Preparing for a podcast with a guy in the US which may happen soon, I thought I’d try to understand a little more about the first wave of the Charismatic movement (aka the second wave of Pentecostalism) over here in England. The story is rather different from, though linked to, that in America, in that it arises firstly among conscientious and godly clergymen, predominantly Anglican and often Oxbridge trained, rather than among the entrepreneurial and often narcissistic characters so prevalent in America, from John Dowie through to Benny Hinn.
Accordingly I turned up the autobiography of the Evangelist David Watson, You Are My God, written after the discovery of the cancer that finally proved fatal to him. Let me say at the outset that this book was immensely helpful to me in 1983, when reading it surreptitiously (it was actually my wife’s) shook me out of spiritual doldrums that had lasted for seven lean years. The benefit was not so much in what it taught, as in reminding me of many people and places of a happier time spiritually: in the end, it was simply an instrument the Lord used to turn my life round. In retrospect, the arbitrariness of that is instructive: “He is Yahweh – he will do what seems right to him.”.
Anyway, leafing through the book 42 years later, from my current position on the Charismatic movement, I think a few insights arise. Interestingly, I seem not to have been uncritical even at the time, as I had quizzically annotated his stuff on the Holy Spirit from a more Pentecostal position than his!
Watson was a Cambridge convert, schooled in the Iwerne camps that have now become tarred by the abusive brush of John Smyth. He spent his first curacy in a rough, but lively, neighbourhood in Gillingham, and his second at the Round Church in Cambridge, which despite the good teaching he found “lifeless.” Now since this is a common theme amongst these early Charismatics (for example Michael Harper, who found the same at All Souls Langham Place), it’s worth asking the reasons if we once reject the Pentecostal idea that the Church carelessly mislaid the Holy Spirit at the end of the apostolic age, which is an idea that Watson’s theology denies even as he partly buys into it.
There are probably many reasons for the sense of heaviness, including the then buttoned-up nature of Oxbridge/Public School Evangelical Anglicanism at that time (which I experienced at Cambridge from 1970). I think that a good number of such converts, boarded out from an early age, were probably emotionally quite damaged. But my main impression is that Britain itself was probably at its minimum of receptivity to biblical supernaturalism, and that had infected the churches, so that even Evangelicals tended to give house-room to naturalistic explanations of Jesus’s miracles, for example. Additionally, Evangelicals had tended to become culture-bound to an earlier age, so that between middle-class respectability, uniformly old hymns, the King James Bible and Cranmer’s liturgy – not to mention entirely clergy-led services – the lack of a sense of spiritual freedom was scarcely surprising. But perhaps it was more psycho-social than spiritual.
But I also wonder if, despite the lack of overt influence from Pentecostalism, which was a minor force in Britain then, its perennial lure of a life-changing experience of the Holy Spirit may have played a part that wasn’t fully appreciated by those influenced by it. Watson says that in 1962-3 prayer groups for revival were springing up everywhere. But why, and what did they understand by “revival”? Watson describes reading about the Great Awakening, the Welsh Revival, the Hebridean Revival… and mentions in passing those strange Pentecostals out in America. But in fact there had been strong links between British and US revivalism since we sent George Whitefield out.
The emotional phenomena associated with the Great Awakening impressed Watson, though he recognises some of them as emotionalism – without giving any indication that he had read Whitefield’s sobering Religious Affections as well as his earlier Narrative of Surprising Conversions. The “second blessing” of “sinless perfection” arose first in Wesley’s movement, and was recycled as “Entire Sanctification” in the Keswick Holiness Movement. The Welsh Revival of 1904 was preceded by the work of American Evangelists clearly influenced by Finney’s revival model, and revivalist Evan Roberts had been immersed in prayer for “the Spirit to descend” and baptize him to give power for service for a decade before he the revival. Roberts corresponded with Pentecostalist Frank Bartleman in California, linking Wales closely to Azusa Street. And so Watson’s expectations were culturally primed by his reading.
In the event, all his fervent prayer, confession of all known sin and so on availed nothing, until at some prompting he instead practised a “positive confession” that he had already received the fullness of the Holy Spirit, and after a short time of praise he had a profound experience of God’s love. He soon visited Martyn Lloyd Jones who also taught “second blessing,” but disagreed with him on the concept of “baptism with the Spirit,” agreeing with John Stott that the Spirit, baptizing us into Christ in the first place, is undoubtedly given to every believer. Watson therefore insisted on speaking of “filling with the Spirit,” or “release of the Spirit,” and yet still saw the experience as a life-changing event, contrary to how Scripture describes fullness of the Spirit. Yet even so he undermines this “once for all” Pentecostal understanding not only by his own testimony, but when later on he gives an even more general (and actually more biblical) description of believers being “blessed by the Spirit (whatever they called it).”
So in fact what he is saying, stripped of the Pentecostal trappings, is that in a variety of ways at a variety of times God gives profound, even supernatural, experiences to believers, whether these are felt as experiences of holiness, joy, love, power or (as in my own case) delight in Scripture. Whether these should be seen as intrinsically life-changing events is questionable – any blessing of God changes us, but that does not warrant any form of “second blessing” teaching.
Yet David Watson, from this experience, went on to embrace the whole Pentecostal package of tongues and other “sign gifts,” and there we begin to see problems arising. These included early failures in Watson’s attempts at communal living (which elsewhere led to pastoral disasters), the failed John Wimber prophecy of his healing, the failed healing itself, and the troubles that have come to the British Church through many such failures in the Third Wave of Pentecostalism via John Wimber, whom Watson was largely responsible for bringing to England, then the Toronto Blessing, and now the whole Bethel-NAR thing, on which I’ve written extensively here.
What began as a necessary and welcome loosening up of Evangelical traditions (and so a genuine work of the Holy Spirit, albeit misinterpreted) has become an addiction to experience that is clearly not of the God of Truth, and the dilution of biblical teaching and so of genuinely “spiritual affections,” in Jonathan Edwards’ phrase.
