Phyllis Tickle, lay eucharistic minister in the American Episcopal Church, author and feminist, spoke in Toronto in May. “[History will, I wager] see the [past] half century as having been more comparable to the upheavals of Europe during the Christian Reformation … than to anything else.” Tickle, in her book The Great Emergence, sees the history of Christianity in 500-year cycles — prior to our age, the Great Reformation, prior to that, the Great Schism between the Greek and Latin church, prior to that, Gregory the Great, and so forth.
We are in the latter stages of the Great Emergence, she argues. And, she finds this an exciting time to be part of church. Not easy. Not comfortable. Some of us in longstanding denominations may worry about membership losses.
Every 500 years the church has a rummage sale. It pulls everything from the attic, sends some to the dumpster, recycles wonderful stuff it had forgotten, and puts the rest out for others who may see a fresh use. In every one of these rummage sales to date, the entrenched form of faith has lost pride of place, and a vital new form has come to pre-eminence.
For instance, in the Reformation, Martin Luther’s doctrine of sola scriptura came to the centre and displaced Roman Catholicism. But the latter did not disappear. Rather, it deepened and spread into new geographic and demographic areas.
But Charles Darwin and the physicist Michael Faraday punctured traditional beliefs about creation; Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg recognized that all is relative to the observer — there is no absolute truth; Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung opened up the unconscious; and Joseph Campbell’s study of comparative religions questioned Christianity as the one true religion.
All of these developments rocked the authority of the Bible as sole arbiter of belief and behaviour. Yet simultaneously they may have freed up the Spirit to enliven God’s people in a host of ways. The Pentecostal movement, unprecedented since the early church, claims direct contact with the Holy Spirit. Alcoholics Anonymous confront addicts with the belief that only God can help them. An increased awareness of Buddhism has conveyed a wisdom and vocabulary to describe and nurture the Holy Spirit. House churches have evolved into a “new monasticism,” a “way of being in which Christians, bound together under vows of stability, live out their private lives together in radical obedience to the great commandment.” Such varied expressions pick up practices, people, and ideas from all sectors of the church, and pour them out as a new and emerging way of being Christian.
But where are the once mainline churches in all this? Some Christians from every denomination have pushed back “violently,” but other traditionalists are simply comfortable with things the way they have been. Tickle blesses these as needed ballast, providing stability in the upheaval. Then there are re-traditioning and progressive Christians, who want to delve into the inherited church for all the life that has been ignored. And there are the “hyphenateds,” members of traditional denominations who also sense a call to the emerging church.
What has happened to sola scriptura? For Tickle, it seems focused “in scripture and the community.” This community, the church, is not a “thing” but a network. It is totally egalitarian, for noone has the full truth. “The duty, the challenge, the joy and excitement of the Church and for the Christians who compose her, then, is in discovering what it means to believe that the kingdom of God is within one and in understanding that one is thereby a pulsating, vibrating bit in a much grander network.”
It is indeed an exciting time to be part of church, part of this “movement toward a system of ecclesial authority that waits upon the Spirit and rests in the interlacing lives of Bible-listening, Bible-honouring believers.” Not easy. Not comfortable. But exciting. Compelling. Gospel.
