[...] Dan Edelen at Cerulean Sanctum: You won’t find a church with a Fifty Year Plan. Or a Twenty, for that matter. Long-range [...]

[...] Sanctum is blogging an interesting series right now which was the inspiration for this post. In Busting Myths about Christianity, Dan says this: So whither the Christian intellectual? Do any still [...]

I’ve read Wells. I like him. He’s one of the guys who inspired me to think harder about the state of the Church.

But ultimately, his focus on ecclesiology and theology prevents Wells from being the kind of multi-disciplined intellectual that can speak on a national stage. He’s primarily an academic rather than the type of philosopher/thinker that can talk on a wide variety of topics. He’s also rather narrow in some regards. By that I mean he’s got a singular view and he’s locked into it, as if nothing could ever shake him enough to contemplate other options. In other words, he’s not visionary. I don’t think that lack is good in a true intellectual. Wells is not a Francis Schaeffer-type. We need someone like Schaeffer more so than Wells.

This is not to denigrate Wells. Like I said, I’ve gotten a lot from Wells’s ecclesiastical views, but he doesn’t typically delve into issues like the economy, the environment, and other social issues.

Lastly, while he’s written many things against postmodernism, he seems utterly resistant to developing the kind of thought patterns required of someone who must speak to a postmodern age. Schaeffer did this brilliantly, but Wells can only critique; he can’t meet postmoderns where they are. He’s too stuck in modernism to bridge the gap. He most definitely sees the problems, but his solutions won’t work correctly in a world that thinks in a whole different way. Wells keeps shouting for the genie to get back in the bottle. That’s not going to happen. We need better.