Preaching: Your most recent book is entitled Prophetic Untimeliness: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance (Baker Books). One thing that pastors will all relate to in this book is your discussion of time — the way that time seems to control our lives. I loved the observation of the Filipino that Americans are people who walk around carrying gods on their wrists. That says a whole lot about who we are as a culture.

Guinness: If you look at the impact of modernity, many people think of things like cars and television, which are very obvious. Actually the oldest and most powerful innovation is the clock. It was invented in 1400. If you think of it in comparison with sundials or water clocks or whatever, it brought precision. There was no precision with sundials. In the night when there was no sun you didn't have any clock at all. It brought coordination — railway timetables coordinating things. Above all it brought pressure. Everything had to be done. Now redeeming the time means packing as much time as you possible can and maximizing and making time efficient with time management staff and so on.

This has not only shaped our world on practical levels — all of us today live crazy lives. We're living stupid lives that are so busy. It's also affected our psychology and philosophy. The Greeks were civilized — they were spatial — and the barbarians were non-Greeks, they were non-spatial, geographical. Now civilized is in contrast to primitive or reactionary; in other words, it is not spatial — it's temporal. You see how our views of time shapes our mentalities. The modern view of relevance is this idea of being absolutely on top of all the trends — the latest is the greatest. If you have mastered all the emerging trends you've got life by the throat. This is absolutely ridiculous. What we have done is reversed the traditional way of seeing things.

Traditionally you take the past, present and the future. Human beings thought you knew a fair amount about the past — it was there. You didn't know much about the present. You knew nothing about the future. In our idiocy we have reversed that. So the idea is the past doesn't matter. You have the extremes like Henry Ford who said history is bunk. Many evangelicals live like that. Bill Moyers says Americans know everything about the last 24 hours — thanks to CNN — not that much about the last 24 years, and nothing about the last 24 centuries.

In the scriptures history is incredibly important in remembering as a source of trust and obedience. Many modern people not only ignore the past but they idolize the present. What's ever-newer is definitely truer. Any change must be progress. This is absolute idiocy. Now we even have the insanity to pretend we know the future. So you look at the new wave of "pastor-futurists" — and they will be nameless. One of them writes in his book that he can put his ear to the ground and hear the future. We do not know the future. This sort of idiocy has been swept up in the cult of relevance and our current culture, without our realizing it, has made us very worldly.