Bulgarian Church Protection of Jews in World War II

Parush R. Parushev

In the rescue of Bulgarian Jews from German death camps, the active role of Christian communities is often overlooked. To have a complete picture of events it is necessary to examine the redemptive role of Bulgarian Orthodox and other Christian communities in moving the nation toward acts of civil disobedience in order to rescue the country’s Jews.

The Orthodox

In Frederick B. Chary’s words: “No other institution with comparable influence so consistently opposed the government’s anti-Semitic policy as did the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.”1 The church’s leading prelates, Metropolitan Stefan of Sofia (future Exarch, 1945-48), Metropolitan Kyril of Plovdiv (future Patriarch, 1953-71), and Metropolitan Neofit of Vidin (acting president of the Holy Synod), unanimously and vocally condemned repressive measures against Bulgaria’s Jews. In turn, all other church officials followed their lead.2

Metropolitan Kyril, a member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, challenged anti-Semitism in print as early as 1938. Then after the Bulgarian government enacted anti-Semitic legislation on 21 January 1941, church reaction was swift and indignant. Metropolitan Stefan, taking the Jewish cause as his personal mission, repeatedly intervened with the police and local government authorities on behalf of this persecuted minority. He also boldly preached against anti-Semitism in spite of numerous government attacks against him. Upon learning of the deportation of Jews from Thrace and Macedonia, he urged King Boris of Bulgaria to block this action, but unfortunately, unsuccessfully. In March 1943, during the days of impending Jewish deportations, Metropolitans Stefan and Kyril both offered refuge to Jewish leaders in their private homes.

On 2 April 1943 the Holy Synod reminded the government of its firm support for Bulgarian Jews, with Metropolitan Kyril stating, “Until now [I] have always been loyal toward the government. Now I reserve the right to act with a free hand in this matter [of the defense of the Jews] and heed only the dictates of my free conscience.”3 On behalf of the Synod, Metropolitan Neofit also warned King Boris: “Because of the extraordinary measures . . . [and] unscrupulous harshness against the Jews . . . God’s wrath against our people may be provoked.”4 No doubt the Church’s bold warnings were “a very influential factor in Boris’ rejection of deportation as a solution to the Jewish question in 1943.”5

According to the 1941 Law for Protection of the Nation, some Jews were to be exempted from its discriminatory provisions. While exemptions theoretically were to benefit very few, in practice they became widely available, thus sabotaging the harshest provisions of the legislation. For example, so-called “mercy baptisms,” liberally conducted, saved considerable numbers of Jews. As Peter Meyer notes, “Because the law spoke of conversion and not baptism having to take place before 1 September 1940, Jews baptized later could also be saved if ministers declared that they had expressed their will to adopt Christianity before that date. Many courts accepted this reasoning.”6

The Catholics

In the life-and-death struggle to rescue Bulgaria’s Jews, Christian confessional boundaries did not impede common cause. Metropolitan Stefan knew of the influence of the small but active Bulgarian Roman Catholic community on Italian-born Queen Giovanna. In the face of pending deportation, he advised Jewish leaders to meet with Catholic priest Fr. Jean Romanov, the queen’s spiritual father.7 Also by 1943 Monsignor Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII and a personal friend of Metropolitan Stefan’s, had secured, with the help of King Boris, transit visas for thousands of Jews from Slovakia and Hungary who were escaping concentration camps by immigrating to Palestine.8 In addition, Metropolitan Stefan was in touch with Bulgaria’s evangelical churches in his attempts to rescue Jews.9

The Evangelicals

The small evangelical community in Bulgaria also took action in defense of the country’s Jews.10 In the early 1940s Nazi German publications frequently complained of Bulgarian complacency in the enforcement of anti-Semitic legislation and of church measures to protect Jews. One German newspaper reported that one Protestant minister “with a community of about 200 souls, managed to baptize 200 additional persons [all Jews] between January and September 1940.”11 After years of searching for direct evidence of this evangelical involvement in rescuing Bulgarian Jews, I discovered that unnamed ministers referred to in the German newspaper were Congregationalist Pastor Asen Mikhailov Simeonov and Baptist Pastor Minkov Radev.12

The First Congregational Church in Sofia under Senior Pastor Simeonov and Assistant Pastor Radev was especially active in assisting Jews. Born in an Orthodox family strongly connected to the Bulgarian Revival,13 Simeonov apparently was converted in a Methodist church while studying in Pleven. After seminary studies in Switzerland, he served Methodist churches in Sevlievo, Plovdiv, and Sofia. Simeonov married a Congregationalist, and in 1935 he was appointed pastor of the First Congregational Church in Sofia.14 From 1935 to 1941 Simeonov and his associate pastor, Baptist Minkov Radev, issued baptismal certificates to Jews. For this aid both pastors lost their church posts and their minister’s licenses in 1941 on orders of the Fascist government.15

The dismissal of Simeonov and Radev did not stop the church’s support of Bulgaria’s Jews. Simeonov’s successor, Pastor Vasil Georgiev Zjapkov, followed in his footsteps.16 As representative of the Alliance of Bulgarian Evangelical Churches,17 he was actively involved with Metropolitan Stefan in assisting Bulgaria’s Jews and in putting pressure on King Boris to prevent their deportation.18

For evangelical pastors Simeonov, Radev, and Zjapkov, as well as for the leadership of the Orthodox Church, it was clear that mercy baptisms were just that – acts of mercy. Christian ministers were well aware that conversions of the heart were not taking place in these acts of baptism. As Simeonov testified, “The majority of the Jews were experiencing deep pain that they had to compromise their faith. And most of them did not do it out of changing their convictions, but because they were forced by the circumstances. Therefore, I did not consider myself a missionary; my duty was simply to help them.”19

In Summary

The role of Bulgarian Christian communities standing in defense of their Jewish compatriots is a remarkable story. These communities gave concrete moral witness in action to faithfulness to a noble vision. In spite of their prominent participation in rescue activities, Christian communities in Bulgaria have been given little credit in secular historiography. Even though there was widespread public support from all levels for acts of rescue, the unanimous support of the efforts by all Christian communities, without exception, is the most telling part of this story. Faced with the dilemma of taking sides in the confrontation of a defiant people against a powerful and corrupt government, religious leaders firmly sided with their flocks and with the Jewish people. As a result, while many Bulgarians of the anti-Fascist resistance movement were incarcerated in concentration camps, not one Bulgarian Jew was sent to death camps.

I believe the Jewish Exodus after 400 years of slavery in Egypt informed Bulgaria’s understanding of its own liberation after 500 years of Ottoman oppression. Thus, the rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews is best understood as an act of civil disobedience motivated by attitudes unique to the Bulgarian context. Bulgaria’s support for its Jews in defiance of the Germans bears the marks of Christian social ethics internalized by the Bulgarian community through the prolonged period of national revival in the 18th and 19th centuries and recorded in the country’s Founding Constitution. F

Notes:

Frederick B. Chary, The Bulgarian Jews and the Final Solution 1940-1944 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 188.

2Michael Bar-Zohar, Beyond Hitler’s Grasp: The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews (Holbrook, MA: Adams Media Corporation, 1998), Chapter 13.

3David Cohen, Otseljavaneto: Sbornik of Documenty 1940-1944 [The Survival: A Compilation of Documents 1940-1944] (Sofia, Bulgaria: “Shalom” Publishing Center, 1995), 230; Tzvetan Todorov, The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgaria’s Jews Survived the Holocaust. A Collection of Texts with Commentary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 98.

4 Bar-Zohar, Beyond Hitler’s Grasp, 173.

5 Chary, Bulgarian Jews, 189; Stephane Groueff, Crown of Thorns: The Reign of King Boris III of Bulgaria, 1918-1943 (Lanham/New York/Oxford: Madison Books, 1998), 328.

6 Peter Meyer, “Bulgaria,” in Peter Meyer, Bernard D. Weinryb, Eugene Duschinsky, and Nicolas Sylvain, The Jews in the Soviet Satellites (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1971), 571.

7 Bar-Zohar, Beyond Hitler’s Grasp, 194. The Apostolic Delegate in Sofia Monsignor Giuseppe Mazzoli helped negotiate the rescue of the Jews (Ibid., 188 and 202-03). On cooperation and good relations between Bulgarian Orthodox and Catholics in Bulgaria, see Peter Hebblethwaite, John XXIII: Pope of the Council (London: Cassell Ltd., 1984), 141, 175-77.

8 Groueff, Crown of Thorns, 230.

9 Veselin Ignatov, “Pastir Zjapkov i Evreite [Pastor Zjapkov and the Jews],” Zornitsa [Morning Star] 121 (April, 1997); Hristo Kulichev, ed., Vestitely na Istnaia: Istorja na Evangelskite Tsarkvi v Balgaria [Heralds of the Truth: A History of the Evangelical Churches in Bulgaria], 2nd ed. (Sofia: Bulgarian Bible Society, 1994), 264-65; 275-76.

10 Cohen, Otseljavaneto, 42-43.

11 Meyer, “Bulgaria,” 571 and 623; D. Andreev’s article in the newspaper Dnes [Today], 24 June 1941, as quoted by Ljubomir Vladikin, “Die Judengesetzgebung in Bulgarien,” Weltkampf, Munich, No. 2 (October-December 1942), 291, cited by Meyer in “Bulgaria,” 623.

12 I want to express my special gratitude to Dr. Hristo Kulichev for his support and help in finding contacts and materials of the Bulgarian Evangelical relationship with the Jews during World War II. He was instrumental in organizing a meeting with Lidja Asenova Simeonova, the daughter of Asen Simeonov. She provided personal documents from her father’s file from the archives of the Bulgarian Communist security prison system and gave me indispensable insights into her father’s life and ministry for the Jews (personal interview, 14 March 2002).

13 His grandfather, Simeon Benchov, was an Orthodox priest active in the 19th century Bulgarian Revival who passed on the vision of the revival to his grandson (interview with Lidja Asenova Simeonova, 14 March 2002; Kulichev, Vestitely na Istinata, 275-76). For Simeon Benchov’s biography, see the entry in Bulgarska Vazrozhdenska Intelegentsia [Encyclopedia of the Bulgarian Revivalist Intelligentsia] (Sofia: Dr. Petar Beron Publisher, 1988).

14 The service of induction was held on 15 November 1931; see “Programa za ustanovjavavaneto nap astir Asen M. Simeonov v I-va Evangelska Tsarkva, ul. Solun 16, Sofia” [Program for the Induction of Pastor Asen M. Simeonov in the First Evangelical Church on 16 Solun Street, Sofia] in the author’s possession.

15 “Reference: Concerning Asen Michailov Simeonov” (Simeonov file in the Archive of the Directory of Police, 10 March 1958, 129. Absolutely Secret) and “Agent’s Report to the Chief Officer of Division ‘B’. 1-Department in regard to the investigation of Asen Mikhailov Simeonov,” Report of agent of 23rd group of the Division ‘B’ of the First Department (Simeonov file in the Archive of the Directory of Police, January 1950, p. 45, Sofia, Strictly Confidential).

16 Kulichev, Heralds of the Truth, 273-75.

17 Ibid., 275.

18 Eyewitness report of Ignatov, “Pastir Zjapkov i Eveite,” 3.

19 Nikola Kjosev, “Pastir Asen Simeonov,” Zornitsa [Morning Star], 123 (May 1999), 2. Simeonov’s testimony is confirmed by prominent poet Valeri Petrov who writes: “I know that because I am one of the baptized….Our family [with a Jewish father and a Bulgarian mother] was a family of atheists and faith cannot be imparted with a document, and Pastor Simeonov knew that very well.” Hristo Kulichev, Contributions of the Protestants to the Bulgarian People (Sofia, Bulgaria: St. Kliment of Ohrid Publisher, Sofia University, 2008, in Bulgarian, 281).

Edited excerpts published with permission from Parush R. Parushev,“Walking in the Dawn of the Light: On the Salvation Ethics of the Ecclesial Communities in the Orthodox Tradition from a Radical Reformation Perspective,” Ph.D. dissertation, Fuller Theological Seminary, 2006.

ALIVE 2025

Rev. Dony K. Donev, D. Min.

“When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also.”

2 Timothy 1:5

My Grandma, Todorka Mindova, was one of the first Sunday school teachers in the Bulgarian Pentecostal Union. After successfully graduating from a training course in the city of Sliven led by Donka Kinareva and personally organized by Dr. Nicolas Nikolov, she was allowed to minister in the denomination. But for grandma, the faith was more than teaching or a sermon. It was life. Many Bulgarian Pentecostal ministers can testify to the effectiveness of her ministry. And for her constant fasting and thousands of answered prayers I could write a book.

But far more interesting for me as a child was the fact that being a Sunday school teacher, Grandma never tried to preach to me. In the hardest moments of life she would only confess these words, which I have remembered from my childhood: “We serve a living God.” More was not needed. For Grandma preached with her life. Read more

The Cross: A Message of Salvation and Revolution

For every Christian, the crucifixion bears one ultimate meaning: salvation. And not just salvation through the cross, but through the death on the cross with multiple layers of significance. It is the fulfillment of Messianic prophecy, the undeniable proof of a sovereign God acting within the drama of human history, and an unprecedented political manifesto revealing the enduring power of faith.

The practice of crucifixion dates back to the 9th century B.C., introduced by the Assyrian king Shalmaneser as a brutal punishment for criminals. Offenders were bound, crucified alive, and raised high to be seen by the public—a horrifying spectacle designed not merely to punish but to sow fear in all who dared challenge the authority of the empire. The true power of this punishment lays not in the death it brought, but in the prolonged agony and exhaustion preceding it.

Before the rise of the Roman Empire, crucifixion already bore the weight of terror and shame. Under Rome, it became the empire’s most dreadful symbol—a declaration that its might could crush any man, any nation. In 71 B.C., following the failed rebellion led by Spartacus, 6,000 of his captured followers were crucified along the road from Capua to Rome.

Rome had turned crucifixion into a science of torture! Death so brutal that the victim became little more than a piece of bloody meat in the eyes of the soldiers. Flesh was torn by whips embedded with metal, bone, and glass. Blood drained from the body until the organs could not function any longer. The body suffocated slowly, painfully, as breathing ceased and the blood powered into the dry limestone dust. The torment was total!

The condemned were then nailed to rough-hewn wooden beams—hands and feet pierced—then lifted slowly into the air. Death came not instantly, but after three to four hours… or three to four days. The sight of a naked, disfigured body suspended on a cross, wracked with agony, could not go unnoticed by the watching crowd. The criminal had turned into a victim of cruelty, of imperial might and of public condemnation.

This is the scene that Tertullian, an early Christian apologist, identified as the peculiar cruelty of crucifixion. The Roman historian Cicero deemed it a “most cruel and horrifying” punishment, while Josephus described it as the “most pitiable of deaths.” Yet for imperial Rome, the crucifixion was a public proclamation: a terrifying sentence reserved for those who dared to disrupt the order and peace of the ultimate pagan state. All rebels against the Empire met such an end!

Jesus knew that this would be His fate! It was foretold in the prophecies. This was how the true Messiah was destined to die. The four Evangelists describe in vivid detail the trial and crucifixion: Judas received his silver and his judgment; conflicting witnesses marred the court; Pilate washed his hands before the crowd, claiming to find no fault. The soldiers’ beatings, the casting of lots for His garments, the crown of thorns, and the long, agonizing walk to Calvary under the burden of the rough heavy wooden cross—all marked the path of redemption.

His blood stained the narrow streets of Jerusalem! The crowd followed Him to the hill called Golgotha. Those near enough saw the splinters of the Roman-crafted cross soaked in blood. Those farther away heard the hammer strike iron through flesh, followed by screams that pierced the air. Then the crowd hushed as the Roman soldiers began to pull the ropes. The cross was raised upright, wedged into the rocky ground. And on it, standing tall between heaven and earth, hung the reason for our faith, the very source of our salvation. The forsaken Messiah, the wounded Healer, the King condemned by kings, the Lord slain by lords. His hands and feet were nailed, His brows crowned with thorns, His body swollen, bloody, and bare. His blood streamed down the tree, dripping onto the hardened faces of the guards below. For this is how God chose to die for the salvation of the world. But even from the cross, through parched lips and a final breath, the Eternal One continued to speak.

At that moment, in midday darkness, the veil of the temple was torn from top to bottom. It was not the end, but a beginning. The wounded, the outcast, the poor, and the powerless were now invited into His presence!

Five apostles—Andrew, Bartholomew, Peter, Philip, and Simon the Zealot also died by crucifixion, as Christ did. Thousands of early Christians were crucified along Rome’s stone paths. John Foxe, in his Book of Martyrs, writes that crosses, poison, and every imaginable cruelty were employed to eradicate Christians. Not for crimes committed, but for the singular “offense” of believing differently. For the early Church, the cross transformed from a symbol of terror into a banner of faithfulness, even unto death.

By the end of the first century, apologists like Minucius Felix were already linking the cross with Christian identity. In the early third century, Tertullian himself proclaimed it the sign of the Lord. History knows no greater reversal, no more profound political declaration: the symbol of Roman oppression became the symbol of the Christian faith.

The early Church’s message was clear: the pagan empire held no power over faith that rose above death, hell, every kingdom and every ruler. The cross carried a social message too, judging justly and restoring dignity. At Golgotha, the lame walked, the blind saw, the poor found their Father.

The cross bore an economic truth as well: an empire built on slavery cannot hold those made free in Christ. But above all, the message of the cross is spiritual. Earthly power cannot liberate the soul. Only Christ, crucified, can redeem those who give their lives to God!

It is likely that, in our own century, a global power may again seek to assert its might crushing dissenters, thinkers, believers alike through legislative, executive, and judicial force. And perhaps, for a time, it will succeed. But it will not endure! For the word of the cross is a power greater than any empire, earthly or otherwise. Easter is the triumph of faith—the holiday that transforms the enemy’s weapons into instruments of salvation.

Christ is Risen! May God keep us all!

Dony K. Donev, D.Min.

Aesthetics and Pathos in the Catholic-Pentecostal Encounter

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Presidential Address

Aesthetics and Pathos in the Vision of God:

A Catholic—Pentecostal Encounter

Ralph Del Colle

Introduction

Some years ago an essay made a deep and lasting impression on me. The article was by Richard A. Baer, Jr. and was entitled “Quaker Silence, Catholic Liturgy, and Pentecostal Glossolalia—Some Functional Similar- ities.” It was published in Perspectives on the New Pentecostalism, a col- lection of papers that had been presented at the second annual meeting of this very Society in 1972. Russell Spittler was program chair and subse- quently editor of the book.

Baer’s thesis was simple and direct. He argued that the “religious prac- tices” of speaking in tongues, the silent worship of the Society of Friends, and the liturgical worship of the Catholic and Episcopal Churches bore a “fundamental functional similarity.” By freeing the worshipper in the depth of one’s spirit, these practices enable one to put the analytical mind at rest and “to respond to the immediate reality of the living God.” “[L]ife as the praise of God” is the intended fruit of such practices.

As one who had migrated from charismatic prayer back to the liturgical prayer of my upbringing his thesis made eminent sense. While I cannot speak about Quaker silence, I have come to know the silence of traditional Catholic spiritualities and can testify (something scholars can do in a Society such as ours) that the functional resemblance holds, at least with regard to the inner dispositions that charismatic prayer, liturgical prayer, and contemplative prayer all seem to evoke. The thesis, while not draw- ing any theological links among the three traditions—it was more a

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phenomenology of religious practices and experience and an affirmation of the spiritual principle of “letting go” in the divine presence—also recalls an essay in which those connections were made at the level of theological traditions.

Albrecht Ritschl, in many ways the mid-nineteenth-century successor to Friedrich Schleiermacher, might have been sympathetic to Baer’s obser- vations, but not in order to commend them. In his essay “Prolegomena to the History of Pietism” he noted the similarities in the intent of reforming efforts undertaken by the medieval Franciscans, the Anabaptists of the Reformation period, and the Pietists of the seventeenth century. It is a com- plicated story, and specialists in the field can render a more critical judg- ment on the proposal than I can. But if he is correct, one has to take seriously the link between world-renouncing piety with its primitivist and reformist impulses and the pursuit of Christian perfection common to all three traditions. For Ritschl the configuration of Christian life that emerges was inimical to that advanced by the magisterial Reformers, the position he upheld. If it is fair to say that Pentecostals are latter-day descendents of this pietistic impulse, at least in regard to the pursuit of Christian perfec- tion, then we have a theological account of the Christian life that links Catholics and Pentecostals. This complements Baer’s observations about the functional similarities that are enacted in worship.

I suspect that none of this is really news to anybody. The option to situ- ate the experiential dimensions of Christian life and the theologies of grace that support that enterprise tend to build bridges from the Wesleyan and Pentecostal camps to the Catholic side of the Western Church, or even to the Eastern Church (as you have heard in David Bundy’s Presidential address), rather than to either the Lutheran or the Reformed traditions. Although, if we dissect all the theological streams that influenced the English Reformation we need to be careful about any simplistic trajectories leading to the Wesleyan and Pentecostal streams of the Christian Church.

Nevertheless, one example of this “catholicizing trend” with some doctrinal substance is rather significant. One has only to recall Frank Macchia’s Presidential Address in 2000 entitled “Justification and the Spirit: A Pentecostal Reflection on the Doctrine by which the Church Stands or Falls.” Although Macchia was not uncritical of the Council of Trent’s Decree on Justification, he did note that Pentecostals have more in common with its transformational understanding of justification than the forensic model confessed by the magisterial Reformation traditions. The key Pentecostal innovation is, in Macchia’s phrase, “that sanctification is

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the means by which the Spirit achieves justification in Christ,” which to my Catholic ears sounds like another way of saying that the grace of justification is indeed sanctifying grace.

In any case, both the proponents of this similarity (not identity!) in the understanding and praxis of grace in the Christian life—one need only recall Albert Outler’s reading of Wesley—and those who, while identify- ing the connection, resist the prescription confirm that we are on solid ground here. Regarding the latter, Karl Barth could be invoked as much as Albrecht Ritschl, although Barth might just lump the liberal Ritschl (no doubt to his dismay) with the Catholics, Anabaptists, and Pietists. The issue, of course, is the extent to which one wants to situate the reality of Christ’s grace in relation to experience, something that in its anthropolog- ical rendering detracts, in Barth’s judgment, from the primacy of God’s word in the matter.

Thus far, what I am suggesting is the following. Baer’s prescient obser- vation about liturgical worship and charismatic worship directs us to an incipient theological connection between the Catholic and Pentecostal tra- ditions. Beyond their “functional similarities” that bear on Jesus’ anticipa- tion of worship in spirit and truth (John 4:23), we can appeal to the shape of Christian life engendered by a theology of grace in which an experimen- tal form of piety is critical. The remainder of my remarks in this address will build on these observations and explore the relationship between the posture of faith and the doctrine of God implied by these respective pos- tures in Catholicism and Pentecostalism. I will then explore the encounter between these two traditions for the mutual contribution they make to Christian proclamation in this third millennium of the Church’s mission.

The Catholic Posture of Faith: Aesthetics and Transformation

Prelude

In good scholastic fashion faith may be considered in both its objective and subjective dimensions. Fides quae creditur refers to the content of faith, the faith that is believed, and fides qua creditur is the act of faith, the faith by which one believes. It may indeed be the case that the preference of the present culture is toward the latter, the personal existential act of faith. This is not limited to Christianity. The commonplace distinction between religion and spirituality is usually made in favor of the latter, thereby allowing any number of people to describe themselves as spiritual

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but not religious. This holds both for those who are affiliated with a reli- gious community and the latter-day transcendentalists, who, in the spirit of Henry David Thoreau, commune with the divine or nature via the individ- uality of their own participation in the harmony of the cosmos. All of this is very American and now perhaps endemic throughout the postmodern West, with the United States clinging more than most to an explicit religio- sity. It is no understatement to suggest that the fides qua is determinative of the fides quae even in the Christian community, if one were to do a sur- vey about the relevance of doctrine for the living and practice of the faith.

I review this to set the context. My intent is not to evoke nostalgia for some more self-consciously religious period in human history. Seculari- zation has indeed had its effects, and while it has not eliminated human religious and spiritual longing, it has opened the door to a radically plural- ist intentionality of religious aspirations and practices. This is not simply a matter of a more widespread global consciousness—I suppose most Americans know where Iraq and Afghanistan are these days—but it also emerges from within the fractures and fragmentations of Western culture itself, even aside from new immigration patterns.

Catholics, constitutionally speaking, cannot ignore the cultural context. We tend to operate analogically rather than dialectically in our theological methods. “Both-and” is our preference to “either-or,” to put it somewhat crudely. Thus our formulae include faith and reason, nature and grace, and, following the same logic, Church and culture. Not that modernity has been an easy ride for the Catholic Church. Witness its divestment, usually forced, of its cultural and socio-political privileges in Europe in the wake of the French Revolution. This has not been without its benefits ecclesio- logically speaking—a new model of Church has emerged—and in the civil realm has brought relief to many Protestants in Catholic majority coun- tries, not the least of which include Pentecostals in Latin America, for instance, a situation still in process.

I need not continue. The Catholic Church has traveled some distance from the cultural pessimism of Pope Pius IX in the nineteenth century to the optimism of Pope John XXIII at the Second Vatican Council and its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes. But it is not that story I want to tell, although I think it is far more complicated than many presentations by contemporary Catholics might suggest. Rather, it is the theological implications of this passage through modernity that are intriguing with this in mind: Catholics must account for culture.

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Aesthetics as the Modality for the Catholic Posture of Faith

As you might have guessed from the title of this address, I am charac- terizing the Catholic and Pentecostal postures of faith under the rubrics of aesthetics and pathos respectively. On the Catholic side it will be no secret that the influence that most informs my reflections is that of the great twentieth-century Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. Let me begin with a proposition.

In the posture of faith, it is impossible from a Catholic perspective to separate the fides qua from the fides quae. Actually I think that is true for all Christians, Pentecostals included, although I should let folks speak for themselves. This does not, however, make it any easier to explicate the matter theologically. My previous reference to the cultural context was intended to highlight the complications attending any assertion of the proposition. For example, one approach in Catholic apologetics is to argue that the truth of Catholic faith is evident in its beauty. Such an aesthetical approach highlights the beauty of its liturgy, religious art, the seamlessness of its dogmatic edifice and philosophical traditions, and the lives of its saints. Actually it is very appealing, perhaps more in the past than in the present. But nostalgic appeals to a previous era, the high Middle Ages or the Church Fathers, for instance, is not what I mean by the aesthetic modality of the faith, even considering the importance of tradition and continuity for Catholic sensibilities.

The aesthetical characterization of Catholic faith has more to do with the configuration of the divine-human relation in terms of beauty, or, more accurately, glory. In other words, the glory of God is manifested or medi- ated through the form of the faith both in regard to its subjectivity, the fides qua, and its objectivity, the fides quae. The light and experience of faith on the one hand, and the structure and dynamic of revelation on the other, constitute the aesthetic modality of faith in the Catholic tradition. Or, to put it another way, contemplation and sacramentality, to use just two examples of Catholic religious praxis, are the two poles by which the divine presence is known and apprehended by Catholics.

First, a word about form, since it may seem odd to Pentecostal ears to hear that faith, even in its subjective modality, is a matter of form. Form implies mediation, and Pentecostals—at least this is my impression—tend to emphasize immediacy in the divine-human relation. From the Cath- olic perspective, form as a modality of mediation does not detract from the reality of God’s presence in one’s life, or from those immediate

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inspirations that may be classified as actual graces, or, as in Ignatian spir- ituality, consolations without previous cause—that is, when God “enter[s] into the soul…to act upon it…without any previous perception or knowledge of any object from which such consolation might come to the soul through its own acts of intellect and will.”

Form, therefore, embraces rather than excludes mystery. Mystery, defined as the salvific presence and agency of God in the gospel, and mys- tery as the human reception of that divine action and presence, is revela- tory of that which exceeds its manifestation in the form. Let me repeat the point: mystery is present in the form, it is mediated by form, and simulta- neously is greater than the form. As we say in the Ignatian tradition in spir- ituality—the one that shapes my own spiritual life—God is the magis, the always more. This holds for God and for the human participants in the mystery of salvation. Neither God nor the workings of grace lie outside of form. The reality of mystery including its excess resides in the form, not behind or beyond it. So there is not a God beyond the mystery of the Holy Trinity, nor is the presence of grace in a person’s life something less than the mystery of God’s self-communication to the believer. This is all the more the case when we consider that the fides quae and the fides qua can- not be separated, although we may distinguish them.

Perhaps this may become clearer by analyzing the following prayer, the Preface for Mass on the Solemnity of Christmas as found in the Roman Missal:

In the wonder of the Incarnation Your eternal Word has brought to the eyes of faith a new and radiant vision of your glory. In him we see our God made visible and so are caught up in the love of the God we cannot see.

Here we have what von Balthasar calls the objective and subjective evi- dences of faith, namely, the Incarnation and the eyes of faith. Note the dominance of the aesthetic motif and its requirement of form. The revela- tion of the Incarnation imparts “a new and radiant vision of your glory.” The “eyes of faith”—a visual metaphor quite at home in the Catholic tradition—leads to the rapture of “being caught up in love of the God we cannot see.” The radiance of the divine glory in Christ, “our God made vis- ible,” generates faith which itself is a participation in that very glory.

The mediating role of form is essential to both revelation and faith. The movement to the God we cannot see is only possible because of the visi- bility of God’s glory in Christ whom we can see. Christ is not left behind as some temporary point of transition into the unseen God. Glory, a good

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biblical concept, is precisely the splendor of God made visible, in this case made visible in the humanity of Christ, the culmination of Israel’s salvation history. A dynamic of praise is the only proper response to the glory irradiating from Christ. The doxology with which the prayer of the eucharistic canon concludes culminates in a movement through Christ, with Christ, and in Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit to the honor and glory of God the Father. Therefore, the principle of sacramentality, that is, the divine presence signified and efficaciously active in a creaturely medium, corresponds to the aesthetical gaze that is worship with its trans- formational implications. Paul knew this well: “All of us, gazing with unveiled face on the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as from the Lord who is Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18).

Likewise, if we cannot dispense with the sacramental mediation of divine glory in Christ, the God-man whose glorified humanity is never dis- pensable, then we cannot ignore the participatory dimensions of the act of faith as well. The form of faith as the fides qua embraces the sensory aspects of human agency, what the classical traditions in spirituality called the “spiritual senses.” The passive and active modalities of the experience of faith presuppose the ontological enablement of the human agent through the grace that both heals and elevates, the gratia sanans and the gratia ele- vans. Faith is enacted via the attunement of the whole person, corporeally and spiritually, to the divine presence discerned, as it were, in the very actions of the one who believes. This primordial Christian experience, an attunement to God in faith, hope, and love, is the basis for all infused graces, whether mystical or charismatic in nature. It is this ontological ele- vation of the human person, a transformative dynamic at the level of habit, that the Catholic doctrine of created grace is intended to convey. Super- natural in modality it suffuses and is known through the human acts that it engenders. The form of the act of faith is the very disposition of the person who is a new creation. He or she is called to radiate the beauty of holiness, the effulgence of the divine glory in Christ that constitutes, permeates, and shines forth from the communion of saints.

In order to appreciate this dynamism of grace I need to turn briefly to the notion of experience and its place in the traditional Catholic theology of grace. It is by no means a foregone conclusion in Catholic theology that experience has any proper place in the theology of grace. At least, it does not occupy the place that the doctrine of assurance does in some Protestant evangelical traditions, especially when this is understood as the means by which the presence of saving grace in one’s life may be verified. The

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struggles of John Wesley, for instance, over whether he was a Christian possessing saving faith seems odd to Catholic sensibilities. In the classical spiritual tradition, one would be cautioned about such enthusiastic excesses, for it was believed that the reliance on experience for the assur- ance that grace was indeed at work distorted both the truth about the oper- ations of God’s grace and the validity of experiences one might have received from the Lord.

The caution about experience was not without dogmatic foundation. The Decree on Justification of the Council of Trent, in Chapter IX entitled “Against the Vain Confidence of Heretics,” concludes: “no one can know with the certainty of faith, which cannot be subject to error, that he has obtained the grace of God.” Following this a strong strain in neo- Scholastic theology, in order to emphasize the supernatural dimension of grace, argued that grace was inaccessible to the realm of human con- sciousness. On the other hand and at the same time, other traditions, espe- cially in spiritual theology, affirmed the vast array of spiritual experiences one could have, including infused mystical graces, the experiential horizon of many a saint. The tradition of discernment of spirits in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola is a good example of this.

The key in all this is Catholic caution about the absolute claim of cer- tainty in knowing that one has grace. Thomas Aquinas distinguished between such certainty and the knowledge one may have by conjecture. For example, although not with absolute certainty, one could interpret one’s experience such as delighting in God and despising worldly things, and conclude to the presence of grace in one’s life. Or, as St. Joan of Arc, with rather heroic faith when asked during her trial if she was in God’s grace, replied: “If I am not, may it please God to put me in it; if I am, may it please God to keep me there.” This is quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (# 2005) in a paragraph that begins with the statement,

Since it belongs to the supernatural order, grace escapes our experience, and cannot be known except by faith. We cannot therefore rely on our feelings or our works to conclude that we are justified and saved.

This sets the context for the aesthetical model of the posture of faith derived from the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar. His definition of the “experience of faith,” a concept he rehabilitates with great effort, never- theless also reflects these deep-seated Catholic sensibilities. Thus he can say that the experience of faith is “the experiencing of something that is essentially hidden and which is present only through mediation.”

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Therefore, he prefers to speak of “dogmatic experience” rather than psy- chological experience, those that are “‘objective’ experiences in Christ and in the Church,” for it is in them that the form of God is known. This ensures that the experience of faith is indeed a self-surrender to God and is pneumatologically based. “The Holy Spirit,” says von Balthasar with a rather Germanic cadence, “is, in identity, both the Spirit of God’s objective revelation in Christ and of the objectivation of the existential Christ-form in the form of the Church—her offices, charisms, and sacraments—and the Spirit of Christian subjectivity as faith, hope, and love.”

The Catholic posture of faith, and I think von Balthasar is right on this, consists in beholding the divine beauty present as glory “in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations” (Eph. 3:21). In this case beauty “is” sim- ply in the eye of the beholder if that beholder is the God-man himself and ours through the participation of grace. Thus we may conclude this section by appropriating the interrelationship between the fides qua and the fides quae, but now in the sense offered by von Balthasar: “. . . the fides quae of the Christian is the fides qua of Christ as he faces the Father, and even the Christian’s fides qua lives from the radiance of this light of Christ, which we can characterize as the Christian’s archetypal fides and which shapes the totality of his form by making the whole man into an adequate answer to God’s Word.”

The Pentecostal Posture of Faith: Pathos and Transformation

Amid the challenges posed to orthodoxy by liberationist-inspired or- thropraxy in the last four decades, orthopathy has emerged as a distinctive Wesleyan and now also Pentecostal contribution to Christian theological method. The “right passion” of the religious affections has restored John Wesley in particular to his rightful place among the great theologians of the Christian Church. Gregory Clapper, Henry Knight, Richard Steel, Theodore Runyon, Steven Land, and Samuel Solivan are among those who have employed this approach. For the purposes of this address I will uti- lize their insights to analyze the Pentecostal posture of faith and then return to its implications relative to the doctrine of God.

It is important to note that the utilization of this concept is of Wesleyan provenance and has been picked up by Pentecostals, especially those in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition, but not exclusively. I mention this because its employment in a Wesleyan context might be different than in a Pente- costal one. These concern three major aspects of orthopathy, which I will

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pose as questions for further Pentecostal theological inquiry.

The first revolves around the influence of Wesley for Pentecostals. While this need not be confined to the Wesleyan-Holiness stream of Pentecostalism, his influence there is certainly greater. Further, does a Wesleyan account of the religious affections also apply to Spirit baptism and glossolalia, the Pentecostal distinctive, as it does to the rest of the affections in the Christian life? In other words, does the emphasis upon the reception, experience, and use of charismata change the configuration of religious affections when compared to the experience of grace that sanctifies? There is also the issue of progeny. Wesleyan theology owes more to Wesley than Pentecostal theology, and there is no comparative figure of similar theological weight in Pentecostal origins such as Wesley occupies in Methodist and Holiness origins.

The second concern focuses on the ecclesial context within which one affirms the centrality of the religious affections and how they may be parsed relative to both discernment and the practice of Christian life. Henry Knight’s excellent book, The Presence of God in the Christian Life: John Wesley and the Means of Grace, identifies the issue in its subtitle. To understand clearly Wesley’s “religion of the heart” he must be situated within his own historical context in the Church of England. The battles against Formalism and Enthusiasm, against Antinomianism and Perfec- tionism, as Knight’s chapters unfold it, were specific to his context. I do not doubt that analogies to that context may appear as types throughout Church history, and therefore Wesley’s distinctions may function as sys- tematic guides and rules, a regulative grammar for theology as a whole. As I have said, it is now time for Wesley to assume his place among the Church’s theologians. But it does raise questions about the relationship between the religious affections and “the traditional means of grace.” It seems to me that Wesley’s very nuanced account of the religious affec- tions, as Knight explicates it, is profoundly informed by his Anglican con- text in which such means were in practice. Is there the same intentionality about these “traditional means of grace,” especially the sacraments, in Pentecostal churches or even in Wesleyan-Holiness churches as there was for Wesley in his own Anglican context? Does this affect one’s account of the religious affections and their emergent formative role in theology? You understand how Catholics would be particularly interested in this question!

A third question concerns the definition and configuration of the reli- gious affections. This is the most important and the one on which I will

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concentrate. Steven Land, in his book, Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom, describes “Christian affections” as “objective, relational and dispositional.” The summary is consistent with the work of the Wesleyan scholars he mines, and highlights the depth and complexity of the religious affections. As objective, God is “the source and telos of the affections.” This corresponds with the fides quae, von Balthasar’s objec- tive evidence in the aesthetical apprehension of God.

There is much to discuss regarding the medium of the fides quae. For example, how does doctrine or dogma mediate the truth and content of the faith? For Land, the emphasis is on oral-narrative formation in which “God’s righteousness, love and power…evoke, limit and direct the affec- tions of the believer.” While this may not include creedal profession, the proclamation of the gospel, indeed of the “full gospel,” is enacted through Pentecostal rituals of praise, preaching, testimony, and prayer. In this dynamic there is certainly present an announcement and discernment of the truth of the gospel. For a full list of such rituals see Daniel Albrecht’s, Rites in the Spirit: A Ritual Approach to Pentecostal/Charismatic Spirituality—(Macro)Rituals in Appendix A, and Liturgical Rites, Foundational and Microrites in Appendix B. (The one I particularly like is the “sacred expletive,” to be distinguished from “sacred explicatives”).

The Christian affections are also relational; in “faith, obedience and love” they “shape and express” one’s “relationship with God, the church and the world.” They embrace the moment-by-moment existential relation that the believer has with the Lord and that is in fact dependent upon Christ’s “initiating, sustaining and directing” action. Again, here I would draw a parallel with the fides qua of von Balthasar’s subjective evidence for the experience of faith.

Finally, the Christian affections are dispositional. Dispositions are to be distinguished from feelings and moods. Therefore, they are not “passing feelings or sensate episodes.” Rather, they characterize a person, and in disposing one to God and neighbor, they seem to corroborate with the notion of the effects of habitual grace in the Catholic tradition. Perhaps we can characterize the dispositional dimension of Christian affections as grounded in the ontological transformation that grace works in the believer, the new creation effected by the indwelling Holy Spirit.

All of the above is consistent with the Wesleyan scholarship I men- tioned and is dependent upon it. A major characteristic of all this work is to underscore what I call the depth dimension of the religious affections.

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The intention of orthopathy is not a revival of emotionalism but the embrace of the biblical notion of the heart as essential to transformation in the Christian life. Its Pentecostal adaptation suggests that the intense affec- tivity that characterized the emergence of Pentecostalism had much to do with a combination of charismatic manifestations and apocalyptic longing. Land even speaks of the “the Apocalyptic Affections” as the overarching category for Pentecostal effusion and experience. Gratitude in praise and thanksgiving, compassion in love and longing, and courage in confidence and hope are proposed as the template by which we can schematize Pentecostal affections. However, another issue arises—in addition to the one I raised about the means of grace—in this adaptation of orthopathy from the Wesleyan to the Pentecostal tradition.

Knight devotes a short section of his investigation to the “relation of immediate and mediated presence.” Again, the analysis and explication of Wesley’s position is informed by how Wesley responded to his critics, in this case, Anglican and Moravian. Suffice it to say that God can be imme- diately present contra some Anglican denials. In fact, Wesley sounds like Ignatius Loyola when he affirms that in private prayer, for instance, God may pour forth his love into one’s heart and thereby be acting immediately on the soul. At the same time, contra the Moravians, God often employs outward elements of religion, such as the means of grace, to relate one to God in an inward manner. In other words, God may become immediately present through the means of grace.

In addition to the issue of whether for Pentecostals the “outward” means of grace are a means to “inward religion,” the theology one assumes on the nature-grace relation is also raised. As I hinted at before, in the Pentecostal arena this has not only to do with the modality of “sanctifying grace,” for example, but also with the nature of the charismata or spiritual gifts. The expectations of the supernatural that inform Pentecostal affec- tions weigh in the direction of immediacy. When translated into Pente- costal practice this may very well mean that the perceived immediacy of divine presence trumps mediated modalities with consequences all across the theological spectrum from spirituality to ecclesiology. Let me briefly pursue these by comparison with the Catholic perspective.

Aesthetics and Pathos: Complementary Postures of Faith?

I have used these two heuristic models, aesthetics and pathos, to char- acterize the Catholic and Pentecostal postures of faith. In the process I

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have raised the question of the modality of divine presence in the two tra- ditions, immediate and mediate, along with their respective theologies of grace, especially in regard to nature and supernature. And just to state the obvious, these are more Catholic queries than they are Pentecostal.

By posing the question of complementarity I am not suggesting incom- patibility at all! It is not a question of right vision versus right affections. As we have seen, both models interrelate the fides qua with the fides quae, the subjective and objective dimensions of faith. So we cannot posit the aesthetic model as having to do only with what is seen, but with “seeing” as well. Likewise, pathos is not limited to the heart of the believer but also applies to the heart of God—the angle largely pursued by Samuel Solivan in, The Spirit, Pathos and Liberation: Toward an Hispanic Pentecostal Theology. My hope, then, is to explore how these two Christian traditions (the oldest and the youngest!) might each illuminate the other.

One area of conversation is certainly ecclesiology, especially the rela- tionship between the sacramental and the charismatic. But that would take us far afield and require attention to a number of issues that have not been broached in this address. Let me concentrate, then, on the question of authenticity and faith. I mean authenticity in the existential sense, the real- ity and truth of faith.

In a postmodern context in which a variety of worldviews, including religious ones, contend with each other, it is imperative that the Church contends for the faith; and this begins primarily in the house of God. It does not stop there. In fact, there can be no authentic faith without mission. But we cannot fool ourselves that the faith will be heard in proclamation without its truth registering in the lives of those who profess it, those who confess Jesus Christ in the Church and in witness to the world. In this regard Catholics have much to learn from Pentecostals and maybe, at least in the lives of the saints (I am mindful of the scandal that has rocked my church in the last two years!), Pentecostals can learn from Catholics.

Authenticity primarily has to do with the encounter with God. A recent document from the Roman Curia entitled Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life: A Christian Reflection on the “New Age” attempts to iden- tify how the spiritual hunger present in our culture is being satisfied with a narcissistic spirituality that focuses on the innate human potential for self-fulfillment. In no way naïve about the diffusion of New Age spirit- uality even by groups within the Church, the document mandates solid theological appraisals and strict spiritual discernment of these tendencies. The main counter to this phenomenon is promotion of authentic Christian

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spirituality, the core of which is a relationship to the God who is transcen- dent to creation and yet redeems it in love.

In order to ensure this prospect it is necessary that the whole person be engaged in the divine-human encounter. Christian faith has never just been a matter of intellectual assent, although that indeed is a dimension of con- version. The way to the truth of the gospel must also embrace the neces- sary interconnection between the objective and subjective dimensions of faith. In both of our traditions the integrity of faith is dependent upon self- surrender to the self-revealing Other known publicly, not esoterically, in the gospel. “Right seeing” and “right affections” bespeak the ongoing transformational process by which believers are conformed to Jesus Christ. The encounter with the living God of the gospel reaches to the depths of the person by virtue of the presence and agency of the One who is revealed. It is to the truth of the latter that we now turn.

The Vision of God in Glory and Power

The vision of God, the visio beatifica or beatific vision, is the most direct and simple understanding of eschatological fulfillment. It is the highest good, the summum bonum, of the creature, this seeing of God face- to-face. An intuitive, immediate seeing of God in the divine essence is what constitutes the beatific vision and embraces acts of knowledge, love, and joy with knowledge or love being more foundational depending on whether one is a Thomist or Scotist. The just soul requires the lumen gloriae, or light of glory, in order to see God. It is beyond the natural capacity of the intellect to see God; therefore the light of glory supernatu- rally elevates the just soul to see God without any creaturely mediation. In this sense the heavenly vision is a case of pure immediacy. Until then we see in a glass darkly, until we shall know fully as we are fully known (1 Cor. 13:12) when we shall see him as he is (1 John 3:2) with the requi- site transformation that this entails—we shall be like him. God may act on the soul directly or immediately in our wayfaring state, but this is only anticipation of what is to come in the state of glory.

One further aspect of this scholastic compendium has to do with the interrelationship among the various forms of cognition. The light of glory corresponds to the light of faith, the lumen fidei, in the present state of grace, which itself perfects the light of reason, the lumen rationis, in the state of nature. So, by the light of reason we know the created order; by the light of faith we know—in the biblical sense of that word—the truths of

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divine revelation; and by the light of glory we will know God in the divine essence in heaven.

The supernatural dimension of the divine economy is evident in both grace and glory. The pilgrim state wherein we walk by faith and not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7) is the fruit of sanctifying grace. The heavenly state is likewise the fruit of glory, the eschatological consummation of grace that presently justifies and sanctifies. The light of glory strengthens the intellect to see God and in the words of Thomas Aquinas “is to be described not as medium in which God is seen but as a medium by which God is seen; and as such does not take away the immediate vision of God.”

Why bother with these theological nuances? If the mutual contribution of our two traditions is to mark the authenticity of the encounter with God as a witness to the truth of the gospel, then we need to take care that the human and divine acts that constitute the encounter are preserved in their full integrity. On the human side this translates into the fully supernatural and the fully human dimensions of that encounter. Grace and grace alone enables the life of faith and the life of glory. Simultaneously, it is the inter- nalization of such grace, the truly sanctified and anointed life that reveals the triumph of grace. Did not Paul say that he did not receive the grace of God in vain but worked harder than the rest of the apostles and not him but the grace of God that was with him (1 Cor. 15:10)? It is this marvel of grace that our two traditions, at their best, bear witness to: I no longer live, but Christ lives in me, yet the life I now live I live by faith (Gal. 2:20). It is this combination of divine and human agency—Christ lives and I live— that is at the heart of the matter.

Translate, if you will, what I have been articulating in Catholic scholas- tic terminology into a Pentecostal genre. First, recall the Catholic expres- sion. One sees God in heaven by the light of glory, an illumination of the created intellect by which the essence of God is known—thoroughly supernatural and yet by God’s gift intrinsic to our glorified cognition. By that I mean that the light of glory, to quote from one scholastic source, is “a supernatural operative habit bestowed upon reason.” Additionally, the life of faith is the beginning of the supernatural process that leads to such consummation.

How does this sound in Pentecostal language? Perhaps something like this? When the Holy Spirit is poured out the divine affections begin to seize us. Now that’s just the beginning! In fact, we have already been moved from within when we began to long and tarry for the coming of the Holy Spirit. To long and to tarry, to groan and to wait upon the Lord!

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Already there is a transformational process that is taking place. For it is in the pathos of God to bestow the Holy Spirit, and now, as we pray and tarry for the promise, it begins to emerge as our own pathos. This too is a gift! The divine affections that want so much to give the gift of the Holy Spirit, in desire so far beyond what human beings in their noble and generous parental affections are capable of—if a child asked for a piece of bread what father among you . . .?! (Luke 11:11-13)—these divine affections are now being matched by grace working within our human affectivity, so closely tied to desire and volition, that we pray, tarry, and receive the gift when it comes. And again, this is only the beginning!

The Spirit is bestowed in power, and what happens? People go forth as the Spirit leads and anoints. Sensitivity to the things of God, both those that make for holiness and those that make for convincing witness, is increased! The grace and power of God so works within that one apostle can say to those to whom he is sent: “For God is my witness, how I long for you with the affection of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:8). Is that not transfor- mation? Is that not the pathos of God becoming the pathos of his children? “Be ye perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48)! “Be mer- ciful just as your Father is merciful (Luke 6:36). And, by the way, from where does Pentecostal praise and adoration arise? Is it not from the mys- terium pietatas, the mystery of piety, at work when, in the synergy (to use an Eastern Christian concept) of divine and human affections, we are led by our high priest, the God-man, our Lord Jesus Christ in praise and worship?

What does all this suggest about the doctrine of God? Since in good Thomistic fashion—the exitus and reditus of all things coming from and returning to God—God is the beginning, the middle, and the end. Actually, Paul said it first: “For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen” (Rom. 11:36). To the human participant the commanding invitation then is clear: “Be holy for I am holy” (Lev. 11:44; 1 Pet. 1:15-16). It sounds as if what we say about God has some- thing to do with the language of being!

Truth be told, not a lot has been written on the Pentecostal doctrine of God. The theologians of this Society are just catching up with the exegetes and historians. I have mentioned Sam Solivan’s utilization of orthopathy. He envisions it as the third leg of a “Liberating Triad” along with ortho- doxy and orthopraxis, oriented especially to “suffering as multi-dimen- sional experience [that] incorporates all our being, including the spiritual sphere.” In the realm of the metaphysics of divine being more specifically,

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Clark Pinnock has argued that a Pentecostal contribution would accentuate the emphasis on divine relationality. Pentecostals, he says, should forswear the absolutist model of divine being because they are “relational theists.” Terry Cross, in the same issue of the Journal of Pentecostal Theology in which this proposal was floated, responded mostly in the affirmative, with the caveat that the perfection and relationality of God ought to be consid- ered in dialectical tension. He did, however, suggest that Pentecostals could not avoid “some kind of philosophical categorization to organize our theological concepts.” Pentecostal theologians and philosophers need to continue this theological inquiry.

I will conclude with some Catholic reflections on the matter in dialogue with Pentecostal concerns. In good Catholic fashion it is my judgment that one cannot afford to evacuate metaphysics from language about God or thinking about God. Clearly that is a loaded statement, and to avoid any further digression I will not unpack it. For those interested, and whose aca- demic fare includes the “sacred explicative,” I will confess that I am mov- ing in a post-Heideggerian Thomistic direction. What that means is simply that the postures of faith that I have discussed imply that presence, or, bet- ter yet, “presencing” is at the core of a metaphysical universe, to borrow a phrase from the late Dominican theologian William J. Hill. The presencing of being seems to me the most cogent account of subjectivity, intersubjec- tivity, and the convertibility of the transcendentals: being, truth, goodness, and beauty. That is the Heideggerian side. The Thomistic emphasis is evi- dent in my continued judgment that the best way to metaphysically describe the being of God relative to creation, and which I think preserves creation as creaturely vis-à-vis God, is the notion of actus purus, God as pure act. All that God is in the divine being itself and in relation to creation is best accounted for as movement from actuality to actuality, not from potentiality to actuality or vice-versa. In other words, movement in God, for example, the intra-divine processions that constitute the persons of the Trinity, and movement from God into the created order—for example, the temporal missions of the Son and Spirit in the divine economy—are move- ments of presencing as pure actuality. Dialoguing with Pentecostals con- vinces me of this even more.

If Pinnock, with Cross’s necessary coda, is correct about relational theism, then the epistemic moment in faith is derived from the presencing of divine agency and power in the motions of grace and in the distribu- tion and operation of spiritual gifts. Pentecostals are acutely aware of God’s presence in their lives, a presence that is both personal, in a sort of

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dialogical and personalist I—Thou Buberian sense, and energetic—in the modality of power. The divine energies, to use an Orthodox concept, or the operative dynamism of the Spirit’s gifting, characterize the Pentecostal/ Charismatic experience. It is through this modality of divine agency that God’s personal nature is known. The manifestation of power is not inimi- cal to personal apprehension of God; rather it seems to confirm it. God cares for me because God has liberated me through the manifest and effi- cacious presence of God’s power.

All of this also has to do with presencing; God’s coming to presence via manifestations of the Spirit, and our coming to presence through the praxis of praise and ministry in the Spirit. No surprise, then, that there has always been an intimate connection among Pentecostals between the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit coming to presence, and eschatological long- ing, the Lord Jesus coming to presence in the parousia, which also entails our glorification with him. The Thomistic twist on these Pentecostal sensi- bilities is necessitated by the following observations.

I return to the context with which I began this address. Our world is plagued by a combination of secular and spiritual forces that have lost their way. Secular forces have settled into a material contestation of identity and power. This misses the mark (another word for sin!) of true diversity in unity by coercive forces that fracture and fragment the human project, both from within communities and from without spiritual forces in all their pluralism seem to refract back into the human condition an infra-cosmic redundancy of escapist aspirations, narcissistic self-fulfillment, or the enlistment of spiritual energy in support of the material contestation of sec- ular forces. In the face of this, what might the churches offer? If “heaven below” is an apt metaphor for the Pentecostal Movement, and let me sug- gest “open heaven” as a metaphor for the Catholic vision, then we need to ensure that the presencing in which we participate is indeed from above.

The Thomistic insistence that God’s coming to presence is from actual- ity to actuality preserves our creatureliness, a necessary prerequisite for participation in the divine light and power that comes from above. It is in the poverty of our finitude and sin that we discover the fullness of God who exceeds the intent of our petitions and even the scope of our imagi- nation (Eph. 3:19-20, 1 Cor. 2:9). Most of all, the pathos and beauty of God, the presencing of grace and glory, bespeaks subsistence in God that exceeds our apprehension and that evokes our praise. By subsistence I mean something that is neither transitory nor ephemeral. Although in the beatific vision we never comprehend God, yet we really commune with

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Aesthetics and Pathos in the Vision of God

God, a communion that begins in via, on the way. Here and now, in the Pentecostal assembly and the sacramental community, there resides the presencing of human and divine persons, the highest form of be-ing. There we catch a glimpse of authentic subjectivity as intersubjectivity, persons in communion. Such communion in the heart of God can only be invoked by naming that form that will never pass away—Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, there is just something about that Name!

Measuring Digital Discipleship

On Measuring Digital Discipleship

One attempt toward a more accurate and useful measurement of spiritual growth is presented by Brad J. Waggoner in his book The Shape of Faith to Come: Spiritual Formation and the Future of Discipleship. Waggoner focuses on seven domains and the answers to questions relative to a defined biblical truth. These domains are: learning the truth; obeying God and denying self; serving God and others; sharing Christ; exercising faith; seeking God; and, building relationships.

https://www.johnbmacdonald.com/blog/measuring-spiritual-growth
https://www.breezechms.com/blog/3-ways-we-measure-spiritual-growth

Through extensive testing, LifeWay Research has discovered that certain markers are at work in the lives of believers who are progressing in spiritual maturity. These 8 signposts reveal each person’s spiritual progress:

1. Engaging the Bible
2. Obeying God and Denying Self
3. Serving Others
4. Sharing Christ
5. Various Exercising Faith
6. Seeking God
7. Building Relationships
8. Living Unashamed

Spiritual Growth Measurement Resources

A few years ago, LifeWay Research embarked on an in-depth study to examine the state of discipleship in the church today—the Transformational Discipleship Assessment (TDA). That study included interviews with 28 discipleship experts, a survey of 1,000 Protestant pastors, and a survey of 4,000 lay people in North America (30 percent of the respondents were from Canada).
This research revealed eight attributes that consistently show up in the lives of maturing disciples: Bible engagement, obeying God and denying self, serving God and others, sharing Christ, exercising faith, seeking God, building relationships, and being unashamed (transparency). The study also found that certain kinds of behavior led to people growing in those attributes. Among them: confessing our sins and reading the Bible.

The RISE of a CHURCH

God’s way out is not yucky nor mucky. When crossing the Red Sea, the Israelites’ rain boots didn’t get stuck in the muck.  They walked on DRY land.  Believe for the DRY path.

Theological Reflections on Dubai as a Modern-Day Babylon: An Analysis of Prophetic Parallels

Theological Reflections on Dubai as a Modern-Day Babylon: An Analysis of Prophetic Parallels

I present this discussion to address an intriguing observation that has surfaced after over two decades of preaching on eschatological signs around the world. While I have delivered messages on the potential parallels between biblical prophecy and contemporary developments, including the rise of Dubai as a possible modern-day iteration of Babylon, I find that there is an absence of an English-language recording encapsulating these ideas. Although materials exist in Bulgarian and other languages, their accessibility requires translation—a process akin to the biblical “gift of interpretation of tongues” (1 Corinthians 12:10). Today, I endeavor to provide a concise analysis of how biblical prophetic frameworks align with the socio-economic and cultural developments in Dubai, with a particular focus on its potential typological significance as a restored Babylonian empire.

The 10-Nation Confederation and Its Eschatological Implications

To begin, we observe the existence of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), a 10-nation consortium that includes Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The composition of this organization is noteworthy for its shared Islamic identity, which imbues its geopolitical actions with apocalyptic undertones, as noted by Esposito (1999) in The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?. Within Islamic eschatology, the concept of the Mahdi, a messianic figure, plays a central role, and population growth is often viewed as a religious imperative to strengthen the Muslim world’s global influence (Nasr, 2007). This shared worldview situates the Middle East, and particularly Dubai, as a focal point in contemporary discussions of global power shifts.

Economic and Cultural Hegemony of Dubai

Dubai, strategically located across the Persian Gulf from Iraq, resonates with the ancient descriptions of Babylon as a center of wealth, trade, and cultural exchange. Scholars such as Oster (2017) have highlighted that ancient Babylon was not merely a geographic entity but a symbol of hubristic human ambition and economic dominance, themes that echo in the modern emirate’s meteoric rise. Dubai hosts over 25 million tourists annually and boasts one of the largest airports in the world, positioning itself as the “tourism capital of the world” (UNWTO, 2023). Additionally, Dubai’s multicultural fabric, where representatives from virtually every nation, language, and religion coexist, aligns with the biblical depiction of Babylon as a cosmopolitan hub (Revelation 17:15).

Economically, Dubai’s influence extends far beyond its borders. It controls over 30% of the NASDAQ technical index, reflecting its significant role in global financial markets (Jones, 2022). The construction of man-made islands, such as Palm Jumeirah and “The World,” symbolizes both its technological prowess and its aspiration to reshape the natural world—a characteristic often attributed to ancient Babylon’s monumental architecture (Finkel, 2013).

Biblical and Historical Comparisons

Theologically, parallels between Dubai and ancient Babylon can be drawn from the narrative of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. The construction of the Tower was motivated by human vanity and a desire to “make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4, NIV), a sentiment that mirrors Dubai’s rapid urbanization and global branding efforts. Furthermore, the Etemenanki ziggurat in Babylon, dedicated to the god Marduk, served as a “temple of the foundation of heaven and earth” (George, 1992). Similarly, Dubai’s architectural marvels, such as the Burj Khalifa—the tallest building in the world—serve as modern testaments to human ambition and ingenuity, echoing ancient aspirations to connect the terrestrial with the divine.

From a historical perspective, the Tower of Babel was constructed after the biblical flood (Genesis 6-9), ostensibly as a safeguard against future cataclysms. This raises the question: Is Dubai, with its advanced infrastructure and resilience to climate change, similarly positioned as a haven against potential global crises? While speculative, this analogy invites further exploration through interdisciplinary studies of theology, urban planning, and environmental sustainability.

Eschatological Considerations and Future Directions

Critics argue that comparisons between Dubai and Babylon lack theological significance. However, an examination of the facts reveals compelling parallels. Scholars such as Beale (1999) have emphasized the symbolic role of Babylon in biblical prophecy, representing human rebellion against divine authority and the concentration of power, wealth, and corruption. Dubai’s emergence as a dominant force in the global economy and culture invites reflection on whether it fulfills a similar archetype in contemporary times.

Finally, the rise of new economic alliances, such as BRICS and the shift toward alternative currencies for oil trade, further underscores the Middle East’s centrality in shaping global geopolitics (Shah, 2023). As the region continues to evolve, the potential for a unified Arab political and economic bloc reminiscent of ancient Babylon remains a topic of significant scholarly interest.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while Dubai is not a direct geographical or historical successor to Babylon, its symbolic resonance with the ancient city is undeniable. The intersection of biblical prophecy, economic power, and cultural diversity renders Dubai a compelling case study for understanding the eschatological dynamics of the modern world. As history unfolds, it remains to be seen whether Dubai will further solidify its role as a modern Babylon, embodying the themes of ambition, globalization, and apocalyptic anticipation that have captured the human imagination for millennia.

Toward a Pentecostal Philosophy of Education

Toward a Pentecostal Philosophy of Education Jeffrey S. Hittenberger Introduction Michael Parra serves as Outreach Coordinator at Valley High School in Santa Ana, California, an urban community south of Los Angeles. Every day Michael works with students in crisis, on the verge of dropping out, involved in gangs, pregnant, suicidal. He states: ‘ Whereas some people might say, “This kid is lost,” I have an of what God can do. Some expectation call people might say I’m optimistic because I’m But what young. or see as a attitude, I would call people optimism, positive expectation, vibrant expectation of what God can do. Outside looking in, some might see it as youthful impetuousness, but I see it as a recognition of God’s power, and my wanting to be involved in God’s Kingdom work. Michael Parra is one of perhaps millions of Pentecostal educators, tens of thousands of whom are working in formal education systems. To be a Pentecostal or Charismatic Christian (henceforth, for the sake of simplicity, Pentecostal) is to be one of more than 400 million people in the world who have submitted their lives to Jesus Christ and opened their souls to receive the baptism or infilling of the Holy Spirit. Terminology varies, but Pentecostals share a belief that the gifts of the Spirit did not end with the Apostles, that the signs, wonders, and miracles in the Acts of the Apostles are not confined to the first century, but that that outpouring of the Spirit continues into the presents. I How do Pentecostal Christians think about and do education? How do Pentecostal experience and theology shape Pentecostal educational philoso- phy and pedagogy? I am especially interested in how Pentecostal experi- ence and theology influence our teaching and thinking when we teach in formal education systems and in higher education systems. Do our experi- ences of Spirit baptism or Spirit in filling and our beliefs about the ongoing outpouring of the Spirit give our educational ideas and practices a distinc- ‘ I David B. Barrett, and Todd M. Johnson, “Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission: 1999,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 23:1 (January 1999), Johnson estimate pp. 24-25. Barrett and Pentecostal/Charismatic population at just over 449 million in mid-1999. define this They category as “Church members involved in the Pentecostal/Charismatic Renewal.” ” 217 1 tive quality? Is there some special gift that Pentecostal educators have to share with the larger church and with the wider world? Four sections follow, corresponding to the major questions to be addressed: What do Pentecostals say about how their experience and theology impacts their educational thought and practice? . What framework might allow us to formulate and compare philosophies of education? How do Pentecostal educators adopt and adapt various educational philoso- phies ? What framework might enable Pentecostals to further explore and articulate the impact of Pentecostal experience and theology upon their educational philosophy and practice? – The bulk of this study is descriptive and analytic in character, covering the first three questions above in some detail, while suggesting a preliminary framework in response to question four. This study is exploratory in nature and seeks to contribute to Pentecostal thinking and practice regarding edu- cation. The structure of this article is inductive, moving from the specifics of Pentecostals reflecting on their own experience as educators toward the generalities of educational philosophy. I do not presume to articulate a Pentecostal philosophy of education in any definitive fashion. I do suggest, however, that Pentecostal experience and theology have relevance for the educational philosophies and practices of Pentecostal educators, a relevance that opens fascinating possibilities for further research and development. For the purposes of this study, “Pentecostal” is defined broadly to include those Christians who consider themselves Pentecostal or Charismatic, embracing the works of the Holy Spirit in the first-century church as described in Acts and elsewhere in the New Testament as relevant and normative for contemporary Christians. Pentecostal experience, by extension, is defined as personal participation in Christian communities that embrace and seek the continuous outpouring of the Holy Spirit and practice the multiple gifts of the Spirit described in the New Testament. A subsequent study might fruitfully examine distinctions among various Pentecostal and Charismatic groups (with their varied ideas of the nature of the continuous 218 2 outpouring) with regard to educational philosophy. Education is also defined broadly to include both the formal (school- based, credit- or degree-oriented) and nonformal (church- or home-based, mentoring-oriented). A Pentecostal educator, therefore, might be a teacher, a pastor, a mentor, a parent, or a friend who intentionally contributes to the learning of another. This broad definition of education also recognizes that much learning occurs indirectly, or informally, and this is of particular sig- nificance to Pentecostals. The primary focus of the study, however, is on education in formal and post-secondary settings. Peterson has defined a philosophy of education as “a unified set of philosophical assumptions together with their implications for the educa- tional enterprise.”2 Knight notes that the task of educational philosophy is to bring educators into z . Face-to-face contact with the large questions underlying the meaning and purpose of life and education. To understand these questions, the student must wrestle with such issues as the nature of reality, the meaning and sources of knowledge, and the structure of values. Educational must philoso- phy bring students into a position from which they can evaluate alternative intelligent- ly ends, relate their aims to desired ends, and select methods that harmonize with their aims. Thus a major task of educational philosophy is to help educators think pedagogical about the total educational and life process, so that they will be in a meaningfully better tion to posi- develop a consistent and comprehensive 3 program that will assist their students in arriving at the desired goal.3 . This study’s methodology includes interviews of Pentecostal educators, a cross disciplinary review of literature related to this topic, as well as philo- sophical and theological reflection. This article is also informed by a life- time of interaction with Pentecostal educators and by my career as a Pentecostal educator serving in a variety of educational contexts. . What Do Pentecostals Say about How Their Experience and Theology Impact Their Educational Thought and Practice? Pentecostal educators face a dilemma. The Pentecostal movement is, among other things, a Spirit-inspired protest against structures and forms that obscure the truths of God’s Kingdom. Pentecostals have historically ‘ . 2 Michael L. Peterson, Philosophy of Education (Downer’s Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1986), 24. 3 George R. Knight, Issues and Alternatives in Educational Philosophy, 3d ed. (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1998), 3. 219 3 shared Jesus’ distaste for religious systems that have become instruments of oppression. “Woe to you experts in the law,” Jesus said, “because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.”4 They have also shared the per- spective of the Apostle Paul, who wrote, “See to it that no one takes you cap- tive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tra- dition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.”5 Pentecostalism is a renewed experience of God’s direct intervention in one’s life, God’s self-revelation in the world. For a Pentecostal, a second- or third- hand experience of God does not satisfy. True ideas about God are no sub- stitute for God’s tangible presence. This Pentecostal emphasis on immediacy makes more abstract thought, or academic discussion about spiritual experiences, suspect. It is one thing to have a theology of Holy Spirit baptism. It is quite another to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. These attitudes toward education, particularly of the rationalistic vari- ety, are clearly not unique to twentieth-century Pentecostalism. Tertullian, in the second century, differed with Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria as to the value of classical education, posing the famous ques- tions : “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?”6 For Pentecostals, to quote Cheryl Bridges Johns, the question might be rephrased, “What has Athens to do with Azusa Street?” Almost six hundred years ago, Thomas a Kempis wrote in his classic The Imitation of Christ: . Cease from an inordinate desire of knowing, for therein is much distrac- tion and deceit. The learned are well-pleased to seem so to others, and to be accounted wise… If thou dost more thine own reason or than upon that power which rely upon brings thee under the obedience of Jesus Christ, it will be long before thou become enlightened; for God industry will have us perfectly subject unto him, that being inflamed with his love, we may transcend the narrow limits of human reason.7 Apprehensions regarding formal education and the pursuit of knowl- 4 Luke 11:52 (New International Version). 5 Colossians 2:8 (New International Version). All subsequent biblical references are from the New Revised Standard Version. 6 Tertullian, “Prescription Against Heretics.” in D. Bruce Lockerbie, ed., A Passion for Leaning: The History of Christian Thought on Education (Chicago: Moody Press, 1994), 71. 7 Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (Chicago: Moody Press. 1984), 26; 48. 220 4 edge have been counterbalanced for Pentecostals by Jesus’ inclusion of the mind in the greatest commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”8 Moreover, Jesus and his biblical followers, including the writers of Scripture, embodied the Apostle Paul’s injunction, “Be trans- formed by the renewing of your minds.”9 Of special interest to Pentecostals is the scholarly approach of the writer of Luke-Acts, who frames his Gospel with these words: “I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.”10 Spirit and mind are clearly complementary for Luke. Likewise, church leaders and reformers through the centuries have drawn upon their formal education in the conviction, encouraged by leaders like Augustine, that “all truth is God’s truth.” Several of the early leaders of the twentieth century Pentecostal movement benefited from their own expe- rience in higher education, like E. N. Bell, first Superintendent of the U.S. Assemblies of God, who had a Bachelor’s degree, a seminary degree, and three years of graduate study at the University of Chicago. So despite ambivalence about formal education, Pentecostals recog- nized the need to prepare believers to be effective students of Scripture and articulate ambassadors of Christ. Pentecostals quickly began to establish Bible schools, then Bible institutes, then Bible colleges, then Christian lib- eral arts colleges, and, most recently, theological seminaries and compre- hensive universities. I I Pentecostals pursued and obtained advanced degrees and Pentecostal churches began to produce scholars. Each of the Pentecostal educators I interviewed for this paper has at least a Bachelor’s degree and almost 80 per cent have earned doctorates. They represent the large number of Pentecostals who combine a Pentecostal experience with advanced formal education ‘ 8 Mark 12:30. 9 Romans 12:2. 10 Luke 1:3-4. ‘ 11 For a summary of the development of higher education in the United States Assemblies of God, the largest denomination in Pentecostalism, see William W. Menzies. Anointed to Sen?e: The Story of the Assemblies of God (Springfield, MO: 12 Gospel Publishing House, 1971 ). For this paper, I interviewed 35 Pentecostal educators either in person or via telephone or email. The profile of my interview group is as follows: Pastors – 2 , Missionary Educators – 3 , 221 5 The responses of these educators have greatest relevance for Pentecostals in higher education, since over 70 per cent of my respondents fit that profile. In principle, however, many of the same findings apply to Pentecostals in other educational settings, as my respondents in these other settings tended to confirm. Future studies of this topic would do well to focus on and compare other populations of Pentecostal educators (e.g., those in two-thirds-world set- tings ; without formal higher education; in various academic disciplines; from different generations; from various Pentecostal and Charismatic move- ments). My interviews included five basic questions, which I will list below with summaries of the responses I received. These questions were meant to elicit personal reflection from Pentecostal educators about the impact of their Pentecostal experience and theology on their educational thought and practice. Thus the questions were open-ended, and in my analysis of their responses I try to let them speak for themselves. For each question I offer a major finding, sample responses, and some elaboration. Question 1: In what ways has your own education been a “Pentecostal education”? Finding: Pentecostal educators note a tremendous Spirit- inspired dynamic in their educational experience and practice. . This group of Pentecostal educators is impressive both academically Public school teachers – 3 ‘ Private Sector Human Resources Trainer – I Educational Consultant (focusing on Sunday Schools) – 1 . Professors at Pentecostal institutions of higher education (IHEs) in the U.S. – 13 3 Professors at Pentecostal IHEs outside the U.S. – 1 Professors at non-Pentecostal IHEs – 2 Administrators at Pentecostal IHEs in the U.S. – 3 Administrators at Pentecostal IHEs non-U.S. – 3 Administrators at non-Pentecostal IHEs – I K-12 Christian school leaders – 2 I did not attempt to select a statistically representative sample of Pentecostal educators. Instead, I sought to interview Pentecostal educators who had a formal educational experience that would have exposed them to diverse philosophies of education, them to reflect on the rele- vance of their Pentecostal experience and theology for their educational causing philosophy. Of my seven are women, five live outside the United States, and three are citizens of nations other than the United States. They are of diverse ethnicities, with seven sample, either have being non-Anglo. completed or are completing doctoral degrees. Approximately 70 per cent attend Assemblies of God churches, with others scattered among other Pentecostal and Twenty-six Charismatic churches. 222 6 and from the point of view of Christian service. Many in this group have obtained graduate degrees from prestigious universities in the United States and abroad. They are also impressive in terms of their commitment to the spiritual growth of their students and their desire to be instruments of the Holy Spirit in their teaching. Almost three-quarters (73 per cent) of these Pentecostal educators had experience as undergraduate or graduate students in Pentecostal institutions of higher education (IHEs). Though most had attended Pentecostal IHEs for at least part of their undergraduate experience, most cited nonformal dimen- sions of their Pentecostal education (through mentors or family members) as more influential in their lives than the formal curriculum. Examples of their comments: ‘ I learned about the church and ministry from my grandfather and from my father. They taught me, informally, the Christian ethics of Pentecostalism. I also learned how to interpret the world and my reality Pentecostally. My Pentecostal education was enriched by the corporate model of the Ivoirian [Cote d’ Ivoire] church, which experienced a sovereign, nation- wide move of God. I was intluenced by the model of African some pastors, well-educated, others not schooled. Often when the formal education experience at a Pentecostal IHE was mentioned, the nonformal educational/spiritual experiences were highlight- ed : . I attended an Assemblies of God school at the undergraduate level and in that sense I suppose you could say I had a Pentecostal education. It . was not so much what was taught, but the ethos that surrounded the com- .. Belief that learning had to be enhanced by encounter with God. Belief that God munity. enriched the classroom that fullest dimension to what we were always by experiences gave leaming. The belief that chapel was a central experience, not because it was ‘more spiritual’ but because , there we actualized the relationship we had with God to include more than left brain activity. In that context there was the real expectation that God would regularly intrude into the humanly devised schedule that sur- rounds formal educational activity. Several noted a deepening of their “Pentecostal education” through influences not generally associated with classical Pentecostalism: Exposure to Catholic and Anglican Charismatics has broadened and resensitized me to the Holy Spirit’s work both personally and corporate- ly. ‘ 223 7 The great irony of my Pentecostal education is that I first to learn about seriously began my tradition’s history and theology when I attended a non- Pentecostal institution: Fuller Seminary! Responses to this question suggest that Pentecostal education has had a very strong mentoring orientation, with families, pastors, and faculty mem- bers personally engaging with their children/parishioners/students and pro- viding personal guidance in their spiritual growth. Conversely, responses to this question suggest that Pentecostal educa- tors have not been thoroughly engaged within their Pentecostal IHEs in reflection on the implications of their Pentecostal experience and theology for their formal education, per se. That is, none mentioned that the formal curriculum in their Pentecostal IHEs had engaged them in asking the ques- tion : “How does my Pentecostal experience and theology impact the way I understand my discipline, my academic field, my professional studies?” Whether at the graduate or undergraduate level or at the K-12 level, all those I interviewed, like most Pentecostal educators, have wrestled with their ideas about formal education in institutions (whether secular or affili- ated with other Christian traditions) whose philosophies of education were not informed by Pentecostal experience or theology (and which were, in some cases, hostile to Pentecostal experience and theology). Question 2: Describe a Pentecostal educator who had a particularly sig- nificant influence on your life. If more than one, would you pick one and tell about their influence on you? , Finding: Pentecostals have experienced Pentecostal education through the mentoring of their professors (as well as pastors, friends and family members) who modeled an integration of mind, spirit, and life. Responses to this question tended to focus on the life qualities of influ- ential Pentecostal educators (their relationship with God, integration of spir- it and mind, personal integrity). Examples of comments on the nature of their influence follow. I could cite a number of very useful influences in my life, but I will sin- out one: W. I. Evans. Evans was the academic dean at Central Bible Institute (now Central Bible College) when I was a student. His knowl- gle edge of the Scriptures, his obvious deep fellowship with the Lord, and his leadership in the chapel services had a great effect on me. He embodied the best features of the Pentecostal revival, in my judg- particularly ‘ 224 8 ment. Professor Daniel E. Albrecht, Professor at Bethany College, was one of the first models I had that one could be/remain Pentecostal and still sue the life of the mind. pur- , Dick Foth, Assemblies of God minister and former President of Bethany Bible College, represented a combination of passionate faith, joyful serv- ice, and an affirmation of the intellect integrated with the previous two disciplines. Dr. James M. Beaty and his wife gave me a great example of what to be a Christian is all about. In their life and practice they lived the values of the Kingdom. Their spiritual disciplines and their faith with vision and their sense of mission impacted my life. I had Murray Dempster for only one course. It was my senior year, a very important moment in my life… It was a turning point in my life. He was just fantastic, so passionate, so animated. He was inspiring a vision, inspiring a passion. ‘ Pentecostal educators interviewed for this study emphasized the char- acter, the passion, the embodiment of truth in the professors who shaped their lives at Pentecostal IHEs. Their mentors integrated mind and spirit and led lives of personal integrity and ministry. Those who mentioned other Pentecostal mentors emphasized these same traits. Question 3: As a Pentecostal educator, how does your Pentecostal expe- rience and/or theology shape the way your teach? Finding: Pentecostal experience and theology strongly influ- ence the ideas of Pentecostal educators about pedagogy, orient- ing instruction toward inspiration, transformation, and empowerment. ‘ In reflecting on their own teaching, Pentecostal educators described what they try to do in their pedagogy. Some of the contrasts they drew were as follows: Transformation rather than just information Practice rather than just cerebral knowledge Experience rather than just theory Inspiration rather than just information. In describing their ideals for teaching, the following words were fre- 225 9 quently used: Vibrant Gift Mentoring Empowerment Power Mission Sensitivity Dynamic Expectation Growth ‘ . . I have sought to pattern my teaching on I Thessalonians 1:4-10. In this passage, Paul reviews the object of his ministry among the Thessalonians, but also the manner in which he ministered to them. I see in this the following: ( 1 ) “with words”-he was articulate in his com- munication ; (2) “with power”-not simply with ‘words,’ but also with the empowering of the Spirit; (3) “with the Holy would under- stand this to mean exercising sensitivity to the Spirit”-I leading of the Spirit; (4) “with deep conviction”-In this I see that the faculty person has an obli- share with the students gation to [personal] convictions, although he must be careful not to insist that the students must how we lived agree with him; (5) “You know among you”-I see this as transparent model- ing of a lifestyle, outside the classroom as well as inside. ‘ The idea that when you’re equipped with God’s power, nothing is in the classroom. I have seen so many pessimistic teachers who can make a list of everything they can’t do. I had the genuine belief, impossible based on my Pentecostal that God could move mountains, that this vessel could be used experience, by God. Marie Brown and my mother [my mentors] also emphasized that the vessel needed to be equipped. God will use your talents. God works in history. Wonderful things can in that classroom. You have to hap- pen equip yourself. I teach from my own experience. I believe that is part of integrity. One should not teach something that isn’t part of her/his experience, in that that is particu- larly related to spiritual principles and values. Some of the educators I interviewed expressed concern that often these principles are not in practice in Pentecostal IHEs due at least in part to reliance upon pedagogical and philosophical models that are more Evangelical (or fundamentalist) than Pentecostal. Most of my ‘Pentecostal’ education could be characterized as classical Most of the teachers and pastors who had the influence on me were Pentecostal but had Evangelicalism. greatest largely embraced a philosophy . 226 10 and lifestyle that would represent more Evangelicalism than Pentecostalism. My ministry today has been shaped more ‘Charismatic’ theology and ecclesiology. This segment of by has Christianity impacted me and allowed me to re-embrace the theology and tice of prac- early Pentecostalism, which is fundamentally different from the suburban, Bible College Pentecostalism of the 1980s and 1990s. ‘ . ‘ Pentecostals have mostly adopted the methods and modes of the larger Evangelical church. And that adaptation does not only concern reli- gious, biblical, or theological education. This conformity to has its Evangelicalism strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side it has more recent Pentecostal taught generations to think, and to think criti- It has also cally. taught the Pentecostals some degree of humility about their own tradition (they are learning to appreciate those who are unlike them). It has caused them to be less myopic about Christianity and them- selves… On the negative side, Pentecostals have forsaken some of their own dynamics. In their desire to appear rational, they forsook their to the openness mystery of Christianity. In their desire to develop their minds, that is they adapted an overly rational, overly linear mode of thinking gutting them of the dynamics that birthed their movement. In their uncritical embracing of Fundamentalist American abandoned what to me was a natural Christianity, they byproduct of their ethos: an aes- thetic awareness, appreciation, and creativity. – Question Four: As a Pentecostal educator, how would you characterize your philosophy of education? In what ways might a Pentecostal phi- losophy of education be distinct or have emphases different from other Christian philosophies of education? Finding: With regard to educational philosophy, Pentecostal educators note Pentecostal influences and distinctives at a number of levels, but indicate that a need exists to further explore this topic. Without exception, the Pentecostal educators I interviewed thought that a Pentecostal philosophy of education could be distinguished, at least in its emphases, from other Christian philosophies of education and certainly from secular philosophies of education. What is less clear is the meaning of a phi- losophy of education. Pentecostal educators located the distinctives of Pentecostal educational philosophy at various levels. Some suggested Pentecostal distinctives at the metaphysical (ultimate reality) level. Pentecostals should have a worldview that informs their philosophy of education. This worldview includes an openness and embracing of the . 227 11 mystery of God and life. God can and does surprise us. God is both frighteningly transcendent and joyously immanent. We need to embrace a pre-Enlightenment scientific vista that sees God as present in the world. Some suggested Pentecostal distinctives at the axiological (value) level. The values of the Pentecostal experience are distinct and deeply rooted in our community: values of a devotion to God’s inerrant Word, to truth, to urgency, to the breadth of God’s people, to Christian to Christian to the of calling, to holi- ness, community, power the Holy Spirit. As we think back about these values, these ideals of Pentecostalism, we are bet- ter able to look forward. . Others see Pentecostal distinctives at the epistemological (knowledge) level. I take one of the hallmarks of Pentecostal theology to be its which calls into epistemolo- gy question any form of rationalism … think a distinct- Pentecostal ly philosophy of education would be grounded in the non- rationalist, experiential epistemology, coupled with an emphasis on lib- erating practice. . Some suggested distinctives with regard to our view of the student. It seems to me that Pentecostal education has to be holistic, all three of Bloom’s traditional taxonomies in the cultivation of mind and embracing spirit for the larger service of the Kingdom of God. Others emphasized the difference in the role of the teacher. A Pentecostal philosophy has to recognize the essential charismatic nature of the teaching gift, and cultivate that gift, realizing that the leads Spirit one, and energizes one, in the communication of truth and bonds the learner into a process of common discovery. . The role of the teacher is different from the role of expert pouring knowl- edge into the uninformed. I want to learn about learning more than about teaching. It’s a dynamic process, not a disengaged, content-driven There is a phi- losophy. dynamic between the content, the learner, and the educator. That’s where the role of the Spirit comes in. Others emphasized distinctives at the level of the curriculum. Truly Christian discipleship (training for mission) must involve the of acquisition spiritual skills: prayer, spiritual power, radical obedience to the Spirit, etc.-all usually regarded as ‘extra-curricular’ or assumed 228 12 . for the student rather than carefully taught as the core of the curriculum. The very method of teaching in Bible colleges and seminaries reflects a detached observation of the Christian phenomena ‘out there’ (a Western/Greek way of knowing) vs. the knowing-by-experience of nor- mative, New Testament Christianity. Several emphasized distinctives in pedagogy, discussed above. Others emphasized the nature and role of the school/educational community. . Pentecostal education has to be holistic. It is tied to an inclusiveness that comes out of Acts. It is global and cross cultural, uniting bond and free, male and female. It has to remember the margins as well as the center. The field in a class is never level. How do I help those for whom this does not come playing easily’? My philosophy of education focuses on stu- dent learning for empowerment. · – . Many spoke of the difference all this makes in practice. My philosophy of education as a Pentecostal educator is impacted by a sense of “present tenseness.” I am not so much wanting to characterize a humanly devised system of to discern cognition. I am dealing with a process of learning implications of information. I am much more aware of a full orbed dimension of education that includes both cognitive and affective and also a dimension of subsequent action. . . Several mentioned the need for Pentecostals at this stage of our history to give focused attention to the topic of educational philosophy. _ We have to learn from the rest of the church. They are centuries ahead of us in terms of developing Christian character; thinking about church- state issues; thinking about societal and ethical issues; thinking about the human person… Too quickly, we are embracing non-Christian ‘ approaches to these disciplines and questions and this will lead to our , demise. . Very little of the earlier approaches to Pentecostal pedagogy or of education remains. It philoso- phy probably is time once again (as the educational founders of our institutions had to original do) to raise the ‘What is an question, appropriate Pentecostal educational pedagogy for our insti- tutions today?’ It is useful to review the thoughts and educational philosophies and practices of our founding educators themselves. Question Five: What resources have been helpful to you in your devel- opment as a Pentecostal educator? . Finding: Most Pentecostal educators agreed that we are still in 229 13 the early stages of the work of bringing Pentecostal experience and theology to bear on explicitly educational issues of philoso- phy and pedagogy. Most of my respondents indicated that written resources on education- al philosophy and pedagogy authored by Pentecostals for Pentecostal edu- cators are lacking, especially for higher education. So what resources have been helpful to them in their development as Pentecostal educators? Eight mentioned colleagues and mentors as their primary resources. Eight men- tioned Pentecostal writers, leaders, and theologians, with each of the fol- lowing named at least once: Gordon Fee, Steven Land, Cheryl Bridges Johns, Myer Pearlman, Billie Ralph Riggs, Davis, Miroslav Volf, Opal Reddin, Robert Menzies, Walter Hollenweger, Roger Stronstad, Mel Robeck, Russell Spittler, Vinson Synan, Lyle Lovett, Murray Dempster, J. Robert Ashcroft, and Robert Cooley. Seven mentioned writers and thinkers not generally associated with pente- costalism, such as: Watchman Nee, Brother Lawrence, Thomas a Kempis, Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, C.S. Lewis, John Wesley, John Piper, Gustavo Gonzalez, Andrew Murray, Madame Guyon, Arthur Holmes, Harry Blamires, Thomas Groome, Parker Palmer, Jean Piaget, George Marsden, and James Burtchaell. Two mentioned “Third Wave” Pentecostal/Charismatic writers, such as: C. Peter Wagner, Cindy Jacobs, John Arnott, Charles Kraft, and Guy Chevreau. . Two mentioned Pentecostal periodicals, such as Enrichment. Several men- tioned the Holy Spirit and Scripture. One mentioned worship music. Few of the Pentecostals mentioned have written specifically on educa- tion. Commenting on one of the challenges faced by Pentecostal educators within Pentecostal IHEs, one of the respondents wrote: “We have had limit- ed opportunity to study our own experience as Pentecostals because [of what might happen] if you don’t come up with the accepted perspective (approved by the denomination).” I conclude this section with a quote that summarizes much of the above: 230 14 ‘ . The creation of Christian higher education institutions outside of min- istry training will no doubt encourage the growth of a professional teach- Pentecostal in the new setting remains to be seen, as the ing class within pentecost. Whether that teaching class can remain roots of Augustinian tradition (Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist) are much more deep context of professional pentecostal educators…Beyond creating institu- powerful and widespread, providing both the training and the continuing tional space for the of Pentecostal training and continuing education and employment teachers, there needs to develop a flourishing interdisci- plinary concentration on the nature and function of Pentecostal a peda- gogy, fellowship between teachers and pastors, and appropriate resources such as journals, internet sites, conventions, etc. As well as an institutional approach to linked to pedagogy, it is essential that Pentecostal teach- ers remain strong local congregations where their gifting is both and relativized by its setting amongst other gifts. There is no room in Pentecostal pedagogy for elitism or showmanship…To some appreciated degree, we are having to invent pentecostal higher education as we go! . The same may likely be said of other forms of Pentecostal education as well. What Framework Might Allow Us to Formulate and Compare Philosophies of Education? A Proposed Framework Pentecostal educators rarely describe their ideas about education in terms of classical philosophies or contemporary educational theories. Their descriptions of the impact of their Pentecostal experience and theology on their educational ideas and practices more often refer to intuitive connec- tions than to systematically defined relationships. While this intuitive sense is both powerful and consistent with Pentecostal experience, it translates with difficulty into formal educational settings, where strategies for curriculum and instruction must be formulated in a systematic way. Consequently, Pentecostal educators often find them- selves lacking a specifically Pentecostal framework for educational philoso- phy, with the result that Pentecostals then borrow heavily from other educa- tional philosophies that do not fully capture the dynamic of the implicit edu- cational ideas undergirding Pentecostalism. Daniels has described this dilemma within the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), a historically African-American Pentecostal denomination. A system of Bible colleges was launched within COGIC in 1972 with the pur- pose of preparing ministers and missionaries. However, while successful numerically, the Bible colleges found themselves, in Daniels’ view, overly reliant upon curriculum and pedagogy insensitive to educational ideas and 231 15 practices implicit within the COGIC Pentecostal community. 13 3 Likewise, Pentecostal educators across formal education systems have been reliant upon books, curricular materials, and instructional methods rooted in other Christian and secular philosophies of education. 14 It would be of value, then, to have a framework within which to com- pare various philosophies of education, which would then allow Pentecostals to intentionally integrate their experience and theology with their educational ideas and practices. Thus we could draw on the wealth of ideas available to us within our own history and communion, as well as on other Christian traditions and other educational and philosophical schools of thought. I suggest that our search for such a framework might fruitfully begin with the questions that educators ask. What are some core questions per- taining to the educational process? I would suggest that the following ten questions are universal educational concerns. While this is not intended to be an exhaustive list of core questions, it does provide a common framework for our discussion of educational philosophies. 1. What is real? 2. What is true and how do we know? 3. What is of value? 13 David D. Daniels, Ill, “‘Live So Can Use Me Anytime, Lord, Anywhere’: Theological Education in the Church of God in Christ, 1970 to 1997,” Asian Journal of Pentecostal Theology 3:2 (July 2000), 303. Daniels writes: “The mission of the of the System of Bible Colleges is admirable, although the uncritical appropriation Evangelical curriculum is problematic.. . What is the best pedagogy to transmit the COGIC message and experience? Does an implic- it COGIC pedagogy exist that could be employed? The System of Bible Colleges promoted a pedagogy that was alien to the COGIC context. The pedagogy of the System of Bible Colleges mitigates against COGIC’s informal education processes of Bible discussion and mentoring.” 14 See, e.g., Cheryl Bridges Johns, Pentecostal Formation: A Pedagogy Among the Oppressed (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 7. Johns writes: “The area of Christian edu- cation reflects some of the best and most sincere attempts to fit in with more established churches. For many Pentecostals, the schooling paradigm, with its closely graded classes, cog- nitive and deductive approach to faith formation, four-color curriculum materials and stream- lined organization, is the wished-for ideal. We point to our untrained teachers, poor facilities and lack of good pedagogy as sure signs of our sectarian backwardness, all the while over- formational processes which have historically been part of our discipleship.” An example of this from looking powerful my own experience concerned the core textbook in the Basic Christianity class at Evangel University, an Assemblies of God institution in Springfield, Missouri, when I attended there in the late 1970s and early 80s. An book on edu- cational philosophy is entitled The Idea of a Christian College, by Arthur outstanding Holmes, a professor of philosophy at Wheaton College. Writing from a Reformed perspective, Holmes provided my classmates and me with a coherent and powerful evangelical philosophy of education, but we to relate it to our Pentecostal experience and theology, and no comparable philosophy of education from a Pentecostal Christian perspective was available. struggled 232 16 4. What are my goals as an educator? 5. How does my contextual setting frame and constrain my educational goals? 6. What is the nature of the student? 7. What is the role of a teacher? 8. What should be learned? 9. How should it be taught? 10. How do my ideas shape my educational practice (and vice versa)? Put simply, then, an educational philosophy involves an educator’s responses to, ideas about, and assumptions regarding these ten essential and mutually informing questions (and others). Within each of these questions there are sub-questions. For example, within the question “What is real?” one will find questions concerning the nature of the universe, the nature of God, the nature of human beings. These are all “metaphysical” questions, and, when one asks about distinctives for a Pentecostal philosophy of education, one might reflect on whether Pentecostals would answer these questions differently, or with different emphases, than others. Insofar as one is an educator, I would suggest, one has ideas about each of these matters. These ideas may be richly or slightly considered. They may be honed by consistent practice or relatively untried. They may be con- sciously related to a philosophical school of thought, a wisdom tradition, or . an educational theory, or not related. One may be said to have a formal edu- cational philosophy if these ideas are made explicit. If these ideas remain implicit, one may be said to have an informal philosophy of education. But educational practice is rooted in these questions and, in this sense, every educator has an educational philosophy. Often, the degree of formality in a statement of educational philosophy is a function of the formality of the educational setting, with formal systems demanding more explicit articula- tion of an educational philosophy and nonformal setting demanding less explicit articulation. 15 As for institutions, an institutional philosophy of edu- 15 Though we may not be explicitly aware of the labels and terminology of educational we are in phi many ways the products of one or some combination of these educational ideas and their working out in practice. For example, few have read the writings of John losophy, Dewey, the foremost American philosopher of education and author of books like and Democracy Education, but virtually all of us are products, at least in part, of reforms in American schools. Deweyian progressive Many Christian educators Alan Bloomri The Closing of the American Mind in the early 1980s, but just what enjoyed reading was the educational Bloom’s philosophy underlying thesis, and was it an educational philosophy that Pentecostal educators 233 17 cation may likewise be said to consist of the institution’s responses to these ten questions, with personal pronouns modified. Toward the end of this discussion, I will suggest a model that draws on depictions of a philosophy of education like the one below. Knight’s model, while lacking a reciprocal dynamic, does have the virtue of depicting the various components of a philosophy of education. Fig. 1. Components of a Philosophy of Education from Theory to Practicel6 The first three elements of Knight’s model are the classical questions of philosophy, organized around metaphysics (What is ultimately real?), axi- ology (What is of value?), and epistemology (How can we know?). Educational goals follow from our worldview, and these goals are shaped and reshaped by contextual factors, such as political dynamics, social forces, economic conditions, and the expectations of immediate family or commu- nity. Our goals then find expression in the framework of specifically edu- cational issues, such as the nature of the student, the role of the teacher, appropriate curricular emphases and teaching methodologies, and our ideas about the social functions of educational institutions. These ideas in turn underlie and shape our educational practices. Joldersma depicts that central place of Christian perspective for Christian educators below. could fully resonate with? Likewise, Paulo Freire’s 1986 book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed touched a responsive chord with many Christians in its appeal for justice, but how cognizant are Pentecostal educators of the underlying educational philosophy? Thanks to to Cheryl Bridges Johns and others, Pentecostals are beginning engage Freirian thought in just this kind of dia- logue, but overall we are in the early stages of this kind of reflection. 16 Knight, Issues and Alternatives, 34. – 234 18 Fig. 2: Influence Domains 17 of Christian Perspective on Various Educational – – Do Pentecostals have anything to add to Joldersma’s model? We will continue to explore this question below. The length limitations of this essay do not allow for a discussion of each of the historic and contemporary philosophies, ideologies, and educa- tional theories that have shaped our educational experiences. For summaries of the philosophies and their educational implications, I would recommend Knight and Gutek.lg In the next section, I provide a brief overview of the components of several contemporary educational philosophies and discuss ways in which they have been adopted and adapted by Pentecostal educa- tors. How Do Pentecostal Educators Adopt and Adapt Various Educational Philosophies? Pentecostals do not hold a single philosophy of education. Some Pentecostal educators would identify with a form of Pentecostal particular- ism. Others would tend to agree with essentialist approaches. Others are 17 Julia K. Stronks and Gloria Goris Stronks, Christian Teachers in Public Schools (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1999), 45. 1 See Knight, Issues and Alternatives, and Gerald L. Gutek, Philosophical and Ideological on Perspectives Education, 2d ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997). 235 19 inclined to speak of their educational ideas in terms that resonate with peren- nialism. Some would consider themselves progressive educators. Still oth- ers are enthusiastic about educational goals and practices that correspond to reconstructionism. There are also Pentecostal educators who would identi- fy with critical pedagogy. They would typically not use this terminology, but I hope to show that the diverse ideas of Pentecostals about education res- onate with these widely divergent educational theories. Drawing primarily upon the history of Assemblies of God education in the United States, I suggest eight approaches to educational philosophy that have emerged in roughly chronological order, but that now coexist among (and within) diverse Pentecostal educators. All eight may be seen as adap- tations of philosophies of education that exist in the larger culture, and we will explore how existing philosophies of education have been adopted and adapted by Pentecostal educators over time. The eight approaches to edu- cational philosophy to be explored in this section are: 1. particularism 2. essentialism 3. perennialism , 4. progressivism 5. reconstructionism 6. critical pedagogy . 7. pragmatism 8. eclecticism. The earliest educational approaches among American Pentecostals may be described as “particularistic.” Particularism in education is characterized by a withdrawal from dominant and mainstream education systems, often a forced withdrawal made by minority groups whose values are not accepted in the dominant culture. Pentecostal particularism is related to forms of fun- damentalist and minority ethnic (such as Afrocentric) educational philoso- phy, in which marginalized groups embrace their separateness and distance themselves from the educational systems of mainstream (and oppressive) society. This Pentecostal separatism was also expressed in a pacifist stance toward war, which was the official position of the U.S. Assemblies of God, for example, until 1967, and in a code of personal piety that avoided involvement in many social activities of mainstream culture (e.g., movies, social dancing, involvement in party politics). Some of the characteristics of Pentecostal particularism are: – emphasis on Bible study and ministry preparation – emphasis on eschatological expectation that Jesus’ Second Coming 236 20 – may occur at any time – flowing from this eschatological expectation, an emphasis on short- term, intense, and practical training for – ministry likewise, a suspicion of longer-term academic pursuits that seem the oretical and insensitive to the shortness of time – use of fundamentalist curricula and theological models, even when such models seem inconsistent with Pentecostal experience and the – ology (e.g., dispensational theology and the Scofield Reference Bible) pragmatic emphasis on practical skills for evangelistic and mission ary endeavors; academic subjects are valued insofar as they give pragmatic assistance for Pentecostal mission (e.g., literacy for preach – ing, writing, and Bible study; math for financial and logistical efforts) formal degrees from academic institutions are considered unimportant and even undesirable. Pentecostal- education in its particularist form is often accused of being anti-intellectual, and in some senses this is true. Many young Pentecostals have been discouraged from “thinking too much.” Pentecostals have some- times seen the mind as an enemy of the spirit and the Spirit. However, as Jesse Miranda, Director of the Urban Studies and Ethnic Leadership Center at Vanguard University, stated in an interview, “They were reacting against pseudo-education and the lack of balance between the rational and the rela- tional. They wanted to go beyond the rational.” The hostility of early Pentecostals, and some contemporary Pentecostals, was not toward intellect or formal education per se, but rather toward the intellectual status systems of formal education from which Pentecostals, largely from lower social strata, had been excluded. Pentecostal anti-intellectualism, then, while sometimes an unbalanced rejec- tion of the mind, more often rejected the rationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that sought to build great structures of truth upon human reason alone. In this sense, Pentecostal particularism antici- pated some of the postmodern critiques of both traditionalist and modernist education. Pentecostal particularism, then, was the educational approach most characteristic of Pentecostal education in the United States in the first few decades of the twentieth century, through the founding of the many Bible institutes and Bible schools. Beginning in the late 1930s, with the establishment of the first Assemblies of God four-year degree-granting institution, Southern California Bible College, and continuing into the 1940s, with the Pentecostal . 237 21 rapprochement with moderate Evangelicals in the various agencies related to the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), Pentecostal educators began to explore other approaches to formal education. The figure below shows key elements of five other educational theories mentioned above. Other educational philosophers would use slightly differ- ent terminology and even different categorical labels, but for the point I wish to make here about diversity of educational opinion within Pentecostalism, I draw upon the educational theory taxonomy suggested by Gutek. (See Figure 3) While most Pentecostals would not describe their educational ideas in terms of the labels above, one often hears the elements of these various the- ories in Pentecostal descriptions of educational ideas. The following descriptions are compilations of comments from Pentecostals, past and pres- ent, that seem to resonate with core elements of these five educational theo- ries. E.ssentialist orientation ‘ ‘ In order to accomplish that Great Commission, we need to be prac- tical and we need to be skilled. To that end, we need to teach our young people to read and write and to calculate, to be able to have the academic skills necessary to spread the gospel through litera- ture, and through Bible study, teaching, and preaching. People without literacy skills cannot really study the Bible and are prone to error and immaturity. Furthermore, math skills are essential if we are to use modem methods of construction, technology, and other tools that allow us to take the message to all the world. In addition to their Bible education, our people need these basic aca- demic tools and we must make sure that they acquire these. These skills are also necessary for good citizenship. , Perennialist orientation God is the giver of gifts, and God’s gifts are of many kinds; super- natural gifts, leadership gifts, service gifts. The Body of Christ is very diverse and so must be the preparation of our youth for their unique callings. In addition to our Great Commission, which impels us to bring the gospel to all people, we have received a cul- tural mandate, which compels us to bring our Christian worldview to bear on all the activities of our lives. We must integrate our faith with our learning and with our lives. All truth is God’s truth. The Bible is wholly true, but it is not an encyclopedia of human knowl- 238 22 edge. We must seek out and understand the truth wherever it is found. To this end, our young people need to study the great works of literature, must understand that science is not opposed to our faith but is compatible with it. The Spirit of God is to lead us into all truth and so our educational endeavors are a sacred activity. . Progressive orientation Traditional education has been much too focused on abstract ideas of truth and too little focused on the child or the learner and her unique needs. As Pentecostals, we prize the soul and spirit as much as the mind. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit touches every aspect of a person’s life. Jesus models that compassionate concern for the whole person. His teaching is not full of abstractions, but is rooted in people’s real life experiences. We need to recover his gra- cious concern for the whole person. Moreover, the Biblical model associates the work of the Holy Spirit with the formation of a com- munity. The church in the book of Acts is a community of concern and love, which values each member, recognizes its diversity and treasures it, and seeks the full formation of each person within the context of the body of Christ. Our education should reflect this concern for body, mind, and spirit, so that we may reflect the love of Christ to the world. All our abstract ideas and great pronounce- ments tend to alienate people from Christ rather than attract them to him. Reconstructionist orientation The outpouring of the Holy Spirit comes with liberating power. When Mary learned from the angel of Jesus’ coming birth, she exclaimed that God has sided with the poor and brought down the proud oppressors. Jesus’ life modeled this identification with the outcast and his judgment upon their rich oppressors. When the Spirit of God came at Pentecost, the Spirit came upon men and women, slaves and free, Jew and Gentile, and most notably upon those outside the structures of political, social, and economic power. This baptism in the Holy Spirit lifted up oppressed people and brought them into a community empowered by the Holy Spirit to speak prophetically against their oppressive circumstances and for a community of equality before God. Our education should likewise empower the oppressed to receive God’s power and to 239 23 build a new society based on inclusion, gender equality, and peace- making. We should be involved in transforming society, not just seeking spiritual experiences for our own satisfaction. Critical 12edagogy orientation Both traditional and modem forms of education have asserted an ability to know and convey absolute truths about the world. They have constructed rationalistic systems and complex theories to explain the world, and then have attempted to force these systems of thought on generations of students. In fact, we should be suspi- cious of all these claims. The Apostle Paul said that we see through a glass, darkly. In other words, our knowledge is very limited. We should be humble about our assertions. What concerns God more than our epistemology and our rationalistic metaphysical systems are our relationships, our authenticity, our advocacy on behalf of the voiceless and the marginalized. We need to teach our children to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God. The Holy Spirit comes with a power not rooted in rationalistic systems, but with authentic, personal, intimate, and liberating power. Each of these expressions of Pentecostal educational ideas represents a synthesis of Pentecostal experience and theology with educational philoso- phies rooted in other intellectual traditions. That elements of these educa- tional theories should be attractive to Pentecostal educators should come as no surprise, since all of these theories are informed by elements of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Many of the proponents of these theories have been and are believers in God and in Jesus Christ, while many other propo- nents within the same general philosophy are not (See Fig. 3). Two other varieties of Pentecostal philosophies of education that merit comment here are Pentecostal pragmatism and Pentecostal eclecticism. Pentecostal pragmatism would assert that the nature of the education system really is not all that important because the Spirit-filled believer can function within any of them, bearing witness to Christ in a dynamic and suc- cessful way, adjusting to the circumstances as need be, just as he or she would adapt and function within any culture. This pragmatism is especially compelling in cultures like the United States, in which the ultimate justifi- cation for most actions is whether it “works.” ” In secular society, the criteri- on to measure whether something works is usually whether it allows one to attain one’s desired outcome, usually defined in materialistic terms. This emphasis on ends can blur the worldview and ethical issues pertaining to the 240 24 Fig. 3. Elements of Five Major Educational Theories means by which those ends are to be achieved, leaving people in a frenetic competition for wealth, status, and personal gratification. The same danger exists for Pentecostal pragmatists, whether the desired end be a growing 241 25 church, a successful ministry, or personal spiritual fulfillment. Pentecostal eclecticism may be the most common philosophy of educa- tion among Pentecostals. The general American public tends to pick and choose elements of educational philosophies in an eclectic way, often with little opportunity to reflect on the larger issues of worldview. “Reflective” eclecticism makes good sense in that good ideas about education and worth- while practices come from a variety of sources and perspectives. However, one must be cautious about what George Posner calls “garbage-can eclecti- cism, in which practices based on contradictory or invalid assumptions are collected into a ‘bag of tricks.”‘ 19 9 Indeed, each of the educational philosophies discussed above has its merits. I believe, however, that Pentecostals are still in relatively early stages of reaching beyond these conventional or popular educational ideas to examine the educational possibilities inherent within Pentecostal experi- ence and theology. The current syntheses have often been forged in a prag- matic way and need to be reexamined. Menzies’s summary of the state of Assemblies of God education in 1970 continues to hold true ‘ thirty years later: ‘ The changes seem to have been occasioned largely by economic and social pressures, not matched by an overarching philosophy of educa- tion. The result of unassimilated changes has produced a degree of uncertainty and competition on the undergraduate level.20 A Possible Framework for Exploring the Impact of Pentecostal Experience and Theology upon Educational Philosophy and Practice It is a crucial time for Pentecostals to re-examine our educational philosophies in the light of our Pentecostal experience and theology. It is conceivable, of course, that Pentecostals may have little that is special to contribute to the discussion of philosophies of education. Some would argue that Pentecostalism merely reasserts orthodox Christian belief with a focus on practice and experience of those truths and not mere intellectual assent to them. The results of this survey and literature review, however, would seem to suggest otherwise. Perhaps Pentecostals do have something to contribute to retlection on educational philosophy, beginning with metaphysics, axiology, 19 George J. Posner, Analyzing the Curriculum, 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1995), 3. 20 Menzies, Anointed, 373. 242 26 and epistemology and extending to the nature of the student, the role of the teacher, pedagogy, curricular emphases, and the relationship of practice to ideas. Based on my interviews, comments by Pentecostal writers, as well as other Christian and secular writers and the biblical text, I offer the following draft framework for envisioning a Pentecostal philosophy of education in order to suggest potential areas of reflection and study for Pentecostal edu- cators in various domains of a comprehensive philosophy of education. I look forward to dialoguing with and learning from my fellow educators and fellow Pentecostals in this exploratory process. ‘ Fig. 4. Draft Framework for Envisioning a Pentecostal Philosophy of Education In this model, God’s empowering presence becomes the framework for the entire educational process. The Holy Spirit informs our reflection and prac- tice. The relationships among worldview formulation, educational goals, issues, applications, and educational practice are dynamic and reciprocal. The Pentecostal theologian Gordon Fee writes, , We are not left on our own as far as our relationship with God is con- cerned; neither are we left on our own to “slug it out in the trenches,” as it were, with regard to the Christian life. Life in the present is ered empow- by the God who dwells among us and in us. As the personal pres- 243 27 ence of God, the Spirit is not merely some “force” or “influence.” The living God is a God of power; and by the Spirit the power of the 1 living God is present with us and for us.21 Like other Christians, Pentecostal educators draw on Scripture and the- ology for their perspectives, and become proficient in contextualizing their educational goals and activities. In doing so, Pentecostal educators see God through the Holy Spirit as One whose presence infuses one’s formulation of ideas, goals, strategies, and who not only guides the process and empowers the plan, but who might break into the process at any time to accomplish the unexpected. The teacher and learner, then, find themselves together in the presence of God, whatever the educational context. From this vantage point, one could suggest fresh ways in which Pentecostals might think and are thinking about their educational philosophy and various ways in which they may continue to engage in powerful educational practice. 21 Gordon Fee, God’s Empowering Presence (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), 8. 244 28

Gustavo Gutiérrez’s Mysticism as a Door to Pentecostal Dialogue

Pneuma 33 (2011) 5-24

Te Movement Toward Mysticism in Gustavo Gutiérrez’s Tought: Is Tis an Open Door

to Pentecostal Dialogue?

Joseph Davis

Associate Professor of Religion, Southeastern University, Lakeland, Florida

jhdavis@seu.edu

Abstract

Over the last few years a distinct shift has occurred within the thought of liberation theology’s most famous proponent, Gustavo Gutiérrez. Specifically, Gutiérrez has ventured into mysticism. With this movement a fascinating question can be posed: Does the incorporation of mysti- cism open up a door for dialogue with Latin America’s other popular theology, Pentecostalism? Conversely, should Pentecostalism reflexively understand itself historically and theologically as a liberating movement of the poor? Placed together, an emphasis on praxis seems to reveal, at minimum, a common starting point. Te methodology of the paper incorporates a detailed historical analysis of Gutiérrez’s position on mysticism and moves to the conclusion that the shift in emphasis opens the door, albeit a small crack, to one of the most exciting opportuni- ties to occur within the history of Christianity: the marriage of Pentecostal spirituality with liberating social action.

Keywords

Gustavo Gutiérrez, liberation theology, mysticism, Pentecostalism

At the 2008 Society for Pentecostal Theology conference, Jürgen Moltmann made a startling statement to commence his talk on the work of “Pentecostals and Liberation Teology.” He said, “I met with Gustavo Gutiérrez in Lima a few years ago, and as we were talking he looked out his window and pointed to the barrios below saying, ‘Out there, it is the Pentecostals who are going into the barrios [to reach the poor].”1 What Gutiérrez meant by the statement was that despite the divide that had separated the two most dominant camps of religious fervor within Latin America, the evidence was clear: it was the

1

Jürgen Moltmann, Statement made at Society for Pentecostal Theology, 15 March 2008, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/157007411X554668

1

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J. Davis / Pneuma 33 (2011) 5-24

Pentecostals who were helping the poor. Laden within such a statement are a plethora of both endless possibilities and admittedly speculative projections. In fact, at the onset one must admit that one small statement does not equate to a full-blown theological tour de force. Nor does it mean that the wedding ceremony is about to begin to join these two previously disparate antagonists. What this statement does create, however, is an open door to further scholarly reflection. Tis is particularly true if the aforementioned statement is coupled with perceived changes in Gutiérrez’s stance toward a kindred spirit of Pente- costalism, namely, mysticism. Granted, mysticism is not Pentecostalism and Pentecostalism is not mysticism.2 But it would not be too much to say that there are similarities between the two, and any movement toward the one may have broader ranging implications for the other. Terefore, before venturing further in fruitless conjecture, a number of questions must be answered. First, have there been any changes in Gutiérrez’s theology of liberation that warrant such projections? Tere are some who feel that all talk of change within Gutiér- rez’s theology of liberation is a misunderstanding of his thought.3 Second, what is Gutiérrez’s approach to mysticism? And third, is it possible that praxis itself has created a crack in the door within Gutiérrez’s thought that might integrate two seemingly disparate theologies? Of course, these questions do not stop at Latin America; rather, the prospect of such a provocative fusion has worldwide implications.

Over the past half-century primarily two religious movements have gripped the imaginations and aspirations of the poor in Latin America. Tose two movements are the theology of liberation and the Pentecostal movement.4 Of the two, only liberation theology can be truly said to be indigenous in origin. Pentecostalism is indigenous in another manner; it is the overwhelming choice of the poor in Latin America.5 Daniel Chiquete, commenting on the perceived rise of Protestantism, denied this misunderstanding by retorting that Latin America has not turned Protestant at all; rather, “Latin America has turned

2

Simon Chan has made an interesting case for a structural compatibility between the two. See Simon Chan, “Pentecostal Teology and Christian Spiritual Tradition,” Journal of Pentecostal Teology Supplement Series 21 (2000).

3

One of Gutiérrez’s most recent biographers, James Nickoloff, maintains such a conservative position. See James B. Nickoloff, “A Future for Peru? Gustavo Gutiérrez and the Reasons for His Hope,” Horizons 19 (Spring 1992): 31-43.

4

Te Pentecostal movement originated at the Azusa Street Revival in 1906. Most point to the Medellín Conference in 1968 as the beginning of the liberation theology movement.

5

Laurie Goodstein, “Pentecostal and Charismatic Groups Growing,” New York Times, 6 Octo- ber 2006.

2

J. Davis / Pneuma 33 (2011) 5-24

7

Pentecostal!”6 In his book on Pentecostalism, Allan Anderson confirms this by saying, “Te growth of Pentecostalism in Latin America has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of Christianity.”7 In fact, a Templeton grant research project confirmed these observations. In terms of the world’s population, two of the top three countries with the largest percentage of Char- ismatics/Pentecostals are in Latin America.8

Interestingly enough, the tie between Pentecostalism and the poor in Latin America is not a local aberration. Te history of Pentecostalism reveals that a disproportionate number of dispossessed and poor are attracted to its message of a God whose Spirit is active and fully invested in the present. Juan Sep- ulveda notes, “From a statistical point of view, Pentecostalism has spread far more in the lower classes of popular sections of Latin American societies” than in the upper or middle classes of society.9 In fact, recent studies confirm not just an interest among the Hispanic poor in the “spiritual” aspects of faith but also a commitment among Hispanic Pentecostals for social change.10 Why? Te answer lies both in Pentecostalism’s derivation and its foundational thesis that God can speak to the common person of any nation, tongue, or tribe. Chiquete notes, “By their very nature the Pentecostals are natural promoters of plurality and inner-cultural contact.”11 In the Azusa Street Revival, one finds the message of a God active in history born among the poor and racially, sexually (gender), and economically dispossessed. From the movement’s inception, Pentecostals were the people “from the other side of the tracks.” Yet, in spite of these humble roots, the exportation of Pentecostalism to Latin America was often viewed with a jaundiced eye among the local religious intelligentsia. Given its origin in the United States, Pentecostalism was sus- pected of being tinged with imperialism.12 As a result, the missions-centered

6

Daniel Chiquete, “Latin American Pentecostalism and Western Modernism: Reflections of a Complex Relationship,” International Review of Mission 92, no. 364 (2003): 38.

7

Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 63.

8

Tirty-four percent of the population of Brazil and 40 percent of the population of Guate- mala are Pentecostal/Charismatic worshippers. Te Pew Forum, 6 October 2006.

9

Juan Sepulveda, “Future Perspectives for Latin American Pentecostalism,” International Review of Mission 87 (April 1998): 191.

10

Villafane points out that Pentecostals in the Hispanic community in New York City are at the forefront of social concern and outreach. See Eldin Villafane, Te Liberating Spirit: Toward an Hispanic American Pentecostal Social Ethic (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1993), 110-26.

11

Chiquete, “Latin American Pentecostalism and Western Modernism,” 36.

12

Sepulveda refutes this conception, saying, “Te commonly held accusation that the rapid growth of Latin American Pentecostalism is the result of a sort of conspiracy of the U.S.

3

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J. Davis / Pneuma 33 (2011) 5-24

Pentecostalism exported to Latin America had the label, “Made in America.” Te label should have read more correctly, “Made among the Poor and Dis- possessed of America.” Here, in Pentecostalism, was a movement that began with the poor and contained in its origins the foundational tenets of breaking down the barriers of social, racial, and gender classifications.

Te early Gutiérrez was clearly one of the students of Latin American theol- ogy who viewed any importation of religion from capitalistic countries with caution. He notes, “Te history of Christianity, too, has been written with a white, Western, bourgeois hand.”13 His primary concern resided in changing the structures of societal oppression, which he called “institutionalized violence.”14 From this starting point, spirituality was seemingly subsumed teleologically under the mandate of effectiveness. Teology itself is formed as “a critical reflection on praxis” as a second step. Gutiérrez affirms this view- point in saying, “From the beginning, the theology of liberation posited that the first act is involvement in the liberation process, and theology came after- ward in a second act.”15 Yet, underneath the definition of praxis is an evalua- tive principle — dissolution of poverty. Gutiérrez notes, “Te criterion mentioned to judge praxis is clearly political effectiveness.”16 As a result of this foundation, the measurement of true spirituality lay within the ethos of social revolution. He says, “We are dealing with two inseparable correlations here and it is important to emphasize this. Te potential of a liberating faith, and the capacities of revolution, are intimately bound together . . . Hence it is impossible to cultivate the one without the other as well, and this is what many find unsettling.”17

Within the criterion of political effectiveness, Gutiérrez also accepted Marx- ist economic theory operationally and coupled it with a heavy reliance upon the social sciences as the proper barometers of societal change. In this, Gutiér- rez believes that Marx’s economic understanding of history is a “scientific understanding of historical reality.” He says:

right-wing to counter the people’s movement and Liberation Teology, has very little basis in the facts.” See Sepulveda, “Future Perspectives for Latin American Pentecostalism,” 190.

13

Gustavo Gutiérrez, Te Power of the Poor in History, trans. Robert Barr (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983), 200-201.

14

Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Teology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, trans. Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), xviii.

15

Gutiérrez, Te Power of the Poor in History, 200.

16

Gustavo Gutiérrez, “Notes to a Teology of Liberation,” Teological Studies 31 (1970): 250.

17

Gutiérrez, Te Power of the Poor in History, xx.

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J. Davis / Pneuma 33 (2011) 5-24

9

Marx deepened and renewed this line of thought in his unique way. But this required what has been called an “epistemological break” (a notion taken from Gaston Bachelard) with previous thought. Te new attitude was expressed clearly in the famous Teses on Feuerbach, in which Marx presented concisely but penetratingly the essential elements of his approach. . . . Basing his thought on these first intuitions, he went on to construct a scientific understanding of historical reality. He analyzed capi- talistic society, in which were found concrete instances of the exploitation of man by his fellows and of one social class by another. Pointing the way toward an era in history when man can live humanly, Marx created categories which allowed for the elabora- tion of a science of history.18

Te early Gutiérrez accented the Marxist aspect in his thought by noting, “Many agree with Sartre that Marxism, as the formal framework of all con- temporary philosophical thought, cannot be superseded.”19 Te accentuating of social and economic liberation led to the misguided perception that the salvation motif in Gutiérrez’s writings was almost exclusively immanistic. Gutiérrez even admitted that

[i]t may seem that we entertain precious little interest in a person’s spiritual attitudes. It could even seem that we disdain qualities of faith or of morality in the poor. We are only seeking to avoid beginning with secondary, derivative considerations in such a way that would confer them with what is primary and basic, creating an interminable number of hair splitting distinctions that in the end only yield ideas devoid of interest and historical impact.20

Given the overt political criterion for evaluating theoretical premises, anyone not involved with immediate political change was viewed axiomatically as part of the problem. Pentecostals fell readily into this category, particularly with a premillennial eschatology as the primary understanding of justice in society. However, the corresponding view from Pentecostals that Gutiérrez’s theology was nothing more than reworked Marxism made the chasm between both diametric. Both assumptions missed the mark in the stereotypical minimiza- tions about the other. Pentecostals misunderstood the theoretical foundations implicit within the ethical imperative of liberation theology, and Gutiérrez minimized the liberating effects of a theology whose historical nexus origi- nated from within the world of the poor.

18

Gutiérrez, A Teology of Liberation, xx. 19

Ibid., 59.

20

Gutiérrez, Te Power of the Poor in History, 95.

5

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J. Davis / Pneuma 33 (2011) 5-24

Te latter misunderstanding struck at the very heart of the characterizations of each position and proleptically disposed each toward a position on personal religion and, by consequence, on mysticism. Was religion a matter of the indi- vidual before God or was God exclusively in the work to liberate the oppressed? Of course, both realized, at least theoretically, that the question raised is not an either/or question but one of degree, given that humanity is made up of individuals, at least on a certain level. Leaning more to the corporate under- standing of self, Gutiérrez placed the poor and oppressed as the basis from which true spirituality began. He said,

A spiritual experience, we like to think, should be something out beyond the frontiers of human realities as profane and tainted as politics. And yet this is what we strive for here, this is our aim and goal; an encounter with the Lord, not in the poor person who is “isolated and good,” but in the oppressed person. . . . [H]istory, concrete history, is the place where God reveals the mystery of God’s personhood. God’s word comes to us in proportion to our involvement in historical becoming.21

Much of Gutierrez’s approach could easily be ascribed to the overwhelming degradation of poverty and the miniscule attention that the issue had previ- ously received in theological forums. Te problem was that most of Gutiérrez’s socioeconomic presentation gave the impression that personal faith only has value within the liberation process. Consequently, the most personal of spiri- tual evidence, conversion, was also stated in terms of self revelation in the midst of involvement with the poor. Tis, coupled with a perceived dialectical universalism, made God seem more like a Hegelian construct than a savior who was accepted personally.22 Te result was that much of the personal moti- vation for societal change was relegated to filial love as an implicit love for God. In other words, of the two Great Commandments, Gutiérrez’s presenta- tion of liberation theology emphasized the second almost as the sum total of the first and the sole extension of its meaning. Gutiérrez had aimed to link the two by showing how love for the poor was biblically equated with a love for God, which, of course, had plenty of biblical support; however, Gutiérrez’s presentation of love for the poor made love for God axiomatic in that the two were the same. Christ was in the naked, the hungry, and the imprisoned — but seemingly nowhere else. Gutiérrez notes, “And this is precisely why it [spirituality] is not a purely ‘interior,’ private attitude, but a process occurring

21

Ibid., 52.

22

Gutiérrez said, “I was greatly influenced by Hegel in his understanding of history in writing A Teology of Liberation. Personal Interview with Gutiérrez, 5 May 1994.

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J. Davis / Pneuma 33 (2011) 5-24

11

in the socio-economic, political, and cultural milieu in which we live, and which we ought to transform.”23 Terefore, there was little need to talk about spirituality prior to its implementation in praxis. Te coterminous equation made spirituality seemingly exclusive to one’s neighbor. Anything else was pietistic narcissism.

Something, or more correctly someone, was lacking. To appropriate Martin Buber, the “I” in the “I-Tou relationship” seemed to be unconditionally assumed in the philosophical category of the other presented by Gutiérrez. Te explanation given for this methodology is that theology is a critical reflec- tion on praxis from the viewpoint of the poor. Te flaw in this methodology was that the original application of this definition viewed the poor almost exclusively through a socioeconomic lens. In other words, the poor were defined by a standard that they themselves did not accept. Te poor viewed themselves as more than merely the victims of institutionalized violence. Reli- gion was not an escape from brutality and minimization; it was a full-scale rebellion to negate the denigrating terms of limitation awkwardly placed upon them by their oppressors.

A Shift in Method Is Noticed

In the early 1980s subtle shifts began to occur within Gutiérrez’s thought that revealed a change in his approach to the question of personal spirituality. Pre- viously Gutiérrez had emphasized theology as a critical reflection on praxis accomplished through the prism of sociopolitical analysis. In the early 1980s word began to leak out from Gutiérrez’s summer school sessions that Gutiérrez had begun to change, or at least modify, his approach to liberation theology. Gerhard Hanlon, who had attended the 1982 summer school session, wrote in a journal article:

In its early years liberation theology in Latin America was concerned with analyzing social reality and interpreting the Bible in terms of liberation from social and political oppression. A few years ago interest turned to the study of the popular religiosity of the masses of the oppressed and attempted to see therein values which might contribute to that liberation. Te most recent interest of Latin American theology is spirituality.24

23

Gutiérrez, Te Power of the Poor in History, 53.

24

Gerhard Hanlon, “A Spirituality for Our Times,” Clergy Review (June 1984): 200.

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J. Davis / Pneuma 33 (2011) 5-24

In this article Hanlon suggests that there is a new theme in Gutiérrez’s theol- ogy. Tat theme is the “popular religiosity of the masses.” But is this a different direction for Gutiérrez’s thought? Hanlon seems to think that this is an added emphasis but not necessarily a contrary viewpoint. Others, however, find in this added emphasis a discarding of the older ways of thinking to make way for the new.

One of Gutiérrez’s harshest critics in methodology is fellow liberation theo- logian Juan Luis Segundo. In a lecture given at Regent College in 1983, Segundo made a startling remark about what he perceived as a reversal in Gutiérrez’s thinking. Segundo stated that his old friend and compatriot Gustavo Gutiérrez had abandoned the font of his former thinking. In this lecture Segundo called upon his old companion to return to the philosopher’s stone from which they were both hewn. Tat stone, said Segundo, was the sociopolitical methodology that was liberation theology’s original contribu- tion to the world. But more than this, Segundo maintained that the changes in Gutiérrez’s thought were more than just an added dimension to his thought. Segundo asserted that the changes were so drastic that it did not make sense to talk anymore about a singular continuous train of thought but rather “of at least two types of liberation theology.”25 Along these lines, Segundo sadly con- fessed, “And what is painful to me is that I no longer know whether Gustavo himself would endorse what he said then, or whether he would consider it a mere sin of his youth.”26

In 1989 Arthur McGovern, in his book Liberation Teology and Its Critics, took up some of the same questions raised by both Hanlon and Segundo and reached similar conclusions. McGovern noted, “Te revolutionary excitement has dimmed,” and as a result “Gutiérrez has devoted much of his time and writings to the question of spirituality.”27 Echoing both Hanlon and Segundo again, McGovern also noted that Gutiérrez’s liberation theology had “shifted” from a more sociopolitical agenda to one that now emphasizes more the spiri- tual side. He pointed this out by noting the differences between the two books A Teology of Liberation and We Drink from Our Own Wells. He says, “ A Teol- ogy of Liberation deals almost exclusively with the issue of sociopolitical eman-

25

Juan Luis Segundo, Signs of the Times, trans. Robert R. Barr (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 67.

26

Ibid., 93.

27

Arthur McGovern, Liberation Teology and Its Critics: Toward an Assessment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989), 87.

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13

cipation, and most of the discussion about liberation from sin deals with eliminating unjust structures caused by sin.”28 Conversely, McGovern notes,

In We Drink from Our Own Wells, Gutiérrez reflects theologically on the journey of the poor in Latin America and the journey of those who have attempted to walk with the poor. When liberation theology first emerged, Gutiérrez wrote about the “revolution- ary ferment” alive throughout Latin America. Te revolutionary excitement has dimmed, but Gutiérrez finds a deeper, more faith centered hope still strong.29

McGovern concludes, “I would clearly designate spirituality as the dominant theme of contemporary liberation theology.”30

Paul Sigmund in his book Liberation Teology at the Crossroads also sees the changes in Gutiérrez’s thought. Sigmund identifies Gutiérrez as the progenitor of what he calls the new line of theological speculation that began to depart from the older, more militant liberation theology of the early years. He says, “Many writers have seen the anticipation of the characteristic elements of lib- eration theology in the writings by Latin American theologians in the middle and early 1960s. . . . However the clearest beginnings of the new line of theo- logical speculation are in the writings of Gustavo Gutiérrez.”31 Why have all these changes occurred? Te answer, for Sigmund, is the times in which Gutiérrez wrote his books. He says,

In A Teology of Liberation, however, the emphasis is much more on the former than the latter in the sense that the structuralist anticapitalism is discussed at much greater length than the participatory populism. Tis emphasis is an understandable product of the time at which the work was written — the late 1960s and the early 1970s. As the book was being completed Chile elected a Marxist president, Salvador Allende, with the support of a coalition that also included Christians and parties of a more secular orientation. Allende’s popular unity seemed to embody the commitment to the poor and the oppressed — and to socialism — that liberation theology argued was the logical conclusion to be drawn from the scriptures.

32

28

Ibid., 82.

29

Ibid., 87.

30

Ibid., 83.

31

Paul Sigmund, Liberation Teology at the Crossroads (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 28.

32

Ibid., 39.

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Te Movement to Mysticism

Had changes occurred within the presentation of a theology of liberation? In A Teology of Liberation Gutiérrez had maintained that “theological categories are not enough. . . . we need a spirituality.”33 With the issuing of the book We Drink from Our Own Wells, Gutiérrez began to make explicit what to many of his followers was implicit, namely, that there was a verdant spirituality within the original coordinates of the theology of liberation schemata. In the fore- word to this long anticipated work, Henri Nouwen stated, “Tis book fulfills the promise that was implicit in his A Teology of Liberation.”34 In this Gutiér- rez was not abandoning his earlier emphasis but “expanding upon the view.”35 In Gutiérrez’s mind, part of the rationale for minimizing the spiritual aspects was that the tenets of spirituality for the poor should germinate from the poor as a part of their own liberation pilgrimage. He notes, “Evangelization, the proclamation of the gospel, will be genuinely liberating when the poor them- selves become its messengers.”36 Tis embryonic spirituality could not be com- plete until the poor were the artisans of their own spirituality: “Te spirituality of liberation will have its point of departure in the spirituality of the anawin.”37 As Gutiérrez warmly anticipated this new type of spirituality, he felt con- strained to contain his own ruminations since the people of liberation would traverse unknown ground in the birthing of a spiritual paradigm. He notes,

Te problem, however, is not only to find a new theological framework. Te personal and community prayer of many Christians committed to the process of liberation is undergoing a serious crisis. Tis could purify prayer life of childish attitudes, routine, and escapes. But it will not do this if new paths are not broken and new spiritual experiences are not lived. . . . Tere is a great need for a spirituality of liberation; yet in Latin America those who have opted to participate in the process of liberation as we have outlined it above, comprise, in a manner of speaking, a first Christian generation. In many areas of their life they are without a theological and spiritual tradition. Tey are creating their own.38

33

Gutiérrez, A Teology of Liberation, 117.

34

Henri Nouwen’s foreword in Gustavo Gutiérrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells: Te Spiri- tual Journey of a People (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984), xiii.

35

Tis is the title Gutiérrez gave to his new introduction in commemoration of the fifteenth anniversary edition of A Teology of Liberation, xviii.

36

Gutiérrez, Te Power of the Poor in History, 22.

37

Ibid., 53.

38

Gutiérrez, A Teology of Liberation, 74.

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15

At least in emphasis, Gutiérrez’s liberation spirituality had begun to change. Te question was what would the new changes look like and how would the new emphasis on spirituality cohere with the old expressions of liberation?

A funny thing occurred in the forging of new spiritualities for the theology of liberation. Te new formulations of faith began to look suspiciously like older, more traditional spiritualities within Roman Catholic mystical life. Sigmund commented, “Without admitting that he was doing so, Gutiérrez continued to modify his approach and to emphasize the agreement between his version of liberation theology and the social teaching of the church.”39 Was it a coincidence that the spiritual evolution looked particularly Roman Catho- lic? True, Gutiérrez had previously noted that “without ‘contemplative life,’ to use a traditional term, there is no authentic Christian life.”40 But in its embry- onic development, he had maintained, “what this contemplative life will be is still unknown.”41 Te unknown of the earlier works became known in such traditional Catholic mystics as St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. Monastic pillars of contemplation also began to filter into the thought of Gutiérrez in Augustine and particularly in Ignatius Loyola (contemplation in action). Here, Gutiérrez began to find historical compatriots of liberation who had traversed the spiritual and had never given up the concern for action. As a result, the interior life was seen not as an impediment to liberation but rather as an ally. A recent work by Gutiérrez emphatically embraces spiritual- ity’s help in observing that “spirituality provides strength and durability for social options.”42 In Gutiérrez’s rereading of the mystical and monastic pil- grims, a new vantage point was found to embrace the historical expressions of the faith without losing the present praxis. Te mystical had been demytholo- gized of self-absorbed pietism and had become practical. As a result, Gutiérrez began to mine the deeper recesses of mysticism laden within Christian history. Now Gutiérrez would even become an apostle for the mystical life: “Only within the framework provided by mysticism and practice,” he observed, “is it possible to develop a meaningful discourse about God that is both authentic and respectful of its object.”43 Specifically, the call to contemplation within

39

Sigmund, Liberation Teology at the Crossroads, 171.

40

Gutiérrez, A Teology of Liberation, 74.

41

Ibid.

42

Gustavo Gutiérrez, “Te Teology of Liberation: Perspectives and Tasks,” trans. Fernando F. Segonia, in Toward a New Heaven and a New Earth: Essays in Honor of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 297.

43

Gustavo Gutiérrez, Te Truth Shall Make You Free (Maryknoll, NY Orbis Books, 1990), 55.

11

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mysticism was now seen as an active participation in the process of liberation as opposed to a fearful withdrawal from the world of need.

Contemplation

What was it about mysticism that attracted the later Gutiérrez? Te answer, of course, is praxis. Gutiérrez had always held to a concept of spirituality that included contemplation, but the adoption of mysticism thrust Gutiérrez into the interior life, which previously had only occupied a footnote in his think- ing. Gutiérrez noted, “Poverty was always a central point in the history of spirituality, and it was always linked to the contemplative life.”44 In Gutiérrez’s life as a parish priest he would often reflect upon the contemplative aspect of the poor, both in merely being within the repose of the church and in active praying. Gutiérrez noted the poor’s abiding presence in the local churches as something more than a place to get out of the rain. He says, “Te poor spend long hours reflecting on their lives [in the church].”45 Reflexively and naturally the poor move from their reflection to prayer. He says, “Tere is perhaps noth- ing more impressive and creative than the praying praxis of Christians among the poor and oppressed. Teirs is not a prayer divorced from the liberating praxis of people. On the contrary, the Christian prayer of the poor springs up from roots in that very praxis.”46

Prayer

Prayer in the spirituality of liberation is not to be thought of as routine, pas- sive, or accepting of degradation. Nor does contemplative silence before God equate to an acceptance of brutality. Gutiérrez states, “Passivity or quietism not only is not a real acknowledgement of the gratuitous love of God, but even denies it or deforms it.”47 Prayer, then, actually questions God about the unac- ceptability of suffering from within the constructs of God’s loving nature: “Teology addresses how to speak about God from the sufferings of the inno-

44

James L. Heff, ed., Believing Scholars: Ten Catholic Intellectuals (New York: Fordham Uni- versity Press, 2005), 45.

45

Gustavo Gutiérrez, “Liberation Teology for the Twenty-First Century” in Romero’s Legacy: Te Call to Peace and Justice, ed. Pillar Closkey (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 55.

46

Gutiérrez, Te Power of the Poor in History, 107.

47

Gutiérrez, Te Truth Shall Make You Free, 35.

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cents, the suffering of the poor.”48 Gutiérrez likewise maintains, “If the ele- ment of injustice be added to this situation of suffering, it can produce resentment and a rejection of the presence and existence of God, because God’s love becomes difficult to understand for one living a life of unmerited affliction.”49 It also maintains the theological structure of struggle before God (coram Deo) as opposed to in atheistic disengagement. Gutiérrez affirms, “Tis painful dialectical approach to God is one of the most profound messages of the book of Job.”50 Te prelude of prayer is central to all God talk because it begins in an attitude of faith from which all talk of God must originate.

True prayer also moves one to action. To pray without a commitment to action nullifies the prayers uttered as faithless. In this dialectical process the surd of suffering moves one to a mystical appropriation of Christ’s suffering. In all unjust suffering the Christian is called to understand that Christ suffers with the victim and “will be in agony until the end of the world.”51 In this suf- fering faith is born — not in a dismissing manner but rather in a mystical paschal participation. From identification with Christ a “hermeneutic of hope” is appropriated that sees in the resurrection of Christ the future redemption.52 Yet, because the suffering is not abated in the present time, there is a need for continued contemplation. Tis discipline of silent meditation beckons the sufferer into an interior life that helps them persevere through the present affliction. Gutiérrez notes, “Teology will then be speech that has been enriched by silence.”53 Yet, the present disciplines and the future hope do not always provide easy answers to the larger, more personal questions of theodicy. In this Gutiérrez confesses, “Tis question is larger than our capacity to answer it. It is a very deep, personal question. Ultimately, we have no answers except to be with the poor.”54 As a result, contemplation continues and compassion follows from the inability (both personal and corporate) to explain God’s love in the midst of evil. Perhaps this is why Gutiérrez was fond of quoting Jose Maria Arguedas’ aphorism, “What we know is much less than the great hope we feel.”55

48

Gustavo Gutiérrez, “How Do You Tell the Poor God Loves You?” Interview by Mev Puleo, St. Anthony Messenger 96 (February 1989): 10.

49

Gustavo Gutiérrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987), 13.

50

Ibid., 65.

51

Ibid., 101.

52

Gutiérrez, Te Power of the Poor in History, 15.

53

Ibid., xiv.

54

Ibid.

55

Ibid., 22.

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Revelation and Praxis

As part of the liberation imperative, Gutiérrez also advocates the age-old dis- cipline of the reading of the Scriptures. From the beginning of Gutiérrez’s project of liberation, the Bible has held a central position. However, even the Scriptures seem to take on a new dimension within the thought of the latter Gutiérrez. Te early Gutiérrez’s epistemology located truth as a dialectical interaction with praxis. He says, “For what we are concerned with is a re- reading of the gospel message within the praxis of liberation.”56 In this he agrees with Congar in saying, “It [the church] must open as it were a new chapter of the theological-pastoral epistemology. Instead of using only revela- tion and tradition as starting points, as classical theology has generally done, it must start with the facts and questions derived from the world and from history.”57 He also notes that “all truth must modify the real world . . . knowl- edge is thus dialectical starts and returns.”58 By 1983 he had revised his episte- mology to include a more preeminent status for revelation in epistemology. He said, “Te ultimate criterion for judgment comes from revelation not from praxis itself.”59 Correspondingly, Gutiérrez also began to modify his position on the social sciences’ place in epistemology. He wrote, “Te Bible concept is very rich, richer than a purely sociological understanding of the poor.”60

Has Gutiérrez’s Mysticism Created an Open Door for Dialogue?

Is Gutiérrez’s incorporation of mysticism a theological portal through which dialogue with Pentecostalism might commence? Given the chasm that has historically separated them, the answer to such a question is at best tentative. First, while the accentuation of mysticism is without question an elaboration of Gutiérrez’s latent spirituality, the translation from mysticism to Pentecostal- ism is not a seamless transition from either side. Yet, there are voices within Pentecostalism who believe that the chasm is not too deep and that a latent commonality abides between the two. Miroslav Volf is one who implores these two theologies to come together. He states, “It is of ecumenical importance for

56

Ibid., 66.

57

Gutiérrez, A Teology of Liberation, 9.

58

Gustavo Gutiérrez, “Te Praxis of Liberation and the Christian Faith,” Humane Vitae (September 1974): 373.

59

Gustavo Gutiérrez, Te Truth Shall Make You Free, 101.

60

Gustavo Gutiérrez, “Gutiérrez Reflects on 15 Years of Liberation Teology,” Interview by Latinamerica Press, Latinamerica Press 15 (19 May 1983): 5-7.

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liberation theology and Pentecostal theology to recognize each other as feud- ing family members,” as opposed to enemies.61 Te reason for this, Volf points out, is an increasing awareness within the Pentecostal movement of both the liberation imperative and the conscientization of socioeconomic need. At first glance, he says, “Liberation theology and Pentecostal theology seem to be prime examples of radically opposing theologies.”62 As Volf notes, however, the two theologies have much more in common than either one of them may wish to believe: “Individual groups of Pentecostalists around the world seem to be slowly discovering the socioeconomic implications of their soteriology, and liberation theologians are becoming more aware of the need for a spiritual framework for their socioeconomic activity.”63 Dario Lopez Rodriguez com- ments on the liberating activity: “Today there is sufficient evidence from sev- eral countries of Latin America that a gradual awakening of the social conscience of a significant sector of the Pentecostal movement is taking place.”64 Doug Peterson agrees: “Ultimately, by empowering people who were previ- ously denied a voice, the Pentecostal Movement in Latin America has acquired a revolutionary potential.”65

On the question of spirituality, Simon Chan also sees a great deal of conti- nuity between Catholic mysticism and Pentecostalism. Within the two tradi- tions Chan sees great possibility in the celebration of the Eucharist as a “central” Pentecostal event.66 Chan also views tongues as, in essence, an expres- sion of Teresa of Avilla’s progression to joy “in which joy becomes so over- whelming that the soul could only respond with all tongues and heavenly madness.”67 Chan says, “Pentecostalism cannot be regarded as a marginal movement, much less an aberration: it is a spiritual movement that matches in every way the time-tested development in Catholic tradition.”68 Chan even believes that the Pentecostal giftings work best in the structure of Roman Catholic and the Episcopal Charismatic traditions. He notes, “In fact I would

61

Miroslav Volf, “Materiality of Salvation: An Investigation in the Soteriologies of Liberation and Pentecostal Teologies,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 26, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 449.

62

Ibid., 447.

63

Ibid., 460.

64

Dario Lopez Rodriguez, “A Critical Review of Douglas Peterson’s Not by Might Nor by Power: A Pentecostal Teology of Social Concern in Latin America,” Journal of Pentecostal Teology 17 (2000): 136.

65

Douglas Peterson, “Latin American Pentecostalism: Social Capital, Networks, and Poli- tics,” Pneuma: Te Journal of Pentecostal Theology 26, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 306.

66

Chan, “Pentecostal Teology and Christian Spiritual Tradition,” 108.

67

Ibid., 60.

68

Ibid., 71.

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like to show that [the Pentecostal reality] is better traditioned in a church that recognizes the constitutive role of the sacraments and the Spirit.”69 But is there a tradition within liberation theology that militates against the indigenous nature of Pentecostalism?

Ecclesiology

In “La Koinonia Eclesial” Gutiérrez proclaims that “the task of the church is as an extension of the missions of the Son and the Spirit.”70 Even in Gutiérrez’s earlier thought he had stated that “spirituality in the strict and profound sense of the word is the dominion of the Spirit.”71 But what does this mean in rela- tion to the ecclesiology? In the formation of the spirituality of liberation, Gutiérrez earlier maintained that he was hesitant to conjecture as to the expli- cation of this “new” spirituality. His reasoning was that the people of libera- tion were “first generation” liberationists; therefore, what liberation spirituality comprised was subsequently in an embryonic and much too formative stage. Gutiérrez has consistently maintained that the poor will not be truly liberated until they are the artisans of their own spirituality. But, as Segundo pointed out, “Something was obvious . . . the common people had neither understood nor welcomed anything from the first theology of liberation, and had actually reacted against its criticism of the supposed oppressive elements of popular religions.”72 Paradoxically, many now have begun to criticize liberation theol- ogy for its lack of indigenous authenticity and for being primarily an academic exercise. Solivan says, “Te power and authenticity present in the early voices of the liberation theologians have been diluted by the process of academic advancement.”73 Charles Self has asserted that “Pentecostalism is truly a faith of the poor and is thus distinct from some liberation theology movements which are for the poor.”74 Tis critique echoes Moltmann’s previous criticism that the theology of liberation had more to do with European theology than it

69

Ibid., 15.

70

Gustavo Gutiérrez, “La Koinonia Eclesial,” trans. David Bustos, Paginas 200 (August 2006): 22.

71

Gutiérrez, A Teology of Liberation, 117.

72

Segundo, Signs of the Times, 74.

73

Samuel Solivan, “Te Spirit, Pathos, and Liberation: Toward an Hispanic Pentecostal Te- ology,” Journal of Pentecostal Supplement Series 14 (1998): 36.

74

Charles Self, “Conscientization, Conversion, and Convergence: Reflections on Base Com- munities and Emerging Pentecostalism in Latin America,” Pneuma: Te Journal of the Society of Pentecostal Theology 14, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 63.

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did with any indigenous ecclesiology. In his “Open Letter to Jose Miguez Bonino,” Moltmann remarked that Gutiérrez’s work “offers many new insights — but precisely only in the framework of Europe’s history, scarcely any in the history of Latin America.”75 Gutiérrez often acknowledges his Euro- pean pedagogy as an encumbrance to his own veracity in speaking for the poor. Solivan states, “Without the poor — those who suffer — as subject, theology denigrates into the academic exercise of cognitive praxis.”76 For a privileged theologian educated in first-rate schools, it would be hard to sepa- rate the wineskins of austere academia from the degradation of poverty. To be sure, Gutiérrez has advocated and modeled the incarnational lifestyle, but does this model extend to his theological method? Or theoretically rephrased, does praxis, itself, have a criterion that uncritically incorporates a residual European pedagogy?

Pneumatology

In We Drink from Our Own Wells, Gutiérrez created considerable distance between “popular religion” and liberation theology by juxtaposing those who believe in miracles with those who are involved in the work of liberation: “Te power of the Spirit leads to love of God and others and not to the working of miracles.”77 Here there is a clear divergence from the view of the poor as it relates to both love and pneumatology. Exceedingly little is said throughout Gutiérrez’s works about pneumatology.78 It is an area of immense neglect. As a result, a penetrating criticism must be directed at this lack, and a question of sufficiency must be raised when the most theologically active participant in historical change (the Holy Spirit) is absent. But perhaps this is the point. Does the weakness in Gutiérrez’s pneumatology nuance his entire understand- ing of the Pentecostal movement? And does this lack predispose the theology of liberation to a critique of immanence from which the Pentecostal poor can speak more adequately? Solivan again points out that the two, miracles and

75

Jürgen Moltmann, “An Open Letter to Jose Miguez Bonino,” Christianity in Crisis 36 (29 March 1976): 5.

76

Solivan, “Te Spirit, Pathos, and Liberation,” 65.

77

Gutiérrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells, 63.

78

A quick perusal of the indexes of Gutiérrez’s books reveals the disparity. In Te Truth Shall Make You Free, the index does not have any references to the Holy Spirit. Tere are thirty-seven to Jesus and eleven to Marx. In A Teology of Liberation there are 107 references to Jesus, ten to Marx, and three to the Holy Spirit. All of the books that Gutiérrez has written display this disparity.

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liberation imperatives, are not inimical to one another: “For many suffering people what makes God’s promise possible in their present experience is the acceptance of the miraculous. . . .Te experiences of promises fulfilled today serve as first fruits of what is yet in store.”79 Gutiérrez emphasizes only the silent suffering aspect of transcendence. But why is it inconsistent to believe, as the poor do, that God’s identification with weakness is equally as true as the Holy Spirit’s manifestation of power? On an economic level Gutiérrez agrees — it is just in the supernatural aspects where there is resistance. Of course, one might ask how God acting supernaturally now would be any dif- ferent from the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us long ago. But the fallout does not end there. Systemically there is another more problematic result, namely, liberation itself.

Eschatology

In Acts 2:15-16 Peter exclaims, “Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel.” Not only were they not drunk, but the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost inaugurated a new era within the life of the church that Joel referred to as the last days (v. 17). In Gutiérrez’s thought there is a great empha- sis on the hermeneutic of hope that creates eschatological longing for change. Gutiérrez is correct in believing in an eschatological hope but does not incor- porate any real pneumatology into his eschatology. As a result, the motivation for change rests primarily within the subject of history, as opposed to the Spirit of, over, and in history. Tis places a heavy weight upon the subject of history, who has hitherto been unable to realize his and her eschatological implica- tions. Granted, the hermeneutic of hope comes through humanity, but it does not originate in humanity. To fill this need, Gutiérrez adopts the methodology of conscientization in what seems to appear more as a Promethean construct than an emphasis upon the Spirit. Tis lack of proper emphasis threatens the entire edifice of liberation in that it places the realization of the movement in the ability of humanity to see. Tis is not the biblical presentation of the noetic effects of sin or the Holy Spirit’s relegation to a subordinate eschato- logical role. Te person who leads into all truth is the primogenitor of the eschatological hope. As a result, the assurance for hope is limited to the ability or inability of humanity to both see and accomplish this hope. And this is a

79

Solivan, “Te Spirit, Pathos, and Liberation,” 91.

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major difference between Pentecostalism and liberation theology. To para- phrase Solivan, Pentecostalism has placed its hope for the future upon a pres- ent belief in the Spirit’s workings. In so doing, they have found the impetus for change both on a personal level and in society. Tis is why there is hope for the future. Revealed in the present dispensation is the future realization of abiding liberation.

Hope for the Future?

Is there a crack in the door that allows for dialogue between what, on the sur- face, seems like two antagonistic viewpoints on liberation spirituality? Gutiér- rez has noted that theology will not be free of illegitimate presuppositions until the poor create their own theology. What became apparent with the writ- ing of We Drink from Our Own Wells, however, was that Gutiérrez did have within his own mind the parameters of a certain type of spirituality, namely, Roman Catholic mysticism. As Volf and Chan have pointed out, this does not invalidate dialogue between Pentecostalism and Gutiérrez. Conversely, neither do the similarities between the two extinguish all distance. Simply put, what validates or invalidates the Pentecostal experience, according to Gutiérrez’s theology, is liberating praxis. Te question is, does Pentecostalism qualify according to this criterion? For many, and particularly the poor of Latin Amer- ica, the answer is a resounding yes. But is it enough that the poor have voted with their feet? Gutiérrez maintains, “If we are to find God acting in history, we must have an attitude of faith that is open to novelty and mystery.”80 Where does this openness to mystery lead? Te answer is, a door that was previously closed and is being opened ever so slowly. Yet, difficulties abide when a lack of openness to novelty and mystery persist. Te close proximity of focus and geography could not help but create some expected sibling rivalry. However, this should not be enough to seal the door shut or close it back again. Tus, in order for greater openness to occur, the father of liberation theology must realize that true liberating praxis is occurring within Latin America under the name of Pentecostalism. Tere must also be the realization of the indigenous choice and that the label attached to Pentecostalism “Made in America,” is not accurate. Rather, the “Made in America” label should, as previously noted, more correctly read, “Made among the Poor and Dispos- sessed of America.” Te location of liberating praxis’s nexus should not

80

Gustavo Gutiérrez, Te God of Life (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 80.

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disqualify its extension or incorporation. If Gutiérrez truly believes in a theol- ogy from the poor, then the poor must be allowed to speak, even if their thoughts take them down less traditional and more mysterious pathways. And perhaps they have spoken — in tongues. Te elaboration of a spiritual need is what precipitated Gutiérrez’s movement into mysticism. Te limitation of that elaboration is where the truly liberating prospects come to an end. Te desire to have a “faith that is open to novelty and mystery” is a glorious incarnational goal. However, the constricting definitions of “novel” and, in this case, “mys- terious” prohibit implementation. Where does this leave the hopes of dialogue between the two most potent forms of religious expression in Latin America? Te answer is looking at a ray of light behind a partially opened door wonder- ing what might happen if the door were to open fully.

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Last Days Revival

As we are getting ready to hit once again the Revival Trail this week, we wanted to give a quick update on our ministry with a praise report and a prayer request. We have received the final reports from our 200-day revival in Europe last year, with multiple salvations, baptisms and dozens of documented healings. For us as a family, this is a great answer for the time, effort and resources we invested in 39 different churches across six EU countries in 2024.

On the same day in 1909, William Seymour at Azusa and Charles Parham at Topeka prophesied that in a hundred years another, “significantly more powerful move of God” would occur, marking a historic milestone regarding the Last Days Revival in America. Just four years later, during the Stone Church revival in Chicago, this same prophetic word was reaffirmed by Maria Woodworth-Etter who stated that “when the Latter Rain comes, it will far exceed anything we have seen!”

We are reminded that the Lord has also been preparing our own ministry for one last powerful move of God. We recall the 2023 Polk County revival that ran for seven weeks, and prior to that in 2017, when one short missionary service we held in rural Mississippi opened the next three months for revival that took place across six southern states.

As we recall our revival summer across South Carolina back in 1999, we are also reminded that for over a quarter of a century since then, we have almost weekly traveled the Southern Road Music Highway, which extends through Appalachia and have ministered in just about every church along its rout. Last but not least, we also recall the 1990 post-Communist revival in Bulgaria, where in less than one school year (nine months), our youth group grew from 30 to 300 active teenage members. To experience all this for a Bulgarian immigrant, who came to this country over 30 years ago as a young 19-year-old, is nothing short of a miracle!

But this one is different! The revival that is about to happen around us will have neither national nor denominational but a worldwide impact. I am talking about miracles occurring in China and Indonesia just because a few of us gathered for a weekly prayer meeting and brought a need before God. I am talking about God moving in Texas and Miami, across the Mexican border and in Havana, just because a local church fasted in Juno, Alaska.

And I don’t know about you, but I DO want to be part of this new great move of God! The time for one last great revival is here – but where’s the Church?

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