book reviews
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Phyllis Tickle with Jon M. Sweeney
The Age of the Spirit: How the Ghost of an Ancient Controversy is Shaping the Church
(Grand Rapids,mi: Baker Books, 2014). 184 pp. $19.99 hardback.
It is strange to think of the work of the Spirit occurring in a line, particularly in a linear narrative of history that can be traced as a genealogy that flows directly back to arguments in the hallowed halls of Christian dogmatists. Why do the schisms and controversies of the past matter to the work of the Spirit in the present? In a fast-paced, cogent introductory for the theologically curious, Phyllis Tickle and Jon M. Sweeney’s The Age of the Spirit: How the Ghost of an Ancient Controversy is Shaping the Church strives to show exactly how major Trinitarian and God-the-Spirit issues in the long-ago history of the church are crucial to contemporary Charismatic understanding.
Tickle and Sweeney’s collaborative summary aims to address a question they note as seasonally recurring through Christian history: “In these times of upheaval and change, where now is our authority?” Or, as it is often reframed, “How should we live?” Surrounding this anxiety about the church’s direction as one that is necessarily of interest to Emergence Christianity, since more than a quarter of the world’s Christians identify as part of the Charismatic movement and its numbers continue to grow. The authors write out of the conviction that knowledge of the story of the church’s grappling to understand the Spirit of God will aid the contemporary Pentecostal or Charismatic-aligned, traditional Protestant, and even spiritual-but-not-religious Christian in their own seeking.
The time is right to conceive of a new work of the Spirit, Tickle and Sweeney claim, taking up again and expanding the argument of their earlier book, The Great Emergence (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), that the latinized world functions within 500-year cycles of major shifts in conceptions and practices of ecclesiastical authority. The theological changes that occur with these shifts are the historical and spiritual narrative that the authors identify as leading to the current trend: the pull of Christians to move away from traditional author- itative structures. Those structures exist because of the previous 500-year shift of the Reformation, itself a movement away from the Great Schism of 1154ce; and that shift was also, in its turn, a change from the Great Fall and Decline of about 500 years previous.
High points and enactors of this “back story” are explained in clear, read- able language, with Tickle and Sweeney mentioning the major controversies regarding the church’s understanding of the role of the Spirit, including concep- tions of the Trinity, beginning with Augustine. Noting that “most of us in the … pews of Christendom have rarely known enough about the history of the faith … to ask where and how an idea like the Trinity got started,” the authors delin-
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-03702006
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book reviews
eate a history of the disagreements surrounding the “great enigma” (34). By quickly but lucidly summarizing Arianism, Montanism, and orthodox under- standings, Tickle and Sweeney trace a history of the creedal statements of the seven Church Councils, lingering on the filioque controversy that lead to the Great Schism and enumerating noteworthy figures’ beliefs throughout the two thousand years of the church. They hold that the story of the Spirit began not in the last several decades with the explosive growth of the Charismatic church, nor with the Azusa Street phenomenon in 1906, but that the current era’s upheaval and shifting of church authority is one that rests on a firm foun- dation of historical precedent. The questions that Christians ask today—what, or who, is the Spirit of God? and what is that Spirit’s relationship to God as Cre- ator and Redeemer?—remain unresolved by the close of the book, but Tickle and Sweeney believe that the way ahead lies in the thought and practice of Emergence Christianity, itself a herald of the new era in the church’s desire to understand and to know the Spirit of God at work.
As important as it is for the modern Christian of any stripe to know the development of creedal acknowledgments of the Spirit, there is something missing in Tickle and Sweeney’s depiction of this history as a straight-forward one, occurring along a singular axis. A reader therefore hopes for an expansion of their description of historical knowledge of the Spirit among the dips, twists, and branching-offs that have happened outside of the dogmatic workings of the latinized church. The events of Azusa Street did not follow a marked path to the myriad of expressions of the Charismatic movement in the United States, let alone that of the movement in the Two-Thirds world. Understanding the Spirit within history remains well-expressed in the quotation of Basil the Great that Tickle and Sweeney repeat in their closing: “What are the energies of the Spirit? Their extent cannot be told, and they are numberless. How can we comprehend what is beyond the ages?” (153).
Maggie Elwell
Ph.D. Candidate, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey
PNEUMA 37 (2015) 281–311
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