The Great Emergence Book Review
Summary: Phyllis Tickle’s, The Great Emergence is my choice for book of the year in 2008. Tickle carefully crafts the historical shifts and tipping points leading up to what she calls a rummage sale on the church. She answers three questions: What Is It, How did it come to be, and Where is it going? The defining question of all reformations is clear: Where is our authority? The book takes an important look at the events leading up to Sola Scriptura and the current events leading away from it.
The value of this book cannot be understated. It helps us understand not just what is happening but also why it is happening within our previous history and current social-religious systems. It’s much more than a history book. It’s a clear and concise look into the strings that moved and are moving the system.
Part 1 – What Is it?
Chapter 1 explores the idea that ever 500 or so years, the world encounters a huge rummage sale of ideas and thoughts. Tickle’s context here is in the church suggesting that the Great Reformation, The Great Schism, and even Gregory the Great were pivotal events in this cycle. The rummage sale is the idea that everything gets looked through and put up for sale. What is then birthed is not just a new expression of Christianity but also a much stronger previous version that grows.
Chapter 2 explores the human constructs/systems that essentially “tether us to the shore.” I appreciated Tickle’s use of graphics to literally illustrate her point.
“The business of winding sufficient duct tape around the casing to make it hold takes us about a century or so, as a rule.”
This line intrigued me because humanity has never had as much power to communicate as today (in a wired world). How will this speed things up? How will it affect the transmission of ideas when we’re no longer reliant on birds or horseman to deliver letters, instead receiving them instantly in email? How will idea viruses take root in this new Great Emergence when blogs (or any new media outlet) can easily dispense, mash up, chew on and dispense iterations of these original ideas at light speed? How will a new generation, one born into light speed adapt to these new ideas? Suffice it so say, I wonder if one dominating aspect of the Great Emergence will likely be how fast it emerges, as much as any new theology or ideas that change our worldview.
Section 2 – How did it come to be?
Chapter 3 explores how the Great Reformation came to be asking a fascinating question. Where is the authority? As people tether to the shore, we need consensus of thoughts and ideas, validated from an authoritative group. For those in the 16th century, this was the Pope. But what happens when there is three Popes, as in the 14th century. Chaos ensues.
“Always without fail, the thing that gets lost early in the process of a reconfiguration is any clear and general understanding of who or what is to be used as the arbitrator of correct belief, action, and control.”
People want a leader to make decisions for them. Luther and others shifted the fundamental authority from the Papacy to Sola Scriptura, which was a massive shift in terms of system because it put the emphasis back on humanity to engage the priesthood of all believers and become literate in the process.
The cost of this was obviously divisive denominationalism, infighting (bloody at times), individualism, and eventually capitalism. Tickle rightly asserts the cost of Sola Scriptura.
“We begin to refer to Luther’s principle of ‘Sola Scriptura, Sola Scriptura’ as having been little more than the creation of a paper pope in place of a flesh and blood one. And even as we speak, the authority that has been in place for five hundred years withers away in our hands. ‘Where now is the authority?’ circles overhead like a dark angel goading us towards disestablishment. Where indeed?”
This responsibility and subsequent individualism eventually became “the common illusion, our shared imagination as Westerners about how the world works and how the elements of human life are to be ordered.” Tickle then argues that the shift in the Great Emergence is a rummage sale of those Reformation practices of individualism, the nuclear family, and even capitalism. Selling the old makes way for the new.
As a side note: Tickle asks about the origins of the Renaissance, suggesting that the fall of the Byzantine Empire is that point. I would offer that the rise of the Medici family in world banking was THE very reason for the Renaissance. Their huge investment in art, science and architecture was deeply important. From Lorenzo , who gave us DaVinci, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi Dome and even Savanarola’s the Bonfire of the Vanities to Pope Leo, whose widespread use of indulgences were pivotal in Luther’s 95 Theses, no family had more influence on affairs of the world during the 14th to the 17th century. No worries though.
Tickle also explores the impact of people like Copernicus and Columbus, who very actions challenged and later shattered long help teachings of the church. But more importantly, these events created questions of authority.
“Could the church be wrong? Yes. It was that simple and devastating.”
These realizations produced not only bloodshed but also reform in both the Protestant expressions and the Roman Catholic Church. Tickle offers a caution that if we don’t learn our history we are destined to repeat it.
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Tomorrow I will post the second half of this book review. It will include chapter 5 which is by far the best chapter in the book, from my perspective, and explores the events that led up to the Great Emergence.
You can also continue the conversation with Tickle and many others at The Great Emergence conference.
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