"We are at a time in history of great shift or change, what Thomas Cahill calls a 'hinge in history.'
It is comparable in every way to what happened in 70 A.D."
-Phyllis Tickle, way back in 2003..
- "Today's Church in America"..read part 2(From which this is excerpted)
Note, this delightful message, given at an Episcopal church as two sermons, lets you in on her developing thinking on the ideas that
became "The Great Emergence, shows that she "got" the huge cultural shift of "The Truman Show" and "The Matrix" movies..and ends:"And I for one have to tell you I like it a whole lot more having that one constant [God] than all that crap...
if you will forgive the French.
And on that inelegant note, thank you."
I would differ with this statement: "At least twice before has there been a time when a culture so dramatically shifted that religion was dramatically changed also. The first time was the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D. A bunch of irregular Jews who were followers of an irregular rabbi discovered that they could no longer function as Jews, that they were instead Christian. Absent the temple and absent a rabbinical system that was not yet developed, they became Christian." This is not really true. The only shift in the Sect of the Nazarene in 70CE was that the leadership left Jerusalem. The Sect still operated within mainstream Judaism until after 135CE, after the rest of the Tribe blamed us for the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt because the Sect abandoned the revolution after Rav Akiva declared Shimon as "Bar Kochba" (Son of the Star, aka Messiah). And then what happened was we were run out of the mainstream synagogues. However, local chavurot (fellowship groups) has already been established, and in some places were full-fledged congregations with their own services... but not "Christian" services. Things were still Jewish in ritual, practice, and idea. That only really STARTED to change -- except for a few isolated groups -- when Marcion gained a following over a decade later, and then only in areas with more of a pagan influence. In the Western Church, they became "Christian" (as distinct from "Jewish") only after successive Church councils where the Torah-observers (still called "Nazarenes") were not invited, culminating with Constantine and the Nicean councils (which were not very Nice, in my opinion! ;-).
ReplyDeleteMore as I continue reading...