Life in the Spirit: A Personal Reflection
I was twenty-three years old, sitting in an evangelism course taught by Billy Abraham at Perkins School of Theology. In class that day, he showed us a video of a man I had never heard of named John Wimber. It was a video about what I would later come to know as “power evangelism.” I watched with a mixture of bemusement and fascination. If you’ve ever seen Wimber speak, you’ll be familiar with his combination of self-effacing humor, unassuming mannerisms, and charismatic fervor. For me, this was all quite new.
I had no context for this, save conversations I’d had with my Uncle Otis, who had long been involved in a charismatic Episcopal congregation. (Yes, those do exist.) I had been raised in United Methodist congregations that were conservative/evangelical, but not in the least given to charismatic expression. What was I seeing now? How seriously should I take it? I didn’t know Professor Abraham very well then, but I knew he was a serious academic, credentialed by Oxford, and never short of compelling, reasoned arguments. But this? I didn’t dismiss it, but neither did I embrace it.
Later as a seminarian I attended a friend’s charismatic church. It wasn’t in a church building, but in a rented office space. It was my first taste of third-wave charismatic Christianity: hands in the air, people crying out to God, and definitely a presence I would come to understand later as the Holy Spirit. Again, I didn’t know what to make of it. A young woman came to the front and gave a prophecy, something about a sword. It seemed incomprehensible to me. I felt more like a tourist than a worshiper.
Divine Action and the Nature of God
The dissonance I experienced in these moments was not simply attributable to cultural differences among church communities. My theology of the Holy Spirit was woefully underdeveloped. During my systematic theology class in seminary, I was required to write a “credo,” a thirty-page statement of my understanding of the proper content of the Christian witness. I decided to structure my credo on the three persons of the Trinity. I got through the sections on the Father and the Son in good fashion. When I arrived at the Holy Spirit, I wrote a couple of paragraphs and realized I had nothing else to say. I had no pneumatology, no functional doctrine of the Holy Spirit. This resulted in two rather alarming realizations. First, and most immediately, I was not going to get a good grade if I handed in my credo with a Holy Binity. Second, it was clear that my own understanding of God was not what it should be. I had intellectual and spiritual work to do.
These were the days of the Jesus Seminar, John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg, and other heirs of the existentialist and process traditions of Christian theology. I was serving on the staff of a relatively large and affluent United Methodist church at the time, and these kinds of works seemed ubiquitous. No doubt this had to do with my particular circle of interaction. Had I been at a Southern Baptist or Pentecostal church, there would have been other strong theological currents, perhaps problematic in their own ways. But in my mainline UMC circle, these works had formed into a popular canon among many clergy and laity.
Many of these works posited certain historical concerns related to Scripture’s reliability, and hence its authority. Yet historical work is always supported by certain epistemological assumptions, and sometimes theological assumptions. Embedded within many of these works is the idea that, while God exists, God does not, or cannot, intervene in the cause-and-effect nexus of history. If that is the case, then events we read about in the life of Jesus (such as healing and prophecy), and similar events reported today, cannot be true. They are ruled out by virtue of our metaphysical commitments, and hence they are epistemologically invalid as well. In other words, we can’t consider them as valid testimony because we have decided a priori that they are untrue. And if these events in Scripture are untrue, it stands to reason that similar events recounted today are untrue today as well.
The key issue here is divine action. What does God do? What kind of God is God? Can God enter directly into the particularities of our historical reality? If God can do this, will he do this? These are the kinds of questions that lie at the root of debates around the plausibility of Christian orthodoxy, and they come to bear in important ways on claims made by charismatic Christians about God and divine action.
By the late 1990s I had become deeply interested in Christian orthodoxy, by which I simply mean the set of basic faith claims affirmed in the classical creedal tradition (the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the Definition of Chalcedon). I had begun to think seriously about what it meant to say that the church catholic got it right about Jesus and the salvation that we have in him. This God brought all things into being. He became incarnate in Jesus Christ and was born of a virgin. Jesus was crucified for our sake, and after three days he rose from the dead. Jesus now lives eternally at the right hand of the Father and will come again in glory. This same God sent the Holy Spirit to abide with us until Christ returns.
The God of Christian orthodoxy--the God of Scripture and the classical creeds--is a God of divine action and intimate, visible involvement in human life. My commitments in this regard set the stage for events later in my life when I would encounter the charismatic movement in more direct and personal ways. In other words, the claims about divine action made in charismatic communities were at least theoretically plausible to me because of the nature of the God I confessed.
“I now believe….”
Sometime around 2006, a conversation began among several members of the faculty at United around the power and work of the Holy Spirit. I was exceedingly interested in this conversation, in part because of my commitment to Christian orthodoxy. But there was also something else. I had begun to get the sense that for many people--including me--God was essentially a construct. We could talk about God and do things in the name of God, and God gave some heft to our claims about ethics and justice. That said, I really didn’t expect anything of God. I remember distinctly once hearing Dr. Peter Bellini say, “Your prayers are powerful,” and I thought to myself, “Are they?” It was a real question. What did I expect of God? Was I content for God to function as a construct, rather than as an active, living Father?
At this point, I encountered three distinct groups of people within a relatively short period of time, each of which would have a significant effect on my life. The first was Aldersgate Renewal Ministries, the charismatic renewal movement within the United Methodist Church. Here is where I would find people within my own tradition who were searching for the same things I was, and devoted guides who were called to lead people into life in the Spirit. The second was Global Awakening, a ministry founded by Dr. Randy Clark. This is where I would come to understand how low my expectations of God had been. It’s where I would learn that there is more--which is also the title of Dr. Clark’s manifesto on the power and work of the Holy Spirit. There is more than I had experienced or expected. The third was Cuban Methodism. Here I would encounter saints who knew what it meant to give themselves to God in utter dependence. They would contend for the faith in spite of many obstacles, including poverty, a hostile culture, and an unfriendly government. They would teach me about faith in God, the joy of the Lord, and spiritual warfare. The combination of these three sets of relationships would have an effect on my faith and belief that was irreversible.
Life in the charismatic world once felt foreign and strange to me. It now feels comfortable, even natural. It has changed the way I pray, how I think theologically, and how I teach. God is not simply a construct, not simply an idea that gives weight to my moral principles, but the living presence who moved among the people of Israel, became incarnate in Jesus Christ, established the church in Pentecost, abides with us in the Holy Spirit, and will come again in glory.
Just after I had finished seminary, I had lunch with one of my professors, a man of depth and kindness. He had long struggled, however, with biblical and traditional claims about divine action. He had recently gone on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje, where the Virgin Mary appeared and spoke to him. He was forever changed by this experience. “I now believe that Moses encountered God in the burning bush,” he said. “I now believe Jacob wrestled with God.” In other words, his experience confirmed what Scripture teaches: ours is a God who is living, present, active, and powerful.
My experiences have not been so dramatic as his, though I have had some powerful encounters with God. And yet I can say with him, “I now believe....” I know that Jesus teaches, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (John 20:29), and to some extent I did. But where the charismatic movement has such power is in teaching us how to experience what is confessed by faith. God is alive. God is powerful. And the God of Scripture is the God of the church today.
For Wesleyan Christians, to believe in and expect the power and work of the Holy Spirit should come as second nature, though it often seems strange to us. Early Methodism was marked by powerful manifestations of the presence of God, including healings, casting out demons, fits of laughter or crying, and prophecy. Apart from these extraordinary manifestations, however, early Methodism also insisted upon regular engagement with the means of grace, such as prayer, the Lord’s Supper, the reading of Scripture, and public worship. These are reliable instruments by which we receive the grace of God and grow in holiness. Indeed, we are taught by Mr. Wesley to expect Christian perfection, or entire sanctification, in this lifetime. Sanctification, however, is the work of God. We must continually reaffirm this lest we find ourselves in agreement with Pelagius. It is God who sanctifies, and the visible sanctity of those who have experienced this divine power testifies to the reality of the God disclosed to us in Scripture and creed.
No Problem-Free Situations
I’ve also been around the charismatic movement long enough to see many of its liabilities. There is, as one would expect, fakery at times. Charismatic Christians are often non-creedal, and this, coupled with the emphasis on personal empowerment and experience, can lead to unhelpful, even harmful or heretical, theological ideas. Sometimes there is an overemphasis on powerful personalities, rather than on the one who empowers. A kind of “touch-not-the-Lord’s-anointed” mentality may develop, which can lead to a breakdown in accountability. Many charismatic churches are independent and lack the structure necessary to provide accountability for key leaders. And, in my opinion, many charismatic Christians have been too quick to allow their faith to become heavily politicized, which is a bad idea regardless of one’s politics.
Yet there are no problem-free situations, and despite these liabilities, God is moving in powerful ways through charismatic forms of Christianity, from free-church independent churches to Pentecostal denominations to Spirit-filled Roman Catholic congregations. God is on the move, in fact, all over the world, pouring out the Holy Spirit on those who are eager to receive him. This is happening to some extent in the United States as well, though we are adept at quenching the Spirit in the interest of comfort, respectability, and institutional preservation.
In Days Ahead
When Paul was in Corinth, he spoke to the believers there about their own liabilities. They were too obsessed with status, he said. They were focusing on the wrong things. Had Paul come to them as a trained and skilled orator, he surely could have impressed them. Skill in rhetoric was a well-established means of gaining public honor. And yet, he says, “My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God” (1 Cor 2:4-5). The word the NRSV translates as “plausible” might better be rendered “persuasive.” The people of Corinth were inundated with “persuasive words of wisdom.” They lived in a religiously pluralistic world. They heard the arguments of philosophers. They heard the persuasive speech of skilled orators. Whether or not Paul could have spoken in the style of these orators, he did not, because he wanted their belief not to rest on his personal qualities, but on “a demonstration of the Spirit and of power.”
The context of the postmodern West is not entirely unlike that of ancient Corinth. We live in a religiously pluralistic environment. We are inundated with ideas through advertising, political rhetoric, and social media. In fact, we live within a marketplace of ideas in which Christianity is now but one voice. In our more honest moments, we may admit that it is hard to get a hearing in the public sphere these days. But the same God who came to the people of Corinth with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power is the God who inhabits our communities of faith today, and that God will move with power. I believe that a revival in Western Christianity is coming. I don’t know when, but I am certain it is on the way. And this revival will not simply involve the success of persuasive words of wisdom. It will not be a revival brought on by apologetics, marketing, or attractional models of church. It will involve an outpouring of the Holy Spirit and an abundance of spiritual gifts, and the faith that is born out of it will rest not on human wisdom, but on the power of a living and ever-present God.
David F. Watson is Lead Editor of Firebrand. He serves as Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.