Cross-sect Transferrence and Corpus Paradigms

Disclaimer:  I wrote this article a couple months ago, but have been hesitant to post it.  I’ve been hesitant because I don’t want anything to be taken as a passive-aggressive shot at any particular church body or person.  Even with this disclaimer, I think some may take this as pretention at best, or a shot at something at worst.  I promise, it is neither.  It is only a thought that’s been brewing at the edge of my mind, working one me as I listen to people’s stories.  But if you are a Protestant, I think it’s worth your read.

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There is a quandary becoming all to commonplace in our denominations today, that of a polarizing along battle lines of beliefs and the ostracization that so easily come with that.  I suppose it’s nothing new; only the details change.  There’s a lot of disconnection and sadness wrapped up in all that, and I’ve been reflecting on the stories I’m hearing from more and more people who have all the passion and best of intent in the world, but nevertheless feel disenfranchised all the more.  And so often, it really all boiled down to differences in philosophies or theologies that caused the gulf.

Being as it is that emerging literature and community is becoming a refuge for the disenfranchised clergy and laity alike, I’ve begun to wander if emergents were perhaps just dysfunctional misfits feeling out of place in functional churches.  There was no legitamate reason to think that, but the possibility still presents itself, I thought.

But I stumbled across the work of Phyllis Tickle, whose theory I have not fully bought into, but which is working on me nonetheless.  If you’ve become familiar with her new book, The Great Emergence, you may be seeing this trend developing in Christianity.  I will only offer a brief synopsis here, but the argument is that Judeo-Christian spirituality tends to take a massive shift every five centuries.  In 1517 AD, the Roman Catholic church split into Catholic and Protestant camps (which led to how many embarrassingly thousands of denominations?).  But before that, there was the 1054 AD Great Schism, which divided the Church into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox streams.  Five hundred years before that was the era of Gregory the Great and the great counsels.  Back from that was Christ; before that was the Babylonian captivity and the emergence of formalized Judaism; before that was the era of the Israelite kings; and so on.  Every five hundred years, the religion changes.  The previous stream does not disappear; it just loses hegemony as a new strand emerges.  The new strand is accused of any number of theological issues and authority confusions.

I’ve become sold on this idea that the Great Emergence is far more than some new great awakening.  It is, instead, the new reformation.  And with it, rather than a new denomination, a new sect is emerging.  And that emergence of sect is creating quite a problem that we are missing, especially those of us in the pastorate confused at our termination.

I have a friend that is an Anglican at heart, but preaches in a small Baptist church.  It’s odd right?  Because we typically do not jump all that much between intra-sect denominations.  If you are a Baptist, you might pick up a job at a non-denom, but you probably will not ever take charge of a Pentecostal congregation.  We just don’t switch between denominations with all that much fluidity.  Even more so, it is almost unheard of to switch between sects.  Baptist pastors do not find themselves as a Roman Catholic priest as their next job, and vice versa.  Pentecostal-ordained ministers don’t get hired by Eastern Orthodox churches.  And so on.

So if we begin to latch onto this idea that the Great Emergence will yield a shift as great as the Great Reformation, then we should expect new sects (not just denominations or bodies) to emerge.  Concordantly, should we then not expect that Christians, especially the clergy, of the Emergence will not fit within Protestant churches?  History shows that we simply do not do well transferring between sects.  In fact, that there are currently so many Emergence sect pastors functioning in peri-Emergence sect churches is a historical novelty in itself.

In the stories I hear, emergents get accused of two items more often than any other: problems with theology and problems with authority.  The theological accusation is simple enough (“you are too liberal”), if inaccurate and entirely reductionistic, but the authority issue is much more vague.  They are rarely accused of being insubordinate so much as they are vaguely told they do not trust authority (generally referring to Scripture, the Reformers, etc.; authority before now rather than a current entity).  Such accusations are confusing because while there is no specific act cited, there is nonetheless a vague mistrust of emergents.  Which is natural; we are biologically inclined to reject and attack want is unfamiliar. It seems that the authority, as well as theological concerns, stem not so much from a specific series of missteps, but instead from a different worldview, hermeneutic, and philosophical system.  It’s not that one cares about authority and theology while the other does not; it really comes down to Modernism versus Postmodernism, Enlightenment hermeneutics versus some other, Cartesian construction versus Derridian deconstruction, etc.

And then there is the difference in how emergents accumulate Christian doctrine.  emergents gather from the ancient, monastic, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant streams, whereas each of the previous sects gathers mostly from within their own stream.  Beyond this, emergents are more willing to accumulate knowledge from outside the Christian body.  All this is done in search of truth, but it appears, to a different sect, that emergents have devolved into syncretism.  So it makes sense that if, say, a Protestant sect pastor cannot understand where his member’s authority comes from (knowing that authority constructs theology), then he will be tempted to see this as relativistic syncretism and certainly heterodox.  This assessment is a misunderstanding, but that is generally the unfortunate result of cross-sect dialogue (a la Protestants accusing Catholics of worshiping Mary instead of Jesus).

Emergents may disparage certain items of Luther and Calvin, but they also venerate and seek to include them.  What is often heard is only the attack, which is taken as rejecting authority.  May the greater Protestant church not forget that the Reformers were accused of two main issues: theological heresies and authority issues.

In the meantime, let us be aware that if there really is a shift underfoot, we will do well to remember that sects have a difficult time getting along with one another.  Let us pray that those emergenting (or any and all of the passionate-yet-ostracized) do not lose faith in themselves, but see that God is once again having a giant Church rummage sale, doing something new in our age, and that the post-rummage sale followers will quite difficult time fitting in with pre-rummage sale churches.  The New is not better, but it is different.  And let us pray for safe havens of graceful churches to gestate this reform in the meantime.

In a time of upheaval, God moves among the ones called heretics.