internet v. incarnation

I had the privilege today of hearing Os Guinness speak, a prominent evangelical Christian social critic and author. During his talk (on how the Church can maintain integrity while engaging our modern society) he related how a young person had said to him, “Why didn’t God just wait for the internet?” The topic was how to best communicate the Gospel, the Good News that is at the core of the Christian message, that God offers a relationship to us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

This brought up an interesting comparison between the internet and the Incarnation. To modern thinking, the Incarnation was terribly inefficient. The internet is much better at spreading information. But the Incarnation was not just about information. That’s why God used a human being to communicate with us. God is interested in relationship not just information. So he became a human being. That action has said so much that the full meaning of it will take eternity to unpack. You can’t boil the Gospel down to a few bullet points.