Phyllis Tickle died yesterday, September 22, at 81 years old. Some believe Tickle was a modern prophet. Others like myself believe she was a false prophet of the postmodern Emergent movement tickling the ears of modern apostates.
For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers (2 Timothy 4:3).
In Christianity Today appears an article by Mark Woods called Phyllis Tickle: Five quotes from a modern prophet. Tickle, “wrote widely about ’emergence Christianity’, arguing in her book The Great Emergence that Christianity is undergoing a massive upheaval as part of a pattern that occurs every 500 years, in which old ideas are rejected and new ones emerge.”
One article describes Phyllis Tickle and Richard Rohr along with Brian McLaren and Tony Jones as “most notable leaders in the Emerging Christianity movement.” Tickle’s book Emergence Christianity: What It Is, Where It Is Going, and Why It Matters, is endorsed by other influential Emergents including Brian McLaren, Richard Rohr and Nadia Bolz-Weber. In the book, Tickle defines the Emergent movement as follows:
We are in a time of transition, and that transition is not a casual or passing one. Rather, it is yet another of the semi-millennial upheavals that have shaped latinized culture and latinized religion from their inception. We are citizens living within the Great Emergence, and as Christians of whatever stripe, we are watching the formation of a new presentation of the faith. We are attending upon the birth and early growth of Emergence Christianity. (Emergence Christianity, Kindle Locations 311-314)
At the heart of this Emergent Reformation is questioning the authority of Scripture, which is culminating in ecumenism and interfaith dialogue. In her book The Great Emergence, she said:
Regardless of what form or forms of Christianity may rise up out of the Great Emergence, in other words, it is safe to say that much of the thinking and many of the effectual conclusions will have had their initial roots in the Vatican Councils. (The Great Emergence, 104-105)
In R.I.P. Phyllis Tickle: Prophet of the Great Emergence, Kyle Roberts writes:
It is interesting that Phillis Tickle passed away on the day that Pope Francis arrived in the U.S. She could see, as much as anyone, that the Great Emergence is not just a Protestant thing, but a Catholic and Eastern Orthodox thing, too.
Pope Francis brings a fresh air to the public persona of Vatican Catholicism. He is, in some ways, the culmination of the changes set in motion by Vatican II.
Roberts says, “at the bottom of all these massive changes in Christianity, lies this haunting question:” and quotes Tickle: “Each time of re-formation has the same central question: Where, now, is the authority?” (The Great Emergence, 72)
In the video below, Phyllis Tickle – Where’s The Authority?, you will see that it is the authority of Scripture which is in question by Tickle. Questioning the authority of Scripture, Tickle asks: “Where now is our authority? The minute you say that’s not going to be the whole authority now. Then you open up the question: So where is our authority?”
In her book The Great Emergence, she elaborates on how Scripture is no longer the authority:
The next assault in this progression of assaults [upon Sola Scriptura] was the ordination of women to the Protestant clergy… The ordination of women was followed, of course, by their elevation to the episcopacy in the Episcopal Church in the United States. Clearly the battle of “Scripture only” was being lost. Now there was only one more tool left in sola scriptura‘s war chest… Enter “the gay issue.”
To approach any of the arguments and questions surrounding homosexuality in the closing years of the twentieth century and the opening ones of the twenty-first is to approach a battle to the death. When it is resolved—and it most surely will be—the Reformation’s understanding of Scripture as it had been taught by Protestantism for almost five centuries will be dead. That is not to say that Scripture as the base of authority is dead. Rather it is to say that what the Protestant tradition has taught about the nature of that authority will either be dead or in mortal need of reconfiguration.
And that kind of summation is agonizing for the surrounding culture in general. In particular, it is agonizing for the individual lives that have been built upon it. Such an ending is to staved off with every means available and resisted with every bit of energy that can be mustered. Of all the fights, the gay one must be—has to be—the bitterest, because once it is lost, there are no more fights to be had. It is finished. Where now is the authority? (The Great Emergence, 100, 101)
She elaborates in her book Emergence Christianity on how the authority of Scripture is being undermined within the Emergent movement when it comes to women’s roles in the church and homosexuality:
The rightness of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered life, much less the rights of those who so live, was to dominate cultural conversations for decades. It certainly was to thrust latinized Christian theology and ecclesiology into a divisive turmoil that has not yet reached resolution. In many ways, though, the implications of this battle are more ferociously telling than were the implications and consequences of all the others. That is, the injunction against homosexuality in all its forms is the last of the biblically based injunctions still standing in the latinized world. Should it come to be resolved, the doctrine of Protestant inerrancy will have no other battlefield on which to defend itself. The die will have been cast and the Rubicon crossed. (Emergence Christianity, Kindle Locations 764-770)
What does the Bible say about the authority and inspiration of Scripture?
All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:16,17).
And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts; knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. (2 Peter 1:19-21)
In 2 Timothy 3:16,17, Paul was referring to the “God-breathed” inspired writings which came to be the Old Testament canon. In 2 Peter 1:19-21, Peter was referring to Old Testament prophets who were moved by the Holy Spirit. The Apostle Peter also considered the Apostle Paul’s letters in the first century to be Scripture as well. Peter said,
And account that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him hath written unto you; As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction (2 Peter 3:15,16).
To Peter, a Jew who believed in the inspiration of the Old Testament, Paul’s writings were on par right alongside them. If this be the case, then the Apostles’ declarations concerning homosexuality (Leviticus 18:22; 20:13; Romans 1:26-27; 1 Corinthians 6:8-10; 1 Timothy 1:10) and female roles (1 Corinthians 11:2-16; 14:34; Ephesians 5:22; Colossians 3:18; 1 Timothy 2:8-15; 1 Peter 3:1-6) are authoritative!
In the video below, Tickle was asked, “As a representative of the church, what would you like to say about the gay and lesbian community?” Tickle admits that the Bible is clear about divorce and remarriage, and the roles of the genders. But she says, “It didn’t work in our society.” She says, “There is a progression of sociological shifts in the last 160 years, and this [homosexuality] is the last puck or playing piece in a deadly game. If anybody on either side of the issue fails to understand what really is the issue. And the issue really is absolute Sola Scriptura. . . . Did God put a period at the end of Revelation or did he put a comma?” Tickle emphatically declares, “We will make this change. There’s no question. It’s essentially a dead issue.”
Obviously the Bible is not authoritative to Phyllis Tickle. Most importantly, I believe and trust the Bible as true and authoritative because Jesus believed it. Jesus did not doubt or have any kind of uncertainty toward Scripture. When Jesus and the apostles quoted from the Old Testament, they called it “the word of God” (Mark 7:13; Romans 9:6). In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the Law, till all be fulfilled” (Matthew 5:18). Our only hope with the Emergents is to lead them back to the true and historical Jesus of the Bible who underlined the authority of the Law (Matthew 5:17-19), the message of the prophets (Luke 24:27) and therefore the authority of Scripture. The Jesus-endorsed Old Testament tells us, “For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven” (Psalm 119:89); “Thy word is true from the beginning: and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth for ever” (Psalm 119:160); “Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him” (Proverbs 30:5). Jesus reaffirmed these propositional truth claims by saying, “Thy word is truth” (John 17:17).
Jesus said, “The scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). The apostles also often cited the Old Testament to demonstrate that they believed the Scriptures were clear and understandable to the common man. The manner in which Jesus and the apostles reason from the Scriptures presupposes that the meaning of the Bible may be interpreted objectively by the individual. No matter how ruthless the Emergent Church is in its attempt to break the Scriptures, His Word assures us that “the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you” (1 Peter 1:25).
Phyllis Tickle was a modern apostate, far from a “modern prophet.” According to a true prophet, Ezekiel, God says:
‘As I live,’ says the Lord God, ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn, turn from your evil ways! (Ezekiel 33:11)
For further study, we have other resources available for more information on Emergence Christianity and Phyllis Tickle. In my book Hath God Said? Emergent Church Theology it is demonstrated how postmodernism is incompatible with a biblical worldview of absolute truth and the authority of the Scriptures on various topics including feminism, homosexuality, hell, mysticism, eschatology, Jesus Christ and the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and more. And our 3-hour Updated Director’s Cut of The Real Roots of the Emergent Church features video footage of Tickle and other Emergents.
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