I remember the exact day I first read Jules Verne.  I remember the exact place and how it made me feel.  The Mysterious Island was recommended to me by a good friend.  And I loved it.  I loved Cyrus Smith and his ability to bend the forces of nature to his will, physics, botany, chemistry, all to form civilization from a deserted island.  But the Island had a secret, he didn’t do it all on his own, he had a helper.  I’ll give you a hint, it wasn’t God Almighty, or Jesus his son.  I loved this story, until I found a better one.   But watching the world around me, I lament that many have not found it yet.  They still subsist with their inferior stories, ever putting their faith in those false gods.  The gods of careers, money, power, governments, the magic of science and technology.  The god of self, individual or collective.

This is Jules Verne’s superman, the engineer.  A man of applied sciences who can bend the world to his will as a magician conjures spells, to reach pragmatic ends.  Nothing can stop this man.  Certainly nothing can stop a whole nation of such men, except for reality.  This is the hero of Tomorrowland.  Also, the whole movie rings reminescient of Atlas Shrugged, but that is another topic.

Oddly enough this movie about the future takes us back to the past.  The movie asks us if we want to go forward or backward, while itself drawing from retro styling.  And not just the set design, the ideas are all old too.  It’s basic modern humanism with that special personal twist of postmodernism.  The power is within you.  Of course we aren’t supposed to answer that we want to go backwards.  It’s the worst thing in the world.  It’s all progress, and evolution, don’t you know? But, I do want to go back.  As C. S. Lewis said, if you are on the wrong road progress means retracing your steps back to the place where you went wrong.  And so we are on the wrong road as a civilization.

The movie gets many things right, as most false religions, the devil is in the details.  There is the shining city on a hill, the child of promise and the quest to gather idealistic followers.  The city is beautiful made of crystal, made of light.  Things move fast and anything is possible.  There is no pain or suffering, or even anything to stain your white jumpsuit, for that matter.  It’s heaven.  And It’s not some etherial floaty heaven, it’s a real tangible place, earth remade, in a different dimension.  All very good counterfeits.

As I awoke from the siren song that Verne sang to me, the song he sings to all his humanist pupils, I found a better story.  I found Robinson Crusoe.  Oddly it was a story read to me years earlier by my father.  But I rediscovered it, by men like C. S. Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton pulling the wool from my eyes.  Crusoe too finds himself on a desert island.  He too creates a civilization.  But he has one thing that Verne does not, purpose.  Surviving to survive is no way to live, though the Darwinians cling to it as a creed. Crusoe, exists to spread the Kingdom of heaven on this earth, he is a Christian.   As such he fights to survive to serve his creator, and he evangelizes one of the savages, Friday.

The movie gets something else right, probably without knowing it.  The Church today has become a lot like that kind sweet little girl proselytizing, for the new earth, for Tomorrowland.  Definitely similar in the sweet part but also in that she is a robot.  Christians today are a lot like robots droning on about being saved and the happy happy joy joy of it all.  It’s about as much fun as a cold metallic handshake.  And a world full of people sitting around waiting for doomsday?  Correct again, that’s the church I know.  Huddled around the TV worshipping football and stuffing their faces or wringing their hands and lamenting each new catastrophe, political or meteorological, waiting for the rapture.  We only seem to get lively when arguing about which group is going to burn.  Like it or not, the Church sets the tenor for this world, it’s just how it works.  And God’s people are doing a bad job.  It’s no wonder the world has no hope, Christians don’t either.  We glom on to every negative passage in the New Testament as if Jesus’ words were to be applied directly to our every situation.  “Yep things are going to get worse, Jesus said so”.  Except that there are many times in history when they didn’t.  Read about the founding of this nation.  Look around the world, the gospel is spreading like crazy.  Twelve fisherman in a sliver of Asia spread their message to the entire world.  Sure there were ups and downs, but things have been getting better for 2000 years as the body of Christ remakes this world.  The Gospel light is spreading.

Giving up now is silly.  But we don’t need the fake hope of Tomorrowland.  We don’t need the superman of Verne.  We need the real story behind Robinson Crusoe, we need the story of Scripture, the good news of the Gospel.  The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.  We have a crystal city,  and we a have a superman who lights that city, his name is Jesus, the Christ.  It’s all there in the Revelation of John.  Tell your friends about it, the ones who haven’t given up hope.  Lay their hands on the Book and they can get the vision too.