Therefore, I’m going to resurrect some of my old reviews that I think fulfill all these functions.  I hope you will be reintroduced to some old friends or helped to find a new one. 

Last Call for Liberty: How America’s Genius for Freedom has Become its Greatest Threatby Os Guinness.  Downers Grove, Il.: InterVarsity Press, 2018 (308 pp., $27.00, hardback).

reviewed by Donald T. Williams

Os Guinness, who got his start as a worker with Francis Schaeffer at L’Abri in the 1960s, has emerged as one of the top Christian cultural critics and political analysts in the world.  As a British expat living in the U. S., he looks at our country as an outsider and an admirer of the way we have preserved and defended human freedom since our beginnings in the unpleasantness of 1776. Now concerned at the collapse of the deliberative tradition of civil discourse and the increasing polarization in our politics, along with the precarious position of First-Amendment rights in the campus culture of political correctness, he has written an important book whose stirring and needed warning risks being muted by its diffuse and wordy style.  Lovers of America and of liberty can only hope it will be heeded anyway.

Guinness gives his own more nuanced version of Schaeffer’s familiar narrative from the classic book and film series How Should We Then Live?  For Schaeffer, the “Christian consensus” of America’s founding, expressed in the grounding of human rights in their inalienable endowment by the Creator in the Declaration of Independence, allowed this nation to avoid for many years the dilemma of history: that freedom inevitably leads to license and license to statist tyranny in an attempt to reimpose order.  Schaeffer contrasted the American Revolution, influenced by the “Christian consensus” in the form of the “Reformation base,” with the French Revolution, which sought to ground the rights of man on a humanist base.  The American Revolution made possible a balance of freedom and form based on inalienable rights received from God and protected by the separation of powers, while the humanist French Revolution, without that base, led to the Reign of Terror and ultimately to the Russian Revolution and Soviet tyranny.  With the loss of the Christian consensus that Schaeffer saw already beginning to happen in the 1970s, America’s heritage of freedom and inalienable rights would be threatened.  Schaeffer saw only two possible paths out of the 1970s: either a reaffirmation of the Christian consensus or an increased threat of an imposed order that would undermine inalienable human rights while preserving “the outward forms of constitutionality.” 

Forty years later, Schaeffer’s words sound prophetic.  Guinness does not reference them, but gives his own analysis in his own terms.  It is amazingly parallel to Schaeffer’s.  It brings the discussion up to date with a treatment of current threats to freedom of speech and religion.  It also adds depth to Schaeffer’s account at certain points, while proving less incisive at others.

Guinness finds the genius of the American founding in its embrace of a covenantal concept of government that ultimately derives from the Hebrews and the Old Testament.  (Guinness is not claiming that Jews had a lot influence directly on the Revolution, but rather that the Founders, whether Christian or Deist, embraced a Hebrew concept that had its origin in the Old Testament history and was communicated to their contemporary world by Christianity.) In the Sinai covenant, an objective moral order was revealed by God and freely embraced as binding by the community, which gives a basis for government by the consent of the governed without the relativism that often accompanies that idea.  The American Declaration of Independence reflects such a structure with its language of inalienable rights endowed by the Creator, while the French Revolution tried to achieve the same results without that foundation.  And the rest, as they say, is history.

            Guinness updates Schaeffer’s account and adds richness and nuance to it by relating it to Hebrew covenantalism.  These are significant contributions.  Unfortunately, two features of the new book weaken it.  First, the style is marred by an excessive addiction to the rhetorical question.  It is an effective rhetorical device when it is not overused.  But my impression is that there are about seventy-two of them here, each one asked some thirty or forty times with only slight variations in wording to alleviate the repetitiveness.  (This count is probably hyperbolic, but you get the picture.)  I found myself rolling my eyes at each next batch of them, intruding on the argument in every chapter.  There are, in sum, maybe 200 pages of really good content hiding in the 308 pages of the book.  It would have more impact if it were not so diffuse.   

Second, and more importantly, Guinness is less forthright than Schaeffer was about what is to be done about this loss of this national consensus about its covenantal foundations.  For Schaeffer the need was a restoration of the Christian consensus by the preaching of the Gospel with a more effective cultural apologetic, along with a stressed understanding that Christianity cannot be embraced as a means to an end, even the preservation of freedom.  It is only really embraced at all if it is embraced as truth.  Guinness gets more vague and nebulous than that as he nears the end of his argument.  “My own conviction after several decades of observing American public life is plain:  The key to the remedy of the American crisis of freedom lies in a fresh exploration of the Hebrew notions of creation and covenant that lie behind both American freedom and the U. S. Constitution” (270, emphasis in the original).  My response is, yes, but how is that going to happen short of the church being challenged to take up the mantle of the Great Commission in a new and radical way?  And Guinness stops short of saying anything that pointed.  Sadly.

Last Call for Liberty is an important statement that is worth wrestling with.  Those who resonated with Schaeffer’s analysis forty years ago will find this updating of it both fascinating and enlightening.  Those who are coming to those ideas fresh will find them expressed in a contemporary idiom whose relevance they will be able to appreciate.  Unfortunately, the book pulls some of its punches and thus may fail to have the impact it might have had.  But don’t let that stop you.  Learn its lessons and make sure your own punches hit home.    

Donald T. Williams, PhD, is Professor Emeritus at Toccoa Falls College.  He is the author of thirteen books, including Deeper Magic: The Theology behind the Writings of C. S. Lewis (Square Halo Books, 2016), An Encouraging Thought: The Christian Worldview in the Writings of J. R. R. Tolkien (Christian Publishing House, 2018), The Young Christian’s Survival Guide: Common Questions Young Christians are Asked about God, the  Bible, and  the Christian Faith Answered (Christian Publishing House, 2019), and Ninety-Five Theses for a New Reformation: A Road Map for Post-Evangelical Christianity (Semper Reformanda Publications, 2021).