Reviews for The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why

The average rating for The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-02-01 00:00:00 Stuart Britton (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.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-04-05 00:00:00 Robin Lasater 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.