Confound Them!: Diabolical Plans for the Church

A.J. Pell is rector of Christ Church in Hope, B.C., and a lecturer in
the Anglican Studies Programme at Regent College in Vancouver.

On the leaf before the title page, Herbert O’Driscoll dedicates this
book to C.S. Lewis, and from that point the reader is drawn into a
Lewis-like book of letters from a supervising devil to a subordinate.
This time the target of diabolical schemes is not the Christian, but the
church. Found in the office files of an Anglican church by a priest on
the verge of retirement, these 28 letters cover a range of issues
currently facing the Anglican Church of Canada, from the challenge of
postmodernity to wrangles over liturgy, to differences about sexual
practices, to lawsuits against residential schools.

O’Driscoll uses the letters to argue that Rene Descartes’s
autonomous individual (“I think therefore I am”) has led to the loss
of an understanding of Christianity as a community of faith. Where the
sense of community is lost, differences become huge barriers to the
progress of the Gospel. Thus, differences in theology, or the practice
of spirituality, or liturgical expression become expressed in ways that
prioritize one’s own choices and denigrate the choices of others. This
state of affairs serves the purposes of the Master of Darkness, not the
Lord of Light.

It is hard to think of a divisive issue in contemporary Anglicanism
that O’Driscoll has not identified. At times, however, he displays
some biases that run counter to his argument. While he lances the
frequent Anglican contempt for both evangelical and fundamentalist
churches, he shows his own bias against the evangelical and charismatic
wings of the Anglican church by failing to see any note of grace in
Bible study that speaks “to the personal dimensions of their lives”
or teaching that calls people to a shared personal experience of the
Holy Spirit’s power. Despite this small personal display of bias,
O’Driscoll has provided readers with a helpful tool for examining
their own stories on the issues of the day.