Two reviews by Darren Cronshaw

Charles Darwin is undoubtedly one of the catalysts for the modern-to-postmodern transition that we are starting to navigate through. These two books offer background on the influence of Darwin on contemporary society, the place of the church and our understanding of the gospel. The first, The Story We Find Ourselves In, weaves an imaginative sharing of the gospel narrative with discussion of Darwin and evolution. The second, The Great Emergence, describes the history of Christianity, with reference to the history of science and ideas including the influence of Darwin, and the epochal changes that Christianity is now experiencing.

Brian McLaren. The Story We Find Ourselves In: Further Adventures of a New Kind of Christian (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003). 203 pages.

Dr Kerry Ellison is an Australian scientist working at the Charles Darwin Research Centre in the Galapagos Islands. A Uniting Church minister’s child by birth, eager youth group member by upbringing, staunch defender of seven-day Creation through a youth pastor’s urging, keen science researcher at university and cynic who turned her back on faith when told she had to choose between God’s wisdom or man’s – creation or evolution.

Kerry’s life is turned upside down and around about, however, after two concurrent events. One, she discovers a relapse of cancer. Two, she meets Neo, an ex-pastor and ex-science teacher who is tour-guiding on the Islands. Their conversations spread over treks searching for turtles to Sunday night informal “church” on board Neo’s La Adventura, from hospital rooms in America to Neo’s old friend Dan’s house. They grapple with the nature of faith, doubt, science, environmental crisis, evolution, atonement, cancer, heaven, prayer, suffering and death. Kerry is amazed Neo can appreciate science and believe Christianity. Her imagination is captured by the story of the world and God and Jesus that Neo unravels.

Neo describes the narrative of the Bible in seven stages; creation, crisis, calling, conversation, Christ, church and consummation. This story is the story we all find ourselves in. It begins with the awe-inspiring account of the universe created out of nothing, order arising out of chaos, the story of the development, emergence or evolution of the world in Genesis. The story tells us that we are not designed to be alone and that we are made not to exploit the world but to live and give life creatively, as apprentices to God. Unfortunately, people have plunged the world into crisis through our selfishness and arrogance, lust and greed. In our desire to live life independently we have lost connection to God.

So God intervened and called and blessed a family to be instrumental in blessing others. God entered into conversation with them for generations. Through priests, prophets, poets and philosophers, God and humanity spoke and listened to one another. The family, which became a nation, grew to know God not just as Creator but as guide, companion and friend. They often drifted away, but would repent and return to God’s agenda. Jesus Christ came through this family, and by his life, death and resurrection profoundly demonstrated the love and triumph of God. He offers to be saviour of our souls after this life but also invites us to join a revolution and let him be saviour of the world and bringer of truth and goodness in this life.

Those whose hearts were won over to Jesus banded together in community, passionately devoting themselves to live differently in ways that would help the world become all God dreamed for it. Looking ahead in hope we see God welcoming and inviting us into recreation, salvaging all that is good in our lives and our world. (esp. pp. 175-176)

Neo and Kerry realise that discovering our place in the story is both inspiring and a little scary. Yet Neo’s words assert the importance of grappling with these larger issues:

If we’re going to do the courageous thing now, as the early church leaders did in their moment, as the Reformers did in their moment, then we need to engage the best thinking and the toughest questions of our culture, with no less courage, because it’s no less dangerous or difficult. And it’s no less necessary either, if we’re going to be faithful to Jesus and his teaching and his mission. And so we need to reenter and reengage the world, this world, and we need to rediscover our story here in this evol–––… this emerging universe, not in some static spiritual world of concepts behind or above this one. (p.164)

The characters and setting are perfect to explore issues of science and faith. Neo explains to Kerry his deeply held faith and his wonder at Creation, and offers historical perspectives on how the church has related to science. There was no objection from the church about Ptolemy’s view of the earth at the centre of the universe surrounded by a range of spheres ascending to God in heaven. But Copernicus and Galileo used telescopes to discover and explain the round earth revolved around the sun, and the church could not cope. With urging from the Inquisition, Galileo hung up his telescope. But instead he picked up mechanics and physics and showed how the world could be explained with physical laws. Monumentally adding to that hole in the medieval worldview, Darwin said mechanics and time explains not only orbits and chemical reactions but life, including human life. What was there left for God to do? Instead of seeing life and everything descending from God above, science was looking down at the atoms and molecules – meaningless, impersonal forces that apparently did not need God to explain the world. Kerry’s youth pastor opposed any hint of evolution. Neo saw it as a brilliant theory, albeit with its share of bugs, but honest observations about how God may have made the universe to become itself.

Brian McLaren is the main conversation partner in Emergent, the network of emerging church practitioners and thinkers who are reassessing the shape of church and theology for a postmodern, post-Christendom, post-Darwin world. The Story We Find Ourselves In is the middle of McLaren’s trilogy where he uses this narrative genre that he calls creative non-fiction or philosophical dialogue. The prequel, A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), focuses on postmodernity itself and the new kind of Christian and new ways of doing church that McLaren urges. The sequel, The Last Word and the Word After That (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005), explores death, hell, judgment and the mercy of God. The Story We Find Ourselves In imaginatively tells the story of the gospel in the context of emerging postmodern culture.

The book is encouraging for Christians to be able to reimagine their story in a bigger context and beyond modern trappings and false dichotomies, especially science versus faith. And it is an accessible and inviting read for “spiritual but not religious” people who may be intrigued by how life looks in the context of this adventurous story.

Phyllis Tickle. The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why (Grand Rapids: BakerBooks and Emergent Village, 2008). 172 pages.

Phyllis Tickle draws on her wide publishing and writing experience on religion in America to offer a concise but ground-breaking portrayal of how Christianity, as it is practiced in North America, is emerging into new shapes and emphases.

The book assumes that every five-hundred years the church experiences a massive transition and ‘cleans out its attic for a massive rummage sale’. The first transition was marked by Gregory the Great, who became Pope in 590CE and guided Christianity into ecclesio-political coherence and into a monasticism that would preserve it for 500 years. He cleaned up after the Roman Empire disintegrated and after the church divided over doctrinal disputes such as at Chalcedon in 451CE which codified the doctrine of Jesus as two natures in one person. The Great Schism, 500 years later in 1054, was the division of Eastern Orthodox Christianity in Constantinople and Pope Leo IX in Rome. The Great Reformation, another 500 years on, gave birth to Protestant Christianity. A convenient date marking this rummage sale was when Luther nailed the 95 theses to the Wittenberg church door on October 31, 1517.

With any of these changes, the old forms of Christianity lost their pride of place and new forms emerged alongside. Normally there is a century or two of unease leading up to overarching changes, and it takes a century to work the transition through. The church has to grapple with how to function in a new context and especially asks “Where now is the authority?” The Reformation, for example, reasserted sola Scriptura, scripture sola, only Scripture and the Scriptures only; and adding the priesthood of all believers. The Catholic Church also had its own Reformation. There is the tension of needing to change externally and rework internally, then as now. Tickle observes; ‘The imperative for us in the twenty-first century, therefore, is not to fear either of the two coursings, but to fear with all our hearts and minds and souls the pattern of bloodiness that has in the past characterized the separation of innovators and retraditioners from one another.’ (p.58) There will be new forms, but they will not completely eradicate old forms which also need renewal.

The church and society has been coming to another point of crisis and transition for two centuries; this time largely because of science. Copernicus, the clergyman astronomer, was a contemporary of Luther, and both of them unsettled the medieval church’s worldviews. But Tickle identifies Charles Darwin’s 1859 The Origin of Species as the tipping point, along with Michael Faraday who from 1851 started field theory. Faraday showed electricity and magnetism were unseen fields of force which intersected to create matter and light. With scientific explanations for the development of life and matter, where is the place of God? Thus churches opposed evolution vehemently, but in broader society there was widespread acceptance of a new paradigm for understanding the universe and its origins of life.

Tickle explains the history of ideas and how mayhem was brewing elsewhere as well. Freud opened up the world of the unconscious, and Jung went further and popularized the collective unconscious. Campbell questioned Christian particularity and exclusivity – on television documentaries for all to see! Einstein introduced the quantum world of atoms, the “special theory of relativity” and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Where was certainty any more? Marx attacked the authority of the church. Theologians from Reimarus to Schweitzer, and later Marcus Borg to NT Wright, searched for the real historical Jesus. Since Azusa in 1906, Pentecostalism introduced fresh egalitarianism to churches and an experiential rather than purely canonical basis for authority. Cars gave people never-before-experienced mobility which decreased commitment to local place. Alcoholics Anonymous popularized a generic approach to God and opened access to spirituality outside the church by offering it to anyone beyond the confines of organized religion. Buddhism enhanced this trend with its openness to selective borrowing and integration with other faiths. Immigration, drugs, the changing role of women, the erosion of the perceived authority of Scripture, churches moving from sacred to secular (to electronic) space, and different views of other religions (especially from Vatican II) are all brewing a different approach to faith.

Tickle’s boldest and most significant section explores where this next transition is going – she describes it as The Great Emergence. Once again, Christianity is facing a time of upheaval and opportunity and having to grapple with the authority question. If other times of transition are an indicator, it will be a massive time of readjustment but also a growing and spreading of Christianity’s influence. Fifty years ago analysts said Christianity in North America could be represented with four squares in a quadrilateral: liturgicals, social justice Christians, conservatives and renewalists (Pentecostals and charismatics). This neat division fitted decades ago, often parallel to denominational lines. But as Tickle identifies, the demarcation points are changing.

There is a gathering centre as an increasing number of Christians are mingling and learning from and embracing one another’s traditions. Tickle describes this as ‘Watercooler theology’; co-workers meeting over a drink and discussing spirituality. It is producing the ‘New Rose’ of Christian expression; a cluster of people in the centre and spreading out along and embracing the axes. There is a backlash as 10% or so of Christians push back into a corner and reassert their traditional identity and position. Those in the corners, however, helps remind the gathering emergent centre of the importance of the different elements.

The developing majority of Great Emergence Christians are embracing orthodoxy (allegiance to doctrine) with orthopraxy (emphasis on action). They are finding a fresh confidence in Scripture (influenced by conservatives and social justice Christians) but often also recognising the place of experience and the Spirit (especially those influenced by liturgical and renewalists). They are sourcing more narrative, mystical and paradoxical theology. Community belonging is more centred on allegiance to Jesus than bounded by particular beliefs or behavior.

Many are discovering richness in community and in the conversation between and among Christians. The Quakers, outside the traditional quadrilateral, have a particular contribution in this. Quakers like Parker Palmer, John Wimber and Richard Foster have played a significant role in reshaping Christianity. Foster’s Streams of Living Waters, for example, models an embracing of different traditions from contemplative and holiness to social justice to evangelical.

The Great Emergnce leaves me with two unanswered questions to ponder. Firstly, Tickle’s descriptions and diagrams help portray where North American Christianity has come from and where it may be going. Her North American focus reflects her expertise. Unfortunately she does not evaluate her frameworks for the rest of the West including Australia, or the rest of the world especially the growing global and southern-dominant Christianity. If global Christianity is becoming more conservative, Pentecostal and assertive, as some observers suggest, then I am curious how Tickle’s analysis will apply beyond the USA?

Secondly, Tickle contends early in the book that the Great Emergence will need to answer two questions – both intellectual tsunamis – in order to emerge to maturity:

1. What is human consciousness and the humanness of the human? 2. What is the relation of religions to one another? (p.73)

She indicates why these are critical questions, building particularly on Freud and Campbell. I would have liked to have read in the last chapters her thoughts on how the Great Emergence is addressing these questions, or point in some helpful directions. Furthermore, how is the Great Emergence treating science – from the theories of Darwin through to chaos theory and the new science? For all the science and psychology of Part 2’s background to the Great Emergence, there is little treatment of science in part 3 and how it is interacting with the Great Emergence.

Darren trains leaders and missionaries with the Baptist Union of Victoria and Forge Mission Training Network.

May 2009