Os Guinness on the Truth Rising Documentary

Authors: John Stonestreet and Os Guinness

Historian and philosopher Will Durant, author of the epic eleven-volume series The Story of Civilization, famously said, “From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.”  

Civilizations, historically speaking, do rise and fall. Our museums and history books are full of legends and artifacts from once-dominant civilizations that are now reduced to ruins. These all were, at some point, detached from the ideals, institutions, and activities that gave them life and led them to flourish. Now, they are no more. 

With respect to Durant, the turn toward barbarism may be quick, but civilizations do not collapse overnight. Rather, most reach a critical moment from which they do not recover. In the new documentary Truth Rising, scheduled for release Friday, September 5, author and social critic Os Guinness describes how and why the West has reached this “civilizational moment.” 

I recently interviewed Guinness and asked him to explain what this means, especially for Christians: 

This idea is the sort of Biblical sense of time—generation, year, day, hour, moment—and the challenge of reading the signs of the times. Take our Lord’s weeping over Jerusalem because “they missed God’s moment when the time came.” You know I’ve always had a sense we need to understand the times.  

Some people are misusing “civilizational moment” as a fancy word for the present moment. No, it has a real definition. A civilizational moment is that period, not a day, a period when a civilization loses touch with what made it great. And when that happens, it faces three broad choices. Either it must renew the civilization, replace it with an equally adequate one, or decline and fall.  

Now clearly, our Western civilization is a Christian civilization that owes a lot to the Greeks and the Romans. But its principal source is the Gospel rooted in Judaism.  

The intended replacement was the Enlightenment, which espoused many of the same Christian truths, only without God and without the Bible. It wanted reason and progress without God, and that has failed. And that’s why we’re at this civilizational moment. Either there’s a renewal of the Christian faith, or the West is declining and will fall.

Truth Rising sits squarely in the tradition of other works that have long pointed to the crisis facing the West. For example, Francis Schaeffer’s seminal work, How Should We Then Live? warned of the influences of existentialism, hedonism, and nihilism. Guinness points back even farther: 

Absolutely. You can go back to incredible predictions like Heinrich Heine in the 1830s of the berserker rage that would break out, and 100 years later it did in his own country, Germany. Or take Nietzsche and the madman’s cry in “The Gay Science” that we’ve murdered God. And Francis Schaeffer. ... You know I was intrigued by him when I first came across him in the 1960s. I was at university then, and I’d come to faith. But there was no sense that people who were teaching us had any clue what was going on in culture. 

This was the sixties, the counterculture, drugs, sex, rock and roll, you name it, and Ingmar Bergman films saying there was no God. And then came this rather unusual man in knickers who connected all the dots because he realized how it was all linked up. Sir Schaeffer was a door opener to an entire generation. 

So why Truth Rising? Why now? Why another work that identifies this civilizational moment? I asked Os these questions, and here’s how he replied: 

I think the difference now is that there’s a widespread sense that it’s not just Europe, it’s not just America. The whole world is now entangled and embroiled in this civilizational moment. As the West declines, so the rise of authoritarianism, the Eurasian landmass, Putin in the West, Xi Jinping in the East. These things are incredible for the future of mankind, because we need an alternative to authoritarianism. 

If we’re in a fight for a human-friendly future (the way I put it), this is an extraordinary moment, which calls out the deepest understanding all of us can bring. And there’s nothing deeper than the Gospel, the Scriptures. That’s why this is such an exciting moment for Christians. 

Indeed, God has called us to this moment in history. We are not mere victims of the mindless forces of history, as secularists believe. Truth Rising explains both the civilizational moment and how Christians can be people of courage and agents of renewal. 

Don’t miss the global streaming premiere of Truth Rising on Friday, September 5. Visit truthrising.com/colson to sign up for updates.