Mary and I just returned from clergy conference where we heard from Phyllis Tickle, noted lay scholar and theologian, who in 2009 wrote an important book called, “The Great Emergence.” In it she chronicles the era changing events since the birth of Christianity, and how these events have affected the life of the church. There is no escaping the fact that the church is shaped by and reflects the culture in which it has its being. Two cultural shaping events in the life of the church she notes are the Great Schism of 1054 which divided the Eastern Church (Greek and Eastern Orthodox) and the Western Church (Latin or Roman Catholic). This event served to lessen both the power and authority of the hierarchy of the church. The Reformation which began in Europe in 1517 essentially continued this process. The days of the Church hierarchy telling its flock, ” It is true because we say it is true,” were over. Increasing literacy served as Catalyst. The Enlightenment in which human reason was extolled as the highest human virtue further challenged the authority of religion itself. The authority of the Magisterium of the church was crumbling.
Cultural change is of course inevitable, but in the twentieth and early twenty first centuries this change has taken place exponentially, at warp speed. The works of Darwin and Freud redefined the nature of human origins and the human psyche; two world wars displayed the capacity of human violence on an industrial scale; antibiotics rendered dread diseases into inconveniences; the birth control pill gave women options and empowerment hitherto unavailable; space exploration once and for all convinced us that the center of the universe is relative; computers and the Internet have rendered impossible isolation from knowledge and relationship in the world, which is now intensely interconnected, and increasingly interdependent.
The church is changing at the same pace as the culture. That is distressing to some but exhilarating to others. Tickle names this rapid change as the Great Emergence in which the church is reinventing itself, seeking a new found relevancy to a world whose identity is a far cry from five hundred years ago. There is new knowledge to consider. Here are some of the qualities she notes in the emerging church: less hierarchy, more relationship and conversation; non-literal interpretation of scripture; the Gospel narratives not considered historical but theological and metaphorical; an active involvement in the issues out in the world that affect human dignity; emotional and meaningful worship; renewed interpretation of core theology such as Atonement and Resurrection. In short the emerging church recognizes, and I think rightly, that theology is not etched in stone, but an evolving reality that is forever changing as the culture changes…a sacred relativity as it were. As emergent Christians we are duty bound to question, and doubt the faith handed down to us in imaginative and responsible ways; to seek earnestly what God is saying to us in the present reality. It surely will have changed from earlier ages, but that I think is a good thing, an exciting thing, because the reality is that God is still about the process of creation…that even the faith is being made new…even scripture imbued with fresh and new meaning. Who knows what is emerging, perhaps a more profound wisdom, a maturity, and a collaborative authority that will give the faith far more warrant than just Sunday morning….perhaps a wisdom, a maturity and collaborative authority that might just change the world.
