Joining some biblical and historical dots on Charismatic theology

Let’s start with a contemporary endpoint: the belief that God routinely speaks to Christians, assuming they learn to listen. It’s the basis of Bethel’s supernatural ministry school, is seemingly common in YWAM training (see video linked in my comment under last post), and is apparently taught to kids even in mainstream youth camps like Spree SW in my area. Furthermore, it has become inherent in the common dictum that “prayer is a two-way conversation.” But in point of fact nowhere in Scripture are we taught to expect God to speak to us in our routine daily prayers, and certainly not at our command, so that a teacher cannot demand that trainee-prayers feed back what God has told them after (say) a ten-minute session. But they do anyway. So where did the belief and practice come from?

Here’s a speculative answer, based on my own study and experience.

The early Holiness and Pentecostal people believed that, since the first disciples were baptised in the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, amid great joy, tongues-speaking and prophecy, somehow the boring modern Church must have lost the Holy Spirit for nearly two thousand years. As William Booth wrote, “Oh, how we long to see another Pentecost.”

And so they held prolonged “tarrying meetings” until something ecstatic happened, and they thought they spoke in other languages (though in fact they didn’t). But actually they were wrong in their first assumptions (as were later folk like Dennis Bennett and even Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who endorsed “baptism in the Spirit”). Jesus has never taken his Holy Spirit from the Church, for the Pentecost event was, as I recently pointed out, the once-for-all coming of God’s shekinah glory to his new temple, the Church. The similar instances later in Acts are all about including out-groups (the Samaritans, the Gentiles, John the Baptist’s disciples) into this one temple of Christ’s body, and occur through the ministry of those already possessing the Spirit, not by a new dispensation from heaven.

Consequently, no true Christian can now be baptized with the Spirit, and we don’t need another Pentecost any more than we need another Crucifixion. It was the Church that was baptised with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and the same Spirit who, through the Spirit-led preaching of the word, baptises all new believers into Christ as per 1 Corinthians 12:13. As Paul says in Romans, anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Christ.

Furthermore, the emphasis in these one-off biblical events was on transformation and ministry, not on experience: we are told that they were full of joy and overflowing with praise (in whatever language), and bold in proclaiming the gospel – but not that they felt electric shocks or fire, or lay senseless for hours, or laughed uncontrollably, as has been the descriptive and even diagnostic language since the early tarrying meetings.

Consequently, when the Pentecostal experience spread to mainstream Evangelicals who had a bit of Bible nous, the language for the post-conversion experience flipped from “baptism with the Spirit” to being “filled with the Spirit,” citing Ephesians 5:18. The trouble is that nowhere in Scripture does that phrase apply to a fundamental spiritual change. In Ephesians it’s about how the indwelling Spirit may be nurtured and shared with others, and elsewhere, as I describe in my already linked recent post, it is descriptive either of Christian character or of equipping for immediate need.

Still, the Ephesians term has the advantage for Charismatics of an imperative continuous tense, “Go on being filled,” which gives the justification for more tarrying meetings, now called worship services, in which the aim is to repeat the experience of baptism of the Spirit filling with the Spirit power encounter with God together with the various ecstatic manifestations thereof not mentioned in Scripture. And hence videos of Bill Johnson at Bethel, or John Wimber at Anaheim, will show them inducing mass-emotion states whilst calling on the Holy Spirit to fall (as at Pentecost, except that’s not what the Bible says!), telling the already-Spirit-baptised crowd to speak out in tongues (contrary to 1 Corinthians 12:30 and 14:27), and accompanied by the strange fire of laughter, or demonic screaming, fallings and convulsions – and the speaker crying out, “More, Lord, More!”. I want you to remember that all this started in the nineteenth century as the need for the Church to claim back the lost Holy Spirit by a new baptism of the Spirit. But what, exactly, is the biblical justification for these weekly outbursts? Nobody in the upper room was yelling for more of the Spirit, as far as I remember the passage.

It’s also important to remember how many Christians fail ever to experience such feelings, closely corresponding to the less suggestible among us, leading to a range of reactions from conscious lying under peer-pressure, through self-deception (I suppose this must be tongues as I’m doing it), to disillusion with the Church – or with God himself. Remember, every Christian is baptised by the Spirit, and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. But not all experience “the baptism,” and that is further evidence that it is not a true baptism at all. Neither, despite the original beliefs of the Holiness and earlier Charismatic movements, is there any evidence that those who receive it become any more holy or effective as Christians than those who do not. On the contrary, those most lauded as anointed apostles, prophets and miracle-workers are those repeatedly revealed as frauds and abusers. This is not coincidental.

Today I heard, I think for the first time, the term, “Experience Junkies” in connection with Charismatic worship. And indeed, there is much of the dopamine-hit about both the experience itself, the desire to repeat it endlessly, and indeed the methods by which it is invoked through repetitive music, hyped-up preaching, and the rest of it. Since it cannot be justified from Scripture, either in terms of “baptism with the Spirit” or “filling with the Spirit,” (or “power encounter,” come to that) then what grounds do we have for attributing it to the Holy Spirit at all, especially when it so often leads to disorder, and sometimes to psychosis? Why would we not, if our theology is controlled by Scripture rather than bolstered by it, compare it with fear and trembling to Kundalini awakening in Hinduism and related ecstatic states, including drug trips? After all, when Ecstasy was the rave drug of choice, was not its selling point the love you felt for everyone, including God? If it ain’t in the Bible, it ain’t biblical.

I’ve remarked before on the love-hate relationship British Charismatics tend to have with excess. One the one hand, most in Evangelical churches here are relatively restrained. The appeals for the Spirit to fall are there, but tend not to last half an hour, and to be reserved and British, which is far less convincing that strident American. And the mood-music, though still done on three or four repetitive chords, doesn’t so much alter one’s mental state when played on an out of tune acoustic guitar rather than by a professional band, but simply sounds intrusive. Songs are repeated more than they need to be for mutual upbuilding, but less than is necessary to affect brainwaves much.

Yet the worship leader often has Hillsong videos in his mind’s eye, and (so it seems to me) a subconscious hankering for the kind of all-in worship they have at Bethel – surely they wouldn’t fake that gold angel dust, would they? So maybe most of us wouldn’t be bold enough to accost strangers in the street to share what God has told us about them and heal them (though I once had a minister who thought that was an ideal), but given how that’s a reality for the truly gifted when the New Pentecost falls, then it’s quite a modest thing to expect God to reply to my prayers with whatever “he” puts into my mind. Because there’s no way, when God is so willing to send fire, that my picture of a snowball is going to be from my own imagination, is there?

Anyway, that’s my suggested train of circumstances from nineteenth-century tarrying-meetings to conversational prayer. After all, it doesn’t really fit into the framework of the spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians, does it? But since I’ve mentioned them, it may be worth doing a similar exercise on the evolution of Charismatic spiritual gifts, since from the beginning, the supposed recovery of the Baptism of the Spirit was linked to certain “sign gifts,” notably tongues and prophecy. But that’s for a separate post, I think.