Apparently, even the best consensual social construct has a shelf life of no more than five centuries. Human systems of meaning only last so long. We all agreed the world was flat, for example, and the construct served us well enough, until, with the shenanigans of Columbus et al., that belief reached the end of what a flat-earth construct could explain. Religion is no exception. In The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why, Phyllis Tickle depicts this five hundred-year cycle of religious change. Every half-century, the system needs reconfiguring. “Re-formation,” Tickle calls it.
Begin with the Great Transformation (the time of Jesus up to 500 CE); move ahead and find Gregory the Great and the Fall of Rome; onward to the Great Schism, when Greek Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism parted ways. Another half-century and you have the Great Reformation-it was 1517 when Luther allegedly nailed his theses to the door at Wittenberg. One more five-hundred-year leap brings “re-form” to Christianity once more. According to Tickle, we live in a time of monumental change: the Great Emergence.
This race through the centuries leaves the reader breathless. Reduced Shakespeare might do it as “History of the Christian Church, abridged” Tickle, however, unlike the comedy group, is brilliant when she is reductive. Her concise review of the past two thousand years gathers lessons from history, interprets them through lenses of religion and social science, and turns out a theoretical explication of current upheaval in the church and in the world.
For a full review, go to:
www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=597
Reviewed by:
Lynn Hunter
http://www.sharpbluepencil.com