SWNID generally eschews prediction, as predictive engagement by definition undermines the "Seldom Wrong" moniker. We do, however, like to make predictions about others' predictions.
We predict that Spencer will be wrong about more than he's right about.
Not that he isn't an acute observer of Christianity's present excesses, inconsistencies, failures and hypocrisies. Not that some of what he says can't or won't happen.
It's just that such predictions, to be reliable, need several kinds of knowledge that Spencer or anyone else except God can't know:
- A thorough, not just impressionistic, evaluation of the present.
- A thorough, not just impressionistic, knowledge of the past, as one seeks analogies to the present.
- Perhaps most obviously, knowledge of what will happen in the future that will change the future in ways unimaginable in the present.
Like all prognosticators, Spencer reflects his tastes in his predictions. Trends he doesn't like (e.g., engagement in politics) will prompt decline. Churches he doesn't like (e.g. therapeutic megachurches) will disappear or morph into something even more dastardly. Foibles that he deems fatal among those whom he critiques (e.g., nominalism and nationalism among Evangelicals) will somehow not affect groups he chooses as winners (e.g. the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, hardly free of nominalism or nationalism by anyone's measure). As usual, the predictions say more about the predictor than the future.
Meanwhile, someone is more or less claiming--again--that he is a prophet. David Wilkerson, stirringly portrayed by Pat Boone in the classic film The Cross and the Switchblade, has been widely quoted in the media as predicting an imminent catastrophe for the Northeast, the very neighborhood where his well-heeled Times Square Church ministers to the down-and-out.
Wilkerson does this kind of thing every once in awhile. Nearly a quarter century ago, a friend gave us a book by Wilkerson, an unreadable conglomeration of indiscriminate condemnations of everything contemporary and predictions of imminent social and economic collapse entitled Set the Trumpet to Thy Mouth. The book was reprinted in 2001, proving yet again that nothing reappears quite so often--or so profitably--as failed prognostications.
1 comment:
I suspect Spencer falls in the long and established line of alarmist evangelical overstaters. I think most people will greet the concerns he voices with a unanimous yawn. People outside of mainstream evangelicalism don't concern themselves with the sort of things that he supposes. He assumes a level of sophistication conspicuously absent from the minds of most people. I suggest he find friends outside of the church that might find his "monkness" strange and awkward.
A good example of the more that is to come can be found in Frank Rich's op-ed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/opinion/15rich.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=culture%20warriors&st=cse.
As much as it pains me to agree with Frank Rich, I think his observation is fairly on point.
BFox
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