Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why (BakerBooks 2008).
If Brian McLaren says a book will ‘shape the conversation among a wide range of Christians for years to come’ and if the Primate of the U.S. Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori  reckons ‘This is an immensely important contribution to the current conversation about new and emerging forms of Christianity in a postmodern environment — and a delight to read’ those endorsements should be taken seriously.ÂÂ
With Scot McKnight I love reading about big theories – ‘and that is what Phyllis gives us. Within a few pages you’ll be wondering if she’s onto something. If she is, then we’re in the eye of a storm.’
Phyllis Tickle is nothing if not prolific. I stopped counting her published books at about 20, and her membership in religious and literary boards (ctrl-f on her resume told me it was 21). And – wait for it – she’s been mother to seven children, and is married to a physician. But she ‘makes her home on a small farm in Lucy, Tennessee’. That might help…  ÂÂ
Her thesis in this book: Every 500 years or so Christianity has a ‘rummage sale’. The institutional church becomes ossified and/or corrupt, and an upheaval occurs which is the catalyst for creative new directions. The first was driven by Pope Gregory the Great, who ‘cleaned up’ a chaotic church mainly by empowering monasteries and convents. (Did you know he was the first to make extensive use of the term “Servant of the Servants of God” – servus servorum Dei?). Then there was the Great Schism (1054) when the Western and Eastern churches ‘divorced’. Five hundred years later we have Martin Luther (and others) provoking the Protestant Reformation (1517).ÂÂ
The ‘Great Emergence’ is a popular term given to the massive changes going on in the Christian church in our present day. The cultural factors behind it include the invention and popularity of the motor car, the drift of populations from urban areas to the city, the ubiquity of mass media and now the Internet, and the rise of post-modernism. In terms of authority, our post-modern age is challenging the Reformation’s mantra of sola scriptura, scriptura sola, and we’re moving to affirming ‘Scripture interpreted in the life of the community’.  (Interestingly, she doesn’t, I think, refer to the ‘Wesleyan [Revelatory] Quadrilateral’ in that context, except in terms of authority issues facing each of the four groups in her major ecclesial quadrilateral – Renewalists, Liturgicals, Social Justice Christians and Conservatives).ÂÂ
Outcome? ‘By the time the Great Emergence has reached maturity, about 60 percent of practising Christians will be emergent or some clear variant thereof’ (139).
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Her overview is more a cultural and ecclesiastical analysis than a theological discussion, which, I would think, softens the impact of it all for conservative Christians. (Perhaps you can argue about theological ideas more readily than with history, and clear cultural and philosophical trends).ÂÂ
Here are some insights I marked with a double line in the margin:
†‘Doctrine as a codified part of Christianity was born under Constantine and was, among other things, formalized for his convenience’ (161).ÂÂ
†‘The drug age that came upon us in the 1960s and ‘70s probably has spawned more human sorrow and waste and wreckage than did any of the century’s wars’ (97)
†(Following a survey of ‘revisionist’ paradigm shifts in the last couple of centuries associated with slavery – ‘the Bible nowhere condemns it’ – women in ministry-leadership, divorce etc.) ‘there is only one more tool left in sola scriptura’s war-chest… Enter the “gay issue.†Of all the fights, the gay one must be – has to be – the bitterest, because once it is lost, there are no more fights to be had’ (101). [Among conservatives] ‘the old cliché of “hate the sin, love the sinner†is usually the rhetoric of choice for negotiating [this] conundrum’ (130).ÂÂ
†‘Eric Elnes, one of Progressive Christianity’s most dynamic and influential young leaders once, half in jest, defined a Progressive as being “anyone who believes in loving God, neighbor, and self, and doesn’t settle for ‘two out of three ain’t bad'”.’ (142)
†In the Emerging Churches the order is ‘belong-behave-believe’ rather than the traditionalists’ ‘believe-behave-belong’. (Which reminds me of John Claypool’s dictum: ‘For Jesus, acceptance precedes repentance; with the Pharisees it was the other way around’).ÂÂ
†‘The Great Emergence… will rewrite Christian theology… into something far more Jewish, more paradoxical, more narrative, and more mystical than anything the Church has had for the last seventeen or eighteen hundred years’ (162)
Talk about erudition. If you want to know how the Quest for the Historical Jesus, Rauschenbusch, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the Azusa Street Revival, Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, AA, Buddhism, the Quakers, ‘watercooler theology’, etc. etc. fit into her schema… well this book will challenge you.  It’s the best book I know to give to thoughtful people in your church who say ‘Let’s get back to what worked 50 years ago.’
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Rowland Croucher   jmm.aaa.net.au
April 6, 2012.ÂÂ
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