Emergence." What Author's Key Message Proposes Church? Essay

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Emergence." What author's key message proposes Church? How evaluate suggestions local church today? Grading Rubric 1) Formatting Spelling 5 pts. 2) Accuracy thoroughness summary key message proposal 65 pts.

The Great Emergence

What is the author's key message and what does she propose to the Church? How do you evaluate her suggestions and what would it mean for the local church today?

According to Phyllis Tickle, the author of The Great Emergence, we are in a new era of religious reflection. Periodically, all religions 'clean house' and re-examine their storehouse of ideals. Over the course of her text, Tickle examines how cultural moments like the re-centering of the universe with the sun at its center; the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species; the development of psychoanalysis; and even the popularization of Joseph Campbell on PBS caused Western culture to view the Christian religion differently. Tickle urges Christians to not see the current culture wars and dissent as a threat, but to view the current debate as a necessary and creative re-visioning of Christianity. After every one of the periodic crises that afflicted the faith, Christianity became more relevant to individual's lives. "From time to time that the only way to understand what is currently happening to us as twenty-first century Christians in North America is first to understand that about every five hundred years the church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale" of ideas, writes Tickle (Tickle 16)

In her history of Christianity, Tickle divides the evolution of the faith into different crisis points. The first was during the early period when Christianity was still a relatively small 'cult' religion and defining its formal ideals. The second was when the religion began to shift and solidify as a state-based faith, around the time of Constantine. The third came after the split between the Roman and Eastern Orthodox Churches. The fourth was the Reformation, and the fifth is taking place in the present day where religion and science are doing battle, which she calls the Great Emergence.

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At least every 500 years Christianity has gone through this -- Christianity is in crisis now and will be again.

Looking back at the past, some of the controversies about the Eucharist or indulgences seem minor, but they were of great significant to individuals embroiled in the controversies at the time. Periods of intellectual disharmony are part of Christianity, which then attempts to 'smooth over' such divisions once a new consensus has emerged. When it was first forming the church furiously debated such topics as to whether God was one person or three in one person, the relationship of Mary to God, and whether Christ suffered pain during the Crucifixion. The subsequent establishment of orthodoxy, (a uniform system of belief that came to be accepted by most Christians) changed the history of the faith permanently. A new conception of what it meant to be human emerged, one in which God and humanity was one and united. Jesus did not merely temporarily inhabit the world in this new view, Jesus was also of the world.

Every great shift in Christianity, writes Tickle, forced believers to reconceptualize what it meant to be human. For example, the Reformation brought forth a new era in which there was "no more Pope, no more magisterium, no more human confessor between humanity and the Christian God, only the Good Book" (Tickle 46). By investing authority in a book, Luther changed not only Christianity but also expanded the need for universal literacy, given that human beings were now encouraged to understand the Bible directly, rather than accept it in a mediated fashion through the interpretation of the clergy. This also transformed the world and the Christian faith, given the multiplicity of opinions this generated.

The development of Lutheranism was both a product of a crisis within the Catholic Church and a larger, exterior social crisis, much like Christianity's current crisis today. The Reformation was stimulated by a rise in interest in classical languages, the sciences,….....

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