Now is the Time!

As I look over the Christian church across the world, I join God as He "sits in His heaven and laughs".  What strikes me as humorous is the determination of so many to make some past insights meaningful despite their terrible deficiencies.   Catholics are intent on ushering Thomas and Augustine into the 21st century.  Lutherans try to make Luther a theological hero. Presbyterians still try to solve Calvin's predestination.  Evangelicals pursue the 20th century insistence on the Five Fundamentals.  All of them are applying some outworn idea to a new world.

I think of the seventeenth century as the beginning of the modern era.  That century saw the urgency of the people replacing the power of the monarchy.

That century saw Galileo challenge the authority of tradition and dogma. That century brought the Pilgrims insisting that God's revelation does not depend on kings and councils. A new age was being born.

Call it the age of science - or of democracy - it upended the the formation of truth by crediting the experience of investigative people, researchers or scientists.  One curious event demonstrates the big change: Fra Lippo Lippi was dismissed from his monastery because he drew a picture of a tree with the green leaves he saw instead of the brown leaves required by medieval artistic standards.

We have lived in the midst of this learning community for several centuries.  And we are still reluctant to let of our nostalgic dependence on the past.  This week's news has focused on pageantry with the Queen of England and an obsession with the Pope.  They reflect our reluctance to move away from ancient authority to modern discovery. 

How can the church speak to people today when its language and ideas and information are rooted in a different language?  How can people schooled in evolution and space travel and computers and relativity and ego analysis subdue their intelligence and their culture to embrace that outworn past?

God must be laughing!