Os Guinness

Review: Signals of Transcendence

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Signals of Transcendence, Os Guinness. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2023.

Summary: The stories of people who have experienced signs or promptings that there is more to life awakening them to pursue the unseen realities beyond the signal.

Peter Berger has described the experience of a sense that there is “something more” with the phrase “signals of transcendence.” In Irish parlance, it is the sense that the barrier between the seen and unseen is barely there. This is all the more significant in the “world without windows” we modern versions of Plato’s cavedwellers inhabit. Os Guinness contends that such signals still come to us. Will we heed, and then search for the transcendent source beyond the signal.

The signals vary for each of us. Guinness tells the stories of ten individuals who, in different ways encountered such signals. For Malcolm Muggeridge, swimming from shore to end his life, one final glance back at the shore lights filed him with so mich hope he needed to find its source, a search of many years. For Peter Berger, the mother’s assurance that “all will be well” in a world where that cannot truly be promised signals a deeper reality where this is so.

For Phillip Hallie, driven to despair with the horrors of the Holocaust, the unworldly goodness of Le Chambon’s people who rescued 5000 Jewish children, rescued him as well. For Chesterton, consumed with the evil in the world, the sight of a beautiful dandelion set off a “thin thread of thanks” and a search for a worldview that could explain a world of brokenness and beauty, which he found eventually in Christianity.

The signals are different for each of us, contends Guinness. For fashion model Windsor Elliott, it was the sense of emptiness at a glamourous gathering that began the quest for something more. For C.S. Lewis, on the other hand, it was glimpses of joyful longing that caught his attention.

Guinness urges our readiness to hear the call and reiterates in each chapter, “Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.” Yet his last story is that of Kenneth Clark, who experienced “the finger of God” in a church in San Lorenzo yet did not heed the signal until on his deathbed when he was received into the church, as attested by those with him. It’s never too late in this life.

He includes his own grandfather’s story, caught up in the Boxer Rebellion, narrowly escaping alive. He writes with a sense of the preciousness and significance of our lives. While he focuses on the signals of the something more for which we are made, he urges the quest for that something, elaborated more fully in his previous book, The Great Quest.

This is a wonderful book for someone who, in Frederick Buechner’s words is “listening to one’s life” and longing for more. Far from being distracted or thinking oneself crazy, Guinness assures us that the signals are worth heeding and the quest pursuing. He who seeks, finds.

_______________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: The Great Quest

/ rtrube54 / 2 Comments

The Great Quest, Os Guinness. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2022.

Summary: An invitation to the examined life in the pursuit of a meaningful existence, a well-lived life.

The meaning of life. It sounds like one of those discussions for a first-year intro to philosophy class as we are challenged by the dictum of Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” In response, we often joke about it. Or we make it an absurd joke, as in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in which the supercomputer Deep Thought computes the answer to the Ultimate Question of the Meaning of Life, The Universe and Everything, as 42.

Os Guinness believes the absence of meaning in modern life of significant concern. Citing the statistics of rising suicide rates and falling birth rates in the modern world, he believes the quest for meaning to be pressing:

The truth is that the urgent need of our times is a fresh seriousness about human existence and a renewed openness to ultimate questions. Answers to ultimate questions are not only vital to each of us as individuals but to whole societies and civilizations. Indeed, there are no great societies or civilizations without confident answers to ultimate questions, and such answers need to become vital again in our schools, our universities, and our public discussion as well as in our families.

Os Guinness, The Great Quest, p. 4

Guinness contends that one needs meaning as one needs oxygen and his plea as he introduces this book is that if we haven’t thought these things through, that we do so. He also identifies some of the reasons we fail to do so: distraction, bargaining that we’ll do it later, and the noise and interference of our busy lives. But for those serious about asking the questions and reaching the conclusions that come of an examined life, Guinness offers to be a guide on the journey.

Guinness lays his cards on the table. He is a convinced Christian, while respecting other religions and worldviews. He proposes to be as fair as possible because he wants people to think things through. He also asks of his readers a personal engagement in their search, ready to say, “here I am” if the transcendent comes calling. While welcoming reason, he eschews the ability of proofs to do anything more than suggest that a belief is reasonable.

With these preliminaries out of the way, he outlines four phases in our search

  1. A time for questions. Warning of the psychological objections to our questions and belief in finding meaning as “bad faith,” he notes the insatiable capacity of humans to ask and some of the perennial big questions: Where did we come from? What can we know? What are we? Where are we going? What can we hope for? The questioning may reveal the inadequacy of the beliefs, the view of the world we have embraced. We may find experiences in the world that shatter our conceptions, signals of transcendence that encourage us to look deeper.
  2. A Time for answers. We begin with conceptualizing, weighing different ideas and how they address our questions. We critically assess the differences and compare different “answers.” How would each shape the way we live if we thought the world that way. For Guinness, there are three main families of answers, those of the Eastern families of faith, those of secularists, and those of the Abrahamic faiths. As we work through these possible answers to the great questions, Guinness concludes, “Does any faith that you as a seeker may consider answer your questions? Does it do so in a way that switches on the light in the darkness and fits like a key in the lock…?”
  3. A time for evidences. One might think answers are enough. He contends that the only reason to believe anything is on the basis of reasonable evidence that it is true–Does it align with reality? Do the facts fit? In detail and as a whole?
  4. A time for commitment. Finally we must commit ourselves to whatever we believe is true. Guinness frames this in Christian terms of discovering “that loving and being loved [by God] is the very heart and soul of faith and the meaning of life” and saying “Here I am!” to that God. Whatever the “faith” one commits to, Guinness warns against the myth that it is about the search and not the destination–equating this to the legend of the Flying Dutchman, doomed to never dock but to sail forever.

Some may object to the Christian framing of this work. While there are statements by those of other “families” throughout, the preponderance becomes increasingly Christian in the progression of the phases. Guinness has warned us and certainly speaks in the terms he knows best, particularly when it comes to commitment where he speaks warmly of entering into loving relationship with God in which one finds meaning and purpose.

So, the reader must decide how far to go with Guinness as guide. Strictly following his four phases without being guided by the Christian examples, I could well see a person ending up in any of the three main “families” and any of the branches of those families. And to do so would certainly be to live an examined life rather than the muddled life of distracted modernity. Guinness can offer further guidance for someone wishing and willing to consider a thoughtful account for how one may embrace Christian faith. The illustrations from both his own life and others may well ring true with one’s own journey and help make sense of it.

I suspect this book may work best as something two friends, who trust and can be candid with each other, may discuss, even if one believes and the other is seeking. I could see a process of working through the phases together that would leave neither unchanged. Indeed, one of my thoughts on reading was that reaching a place of commitment ought not end the living of an examined life, and it has often been the dialogues with seekers, skeptics, and those in deep pain that have driven me deeper into the questions, the answers, the evidences, and my own commitment.

____________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary advanced review galley of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Carpe Diem Redeemed

/ rtrube54 / 3 Comments

carpe diem.jpg

Carpe Diem Redeemed, Os Guinness. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2019.

Summary: A consideration of how, in our present day, we ought make the most of the time, to properly seize the day.

The collection of epigraphs alone may be a reason to acquire this book. The book opens with fourteen pages of epigraphs on the subject of time spanning the gamut from Lao Tzu to Richard Branson.  The epigraphs explore various perspectives on time and our relation to time, and how we live within it. The one thing all of us recognize in our most reflective moments is the brevity of our life span and how rapidly it passes. As the author of this work, it is “the dash between the two dates on our gravestones.” The perennial question is what the meaning of this transient existence is and how we might make the most of it.

Guinness interacts with a similarly titled book, Carpe Diem Regained, by Roman Krznaric, who believes there is no transcendent source of meaning, that we must create that meaning for ourselves, and then “seize the day” Guinness argues that carpe diem requires a vision of life that makes sense of time and history, and roots this in the Judeo-Christian account found in the Bible.

He contends for a covenantal perspective on time in contrast to cyclical or mere chronological views of time. Time has a telos that is shaped by the relation between a sovereign God committed to his creation including human beings created with real freedom to respond in love or rebellion. This freedom involves both real risk and the possibility of redemption. Our lives are neither determined nor part of an endless cycle.

We exist in an era in which the precision and coordination of our time-keeping eventuates in a life of constant pressure. At a deeper level, our modern understanding of time is shaped by a narrative of progress, a presumption that the latest is the greatest, and the paradox of the avant garde becoming the rear guard, an inevitable fatality of progress.

How then does he propose we seize the day within these contemporary dynamics of time. The beginning is not an idea, but a “walk,” daily, with God, the daily rhythms of trust and obedience that shape a life and not just an ideology. Secondly, this means discerning the times, understanding what is really happening in them and how God is working in them. Then it means serving God’s purpose in that time. Christians practice a kind of prophetic untimeliness or “resistance thinking” against the ways that the culture distorts past, present, and future.

This kind of life may be costly. Guinness relates some of the cost to his own family, former missionaries in China. He lost a brother and sister to starvation during World War 2 and his parents suffered arrest under the communists for several years. It was tempting to wonder what they accomplished, yet there hope was that “the end is not the end,” that our hope is in the coming of Jesus.

He summarizes his argument as follows:

   Those with the greatest view of time are those best able to use and enjoy the time they have. Life is short, but we are called to rise to our full potential, making the most of it and seizing each day. Within the biblical view of time and history, life offers meaning and opens prospects whose significance far outstrips its shortness. (p. 136)

This is classic Guinness, down to the three alliterated points in many chapters! But there is also something different. There is a personal character to this work as well. Guinness shares more of himself than I’ve observed in many of his books, and we have the sense of one who has been long at this journey imparting vital wisdom. He speaks into our time-pressured and experience-oriented culture of a vision of carpe diem that is far more than filling one’s life with as much experience as we can cram into the brief space of our lives. He reminds us of the biblical wisdom that understands life within our covenantal relationship with a transcendent and yet loving God who makes sense of the flow of time and its ultimate end. This is a God who invites us to walk with Him, to see our times with his eyes and serve his purposes in our generation, and trust that this is enough. We also seize the day, not in a self-fabricated purpose or an endless cycle, but in the faith that the employment of all our energies toward the purposes of God will bring joy and our time and matter for eternity.

________________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

 

Review: Impossible People

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

impossible people

Impossible People, Os Guinness. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2016.

Summary: Delineating the advance of modernity and its negative consequences, Guinness calls upon Christians to be the “impossible people” who both resist and positively engage the culture to “serve God’s purposes in this generation.”

I’ve been reading the work of Os Guinness since my student days when he wrote The Dust of Death and it is my feeling that his many books are really one extended and developing argument both describing modernity’s impact upon the culture in it’s movement away from God and its exhaustion of its Christian heritage, and the nature of Christian faithfulness in the face of these developments.

What distinguishes this book for me seems to be a certain urgency, captured even in the title Impossible People. He explains his choice of this striking phrase:

“The term impossible man was used to describe the eleventh-century Benedictine reformer Peter Damian (c. 1007-1073). Dante placed Damian in the highest circle of paradise as a saint and the predecessor of Francis of Assisi. A thousand years ago, as in our own time, there was little regard for truth or for the integrity and purity of the Christian faith. Nor was there much sense of the gravity of sin, so the church was easygoing, corruption was rife and the moral and theological rot was as pervasive among the clergy and the leaders of the church as among ordinary people.

. . .

Unquestionably, the term impossible man was ambiguous. It could be taken either as a
compliment or an insult. Doubtless, many of Peter Damian’s generation admired him for his stand, just as many hated him for his fervor, and many were frustrated and made
uncomfortable by what they saw as his intransigence. In other words, the same term could express either admiration or exasperation, as it will again today. But all that was irrelevant to Peter Damian. He spoke, wrote and acted solely with an eye to the audience of One. He could not be deterred by other voices. He was faithful to Jesus alone and above all. His faith had a backbone of steel. He was the impossible man. (pp. 30-31)

Guinness proposes that distinctive witness in our time will be much like that of Damian, and will require of us the qualities of “impossibility” evident in Damian — not only integrity and courage, but spiritual power that apprehends the dynamics of spiritual warfare behind the principalities and powers dominating modern life, and the weapons of such warfare, which is not against other people, whom we are called to love and win.

This incorporation of the spiritual powers behind the cultural forces confronting Christians seemed to me more clearly drawn than in any of Guinness’s other books, which emphasized clear understanding of cultural forces, and our calling to distinctiveness of thought and life in their midst. I cannot recall in other books where Guinness so clearly affirms the reality of the miraculous and works of power as he does here.

There also seemed to be a greater urgency in Guinness in his denunciation of what he sees as the church’s compromises both of integrity and doctrine, including what he sees as the rapid, revisionist shift in the understanding of human sexuality in broad swathes of the church as it embraces the social construction of reality rather than transcendent understandings that have been held through the church’s history. He decries a generationalism within the church which prevents the passing of the baton of faithful witness and presence from elder to rising generations in our present time.

Part of Guinness’s concern is for what he sees to be modernity’s impact on the wider culture as well as upon the church. He sees in such things as the interest in singularity a kind of “tower of Babel” hubris bound to disillusion. Likewise, perhaps in his best chapter, he explores the lingering spiritual memory of modern atheism, that he describes as “life without an amen.”

There is much here I appreciate in his analysis of our present cultural moment. His grasp of the pluralizing, privatizing, and relativizing elements of a modernity rooted in the social construction of reality describes the water we swim in and often have become accustomed to. I wholeheartedly affirm his description of what it means to be “impossible people” and particular the call to a recovery of spiritual power in a materially affluent but spiritually flaccid church.

What I think would have made this case more compelling to me would have been to apply this analysis not merely to the politics of the left, but to our idolizing of politics of all stripes. He takes several swipes at Barack Obama (who was sitting president when he wrote this) but is silent about the politics of the right. I personally believe that one of the things that would make Christians the “impossible people” he would have us be is to forsake all political alliances to left or right to be a prophetic voice toward the versions of idolatry and corruption across the spectrum of our political life.

I also wonder if Guinness’s word about generationalism might have carried more weight were this book to have been co-written with a millenial. My sense is that this is a work that will resonate well with those of Guinness’s own generation, but much less well with many of those he most needs to convince of the case he is making — millenials — if they even pick up this work.

That would be regrettable because the matters Guinness raises are ones of grave concern if true, and ones around which the church needs consensus. We are, sadly as Guinness notes, often divided in the church across the same fault lines as our culture, including those of generation, as well as ethnicity, economic status, and social class. Guinness has been a principled voice for the civil and public engagement of Christians in the wider culture, one respected in many quarters both here and abroad. My hope is that in whatever years remain for him (hopefully many!) he will find more partners across these divides who dialogue, dream, and pray together about what it means to be the “impossible people” he describes. Perhaps that would be something all of us might aspire and pray toward, within our own potential spheres of influence, as well as in our own faith communities.

The Month in Reviews: June 2016

/ rtrube54 / Leave a comment

Reading for the Common Good

This was one of those months where my reading was all over the place from essays in military history to fictional accounts of Irish country doctors to a new book on sleep. There was the usual theology, including a collection of essays on Karl Barth, an outstanding book on the atonement, an inter-generational dialogue on the future of our faith, a discussion of the roles of parents in their children’s faith, and conversely a discussion of the religious choices of “nones” around raising their children. Two other outstanding reads concerned the role of persuasion in Christian witness, and the role of reading in the life of Christian communities. So, without further ado, here is the list!

Confessing Christ

Confessing Christ for Church and World, Kimlyn J. Bender. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2014. A collection of essays in Barthian theology, exploring his ecclesiology, his confessional theology, particularly as it bears on the canon, and his understanding of the relationship of Christ and creation. (Review).

Future of Our Faith

Future of Our Faith, Ronald J. Sider and Ben Lowe. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2016. Two activist evangelical leaders forty years apart pose critical questions for each other about issues facing the church, with responses from the other. (Review).

Christ Crucified

Christ Crucified: Understanding the Atonement, Donald Macleod. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2014. A thoughtful, contemporary restatement of the classical doctrine of the atonement including different contended terms in reference to the atonement including substitution, expiation, propitiation, satisfaction, and victory. (Review).

Christ and Crisis

Christ and Crisis, Charles Malik. Grand Rapids: Acton Institute, 2015 (originally published by Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1962). Contends that the deepest crisis of his (our) age is a spiritual crisis that the church properly addresses by laying hold of all the resources and pursuing the calling of people of faith. (Review).

An Irish Country Doctor

An Irish Country Doctor, Patrick Taylor. New York: Forge Books, 2007 (an earlier version published 2004). A young doctor fresh from medical school becomes the assistant to a rural, and somewhat eccentric, general practitioner in a small village in Northern Ireland and learns lessons about life, love, and medicine they didn’t teach in school. (Review).

Father of Us All

The Father of Us All, Victor Davis Hanson. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010. A collection of essays arguing from history that war is a tragic but persistent feature of human existence that explores some of the particular challenges that democracies from Athens to the present day United States face as we are faced with the prospect or reality of war. (Review).

Fool's Talk

Fool’s Talk, Os Guinness. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2015. Guinness argues for the recovery of the lost art of persuasion that combines good apologetic work with evangelism and is aware of the many people Christians address who are not open to their message. (Review).

The Sleep Revolution

The Sleep Revolution, Arianna Huffington. New York: Harmony Books, 2016. Huffington summarizes the research on sleep, the impact of sleep deprivation on our lives and performance, and steps we may take night by night to reverse this deficit and improve our lives.  (Review).

Losing Our Religion

Losing Our Religion, Christel Manning. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Qualitative sociological research on the religious category of “nones” exploring the different types of “nones”, the influences of time and place, and the parenting choices around religion “nones” face in raising their children. (Review).

dupee.indd

It’s Not Too Late, Dan Dupee. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2016. A book addressed to Christian parents of teens making the transition from high school to college on the continuing important role parents may play in their teen’s faith journey. (Review).

Miracle Work

Miracle Work, Jordan Seng. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2013. A description of how God wants to work through us to do things in the world, including supernatural things like healing, delivering people from demons, prophesying, or intercessory prayer. (Review).

Reading for the Common Good

Reading for the Common Good, C. Christopher Smith. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2016. Explores how the communal practice of reading in congregations fosters a learning community and shared social imagination the results in clearer congregational identity, sense of mission in one’s setting, and wider engagement with the environment, economics, and political order. (Review).

Best of the Month: This was a tough one. Christ Crucified and Fool’s Talk are both quite good. I’m going to give the nod to C. Christopher Smith’s Reading for the Common Good, a book I wish I’d written and I think vitally important if Christian communities are going to become vibrant learning communities. Smith connected the dots for me about how our personal love of reading can connect into our communal life in life-giving ways.

Quote of the Month: Here I will go with a quote from Donald Macleod’s Christ Crucified, his rejoinder to those who argue that the idea of substitutionary atonement is little more than “divine child abuse.” He writes:

“…the child-abuse charge ignores the clear New Testament witness to the unique identity of Jesus. Not only was he not a child; he was not a mere human. He was God: the eternal Logos, the divine Son, the Lord before whom every knee will one day bow (Phil. 2:10). This is no helpless victim. This is the Father’s equal. This is one who in the most profound sense is one with God; one in whom God judges himself, one in whom God condemns himself, one in whom God lets himself be abused. The critics cannot be allowed the luxury of a selective use of the New Testament. It is the very same scriptures which portray the cross as an act of God the Father which also portray the sufferer as God the Son, and the resulting doctrine cannot be wrenched from its setting in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The ‘abused child’ is ‘very God of very God’. It is divine blood that is shed at Calvary (Acts 20:28) as God surrenders himself to the worst that man can do and bears the whole cost of saving the world.” (p. 64)

Coming Soon: I’m currently reading Kirsten Hannah’s The Nightingale, historical fiction exploring conditions in German-occupied France through the lives of the Rossignol (which means “nightingale”) daughters and their father. I’m also working my way through David Maraniss’ account of the life of Vince Lombardi, When Pride Mattered. Lombardi was one of the coaching greats of my youth. Maraniss explores the tension between faith, family, and football that was his life as well as the way Lombardi transformed pro football. I’ve just begun Neither Complementarian nor Egalitarian by Michelle Lee-Barnwell, exploring whether there is a different way of thinking about gender roles than these two polarized positions. Marva Dawn’s In the Beginning, God is an older work meditating on what the creation accounts reveal to us of the character of the God of Creation.

My summer project has been the creation of an index of reviews on Bob on Books. Since the inception of the blog, I’ve reviewed around 350 books. Soon, hopefully, you will be able to scroll through a list of these by author. Of course, you can always use the search box on any page to find whether I’ve reviewed a book or to search on a topic. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how I can continue to make the blog more useful as a resource for “thoughts on books, reading, and life.”

Review: Fool’s Talk

/ rtrube54 / 2 Comments

Fool's Talk

Fool’s Talk, Os Guinness. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2015.

Summary: Guinness argues for the recovery of the lost art of persuasion that combines good apologetic work with evangelism and is aware of the many people Christians address who are not open to their message.

This is a book that Os Guinness has been preparing for a lifetime to write. Throughout his life, Guinness has been presenting the Christian faith in the public square, not only with the interested but also those who are not, those who would oppose or are disinterested in the Christian message and worldview. The book reflects a summation of the lessons he has learned and his urgent sense that the pressing need for Christian witness today is a recovery of the lost art of Christian persuasion. We know how to proclaim and we know how to protest. But do we know how to persuade those with whom we differ, engaging both minds and hearts?

He contends that often we settle for mere technique, whether that be “canned” evangelistic presentations, or “canned” arguments for the faith. This often is not enough because such approaches assume the interest of the person with whom we engage. Yet to persist in the work of persuading is urgent for those who love God because our enemy seeks to rob God of glory either by questioning his existence or by impugning God with the blame for humanity’s problems.

He argues that we take the approach used by Erasmus in The Praise of Folly, becoming the “holy fool” a kind of court jester representing the kingdom of heaven pointing out the follies of unbelief, and perhaps at times following the holiest fool of all, the Lord Jesus. [Having read and reviewed this biography of Erasmus recently, my interest is piqued to read In Praise of Folly!] He then plunges into considering the anatomy of unbelief, and how often it is ultimately not simply an intellectual incapacity to believe, but a heart-driven unwillingness to believe because of what this would mean for one’s life.

This calls for different forms of persuasion depending on the person. It may mean the turning of tables on them, pressing them to the ultimate conclusions of their beliefs (for example, “relativizing the relativizers”), if they are a person who prides themselves on consistency. For others, less consistent, it may be exploring the disturbing “signals of transcendence” that point to a reality other than can be explained by their worldview. The challenge is bringing a person to a place of facing the inadequacy of the belief they’ve embraced to be willing to consider something different.

The latter chapters consist of several warnings for the advocate of Christian faith. One is the “know-it-all” attitude that is not characterized by a humility before truth. Another is hypocrisy in one’s life where one’s claims and one’s character fail to match up. And finally, he warns of the ways we may betray the faith. The four step process of embracing an assumption of modern life as superior, abandoning all that does not square with this, adapting whatever faith is left around this, and finally assimilating into the culture. What Guinness points out is the danger in our efforts to engage with the culture, that if we are not clear on what must be central and unchanging, that we will make fatal compromises.

Perhaps the most significant idea here, and one worth further development, is this idea of the “holy fool.” As Guinness observes, there have been some, like Erasmus, G.K. Chesterton, Pascal, Muggeridge, and Lewis, who with wit, humor, and incisive argument point out the weaknesses and follies of others while commending by persuasion and a kind of winsome humility the transforming nature of Christian faith. Such an approach takes both truth and people seriously, engaging heart and mind, not with canned approaches or sterile arguments, but warm-hearted persuasion that gives people reasons for heart, soul, mind and strength to love God more than all else.

One might ask, “where is God in all this?”, and at points this seems like a book on the Christian rhetorician’s art, and this alone is all that is needed. What Guinness reminds us of, is that while the Christian communicator always is dependent of the work of God in those with whom they communicate, the person may often only become aware of this as they come to the place of commitment. He writes, and with this I’ll conclude:

     “Intriguingly, this fourth stage of the journey is often when God’s presence becomes plain for the first time. The wholehearted step of faith of the new believer is far more than simply his or her own step. At one moment a seeker making her commitment knows as she has never known anything before that she is more responsible for the step of faith than for any other choice in life, and that she has never been more fully herself than in taking it. But the next moment she knows too that the One she thought was the goal was all along the guide as well. She knows that she has not so much found God as that God has found her. All the time the seeker thought she was seeking, but actually she was being sought, for God can only be known with the help of God. ‘The hound of heaven,’ as the poet Francis Thompson called God, has tracked the seeker down” (p. 248).