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Os Guinness first became a fixture on Christian reading lists with the publication of The Dust of Death: A Critique of the Establishment and the Counter Culture—and a Proposal for a Third Way (InterVarsity, 1973; reissued with a new foreword—and a new subtitle—by Crossway in 1994). Born in China and raised and educated in England, where he took an advanced degree from Oxford University, Guinness was one of many young Christians of diverse persuasions to be markedly influenced by Francis Schaeffer.
Guinness, who has lived in the United States since 1984, was the executive director of the Williamsburg Charter Foundation from 1886 to 1989. He is currently the senior fellow of the Trinity Forum, a seminar-style forum for senior executives and political leaders that engages the leading ideas of our day in the context of faith. Guinness is the author of many books, including most recently The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life (Word). Michael Cromartie met with Guinness in Washington, D.C., to talk about his new book.
What was the burden that caused you to write The Call?
Nearly 25 years ago, I left L'Abri after one of the most stimulating and fertile periods in my life. As I left, I wrote down the outline of 25 books that I hoped to write. This was one of the central two or three that I always had in mind to write.
I think calling is the key to two things. On the one hand, it is the key to the enormous quest for individual purpose today, which you see across the Western world: to find the idea, as Kierkegaard put it, for which I can live and die. Clearly, some people are turning toward the East, which is no answer because it ends up in renunciation. Some people are going the Western route toward a kind of Nietzschean Superman. But the deepest answer to individual longing for purpose is to rise to the call of our Creator. So that's the first reason, the search for individual purpose.
The second is to find and rediscover a truth in the gospel powerful enough to blow aside the constrictions of modernity. As I've looked at the great periods of history I've asked myself: What was it in the gospel that was so powerful, culturally and historically? Clearly the top two answers are the cross of Christ and calling. Calling was there at Sinai at the birth of the Jewish movement; calling was there at Galilee at the birth of the Christian movement; calling was there critically in the Reformation and its contribution to the rise of the modern world.
I would argue that no truth of the gospel has been more influential in shaping the United States than calling. So when Tocqueville says he sees the whole future of America imprinted in the first Puritan who steps ashore in New England, what he's talking about centrally is a notion of calling. Even something like "manifest destiny" is a nationalistic, secular distortion of calling. Even the American dream, you could say, is an economic distortion of calling. But much of the dynamism, much of the progress, much of the forward-looking thrust of this great country comes from the Puritan contribution of calling.
Calling has always been critically and powerfully explosive when it has been clearly understood. We need such a truth again today.
When you write about calling, what exactly do you mean?
It is often distorted on one side by being spiritually narrowed into simply meaning guidance. On the secular side, it has been distorted into becoming just your job. By calling I mean that God calls us so decisively in Christ that everything we are, everything we have, and everything we do is invested with a direction and a dynamism because it is done in response to his summons and his call.
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