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Another Look: Phyllis Tickle's "The Great Emergence"

Posted Feb 17, 04:15 PM | 9 comments | by Editor | Link

By Nic Paton, re-posted from Emerging Africa:

Where is this thing going, even as it is carrying all of us along with it in its mad careen?

In a movement regularly criticised as consisting of online, anti-establishment, young, white males, Phyllis Tickle’s voice is a relief. White of hair and skin she may be, but on most other counts she scratches parts that others cannot, breaking apart age, gender and denominational categories. When she spoke to Tony Jones on a podcast in July 2007 two things stood out for me. Firstly, her unabashed, unequivocal support of the Emergent and Emerging conversation, and the fact that her ambition when she grew up was to “be a crone”.

Tickle, now in her 70’s, is well qualified to comment. The author of numerous works (including plays), she was also the founding Religion editor for Publisher’s Weekly, close to the heartbeat of social, philosophical and theological trends at the fin de siècle in the United States. Widely acknowledged as an expert in Church history, she is well placed to see large patterns at play, and to sooth our angst, “you are not alone in the turbulence you are experiencing; it has happened before, again and again”. In addition to an Elders wisdom, she offers incisive analysis from a feminine point of view. As a crone in the making, she is bold enough to offer a prophetic vision not just to our age, but for generations to come. For some, Armageddon and Rapture are just around the corner, and prognostications about a New Christianity in Time and Space are the last things to worry about, but Tickle keeps her feet firmly on the ground, and reaches unashamedly for the stars.

Tickles central quest can be stated succinctly, and it is this: “Where, now, is our authority?” Like Francis Schaeffer’s question “How then shall we live?” (posed in the 1970’s), she shares a perspective widely informed by broader cultural trends. Unlike Schaeffer, who wrote from deep within a modernist, conservative evangelical paradigm, but nonetheless provided a solid Christian witness against the onslaught of what he termed the “Line of Despair” — existentialism, nihilism, and relativism being his watchwords — Tickle brings to us the fruits of an optimistic, post modern “return” to biblical faith.

For her, the problem of authority hinges around the current protestant orthodoxy of “sola scriptura, scriptura sola.” While Luther played a pivotal role in steering the Church onwards 500 years ago with his emphasis on the priesthood of all believers, and the sole authority of scripture, Tickle sees the end for sola as commonly understood.

The erosion of the authority of sola scriptura will have been in 4 stages: the end of slavery as a biblically justified practice, the acknowledgement of the reality of divorce and that those who suffer it might find total restitution in the eyes of God, the ascendancy of woman to ministry, and finally (and as yet incomplete), an acceptance of homosexuals into the Church. Added to this she includes the Pentecostal and Charismatic renewals (the Vineyard movement getting special mention) in which the Holy Spirit played an increased role in questions of Authority.

Unlike most voices who see only the demise of a Christianity without the “authority of scripture”, Tickle offers a new direction. But rather than some simplistic alternative, her proposal is robustly built up, step by step, and illustrated in a series of developing graphics. She starts with a “quadrilateral”: a square of 4 parts, each representing a major sector of the North American Church: Conservatives, Renewalists, Social Justice and Liturgical. She shows via a “cruciform” how these are beginning to coalesce into what she calls the “gathering centre”. What emerges is an iconic “rose” motif representing a qualitatively new type of Christianity.

The culminating thought is the introduction of a new word (new to me at any rate) — Orthonomy. Ortho we shall identify as meaning “correct” or “right”, but nomos is more difficult.

I’ll leave this one for the author’s own words:

”... it means to name the principles or resonances that create the harmony of sounds in poetry or music and the order in things in creation … to name the law and its perfection as the expression of the governance of God. In sum, nomos is, most nearly, the ineffable beauty in that which is divine, especially as it becomes incarnate in space and time.

“Orthonomy may be defined then as a kind of ‘correct harmoniousness’ or beauty. In effect, when it is used here, it means the employment of aesthetic or harmonic purity as a tool — and therefore the intent or authority — of anything, be that thing either doctrine or practice.” [149]

“Where, now, is our authority?” Tickle suggests that it arises out of community, conversation, and a new way of knowing, from the compost provided by every sector and tradition of the church, but that is will be based on an epistemology substantially different from modernistic ways of knowing. She has managed to put into words something I have only suspected: the ultimate authority of Jesus’ parables, for example, lie in their boundless meaningfulness and their inherent poetry. Many, if not most of us, who hold scripture in high regard, might find the assertion that orthonomy supercedes orthodoxy just one step too far, but I sigh with relief to have my deepest intuitions thus validated.

As original and erudite as it is, The Great Emergence is not without its problems. Briefly, its admittedly North American emphasis does make it hard to accept the thesis wholesale for anyone from the rest of the world. I always balk at American ignorance, arrogance, and parochialism, so my hot buttons are easy to find. I am in no way accusing her of these things, far from it, but I’ll be happy to put this bias down to her publishers DNA and demographic awareness more than any suspect intent.

While for the most part I was spellbound by her originality and alacrity, there were times when her waxings began to wane. One such instance is her “cable” analogy of truth which lost me, sinking somewhat under its own weight. And lastly, I think just a touch of hard sociological data might have been in order, to support her claims that for instance, one quarter of Emergents are Catholic (but perhaps that is someone elses job).

Like Brian McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy, The Great Emergence is a deeply ecumenical work, gifting the church with new and exciting tools for engagement with a new era. She considers the roots of this emergence, presenting the Reformation as a prequel to emergence, and then showing how in the last century Marx and Darwin, Einstein and Heisenberg, Freud, Jung, and Campbell have played pivotal roles in the redefinition of our world. I’d suggest that this “worldly” awareness be taken further by the reader, and although flawed, James Herrick’s The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition, a catalog of the influences eroding what he (too pejoratively) calls the “Revealed Word” tradition, provides a good counterpoint.

As in all things, history will tell whether The Great Emergence was in fact a once-in-500-year event, a vain hope, or plain hype. But it is deeply reassuring to have a qualified elder observe, hold, and validate a nascent movement. In The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle has combined the energy of the maiden and the wisdom of the crone, together with the nurturing intent of the mother, in her proud, celebratory closing litany: “The cub has grown into the young lion; and now is the hour of his roaring.”

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Nic Paton—Postmodern Liturgist, multi-instrumentalist, VJ, and scullery theologian—lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and contributes to Emerging Africa.

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