Book Notes 1 - The Great Emergence

This is the first of six in a series of notes in order to summarize the class texts. The first book I chose to read was the Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle. It advances in 3 parts and has 7 chapters.

Part 1 - Chapters 1 and 2

The first chapter covers what Tickle calls 'Rummage sales.' Her theory is that every 500 years the church clears out its 'attic' of all of the ways of thinking and being that people have grown tired of in some form or another. We are now in the great emergence. Before that was the Great Reformation and before that, the Great Schism. This chapter spends a good deal of time explaining the Great Schism as it is more obscure in Western history than the Reformation. The foundational problems facing the Church during the schism was the question of how to view the person of Christ. Fully divine? Fully human and fully divine? Etc. There was also the question of the importance of Mary. Part 1 of this book is foundational and sets up the terms that the author uses for the rest of her argument. Moving to chapter 2 one finds such a term. Cable of meaning appears now as a term that is central to the author's proof of the Great Emergence. Tickle asserts that religion is a social phenomenon organized and created by man. While reading this chapter, all I could think is that she has read Peter Berger's The Sacred Canopy. One cannot read chapter 2 without it smacking of Berger's theory of world construction. Essentially, the outside shell of the cable is the world of meaning agreed upon by society. The inside cable are all the pieces that create the shell: morality, spirtuality, etc. Her use of this idea is central for the rest of the book.

Part 2 - Chapters 3, 4, and 5

In these chapters, Tickle traces how the Great Reformation replaced the monastic system and then leads the reader up to the time of the Great Emergence and explains what are the key elements leading to the downfall of reformation thought. Chapter 3 follows the downfall of the monastic system and of the Dark Ages. Key ideas that pulled at the cable of meaning for that world were the discoveries of the earth being round, and that it was not at the center of the universe. The entire world the church had so dogmatically taught simply did not exist anymore and people were left scrambling for explanations. In chapter 4, Tickle moves to present ideas that began to challenge Reformation thought. The sojourners were Darwin, Freud and Campbell. Tickle also points out the importance of mass media in changing the views of the people. She cites the printing press for the reformation age and t.v. and the internet for the emergence age. One of the key points of reformation thought is the idea of sola scriptura, scriptura sola, a.k.a. biblical inerrancy. However, figures such as Darwin, Freud, Faraday, Jung and Campbell downright challenged that concept in various ways. The scientific findings led to the demystification of the world. There was a logical explanation for formally spiritual events. Campbell wrote a book challenging the idea of Christian exclusivity that rocked the world. Chapter 5 furthers the thesis by speaking of the findings of Einstein, Marx, etc., mass transit and media, and the downfall of the matriarchal homes of the early 1900s. Women working in factories during World War II is also mentioned as an example.

Part 3 - Chapters 6 and 7

This is where Tickle tracks and defines the Great Emergence. She starts by presenting a traditional chart of how churches have been separated by type in the past. Through chapter 6, Tickle keeps tweaking the image of that chart to represent the emerging church. The author describes how the emergent church has presented itself as a vortex in the center of this chart. As the movement grows stronger, traditional churches are forced to react. They line up in concentric circles around the emergent church in four different categories. Traditionalists, re-traditionalists, progressives, and hyphenateds. Of the four, progressives seemed to be the most confusing. I didn't quite understand her definition of them. All of this labeling is imperfect, but illuminating all the same. In the final chapter, Tickle presents the new authority that the emergent church may come to rest on. Two key terms are presented. Orthonomy and Theonomy. Orthonomy refers to the idea that if there is an event that is so beautiful that is like the divine is contained within its beauty than it must be true. It is a concept that does not directly translate well into English. Theonomy means that only God can be the source of perfection in action and thought. However, both these terms lend themselves to great weaknesses. Tickle goes on to say that many emergent Christians say authority rests in the community and the Bible. After this, the author explains that this creates something called network theory where Church isn't seen as a particular building or 'thing', but as a vast web spread accross the globe. The book concludes with basically saying we will have to wait and see what comes of all this, but it also comes with a warning. Each 500 year period was followed by great violence. Tickle hopes this does not occur again.

That is the summary of the content of this book. A shorter work, 175 pages or so, but man....packed full.