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From the church's birth to the reign of St. Gregory the great, to the Great Schism and through the Reformation, Phyllis Tickle notes that every 500 years the church has been rocked by massive transitions. Remarkably enough, Tickle suggests to us that we live in such a time right now. The Great Emergence Examines history, social upheaval, and current events, showing how a new form of Christianity is rising within postmodern culture. Anyone interested in the future of the church in America, no matter what their personal affiliation, will find this book a fascinating exploration.
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First published October 1, 2008
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About the author
Phyllis Tickle
96 books76 followersPhyllis Natalie Tickle was an American author and lecturer whose work focuses on spirituality and religion issues. After serving as a teacher, professor, and academic dean, Tickle entered the publishing industry, serving as the founding editor of the religion department at Publishers Weekly, before then becoming a popular writer. She is well known as a leading voice in the emergence church movement. She is perhaps best known for The Divine Hours series of books, published by Doubleday Press, and her book The Great Emergence- How Christianity Is Changing and Why. Tickle was a member of the Episcopal Church, where she was licensed as both a lector and a lay eucharistic minister. She has been widely quoted by many media outlets, including Newsweek, Time, Life, The New York Times, USA Today, CNN, C-SPAN, PBS, The History Channel, the BBC and VOA. It has been said that "Over the past generation, no one has written more deeply and spoken more widely about the contours of American faith and spirituality than Phyllis Tickle." A biography of Tickle, written by Jon M. Sweeney, was published in February 2018. Phyllis Tickle: A Life (Church Publishing, Inc), has been widely reviewed.
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February 2, 2014
(Boy, I hate it when GoodReads swallows my review when I go to save it ...)
"The Great Emergence" is a somewhat interesting but ultimately too-shallow book that sets out to tackle epic themes of religious history and predict where modern Christiantiy is going, and instead asserts a somewhat dubious historical pattern and engages in idle (but incomplete) speculation about contemporary faith evolution.
For a book talking about the world-changing phenomenon of the "Great Emergence," Tickle is either coy or obtuse about explaining what exactly it is. There are plenty of references early on, but I got the sense that this is a well-known term within a given academic/literary circle, making it far less useful for a general lay reader who's handed the book for study. I found it ironic that she goes into detail explaining "orthodoxy" and "orthopraxy," terms I already knew, but that the "Great Emergence" doesn't warrant explanation until many chapters in.
The GE, according to Tickle, is a re-evaluation and re-formation of society and religion. Sometimes she seems to mean the former, oftentimes she focuses on the latter. As part of the GE, in a religious sense, we should be seeing a decline in denominationalism, and a decline in authoritarian / dogmatic faiths (rule through hierarchy or rule through "sola scriptura"), in favor of a more blended, tolerant, crowd-sourced sort of Christianity.
It's an exciting prospect, pulling in and respecting a wide array of traditions, but eschewing the "I have a monopoly on the truth -- obey me" themes which Christianity has suffered from since Constantine adopted it as the state religion. The problem is, aside from some selective themes in modern American Christian history over the last fifty years, Tickle doesn't really provide a convincing case for it. Again, she seems seems to consider Emergent Christianity to be a given, and its historical inevitability as the wave of the future natural and unquestionable.
But it's not. Tickle (admittedly) focuses just on North America. She notes that European Christianity has been undergoing these same trends far longer, but doesn't demonstrate how Christianity there follows the pattern breaking down the quadrangle she uses as a model -- Liturgy vs Social Justice, Renewal vs Conservatism, doctrine-centric vs practice-centric, etc. And beyond that, she ignores the Global South and its (much higher population) Christian communities, which don't seem to fit her model at all.
More importantly, especially in a North American and European perspective, she ignores changes in religious demographics, both the increase in minority / non-Christian faiths, and the decline in religiosity and the rise in atheism. She would probably suggest that the apparent decline in Christianity (though still by far a majority) is because Emergent Christianity doesn't adhere so closely to traditional denominational church-going, and thus measurements based on church attendance and the like are far less important than they used to be -- but she never actually addresses it here, again taking for granted Christianity as the sole faith (or lack-of-faith) tradition in North America.
The other part of the book, with which the first half is concerned, is a historical hypothesis that Church (or maybe Societal) History goes in 500 year cycles. Thus we have the birth of Christ. Five hundred years later, there's a group of events made up of the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451), the fall of Rome (AD 410-480), and the papacy (AD 590) of Gregory the Great, which signaled the monastic reforms of the Church and their ability to preserve society through the Dark Ages. Five hundred years after that, in 1054, we have the great schism between the Catholic (Rome) and Orthodox (Constantinople) churches. Five hundred years later, we have the Reformation (Luther's theses in 1517, but extending another 150 years). And five hundred years after that, we have the modern day and the Great Emergence.
It's an interesting pattern, but, as any historian will tell you, patterns can be found anywhere. The events described are all important ones, but she ignores other events of arguably equal significance, even from just the perspective of Church history. The imperial adoption of Christianity and the Council of Nicea in the mid-4th Century is ignored, as are the critical Benedictine reforms of the 8-9th Centuries. The Age of Enlightenment, from late 17th to the late 18th century, is left out, or minimized as simple result of the Reformation due to Protestant insistence on literacy, even though it profoundly changed views of religion and led to the rise of political states with religious tolerance rather than religious establishment.
There's no explanation that Tickle provides for the supposed five hundred year pattern. Indeed, given the breadth of dates involved (a hundred years range, if not more, for the events given at the top of each cycle), it's difficult to argue that even if these were the actual key events that the really show a five hundred year cycle. It's an obvious temptation to have one, since it would then point to the modern era as one of key changes (which are always more interesting to write about, but the point is not well put forth, let alone proven.
There's some interesting material in this book -- the eventual discussion of Christian religious classifications and how they may be blending (and counter-blending) is good fodder for discussion, but without anything more concrete to demonstrate this is actually happening it remains simply good "bull session" material. Similarly, the historical patterns are worth further examination, conversationally, but as presented are too weak to take seriously.
"The Great Emergence" is a somewhat interesting but ultimately too-shallow book that sets out to tackle epic themes of religious history and predict where modern Christiantiy is going, and instead asserts a somewhat dubious historical pattern and engages in idle (but incomplete) speculation about contemporary faith evolution.
For a book talking about the world-changing phenomenon of the "Great Emergence," Tickle is either coy or obtuse about explaining what exactly it is. There are plenty of references early on, but I got the sense that this is a well-known term within a given academic/literary circle, making it far less useful for a general lay reader who's handed the book for study. I found it ironic that she goes into detail explaining "orthodoxy" and "orthopraxy," terms I already knew, but that the "Great Emergence" doesn't warrant explanation until many chapters in.
The GE, according to Tickle, is a re-evaluation and re-formation of society and religion. Sometimes she seems to mean the former, oftentimes she focuses on the latter. As part of the GE, in a religious sense, we should be seeing a decline in denominationalism, and a decline in authoritarian / dogmatic faiths (rule through hierarchy or rule through "sola scriptura"), in favor of a more blended, tolerant, crowd-sourced sort of Christianity.
It's an exciting prospect, pulling in and respecting a wide array of traditions, but eschewing the "I have a monopoly on the truth -- obey me" themes which Christianity has suffered from since Constantine adopted it as the state religion. The problem is, aside from some selective themes in modern American Christian history over the last fifty years, Tickle doesn't really provide a convincing case for it. Again, she seems seems to consider Emergent Christianity to be a given, and its historical inevitability as the wave of the future natural and unquestionable.
But it's not. Tickle (admittedly) focuses just on North America. She notes that European Christianity has been undergoing these same trends far longer, but doesn't demonstrate how Christianity there follows the pattern breaking down the quadrangle she uses as a model -- Liturgy vs Social Justice, Renewal vs Conservatism, doctrine-centric vs practice-centric, etc. And beyond that, she ignores the Global South and its (much higher population) Christian communities, which don't seem to fit her model at all.
More importantly, especially in a North American and European perspective, she ignores changes in religious demographics, both the increase in minority / non-Christian faiths, and the decline in religiosity and the rise in atheism. She would probably suggest that the apparent decline in Christianity (though still by far a majority) is because Emergent Christianity doesn't adhere so closely to traditional denominational church-going, and thus measurements based on church attendance and the like are far less important than they used to be -- but she never actually addresses it here, again taking for granted Christianity as the sole faith (or lack-of-faith) tradition in North America.
The other part of the book, with which the first half is concerned, is a historical hypothesis that Church (or maybe Societal) History goes in 500 year cycles. Thus we have the birth of Christ. Five hundred years later, there's a group of events made up of the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451), the fall of Rome (AD 410-480), and the papacy (AD 590) of Gregory the Great, which signaled the monastic reforms of the Church and their ability to preserve society through the Dark Ages. Five hundred years after that, in 1054, we have the great schism between the Catholic (Rome) and Orthodox (Constantinople) churches. Five hundred years later, we have the Reformation (Luther's theses in 1517, but extending another 150 years). And five hundred years after that, we have the modern day and the Great Emergence.
It's an interesting pattern, but, as any historian will tell you, patterns can be found anywhere. The events described are all important ones, but she ignores other events of arguably equal significance, even from just the perspective of Church history. The imperial adoption of Christianity and the Council of Nicea in the mid-4th Century is ignored, as are the critical Benedictine reforms of the 8-9th Centuries. The Age of Enlightenment, from late 17th to the late 18th century, is left out, or minimized as simple result of the Reformation due to Protestant insistence on literacy, even though it profoundly changed views of religion and led to the rise of political states with religious tolerance rather than religious establishment.
There's no explanation that Tickle provides for the supposed five hundred year pattern. Indeed, given the breadth of dates involved (a hundred years range, if not more, for the events given at the top of each cycle), it's difficult to argue that even if these were the actual key events that the really show a five hundred year cycle. It's an obvious temptation to have one, since it would then point to the modern era as one of key changes (which are always more interesting to write about, but the point is not well put forth, let alone proven.
There's some interesting material in this book -- the eventual discussion of Christian religious classifications and how they may be blending (and counter-blending) is good fodder for discussion, but without anything more concrete to demonstrate this is actually happening it remains simply good "bull session" material. Similarly, the historical patterns are worth further examination, conversationally, but as presented are too weak to take seriously.
April 6, 2013
Although the subtitle of this latest book by Phyllis Tickle is "How Christianity is Changing and Why," the book is about so much more. The book's thesis is that the western Church is going through an upheaval and rearrangement, the likes of which have not been seen for 500 years.
Even more surprising, Tickle argues persuasively that similar transformations have occurred every 500 years, each one leading to huge and fundamental changes in religion, but also in society, culture and the individual person's life.
Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther nailed his treatises to a church door and initiated the Great Reformation. 500 years before that the church split into the east and the west: Eastern and Greek Orthodox on the one hand, Roman Catholicism on the other. Going back 500 more years we arrive at the fall of the Roman Empire and the ushering in of the dark ages.
And 500 before that is the time of Jesus himself, a transformation so great that even the way we number our years was changed as a result. If we consider the whole Judeo-Christian world, the pattern extends even further: 500 years before Christ was the fall of the temple in Jerusalem, and 500 years before that we have the reign of King David.
Tickle takes us through a broad and far-reaching review of history, laying out the case that we are now in a time she calls The Great Emergence, and have been for several decades now. Just as Martin Luther's ideas would not have spread without Gutenberg's printing press, the ideas arising at this current time would not be spreading without the web.
And just as Luther's ideas rejected the existing authority structures in the church at the time, so to now do the activities of those involved in The Great Emergence reject the authority structures of our time. The Internet and Web 2.0 technologies are making this rejection which started in the 1960s even more pervasive.
As we all know, the Reformation also ushered in an age in which Science became the dominant force in our culture. The names that come to mind are known to all students: Newton, Copernicus, Galileo. Tickle discusses several key events in Science in the last hundred years that have ushered in the next great age of transformation. Most of us would also have no trouble naming the scientists responsible for this latest turn of events: Darwin, Freud, Einstein.
This is a short book, less than 170 6"x9" pages, but packed with many thought-provoking ideas. Toward the end of the book, on p. 152, Tickle touches on the possibility that what is happening to the church is a natural event:
"...in this case, the Church, capital C, is not really a 'thing' or entity so much as it is a network in exactly the same way that the Internet or the World Wide Web or, for that matter, gene regulatory and metabolic networks are not 'things' or entities. Like them and from the point of view of an emergent, the Church is a self-organizing system of relations, symmetrical or otherwise, between innumerable member-parts that themselves form subsets of relations within their smaller networks, etc. etc. in interlacing levels of complexity."
She goes on to draw the clear conclusion: what this means is that no one individual or hierarchical structure is in charge:
"No one of the member parts or connecting networks has the whole or entire truth of anything...each is only a single working piece of what is evolving and is sustainable so long as the interconnectivity of the whole remains intact."
This is a fascinating book, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in history, the intersection of religion and science, the current state of Christianity, or any number of other topics. I predict people will be talking about this book for years and you just might want to be among those who read it first.
Even more surprising, Tickle argues persuasively that similar transformations have occurred every 500 years, each one leading to huge and fundamental changes in religion, but also in society, culture and the individual person's life.
Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther nailed his treatises to a church door and initiated the Great Reformation. 500 years before that the church split into the east and the west: Eastern and Greek Orthodox on the one hand, Roman Catholicism on the other. Going back 500 more years we arrive at the fall of the Roman Empire and the ushering in of the dark ages.
And 500 before that is the time of Jesus himself, a transformation so great that even the way we number our years was changed as a result. If we consider the whole Judeo-Christian world, the pattern extends even further: 500 years before Christ was the fall of the temple in Jerusalem, and 500 years before that we have the reign of King David.
Tickle takes us through a broad and far-reaching review of history, laying out the case that we are now in a time she calls The Great Emergence, and have been for several decades now. Just as Martin Luther's ideas would not have spread without Gutenberg's printing press, the ideas arising at this current time would not be spreading without the web.
And just as Luther's ideas rejected the existing authority structures in the church at the time, so to now do the activities of those involved in The Great Emergence reject the authority structures of our time. The Internet and Web 2.0 technologies are making this rejection which started in the 1960s even more pervasive.
As we all know, the Reformation also ushered in an age in which Science became the dominant force in our culture. The names that come to mind are known to all students: Newton, Copernicus, Galileo. Tickle discusses several key events in Science in the last hundred years that have ushered in the next great age of transformation. Most of us would also have no trouble naming the scientists responsible for this latest turn of events: Darwin, Freud, Einstein.
This is a short book, less than 170 6"x9" pages, but packed with many thought-provoking ideas. Toward the end of the book, on p. 152, Tickle touches on the possibility that what is happening to the church is a natural event:
"...in this case, the Church, capital C, is not really a 'thing' or entity so much as it is a network in exactly the same way that the Internet or the World Wide Web or, for that matter, gene regulatory and metabolic networks are not 'things' or entities. Like them and from the point of view of an emergent, the Church is a self-organizing system of relations, symmetrical or otherwise, between innumerable member-parts that themselves form subsets of relations within their smaller networks, etc. etc. in interlacing levels of complexity."
She goes on to draw the clear conclusion: what this means is that no one individual or hierarchical structure is in charge:
"No one of the member parts or connecting networks has the whole or entire truth of anything...each is only a single working piece of what is evolving and is sustainable so long as the interconnectivity of the whole remains intact."
This is a fascinating book, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in history, the intersection of religion and science, the current state of Christianity, or any number of other topics. I predict people will be talking about this book for years and you just might want to be among those who read it first.
May 5, 2011
I think it's pretty obvious to the unbiased reader of "The Great Emergence" that Tickle's arrangement of history, her beliefs about what is most important and why, and her assessment of where we're at and where we are going are all easily called into question. Since she both defines and applies her own terms as they relate to the monumental shift she describes, and then incorporates virtually everything we can possibly observe into it, it becomes apparent early on that if you don't just relax and listen to what she has to say, you will not get through the book.
Bill Moyers' impact on the Christian church has been comparable to Darwin and Freud? Really? Better to just let it go and read on.
Ignoring entirely the Bereans, Tickle portrays sola scriptura as nothing more than a pragmatic concoction of the Reformers. But I think a strong argument can be made for the authority of scripture on the most practical grounds imaginable, with no mention of the Reformation (or literacy, or translations, or printing) whatsoever.
As it relates to the issues of slavery and women's suffrage, Tickle is too eager to fix the blame for the church's errors on a belief in the authority of scripture, rather than on the validity of their interpretations. She also focuses far too little on how deeply scripture informed and motivated those who fought bravely for advancement in those areas, and the moral traction that scripture gave to their arguments.
To set the leading of the Spirit and biblical authority in opposition, or competition, you must assume they are in conflict. I would like to know what that point of conflict is, what the Bible specifically says that is in error, and what the Holy Spirit has instead revealed that shows the authority of scripture to be problematic. I understand the idea that there may be a persistent tension in evidence, and that not everything will resolve cleanly in matters of faith, but if that's the case, why on earth do we need to let go of biblical authority?
I recently have been reading a critique of John Shelby Spong, a collection of essays written by ten Episcopal scholars. In places, it traces the bishop's ideas from early articles appearing in The Christian Century to his current heretical stances. Wherever you place Spong's ideas in relationship to modern or postmodern notions, his decline from iconoclast to apostate has been accompanied by reasoning that is arrestingly similar to that of Tickle. In fact, they appear to be coming to many of the same conclusions.
Bill Moyers' impact on the Christian church has been comparable to Darwin and Freud? Really? Better to just let it go and read on.
Ignoring entirely the Bereans, Tickle portrays sola scriptura as nothing more than a pragmatic concoction of the Reformers. But I think a strong argument can be made for the authority of scripture on the most practical grounds imaginable, with no mention of the Reformation (or literacy, or translations, or printing) whatsoever.
As it relates to the issues of slavery and women's suffrage, Tickle is too eager to fix the blame for the church's errors on a belief in the authority of scripture, rather than on the validity of their interpretations. She also focuses far too little on how deeply scripture informed and motivated those who fought bravely for advancement in those areas, and the moral traction that scripture gave to their arguments.
To set the leading of the Spirit and biblical authority in opposition, or competition, you must assume they are in conflict. I would like to know what that point of conflict is, what the Bible specifically says that is in error, and what the Holy Spirit has instead revealed that shows the authority of scripture to be problematic. I understand the idea that there may be a persistent tension in evidence, and that not everything will resolve cleanly in matters of faith, but if that's the case, why on earth do we need to let go of biblical authority?
I recently have been reading a critique of John Shelby Spong, a collection of essays written by ten Episcopal scholars. In places, it traces the bishop's ideas from early articles appearing in The Christian Century to his current heretical stances. Wherever you place Spong's ideas in relationship to modern or postmodern notions, his decline from iconoclast to apostate has been accompanied by reasoning that is arrestingly similar to that of Tickle. In fact, they appear to be coming to many of the same conclusions.
December 8, 2010
Mush, incoherence, distortion and lies about Evangelical Christianity
This book is commended by, amongst others, the Primate of The Episcopal Church in the USA, which is no surprise ...
The general thesis is that we are experiencing a cyclical, 'Great' development in the history of Christian faith
Which involves the re-creating of most of the firmly-held views of the 16th century Reformation
The book is deeply-flawed in its anthropocentric view of practically every development - cultural, philosophical, historical, theological, liturgical - in the past 400 years!
God, and His will, and His purpose of love in the redemption of the world by the substitutionary death of HIs only Son, Jesus Christ, is remarkably-dismissed as a sort of relic of understanding from another age ...
Phyllis Tickle's book left me breathless in wonder at her leaps of logic; her creative distortions; her bias against the faith once-delivered.
Her last name's ironic label is surely worth considering, especially in light of St. Paul's warning to young Timothy. to take heed and avoid those whose ears itch after novel false teaching designed to 'tickle' us.
This book is dangerous to the faith of those not grounded in Scripture, not taught the Bible weekly, not aware of the subtle lure of heresy.
This book is commended by, amongst others, the Primate of The Episcopal Church in the USA, which is no surprise ...
The general thesis is that we are experiencing a cyclical, 'Great' development in the history of Christian faith
Which involves the re-creating of most of the firmly-held views of the 16th century Reformation
The book is deeply-flawed in its anthropocentric view of practically every development - cultural, philosophical, historical, theological, liturgical - in the past 400 years!
God, and His will, and His purpose of love in the redemption of the world by the substitutionary death of HIs only Son, Jesus Christ, is remarkably-dismissed as a sort of relic of understanding from another age ...
Phyllis Tickle's book left me breathless in wonder at her leaps of logic; her creative distortions; her bias against the faith once-delivered.
Her last name's ironic label is surely worth considering, especially in light of St. Paul's warning to young Timothy. to take heed and avoid those whose ears itch after novel false teaching designed to 'tickle' us.
This book is dangerous to the faith of those not grounded in Scripture, not taught the Bible weekly, not aware of the subtle lure of heresy.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 19, 2020
I have read this book a few times over the years. Each time I read it, I cringe more and more about how Bush era it is--for a book about the future it is very rooted in that present--and how Tickle moves too quickly or cartoonishly through certain parts of history. As I grow as a historian, I find it annoying when public intellectuals generalize to the point of being inaccurate.
However, this book--really a series of essays and thoughts pulled together into a single essay--is a brilliant introduction to an American-centred view of Christian history and a description of why everything seems so strange and troublesome right now. I think Tickle is a bit too optimistic about the centre of the "New Rose," but I hope I am wrong.
However, this book--really a series of essays and thoughts pulled together into a single essay--is a brilliant introduction to an American-centred view of Christian history and a description of why everything seems so strange and troublesome right now. I think Tickle is a bit too optimistic about the centre of the "New Rose," but I hope I am wrong.
January 30, 2021
Tickle's thesis is that every 500 years the Church goes through a major transition -- such as the Reformation--and that we are going through such a time now when "the Church cleans out its attic and has a giant rummage sale." She calls this the Great Emergence. The most helpful part of the book is her idea that this is based around the question "where now is the authority?" She discusses all the ways in which authority is now being challenged: what is human consciousness? what is the relationship of religions to one another? Is there absolute truth? Does the Sabbath have any meaning today? Can one choose his/her own concept of God? Can one be spiritual but not religious? How do we reconcile scripture with issues of white supremacy, divorce, abortion, women's rights, family structure, etc.? Unfortunately, Tickle falls down when it comes to defining what might be emerging in response to all these challenges. She posits a quadrilateral chart where the four quadrants are assigned to litugicals, social justice Christians, renewalists and conservatives and then shows how contemporary forces cause this to swirl and coalesce in different ways. She failed to convince me though that this is in fact the state of the Church today, especially in light of the rise of the Christian Nationalists whom Tickle did not conceive of as being part of the mix, but who are obviously emerging as a force to be reckoned with.
January 16, 2024
Wherever she is, Phyllis Tickle is the smartest person in the room. She has absolutely shaped any understanding of the Christian emergence movement. And when she describes, or one collects, her ideas about the history and future of the church, it could not be more persuasive and impressive. This particular book, however, does not quite fulfill those accolades. The Great Emergence is creative and descriptive, even one of the most important books in the field. For a layperson it might be shocking and transformative. But for anyone familiar with her later work—-Tickle has added so much about what to expect for the life of faith, and clarified so well how the major religious changes came about—-this book is good, not great. Here, she spends much more time on the cultural movements that impacted religion, which are interesting and relevant, but not as fun to read for a theology and church geek. Her description of a holy “cable” and graphs of modern faith authorities are overwrought. And yet, wherever she leans into existentialism, Tickle really does inspire, whether it be with an explanation of why the gay debates are so difficult for society, or in her advice about finding meaning from faith: “Life is simply too hard and too painful for us to endure, if endurance is the only purpose.” (34)
(re-read Aug 2015)
(re-read Aug 2015)
August 19, 2010
The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle is a sociological study on the history and possible future of Christianity.
This text is unusual for its inclusion of and respect for both Catholicism and Orthodoxy in its 163 pages of exploration on how Christianity has changed, from just prior to the Reformation until today.
Its basic thesis is that society, and as a result, the church, changes drastically every 500 years, beginning with the rise of Monasticism about 500 years after Christ, with the transition periods being the most disruptive.
She talks about the effect of a myriad number of things on Christianity including such diverse phenomena as Charles Darwin, Alcoholics Anonymous, Rosy the Riveter and Leave it to Beaver.
The book really is a hopeful one all in all of the survival of Christianity and even leaves us, in the footnotes, with a prophesy by Joachim of Fiore, that divides Christianity into bi-millennial units emphasizing the Father (from the beginning of time to the birth of Christ , the Son (up to the year 2000), the Holy Spirit (from 2000-4000) and a glorious union of the three from the years 4000-5000 AD.
This text is unusual for its inclusion of and respect for both Catholicism and Orthodoxy in its 163 pages of exploration on how Christianity has changed, from just prior to the Reformation until today.
Its basic thesis is that society, and as a result, the church, changes drastically every 500 years, beginning with the rise of Monasticism about 500 years after Christ, with the transition periods being the most disruptive.
She talks about the effect of a myriad number of things on Christianity including such diverse phenomena as Charles Darwin, Alcoholics Anonymous, Rosy the Riveter and Leave it to Beaver.
The book really is a hopeful one all in all of the survival of Christianity and even leaves us, in the footnotes, with a prophesy by Joachim of Fiore, that divides Christianity into bi-millennial units emphasizing the Father (from the beginning of time to the birth of Christ , the Son (up to the year 2000), the Holy Spirit (from 2000-4000) and a glorious union of the three from the years 4000-5000 AD.
October 2, 2017
Although I don’t feel competent to evaluate its claims, I found Phyllis Tickle’s audiobook “The Great Emergence” to be completely fascinating. This book is particularly appropriate during this 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Now (the book was written 5 years ago), according to the author, the church is entering “the great emergence.” It was good to review my Goshen College church history classes, and I loved her sociological description of the last hundred years—eeks, I’ve lived through all but 30 of those. And, so much has indeed happened: Rosie the Riveter, the automobile, the development of technology, to name a few. I especially enjoyed Tickle's account of the emergence of the Pentecostal movement with its emphasis on experiential faith and of the influence of the Quakers. And, how radio, etc., has changed church music from participation to performance (ah, I’ve never lost my appreciation of Mennonite singing). I chuckled at her lists of labels that churches now use, particularly mainline denominations with a hyphenated add-on to name each particular quirk. Good to stretch the mind a bit and to review my own spiritual path.
August 9, 2023
This just was not very good.
Tickle contends around every 500 years, there is a massive re-ordering of religion. Tracing the Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation (with a short aside to Gregory the great), she says that we are due for another re-ordering. She believes that this is happening in the Emergent church.
I disagreed tremendously with the premise, which was that something is seriously wrong with the “sola Scriptura” style of authority in Christianity. I disagreed with the main currents Tickle argued are contributing to the reformation in our time. I disagreed about the scope, impact, and future of the emergent movement, which she views as significant on the order of the Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation. Come to think of it, there is very, very little here that I did agree with.
This book is a great example of why we don’t write history before it happens.
Tickle contends around every 500 years, there is a massive re-ordering of religion. Tracing the Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation (with a short aside to Gregory the great), she says that we are due for another re-ordering. She believes that this is happening in the Emergent church.
I disagreed tremendously with the premise, which was that something is seriously wrong with the “sola Scriptura” style of authority in Christianity. I disagreed with the main currents Tickle argued are contributing to the reformation in our time. I disagreed about the scope, impact, and future of the emergent movement, which she views as significant on the order of the Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation. Come to think of it, there is very, very little here that I did agree with.
This book is a great example of why we don’t write history before it happens.
August 14, 2022
Church history is hard to come by and Tickle graciously fills us in, showing us the pattern for church reformation and that we are right on schedule for a major shift, not only in the North American church, but in the world.
I wanted to give this book 5 stars, but I did not only because some parts are hard to follow and she references times and places and events that I was unfamiliar with. I found myself having to look up a lot of things which is not terrible, it just made the read a bit more laborious. I felt it could have been, maybe even should have been written in a way that is more accessible for a common lay American Christian.
Still so enlightening and exciting to see the overplay of social, political, economic factors in the shift we have seen about every 500 years in church history and to see how the forces of our times are bearing out yet another one.
I wanted to give this book 5 stars, but I did not only because some parts are hard to follow and she references times and places and events that I was unfamiliar with. I found myself having to look up a lot of things which is not terrible, it just made the read a bit more laborious. I felt it could have been, maybe even should have been written in a way that is more accessible for a common lay American Christian.
Still so enlightening and exciting to see the overplay of social, political, economic factors in the shift we have seen about every 500 years in church history and to see how the forces of our times are bearing out yet another one.
August 11, 2023
This is a great and helpful read. I read the complaints against and understand the scope that Tickle tried to cover and how it does not deal completely with the historic trends. However, it is a great starting place and seems even more relevant today that when she wrote it in 2008. Totally recommend this for anyone looking at the state of the western church and attempting to comprehend its evolution.
November 13, 2024
Certainly a helpful and important introduction. It lacked enough context for me at times and I would like to think I'd have enough for the understanding of history in the church. Overall though, it asks helpful questions and peaks the readers interest into the way the church is changing and should change.
March 23, 2022
A lot of food for thought. What does the next iteration of the Christian church look like? Since religion has changed historically every 500 or so years - it is about time! And so- what comes next?
September 30, 2017
On 9/11 2001 the world itself seemed to tilt on it's Axis. What was in terms of stability and clearly defined demarcations between peoples, nations, politics, and cultures suddenly evaporated as we stepped into the shadows of uncertainty.
It was like a bell had been rung announcing that new age had dawned. I knew it then being a 19 year old terrified as I watched the World Trade Centers smolder, the ruins in Pennsylvania, and the gaping hole in our Pentagon.
And that feeling hasn't dissipated. In fact, given our current state of affairs globally, it's intensified. The political upheavals all over the west and in the middle east sort of made a fool of those who feared a unified one world government as everything started to fragment and continues on today with the Kurdish Vote.
Phyllis Tickle, in her work, The Great Emergence simply put a name to the anxiety and restlessness of the world, now. Change has come and not just in a religious way but because religion informs society and society informs the faiths, it has come in all ways.
If she's right, it would explain "The Millennial" generation that are virtually strangers to their parents. It would explain the rising of their parent's authoritative response to their children that is happening all over the western world but sequestered in certain demographics. It would explain the departure from self awareness of the reformation to this super or hyper awareness in our every increasingly connected world.
Unlike some of the reviews below, I do not believe Tickle endorses or refuses to endorse this new age. She's simply presenting what is happening to us in a way that is academically rigorous and faithfully rigorous as well as spiritually aware of a shift in the winds.
I think there was an assumption made that Sola Scriptura and the Reformation and it's resulting changes would be the end all be all of what could be achieved. And yet...protestantism isn't what protestantism started off being. It now stands FOR empire instead of standing against it and in the resulting years has lost it's authority as well as it's believability now that science has mythologized critical aspects of it - including the scriptures. Today, modern day protestantism is exactly where The Catholic Church was 500 years ago and if our modern day political discourse is any indicator - just as reactionary.
If she is correct in her observations, and if that thing we feel in our gut - that winding, twisting, uncertainty that lingers just outside the periphery of this new world and it's inhabitants - the implications are both immediately awesome and terrifying.
Yet, the first step toward understanding a thing is being able to name that thing. This book does so remarkably well.
The sole comfort I derive is that God is on the move and whatever comes - no matter how it comes - his will be done.
It was like a bell had been rung announcing that new age had dawned. I knew it then being a 19 year old terrified as I watched the World Trade Centers smolder, the ruins in Pennsylvania, and the gaping hole in our Pentagon.
And that feeling hasn't dissipated. In fact, given our current state of affairs globally, it's intensified. The political upheavals all over the west and in the middle east sort of made a fool of those who feared a unified one world government as everything started to fragment and continues on today with the Kurdish Vote.
Phyllis Tickle, in her work, The Great Emergence simply put a name to the anxiety and restlessness of the world, now. Change has come and not just in a religious way but because religion informs society and society informs the faiths, it has come in all ways.
If she's right, it would explain "The Millennial" generation that are virtually strangers to their parents. It would explain the rising of their parent's authoritative response to their children that is happening all over the western world but sequestered in certain demographics. It would explain the departure from self awareness of the reformation to this super or hyper awareness in our every increasingly connected world.
Unlike some of the reviews below, I do not believe Tickle endorses or refuses to endorse this new age. She's simply presenting what is happening to us in a way that is academically rigorous and faithfully rigorous as well as spiritually aware of a shift in the winds.
I think there was an assumption made that Sola Scriptura and the Reformation and it's resulting changes would be the end all be all of what could be achieved. And yet...protestantism isn't what protestantism started off being. It now stands FOR empire instead of standing against it and in the resulting years has lost it's authority as well as it's believability now that science has mythologized critical aspects of it - including the scriptures. Today, modern day protestantism is exactly where The Catholic Church was 500 years ago and if our modern day political discourse is any indicator - just as reactionary.
If she is correct in her observations, and if that thing we feel in our gut - that winding, twisting, uncertainty that lingers just outside the periphery of this new world and it's inhabitants - the implications are both immediately awesome and terrifying.
Yet, the first step toward understanding a thing is being able to name that thing. This book does so remarkably well.
The sole comfort I derive is that God is on the move and whatever comes - no matter how it comes - his will be done.
January 16, 2012
More than a bit ambitius, Tickle tackles not only the history of Christendom (from a Protestant perspective) but the major players in post-renaissance science, politics, psychology, and sociology.
Tickle's thesis is that every 500 years, the Christian faith has a great "rummage sale" in which they re-orient themselves. While this 500 year division is too neat and tidy (she says as much) and it's presumptious to say we're experiencing one now (time will tell on that front), this is an excellent read.
For starters, Tickle has a great mind and is an outstanding writer. Because the breadth of her reach is so large most topics cannot get more than a superficial treatment. But because she is such a great communicator, this comes across not as a weakness but as a strength. She succinctly and accurately summarizes many of the non-theological or religious reason for why changes in Christendom occur. On this point she should be commended for writing in a scholarly and accessible fashion.
I was less excited about the implications she draws for the (post-)modern Church. Tickle suggests that the four major voices in the quadralateral that is Christianity (the liturgical, the social justice, the renewal, and the conservative) are re-orienting themselves toward the center and incorporating bits and pieces from each other. While I do not argue that this is happening, especially on a popular and practical level, I do question whether this is a good thing. I wonder if merging togther like this necessarily causes the Church to loose her sharp edges. In doing so, is the Church expressed as individual churches becoming a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none?
However, I'm willing to give Tickle the benefit of the doubt on this one and respect her honesty in learning from the past and attempting to move forward into the 21st century.
Tickle's thesis is that every 500 years, the Christian faith has a great "rummage sale" in which they re-orient themselves. While this 500 year division is too neat and tidy (she says as much) and it's presumptious to say we're experiencing one now (time will tell on that front), this is an excellent read.
For starters, Tickle has a great mind and is an outstanding writer. Because the breadth of her reach is so large most topics cannot get more than a superficial treatment. But because she is such a great communicator, this comes across not as a weakness but as a strength. She succinctly and accurately summarizes many of the non-theological or religious reason for why changes in Christendom occur. On this point she should be commended for writing in a scholarly and accessible fashion.
I was less excited about the implications she draws for the (post-)modern Church. Tickle suggests that the four major voices in the quadralateral that is Christianity (the liturgical, the social justice, the renewal, and the conservative) are re-orienting themselves toward the center and incorporating bits and pieces from each other. While I do not argue that this is happening, especially on a popular and practical level, I do question whether this is a good thing. I wonder if merging togther like this necessarily causes the Church to loose her sharp edges. In doing so, is the Church expressed as individual churches becoming a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none?
However, I'm willing to give Tickle the benefit of the doubt on this one and respect her honesty in learning from the past and attempting to move forward into the 21st century.
April 15, 2021
I devoured this book in a day and I have been thinking about it ever since. Phyllis Tickle is not a theologian, her book is not about some new, progressive form of Christianity. Rather, she takes a sociologist’s and historian’s view and charts out a hopeful path forward for the church. While some of her connections and constructions come off as a bit dubious ((orthonomy vs. theonomy?), her premise is sound: no matter where you sit in terms of Christian belief and practice, growth in the Church is not taking place in the established denominations, but rather in these new communities that are meeting in the middle, borrowing freely from other denominations and faiths. Every 500 years, she says, the church undergoes a radical shift, and the question addressed in this shift is “Where does our authority come from? Where is the center of authority?” She ventures to say that authority in these new churches rests in community. Now I cannot turn around without seeing a new church venture pop up, meeting in homes, hotels, renting space in church buildings. It gives me hope for the future.
May 17, 2014
As someone who has been familiar with the emergent movement in practice since the late 1990s and intellectually/theologically since 2003, I judge such introductory discussions about it less on the content itself than on the presentation. In this respect, Tickle does a very admirable job in tracing a general trajectory for developments in Christian theology and church structure both in history and today. The author would no doubt agree that this is but one way of exploring these themes (indeed it would not be emergent if it claimed to represent THE story itself). Taken in this limited sense, it is a very good book indeed, though I certainly take issue with details here and there. And, as it discusses an ongoing phenomenon, its 2008 publication date also makes it a bit dated already. But, as an introduction to the changes and reactions in contemporary Christianity, for the bewildered, confused and curious alike, it remains a success.
December 28, 2010
Short review: Phyllis Tickle is a great proponent of spiritual disciplines especially fixed hour prayer. But I just don't think she is in her field talking about this history of Christianity. The thesis is that we are in the midst of the next reformation (something she suggests happens about every 500 years.) It is interesting writing and I learned a few things. But there are too many alternative explanations for what is going on in Christianity for me really to think that Emergent/Emerging church is the next manifestation of the church. I am all for the Emergent/Emerging church. But I do not think that is where the church as a whole is heading.
Full review on my blog at http://bookwi.se/great-emergence-the-...
Full review on my blog at http://bookwi.se/great-emergence-the-...
July 17, 2023
Great overview of the history of the Judeo-Christian tradition. However, I want more information about where the church is going and how it is being transformed.
Not sure if the above paragraph is actually about this book. If I read it in 2014, I read it wrong. This possible time around, I found it very comforting or assuring. I have a way to look at all the changes happening in the Christian world without fear or doomsaying.
Not sure if the above paragraph is actually about this book. If I read it in 2014, I read it wrong. This possible time around, I found it very comforting or assuring. I have a way to look at all the changes happening in the Christian world without fear or doomsaying.
February 26, 2014
Excellent summary of Christianity from the first century until somewhere in the future with special emphasis on North American churches and practices crammed into about 150 small pages.
After raising several children on a Tennessee farm and a great career as a woman of letters in New York and D.C. she is still on the road at 80+ years old.
After raising several children on a Tennessee farm and a great career as a woman of letters in New York and D.C. she is still on the road at 80+ years old.
Read
April 5, 2009Too pomo for me. Gave up, lost interest, frustrated with the meandering. Plus what she considers to be "central questions" I...don't. And find rather boring by comparison to some other questions.
March 21, 2021
3-1/2 stars rounded down to 3. This book probably deserves a higher rating. My rating is not so much a critical review of these books as it is a personal response to the topic – not a topic for books I’d read on my own. They were the choices of my book group. (I need to add that often I become enthusiastic about books I originally had little or no interest in.)
According to the premise of these two books by Phyllis Tickle, a respected authority on religion in America, about every five hundred years the church holds a giant rummage sale of the ideas once held inviolable. For example: in the first century, the Great Transformation, the birth of Christianity rising out of Judaism; in the sixth century, Gregory the Great and Monasticism arguing over the nature of the Incarnation; in the eleventh century, the Great Schism, resulting in the split between Eastern and Western Orthodoxy; in the 16th century, the Great Reformation, resulting in the split of the Roman Catholic Church with the resultant rise of Protestantism. So, even if you’re not good at arithmetic, you can see we’re due for another rummage sale.
The good news, according to Tickle and other adherents of this way of looking at church history, is that what emerges from these upheavals, although alarming at the time, has been a new and vital and more widespread form of Christianity. Now, in the 21st century, we have something that has been dubbed the Great Emergence.
Of course these seismic events or rummage sales, if you will, didn’t happen all at once; they came as a result of social, cultural, scientific changes, and new inventions that were occurring during those times. Although both books are brief, Tickle does a good job of naming and analyzing how these events contributed to the big changes in the church in each era. They don’t seem to me to be equal contributors; some I was surprised to see listed as contributors at all; and some contributors I thought were left out or received minimal attention. Still, it’s a helpful list for understanding the interconnectedness of things. It is also important to remember that Tickle is not writing about a worldwide church but about Western Christianity, particularly as practiced in North America.
The central question in each of these upheavals is/was where does authority lie? In whom or in what does authority reside? The shift in each case has been to make the source of authority less hierarchical: the Pope looses ground, sola scriptura loses ground, a kind of flattening of authority occurs until one looks within oneself to find authentic authority. Rules and beliefs imposed from the outside are no longer primary. The old order of believe – behave – belong has been reversed to behave – belong – believe. Franklin Graham, like his father, not an adherent of the Great Emergence, comes on television to say, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will [belong.]” You will hear people of the new order say, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” Logic is not worth nearly so much as the last five hundred years would have had us believe. Logic is human, not divine and suffers the limitations of humanity. The heart may inform and direct the mind.
Emergence Christianity is not monolithic. Tickle cites many forms of it. Some nascent; some, perhaps, destined to disappear or merge with another. She defines some of the chief forms as:
Emergent Christians: aggressively all-inclusive and non-patriarchal. Their church may not be a traditional church building with a pastor to support financially. They may meet in someone’s home or in a pub. They’re strong on social action. They’re sometimes called the “fresh expressions church.”
Emerging Christians: want emergence methods in worship but also traditional theology and they’re usually patriarchal. They want strong ties to their inherited church.
Hyphenated Christians: move with no animosity toward what has been or what is becoming.
Tickle is a good writer and quite chatty, which is a plus in what could otherwise be a boring, stuffy, and academic subject. She calls for acknowledging that change is inevitable and for participating responsibly in the transformation.
According to the premise of these two books by Phyllis Tickle, a respected authority on religion in America, about every five hundred years the church holds a giant rummage sale of the ideas once held inviolable. For example: in the first century, the Great Transformation, the birth of Christianity rising out of Judaism; in the sixth century, Gregory the Great and Monasticism arguing over the nature of the Incarnation; in the eleventh century, the Great Schism, resulting in the split between Eastern and Western Orthodoxy; in the 16th century, the Great Reformation, resulting in the split of the Roman Catholic Church with the resultant rise of Protestantism. So, even if you’re not good at arithmetic, you can see we’re due for another rummage sale.
The good news, according to Tickle and other adherents of this way of looking at church history, is that what emerges from these upheavals, although alarming at the time, has been a new and vital and more widespread form of Christianity. Now, in the 21st century, we have something that has been dubbed the Great Emergence.
Of course these seismic events or rummage sales, if you will, didn’t happen all at once; they came as a result of social, cultural, scientific changes, and new inventions that were occurring during those times. Although both books are brief, Tickle does a good job of naming and analyzing how these events contributed to the big changes in the church in each era. They don’t seem to me to be equal contributors; some I was surprised to see listed as contributors at all; and some contributors I thought were left out or received minimal attention. Still, it’s a helpful list for understanding the interconnectedness of things. It is also important to remember that Tickle is not writing about a worldwide church but about Western Christianity, particularly as practiced in North America.
The central question in each of these upheavals is/was where does authority lie? In whom or in what does authority reside? The shift in each case has been to make the source of authority less hierarchical: the Pope looses ground, sola scriptura loses ground, a kind of flattening of authority occurs until one looks within oneself to find authentic authority. Rules and beliefs imposed from the outside are no longer primary. The old order of believe – behave – belong has been reversed to behave – belong – believe. Franklin Graham, like his father, not an adherent of the Great Emergence, comes on television to say, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will [belong.]” You will hear people of the new order say, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” Logic is not worth nearly so much as the last five hundred years would have had us believe. Logic is human, not divine and suffers the limitations of humanity. The heart may inform and direct the mind.
Emergence Christianity is not monolithic. Tickle cites many forms of it. Some nascent; some, perhaps, destined to disappear or merge with another. She defines some of the chief forms as:
Emergent Christians: aggressively all-inclusive and non-patriarchal. Their church may not be a traditional church building with a pastor to support financially. They may meet in someone’s home or in a pub. They’re strong on social action. They’re sometimes called the “fresh expressions church.”
Emerging Christians: want emergence methods in worship but also traditional theology and they’re usually patriarchal. They want strong ties to their inherited church.
Hyphenated Christians: move with no animosity toward what has been or what is becoming.
Tickle is a good writer and quite chatty, which is a plus in what could otherwise be a boring, stuffy, and academic subject. She calls for acknowledging that change is inevitable and for participating responsibly in the transformation.
December 18, 2017
What a marvelous, seductive idea, well explained here with brave, sweeping prose - that we are in the midst of another "reformation."
I would just like to see what this means not only for Christianity, but for all the West, and all the world. During the previous reformation most of the West was Christian - but now, a lot of Westerners are atheist or agnostic or "spiritual but not religious." How are they connected to the Great Emergence? What does the Great Emergence mean for them? What does the Great Emergence mean for culture? It seems that this is perhaps something that is larger than Christianity.
"But the more or less colonialized Church that Reformation Protestantism and Catholicism managed to plant was, obviously, more or less colonialized, with all the demeaning psychological, political, cultural, and social overtones and resentments which that term brings with it. One does not have to be particularly gifted as a seer these days, however, to perceive the Great Emergence already swirling like balm across that wound, bandaging it with genuinely egalitarian conversation and with an undergirding assumption of shared brotherhood and sisterhood in a world being redeemed."
"Emergents, because they are postmodern, believe in paradox; or more correctly, they recognize the ubiquity of paradox and are not afraid of it. Instead, they see in its operative presence the tension where vitality lives. To make that point, an emergent will quite often offer the most simplistic of proof texts: X squared = 4, and that is a fact. Since it is a fact, what is the value of X? Quite clearly, X = 2 . . . except, of course, X also quite clearly equals -2. What is one to make of that contradiction, that impossibility, that paradox?
For starters, what we in the first world have made of it is the bulk of all the technology and gimmicks that render our lives so much more comfortable than otherwise they would have been. The point, in other words, is that logic is not worth nearly so much as the last five hundred years would have had us believe. It is, therefore, not to be trusted as an absolute, nor are its conclusions to be taken as truth just because they depend from logical thinking. Very often, in fact, logic's fallacies result from logic's lack of a sufficient height or distance in its perspective. That is, logic suffers from the fact that it is human, not divine, and suffers all the limitations of humanity, including being irrevocably contained in time and space.
By extension, meta-narrative is likewise to be distrusted, being as it is also a product of humanity's human thinking and explaining. Narrative, on the other hand, is the song of the vibrating network. It is the spider's web in its trembling, a single touch on one strand setting all the others to resonating. Narrative circumvents logic, speaking the truth of the people who have been and of whom we are. Narrative speaks to the heart in order that the heart, so tutored, may direct and inform the mind."
"The cub has grown into the young lion; and now is the hour of his roaring."
"No ship, even a tethered one, can stay safely afloat and in place unless it has some ballast to hold its courses against those of the rocky sea it sits in. Thus, while ballast is neither an attractive word or an appealing concept, it enjoys the countering advantages of inestimable importance and absolute usefulness. In the Great Emergence, reacting Christians are the ballast. However unattractive they may seem to be to other of their fellow Christians and however unattractive nonreacting Christians may seem to them, the small, outer percentage is the Great Emergence's ballast; and its function is as necessary and central to the success of this upheaval as is any other part of it. If the boat is not to tip and swamp, the ballast that forestalls too hasty a set of movements in a stormy sea must be there. One of the great dangers of what North America is going through is that some of her Christians, of whatever stripe, may cease to honor and accept the necessary function of all her Christians."
I would just like to see what this means not only for Christianity, but for all the West, and all the world. During the previous reformation most of the West was Christian - but now, a lot of Westerners are atheist or agnostic or "spiritual but not religious." How are they connected to the Great Emergence? What does the Great Emergence mean for them? What does the Great Emergence mean for culture? It seems that this is perhaps something that is larger than Christianity.
"But the more or less colonialized Church that Reformation Protestantism and Catholicism managed to plant was, obviously, more or less colonialized, with all the demeaning psychological, political, cultural, and social overtones and resentments which that term brings with it. One does not have to be particularly gifted as a seer these days, however, to perceive the Great Emergence already swirling like balm across that wound, bandaging it with genuinely egalitarian conversation and with an undergirding assumption of shared brotherhood and sisterhood in a world being redeemed."
"Emergents, because they are postmodern, believe in paradox; or more correctly, they recognize the ubiquity of paradox and are not afraid of it. Instead, they see in its operative presence the tension where vitality lives. To make that point, an emergent will quite often offer the most simplistic of proof texts: X squared = 4, and that is a fact. Since it is a fact, what is the value of X? Quite clearly, X = 2 . . . except, of course, X also quite clearly equals -2. What is one to make of that contradiction, that impossibility, that paradox?
For starters, what we in the first world have made of it is the bulk of all the technology and gimmicks that render our lives so much more comfortable than otherwise they would have been. The point, in other words, is that logic is not worth nearly so much as the last five hundred years would have had us believe. It is, therefore, not to be trusted as an absolute, nor are its conclusions to be taken as truth just because they depend from logical thinking. Very often, in fact, logic's fallacies result from logic's lack of a sufficient height or distance in its perspective. That is, logic suffers from the fact that it is human, not divine, and suffers all the limitations of humanity, including being irrevocably contained in time and space.
By extension, meta-narrative is likewise to be distrusted, being as it is also a product of humanity's human thinking and explaining. Narrative, on the other hand, is the song of the vibrating network. It is the spider's web in its trembling, a single touch on one strand setting all the others to resonating. Narrative circumvents logic, speaking the truth of the people who have been and of whom we are. Narrative speaks to the heart in order that the heart, so tutored, may direct and inform the mind."
"The cub has grown into the young lion; and now is the hour of his roaring."
"No ship, even a tethered one, can stay safely afloat and in place unless it has some ballast to hold its courses against those of the rocky sea it sits in. Thus, while ballast is neither an attractive word or an appealing concept, it enjoys the countering advantages of inestimable importance and absolute usefulness. In the Great Emergence, reacting Christians are the ballast. However unattractive they may seem to be to other of their fellow Christians and however unattractive nonreacting Christians may seem to them, the small, outer percentage is the Great Emergence's ballast; and its function is as necessary and central to the success of this upheaval as is any other part of it. If the boat is not to tip and swamp, the ballast that forestalls too hasty a set of movements in a stormy sea must be there. One of the great dangers of what North America is going through is that some of her Christians, of whatever stripe, may cease to honor and accept the necessary function of all her Christians."
October 12, 2024
The major premise of this book is that the church has undergone three significant upheavals, the Great Schism, what she says is now being called "The Great Reformation," and what is happening now, what she calls "The Great Emergence." The author is able to check her bias in a number of instances, but once she gets to the current situation in North America, her bias is evident.
She uses a quadrant theory of unnamed "historians, theologians, and observers" to divide North American Christians into four camps that she admits is now inadequate. She labels the four quadrants "Liturgicals, Social-Justice Christians, Renewalists, and Conservatives." However, my denomination, the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, would fit in with the Liturgicals and the Conservatives. Liturgicals include Christians who would also describe themselves as Renewalists (Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians). As she admits, the Roman Catholic Church has a strong history of social-justice activism, so the Liturgicals label is limiting.
She gets downright pejorative when she examines the schisms in the Episcopal and Presbyterian mainline churches (the Methodist schism happened after the publication of her book). Those who left the mainline churches are labeled by Tickle as "reactionaries."
As a liberal Episcopalian, she downplays the schism in the Episcopal Church (and the Anglican Church in Canada) which resulted in the formation of the Anglican Church in North America. In a footnote she explains that it was predicted that 9 to 13% would leave the Episcopal Church, but only 7% did. As one who left the Episcopal Church, her footnote raises a few questions. First, who predicted that the schism would result in a 9 to 13% loss? She mentions unnamed "scholars and commentators" in the main text on page 136, but why would their predication carry so much weight that the author would use it to downplay the significant loss of 7% of membership? Second, how is the 7% measured? Given that the Episcopal Church has been in decline for decades, I'm not sure that any measure would accurately separate the losses from the schism that happened after 2003 from the historical phenomenon of losses and losses to the Anglican Church in North America. For example, how many left churches that stayed within the Episcopal Church because of the denominational actions in 2003?
I don't find her argument convincing due to a number of issues in addition to those named above. When she gets to what she calls "emergents" and "emergent churches" she becomes vague to the point of vanishing insight. The emergents and emergent churches defy her four quadrant theory, they are what others would call evangelicals (she doesn't use this term), their churches are often nondenominational, but she says in the last paragraph of her book that she really doesn't have a fix on where the current realignments are headed.
What she doesn't explore at all is that the mainline liberal denominations, including her own Episcopal Church, are declining in large numbers. What she doesn't offer any insight on is when evangelical churches (again, terms she doesn't use), will eclipse the mainline liberal denominations. I find her analysis lacking.
She uses a quadrant theory of unnamed "historians, theologians, and observers" to divide North American Christians into four camps that she admits is now inadequate. She labels the four quadrants "Liturgicals, Social-Justice Christians, Renewalists, and Conservatives." However, my denomination, the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, would fit in with the Liturgicals and the Conservatives. Liturgicals include Christians who would also describe themselves as Renewalists (Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians). As she admits, the Roman Catholic Church has a strong history of social-justice activism, so the Liturgicals label is limiting.
She gets downright pejorative when she examines the schisms in the Episcopal and Presbyterian mainline churches (the Methodist schism happened after the publication of her book). Those who left the mainline churches are labeled by Tickle as "reactionaries."
As a liberal Episcopalian, she downplays the schism in the Episcopal Church (and the Anglican Church in Canada) which resulted in the formation of the Anglican Church in North America. In a footnote she explains that it was predicted that 9 to 13% would leave the Episcopal Church, but only 7% did. As one who left the Episcopal Church, her footnote raises a few questions. First, who predicted that the schism would result in a 9 to 13% loss? She mentions unnamed "scholars and commentators" in the main text on page 136, but why would their predication carry so much weight that the author would use it to downplay the significant loss of 7% of membership? Second, how is the 7% measured? Given that the Episcopal Church has been in decline for decades, I'm not sure that any measure would accurately separate the losses from the schism that happened after 2003 from the historical phenomenon of losses and losses to the Anglican Church in North America. For example, how many left churches that stayed within the Episcopal Church because of the denominational actions in 2003?
I don't find her argument convincing due to a number of issues in addition to those named above. When she gets to what she calls "emergents" and "emergent churches" she becomes vague to the point of vanishing insight. The emergents and emergent churches defy her four quadrant theory, they are what others would call evangelicals (she doesn't use this term), their churches are often nondenominational, but she says in the last paragraph of her book that she really doesn't have a fix on where the current realignments are headed.
What she doesn't explore at all is that the mainline liberal denominations, including her own Episcopal Church, are declining in large numbers. What she doesn't offer any insight on is when evangelical churches (again, terms she doesn't use), will eclipse the mainline liberal denominations. I find her analysis lacking.
March 29, 2022
Summary: Phyllis Tickle believes that every 500 years or so, the church (or maybe humans in general) go through a great religious revolution:
1. The formation of Christianity out of Judaism.
2. Gregory the Great (6th century)
3. The Great Schism (AD 1054)
4. The Reformation (AD 1517)
This may be true, but she is too parochial to have proved it in this book.
There are good things here. Her illustration of the process of religious questioning is quite good. Tickle sees established religion as a sort of cable that has three interwoven strands — spirituality, corporeality, and morality. These are contained within a waterproof (I would say culture-proof) casing , representing the common understanding for believers of how the world works and is to be understood. This structure protects the interior strands of the faith from the waves and rocks of the world, allowing society to grow for long periods of time unperturbed. But every 500 years or so, that casing gets worn through, and we collectively pull out and finger the strands, questioning our theological and philosophical roots.
This is a a useful illustration, but it does nothing to prove the crux of her argument: that we are in the midst of a 500 cyclical religious upheaval. Peter Turchin has a far more advanced model (cliodynamics) which incorporates a variety of cycles, and predicted in advance a massive political conflict in the early 2020's. Whether he's correct is debatable precisely because his model is so detailed; whether Phyllis is correct is not because hers is too simplistic.
The larger problem is that Phyllis seems unclear what the "Emergent Church" she's writing about actually is, in part because she's not at all clear what a "Christian" actually is. Millions of adherents throughout the world accept Christianity as a substantive revelation from God; Phyllis clearly does not. She is very Anglican in her outlook -- concrete forms (liturgy) that mask a substance (truth claims) about as solid as Jello. "Is it true" or "is is good" (Aristotelian / Augustinian questions) simply do not factor into Tickle's equation. God's position on baptism, eucharistic devotion, divorce, homosexuality, or women priests is simply irrelevant; these are just interesting religious diversity to Tickle, a view only permissible to an observer of a phenomenon, not a participant. In fact, does Phyllis accept God even has views on human behavior at all? "Christian" appears to be just an ontological category, bereft of any actual substance other than that which we create. As such, that fact that her "Emergent Church" would likely not be recognizable Christian in any historical sense doesn't dampen her enthusiasm at the prospect.
A far better and more comprehensive book on this subject is The Unintended Reformation by Brad Gregory. The Great Emergence is slightly above the level of a "Jesus Calling" book but far below a serious historical argument.
1. The formation of Christianity out of Judaism.
2. Gregory the Great (6th century)
3. The Great Schism (AD 1054)
4. The Reformation (AD 1517)
This may be true, but she is too parochial to have proved it in this book.
There are good things here. Her illustration of the process of religious questioning is quite good. Tickle sees established religion as a sort of cable that has three interwoven strands — spirituality, corporeality, and morality. These are contained within a waterproof (I would say culture-proof) casing , representing the common understanding for believers of how the world works and is to be understood. This structure protects the interior strands of the faith from the waves and rocks of the world, allowing society to grow for long periods of time unperturbed. But every 500 years or so, that casing gets worn through, and we collectively pull out and finger the strands, questioning our theological and philosophical roots.
This is a a useful illustration, but it does nothing to prove the crux of her argument: that we are in the midst of a 500 cyclical religious upheaval. Peter Turchin has a far more advanced model (cliodynamics) which incorporates a variety of cycles, and predicted in advance a massive political conflict in the early 2020's. Whether he's correct is debatable precisely because his model is so detailed; whether Phyllis is correct is not because hers is too simplistic.
The larger problem is that Phyllis seems unclear what the "Emergent Church" she's writing about actually is, in part because she's not at all clear what a "Christian" actually is. Millions of adherents throughout the world accept Christianity as a substantive revelation from God; Phyllis clearly does not. She is very Anglican in her outlook -- concrete forms (liturgy) that mask a substance (truth claims) about as solid as Jello. "Is it true" or "is is good" (Aristotelian / Augustinian questions) simply do not factor into Tickle's equation. God's position on baptism, eucharistic devotion, divorce, homosexuality, or women priests is simply irrelevant; these are just interesting religious diversity to Tickle, a view only permissible to an observer of a phenomenon, not a participant. In fact, does Phyllis accept God even has views on human behavior at all? "Christian" appears to be just an ontological category, bereft of any actual substance other than that which we create. As such, that fact that her "Emergent Church" would likely not be recognizable Christian in any historical sense doesn't dampen her enthusiasm at the prospect.
A far better and more comprehensive book on this subject is The Unintended Reformation by Brad Gregory. The Great Emergence is slightly above the level of a "Jesus Calling" book but far below a serious historical argument.
September 13, 2022
Legitimately interesting cyclical theory that severely lacks necessary historical evidence, punctuated by extremely lazy promotion of an already-dead movement.
NS Lyons's article (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/ar...) introduced me to this book, and he takes the theory a lot more seriously than I think Tickle deserves on the merits displayed here: there's little-to-no explanation as to how religious cycles still take 500 years in the 2000s (the same length as the interval between 0 and 500AD) when every other element of cultural shift has sped up by orders of magnitude.
I wanted this book to be a sort of theory of change in the church, which, it is, but only in the broadest strokes. Tickle lays out her theory quite nicely in the early pages, but she only really examines the Reformation as a historical analogue: we hear very little about the prior Great Schism of 1054 or the reforms of Gregory I in the 590s, her two alleged prior instances.
Obviously, the entire premise has serious weaknesses: certainly Christianity has undergone far more than three major schisms prior to the modern era, but even if I accept these three (along with a fourth ongoing one) as authoritative, Tickle doesn't try very hard to show that her theory fits two out of her three examples!
For (presumably) his part, Lyons argues that Tickle may have correctly diagnosed the problem of cyclical schisms while missing the salient movement in the 2010s: wokeness as a Christian heresy rather than as a political movement or independent religion. This is a very interesting thesis, and I hope someone develops it further: I find it far more helpful and useful than the genealogical critique that "wokeness comes out of Christianity, therefore Christianity caused wokeness", which sounds to me like nothing more than yet another attempt by (non-woke) liberals to attack their traditional opponents. Framing the moral commitments of wokeness as a heretical offshoot, seductive to many within and outside the church, better frames the mechanisms and alliances without denying the genealogy: in my view.
NS Lyons's article (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/ar...) introduced me to this book, and he takes the theory a lot more seriously than I think Tickle deserves on the merits displayed here: there's little-to-no explanation as to how religious cycles still take 500 years in the 2000s (the same length as the interval between 0 and 500AD) when every other element of cultural shift has sped up by orders of magnitude.
I wanted this book to be a sort of theory of change in the church, which, it is, but only in the broadest strokes. Tickle lays out her theory quite nicely in the early pages, but she only really examines the Reformation as a historical analogue: we hear very little about the prior Great Schism of 1054 or the reforms of Gregory I in the 590s, her two alleged prior instances.
Obviously, the entire premise has serious weaknesses: certainly Christianity has undergone far more than three major schisms prior to the modern era, but even if I accept these three (along with a fourth ongoing one) as authoritative, Tickle doesn't try very hard to show that her theory fits two out of her three examples!
For (presumably) his part, Lyons argues that Tickle may have correctly diagnosed the problem of cyclical schisms while missing the salient movement in the 2010s: wokeness as a Christian heresy rather than as a political movement or independent religion. This is a very interesting thesis, and I hope someone develops it further: I find it far more helpful and useful than the genealogical critique that "wokeness comes out of Christianity, therefore Christianity caused wokeness", which sounds to me like nothing more than yet another attempt by (non-woke) liberals to attack their traditional opponents. Framing the moral commitments of wokeness as a heretical offshoot, seductive to many within and outside the church, better frames the mechanisms and alliances without denying the genealogy: in my view.
Read
June 27, 2022I came across this book referenced somewhere else. Jen Hatmaker? IDK At any rate, this is a fascinating book. Tickle postulates that religion goes through a major upheaval about every 500 years. Even more pertinent? We're in the middle of one.
Now, there are some limitations. Namely this book concerns itself primarily with Western religion. Tickle acknowledges this. I have some questions about the last chapter in which she attempts to predict where Christianity is going, but, hey, we won't know that until we get there and we're looking back.
On the whole, however, it's an interesting book for those who would like a refresher on how Christianity got to this particular point. Also, her explanation for the social upheaval right now not only makes sense but also gives me a little hope because after painful steps backward, Christianity usually steps forward.
Most interestingly, I could almost see a pattern whereby all of the different religious factions might end up eventually--far, far in the future--coming together again. That idea was fascinating.
Anyhoo, God is love and Love your neighbor--that's what I try to live by. And you might want to read a Kindle or paper version of this book so you can see the graphs. But I did love the narrator--Pam Ward, I believe.
Also interesting? Phyllis Tickle was born in Tennessee and died in Tennessee. I only regret I didn't discover her until she had passed, much like Rachel Held Evans.
Now, there are some limitations. Namely this book concerns itself primarily with Western religion. Tickle acknowledges this. I have some questions about the last chapter in which she attempts to predict where Christianity is going, but, hey, we won't know that until we get there and we're looking back.
On the whole, however, it's an interesting book for those who would like a refresher on how Christianity got to this particular point. Also, her explanation for the social upheaval right now not only makes sense but also gives me a little hope because after painful steps backward, Christianity usually steps forward.
Most interestingly, I could almost see a pattern whereby all of the different religious factions might end up eventually--far, far in the future--coming together again. That idea was fascinating.
Anyhoo, God is love and Love your neighbor--that's what I try to live by. And you might want to read a Kindle or paper version of this book so you can see the graphs. But I did love the narrator--Pam Ward, I believe.
Also interesting? Phyllis Tickle was born in Tennessee and died in Tennessee. I only regret I didn't discover her until she had passed, much like Rachel Held Evans.
February 29, 2016
Phyllis Tickle, “The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why”, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2008)
“... about every five hundred years the Church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale.
Any usable discussion of the Great Emergence and what is happening in Christianity today must commence with yesterday and a discussion of history. Only history can expose the patterns and flow of our own times and occupy them more faithfully.” (p16)
“... about every five hundred years the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity, whatever they may be at that time, become an intolerable carapace that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur.” (p16)
carapace = A carapace is a dorsal (upper) section of the exoskeleton or shell in a number of animal groups, including arthropods such as crustaceans and arachnids, as well as vertebrates such as turtles and tortoises. In turtles and tortoises, the underside is called the plastron.
ossified = turn into bone or bony tissue.
incrustations = the action of encrusting or state of being encrusted.
“... every time the incrustations of an overly established Christianity have been broken open, the faith has spread – and been spread – dramatically into new geographic and demographic areas, thereby increasing exponentially the range and depth of Christianity's reach as a result of its time of unease and distress.” (p17)
“... we … see over and over again, religious enthusiasms in all holy rummage sales are unfailingly symptomatic or expressive of concomitant political, economic, and social upheavals.” (p21)
At the Council of Chalcedon it was Oriental Christianity that was exiled from (or withdrew from) both Western and Eastern Christianity, resulting in the three grand divisions of the faith:
Western Christianity – which by the beginning of the twentieth century as Roman Catholicism and Protestantism;
Eastern Orthodoxy – also called Greek Orthodoxy, existing in Greece, Asia Minor, Eastern Europe, and Russia, as well as today in North America, China, Finland, and Japan; and
Oriental Orthodoxy – subtitled as Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, or Syrian Christianity. (p24)
“When an overly institutionalized form of Christianity is, or ever has been, battered into pieces and opened to the air of the world around it, that faith-form has both itself spread and also enabled the spread of the young upstart that afflicted it.” (p28)
“... the one question that is always present in re-formation: Where now is the authority?” (p45)
Reformation - “No more Pope, no more magisterium, no more human confessor between humanity and Christian God, only the Good Book.” (p45-46)
The obvious, general benefit of 'Scripture only and only Scripture' was that .. a new source of unimpeachable authority ha(d) been duly constituted and established..” (p46)
“We begin to refer to Luther's principle of 'sola scriptura, scriptura sola' as having been little more than the creation of a paper pope in place of a flesh and blood one.” (p46)
“The century or so of peri-Reformation running up to Luther and to a fully articulated Reformation was rife with more challenges to the authority of the common illusion and the extant cultural story than just the presence of three warring pretenders to the papacy. … In 1453, the Ottoman Turks finally succeeded in capturing Constantinople with the result that thousands of Greek Orthodox scholars, traders, and intelligentsia fled what is now Turkey to take up residence in Europe. What they carried with them was threefold. First, they brought copies upon copies of the ancient writers who had informed their hereditary culture – Homer, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, the great dramatists, Euclid, Demosthenes, and their kind – along with the great Roman writers – Lucretius, Ovid, Cicero, Pliny, and their kind.
(Secondly) the exiled Greeks possessed the ability to read the ancient, classical tongues with sophisticated accuracy.
(Thirdly) they brought with them the spectacular scientific and mathematical knowledge of the Arab/Islamic culture in which they had been living.” (p47)
bellicose (p48) = demonstrating aggression and willingness to fight.
“... and perspective generally alleviates anxiety enough to make the effort of climbing worthwhile.” (p63)
“In 1895, the Conference of Conservative Protestants, meeting in Niagara Falls, issued a statement of five principles necessary to claim true Christian belief: … Those five principles of doctrine would become 'the Fundamentals.' By 1910, the Conservative Protestants body would begin publishing a magazine called 'The Fundamentals'; and the word fundamentalist would enter our language as the label for a very clearly defined mindset.” (p65-66)
“That which has held hegemony, finding itself under attack, always must drop back, re-entrench itself, run up its colours in defiance, and demand that the invaders attack its stronghold on its own terms. In religion as in warfare, things never quite work out that way; but there is a period in which the invaders do hesitate, trying to figure out how and why, with guns in their hands, they should want to attack the fort with bows and arrows, or something very analogous to that.” (p66)
“Generalisations are dangerous in that they invite the truth of what they say to be destroyed by the inaccuracies or inapplicability of the details that they are generalising. Nonetheless, generalisations usually have a substantiated core of truth in them, as well as provide an economy of observation.” (p95)
“We can not ignore the passing of much religious experience, instruction, and formal worship from sacred space to secular space and, perhaps even more significantly, into electronic space.
Nor can we, in speaking of the computer and cyberspace, forget that both have connected each of us to all the rest of us. The hierarchal [p106, now p107] arrangement or structure of most extant Churches and denominations is based on the hierarchal arrangement of the Reformation's evolving nation-states. It is, however, quite alien and suspect, if not outright abhorrent, to second-generation citizens of cyberspace where networking and open- or crowd-sourcing are more logical and considerably more comfortable.” (p107)
“... about every five hundred years the Church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale.
Any usable discussion of the Great Emergence and what is happening in Christianity today must commence with yesterday and a discussion of history. Only history can expose the patterns and flow of our own times and occupy them more faithfully.” (p16)
“... about every five hundred years the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity, whatever they may be at that time, become an intolerable carapace that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur.” (p16)
carapace = A carapace is a dorsal (upper) section of the exoskeleton or shell in a number of animal groups, including arthropods such as crustaceans and arachnids, as well as vertebrates such as turtles and tortoises. In turtles and tortoises, the underside is called the plastron.
ossified = turn into bone or bony tissue.
incrustations = the action of encrusting or state of being encrusted.
“... every time the incrustations of an overly established Christianity have been broken open, the faith has spread – and been spread – dramatically into new geographic and demographic areas, thereby increasing exponentially the range and depth of Christianity's reach as a result of its time of unease and distress.” (p17)
“... we … see over and over again, religious enthusiasms in all holy rummage sales are unfailingly symptomatic or expressive of concomitant political, economic, and social upheavals.” (p21)
At the Council of Chalcedon it was Oriental Christianity that was exiled from (or withdrew from) both Western and Eastern Christianity, resulting in the three grand divisions of the faith:
Western Christianity – which by the beginning of the twentieth century as Roman Catholicism and Protestantism;
Eastern Orthodoxy – also called Greek Orthodoxy, existing in Greece, Asia Minor, Eastern Europe, and Russia, as well as today in North America, China, Finland, and Japan; and
Oriental Orthodoxy – subtitled as Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, or Syrian Christianity. (p24)
“When an overly institutionalized form of Christianity is, or ever has been, battered into pieces and opened to the air of the world around it, that faith-form has both itself spread and also enabled the spread of the young upstart that afflicted it.” (p28)
“... the one question that is always present in re-formation: Where now is the authority?” (p45)
Reformation - “No more Pope, no more magisterium, no more human confessor between humanity and Christian God, only the Good Book.” (p45-46)
The obvious, general benefit of 'Scripture only and only Scripture' was that .. a new source of unimpeachable authority ha(d) been duly constituted and established..” (p46)
“We begin to refer to Luther's principle of 'sola scriptura, scriptura sola' as having been little more than the creation of a paper pope in place of a flesh and blood one.” (p46)
“The century or so of peri-Reformation running up to Luther and to a fully articulated Reformation was rife with more challenges to the authority of the common illusion and the extant cultural story than just the presence of three warring pretenders to the papacy. … In 1453, the Ottoman Turks finally succeeded in capturing Constantinople with the result that thousands of Greek Orthodox scholars, traders, and intelligentsia fled what is now Turkey to take up residence in Europe. What they carried with them was threefold. First, they brought copies upon copies of the ancient writers who had informed their hereditary culture – Homer, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, the great dramatists, Euclid, Demosthenes, and their kind – along with the great Roman writers – Lucretius, Ovid, Cicero, Pliny, and their kind.
(Secondly) the exiled Greeks possessed the ability to read the ancient, classical tongues with sophisticated accuracy.
(Thirdly) they brought with them the spectacular scientific and mathematical knowledge of the Arab/Islamic culture in which they had been living.” (p47)
bellicose (p48) = demonstrating aggression and willingness to fight.
“... and perspective generally alleviates anxiety enough to make the effort of climbing worthwhile.” (p63)
“In 1895, the Conference of Conservative Protestants, meeting in Niagara Falls, issued a statement of five principles necessary to claim true Christian belief: … Those five principles of doctrine would become 'the Fundamentals.' By 1910, the Conservative Protestants body would begin publishing a magazine called 'The Fundamentals'; and the word fundamentalist would enter our language as the label for a very clearly defined mindset.” (p65-66)
“That which has held hegemony, finding itself under attack, always must drop back, re-entrench itself, run up its colours in defiance, and demand that the invaders attack its stronghold on its own terms. In religion as in warfare, things never quite work out that way; but there is a period in which the invaders do hesitate, trying to figure out how and why, with guns in their hands, they should want to attack the fort with bows and arrows, or something very analogous to that.” (p66)
“Generalisations are dangerous in that they invite the truth of what they say to be destroyed by the inaccuracies or inapplicability of the details that they are generalising. Nonetheless, generalisations usually have a substantiated core of truth in them, as well as provide an economy of observation.” (p95)
“We can not ignore the passing of much religious experience, instruction, and formal worship from sacred space to secular space and, perhaps even more significantly, into electronic space.
Nor can we, in speaking of the computer and cyberspace, forget that both have connected each of us to all the rest of us. The hierarchal [p106, now p107] arrangement or structure of most extant Churches and denominations is based on the hierarchal arrangement of the Reformation's evolving nation-states. It is, however, quite alien and suspect, if not outright abhorrent, to second-generation citizens of cyberspace where networking and open- or crowd-sourcing are more logical and considerably more comfortable.” (p107)
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