Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion, by Os Guinness.
I will never promote a book above scripture or encourage you to read something in place of scripture, but there are many instructive books that help us to understand and apply it. Read in the light of God's Word, some books can be very helpful. This is one such book.
... and wow, what writing! Even on my first reading, I bounced back and forth several times through what I'd read, re-reading and highlighting passages of impact. The problem is, I don't want to highlight the entire book!
Guinness' entire thesis is based on the premise that we have lost our ability to persuade people of their need of a saviour, and he spends some time proving this thesis, then outlines a comprehensive method for overcoming it.
Across 12 eloquently written chapters, Guinness builds a case. He even addresses the problem of education, knowledge and eloquence and how these attributes get in the way.
"Just as to a man with a hammer, everything is a nail, so in the age of science and technology, everything is a scientific and technical matter to be solved by scientific and technical means." (p.31)Guinnes denies that he is a scholar or academic, yet he is a highly educated man with a Ph.D:
"Many of us today, and I include myself, are not naturally adept at creative persuasion. But the reason is not that we are not educated enough, but that we have too much education of the wrong sort." (p.177)Interspersed with a very healthy humour, the book contains many challenges that strike at the heart:
In talking about persuasion through story-telling and paradigm shift, he says,
"The method acts like a spring-loaded trap that promises cheese but delivers a coup de grace to the unsuspecting mouse" (p.42) and,
"The cross, Martin Luther wrote, was the devil's mousetrap. The devil smelt cheese, and wham, felt steel." (p.72)In his section "Cross-centred and Cross-shaped", Guinness says that proclamation and persuasion must never be separated, but that Christian advocacy must ...
"... be shaped ... by five central truths of the faith - creation, the fall, the incarnation, the cross and the Spirit of God", (p.27),and he goes on to expound each of these pillars in the context of proclaiming the gospel through persuasion. I found this section very helpful and practical, for example, he says,
"True to the incarnation, Christian persuasion always has to be primarily person-to-person and face-to-face, not argument to argument, formula to formula ..." (p.27)This concept reminded me of Screwtape's description of a man in C.S. Lewis' Screwtape letters,
"Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy; and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will." (Ch. 6)Guinness gives warning (The Defence Never Rests) and Exhortation (The Way of the Open Hand) and beautifully explains bible passages to encourage our Christian Advocacy work. The most striking of these is the account of Jesus telling the parable of the vineyard (Lk. 20:9-19 and Guinness pp.179-181)
In wrapping up, Guinness gives a very good and practical overview of the psychology of the mind, and how an understanding of peoples' thought processes can bring an individual to faith.
I have two criticisms of this book. The first is relatively minor in comparison with the second; there is the loose quote which Guinness uses of Frankfurt on page 192, which I would argue does not add value to the thesis, and on page 242, Guinness apparently refers to the God of the Christian faith and the god of Islam as one-in-the-same. His intended meaning is not clear in this section though. This needs to be carefully measured against scripture. An explanation that I found helpful is here: https://carm.org/god-christianity-islam
This has to be one of the best books I have read in terms of thesis, purpose, flow and structure. It's a very academic book, yet it's not! This is a 5-star book. There's so much more I could write, but the post is long enough - you'll just have to read the book if you want more of it.
(For those cynical readers who wonder whether I was given a free book: No! I purchased this book. I'd tell you if I was given the book to review! I have used an e-book version on Kindle.)