In the modern world, the ultimate inspiration is the machine.

The culture spawned by the Enlightenment, with its obsession with rationalism, abstraction, and measurement, is a culture devoted to control. Machines enable standardization and predictability, along with the application of intense power, giving human beings a sense of far greater control over their destinies.

Henry Adams, in his classic memoir of the 19^th century, gave one expression of this (then) new inspiration. In the ancient cultures of the west, he said, the ultimate inspiration was the Madonna - the beautiful, mysterious, fertile woman. But in his lifetime, the inspiring symbol became the "dynamo" - electrical power, the amazing forces harnessed by technology. We no longer affected our destinies by participating in an organic order, but by dominating nature.

Adams was impressed by the dynamo, but never loved it.

In the 20^th century, the modernist love of the machine produced ugliness and inhumanity. People were expected to live and work in the cold, uniform landscape of Le Corbusier's urban vision. People had to cope with the hell of bureaucracies. In its worst forms, modernism produced the totalitarian societies of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

In the postmodern world, then, the machine is not an inspiration but a monster - the more frightening for being cold and logical. Think HAL 9000.

The machine is driving many of the Emergents' reactions to contemporary life. They hate rationalism as the driving force of uniformity, standardization, and other killing "absolutes." They seek to recover joy amid the ruins of human society, and they seek to do so particularly through Christian mysticism and artistry.

In A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren devotes a chapter to explaining, "Why I Am Mystical/Poetic." He remarks that, early in college, he switched majors from philosophy to literature (p 147). "Philosophy, as I experienced it in the 1970s at my large state institution, was engaged in the prose language of the scientist; the wisdom I was seeking was found in the wilder language of the poet. Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar said it like this, ‘God needs prophets in order to make himself known, and all prophets are necessarily artistic. What a prophet has to say can never be said in prose.'"

Notice who the bad guys are in McLaren's statements: a "large state institution," those who use "prose language," and "the scientist." The courtiers of machines. The good guys are the "wilder" prophets and poets who don't fit in the prose world. The good guys have "wisdom."

In the growing furor over Emergent Christianity, this hatred of the modernist aesthetic does not get enough notice.

From what I have read of their views so far, the visceral rejection of things suburban, standardized, and synthetic is the genuine wellspring of Emergent yearning for a new kind of Christian. Emergents are rightly horrified by the wasteland modernism has created.

I wonder what McLaren means by saying that he pursues "the wilder language of the poet," but I do not wonder why he pursues it. Modern life is barren.

Specifically, Emergent Christians are reacting against evangelical culture.

The megachurch is nothing if not a creature of modernism. It is designed by men and women who live by numbers, communicate in slogans, and dream in blueprints. The megachurch is another machine. As a place where the whole person can be fed - mind, body, and emotions - the megachurch, like other modernist visions, is a failure.

Again, I wonder what McLaren and others might mean by the new directions they articulate, but I do not wonder why they seek something new. Evangelicalism as it currently exists is dying.

So here's my problem: McLaren proposes disastrous redefinitions of the faith in reaction to a profound need - a need most conservative evangelicals care nothing about, the need for artistic beauty. I fear McLaren and others will succeed in selling their theological wares. The stifling superficiality of evangelical culture makes their case for them. 

But the success of Emergent theology can be undermined, I believe, if evangelicals start applying not only biblical truth but also biblical beauty, biblical artistry to the life of churches. After all, regardless of whether one thinks they had wilder language (I happen not to think so), the prophets were indeed artists.