paradise misnamed

Theology After Google

I’m almost embarrassed to list these differences, because they’re so obvious. But here’s the amazing fact: Denominations aren’t changing. In most cases they’re not planning for and investing in new forms of church for this brave new world. (There are some great exceptions.)

I find it a bit ironic that he should refer to the things happening today as a "brave new world".

A few years ago, I tried to read Huxley's book. I didn't get very far into it, for whatever reason. But I did get enough into it to get some idea of what that 'brave new world' was like--people kept docile in a kind of drug-induced haze; babies mass-produced on a kind of test-tube assembly line; people's lives pretty much engineered from the get-go.

In other words, like Orwell's "1984", Huxley's "Brave New World" is dystopic. It isn't a paeon in praise of that brave new world, but a siren in warning of it, to keep us from going there.

At the risk of having both the shrink and the seer do flips in their graves, perhaps we could say that this choice of words by the Ooze author is both Freudian and prophetic.

If there are "some great exceptions" "planning for and investing in new forms of church for this brave new world", what does this mean? Since this writer seems to be in the Emergent and liberal camps, why should a conservative like myself be overly impressed with his assertions? Could his statements about the death of the traditional church be like Carville's statements last year about the the GOP being dead? Is it not more wishful thinking than actual fact? Is it that, having gone over to the liberal and Emergent sides, he simply may be seeing things wrongly?

Not that the Church is very perfect. Yet I will not thunder as if from on high about the supposed laxity and luke-warmed-ness of the Church. I've known to many Christians whose lives are not going to be famous, who lived quietly and did what they could in the circles they were in, and I have too much respect for them to belittle them and those like them.

I think that, for all it's faults, the Church is far from dead, but I think this writers wants people to think it is. And he has reason for wanting them to think that, for even wanting to speed it's death. And it will become clearer soon, I hope.