Part XXXV Matthew - Getting Back in Touch with our Source

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 1 January 2015 2 Comments
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Question

Are you familiar with Phyllis Tickle’s book The Great Emergence and her analysis of where we are in terms of the 500-year cycle of “great” changes? Does it make sense to you? Does “Emergent Christianity” seem to be the wave of the future for faith? Will its impact be primarily on the established church or will it be a new form of faith altogether?

 

Answer

Dear Rich,

I am not only familiar with Phyllis Tickle’s book, but I also know and admire Phyllis, who has been a friend and a colleague for years. Her book, The Great Emergence, echoes some of the thought of Karen Armstrong, another of my personal friends and favorite authors. It is fascinating to anticipate, as her book does, the relationship between the historical articulation of a faith tradition and at the same time assess the impact on that articulation of the age in which we live and the knowledge that we possess. For example what does it mean when we speak of God as “in heaven” when we live not in a three tiered universe, which that phrase assumes, but a space age in which we embrace the vastness of the universe. Where is heaven? What does it mean to talk about the human “fall” and “original sin” when we embrace the insights of Charles Darwin, who has taught us that there was no original perfection from which we could have fallen, but rather an evolutionary process that occurred over billions of years as life moved from a single cell to intelligent, self-conscious complexity? We are always being forced to acknowledge that the way we understand both God and religion moves in dialogue with changes in human culture, changing knowledge and stages of life and expanding consciousness. It is, therefore clear to scholars like Phyllis Tickle that religious systems change in cyclical patterns. There is no evidence, however, to think that there are abrupt changes and one never knows except when looking into the past, whether what is thought to be emerging is a minor adaptation or a genuine new birth of a newly-perceived insight.

I think one can interpret history only in hindsight, we cannot study movements of history with future projections. That is our tendency once we begin to see a new pattern developing.

So, I urge you to read and interact with both Phyllis Tickle’s thinking, but don’t leap to conclusions too quickly. The future is finally unknown and only fortune tellers, not theologians, really believe they can discern it.

I am convinced that the institutional church, at least as we now understand it, is dying. That does not bother me. That has happened many times before. There is no church in the catacombs today, neither is anyone building great cathedrals at the center of every major city. I am convinced that Christianity shares in eternity. I am not sure that the Christian Church, as we know it today, does.

John Shelby Spong

 

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