Review: 'The Great Emergence' by Phyllis Tickle lacks insight

If you're looking for a guide to the ways Christianity today is changing, you won't find it in The Great Emergence, written by a former religion editor of Publishers Weekly. Phyllis Tickle devotes much of her book to the various elements that make traditional Christianity hard to maintain — elements as unsurprising as the impact of Darwin and Freud, and as unconvincing as the popularity of mythology expert Joseph Campbell's televised conversations with Bill Moyers.

Then she offers an exceedingly murky description of what is taking the place of the old religion. In a few words: Something's coming, can't say quite what. She even presents several diagrams that are supposed to show how the Emergence is coming about, but they're finally no more illuminating than her prose.

Tickle says a few things clearly, for example that Scripture's authority has been weakened by acceptance of gay rights and ordination of women as ministers. Her reasoning here is lucid enough: Since Paul declared that women are to be silent in church, and the Bible unambiguously condemns homosexuality, progressive movements are forcing re-evaluation of tradition.

But she goes on to make assertions that she fails to justify. The Great Emergence, she states, "will rewrite Christian theology — and thereby North American culture — into something far more Jewish, more paradoxical, more narrative, and more mystical than anything the Church has had for the last seventeen or eighteen hundred years." Maybe it will, but is it too much to ask for an argument supporting such a sweeping claim?

Every 500 years, Tickle says, the church experiences a transformation. The most recent of these was the Reformation of the 16th century, and now it's time for another. But what the coming earthquake will bring remains obscure in this brief, unauthoritative volume. You'll find more substance in the daily newspaper. And probably a better grasp of history.

Elizabeth Leib is a freelance writer in Tampa.