Like Alexis de Tocqueville, Os Guinness is a figure I have heard quoted often in books and interviews for several years but never read directly myself - until now.
His 2021 work, 'The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai’s Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom,' is then really my first experience considering his views and appraisals in something approaching their entirety.
On that note, the premise of Guinness's 'The Magna Carta of Humanity' is so profound as to need more consideration and mulling over before I can give anything approaching a satisfying verdict, but there is a lot here. And the reputation Guinness has for thinking big picture and communicating about the complex relationships between our beliefs and ideas and the reality we experience is well-deserved.
For instance, have you considered how closely related what the Bolsheviks did in Russia and what the Maoists did in China was patterned after what happened in France in 1793? Guinness clearly has, and he invites you to join him in such considerations - not as some arcane ivory tower thought exercise, but as an entirely practical way of viewing our current circumstances with BLM, Antifa, Progressivism, Cancel Culture, CRT, Surveillance Capitalism, and the censorship of conservatives online and IRL, to name just a few features of modern political discourse and policy-making.
It's worth noting also that Guinness wrote his work before the recent troubles in Canada, now possibly on their way to the U.S. via another Freedom Convoy American-style and however the Democrats under Joe Biden feel lucky enough to respond to that.
Yet the bend toward totalitarianism based on the elevation of Reason to the place which should be occupied by God alone is easy to anticipate when we look at how men who have played God throughout history have acted when questioned about the treatment of their inalienable rights.
As Guinness puts it succinctly, "Only when God is God can we be us." And what he means by this is that whether governed or governing, we don't relate to one another in a fully human nor humane way when we reject the basis for human rights - the divine authority of God Almighty.
The dignity which each man, woman, and child possesses by virtue of being God's possession, and made in God's image, must be understood in the context of the righteousness of the Lord of all Creation Himself in order to be preserved and protected.
Just so, Guinness argues that better than comparing and contrasting the American Revolution and the French Revolution directly is something which had not occurred to me - comparing history's greatest liberation of an enslaved people at Sinai, where God took a people who were no people and made them His own, delivering them out of 400-years of hard bondage to the Pharaoh of Egypt and giving to them the Promised Land and His covenant.
This is a more apt comparison in many ways, not least if Guinness is right to say that the revolution at Sinai was the inspiration for the revolution in the thirteen colonies which became the United States. As I was reminded in reading 'The Magna Carta of Humanity,' the first proposed Great Seal of the United States [before 14 August 1776] was Moses leading the children of Israel through the Red Sea, Pharaoh and his chariots visible as well, with the motto inscribed.
"Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God."
