The Age of the Spirit: How the Ghost of an Ancient Controversy Is Shaping the Church

Reading this pair of veteran authors is like being invited as a freshman into the office of an admired professor and then being brought up to speed like a colleague. Tickle (The Great Emergence) and Sweeney (The Pope Who Quit) embrace the reader of this book, third in a series about the emergent church movement: they use “we” and never patronize. The back story from early Christian history, comprising enigmas and heresies, confusions and creeds, and “Breath, Bread and Beards,” covers the greater part of the text. The front story is today’s emergent church, based in the spiritual more than the religious, the holy more than the hierarchy, and in the image of “God as an activity more than as an entity” and the Holy Spirit as “like unto fire.” With poetic prose, Tickle and Sweeney mix known words (“trinity”) and new (“nescient”); they stir in big ideas, sweeping summaries, and don’t-miss footnotes, in laying the intellectual foundation for their analysis. (Jan.)