It’s always a pleasure to interview Os Guinness, whose latest book is called The Last Christian on Earth: Uncover the Enemy’s Plot to Undermine the Church. It’s a new edition of his 1983 work, The Gravedigger Thesis. Below he explains what he’s trying to accomplish in the book and how the Church in the Western world can escape from its Babylonian Captivity. What do you perceive to be the core challenge to the Western Church in the 21st century?
The chief challenge for the church in our time could be summarized in three words: integrity, credibility, and civility. This book is about the first, and our need to recover a faith that can prevail with the integrity and effectiveness in the advanced modern era. Everyone mentions rightly that the church is exploding in the Global South, while failing badly in Europe and faltering in the US. But the church in the Global South is largely pre-modern, and the major reason for the weakness of the church in the West is captivity to the spirit and systems of the modern world. Put differently, much of the church in the West is in a profound Babylonian captivity. It has become deeply worldly, like the European church before the Reformation.
Examples abound on all sides, though many of the crasser and more blatant ones are actually less damaging. For example, anyone with their eyes open can see the link between modern consumerism and the horrors of the health and wealth gospels. But fewer people have analyzed the links between our modern views of time, “fast life,” the “culture of immediacy,” and the equal errors of our recent Evangelical craze for “change,” “relevance,” “innovation,” and “thinking outside the box.” The result is that in the last few decades, many Evangelicals have become second only to the extremes of the Protestant mainline in the way they are energetically breeding forms of worldliness. So I believe we are in dire need of revival and reformation.
What The Last Christian on Earth does is describe the structures and spirit of the modern world, and show how they are the shoals on which much faith is foundering because it is not aware of them. This means that, contrary to many of good Reformed friends, theology alone is not the answer. Nor is having a “Christian worldview” the answer by itself, because that ignores the social context in which the worldview is lived. If “sound theology” and “thinking Christianly” lack an understanding of the distortions of the modern world, they simply will not be effective in the way their proponents hope. We must recognize the distorting structures of our modern world, and then with God’s help, overcome them with powerful Christian living inspired by deep Christian theology and thinking.
But my book is not so much a call for improved “cultural analysis,” as it is an open and passionate call for Evangelical renewal. The issue is faithfulness and discipleship, and how we are following the call of Jesus in our extraordinary modern times. I hope many people will finish the book and drop to their knees.
What is the “gravedigger thesis”?
The “gravedigger thesis” (which gave the book its original title) is the notion that the Christian faith is the single strongest contributor to the rise of the modern world, yet the church has fallen captive to the modern world it helped to create. So as the church accommodates to the world uncritically, it becomes its own gravedigger. There are parallel versions of the same idea in Cotton Mather as well as Karl Marx. For Mather, early Puritanism created prosperity, only for prosperity to undermine Puritanism. I would argue that only such a wide-ranging analysis does justice to the full raft of problems we are facing today. Without taking such cultural analysis into account, other proposed remedies will always fall short of our hopes and prayers.
Justin Taylor
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