The New Authority

My Wednesday book study group has been reading Phyllis Tickle's new book The Great Emergence. Her thesis is basically that every five hundred years in the history of religion a great cataclysmic change of some type occurs. She asserts that we are now in such a time period.

For example, she goes back in time to five hundred years before now and points out the beginning of the Reformation as the Protestants broke away from the authority of the Catholic Church. The new authority at that time became "Scripture and Scripture only." Five hundred years before the Reformation there occurred the Great Schism between the Eastern church and the Western church. Before that, five hundred years approximately, the Dark Ages ushered in a long period of monastic tradition. When we return to the years 70-130 of the common era, we find the beginnings of the Christian church and its break with traditional Judaism.

On the one hand, as we review this church history, change seems inevitable and evolving. On the other hand, we might be fearful of whatever changes might lie ahead for us. Tickle's point about these "great emergence" periods, however, is that they are always divided into two parts that become stronger than ever before. We need only to look at the growth and proliferation of Protestant churches as one proof.

The new authority of the 21st century, Tickle suggests, is going to be an emergent "beloved community" where all work together as the early New Testament church did to provide for the needs of all its members. She argues that the Bible will no longer be valid as the authority since numerous scholarly articles and books have been written recently to suggest the somewhat arbitrary nature in which the Bible was assembled. In addition, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls have challenged traditional beliefs. The Bible may no longer have the inerrant content and infallibility that Protestants once believed.

I personally have believed in the Bible's Truth as authority for too many years to support this new theory though I am open to seeing how a new community of believers might work. As a relatively new Episcopalian, I value already both tradition and Scripture, but I am now open more to using experience and rationality as an additional test of faith.