Os Guinness appeared on the scene in the latter part of the twentieth century as a Christian who understood that the great Commandment includes loving God with the mind.

The Gravedigger File

One of Guinness' best works was written in the mid 1980s 'The Gravedigger File'. 

The Gravedigger File was not only a brilliant expose of the weaknesses of modern Western Christianity, but drawing on the work of Enid Welsford and advice from Malcolm Muggeridge, it also offered a path out, for those prepared to take it.

'Folly' and laughter! (excerpt from the conclusion of 'The Gravedigger File')

The second fool is the fool bearer, the person who is ridiculed but resilient, the comic butt who gets slapped but is none the worse for the slapping. In Christian terms, the second fool is the one who is called a fool by the world, but who neither deserves it nor is destroyed by it. What is important, since it links the second fool to the third, is the secret of this resilience. The quicksilver spirit of the second fool springs from the Christian vision of the discrepancy between the apparent and the real, between the way things are, and the way things will be. Knowing this discrepancy, the fool bearer is always able to bounce back, and his laughter is neither bitter nor escapist, but an expression of faith. It is the kind of laughter which absorbs pain and adversity and, seeing beyond them in situations of despair, becomes a sign of hope.

The second fool is the "fool for Christ". from the Apostle Paul to Francis of Assisi and Clare to Thomas a Kempis down to the despised and persecuted believers of the 20th Century, the great tradition of fools for Christ has never lacked an heir and will play its part here too. As Reinhold Schneider wrote from his experience as a courageous Christian poet in the German Resistance movement of the thirties, "Anyone who is against the Spirit of the Age in the name of the Lord must expect that spirit to take its revenge." Wherever the gospel has been in contention they have stood like lightning rods in the storm. But seizing the initiative and turning the tables was never meant to be their brief.

Table turning is the forte of the third fool. This is the person who appears a fool, but is actually the fool maker, the one who in being ridiculous reveals. The third fool is the jester: building up expectations in one direction, he shatters them with his punch-line, reversing the original meaning and revealing an entirely different one. Masquerading perhaps as the comic butt, he turns the tables on the tyranny of names and labels and strikes subversively for freedom and for truth. From the apostle Paul (again) to Nicholas of Cusa to Erasmus to G K Chesterton, this strain of brilliant Christian has never quite died out, yet it has never been as common as the first fool nor as honoured as the second.

"Who then is wise enough for this moment in history?" my source said gripping my arm. "The one who has always been wise enough to play the fool. For when the wise are foolish, the wealthy poor, and the godly worldly, it takes a special folly to subvert such foolishness, a special wit to teach true wisdom." When the significance of this dawned on him, he said, it was as if he had been caught off guard and catapulted to the one conclusion he had not expected: all along it had been he who played the fool while the fool maker had been 'the Adversary' (Christ)