Emergence.\" What Author\'s Key Message Proposes Church?

¶ … Emergence." What author's key message proposes Church? How evaluate suggestions local church today? Grading Rubric 1) Formatting Spelling 5 pts. 2) Accuracy thoroughness summary key message proposal 65 pts.

The Great Emergence

What is the author's key message and what does she propose to the Church? How do you evaluate her suggestions and what would it mean for the local church today?

According to Phyllis Tickle, the author of The Great Emergence, we are in a new era of religious reflection. Periodically, all religions 'clean house' and re-examine their storehouse of ideals. Over the course of her text, Tickle examines how cultural moments like the re-centering of the universe with the sun at its center; the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species; the development of psychoanalysis; and even the popularization of Joseph Campbell on PBS caused Western culture to view the Christian religion differently. Tickle urges Christians to not see the current culture wars and dissent as a threat, but to view the current debate as a necessary and creative re-visioning of Christianity. After every one of the periodic crises that afflicted the faith, Christianity became more relevant to individual's lives. "From time to time that the only way to understand what is currently happening to us as twenty-first century Christians in North America is first to understand that about every five hundred years the church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale" of ideas, writes Tickle (Tickle 16)

In her history of Christianity, Tickle divides the evolution of the faith into different crisis points. The first was during the early period when Christianity was still a relatively small 'cult' religion and defining its formal ideals. The second was when the religion began to shift and solidify as a state-based faith, around the time of Constantine. The third came after the split between the Roman and Eastern Orthodox Churches. The fourth was the Reformation, and the fifth is taking place in the present day where religion and science are doing battle, which she calls the Great Emergence. At least every 500 years Christianity has gone through this -- Christianity is in crisis now and will be again.

Looking back at the past, some of the controversies about the Eucharist or indulgences seem minor, but they were of great significant to individuals embroiled in the controversies at the time. Periods of intellectual disharmony are part of Christianity, which then attempts to 'smooth over' such divisions once a new consensus has emerged. When it was first forming the church furiously debated such topics as to whether God was one person or three in one person, the relationship of Mary to God, and whether Christ suffered pain during the Crucifixion. The subsequent establishment of orthodoxy, (a uniform system of belief that came to be accepted by most Christians) changed the history of the faith permanently. A new conception of what it meant to be human emerged, one in which God and humanity was one and united. Jesus did not merely temporarily inhabit the world in this new view, Jesus was also of the world.

Every great shift in Christianity, writes Tickle, forced believers to reconceptualize what it meant to be human. For example, the Reformation brought forth a new era in which there was "no more Pope, no more magisterium, no more human confessor between humanity and the Christian God, only the Good Book" (Tickle 46). By investing authority in a book, Luther changed not only Christianity but also expanded the need for universal literacy, given that human beings were now encouraged to understand the Bible directly, rather than accept it in a mediated fashion through the interpretation of the clergy. This also transformed the world and the Christian faith, given the multiplicity of opinions this generated.

The development of Lutheranism was both a product of a crisis within the Catholic Church and a larger, exterior social crisis, much like Christianity's current crisis today. The Reformation was stimulated by a rise in interest in classical languages, the sciences, and the development of an emerging middle class which desired to be newly empowered with knowledge (Tickle 51). "Protestantism not only established a new and powerful way of being Christian, but it also forced Roman Catholicism to make changes in its own structures and praxis. As a result of both those changes, Christianity was spread over far more of the earth's territories than had ever been true in the past" (Tickle 17). Faith was now something that lay in the hands of the people, and thus the democratization of concepts of the Church worked to sustain the Christian faith during a time of tumultuous world change. Without the ability to grow and change, the Church could not have survived. Similarly, the emergence of Darwin and Freud challenged the Christian faith with a new, scientific reckoning of humanity. Some Christians opposed these teachings, while others found ways of viewing their faith as complementary to this shift in the cultural consciousness.

In our own era of the Great Emergence, Christians are coping with the troubling philosophical implications of modern physics, such as Einstein's Theory of Relativity and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Once again Christians are in the midst of in an era of divisiveness and debate. The factions warring in today's great intellectual debate Tickle gives specific names. She actually draws a chart to delineate how these traditions interact: the Liturgicals (traditional Roman Catholic, Episcopalian and Anglican and Lutherans), Social Justice-focused Christians, Renewalist (charismatic Pentecostal evangelicals), and Conservatives (Biblical literalists). These factions must come together to come to some consensus about the role of faith for the faith to remain strong. Tickle believes that they will, but they must avoid name-calling or attempting to demonize those with whom they disagree.

All perspectives, Tickle believes, have some value. Progressives attempt to adapt to the realities of post-modern life. Traditionalists choose to "stay within their inherited Church," but can still serve as agents of change (Tickle 141). Re-Traditionalists are still willing to clean house, often in the name of making the Church more like it was in previous eras. What Tickle calls hyphenates like 'Metho-mergents" strive to create new communities entirely (Tickle 142). These dueling philosophical orientations have not solidified into a newly revitalized Christianity, but Tickle believes that Christianity will be richer when they do.

Tickle's book is fundamentally optimistic about the potential for collaboration between the different ideological faiths with the Christian family. And whenever a new form of Christianity has burst forth from the old, the numbers of the faithful have increased rather than decreased. After the Reformation, Protestantism, the 'religion of the Book,' spread around the world, just like after the first movement to codify the faith transformed Christianity into a world religion. Tickle's advice to churches today is not to fear change and intellectual debate, but to welcome it.