Quotes from Os Guinness

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.

Again, the heart of apologetics is the apologetics of the heart.

Or of the fact that in the United States, where Evangelicals, the people of the good news, are still strong numerically, they have become one of the shallowest, noisiest and most corrupt parts of the Christian Church, bringing down an unprecedented avalanche of disdain on their heads—almost none of which has anything to do with Jesus?

apologetics is pre-evangelism in that it addresses those who do not realize they are in a bad situation, and therefore do not see the gospel as the good news that it is.

We must never distinguish apologetics and evangelism too neatly. But in broad terms, evangelism is the sharing of the good news, and it addresses the needs and desires of those who know they are in a bad situation.

Christians," as that crusty old philosopher Bertrand Russell used to quip, "would sooner die than think—in fact they do.

In a post-Christian era many of our friends, neighbors, and colleague will reject God for a score of reasons, but we must live and speak that they reject God for God's sake and not because of what we have said or done that has framed God wrongly.

Love is "the alpha and the omega of apologetics," in the sense that all we say must come from love, and it must lead to love and to the One who is love—in other words, Christian advocacy must move from our love for God and his truth and beauty, to our love for the people we talk to and work right up to their love for God and his truth and beauty in their turn.

Outrage is appropriate in response to genuine wrong, tears in response to grief, shock in response to unexpected disaster. We mustn't force ourselves to thank God for these things or we will be harder on ourselves and softer on evil than God is. It is not that even Christians need not give thanks for these things, but that Christians especially should not give thanks for them. We should always be as human as God made us.

The philosopher Marar writes, "As our hearts can't stop pumping blood, so our minds can't stop pumping illusions.

For at the heart of freedom lies a grand paradox: the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom.

Whether or not the Christian faith is true is now irrelevant. All that matters is that to more and more people in the modern world it no longer seems true.