“After a certain age most people are uncomfortable with new ideas. That certain age varies by person, but if you’re over fifty-five (mentally) you probably won’t enjoy this thought experiment. If you’re eighty going on thirty-five, you might like it. If you’re twenty-three, your odds of liking it are very good.”
This excerpt from God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment by Scott Adams, is pasted on the web site of one of the emergent churches in Pittsburgh, www.churchreincarnated.com. Standing alone at the top of the web page, the quote projects an edgy image and warns the viewer that this church is going to push the buttons of nearly everyone, and if you’re no longer mentally malleable, you might as well avoid the church altogether.
And what about the statement in its context? Adams, well known for his comic strip Dilbert, writes a fictional account of a young deliveryman drawn into a metaphysical journey by an old man he encountered while delivering a package. The dialogue that ensues is intended to lure the reader into a complex “thought experiment” about ultimate reality.
The quote above, in which the author introduces what the reader is about to encounter, exposes Scott Adams’ hubris, in imagining that he can toy with the deepest enigmas of life in such as way as to explode the shoddy thinking of the great philosophers and theologians who have preceded him. In a later book Adams pokes fun at himself with the title, Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!: Cartoonist Ignores Helpful Advice. Did he know he was overreaching with his “thought experiment?”
Adams knows his market, however. In soliciting twenty-somethings, he is pretty sure he can get away with a postmodern presentation of reality that, while slippery with the truth, is appealing in its ambiguity. I’m finding a lot of that in the emergent churches: slipperiness and ambiguity. Nobody is going to disagree with what is presented because it is generic and generous (I hear the word generous a lot), and besides, no one who attends is in the mood for precision of thought, anyway.
So, they’re right: I’m over fifty-five and I don’t really care to wander around the universe aimlessly. But here’s my dilemma: I have been commissioned to bring the gospel to those who do.
Posted in Missional Church
