Did you know that there are Pentecostals who baptize infants? Did you know that there are Pentecostals who recite the Creed in worship? Did you know that, outside the U.S., most Pentecostals don't require speaking in tongues as evidence of a baptism in the Holy Spirit? Did you know that there are Pentecostal denominations in the World Council of Churches?
Neither did I!
Until I read An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity, by Allan Anderson. This scholarly and accessible book traces the origin and spread of Pentecostalism throughout the world, and also analyses Pentecostal theology, ethics and worship, as well Pentecostalism's relationship to the culture and to the ecumenical Church.
If it's not always and everywhere about speaking in tongues, just what then is Pentecostalism? Anderson suggests this answer: A shared conviction that the Holy Spirit can and should be experienced immediately and powerfully. This is in contrast to Roman Catholics, for whom the Holy Spirit is practically co-terminus with the Church, and with Protestants, for whom the Spirit has been reduced to a scriptural pedagogue.
And yet Pentecostalism does have country cousins in ecumenical Christianity. The mystical tradition, for instance, as Anderson points out.
To be sure, you have to look closely for the family resemblance. Mystics are quiet; Pentecostals are noisy. You tend to find mystics in monasteries; you can find Pentecostals all over cable TV. Mysticism offers an experience of God in which the boundary between the I and the Thou is erased momentarily, and the finite self dissolves into the Infinite. In a Pentecostal experience of the Spirit, one seems to retain a sense of self, only augmented by spiritual power: speaking in tongues, prophecy, exorcism, miraculous healing.
But what they share in common is a powerful and unmediated (to the extent possible in this space-time continuum) experience of God. It's not quite right to say that Pentecostalism is mysticism for the masses, but it isn't entirely wrong either. Once, while on retreat, a Cistercian monk gave me and my Presbyterian co-retreatants a good talking to about this subject. "What do you want? A letter from God (i.e., scripture), or GOD HIMSELF?" A Pentecostal could just as easily pose the same question.
Did you say exorcisms? Miracles? Yes, indeed. And why not? ask Pentecostals. The Bible is full of such stuff. Pentecostalism, like Protestantism once did, bills itself as a restoration of primitive Christianity, only in the context of a modern, disenchanted world understood primarily through scientific models of causes and effect. Outside Pentecostalism, God has either been kicked to the curb, or banished to the heavens, only permitted to come down to endorse our moral reform projects (as with "liberals" and "conservatives") or to mock the earnestness of liberals and conservatives in a moment of Revelation (neoorthodoxy).
But Pentecostals proclaim that the supernatural is alive and well. The desert is still a haunt of demons, and not just in Las Vegas! But prayer can still banish demons and heal the sick, they say.
How do we respond to this claim? My own experience and study of mysticism leads me to believe that the supernatural is not only real but can be encountered. It's local. Even if I were to lack some of the experiences and opportunities for study that I've had, I'd still be reluctant to dismiss Pentecostal testimony out of hand. And this despite the known charlatans. The weight of the testimony is just too great.
And yet we have benefited incalculably from the West's turn from a preoccupation with ultimate causes, and a focus on proximate causes. It is unfortunate that many African Pentecostals felt they had to choose between prayer and quinine, although since the latter was being offered only by their colonial overlords it's somewhat understandable. At any rate, while not all talk about the need for re-enchanting the world is sound, there does seem to be a real need for a theology of presence that can explain the experience of God's immanence in a Newtonian and quantum world.
Earlier I mentioned Schleiermacher's position that natural cause and effect is an expression of God's causality, which differs not just in degree but in kind from natural causality. Scleiermacher's thought is a game but finally less than satisfying account of God's relationship to the world because it cannot account for the supernatural surplus of Pentecostalism, or for the thin places in the barrier between God and the world that mystics are so adept at finding and poking through--both of which scripture testifies to. Are there other options out there?
But more than a theology of the Holy Spirit, we need the Holy Spirit. Period.
As a Quaker, I consider the Religious Society of Friends (esp. the liberal and conservative branches, who still practice expectant worship) a Pentecostalist church, since the "shared conviction that the Holy Spirit can and should be experienced immediately and powerfully" is fundamental to our faith. But we tend to be quieter about it. ;)
Posted by: Dave Trowbridge | 25 October 2010 at 08:10 PM