Every 500 years or so, since Jesus walked this earth, there has been a great change in the Christian faith. The last was the Great Reformation, as it is sometimes called. In her book “The Great Emergence”, Phyllis Tickle describes the current landscape of shifting tides.
One major takeaway is that she sees the question of “what is the authority?” at the center of each change. For the Reformation the answer settled on sola scriptura, scriptura sola. As she points out, this view can no longer hold, and so in the Great Emergence we seek to settle on the emerging authority.
If asked, the authority may very well be “in Scripture and the community”, which is a sort of amalgamation of previous authorities. “The duty, the challenge, the joy and excitement of the Church and for the Christians who compose her, then, is in discovering what it means to believe that the kingdom of God is within one and in understanding that one is thereby a pulsating, vibrating bit in a much grander network. Neither established human authority nor scholarly or priestly discernment alone can lead, because, being human, both are trapped in space/time and thereby prevented from a perspective of total understanding. Rather, it is how the message runs back and forth, over and about, the hubs of the network that it is tried and amended and tempered into wisdom and right action for effecting the Father’s will.”
If you have felt, like me, that there is a change in the wind, this book leaves little doubt. We are not merely in a time defined by the normal ebbs and flows of human existence, but the Great Emergence of the faith, that in some ways is new, but in many others brings us back to the this-worldly redemptive gospel of Jesus and his kingdom.
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