We have just celebrated the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and here I am writing yet another post on Pentecostal doctrine. Why? Because Charismatic teaching is still prevalent in Evangelical churches and denominations, and because in these crucial times it actually weakens the resistance of the Church to the increasing concerted attacks of the enemy, and blunts its offensive power. False teaching must inevitably debilitate the Church Militant.
Besides, Easter actually prompted, in part, this post, because the Resurrection actually completes the sequence of facts on which the apostolic gospel was originally presented (the Ascension being subsumed in the Resurrection, and the gift of the Spirit a result, rather than a component, of the gospel). Paul teaches the Corinthian church:
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.
As we shall see, facts are the thing, however unfashionable that view in an age of feelings.
A second trigger for this post is a video by the ever-industrious John Collins, who has traced the origins of Pentecostalism back even beyond its claimed origins in the Azusa Street revival and the paedophile Charles Fox Parham, in whose circle William Seymour (the Azusa Street revivalist) was trained.
Collins reveals a tangled network of individuals and churches broadly involved in the Holiness Movement of the nineteenth century. Each of them had their own peculiar doctrines, some of them within the bounds of orthodoxy, and some entirely heterodox. For in the melting pot of American life they tended to pick up on fads of the time from British Israelism to Spiritualism and, later, White Supremacism in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, whose origins as a supposedly Christian renewal organisation, closely linked to Pentecostal cultists like William Branham, are largely forgotten. Even the more Christian part of their theology had infinite variations, as the rapid development of Unitarian “Oneness Pentecostalism” shows.
Early Pentecostalism incorporated many of these sects, but very soon divided along new lines, recycling different teachings in new combinations. That fragmenting and recombining process persists in Latter Rain and other movements up to the present New Apostolic Reformation. And so, Collins concludes, pretty much the only common factor in the streams that flowed into, and out of, early Pentecostalism was their “Baptism of the Spirit” experience (to which, of course, the importance of tongues was added by Parham and Seymour).
What is more, what doctrine there was, orthodox or not, very much secondary to the Second Blessing experience. Collins has tried in vain to find contemporary news reports of actual gospel messages in Azusa Street, though there are plenty of reports of (unfulfilled) prophecies of national disasters and so on. This accords, to a degree, with the Welsh Revival that was a direct inspiration for the American phenomenon, as I have recorded elsewhere. In Wales a genuine gospel message was sometimes – but by no means always – preached, for Evan Roberts’ priority became the manifestation of the Spirit.
In previous posts, as here, I’ve documented how the “Charismatic experience” not only arose from, and led to, a whole range of theological positions both orthodox and heretical, as Collins describes, but was not even, in itself, consistently tied to any particular spiritual event. “Baptism of the Spirit” was just one popular explanation amongst others whose historical changes can be traced. And so what we see is a profound experience with no particular doctrinal background, and which is theologised in a great varieties of ways, including in terms of non-Christian religions. It even seems to be closely related to the experiences produced by drugs: George Harrison, for example, got into transcendental meditation after his “consciousness was opened” by an LSD trip in America.
But an honest appraisal of the New Testament teaching gives an entirely different picture. When the apostles are hauled before the temple authorities in Acts 5, Peter’s testimony ends with:
“We are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.”
Now, it is clear that Peter uses “obey” in a different sense from his previous “We must obey God rather than men.” For the Holy Spirit is received by faith, not as a reward for obedience (Galatians 3:2). Yet as the Galatians verse states, that faith is not receptiveness to an experience, but belief in what they have heard. This “obedience of faith” is mentioned a few more times in the NT, most clearly in Romans 6:17:
But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted.
And as we saw elsewhere in Paul’s writing, the core content of that teaching was Jesus’s death for sin, and his resurrection. “This is what we preach, and this is what you believed” (1 Corinthians 15:11). It follows that obedience to the preaching of this message, and no other, is the indispensable basis for the giving of the Holy Spirit in all his fullness. Conversely, all, without exception, who obey this teaching receive the Spirit, without respect to any particular experience.
That biblical picture removes the whole question from the realm of whether one’s Charismatic experience is genuine or false. It is simply irrelevant to the New Testament’s teaching either way. The Pentecostals got their ideas wrong from the start, though their errors can be followed back to earlier roots in Wesley and Zinzendorf, as well as in the sporadic supernatural mysticism movements down the centuries like the Zwickau prophets and Montanus way back in the past.
There is, I suspect, another body of research to be done to uncover how Charismatic theology, currently dominant within British Evangelicalism, has contributed to the institutional impotence of today’s Evangelical institutions. I can’t document why the Evangelical Alliance or the Baptist Union seem more concerned about gender inclusion, Islamophobia and community cohesion than they are about saving the lost. But my instincts tell me that the connection is there.
