The Great Emergence considered

I recently read Phyllis Tickle’s newest book The Great Emergence. It is a short quick read, really only evaluating a single premise, but the subject is very enlightening, even in its simplicity. The basic thesis is that that every five hundred years there is some sort re-formation within the church, a giant rummage sale as she calls it. Most of the book is dealing with the history of the previous rummage sales; the Great Reformation, the Great Schism, even pointing back to the re-formations of Jewish history and even other religious traditions having similar breaks in history.

She uses this history as the grounds for explaining what is happening today, but also what has been happening through the previous century; she argues that it all began with the work of Darwin and Faraday, in Biology and Physics respectively. She explains how in the previous reformation, the question of authority was central in how things were restructured. The two centrals themes of that reformation were the sola scriptura(scripture as the only source) and the priesthood of all saints. What these two scientists did was to unground the authority of scripture as the sole source of authority. Tickle then goes through the proceeding 150 years to explain how things have continued to process until today.

There was much that was extremely helpful. Her exegesis on the modern sects of Christianity within America was very helpful to see.They are very helpful in displaying how we as a society think about certain topics by way of what type of church tradition we have chosen. I have scanned one of her diagrams which I found very helpful, for those of you out there who don’t have access to the book (maybe just an excuse to use our new scanner, thanks Suzanne).

Basically there were four sets which we fall under: liturgical(catholic,anglican), social justice christians(mainline), renewalists(charismatic), & conservatives(evangelicals). The Great Emergence she argues has started to mix these different sects, causing a melting pot in the middle. There are some interesting divisions of understanding authority. the liturgical & social justic are more orthopraxy opposed to the others as being orthodoxy.  But it also cuts another way, liturgical & renewalists being more orthonomy and social justice & conservatives being more theonomy. Orthonomy is the stance of being more inclined to not worrying about theology and simply embracing the beauty of it, an experiential treatment of authority; while theonomy is understood as saying that only God is the source of perfection and the Bible being the only source of his divine word, moving back towards a sola scriptura understanding.

She then holds that the newest form of authority is the ‘wiki’ version or networked authority. She sees everything happening at the center of where all these ideas come together and through that tension the community can come to an understanding of what is true and what works.

She also spends a short chapter making sweeping summaries about other aspects of the current Emergence happening in American churches. If you have been reading any other ‘emerging’ authors you will have undoubtedly met all the ideas in more detail, but for anyone that hasn’t hopefully she didn’t summarize too shortly, to the point of misunderstanding.

Though there is a lot more I could say, I will leave it to another post or two. As a teaser, one is about Kierkegaard’s influence on the Penacostals and another my beef with her interpretation of the Marx-Stalin influence.