Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion by Os Guinness

Donald R. Bryant
For those nurtured on the vision of Francis Schaeffer, Os Guinness is the
incarnation of the spirit of Labri. His forte is superb cultural analysis, immersion
in the contemporary literature and artd, rooting the authentic Christian
imagination in orthodoxy.
His latest work, Fools Talk, is a summary statement of his apologetic and
evangelistic concerns. The church finds herself less and less effective in the
encounter with people who are not open, not interested or not needyin other
words, people who are closed, indifferent, hostile, skeptical or apathetic, and
therefore require persuasion. The witnessing Christian community assumes
people are open to what we have to say, maybe even interested. Not!! In much of
the advanced modern world fewer people are open today than ever. Indeed,
many are more hostile, and their hostility is greater than the Western church has
faced for centuries, he writes.
Yet, he contends, we are in the grand age of apologetics. With the
advanced pluralism of our time and the loss of a metanarrative, there is a
sociologically demonstrated proneness to conversion in the Western world.
People are converting to other worldviews all the time. Just not so much to
Christianity. The question is why not?
Perhaps McDonaldization and McDisneyization in the church, patterned
after our host culture, have something to do with it, seeking to override the will of
the consumer rather than convince the mind. McApologetics will not do - fast,
wordy, formulaic, and mathematical, complete with church growth charts. We
must return to the communication paradigm that flows out of our central beliefs
and from the models found in the prophets of the Old Testament and especially
of Jesus himself.
Our central beliefs are the five central truths of the faithcreation, the
fall, the incarnation, the cross, and the Spirit of God. True to the biblical
understanding of creation, Christian persuasion must always take account of the
human capacity for reason and the primacy of the human heart. True to the
understanding of the fall, Christian persuasion must always take account of the
anatomy of an unbelieving mind in its denial of God. True to the incarnation,
Christian persuasion always has to be primarily person-to-person and face-toface, and not argument to argument, formula to formula, media to media or
methodology to methodology. True to the cross of Jesus, Christian persuasion
has to be cross-shaped in its manner just as it is cross-centered in its message
And true to the Holy Spirit, Christian persuasion must always know and show that
the decisive power is not ours but Gods.

The title makes the point - Christian persuasion is fools talk, a crucified
style in which our weakness is rooted in Gods power, a power that will have its
day as it seeps through the cracks in human defense mechanisms, past what CS
Lewis called, the lions at the gate. (Lewis uses this metaphor as reason itself,
but I think it can apply even more broadly to attitudes that are at work off the
radar screen). Guinness models for persuasion are new and old. In our time they
are CS Lewis, Francis Schaefer, and Peter Berger of the last century and
Erasmus of Rotterdam in Martin Luthers time, particularly this book In Praise of
Folly. Erasmus was a Roman Catholic churchman who wrote this parody of the
church of his day using the backdrop of a jester, one who through humor,
inversion, and tongue-in-cheek satire criticized the moribund and sleepy church
that had lost the edges of the Gospel and the capacity to persuade and reach the
hearts of the people. The message had become so familiar and its edges so dull
that it could not cut to interior worlds. Perhaps humor would have to do. Make
them laugh before they kill you.
Christian persuasion aimed at the bored and the hostile has to recover the
art of fools talk, not of clever talk. This ministry paradigm drills deep into the rich
fields of 1 Corinthians where the Apostle Paul frames his ministry. Seen as a fool
on a stage, the audience watches him and is drawn into the story that they would
otherwise reject. Their jeering of the jester morphs into realization and wonder.
Truly, as Guinness remarks, Balaams ass is the patron of apologists.
Guinness identifies three types of fools in the Bible. There is first the fool
proper, that broad category of people who have no time for God. The second is
quite different, the fool bearer, the person who is not actually a fool at all but who
is prepared to be seen and treated as a foolthe fool for Christs sake. Here
Dostoyevskys The Idiot gives insight. This leads us to the third typethe fool
maker. Realizing that the application of power in order to persuade usually
overcomes by destroying what defies it, as Reinhold Niebuhr asserts, it takes the
full folly and weakness of the cross to find out us sinners and win us back in a
way that will not destroy us.
We are hardened, blind, deaf, deceived and foolish madmen who left to
ourselves suppress the truth. How can we ever be stopped in our rush to
another distraction? Enter the fool, who will also distract us, but it is a diversion
that leads us back to the path that takes us to ultimates. How? By leading us to
ask questions and uncovering the inconsistencies and pressures or our own
worldviews, a favorite theme of Francis Schaeffers, as Guinness points out.
He posits that the church does this by being on their ground, using their
prophets, helping them to relativize what they considered absolute. As Berger
models it, we relativize the relativizers. After all, while all their thoughts can be
thought, not all their thoughts can be lived out. The very attempt to do so creates
tension. By a working familiarity with the cultures own prophetic voices and its
own tensions, their comfortable unbelief can be subverted by using questions to

raise questions about how far down the road their own prophets can take them.
The most memorable metaphor Guinness uses is that of Arthur Koestlers.
The young Arthur was given a puzzle, a paper with a tangle of very thin red and
blue lines that at first sight looked more of a mess than a picture. But if you
covered it with a piece of transparent red tissue paper, the red lines disappeared
and the blue lines formed a picture of a clown with a dog. And if you covered it
with a blue tissue paper, the blue lines disappeared and a roaring lion emerged,
chasing the clown across the ring. There are crucial differences in perspective
between the worldviews, and the differences make a difference. Each claims to
be comprehensive on its own terms, each has its own way of explaining and
explaining away the others, and the question is how do we decide between
them?
Once people begin to question the adequacy of their adopted explanations
for reality, they can then become a seeker, looking for something more complete.
When life becomes a question, the search is on for an answer. Among the
possible answers, there must inevitably be the question of which possibility is
true. It is here that the usual method of apologetics begins to play its real role.
Until then, it sits on the sidelines. Coming into the game too early is, as they say
in football, too many players on the field. Until this happens, evangelism is
merely passing in the dark. Of course, it is the Holy Spirit who shepherds this
process. He does not show up only in regeneration but waters and tends the
heart as it awakens from its dogmatic slumber, using Immanuel Kants
phrasing.
Guinness demonstrates sensitivity to three objections. The first is that of
Reformed apologists who would contend that he is placing too high a faith in the
capacities of fallen people. Second, isnt Guinness just being clever, the very
thing he eschews? Isnt he just McDonalds in another guise, treating the other as
an object to be tricked into conversion by adroit questions? Guinness is most
sensitive to this objection. The third, objection is that his apologetics demands a
high level of education and not available to pew guy, who, after all, in the New
Testament is the primary means of Kingdom expansion through Gospel witness.
He rejects this implication, but, alas, the everyday laymen will find the book too
slow for his tastes as Guinness does what he does best, cultural analysis - book,
authors, films, the arts, etc. I, for one, do not believe that his method is obscure,
but it cannot be described as readily accessible to everyman. Thats okay. He
influences our method by a more trickle down effect than a direct lunge at the
church with a precise score. Thought shapers within the church read Guinness.
They will take it the next step.