taught me all that I know
about solitude, secrecy, and fasting and some of these other disciplines today.
I think they're absolutely essential, as is pointed out in the book. Solitude is
what weans you away from addiction to other people. And all of us like approval,
and many of us are turned on by other people, certainly by crowds, or whatever.
Take the extroverts. It's in solitude that you really get your audience right,
the one audience, the audience of One. So that you're no longer addicted to
people, or to success, or to these things which are essentially worldly, but
that we have the perspective right before the Lord. We need a sort of mid-course
correction quite often.
JQ:
You mention that the poor have little choice in pursuing a call in a
professional sense. What advice do you have for those who do not have the
financial space to maneuver into a perceived calling.
Guinness:
I put that in as a matter of realism and gentleness, because in a fallen world,
obviously we can’t all get jobs which express our gifts and calling.
But if the world was not fallen, our work would have been purely
expressive of who we are and the gifts and calling that God has given us.
But in a fallen world, that is not so. It’s always creative, but it’s
partly cursed. So you can look at many societies and see that everyone middle
class or lower, which in most societies is most people, simply had to do a job
to survive. They couldn’t chose. So
we in America today, everyone middle class and above with our incredible options
of choice and change, have the luxury of choosing something which fits us.
But most countries, most periods of history, and even many in the West
today cannot do that.
Now the point is that everything we do is done as
unto the Lord so it is a part of calling. A good example of this in the
scriptures is the Apostle Paul and tent-making. The heart of his calling was to
be an apostle to the gentiles. But there was no job that paid him to do that.
You know - “Apostle to the Gentiles: $50,000 per year.”
So what he did was make tents. Was it a part of his calling?
Of course it was because everything is. But it was a part, it
wasn’t the heart. He used the tent making to free himself for his real
core calling to be an Apostle to the Gentiles. And many people have to do that
today. They have to take a job to survive in order to free themselves for what
is the real thing at the center of their lives.
JQ:
Your chapter on the need for ongoing reformation is particularly critical of the
American church. Do you find yourself being criticized for your critical
analyses?
Guinness:
Oh . . . (pausing as if trying to remember receiving any criticism). Often.
(Laughs) For various reasons. When I wrote Dining
With The Devil people effectively said “How dare you!” as if I were
touching the ark! Although now, more and more people realize the broad merits of
the questions that some of us are trying to raise, but people used to get
furious. You know a lot of people think if you just have analysis, it's very
paralyzing. But I think it just helps you see where you are, in order to know
what you should do. So analysis by itself is nothing. You have to have the
action which flows from the analysis. So there are a number of reasons people
are very uncomfortable. They also say, “What right do you as a European have
to come over here and criticize Americans?” But then I always think that I'm a
missionary to America, and that's my calling, as a missionary to America.
JQ:
Some Pastors would respond that it's very easy for you to sit back in your ivory
tower Christian think tank and criticize where the church is today. How would
you respond to that?
Guinness:
The answer is I don't live in an ivory tower, and I'm not in a think tank. But
you're right, they do say that. In fact, many pastors are in, not an ivory
tower, but a soft world in the sense that the private world is a world where
their people are free to apply their faith to the whole of life. The real
challenge is to take faith out of the home, out of the church, out of the
weekend, and apply it in the tough secular world of business, politics, law,
education, industry and so on. That's the world in which I work, encouraging
business leaders and political leaders to
apply their faith in the hurly-burly of secular life. So in fact I don't live in
an ivory tower or think tank at all.
JQ:
You’ve just co-authored a book with Louise Cowan - Invitation
to the Classics. Tell us a
little about that project.
Guinness:
Well, that is a one-volume Christian introduction to the classics. Written
because, on the one hand, you have multi-cultural extremists trashing the
classics. On the other hand you have many in the church of Christ suffering from
Alzheimer's when it comes to anything between Revelation 22 and 1900. And so
we're trying to restore the church’s memory. Here is this great heritage of
imagination and ideas, most of which is directly engaging in Christian faith.
Not all of it, but most of it. But there is another reason too. For us here at
the Trinity Forum, it's an example of the
fact we are not doing fine. We believe in analyzing the worst-let's
face it, and sowing seeds for a new Reformation renaissance. Praying that there
will be one. So here we are, producing this superb full color Christian guide to
the classics, with the belief that Christians can recover and bring back western
culture again.
Copyright: John R. Quigley, Jr.