from Ground Glass:
Somebody said recently that the best thing a student could do was to get in some shows and publish a book, but nothing about becoming a human being, nothing about having important feelings or concepts of humanity. That’s the sort of thing that is bad education. I’d say be a human being first and if you happen to wind up using photography, that’s good for photography. – Henry Holmes Smith
My brother was at the National Youth Worker’s Convention this past October, and he saw Phyllis Tickle give a presentation outlining the essentials of Church history. Being curious, and entirely biased, I asked him what mention, if any, was made of Orthodoxy. The Eastern Church tends to be a blind spot for even those well versed in Christian history. Stephen said that Orthodoxy had been mention in passing, but that was it. I suppose I was pleasently surprised that it was mentioned at all.
I didn’t think much of Phyllis Tickle again until I got an e-mail from a friend praising Tickler’s new book The Great Emergence. I don’t mean to single out this particular friend, and I hope that if she reads this blog, she won’t take it personally. She had asked for responses from those who had read the book, and as this video she shared leaves me with no desire to read further, I’ll post my brief response to the video here.
I would also like to add that I became deeply engaged in Emergent thinking some time before I began to move toward Orthodoxy. My own perspective is not entirely uninformed about Emergence, nor are my comments entirely without some snarkiness.
- I don’t believe I’ve ever heard the Great Schism referred to, essentially, as a “giant rummage sale”. And what does that imply, from a Western Christian perspective? That what the Western Church really did in 1051 was simply to discard what was broken and outdated (otherwise known as the Eastern Church).
- I’ll be happy when the Emergent movement stops using the word radical.
- The Emergent Church has an entirely different understanding of the term ‘monastic’. That’s fine, but I just think it deserves clarification: monastacism and communal living are not one and the same thing.
- The Emergent Church, from the Emergent perspective, is “post-Protestant”. The Emergent Church, from the Orthodox perspective is, I think, entirely Protestant.
- And my favorite bit: “It is dipping back ardently, if you will, to [the] First, Second and Third Century to try to find there the passionate* parts of the Christian Liturgy that sustained the Church during those dreadful years of persecution“.
If they really want to know what sustained the Church…they could just ask.
* I will also be happy when the word passion stops being so overused.
This is one reason I thank God for the liturgy. The liturgy does not target any age or cultural subgroup. It does not even target this century. (It does not imagine, as we moderns and postmoderns are tempted to do, that this is the best of all possible ages, the most significant era of history.) Instead, the liturgy draws us into worship that transcends our time and place. Its earliest forms took shape in ancient Israel, and its subsequent development occurred in a variety of cultures and subcultures—Greco-Roman, North African, German, Frankish, Anglo-Saxon, and so on. It has been prayed meaningfully by bakers, housewives, tailors, teachers, philosophers, priests, monks, kings, and slaves. As such, it has not been shaped to meet a particular group’s needs. It seeks only to enable people—people in general—to see God.
Please watch this, and let’s talk about it. Very interesting – I really want to get your thoughts.
Dad e
my response: True, true, true – ALL of it.
