by Phyllis Tickle
In the constant morphing and shifting of the 21st century, trying to “be” anything at all is a bit of an adventure, whether one is Christian or not.
Beyond that, there is the other great truth that not all adventures are exhilarating. Some, in fact, are not even pleasant. Nor can there be any doubt that, for many of us today, our 21st century times are honestly distressing as well as taxing, not to mention occasionally downright frightening.
There is not, in other words, any real question about the fact that we truly are living in strange times. It is equally true, however, that we are not living in singular ones, much less in ones that have no precedent. As a matter of historical fact, quite the opposite is true. That is, about every 500 years, give or take a decade or two, the cultures of the Latinized Christian world go through a time just like ours — an epoch or era of enormous upheaval in which everything from politics to economics, from technology to social structures, from intellectual pursuits to domestic configurations and back again changes. Everything … and that includes religion.
We may not know why this is so — in fact, we don’t — nor do we have any reason to assume that our semi-millennial interruptions will always go on happening. All we can really know is that so far such a pattern has held true and that, as a result, you and I are presently deep into what Bishop Mark Dyer of the Episcopal Church jokingly refers to as “another one of our five-hundred-year rummage sales.”
The last such upheaval was in the 16th century, and we call it the Great Reformation. Before that, it was the 11th century, and we call that one the Great Schism. Before that, it was the Great Decline and Fall of the 6th century, not to mention the Great Transition or Great Transformation of the 1st century, that being the one from which all of our own spiritual lives arise and around which even our method for dating time pivots. (Since we seem to be addicted to using Greats to label our historic tsunamis, it should also come as no surprise that the one we are living through is generally referred to now as The Great Emergence or that the form of faith practice arising from it is labeled as Emergence Christianity and/or Emergence Church.)
If we are honest with ourselves, then, we can look at the list of Greats and deduce several things that bear directly on our own situation. First, everything — not just religion, but everything — does indeed change. We are taught as high schoolers, for instance, that the Great Reformation saw the rise of the nation-state, the birth of capitalism, the coming of humanism into the West, the creation of the middle class, the establishment of individualism as a virtue, etc., etc., and, oh, by the way, the coming of Protestantism, also.
In many ways, that curricular way of seeing the Reformation is more helpful and certainly more honest than are some of our less secular ones; for what it recognizes is that, within a matter of a few decades, there was a veritable maelstrom of technological and physical advances … the importation of gun powder, the invention of the printing press, the opening of new trade routes along with the discovery of a new world (not to mention the loss of the old, very comfortably flat one), the burgeoning of cities replacing serf villages, the notion (and proof, alas) that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe, etc., etc.
And what all of that meant was that, within the course of a century or so, a whole new life/ way of being/world happened … and those who were born with or into it were its natural citizens, speaking its language easily and navigating its circumstances naturally. But as for those human beings who had not been born within it and whose human ways of being had not been constructed within it? Ah, they were like immigrants, having to learn a new language and new methods in order to live in a world not of their making and, often, not of their liking.
Religion is a sacred construct, certainly; but it is also a social or sociological one. That is, in addition to conveying holy truths for its adherents, it serves also to answer for the general society around it the foundational questions of meaning and worth and conduct. How now shall we live? Why? To what end? What is the Good? And what is the Right? To serve both these purposes — that is, both the theological and the socio-moral ones — religion must (absolutely must!) speak in the language of the culture in which it exists. It is, in other words, the old adage all over again that to evangelize the natives, you first have to learn to speak the language of the natives. All of which means that for each of our new milieus there has had to be a new “church” — or perhaps better said, a new way of understanding and expressing Christian theology, ecclesiology and spirituality — one that looks like the new milieu and talks like it and understands it… which imperative, whether we like it or not, is precisely where Protestantism came from and from which Emergence Christianity presently is arising.
Protestantism came to us and our forebears as a new growth and shaping of the Christian message in response to a new growth and shaping of the world itself. It came into the 16th century as a presentation of the Christian Gospel that could understand capitalism (and still does), that could honor the individual (and still does), that recognized the middle class as worthy (and still does), that believed in institutions and valued universal literacy (and still does), all of these things being gifts to the yearning souls of the 16th century and to those of us who have come after them.
All of this also compels us to remember and respect a second thing, namely that Christianity most certainly and quite obviously did not die as a result of the tumult of the Reformation era and the concomitant birth of Protestantism. Rather, Christianity grew enormously. Like a mighty river that had just gained a whole new tributary, it spread into new lands and among whole new bodies of people. Of course, that should not have been a matter of much surprise, since the faith had always grown and spread as result of each of the prior “500-year rummage sales,” but sometimes in the duress of the moment we forget to remember things like that. We also tend to forget in such times that our loyalty is to our faith first and to our particular configuration of it second.
Third, we can know — hopefully with some humor — that had Roman Catholics been as obsessed with membership numbers in the 16th century as we are today, they would undoubtedly have fired the pope and shut down the Vatican. Declining congregant numbers have rarely declined more dramatically than they did for Rome in the 16th century. Why? The reason is so obvious it is almost pedestrian: There was nothing to make Protestants out of except Roman Catholics. It was that simple, just as it has been that simple in every one of our 500-year brouhahas and just as is happening now when both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism find their numbers dwindling as more and more former congregants move on to Emergence forms of faith and practice. (One could ask just here whether membership numbers are the best index of church vitality in the first place anyway, but that is a different, though related, issue.)
Fourth, and just as significantly, we can recognize that Roman Catholicism, the form of Christianity which held hegemony or pride of place in the West for the 500 years from the Great Schism to the Reformation, certainly did not cease to exist in the 16th century. Like the other forms of Christianity that had held hegemony or dominance before it, Roman Catholicism did indeed have to drop back, reconsider with stringent and holy candor some of its practices and painfully, but prayerfully, reconfigure some of its ways … but it did not die! Rather, like Christianity in general and like its predecessors in hegemony, Roman Catholicism continued to grow and spread and even beyond that, continued — and continues — to give to the faith universal its own rich gifts of aesthetics and spirituality and historic theological thinking.
So it is that now you and I are the Christians living through an era of history that has for the first time seen more and more of the machinations of the universe revealed to just plain, ordinary people; one that has witnessed the atom being split; that has had to learn to negotiate the stress of life in a geography where every single part is accessible from every other part in a matter of hours physically and of minutes electronically; where the exponential growth in just sheer information daily obviates some of what we only thought was true or accurate or utile and where information theory itself is a pulsating part of every minute of every day; where … . And the list goes on, though there is little need to elaborate it further, so familiar have its member-parts and characteristics become.
What does need to be remembered now — and perhaps even more frequently elaborated among us than has been the case recently — is the history of our faith, the long way of its growing over the centuries, the patterns and truisms of its experiences and the inviolate assurances of its ongoing thrust. We and our forebears have been here before, and it was good. Now it is upon us to so live and so pray that it will be again.
PHYLLIS TICKLE is the founding editor of the religion department of Publishers Weekly and the author of more than three dozen books on religion in America, including “The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why,” “Emergence Christianity: What It Is, Where It Is Going, and Why It Matters” and, most recently, with Jon Sweeney, “The Age of the Spirit: How the Ghost of an Ancient Controversy Is Shaping the Church.” She is a lay eucharistic minister in the Episcopal Church and makes her home on a small farm in Lucy, Tennessee.
