[The Great Emergence: A Review]
By Darren King
A much anticipated book arrived on my doorstep recently, courtesy of Baker Books. Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why is a book that introduces an idea that Tickle has been pushing for some time now; that Christianity is in the process of undergoing a major tectonic shift. We’re not talking minor tweaking, but a major reorganization. The second point in Tickle’s thesis is that this kind of transformation is not new. In fact, history suggests it takes place approximately every five hundred years.
From the introduction to the book:
That is, as Bishop Dyer observes, about every five hundred years the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity, whatever they may be at that time, become an intolerable carapace that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth can occur. When that mighty upheaval happens, history shows us, there are always at least consistent results or corollary events.
This last point is what I found intriguing. After all, the first point, the first part of the first point at least – that we are in the midst of a major shift – has been clear to many of us for some time now. The last point directs us to some interesting history, regarding what happens with the new growth, as well as the old structures.
Tickle continues,
First, a new more vital form of Christianity does indeed emerge. Second, the organized expression of Christianity which up until then has been the dominant one is reconstituted into a more pure and less ossified expression of its former self. As a result of this usually energetic but rarely benign process, the Church actually ends up with two new creatures where once there had been only one.
The most obvious example of this is evident in the products of the Reformation. Not only did Protestantism emerge, with its calling-card of
sola scriptura, but the Roman Catholic Church also revitalized itself. In other words, the post-Reformation Catholic Church was no longer the same institution it was prior to that time. In fact, I sometimes wonder if Luther would have been happy enough with the reorganization/revitalization that the Catholic Church did go through, as opposed to resorting to a completely new institution. After all, Luther’s original purpose was renewal, not revolution.
Ah, but I digress…
If Tickle is right, and I think she is, then we should count ourselves as privileged to be living through such a transitional time. At least, that’s how I feel. “Why be thankful for that?”, you might ask me. Well, the way I see it, while these times can be tumultuous, they also let us be witnesses to God’s Spirit moving through the world. And that’s how I see this, not just as a human-driven enterprise, but as an evolution in thinking/being, breathed on by God Himself.
One thing that stands out is the book’s ability to inform us as to how we got to this point in the first place – midstream in a major transition. So many Emergent-ish books are focused squarely on the now. But a more historical perspective is always good. Even when one does come across some church history these days, it’s often in reference to the very fashionable topic of the early church. But Tickle gives us much more than that. In fact, she pretty much leaves that aspect of history alone. She doesn’t weigh in on who “gets Jesus best”. Instead, she focuses on the major epochal shifts in Christianity. And, in parallel, she shows how this is always tied to events/shifts going on in the larger society.
Speaking of history, one helpful point Tickle makes is that, while many resist change today, they would do well to remember that while we are now facing a major transition, we are already, in whatever tradition we stand in, a product of such a prior transition. Speaking of this, there are times when one really does get the sense that fundamentalists believe that God created the world sometime around the 17th century; because they seem to assume that Protestant Christianity, with
sola scriptura and such, is where it really all began. Or, perhaps more aptly put, these people assume that what the Protestant Reformation did was restore Christianity to a vision present in the early Church. Okay, there is some aspect of truth to this. But in reality, it’s comparing apples to oranges. The Protestant perspective was, above all else, a product of its time.
And on these shifts, Tickle makes an interesting point regarding the consequences of such shifts. And here we can make reference to the well-trodden law of intended and unintended consequences. Of the Reformation, Tickle writes,
When an overly institutionalized form of Christianity is, or ever has been, battered into pieces and opened to the air of the world around it, that faith-form has both itself spread and also enabled the spread of the young upstart that afflicted it. Christianity became a global religion as a result of the Great Reformation. A large part of that globalization was in direct consequence of Protestantism’s adamant insistence on literacy, which in turn led more or less directly to the technology that enabled expansion and trade. As a result, Catholics and Protestants alike, could, and did, carry Christianity out of Europe and into the world beyond, often in strenuous – and energizing – competition with each other.
Of course with this expansion came an unholy mix of culture, nation-state and religion, as European nations forced themselves and their assumedly
Christian worldview on “the heathens” they encountered around the world.
Another aspect of the relationship between culture and a transformed Christianity is evidenced in the Protestant Reformation's embrace of, and in many ways, enablement by, the invention of the printing press. Now this connection between technological advance and shifting cultural values is also very clearly evident in the Great Emergence we are now experiencing. As Tickle makes note of, this Great Emergence would not be possible if it were not for the Internet and the World Wide Web. With these inventions, a new kind of communication is possible.
And of course, not only does the Net make new kinds of interaction possible, but, by its very structure, it begins to help us re-imagine what community can look like. The World Wide Web, if nothing else, demonstrates that a largely egalitarian model of community is indeed possible. Tickle writes,
…the Church, capital C – is not really a “thing” or entity so much as it is a network in exactly the same way that the Internet or the World Wide Web or, for that matter, gene regulatory and metabolic networks are not “things” or entities. Like them and from the point of view of an Emergent, the Church is a self-organizing system of relations, symmetrical or otherwise, between innumerable member-parts that themselves form subsets of relations within their smaller networks, etc., etc. in interlacing levels of complexity.
Now, central to every great shift in Christian understanding and organization is the question of authority. Who, or what, gets to call the shots? Prior to the Protestant Reformation it was the Catholic Church hierarchy – and, even more specifically, the supposedly infallible Pope. Afterward, for Protestants, it was the words of Scripture deemed the final arbiter of faith and belief for Christians.
So what about today, and tomorrow? What will emerge as the authority for emergents? Most of us see that
sola scriptura just will not do. Regardless of what one reads in the Bible, it is a preconceived interpretive framework that makes sense of those words. So, in reality, it is people’s hermeneutical assumptions that have served as authorities. And that’s why you get so much divergence around biblical interpretation. But that doesn’t sound very “absolute”, does it? No, actually that sounds pretty gosh-darned subjective.
So, what are we to do? Or, again, the question is, what will emerge as the new authority? Well, Tickle speaks to that as well:
The end result of this understanding of dynamic structure is that realization that no one of the member parts or connecting networks has the whole or entire “truth” of anything, either as such and/or when independent of the others. Each is only a single working piece of what is evolving and is sustainable so long as the interconnectivity of the whole remains intact. No one of the member parts of their hubs, in other words, has the whole truth as a possession or as its domain. This conceptualization is just theory. Rather, it has a name: crowd sourcing; and crowd sourcing differs from democracy far more substantially than one might first suspect. It differs in that it employs total egalitarianism, a respect for worth of the hoi polloi that even pure democracy never had, and a complete indifference to capitalism as a virtue or to individualism as a godly circumstance.
This makes sense, doesn’t it? Whether we recognize it or not, new structure, new identity, new ordering,
is already taking place, via the Web. But, interestingly enough, as was demonstrated in a university study about the nature of the web’s connectivity, its not like a purely egalitarian model creates a completely even playing field. It does at first, but over time new authority structures do emerge, in that people link to, and reference, certain web resources much more often, and with more emphasis, than others. Still, as Tickle argues, no one hub is grand central station. There is, as the saying goes, truth in tension; it is a sustaining, organizing tension that emerges between these various spokes within the wheel that serves as the new authority.
Regardless of how you come down on these various issues; whether you're optimistic, like me, or think this is the ushering in of all things apocalyptic, Tickle's book is a vital resource in the discussion. With her detailed sense of history, and fluid understanding of the interaction between church and culture, Tickle offers us an informative, insightful perspective on what has, and indeed,
is happening, in our world. And if you're concerned that this read will turn in to an epic journey, fear not, unlike so many other books covering this kind of topic, Tickle's is surprisingly succinct, and surprisingly readable. In a mere 165 pages Tickle takes us through 2,000 years of Christian history - and leaves us, expectantly, on the doorstep of the 21st century.
