Attitudes to sexuality and power made for a disastrous cocktail

Tuesday, May 26, 2009
FR TONY FLANNERY

Excerpt:
The American writer Phyllis Tickle, in her latest book, How Christianity is changing and Why, takes an interesting angle on the trauma in the Christian churches. Her thesis is that a major upheaval has occurred in Christianity every 500 years, and that this period is the fourth such event in the history of the church. The institution becomes so encrusted that it needs some big event to blow it open again, and make room for a fresh impetus.

She lists the previous upheavals: around AD 500 with the decline of the Roman Empire and the social and religious collapse that came with it; the 11th century split between the East and the West; and the Protestant Reformation.

Each of these big occurrences, according to Tickle, brought a cleaning out of the old, and the birth of a new dynamism in the proclamation of Christ’s message. She identifies what is happening today as the next great upheaval.

The key question underlying all these changes is authority. Who wields authority, and in what way? Her thesis is that we will emerge changed and revitalised. But Donald Cozzens, in his review of her book, does not share her optimism. Rather than seeing a new emerging church he feels that a lot more of the present church has to be done away with. the rest