The Vineyard & The Great Emergence

Phyllis Tickle, in her 2008 book The Great Emergence, calls the Vineyard movement "one of the few--some would say the only--examples of more or less traditionally structured emergence Christianity."

She goes on to mention a few long-time Vineyard catchphrases that have come to be central to the Emergent movement. The first is authenticity, and the second is "belong-behave-believe" (a common expression of the center-set approach to church membership).

Tickle then says our church movement "is entrepreneurial in governance at the congregational level, is egalitarian to a fault, regards itself as non-creedal, and uses "tribal" as an adjective of choice for describing its singular form of group affinity and affections."

I am simultaneously excited, refreshed and concerned by her opinions.

I am excited because Tickle lumps the Great Emergence in with the other 3 major upheavals of the church in the last 2000 years (The Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD led to a three-way church split, The Great Schism culminated in 1054 with the rise of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, and the Great Reformation centers around the year 1517 when Luther published his 95 theses). Her point, which is new to me, is that emergent Christianity is no more a sign of the death of the Church and the complete and utter moral decay of Western society than any of the three previously "new" streams of Christianity were. Therefore I'm excited, because she believes the Great Emergence is a good and inevitable thing, and because she thinks the Vineyard is one of the movers and shakers of said Emergence.

I'm also refreshed by Tickle's assessment of the situation. In my opinion, she manages to be objective, fair and quite balanced, while also striking to the heart of some of the big and controversial questions surrounding the emergent church in a powerfully insightful way. For example she points out that some critics of the emergent church are alarmed by its response to (or 'profit' from) the demise of capitalist economics, the Protestant church's dramatic shrinkage, the erosion of middle class and family values, a shift from cash to information as the base of economic power, and the disappearance of the nation-state occurring simultaneously with the rise of globalization. Yet Tickle points out that each of those factors contributed, as they developed, to the rise of Protestantism during the Great Reformation directly because Protestantism became both the reflection on and the expression of those values. Therefore it is only natural for the Great Emergence to gain momentum, authority and relevance as each of those factors that helped create Protestantism gets thrown out or re-invented.

I am concerned, or maybe just disgruntled, with Tickle's treatment of Scripture. Writing on the perennial question that besets the church during periods of upheaval ("Where, now, is our authority?") she argues that the Great Reformation's doctrine of sola scriptura is now dying and will soon be dead. In other words, the Bible as the church's source of certain truth is about to get thrown out the window. She begins with the Civil War, when American Protestant churches split violently over slavery as an issue that the Bible seems to neither explicitly support or condemn. She follows that with the story of World War I and women's suffrage, which seems to undermine the Bible's stance on gender roles. She writes, "Although we may argue with some success that the Garden of Eden does not really make woman subject to man, it is impossible to argue that St. Paul does not operate from that principle." I disagree strongly with this assertion, based on my reading of The Blue Parakeet by Scot McKnight, who I think does a fantastic job demonstrating that Paul may have argued for the submission of women in church because of a particular cultural situation, but by no means should his teaching be interpreted as a mandate for all times and all churches. Yes, the church probably messed this up for centuries, but that does not mean that women are subject to men as a Biblical principle.

Read more about why Paul wrote that stuff in 2 Timothy (on account of the new Roman woman) from another Vineyard guy here.

Next Tickle talks about the church’s teaching on divorce, which has changed radically in the last 100 years. And I would argue again that the church has screwed up royally in its interpretation of Jesus’ teaching on divorce (see Matt 5:31-32), which was again, specific to the cultural (my thanks to Dallas Willard in The Divine Conspiracy for helping me understand this). Therefore it’s not the Biblical principle that has been wrong and needs to be tossed out the window, but the church’s poor interpretation of the Bible.

Finally Tickle turns to the question of homosexuality, and in my opinion misses it entirely. For her, the question of homosexuality in the church is merely the last remaining tribute to a nearly defunct era of sola scriptura. It will go the way of female priests and divorce as things the church once denounced but now tolerates and even welcomes. But to me, homosexuality is simply a sin--not a grey area like divorce or women in ministry which ought to be contextualized--which we must never accept as normative, but that we have (once again) misinterpreted and mistreated for many long centuries. Men and women who have homosexual feelings or homosexual tendencies are not better or worse than I am. Their sin is no better or no worse than my sin. Their redemption is no less complete than mine. The church has been mistaken in its harsh (to say the least) treatment of homosexuality, but it should not make the mistake of now being overly indulgent with it.  If it were up to me, I wouldn’t ordain someone who winks at homosexuality, but nor would I ordain someone who winks at greed. I guess this is where Tickle and I differ; she doesn’t think Pauline passages on women can be culturally contextualized, and I don’t think NT passages on homosexuality can be culturally contextualized. I believe the contextualization of the former is necessary and good, and the contextualization of the latter is inappropriate and wrong. For her, there is no contextualization, there is only the demise of sola scriptura.

Does this prove that I am not an orthodox member of the Vineyard movement, or that the Vineyard is not really the emergent juggernaut Tickle says it is? Probably neither, but it is an interesting difference.

 PS I really like that she used the word ‘tribal.’ :-]]]