The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why
By Phyllis Tickle
Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2008
Review by Carl McColman
The cover of this book— featuring four images of Jesus, cobbled together to kinda sorta create a composite image of the Christ — is a hint about where Phyllis Tickle ultimately takes her introductory survey of emergent Christianity. This is a useful and often entertaining, if not entirely satisfying, short overview of the historical forces that have led to what is probably the most controversial movement within American Christianity today, particularly in the evangelical world. Emergent (or emerging, both variants get used, it seems interchangeably) forms of Christianity are diffuse, decentralized, and therefore somewhat maddeningly impossible to pin down, but the easiest simple definition of this phenomenon would be “the expression of Christianity that has emerged following the encounter between the faith and the postmodern world.”
Naysayers argue that Christianity doesn’t need to be shaped or influenced by postmodernity, any more than the Republican party needs to be influenced by Barack Obama. But this kind of purity-driven rejection of anything perceived as “un-” or “not sufficiently” Christian has been around since the early days, when some of the church fathers tried to engage in dialogue with the Greek philosophers while others rejected such efforts as threatening to Christian identity. Similar tensions have arisen around Christianity’s engagement with science, modernity, Eastern religions, and now postmodernity. Phyllis Tickle avoids any hint or moralizing or sermonizing and does not try to weigh in on whether postmodern expressions of Christianity is a good thing or not — although her upbeat assessment of how the faith holds a “rummage sale” every five centuries or so (she sees the flowering of monasticism in the sixth century, the great schism in the eleventh, and the reformation in the sixteenth, as pivotal events in Christian history, and asserts that “the great emergence” of the 21st century will stand alongside those earlier transformative events) suggests that she is pretty much affirming of the emergent conversation.
Tickle is a natural born storyteller and she truly shines when she simply and succinctly traces the history of the social, cultural, scientific, religious and spiritual events over the last century or so that have culminated in the roiling transformation of Christianity that she calls the Great Emergence.
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