Os Guinness: Die Gefahr der „messbare Ergebnisse“

OS Power Nachfolgend ein Zitat aus dem neuen Buch von Os Guinness:

Os Guinness: Renaissance – The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times, Inter Varsity, 2014, 187 S.

Every age is fooled by its own fashions, and it is time to subject this modern idolatry of opinion and numbers to decisive Christian thinking. For modern people, numbers are the key to control, but humans are more than aides de camp to the almighty computer. We would of course scorn anyone who put their half-baked preferences, momentary whims, and brazen desires above serious concerns for truth. So why do we bow to opinion polls that are mostly just such emotions gathered with statistical scientific precision and expressed under the halo of grand numbers?

Consider the trend toward numbers in the light of original sin, for example, and it would be obvious that any democratic people’s “we” is just as corruptible, if not more so than any autocratic ruler’s “I.” If we do not want mass democracy to degenerate into a new and subtle tyranny of King Demos and his regime of numbers, we must recognize and resist the trend. Ten million ignorant assertions, even when magnified and accelerated in a hundred million tweets and “likes,” still never add up to truth or wisdom.

What matters here, however, is not the danger to democracy but to the church. We therefore need to trace the overall damage of such worldly thinking. It develops Christians with an eye for the bandwagon rather than the Bible, for popularity rather than principle, and with a greater sensitivity to horizontal pressure than to vertical authority. It renders Christians vulnerable to the mob-masters of the virtual age, the high-tech wizards who can corral the opinion of millions within minutes. (This is a crucial factor in the cataclysmic suddenness of the triumph of the sexual revolution over the Jewish and Christian faiths that have shaped Western civilization for 2,000 years.) The result is a church befuddled over the difference between success and faithfulness, hesitant to buck the going trends, fearful to stick her neck out and find herself in the minority, and reluctant to risk the loneliness of pursuing the true and the excellent regardless of all outcomes—in short, a church fatally weakened because it is worldly. In today’s world, the courage of Athanasius contra mundum would be scorned as Athanasius marooned on the wrong side of history.

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