A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. Alan Hartley is writing his Master’s thesis at Regent College, and is a member of Knox Church, Toronto.
The Gravedigger File: Papers on the Subversion of the Modem Church, Os Guinness. InterVarsity Press, 1983, 238 pp.
Just as Tom Sawyer, with some smooth talking, conned Huckleberry Finn into painting a fence for him, so too the Director of Darkness, with minimal effort, has duped the church into digging its own grave. This revelation comes in The Gravedigger File, a series of classified memoranda turned over to the church by a defecting Satanic secret agent. The church, by being uncritically identified with the modern world, and much to Satanic glee, has subverted itself from within. The enemy sees this with great clarity, having initiated the scam, while Christians, suffering the ‘Sandman Effect’, sleep on.
Though the plot outline reads like a comedian’s rendition of John Le Carre writing the Screwtape Letters, there is a good deal more to it. Os Guinness is jesting in earnest about the infection introduced by the church’s cultural involvement. His thesis is not that modern culture is inherently inimical to Christianity, but that the church’s cultural involvement has brought cultural contamination, being conformed to the world rather than transforming it. The disease is worldliness and the prognosis is not encouraging. And he presents this key point from the vantage of the Devil, in a very readable, engaging analysis of the modern church.
He distinguishes between secularism, a philosophic position, and secularization, a sociological phenomenon. The book is primarily about the sociological process of secularization in the church, and not about the intellectual problems of classical apologetics. Christian faith may be intellectually credible, but the church is ceasing to be plausible by losing the cultural distinctiveness that Christian faith necessarily entails. This limiting of the scope of the Lordship of Jesus Christ happens by means of a wrong identification of the church with modern culture.
Guinness paints a big picture, relating very diverse phenomena. He deals with the privatization of faith, pluralization, civil and consumer religion, the process of seduction by the world and much else. His sociological tools grant a wealth of insight, but they also have an ideological bias which paradoxically tends to underestimate the power of ideas in the subversion of the church. The analysis is comprehensive and compelling, but it is less than convincing that these sociological tools offer a fully Christian perspective.
The imaginative form of the book has a Satanic sociologist write the memoranda. The Christian who has received them from the defecting agent adds an afterword. And the force of the afterword is to disavow in some measure the analysis of the memoranda. The afterword is more hopeful, less certain that the church has been successfully subverted. There is a real discrepancy between the devil’s memoranda and the conclusions made about them by the Christian publisher. This is due in part to the difficulty of the literary form, and perhaps to an intention to confront and then encourage the reader. But Guinness also seems unwilling to finally accept the conclusions of his analysis. The double entendres entailed by the literary form create considerable ambiguity and we are left to puzzle out the validity of the Satanic agent’s view of the church.
Nonetheless the book offers a comprehensive perspective on the modern church. From a sense of history, it begins to generate principles of action in the present. It provides a powerful set of analytical concepts. And it most helpfully raises a host of questions about what it means to be rightly “in” the world but not “of’ the world. The Gravedigger File invites and sustains careful reading.