History of Christianity

The Florida State University Department of Religion is pleased to announce its 11^th Annual Graduate Student Symposium to be held February 17-19, 2012 in Tallahassee, Florida.

Last year’s symposium was a huge success, allowing over forty presenters from over twenty universities and departments as varied as Religion, Geography, Psychology, and Philosophy to share their research, learn from one another, and meet many of their peers and future colleagues.

This year’s symposium will be centered on the theme “Beyond Borders: Constructing, Deconstructing and Transgressing Boundaries.”

Dr. Manuel A. Vásquez, of the University of Florida, will deliver this year’s keynote address. His lecture is tentatively titled “Beyond the Fetishism of Commodities? Hyper-Animism and Materiality in the Present Age.” Also, we are pleased to host Dr. Kathryn Lofton of Yale University as a guest respondent.

Due to our commitment to collaborative scholarship, students from all fields with interdisciplinary interests in the study of religion and at all levels of graduate study are encouraged to submit paper proposals.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Building and Maintaining Identities
• Communities, both Local and Global
• Scholars Manufacturing Subjects
• Strategies of Empowerment and Subjugation
• Limits of Embodiment
• Political, Ethical and/or Gender Conflicts
• Discourses of (In)Justice.

Presentations should be approximately 15 to 20 minutes in length and will receive faculty responses. In addition, every year respondents select the best graduate paper to receive the Leo F. Sandon Award, an endowed award named for the Religion Department’s former chair.

Proposals including an abstract of approximately 300 words, a list of key terms, and a one-page CV should be submitted by December 15, 2011 for review. Final papers must be submitted by January 15, 2012. Please send proposals to Michael Graziano at fsureligionsymposium@gmail.com.

by Andrew Stern

Few people consider November 30^th, the Feast of St. Andrew, to be a highpoint of the holiday season. Since the Middle Ages, however, the feast has had particular significance for people who share the saint’s name. In fact, for centuries every traditional name in Europe had a particular “nameday” corresponding to the feast day of the saint of that name (similar celebrations, known as “onomásticas” take place in many Latin American countries). Thus, on November 30^th, “Andrews” would celebrate the feast of St. Andrew, while their friends and families would offer them good wishes and even gifts. Particularly in predominantly Catholic or Orthodox countries, namedays often became more important than birthdays, since everyone knew the feast day of an individual’s patron saint (in fact, in many European countries one can still purchase calendars with lists of namedays), while relatively few people knew the date of his/her birth.

The celebration of namedays has declined in prominence in recent decades, especially in Western Europe, yet it was an important practice at the peak of European immigration to the United States in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. Therefore, it is surprising that there is so little evidence of nameday celebrations among immigrant communities in the U.S. Studies of immigrant religions in the U.S. chronicle the many traditions that survived the process of transplantation, but of course there are others that did not, and namedays seem to be a prime example. Why is it that this tradition failed to take root in the U.S.? Given the zeal with which American capitalism seizes on any religious tradition that can be commodified and marketed (witness the Our Lady of Guadalupe candles for sale in the Hispanic aisle of virtually every supermarket), why is there virtually no trace of nameday calendars, cards, or other merchandise produced in the U.S.? Feast day celebrations of saints important to entire nations survived, so were nameday celebrations too individualistic? Answers to these questions, and similar questions regarding other religious practices that vanished in the US, may provide valuable insights on the immigrant experience.

Nameday celebrations never really caught on in the U.S., but technology may provide a way to revive the tradition. The website namedaycalendar.com, for example, allows one to view the namedays celebrated on any given day in eighteen different European countries. There is also a distinctly American nameday calendar, published since 1982 and available online at americannamedaycalendar.com. This calendar blends the religious roots of namedays with American civil religion. Thus, people named Paul can celebrate their nameday on the feast of St. Paul or on the anniversary of the birth of Paul Revere. Similarly, the calendar assigns the name “Irving” to May 11^th, since that was the birthday of Irving Berlin, whom the calendar honors as the author of “God Bless America.” Although namedays are becoming more secular events even in those European countries where they are still widely celebrated, the addition of new “saints” to the calendar seems to be an American phenomenon. Perhaps in a few years the calendar will include namedays for “Barack” (August 4), “Beyoncé” (September 4), and “LeBron” (December 30).

Immigrant religions in the U.S. are nothing if not resourceful. The internet may provide a way to maintain traditional practices, but there are also low-tech solutions. This year on November 30^th I will receive, as I have each year for as far back as I can remember, a Happy Birthday card from my Hungarian relatives with “Birthday” meticulously scratched out and “Nameday” written in its place.

by Esther Chung-Kim

In a recent conversation with a faculty colleague, we noticed that most students claimed to be “willing to change their mind” but when presented with a different perspective that debunked previous notions and stereotypes, many in fact chose to remain “unchanged” in their views. If this is true for 21st century young people who are accustomed to a high pace of change on multiple levels, how much harder would it be for people in the 16th century to change a long-held belief and practice about the church? Especially when the belief is about how to solve the problem of sin. This leads us to the concerns around penance and confession, which I know are imprecise terms since they are based on the medieval understanding of “poenitentia,” sometimes rendered as repentance. How did the Protestant reformers introduce a change of view concerning “poenitentia”?

It is well- known among Reformation scholars that the Protestant reformers criticized some of the practices related to penance, but it is less-known how they appealed to an earlier tradition to challenge an existing one. By the late medieval period, ritual penitence was the result of a long development and continual adaptations of older historical traditions and while theologians, confessors and preachers differed in their understanding of just how the sacrament of penance worked to forgive sins, they all agreed that forgiveness was the outcome of a combination of divine grace and human effort.[1] In much of late medieval piety, preachers and people understood penance as a process requiring contrition (remorse over sin), confession (verbal account of sin committed) and satisfaction (amends usually in the form of punishment or renunciation offered by the penitent). These were the necessary steps for a penitent to receive absolution and forgiveness, and ultimately salvation. Because sin had a penalty either on earth or in purgatory, penance, which resolved the problem of sin and its expected consequences, was crucial. Late medieval preachers upheld Mary Magdalene as a model penitent for lay believers to emulate.

While the Protestant reformers initially retained the doctrines of contrition, confession and satisfaction followed by absolution, they criticized the practices of penance in which forgiveness seemed to depend on a person’s own efforts or a priest’s gestures. By relegating human effort and elevating divine grace as sufficient for the remission of sins, Protestant reformers such as Martin Luther understood forgiveness as a gift promised by God and received through faith and therefore not dependent on human contribution or effort. Based on Luther’s thought, Philip Melanchthon, a professor at the University of Wittenberg and a close friend and colleague of Luther, tried to explain how such new thought not only had the support of Scripture but also of the early church tradition. Likewise John Calvin, a pastor and reformer in Geneva tried to explain for Calvinist/Reformed groups how their new thought could be understood as a return to the ancient tradition.

In other words, key Protestant reformers, such as Philip Melanchthon and John Calvin attempted to claim the ancient voices of the past in their efforts to challenge and change late medieval notions about penance. In much of their writings on this topic, both Melanchthon and Calvin listed explicit references to the early church fathers usually for support, and sometimes for correction.[2] The significance of these citations is two-fold. First, they answered the charges of innovation by rooting the reformers’ views in the church’s ancient tradition, even if that ancient tradition needed revision. Second, the reformers considered the rediscovery of ancient Christian writings as an opportunity to rewrite history, i.e. to construct a new interpretation of the ancient tradition that would allow a critique of penitential practices and the religious views sustaining them. The use of the church fathers in Melanchthon and Calvin shows that the appeal to ancient authorities in the context of competing biblical interpretations would serve to revise or subvert existing religious positions. They were able to do this by simultaneously claiming Scripture as their authority and the church fathers as valuable predecessors, in so far as they illumined the meaning of Scripture. In their efforts to criticize late medieval penitential practices, Melanchthon and Calvin claimed the quasi-authority of the early church fathers in addition to Scripture to reform penance and the practices related to it.

[1] Anne T. Thayer, Penitence, Preaching and the Coming of the Reformation, Burlington 2002, p. 48-49.

[2]John Calvin, “Dedication to Simon Grynaeus,” in Ross Mackenzie (trans.): Commentary to the Romans, Grand Rapids 1960, p. 3. Calvin says he is using a different kind of writing and intending something other than what Melanchthon has already achieved illustrating the principal points, since he “neglected many points which require attention.”

by W Clark Gilpin

When my colleague Catherine Brekus and I edited American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity, published this month by the University of North Carolina Press, we organized chapters from our twenty-two authors thematically. Sections included “Christian Diversity in America,” “Practicing Christianity in America,” and “Christianity and the American Nation.” Looking back over the past dozen years, edited volumes have most frequently taken this thematic approach. New Directions in American Religious History (Oxford, 1997), edited by Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart, included sections on “American Religion and Society” and “Protestantism and Region.” Similarly, when Peter W. Williams edited Perspectives on American Religion and Culture (Blackwell, 1999), sections addressed such topics as “Race and Ethnicity” and “Intellectual and Literary Culture.”

Books with multiple authors addressing the range of American religious experiences perform an invaluable service both for scholars and students, and broad thematic topics are the most efficient way to give needed coherence to diverse perspectives and materials. But the thematic strategy elides one crucial task of historical inquiry: proposing models of development across time. In a word, what would contemporary historians claim about the chronology of American religious history, its major periods and nodes of transformation? And how would historians of American Christianity position various Christian groups within that larger narrative of religions?

In no small measure, decisions about periodization depend on the issues that a given author or group of authors have identified as the principal engines of change. Historians who link American religious history to immigration are likely to produce a different chronology from historians focused on the intersection of religion and politics, or the history of religiously motivated movements of social reform. And yet, a moment’s reflection will also suggest that these three sets of concerns display interesting chronological convergences, for example, with changes in U.S. immigration law and movements for civil rights during the 1960s.

Similarly, chronology and periodization are influenced by the historian’s own appraisal—whether explicit or implicit—of the cultural moment in which he or she is writing. A half-century ago, H. Shelton Smith, Robert T. Handy, and Lefferts A. Loetscher produced a chronologically organized, two-volume anthology of primary texts, American Christianity: An Historical Interpretation with Representative Documents (Scribner’s, 1963). Their sense of having entered an era of new interdenominational openness found reflection in the title of their concluding section: “The Ecumenical Awakening.” Roughly thirty years later in 1992, Mark Noll would survey his surroundings and conclude his magisterial History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Eerdmans) not with a celebrative declaration but with a question: “Wilderness Once Again?”

Finally, very few religions represented in the United States are restricted to a solely national existence. Certainly in the case of Christianity, the reach of its various communions is fully global. How does this international—indeed, intercontinental—scope of religious faiths and practices influence scholarly interpretation of the religions’ historical development in the United States?

Large scale interpretations of change across time that adequately reflect these diverse issues and historical contingencies are, I would argue, best addressed by teams of scholars committed to collaborative scholarship and willing to debate alternative proposals. Falling back on chronologies built around major wars or simply the beginning and ending of centuries is not sufficient to the task of illuminating the rich history of religions in the United States to a new generation of students.

by Peggy Bendroth

One mark of a good article is that it sticks in your head long after you’ve finished reading it. I’m still musing on Sarah Hammond’s recent contribution to Church History (September 2011), which analyzed the life and career of evangelical businessman R.G. LeTourneau. No world-denying angry fundamentalist, LeTourneau was a successful entrepreneur. His company made earth-moving equipment (which is an interesting metaphor in itself) and he applied his faith in some fashion to the anti-union libertarian politics of conservatives during the Depression era. Yet LeTourneau was no dogmatist either, and he quite willingly accepted the opportunities afforded by the New Deal and the economic expansion brought by World War II.

So why the musing? Over the past several decades we have moved from understanding fundamentalism as a movement of ideas and institutions to one with a real social context. The first layer of explanation dealt with matters around gender; Hammond’s article demonstrates that the next set of riddles have to do with money and politics—in a sense the movement’s social class identity. Thanks to her and many other wonderful scholars like Darren Dochuk, Tim Gloege, and Daniel K. Williams, we are beginning to see fundamentalists as people who voted, paid bills, and perhaps even read the stock market report in the local newspaper.

This has prodded my thinking in several different areas. For a long time, for example, I have assumed that the political involvement of the Christian Right was a sometime thing, born out of a sense of cultural emergency but hardly the default mode for conservative Protestants. Now I wonder. It’s hard to imagine R.G. LeTourneau at a Tea Party rally but not impossible. We can now see that modern-day evangelical politics first took shape in a social awareness nurtured in the 1930s and 1940s, and that they’re not likely to depart any time soon.

But the even bigger question, for me at least, is what separated people like R.G. LeTourneau from other Protestants, especially those we now call mainline. It looks like there was more at stake in the separation of conservatives from liberals than just differences in theology—and probably less than cultural alienation on one side and cultural privilege on the other. Whatever it was, it has made a lot of people angry, and for a very long time.

And so lately I have been trying to make sense of “grassroots liberalism.” The Congregational Library, where I work, has provided a constant source of wonder in that respect. It is full of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century religious flotsam and jetsam mostly from local churches, but also from a variety of middle-management level pastors—in other words, from sources that were articulate though not particularly famous.

My Library shelves do not cry out with the spiritual crisis we’ve come to expect, mostly from a narrative that, I would argue, has been shaped by histories of fundamentalism. Nor do they sag under the weight of religious apathy and ignorance—also a fundamentalist construct. These are not, for the most part, people busily rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic, only vaguely aware of future doom. Many of them are engaging, earnest, and smart — and certainly aware of the challenges they were facing, both intellectual and social.

So: what if we cleaned the slate and tried to understand this form of Protestant faith on its own, as one of many possible ways of being religious during those difficult times? Why assume off the bat that this form of religion was fatuous or insincere?

This means finding ways to talk about the liberalism of the pews. Intellectual history—the impact of biblical criticism and scientific rationalism—is important, but only as those ideas filtered through the idiosyncratic rhythms of local church life. This does not mean people did not care about who wrote the book of Job or whether Moses really parted the Red Sea. This isn’t a matter of being anti-intellectual or reactionary: it may be that some people just had other short-run priorities. Lifelong friendships or even the menu for the next church dinner may have weighed heavier in the spiritual calculus of the average church member than existential certainty on theological questions.

This doesn’t mean that lay liberalism didn’t matter—or that it wasn’t sufficiently “religious” according to some objective measurement. As I’ve slowly come to understand the people who stocked my library I’ve begun to recognize a distinctive (and vaguely familiar) kind of modern faith, not so much in their words but in the way they said them. In many cases this meant a kind of ironic distance toward the pieties of previous generations: these folks still prayed earnestly but sometimes with an eye open to check the clock on the wall.

I see this in the account of a youth group in the 1920s, deeply mired in the toils of a Lenten series on “Some Big Questions for Young People.” Thanks to a quick-witted, or maybe desperate, pastor they ended up doing improvisations on Bible stories about Joseph, King David, and the Prodigal Son. This appeared to involve dressing up in bathrobes and hats and adding a lot more slang and sword-play than the original texts included. Though their pastor insisted that his teenagers displayed the “finest type of reverence” throughout the exercise, one wonders if he just wasn’t completely in on the joke. Something was happening here that had to do with sacred texts—which also makes me wonder whether a fundamentalist youth group would have been able to enjoy this kind of silliness.

Sometimes people who didn’t take their religion too seriously made fairly good Christians. Take, for example, one of my favorite stories about Sunday bicycle-riding, one of the classic irritants to the faithful a century ago. “I am not a bicycle rider, but a middle-aged, Puritan, Yankee woman,” said one reader of the Congregationalist in 1896. “Often, recently, I have heard of those of my own age and older speak bitterly, unkindly, in a very un-Christian spirit, of the bicycle riders spoiling our Sunday — of bicycles being the great enemy of the Sabbath. Every time, in my heart,” she said, “I find myself defending the bicycle rider. I have taken pains to be observant and see in what way they spoiled our Sabbath. They pass my door on Sunday morning, singly or in company, and in sincerity I say, God bless them! By how many voices will he speak to them today and draw near to their hearts and open their lives.”

Who was this person? At the very least, may her tribe increase! I think she is a small part of the reason why causes like ecumenism remained such a passion for mainline Protestants up through the 1960s. This was not an agenda imposed by idealistic church leaders, but at least in part a concern that bubbled up from a local churches. It had roots in a certain kind of lay piety, one that is much easier to describe than define.

People like my bicycle-riding sympathizer also point us toward the roots of civic tolerance, of the “live and let live” kind of piety most recently described in Robert Putnam and David Campbell’s American Grace. The now-familiar fundamentalist story line of liberal fecklessness just doesn’t do these people justice, nor does it help us see the full spectrum of Protestant belief in the world today—including some forms of belief that might be well worth encouraging. The big question comes down to this: If we took our liberal pew sitters seriously, how would we tell the story of American religion in the twentieth century?

Summer 2012 NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities
Spatial Narrative and Deep Maps: Explorations in the Spatial Humanities
June 18-29, 2012
Call for Proposals: Applications due Friday, February 3, 2012

The Virtual Center for Spatial Humanities (VCSH), a multidisciplinary collaboration among Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI), Florida State University, and West Virginia University, is pleased to announce an NEH Advanced Institute for summer 2012 designed to advance exploration of key topics in the spatial humanities.

The institute will offer scholars the opportunity to discover the benefits of a spatial-analytical approach to humanities scholarship and to explore how to bend geo-spatial technologies, including GIS and Web 2.0 tools, to the needs of the humanities. Two areas of emphasis will be spatial narratives and deep maps. Fellows participating in the program will learn both by engaging with a variety of existing projects as well as through the production of a prototype project in collaboration with the VCSH team. Fellows also will have an opportunity to present their own work and to contribute to scholarly and Web products that result from the institute.

The institute will meet in Indianapolis from June 18 to 29, 2012 and will be administered by IUPUI’s Polis Center. It will draw upon a multidisciplinary faculty from the three collaborating institutions, as well as leading scholars in the field of spatial humanities from the US and UK, and will be supported technically by the advanced technology group of the Polis Center. The institute schedule will allow time for fellows to interact with the staff and to seek advice for their own projects or project ideas, but the primary focus will be on how to use geo-spatial technologies to enhance the narrative and analytical traditions of the humanities. The fellows will work with project staff to develop a prototype deep map to support multi-scalar and contingent analysis of problems of interests to humanists. To focus this work, the institute will explore the spatial contexts of American religion, using the Digital Atlas of American Religion, an NEH-supported project of VCSH, and the multi-faceted evidence from the Polis Center’s six-year study of the intersection of religion and urban culture in a mid-sized American city.

About the fellowships:

Up to 12 fellowships will be awarded to individuals or teams who demonstrate serious interest in the application of geo-spatial technologies to problems in the humanities. While scholars in all humanities disciplines are eligible to apply, we are especially interested in collaborating with those who have experience in one or more geo-spatial technologies as well as scholars who have thought about the spatial dimensions of American religion.

During the institute, fellows will explore central issues in the spatial humanities, including such topics as database structures and information architectures, interactive design, and collaborative research, while situating these concerns within the fields of American history and religious studies. Guest lecturers during the summer include Ian Gregory (historical GIS and digital humanities, Lancaster University), Anne Knowles (historical geography, Middlebury College), Katy Börner (informatics and advanced visualization, Indiana University), and Art Farnsley (sociology of religion, IUPUI), among others. Institute leaders are David Bodenhamer (history, IUPUI), John Corrigan (religious studies, Florida State), and Trevor Harris (geography, West Virginia University).

All fellows will participate in a two-week residency June 18-29 at IUPUI. The residency will include colloquia and working sessions in which participants collectively will develop project foundations and address relevant issues in spatial humanities. Fellows also will be provided the opportunity to present their own projects. Applicants need not be proficient with geo-spatial technologies but must demonstrate some level of engagement with them as well as with spatial questions and analyses. Evidence of the capacity for successful collaboration and for scholarly innovation is required. Fellowship awards will include a stipend of $3,000 for each participant, as well as a travel allowance.

Accommodation and meal costs will be the responsibility of each fellow, but the institute will seek to arrange low-cost housing for participants. We welcome scholars from all career levels, from advanced graduate student to full professor.

About the proposals:

Proposals should include the following:

• Two to three-page statement of how participation in the institute will fit the scholarly and professional goals of the applicant. 

 

• One-page description of the applicant’s experience with geo-spatial technologies and spatial analysis. 

 

• Brief CV (maximum of three pages). 

 

• Letter of support from department chair for non-tenured faculty or from dissertation adviser for doctoral candidates. 

 

Projects that articulate a clear understanding of the potential of spatial humanities and the problems associated with the use of geo-spatial technologies in humanities scholarship will be regarded favorably.
lectronic applications are required. Submit to ddearth@iupui.edu.

Deadline for applications: Friday, February 3, 2012. Fellowship recipients will be notified in mid April, 2012.

Questions may be directed to ddearth@iupui.edu.

by Richard Kieckhefer

We historians have a love-hate relationship with periodization. We roll our eyes at times. We take it lightly. Still, we have to do it: our books have to have chapters, our classes have to get organized into units, and we need to make sense somehow of the chronological flow, so even if we don’t take the periods all too seriously we have to periodize. Our books have “in the Late Middle Ages” or the like in their subtitles. We may argue about where the breaking points lie: we may deny that 1492 or 1517 is a crucially important date, and indeed it is currently fashionable to argue for a period that somehow merges the Later Middle Ages with the Early Modern Era. Still, one way or other we periodize.

There are different ways of periodizing, however, and they are not all equal. Some schemas are event-driven, while others are phase-driven. An event-driven system looks mainly at the great turning-points and insists that they were somehow revolutionary. We may be unclear about exactly what came after the upheavals, or in between, or what the revolutions produced, but we can see the fireworks and we are sure something big must have happened. A phase-driven looks at a long block of time and sees characterizing features that distinguish it from earlier and later phases, with or without precise moments of transition.

Joachim of Fiore’s view of history is a classic case of a phase-driven schema. The key to history for Joachim was the succession of eras correlated with persons of the Trinity: the era of the Father had passed, that of the Son was passing, and that of the Holy Spirit was around the corner. Of course Joachim paid attention to the transitions as well, the periods of overlap between the eras, each featuring prophets and charismatic leaders. Still, the transitions were not the main point. It was the eras that drove Joachim’s scheme of things. The link with a person of the Trinity brought with it characteristics of the era that were lasting and all-important. The era of the Spirit would be contemplative, and dominated by monastics. Joachim’s vision was mainly of how things had been, were, and would be.

Classic secular schemes of periodization–Auguste Comte’s, Hegel’s, Marx’s–have also been phase-driven, however much or however little they have attended also to the circumstances of transition. With periodization of this sort it doesn’t matter so much when one era ends and the next begins; gradual transition is usually presupposed. What is important is the succession of forces operative in history, and the vision of historical process implied by that succession.

A phase-driven schema can be powerful because of its clarity. It tells you what the visionary finds important in history, and it suggests that something new is coming that will have staying power because it is important, perhaps inevitable and irresistible. It may give a vision of a new earth to live in, an earth that may be refreshed by waters crashing down from the crystal sea. Who would not wish to live in such a new era? A phase-driven system may also be lacrymose, if it begins with a golden age and sees humankind bumping its way downward toward leaden bottom. In either event, a phase-driven schema brings clarity of vision, positive or negative. Whether we agree with them or not, phase-driven schemas can be intellectually interesting and heuristically fruitful, as event-driven schemas rarely are.

The first problem with event-driven periodization is that it tends to be so arbitrary. It often emphasizes and perhaps exaggerates some recent development, giving it epoch-making significance. In the 1960s we were told the Second Vatican Council was such an event. But those with historical consciousness have pointed out that the Council was preceded by decades of reform, that it took some time for its effects to be worked out, and that there were competing events that could just as well claim to be epoch-making. Why not the foundation of the World Council of Churches, which signaled a broader shift among Christian denominations? Perhaps the Second Vatican Council was in some key respects an exercise in catching up.

Much earlier there was the Fourth Lateran Council, also seen as epoch-making, and again the council itself became shorthand for a broad and diffuse series of reforms that had begun earlier and extended beyond its closing session. Long before that there was the Nicene Council, mother of all ecumenical councils, and surely that was epoch-making, was it not? Or was it rather the conversion of Constantine, which preceded Nicaea and made it possible, that was the real turning-point? Or perhaps the reign of Theodosius I, which went well beyond that of Constantine in making Christianity the official religion of the Empire? Or was it the formation of Benedictine monks, which helped spread the conversion out into the countryside and into newly Christianized countries? Or perhaps the moment when those Benedictines were first commissioned as missionaries, when they were sent to convert England? When we are defining our chronology by epoch-making events, there will always be a certain arbitrariness about the events we choose.

Indeed, event-driven schema are seldom clear either in their chronology or in their vision of the future. They tend to ignore alternative claimants that may be just as epoch-making as the ones they highlight. They exaggerate high-profile events at the expense of all that has led up to them or flows from them–or, for that matter, around them. They claim a new era has begun, even if its character is still seen through a glass quite darkly. They rarely have the boldness and clarity of vision seen in phase-driven schemas. They represent history as a jerking progression from one crisis to the next. Rarely do they give deep insight into the workings of historical process. Seldom do they produce clear and convincing visions of enduring values. They can thus be at the same time both sloppy and timid.

What, then, about Phyllis Tickle’s focus on a “great emergence” ? Does it exaggerate the sense of a moment–our moment, the time when something is emerging–at the expense of clarity about what we are to hope for? Does it play fast and loose with its chronology? Does it have all the shortcomings we might expect of an event-driven schema of periodization?

by Barbara Newman

A slender but hugely ambitious book called The Great Emergence:  How Christianity is Changing and Why (BakerBooks, 2008), has been taking congregations by storm.  Its subject, the “emerging church,” has neither vestries nor vestments, clergy nor canon law.  This freeform movement or network or simply “conversation,” as the book calls it, so far involves Christians who are mostly young, mostly American.  It is harder than mercury to grasp, but just as mesmerizing to watch.  It may represent the death throes of denominationalism, the first stirrings of a Great Awakening, or the twenty-first-century sequel to Harvey Cox’s secular city.  It may be the Christian faith reinvented by a generation that grew up “spiritual but not religious.”  Or it may be equal parts Holy Spirit and media hype.

Author Phyllis Tickle loves to quote the Anglican bishop Mark Dyer’s witticism: “about every five hundred years the Church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale.”  My first response was, fabulous!  Being all too familiar with sales of the usual sort, how I would love to shop at these!  Instead of distressed jeans and sweaters past their prime, the clothing racks feature embroidered chasubles and dalmatics in every hue—pentecostal red, Marian blue, Lenten purple, glittering paschal gold.  Nuns’ habits from long-forgotten orders come complete with wimples and aerodynamic coifs.  Reformed tastes can find a frayed black preaching gown from Geneva or a charming seventeenth-century ruff.  There on the discount rack—could that be a tie-dyed stole from the Sixties?

On the book table, those shreds of papyrus don’t look like much, but they’re the oldest scraps of Scripture we have.  Beside them, a weathered scroll from Nag Hammadi preserves the gospels of Thomas and Mary Magdalene.  That enormous folio volume is a medieval glossed Vulgate, its postage-stamp of Scripture surrounded by a penumbra of commentary, and over there is Luther’s Bible in its thick black Fraktur.  For bargain-hunters, pamphlets of the Nicene Creed go for fifty cents apiece.  Feeling plush?  If your living room needs a conversation piece, why not splurge on a rococo monstrance?  Gold is always a good investment.  But wait—what’s that funny-looking thing in the corner, next to the mission magazines?  A used hair shirt!  Buy two and we’ll throw in a flagellum at no extra charge, authentic blood stains included.

But alas, Tickle’s rummage sales are only metaphorical.  Her candidates for these quincentennial affairs are the papacy of Gregory the Great (590-604), the Great Schism of 1054, the “Great Reformation” of 1517, and the Great Emergence—choices that owe more to her Five-Hundred-Year Plan than to any sober assessment.  Gregory the Great was an important pope, but since his reign falls a century too late, he must figure chiefly for the epithet attached to his name.  Tickle makes him symbolize the fall of the Roman Empire, the Council of Chalcedon (confused with Ephesus in 431), and the rise of monasticism.  Gregory was in fact the first monk to be elected pope, as well as the author of St. Benedict’s Life.  But why not choose Benedict himself, whose Rule is still observed and whose dates better fit the 500-Year-Plan?  The only answer seems to be that he was never christened “Benedict the Great.”  Monasticism itself, of course, dates back to the third century and flourished in the fourth.

If an epochal reign must mark the first rummage sale, I would propose Constantine’s (he even has a “Great” attached to his moniker).  The first emperor to fight and conquer in the name of Christ, he made Christianity a licit religion, then an official one; presided over Nicea in 325, giving Christendom its first universal creed; and founded Constantinople, its cultural and political capital for centuries to come.  Five hundred more years bring us to Charlemagne (“Charles the Great”) who, as the first emperor crowned by a pope, inaugurated a new era in papal/imperial relations and organized a top-down movement to standardize Christian worship.  But a 500-Year-Plan beginning with these figures would run only to 1800, two centuries short.  So it could not validate the world-historical importance of the present, which is the real purpose of Tickle’s scheme.

Her next rummage sale falls in 1054—a sad year of schism between Rome and Byzantium.  But the churches of east and west, already divided by language and culture, had ceased to have much significant contact long before this exchange of anathemas.  The schism of 1054 became “great” only because no one ever bothered to mend it; few Christians, other than the hierarchs involved, took much notice at the time.  For most church historians, the “Great Schism” took place from 1378-1417, the calamitous era when two and then three rival popes claimed jurisdiction, weakening the papacy beyond repair.  Brian McGuire has made a case for the conciliar movement of that age as “the last medieval reformation,” whose failure made the sixteenth-century one inevitable.  Tickle, by her insistence on slapping a “Great” before the reformation launched by Luther, raises the question of earlier and later ones—such as the “reformation of the twelfth century” (Giles Constable), the “premature reformation” of the Lollards (Anne Hudson), and the Catholic Reformation of Trent.

In short, cherry-picking dates from church history cannot prove, by some Marxian iron law, that we now stand at an epoch-making turn.  Curiously, though, Tickle’s scheme of periodization bears an uncanny resemblance to a much older one.  According to the twelfth-century prophet Joachim of Fiore, just as the Age of God the Father gave way to that of the Son, a glorious Age of the Holy Spirit would supersede the latter.  And when would that golden age begin?  Very soon—it was already, so to speak, emerging.  Joachim’s dates, like Tickle’s, combined an appearance of precision with pragmatic flexibility, so that his followers could shift them whenever the prophesied events failed to materialize.  This intoxicating blend of prophecy and history made his views irresistible to some of the keenest reformers of the age.  Sadly, many were condemned for heresy and paid with their lives.

Our own day, like every other, is an age of crisis and a time of transition.  So I have no bone to pick with the emerging church, whatever it is or may become.  Whether it really has the importance Tickle claims for it, only time will tell—or rather, the historians of the future, for  prophets make poor historians and vice versa.  We mortals, it seems, can at best view either past or future with clear eyes—seldom if ever both.