God has called us to this moment in history. We are not mere victims of the mindless forces of history, as secularists believe. Truth Rising explains both the civilizational moment and how Christians can be people of courage and agents of renewal.

Historian and philosopher Will Durant, author of the epic eleven-volume series The Story of Civilization, famously said, “From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.”

Civilizations, historically speaking, do rise and fall. Our museums and history books are full of legends and artifacts from once-dominant civilizations that are now reduced to ruins. These all were, at some point, detached from the ideals, institutions, and activities that gave them life and led them to flourish. Now, they are no more.

With respect to Durant, the turn toward barbarism may be quick, but civilizations do not collapse overnight. Rather, most reach a critical moment from which they do not recover. In the new documentary Truth Rising, scheduled for release Friday, September 5, author and social critic Os Guinness describes how and why the West has reached this “civilizational moment.”

I recently interviewed Guinness and asked him to explain what this means, especially for Christians:

This idea is the sort of Biblical sense of time—generation, year, day, hour, moment—and the challenge of reading the signs of the times. Take our Lord’s weeping over Jerusalem because “they missed God’s moment when the time came.” You know I’ve always had a sense we need to understand the times.

Some people are misusing “civilizational moment” as a fancy word for the present moment. No, it has a real definition. A civilizational moment is that period, not a day, a period when a civilization loses touch with what made it great. And when that happens, it faces three broad choices. Either it must renew the civilization, replace it with an equally adequate one, or decline and fall.

Now clearly, our Western civilization is a Christian civilization that owes a lot to the Greeks and the Romans. But its principal source is the Gospel rooted in Judaism.

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