Inevitable, necessary crisis: every 500 years upheaval hits Christianity, writer argues—and it's happening now

National Catholic Reporter, May 29, 2009 by Tom Roberts

It may be difficult to see how the manner in which the church handles parish closings, the priest shortage or the sometimes bitter debates among its members relates to a bigger picture. At the local level, it becomes a matter of survival, of finding the community that "fits," whether to preserve Latin ritual, for instance, or to preserve a eucharistic community with lay leaders.

Phyllis Tickle, however, would say that those competing tensions, the anxieties of the era, are among the signs that we are squarely in the midst of a grand shakeup that regularly occurs on a bi-millennial basis to institutionalized Christianity. In her latest book, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why, she argues that this phenomenon has been "sending intimations of itself' and "slipping up on us for decades in very much the same way spring slips up on us week by week every year."

Her treatment of the Great Emergence deals largely with U.S. Protestantism and with a phenomenon that has generated its own universe of communities, literature and theology. (More on all of that another time.)

Her thesis--that we are amid an emergence of huge proportions fashioned by forces ranging from the printing press to further advances in science and technology, from biblical studies to various realizations about space and time that have infiltrated our religious certainties serves as a larger frame for any investigation of what is emerging in U.S. Catholicism.

Tickle, founding editor of the religion department of Publishers Weekly and author of more than two dozen books, cites Anglican Bishop Mark Dyer's observation that "the only way to understand what is currently happening to us as 21st-century Christians in North America is first to understand that about every 500 years the church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale."

Another way to put it, as Tickle does early on in her book, again citing Dyer, is that "about every 500 years the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity, whatever they may be at that time, become an intolerable carapace that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur."

Dealing in 500-year cycles, give or take a few decades, means that the last" garage sale" occurred in the 16th century with the Great Reformation; 500 years back from that was the Great Schism; and 500 years before that "takes us to the sixth century and what once upon a very recent time was labeled as 'the fall of the Roman Empire' or 'the coining of the Dark Ages.'"

Through all of these periods, Tickle writes, three things have always occurred:

* A new and more vital form of Christianity emerges;

* The previously dominant form of Christianity "is reconstituted into a more pure and less ossified expression of its former self';

* Every time the incrustations of an overly established Christianity have been broken open, the faith has spread ... dramatically into new geographic and demographic areas."

Perhaps an even more important point for Catholics--if, indeed, Catholicism is going through the same experience as the rest of Christianity--is Tickle's observation that the central question the faith faces while making its way through the turmoil of each of these periods is: Where is the authority?

Each time the previous story is "broken" (think, for instance, of how Copernicus and Galileo disturbed Catholic cosmology and scriptural certainty) and "the common imagination dispelled into a thousand wisps of half-remembered and now ludicrous fantasy," there emerges "an adjusted, largely new story and an adjusted, largely new imagination." Emerging along with the new story and imagination are advocates to articulate and promote them. In the doing, authority finds a new locus.

In Tickle's scheme, America contributes enormously to the current emergence by virtue of its religious diversity and the way we no longer live just in a pluralistic culture where religious freedom is guaranteed but, more significantly, in close proximity with one another.

Old barriers have been breaking down. It has occurred over time as a gradual process, at first "people swapping stories and habits, people admiring the ways of some other people whom they liked, people curious and able now to ask without offense."

All this swapping back and forth was aided by the fact not only of our physical proximity with one another but also because we lived in a media age. "Newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and in one mighty burst of glory, the Internet saw to it that ideas flew about like bees in an overturned hive.

If one is tempted to dismiss Dyer's assessment as predictably Anglican (or more narrowly, U.S. Episcopalian), with its distaste for some of Roman Catholicism's absolutes and its tolerance of revolutionary ordinations of women and gays, Tickle claims that the Roman Catholic church was way ahead of most in anticipating the questions of the current emergence.

In fact, she writes, "approximately one quarter of today's 'emergents' and 'emergings' are Roman Catholic, not Protestant, in background and natal formation," which leads her to conclude that any treatment of the period leading up to the great emergence "must acknowledge the presence and enormous formative impact of both Vatican I and Vatican II on Roman Catholicism in particular and on retraditioning and emergent/ emerging Christianity in general."