February, 2010:

I’m no historian. You probably aren’t either. Fortunately, this fact probably won’t serve as a handicap when reading this short book of history.

“The Great Emergence” is a book that makes sweeping generalizations about large swaths of world history. Many conclusions are drawn from these generalizations, which leaves us non-historians in a bit of a bind: in order to accept Tickle’s conclusions, we must first accept her version of the events. Without extensive knowledge of these historical events, it is difficult to refute or agree with either.

But before this really becomes a problem the book shows itself to be an exercise in unintentionally amusing hyperbole. Likewise, the concerns with historical accuracy subside, inversely proportional to the level of – again, unintentional – humor that accompanies the escalating hyperbole.

Pretending to be a short but concise assessment of current events, the book is more like an impressionist painting than an accurate portrait. The subtitle sets the goal of answering “How Christianity is Changing and Why,” but it is a small book with too few pages (165) in which to accomplish the task. In many places, the historical flybys leave so much unsaid that regardless of your level of historical knowledge it’s pretty easy to tell that too much of the story is missing. At other points in the book, inordinate amounts of space are spent on tangential developments at various historical junctures in church history.

Tickle sees the current period of upheaval as an event in significance equal to the Great Schism and the Great Reformation. What we are living through, by her estimation, is the Great Emergence – and this is a cause for great elation.

In one particularly effusive section, Tickle pictures the movement itself as a great healer:

“One does not have to be particularly gifted as a seer these days,” she says, “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.” (p29)

A sentence of greater utopian delusion has seldom been written.

It is little wonder that those who are leaders of emergent Christianity call Tickle a friend and ally. Of Doug Pagitt she says he is “one of emergent Christianity’s most influential and brilliant thinkers.” She calls Brian McLaren “the symbolic leader of the Great Emergence… in the same way that Martin Luther became the symbolic leader and spokesman for the Great Reformation.” It’s all a bit much, regardless of the contributions these two may have made.

Sola Scriptura

Tickle chooses as a common thread for the book the metaphor of a rummage sale, and though the metaphor appears at regular intervals, it is never quite explained or successfully coaxed into a relevant illustration of historical upheavals. We’re not sure what is being sold at the rummage sale or what the current one has in common with past one, etc.

A third of the way through the book 46, Tickle goes to work on the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura, claiming, “Even many of the most die-hard Protestants among us have grown suspicious of ‘Scripture and Scripture only.’” She goes on:

“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. And even as we speak, the authority that has been in place for five hundred years withers away in our hands.”

Her evidence: Paul’s injunctions against women, the one-time acceptance of slavery, and flat-earth theology. For her, this evidence is damning evidence; she leaves no room for other options. Paul says one thing (women must keep quiet in the assembly), we do another (women are allowed to speak), therefore sola scriptura is an illusion and scriptural authority is eroded. This narrow view of Sola Scriptura is laughable. Occasional doctrinal corrections cannot be used as indicators of future change, as Tickle proposes on the following pages.

Tickle also makes parallel comparisons between the current and historical hegemony. Hegemony is leadership or dominance, esp. by one country or social group over others. In the 16^th century, the ruling hegemony was the Roman Catholic Church. It is pretty difficult to draw a modern parallel of a uniform hegemony against which Emergents are protesting or which they are attempting to reform.

In short, her parallels are too labored to be convincing, and too weak to maintain their connection to their supposed historical equivalents. Just who or what constitutes the current hegemony? We’re not told.

Grandma, Tin Lizzie, and the Decline of Protestantism

On pages 86-87, she proposes a line of social theory involving grandma (yours), Norman Rockwell, and the automobile that defies reason. Of Grandma, Tickle claims that “When the Tin Lizzie took away her kingdom of influence, it was Protestantism more than Grandma that came untethered and was diminished.” This attempt at a two-page synopsis of a wide range of events ends up looking more like the work of Salvador Dali than Norman Rockwell. Like Dali’s paintings, Tickle’s words are fun to look at but making sense of them is an arduous task.

Shortly after (91-93), in what seems to be another attempt at a “Dali Word Picture”, Tickle claims that pastoral authority was singlehandedly supplanted by Alcoholics Anonymous. Huh?

In another episode of incoherent and unfounded “fact-stating” Tickle claims that, “In the hands of the Emergents, Christianity has grown exponentially, not only in geographic base and numbers, but also in passion and in effecting belief in the Christian call to the brotherhood of all peoples.” Is there some evidence of this of which none of us are aware?

Tickle’s penchant for hyperbole is, if nothing else, amusing. I quote the following (p135) at length for your amusement:

“There is enormous energy in centripetal force, especially as it gathers more and more of its own kind into itself. Centripetal force, though, is usually envisioned by us as running downward, like the water in a bathtub drain. The gathering force of the new Christianity did the opposite. It ran upward and poured itself out, like some bursting geyser, in expanding waves of influence and nourishment. Where once the corners had met, now there was a swirling center, its centripetal force racing from quadrant to quadrant in every widening circles, picking up ideas and people from each, sweeping them into the center, mixing them up there, and then spewing them forth into a new way of being Christian, into a new way of being Church.”

Gathering… running… pouring, bursting, expanding, nourishing! Swirling! Racing! WIDENING! SWEEPING! MIXING!!! SPEWING!!!!!!

If you want to know what reading The Great Emergence is like, imagine your newest married-in relative attempting to write your family history. She may have something to say and plenty to add in the future, but hearing a few of Uncle Joe’s stories hardly qualifies her to write a definitive history of your family – or a map of its future for that matter. Tickle may well be truthful to a mainline perspective on historical events, and she may even have something to offer in predicting the trajectory of mainline denominations, but this book’s target is primarily Evangelicals, with whom, as far as we now, she has little affinity or experience.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, the book is more an exercise in poetic impressionist prose than historical analysis or prophetic utterance. It is a short read, but in the end not really worth the time. This much history deserves a more thorough treatment than 165 pages in a small book.

Are we on the verge of some significant shifts in the Western Church? It’s pretty safe to say that we are. It would be difficult to name another period in history where so many questions and debates and trends and issues were at play.  But to draw a parallel between this time and the periods of upheaval of the past is a bit overblown.

I have not read any of Tickle’s other books, but I’ve heard they’re quite good. I have heard numerous interviews with her and enjoyed them. Tickle’s thoughts, analysis, and prescriptions for our current age of upheaval are far narrower in scope than the book purports them to be. There is plenty of revision here masquerading as synopsis.