Continuing to explore the spread of Pentecostalism in British Christianity, after my revisiting of David Watson I have dipped into Jim Packer’s 1979 book, Keep in Step with the Spirit. Packer is generally sceptical about the Charismatic movement, whilst (from that chronological viewpoint) accepting not only that God had used it, but that the Charismatic Renewal had been the major thing God was doing in the Evangelical Church at that time.
He reaches much the same conclusion that I did in my Watson piece, that as a necessary and welcome loosening up of Evangelical traditions it included a genuine work of the Spirit (remembering that so did the betrayal of Jesus!), but was theologically misinterpreted. Packer starts by describing how the Augustinian understanding of holiness as a progressive work of sanctification, as taught in Reformed Christianity particularly, became in John Wesley’s revivalism a one-off experience, to be sought, like his understanding of conversion as necessarily a crisis, by fervent seeking prayer. He goes on to show how the Keswick Holiness Movement repackaged this “sinless perfection” experience as a second blessing of the Holy Spirit enabling indwelling sin to be victoriously overcome (by “letting go and letting God”), and then how the same second blessing gained the emphasis of “power for service,” as in the 1904 Welsh Revival, and in the Pentecostal movement was recycled as the restoration of the Acts 2 “baptism of the Holy Spirit” and of lost New Testament “sign gifts.”
I noted before how David Watson experienced the blessing by realising he already had the Holy Spirit and just needed to “release” him so he could be “filled.” His actual experience was not of sinlessness, nor holiness, nor power for service, nor (since his theology denied it) the baptism of the Holy Spirit, but a sense of God’s love.
To bring things up to date I should point out how, especially since the Toronto Blessing, this “experience of the Holy Spirit” has become, firstly, a repeatable experience rather than a one-off key to the “higher life,” and secondly that the principal element stressed is that of divine power for its own sake. So to stand unconscious of everything with one’s arms raised for hours, or to act drunk, is as legitimate as feelings of profound love. But returning to David Watson, it is interesting to quote Jonathan Edwards, in his Religious Affections:
It is no evidence that religious affections are saving, or that they are otherwise, that there is an appearance of love in them. There are no professing Christians who pretend, that this is an argument against the truth and saving nature of religious affections. But, on the other hand, there are some who suppose, it is a good evidence that affections are from the sanctifying and saving influences of the Holy Ghost. Their argument is that Satan cannot love; this affection being directly contrary to the devil, whose very nature is enmity and malice. And it is true, that nothing is more excellent, heavenly, and divine, than a spirit of true Christian love to God and men: it is more excellent than knowledge, or prophecy, or miracles, or speaking with the tongue of men and angels. It is the chief of the graces of God’s Spirit, and the life, essence and sum of all true religion; and that by which we are most conformed to heaven, and most contrary to hell and the devil. But yet it is in arguing from hence, that there are no counterfeits of it. It may be observed that the more excellent anything is, the more will be the counterfeits of it.
Edwards is right there – don’t rape gangs operate by the pretence of love towards their young victims? He goes on, at great length, to show how true divine love is validated by its fruits, not by emotions:
Reason says the same that Christ said, in John 14:21, “He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.”
That takes us back to Augustinian holiness, and David Watson certainly demonstrated that, though he also bought into the whole paraphernalia of Pentecostalism’s teaching on gifts of the Spirit and worship (contra Watson, proskuneo does not mean “I come forward to kiss,” but to prostrate oneself before a potentate). Jim Packer, without alluding to Watson personally, acknowledges that good fruit in many Charismatics. In fact, by the time he wrote the book in the late seventies, the strong theological underpinnings of British evangelicalism had moderated much of the “Charismania”. Witness the widespread abandonment of “second blessing” teaching, the abandonment of tongues as necessary evidence of possessing the Spirit, the denial of harmful teachings about healing being inevitable with sufficient faith, and so on. Amusingly Packer contrasts this “white collar” British version with American “blue collar” Pentecostalism.
His point is valid – as I remember from the early 1980s. The British story was genuinely different from the American, at least until “Third Wave” Pentecostalism shook things up again through John Wimber in the mid 1980s, and the Toronto Blessing in the 90s. Until then, much of British Charismatic experience seemed to its adherents to be quite separate from the corrupt tree of Pentecostalism that John Collins of William Branham Historical Research had documented, of which they were entirely ignorant. In fact, Packer’s greatest weakness is that he too is completely oblivious to the sociological connections of the movement, viewing it almost entirely theologically and psychologically. But as I pointed out in my previous post, the connections were there, or else a desire for a more vibrant experience of God would not have revolved around “the blessing,” revivalism, and the Charismatic gifts.
That brings me to my main point in this post, which is that, 45 years ago, Packer was fully aware that the whole Charismatic package (leaving aside the true ongoing work of the Spirit in believers and churches), which was sold as Restoration of New Testament Christianity, was nothing of the sort. The second blessing cannot be justified from Scripture. Whatever Scripture does or does not say about the withdrawal of certain gifts, it was already known that glossolalia is non-linguistic, and therefore not the biblical gift of tongues, which was always language with actual meaning (1 Corinthians 14:10). The apostles’ healings were always instant, complete, and permanent (and according to Acts extremely restricted in who performed them). Predictive prophecies always came true (and to ensure they were, were always subjected to testing in the assembly). And so on. The genuine restorations were in less obvious areas, such as the participation of all believers in ministry (and even that gain is both reversed and perverted in the megachurch movement, in which only the Anointed matter).
Like Packer, I willingly grant that many or most Christians will at some stage experience extraordinary witness from the indwelling Spirit. Miraculous healings, and no doubt other signs, will sometimes occur in answer to prayer. Perhaps on occasion God will empower, say, a pioneer missionary to preach fluently in an unlearned language. And few doubt that prophetic insights may come through any believer, not to mention Packer’s contention that whenever we interpret God’s word for the moment, we prophesy. But the “standard Pentecostal package,” let alone the disorderly excesses so often seen, and indeed the whole re-design of the theology of assembly as supernatural encounter rather than mutual edification – these do not constitute restoration at all, but innovation.
Now Jim Packer, writing without the benefit of the half century of experience since, concedes that the innovations might, in some cases, be beneficial to faith, and therefore of God. He speaks particularly of tongues, suggesting (like philosopher Stephen Clark) that perhaps the dissociation of mind from tongue, by using nonsense syllables, might enable higher levels of the spirit to worship more freely. Perhaps unconnected “interpretations” of glossolalia (which cannot by definition be translations) can edify if they are based on God’s truths.
Well, maybe. The same might be said of those “vanilla prophecies” that say, “Thus says the Lord – ‘I love you, my children.'” But they are not prophecies in the biblical sense. And the usual pattern is for God to tell us in Scripture how were are to worship him rightly, and not to expect him to sanctify notions of our own. Remember golden calves, strange fire, foreign-pattern altars, and everyone talking at once in Corinth. Priestly garb seemed reverential to Constantine’s priests, but took us down a long road to sacerdotal corruption of New Testament worship. Adopting Critical Race Theory keeps the Anglican Church in step with elite society – but not so much in step with the Spirit, whose outpouring was to enable “the faith once for all delivered to the saints.”
Restoration, like Reformation, is a good idea. But I think it was Karl Barth who coined the phrase semper reformans, to which we might add semper restitutans, if my Latin is correct: ideas which imply that what we allow to remain unreformed, or incorrectly lost from the church, is likely to come back and bite us. And that includes what was introduced in our own times.
