“Keep on Stinkin’: Appalachian Ramp History Guide & Cookbook” a New Release by Cup & Cross Ministries

A heartwarming collaboration between a mother and her 11-year-old daughter has resulted in a one-of-a-kind cookbook and history guide celebrating the wild, flavorful ramp. Titled Keep on Stinkin’: Appalachian Ramp History Guide & Cookbook, the book blends delicious recipes with the fascinating cultural and historical journey of this beloved wild leek, showcasing the duo’s creativity and shared passion for food and storytelling.

Ramps (Allium Tricoccum), also known as wild leeks, garlic or onions or even ramsons or wood leeks, are a native North American bulbous perennial flowering plant in the amaryllis family. They have played an essential role in Appalachian and Indigenous diets for centuries. They are celebrated for their pungent flavor, which is a blend of garlic and onion, and their brief, highly anticipated growing season each spring.

Keep on Stinkin’ explores Appalachia’s rich cultural history with a food journey through the ages. This cookbook features a brief history of ramps along with nearly 60 Appalachian-inspired recipes showcasing this wild plant as the star ingredient. These dishes honor traditional mountain cooking with a focus on foraged ingredients, cast-iron skillets, and rustic flavors. Written by Kathryn Donev and her daughter Kariyana, Keep on Stinkin’ is an intergenerational cookbook celebrating their shared love for cooking. Kathryn is an avid home cook who has authored several globally available cookbooks while Kariyana is a young food enthusiast with a talent for crafting bold, unique flavor combinations.

A Call to Righteousness: Impending Judgment by Dr. David Franklin (1994)

“A Call to Righteousness: Impending Judgment,” authored by Dr. David Franklin in 1994, serves as a prophetic admonition to nations, drawing parallels between contemporary societal behaviors and the biblical narratives found in the Book of Ezekiel. In this concise 48-page work, Franklin underscores the consequences that befall nations persisting in moral and spiritual decline, emphasizing themes of desolation, destruction, dispersion, despair, and the hope of prophetic restoration. Central to Franklin’s discourse is the analysis of Ezekiel chapters 12 and 14. He posits that when a nation indulges in violence and forgets its foundational spiritual values, it stands accountable before the Sovereign Lord. Franklin delineates a divine sequence: persistent wrongdoing leads to confrontation by God, followed by periods allotted for repentance. Should these opportunities be ignored, divine judgment becomes inevitable upon the unfaithful nation.
Anticipating global shifts, Franklin calls for international righteousness and critiques the prevailing economic complacency of his time. He challenges the “debt-free” myth, forecasting significant economic transformations. Notably, these insights were penned years before discussions on foreclosures and global economic crises became prominent, showcasing Franklin’s foresight into financial vulnerabilities that would later manifest.

A particularly compelling segment of the book delves into Ezekiel’s vision concerning the departure of the Glory of God. Franklin interprets this as a cautionary tale for contemporary society, suggesting that the withdrawal of divine presence is a direct consequence of collective disobedience and moral decay. This interpretation serves as both a warning and a call to action, urging readers to reflect on their spiritual commitments and the presence of divine glory in their communities.
The prophetic nature of Franklin’s work gained renewed attention post the September 11, 2001 attacks. Readers and scholars revisited “A Call to Righteousness,” noting its prescient warnings about impending judgment and the moral state of nations. This resurgence highlighted the book’s enduring relevance and its capacity to speak to unfolding global events.

In essence, “A Call to Righteousness: Impending Judgment” is more than a historical or theological treatise; it is a timeless exhortation. Franklin challenges individuals and nations alike to introspect, repent, and realign with principles of righteousness. His work serves as a reminder that the trajectory of a nation is profoundly influenced by its collective moral and spiritual choices, and that heeding calls to righteousness is paramount to avert impending judgment.

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In 1994, as a prophetic warning to the nation some seven years before the 9/11 attacks, Dr. David Franklin wrote “A Call to Righteousness: Impending Judgment.” Drawing conclusions from Ezekiel’s chapter 12 desolation, destruction, dispersion, despair and prophetic hope in chapter 14, he warns that:

(1)   When a nation persists in violence, the Sovereign Lord confronts and holds responsible
(2)   When a nation forgets God, He allows for times of repentance
(3)   If repentance is ignored, God will expose and execute judgment on an unfaithful nation.

The book continues with a call for international righteousness (p. 10) and a critique of the debt-free myth proclaiming a time of economic shift (p. 11-12). Remember, this warning was written two decades before anyone in America had mentioned foreclosure, crises or global economic crises. But my favorite chapter still is the interpretation of Ezekiel’s vision of the departure of the Glory of God (p. 20-21).

I read this book back in 1999 and frankly had forgotten about it until 2011 when, at a young ministers training camp in the mountains of Bulgaria, we experienced what we consider the most genuine appearance of the Glory of God in our whole ministry. We wrote about it then and presented our observation at the 2012 Missions Conference at the Good Shepherd Church of God inPahokee,FL. The four points of our observation carry a tremendous prophetic resemblance to what Dr. David Franklin had proclaimed in his book 18 years ago:

(1) Every time God renews His covenant with His people, He shows His presence.

(2) We know that God is present in the covenant, because He shows His glory. It happened to Moses and his generation. And it also happened to Solomon several hundred years later.

(3) When a generation looses the vision of the Glory of God, God begins renewing His covenant again with a new generation.

(4) God is not satisfied with a people who know the signs and the blessings of the covenant. He rests not until He is revealed as the God of the covenant.

 

VICTORY DAY?

Donald Trump Declares May 8 as Victory Day in World War II
U.S. President Donald Trump has officially designated May 8 as Victory Day in World War II. The date commemorates the Allied triumph over Nazi Germany in Europe and is widely recognized as a symbol of the end of hostilities on the continent.

Security Concerns Ahead of May 9 Victory Day Celebrations
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Kyiv cannot guarantee the safety of international leaders attending the Victory Day celebrations in Moscow on May 9.

“Our position is very clear regarding representatives of all countries who have traveled or plan to travel to Russia on May 9 — we cannot take responsibility for what happens on the territory of the Russian Federation. They are the ones responsible for ensuring your safety,” Zelensky stated, as quoted by Agence France-Presse. Despite these warnings, the Kremlin has stated that a “significant” number of foreign heads of state are expected to attend the military parade in Moscow, including Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Medvedev Issues Threat Regarding May 10
In direct response to President Zelensky’s comments, Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council, issued a stark warning. He stated that there is “no guarantee that May 10 will come for Kyiv” in the event of “a real provocation on Victory Day,” intensifying tensions surrounding the commemorative events.

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.

The Third Wave And The Third World

PNEUMA 37 (2015) 177–200

The Third Wave and the Third World C. Peter Wagner, John Wimber, and the Pedagogy of Global Renewal in the Late Twentieth Century*

Jon Bialecki

University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland

Jon.Bialecki@ed.ac.uk

Abstract

While a great deal of social science literature has examined the explosion of pente- costal and charismatic Christianity in the Global South as well as conservative and anti-modern forms of resurgent Christianity in the United States, little work has been done to investigate the causal effects of the former on the latter. Drawing from exist- ing literature, interviews, and archives, this article contributes to filling that gap by arguing that in the mid-twentieth century, evangelical missionary concerns about com- petition from global Pentecostalism led to an intellectual crisis at the Fuller School of World Missions; this crisis in turn influenced important Third Wave figuressuch as John Wimber and C. Peter Wagner and is linked to key moments and developments in their thought and pedagogy.

Keywords

C. Peter Wagner – Church Growth – Fuller School of World Missions – global Pente- costalism – John Wimber – pedagogy

* In addition to the print and archive sources listed below, this material is drawn from confi-

dential interviews with people associated both with The Vineyard and the Fuller School of

World Missions/School of Intercultural Studies; I thank them for their generosity. I also wish

to thank the librarians and archivists at the Regent University Library for all the assistance

rendered to me when I was researching in the John Wimber Collection. An earlier version of

this talk was presented to the University of Edinburgh Centre for the Study of World Chris-

tianity Seminar Series. Drafts of this paper benefited from comments by Amos Yong, Caleb

Maskell, and two anonymous peer reviewers; all errors and insufficiencies are of course mine

alone.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-03702001

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bialecki

This essay argues that a crisis in evangelical missiology resulted from the rapid growth of Pentecostalism worldwide and that this crisis had important effects on the thought and pedagogy of several important American charismatic fig- ures, including John Wimber (a leading figure in the Vineyard Christian Fel- lowship) and C. Peter Wagner (a noted charismatic educator and author). Fur- thermore, this article also argues that through Wagner and Wimber this crisis resulted in an “instrumentalization” of charismata in the early Vineyard and in a shift from a quantitative imaginary to a qualitative imaginary in segments of the American Church Growth movement. Part of the stakes in this argu- ment arise from the influence of these two figures; however, part of the possible relevance of this argument comes from the fact that it is relatively rare for academics to consider the influence of global Christianity on the charismatic renewal movements of the 1980s and 1990s.

This is unfortunate. Of all the world-historical shifts that have occurred in the last one hundred years, without doubt among the most important have been the shifts in the global distribution, numbers, forms, and intensities of Christianity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This has, at least in part, taken the form of the exponential growth of the pentecostal and charis- matic versions of Christianity in Africa, Latin America, and Oceania, which has brought about both a demographic and an intellectual shift in the locus of Christianity from Europe and America to the so-called Global South (previ- ously known as the Third World).1

It is usual, in discussing these forms of Christianity, to contrast their growth and intellectual influence with the demographic loss and secularization that has occurred in the previous Christian centers of concentration in western Europe and Anglophone North America.2

Secularization, however understood, has not been a uniform process. Soci- ological evidence indicates that while some religious forms have been waning, until quite recently more “conservative” forms of Christianity have fared better and had even tended to grow, although this growth may have recently topped out in America. I am careful about the term conservative here, because I want to be clear that these resurgent forms of American religiosity under discussion are not conservative in the Burkean sense of the word. In the United States, for

1 See generally Joel Robbins, “The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity,”

Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 117–143; Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The

Coming of Global Christianity(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

2 These generalizations are particularly the case in my discipline of anthropology; for reasons

of competency and comity, anthropology will be the primary (though not the exclusive) focus

of my discussion of the literature.

PNEUMA 37 (2015) 177–200

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the third wave and the third world

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instance, these avowedly anti-modern forms of Christianity have been quite innovative at the levels of technology, practice, aesthetics, and theology, and these innovations have been at times quite important.3

A good example of this innovation is the “Third Wave,” an American charis- matic revival movement that started in the late twentieth century. The term Third Wave is used to suggest that this form of pentecostal-infused evangelical Christianity, which consists of post-denominational charismatically affiliated churches, is a successor to the two “previous” “waves of the Spirit”: Pentecostal- ism in the early twentieth century and the mid-century charismatic move- ments that occurred in the various established denominations. Unfortunately the term is misleading, since it tends to portray these other Christian forms as living fossils; and it is questionable whether terms of more recent coinage, such as the “New Apostolic Reformation” or “Apostolic Networks,” are any better.

A specific illustration is the Vineyard, which, having originated in Southern California, is now an international church planting movement. When the Vine- yard discusses its “distinctives” it focuses on being “culturally current,” that is, it eschews what it sees as “religious” forms and instead prefers speech, pre- sentation, and worship that are more in harmony with contemporary cultural and aesthetic norms. Vineyard praise music, for example, borrows heavily from various popular music genres. More telling of innovation, the Vineyard also presents itself as “empowered evangelicals” or as part of the “radical middle.”4 Both of these rather gnomic terms indicate that the Vineyard understands itself to be a mix of evangelical theology on one hand and pentecostal supernatural practices, such as speaking in tongues, healing, and prophecy, on the other. This may seem to be an unstable compound, and the fractious history of the Vine- yard suggests that it is, but for many Vineyard believers, particularly long-term

3 On theologically conservative American Protestantism as ideologically anti-modern while

still adopting modern technologies and organizational templates, see Bruce Lawrence, De-

fenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age (Columbia, sc: University

of South Carolina Press, 1995); Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamen-

talist Language and Politics (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2000). This literature

primarily addresses forms of Fundamentalism and Conservative Evangelicalism; in contrast,

R.G. Robin has argued that certain strains of early Pentecostalism could be characterized as

displaying a folk-modernity; that characterization seems to be in part based on the utilitar-

ian use of modernist modes of organization, however. R.G. Robins, A.J. Tomlinson: Plainfolk

Modernist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

4 Rich Nathan and Ken Wilson, Empowered Evangelicals: Bringing Together the Best of the

Evangelical and Charismatic Worlds(Ann Arbor,mi: Vine Books, 1995); Bill Jackson,The Quest

for the Radical Middle: A History of the Vineyard (Cape Town: Vineyard International, 1999).

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veterans and leadership, this instability is a feature and not a bug; it makes their religious practice seem exciting and perhaps a little dangerous.

Both this sense of danger and the idea of the Vineyard as a hybrid object are an inheritance from John Wimber. Wimber was, at different times, both the founding director of the Department of Church Growth at the Fuller Institute of Evangelicalism and Church Growth and a session player for the Righteous Brothers. He led the Vineyard from 1982until his death in 1997;it wasduring this period that the Vineyard experienced its greatest growth, and this was also the time when its reputation as a charismatic renewal movement was cemented.

The Vineyard has had respectable growth; it has expanded from thirteen churches when Wimber started stewarding the movement to its present state of 1,500 churches globally, with about 590 churches in the United States and more than one hundred churches in the uk.5 More than for its growth, how- ever, the Vineyard has been lauded for its influence; it has been described as being responsible for the “Californianization” of American Evangelicalism, as being part of a “second reformation” that has resulted in a new, experientially centered Protestantism, and as one of the “way-stations on [the] transnational rails” that are responsible for the global propagation of neo-charismatic and pentecostal Christianity.6

This last descriptor is interesting, because it brings up a common omission in the literature. By and large little has been written about the simultaneous rise of what we might call “global Pentecostalism” on one hand, and of anti-modern forms of American Protestant and post-Protestant Christianity on the other. When this phenomenon is addressed, at least in the field of anthropology, it is usually as the effect of ideational material and financial support from western and often American forms of Christianity to global pentecostal-charismatic Christianity;7when the effect of global pentecostal-charismatic Christianity on western and North American Christianity is considered, it is usually either as part of diasporic movements or expatriate churches opening in the West (for instance, in the vast literature on Ghanian and Nigerian churches in Europe and the United Kingdom).

5 Thomas Higgins, “Kenn Gulliksen, John Wimber, and the Founding of the Vineyard Move-

ment,”Pneuma34 (2012): 208–228.

6 Mark Shibley, Resurgent Evangelicalism in the United States: Mapping Cultural Change since

1970 (Columbia, sc: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); Donald Miller, Reinventing

American Protestantism: Christianityin the New Millennium(Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1997); David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Malden, ma: Blackwell

Publishers, 2002).

7 See, e.g., Steve Brouwer, Paul Gifford, and Susan D. Rose, Exporting the American Gospel:

Global Christian Fundamentalism(New York: Routledge, 1996).

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This lack of attention on the part of anthropologists to the effects of global Christianity on the West is particularly pronounced. The last decade has seen a growing interest in global Christianity as well as Christianity in Europe and America.8 That shift, however, has occurred for what is understood to be two distinct and autonomous reasons: global Christianity has become of interest to anthropology because of its growth, while resurgent anti-modern western Christianity is seen as a worthy object because of its perceived political vitality.9

There are reasons to be suspicious of this account of one-sided western influence: it is clear that in previous moments of comparable religious foment there was a much greater level of transnational integration. Historians of early Pentecostalism, and indeed early Pentecostals themselves, were well aware of the international networks traced out by late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century revivals; in contrast to the usual Topeka-to-Azusa Street folk narrative common among contemporary pentecostal believers in the United States, early twentieth-century pentecostal intellectuals such as Frank Bartleman often pos- ited different alternative peregrinations of the movement, favoring itineraries that had the spirit first transversing Wales and India instead of Topeka before alighting in Los Angeles and Azusa Street.10

Here I will present a similar international genealogy for the Vineyard, albeit one with more phase changes and one that goes through a rather narrow institutional bottleneck. Now the Vineyard tends to frame its history as a domestic revival; what is being claimed here is that both the form and the growth of the Vineyard were catalyzed by a crisis in American evangelical missiology that is directly traceable to the growth of Christianity in the Global South. This crisis gave rise to an attempt by American Evangelicals to capture what they would categorize as pentecostal supernatural powers and to use these powers for what they understood as godly but yet technocratic ends: as another instrument in the set of tools that was programmatically offered by the self-styled social science of American Church Growth. This, I will argue, not only gave rise to the Vineyard, but it also mutated segments of the Church Growth movement so much that it became something else entirely.

8

9

10

See Jon Bialecki, Naomi Haynes, and Joel Robbins, “The Anthropology of Christianity,” Religion Compass2 (2008): 1139–1158.

For a rare exception in anthropology, see Kevin Lewis O’Neill, City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), which discusses the mutually beneficial interactions between pentecostal megachurch pastors in both the developed and the developing worlds.

Frank Bartleman, Azusa Street (Plainfield,nj: Logos International, 1980).

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“Look Out! The Pentecostals are Coming!”

Scholars writing on the Vineyard treat it is as a domestic affair, a revival that fell from the sky in a hermetically sealed Protestant America. Three scholarly works offer accounts that have been beneficial in documenting this quickly growing movement. To differing degrees, however, they focus on the Vineyard only in so far as it responded to, catalyzed, or caused transformations within white evangelical culture within the United States; when the forces that brought the Vineyard into being are explored in the context of any larger socio-historical phenomena, they are regarded primarily as intertwined with changes in the broader Anglophone culture.

Tanya Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back is chiefly an ethnographic account of the modes of self-discipline that allow Vineyard believers to have a sense of God as both a sensory presence and a perceived interlocutor.11The author does, however, take up history as well, tracing this underlying desire for immediacy back to the Jesus People movement of the 1960s; this, Timothy Jenkins has recently stated, “on its own is a valuable contribution to the study of Protestant Christianity.”12

Similarly, Donald Miller’s Reinventing American Protestantism also depicts the Vineyard as basically a sequel to the 1960s Jesus People movement and an iteration of a larger postmodern American Protestantism.13 What sets the Vineyard apart in Miller’s account was its transformation by Wimber’s exper- tise as a Fuller “church growth consultant” and by his interest in more charis- matic Christianity and divine healing. Miller regards the Vineyard as a new turn resulting from a post-1960s rejection of hierarchical religion and, simultane- ously, as another repetition of the cycle of denominational growth and decay that (following Fink and Starke) Miller sees as central to the religious history of North America.14To the degree that any region outside the United States exists

11

12

13

14

T.M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relation- ship with God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).

Timothy Jenkins, “‘Religious Experience’ and the Contribution of Theology in Tanya Luhrmann’sWhen God Talks Back,”hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory3 (2014): 369–373. Miller, American Protestantism; see also his account of the post-Wimber period in Daniel Miller, “Routinizing Charisma: The Vineyard Christian Fellowship in the Post-Wimber Era,” inChurch, Identity, and Change: Theology and Denominational Structures in Unsettled Times, ed. David A. Roozen and James R. Nieman (Grand Rapids, mi: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005).

Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy(New Brunswick,nj: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

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at all for Miller, it is not as a causal factor but either as a missions field for these movements or as parallel examples of theologically conservative, experientially centered religiosity occurring in other geographical domains.

Bill Jackson’s whig history of the Vineyard, The Quest for the Radical Middle, is centered on the particularities of the Vineyard and, unlike Luhrmann and Miller, does not attempt to depict the movement as another token of a larger abstract type.15This leaves it more nuanced, even if it does use a larger western Christian history, and particularly an Anglo-American Christian history, as the background against which the figure of the Vineyard is made visible. Jackson’s account, however, is centered almost exclusively on John Wimber, so much so that it reads as much as a biography of Wimber as it does a church history.

What I am suggesting here, though, is that while Wimber certainly was pivotal, he was only a proximate cause. To understand the Vineyard, we must not only leave the United States but must also turn to another figure, although again nothing can be attributed solely to this person either.

C. Peter Wagner’s career trajectory will place him in the center of some of the more contentious moments of American pentecostal and charismatic Chris- tianity during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; he could be viewed as either wandering Zelig-like into these moments or, alternatively, as mid- wifing them. More importantly, it was he who coined the two most common terms used for Vineyard-like movements: while “radical middle” and empow- ered Evangelicals are Vineyard-originated terms, it was Wagner who coined the phraseThirdWaveoftheSpiritand, a decade and a half later, the termNewApos- tolic Revivalas well.

Some current Vineyard members tend to view C. Peter Wagner as inclined slightly toward being a raconteur and a self-promoter. But there is reason to suspect that his own accounts of his days as an evangelical missionary to Bolivia may differ. There is a certain American charismatic speech-genre that is structured by early failure turning into later unforeseeable yet exemplary success; it is a way of marking the kind of transformative journey that is so central to charismatic sensibilities. But Wagner’s account of his early mission days exhibits something so raw and almost abject about the way he discusses his initial failings, and this, along with the exacting nature of the quantitative figures that he uses to demonstrate the degree to which success eluded him, lends plausibility to these claims rather than reducing them to a mere element in a genre form.

15

Jackson,Quest.

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Consider the details. By 1965, Wagner was an important figure in Bolivian evangelical missions. He was an experienced missionary who, except for a year’s furlough spent earning a Th.M. from Princeton Theological Seminary, had been working in Bolivia since 1956. When he returned to the mission field after that one-year sabbatical, his qualifications, along with an earlier master’s degree from Fuller Seminary, eased his way toward becoming head of the Bolivian Theological Educational Association and General Director of the Bolivian Indian Mission. The same qualifications also made him the ideal Bolivian partner for a series of national pastors’ conferences funded by the Los Angeles-based World Vision International.

The World Vision money was a particular boon, since it allowed the orga- nizations that Wagner served to carry out a rather ambitious national project. The money wasfolded intoan alreadyexisting Bolivia-wideprogrambeing con- ducted by the “Evangelicalism in Depth Institute” (eid), an organization that promoted intra-evangelical cooperate projects. eid had determined that 1965 would be a year for congregations to make a push for conversions such as had not occurred before in the preceding seventy years of evangelical activity in Bolivia. The rough idea was, in one coordinated and exhaustive effort, to col- lectively spend evangelical Bolivian resources entirely toward the conversion of the nation. In recalling the year, Wagner described the tone among his fellow Bolivian evangelicals as follows: “Never has there been more excitement; never had there been more unity; never had there been more public pronounce- ment of the gospel.”16 This exhaustive coordination sometime worked to the exclusion of all else: “Some Christian Bible schools even closed for the year so the students and faculty could be active in eid. The hope? Reach Bolivia for Christ!”17

The scope of this aspiration is striking. The gap between that aspiration and its achievement, however, is significant. Consider these numbers. In 1964, the year before Wagner’s push, Brazilian evangelical Protestantism grew 15 percent. The next year, during the Wagner-led concerted effort, there was a 3-percent dropin growth. This was not a permanent drop; during 1966 it rose back up to 14 percent, only to fall back down again to 11 percent the following year.18Wagner’s own project did not “reach Bolivia for Christ,” but rather caused its hand to falter for a season. Damning as these statistics are, Wagner cannot complain about them; these numbers were Wagner’s own.

16

17 18

C. Peter Wagner, Wrestling with Alligators, Prophets, and Theologians: Lessons from a Life- time in the Church: A Memoir (Ventura,ca: Regal, 2010), 64.

Ibid., 66.

Ibid.

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Wagner compiled these figures as part of a post-mortem that he put together in the early 1970s, when he was working as a professor at the Fuller School of World Missions, a newly instituted section of the larger Fuller Seminary. Wagner’s dissection of theeid“reach Bolivia for Christ” campaign not only was frank in observing how Evangelicals were fairing, but it was also forthright in identifying which group was succeeding where Wagner’s own Evangelicals had failed. And that successful group was the Pentecostals.

Wagner’s examination of pentecostal success, not just in Bolivia but in all of Latin America, was published in a 1973 monograph with the off-putting title Look Out! The Pentecostals Are Coming.19 The title, reminiscent of a Satur- day afternoon horror matinee, echoes the then-regnant American evangelical sense of otherness about Pentecostalism. The book ends up, however, with a surprising endorsement both of Latin American pentecostal success and of the tactics through which that success was achieved. Here Pentecostalism is presented not as a force with which Evangelicalism is vying but, rather, as a template that a missionary Evangelicalism should adopt. In expressing his aspirations for the book, Wagner states that “[p]rejudice has kept many non- Pentecostals from learning the valuable lessons about effective evangelicalism in Latin America that Pentecostals can teach. I pray that God will use this book to break down some of those long-standing barriers.”20

Wagner himself is quite blunt about having shared some of those prejudices when he was a missionary in Bolivia. He describes himself as being a “convinced cessationist” when he was in Bolivia, a man who would preach against a local pentecostal healing campaign held at the edges of the city because “respectable Christians met in buildings, not in vacant lots.”21Wagner also recalls telling his “people” that the pentecostal “claims of healing were false and that their true faith in God would be severely damaged if they dared to show up at one of those disreputable gatherings.”22

Regardless of his in-field prejudice, Wagner acknowledges that the growth of Pentecostalism in Latin America during the twentieth century has been one of the “success stories” for Protestant Christianity. Wagner estimates that in 1900, just one year before Agnes Ozman received the gift of tongues in Topeka, Kansas, there were only 50,000 Protestant adherents in Latin America;

19

20 21 22

C. Peter Wagner,Look Out! The Pentecostals Are Coming(Carol Stream,il: Creation House, 1973).

Wagner, Look Out!13.

Wagner,Wrestling, 115, 117.

Ibid., 117.

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he also estimated that by the year 2000, twenty-seven years after his book was published, Latin America would be the home for 100,000,000 Protestant believers, most of which would be pentecostal.23This was a slight overshoot: at the dawn of the new millennium there were actually an estimated 64 million Latin American Protestants. This is an impressive number, but still about 36 million short of what Wagner envisioned.

The point is not that Wagner failed in his prognostication, but rather that he was so enamored of pentecostal success that the one hundred-million mark was imaginable for him, a value he extracted from the then-current tangent of pentecostal growth. Pentecostal growth was the controlling variable here because Wagner considered Pentecostalism to be, in effect, the engine of Prot- estant growth in Latin America; Wagner estimates that at the time he was writing, nearly two-thirds of all Latin American Protestants were pentecostal, and that this condition would either continue into the future or would inten- sify. For Wagner, in Latin America at least, Protestant success was, in effect, only pentecostal success.

Wagner cites numerous reasons for this pentecostal growth. He claims that a historic tendency of Pentecostals to come from lower socioeconomic stand- ing gives pentecostal missionaries an edge in recruiting the proletarian and peasant populations who make up the majority of the region’s people. He also attributes a great deal of success to pentecostal practices of immediately inte- grating believers into the church; by contrast, he presents Evangelicals and Fundamentalists as seeing their mission completed at the moment of conver- sion, an approach that runs a higher risk of these conversions simply not taking.

Wagner also suggests that a pentecostal focus on planting new churches, rather than growing already existing churches, is important. Even the increased tendency of Pentecostalism to go through church or denominational splits is identified as a positive, since this multiplies churches, and after splits both par- ties tend to grow numerically. Wagner also credits Pentecostals with a more complete mobilization of church membership in evangelizing efforts, which works not only to increase yield but also to identify and train people whose tal- ents might make them possible pastors themselves in the future; this operation is easier to carry out if spiritual baptism and on-the-street apprenticeship train- ing can do the work that normally occurs through years of seminary education. Finally, unlike other Protestant worship services, Latin American pentecostal services are presented as being “culturally relevant,” Wagner’s term for religious material crafted to secular sensibilities and aesthetics; this is a vision of worship

23

Wagner, Look Out!25.

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with guitars and accordions instead of pipe organs, which, according to Wag- ner, makes pentecostal services that much more enjoyable for adherents.

The strategies that Wagner believed he identified in Latin American Pente- costalism seem to be mainly about leveraging individual attention and ener- gies, and they will also be found in the Vineyard once it comes into being. But these are all new modes of social organization that could be taken up by Evangelicals without adopting some of the core practices associated with Pen- tecostalism.

There are other suggestions by Wagner, however, that flirt with a reconfigura- tion of Evangelicalism and with an adoption of not just peripheral pentecostal modes of social organization but also with fundamental orientations toward authority and affect. We see this in Wagner’s call for a new pneumatology, for speaking in tongues, and for praying for the sick. For Wagner, pentecostal pneu- matology is as much a problem as it is an opportunity. While he acknowledges that the sort of “regeneration” seen in converts to Pentecostalism can only be understood as the work of the Holy Spirit, he believes that this engenders a ten- dency for Pentecostals to see their high levels of conversion as evidence that they “have a corner on the Holy Spirit,” that “the Holy Spirit is working only in Pentecostalism,” and that the Spirit “is not to be found in other churches.”24

This gives rise to two problems: a pentecostal triumphalism, which Wag- ner decries, and an evangelical carte blanche rejection of pentecostal claims regarding the Holy Spirit. For Wagner both positions are in error, as he holds that “Pentecostal doctrines of the Holy Spirit probably are somewhat less sig- nificant than Pentecostals like to think, and somewhat more significant than non-Pentecostals like to think.”25

Part of the difference between evangelical and pentecostal pneumatology is merely in degree of emphasis, which Wagner suggests should not be a problem for American Evangelicalism of this period; the real problem was the initial evidence doctrine, according to which tongues is the sole acceptable indication of infilling by the Holy Ghost. But noting that initial evidence is not a uniform position, he sees this doctrine as incidental to pentecostal growth and perhaps even a drag on it. Initial evidence, therefore, is one bit of Pentecostalism that Evangelicals can dispense with when they are pillaging the charismatic tool shed. Tongues are an acceptable form of ecstatic prayer, but nothing more.

For Wagner, however, the exemplary pentecostal charisma is not speaking in tongues but healing. Part of this has to with participation rates; drawing on

24 25

Ibid., 30. Ibid., 33.

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extant studies, he estimates that far more Latin American Pentecostals pray for healing than speak in tongues. Wagner sees this as in part a reaction to poverty, with Pentecostals turning toward the only medical system that many of them can afford; but he also sees healing as part of a concerted effort to grow the religion. Wagner notes an evangelical antipathy to healing, in which supernatural cures are looked down on as something less than salvation. But Wagner also notes that for Pentecostals, salvation is brought about by healing, or rather, healing is evidentially powerful, compelling those healed to convert.

This is a rather utilitarian take on pentecostal healing; in fact, Wagner’s entire analysis is relentlessly ends-related. The only break from a continual cost-benefits analysis is the occasional colourful illustrative passage featuring one Latin American pentecostal or another, and one senses that in the end these figures are there as guarantors of Wagner’s knowledge of the subject as much as they are case studies to be learned from.

This utilitarianism in Wagner’s early work is important. To understand this, it helps to know a little bit about the institution that Wagner joined after this time in Bolivia, the School of World Missions (swm, now called the School of Intercultural Studies), located at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California. While this article will focus on the swm, we should note that Fuller Seminary is itself a storied institution, founded by radio revivalist Charles Fuller in 1947 with the intention of restoring what was felt to be a lack of wider respect for theologically conservative Protestant scholarship. Debates in that school proved to be a catalyst for the neo-evangelical break with Fundamentalism that occurred in the post-World War ii period in the United States. Fuller was the scholarly space in which American evangelical intellectuals did the most to free themselves from both dispensation and inerrancy, the two most problematic inheritances from early twentieth-century American Fundamentalism.26

Interestingly enough, the School of World Missions itself did not begin as an organ of Fuller Seminary but was originally founded in Eugene, Oregon in 1957 as an independent entity. The institution was set up by Donald McGavran, a mainline Protestant missionary to India who was disenchanted with a per- ceived missions emphasis on social works as opposed to evangelism. Theswm was not supported by McGavran’s denomination and thus had a hardscrab- ble start: its physical plant was a just a single spare room in the corner of a library that belonged to an unaffiliated Christian College. Only in 1965 was the

26

See George Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangeli- calism(Grand Rapids,mi: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1987).

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swm adopted by Fuller as an attempt to balance the then new Fuller School of Psychology, an initiative that struck some of the School of Theology faculty members as too humanistic.

The swm’s initial autonomy is important because, as the head of an origi- nally independent institution, Donald McGavran had a high degree of freedom in determining how the school should be organized, and his choices would have far-ranging effects. One of the effects was to ensure that the school acted as a testing ground for what McGavran understood to be a new Christian sci- ence. Despite its name, McGavran saw the swm not as engaging in missiology but, rather, as a proving ground for an academic and empirical discipline that McGavran called Church Growth. Church Growth could be separated from missiology in that missiology was, in McGavran’s eyes, unsystematized and predicated on hearsay and anecdotal evidence, while Church Growth was a self-conscious integration of a positivist social science and theology, fulfilling the Great Commission in a quantitatively verifiable manner.

The vision of Church Growth was that while in one sense God is in heaven, in another sense God is also in the details, and the details were capable of being conveyed quantitatively. As a break with missiology, McGavran pioneered a technique through which growth could be numerically charted and classified: Does this growth take place through biological reproduction, conversion, or transfer from other Christian groups? Just as important for McGavran was identifying the social groups within which growth was occurring. Borrowing from structural-functionalist social anthropology, McGavran created technical means for the identification of homogenous, bounded “people groups,” as well as a metric for identifying the degrees of social distance between any two people groups.

There were two purposes for all this quantification and systematizing. The first was to allow for a crafting and testing of hypotheses regarding the causes of church growth, all of which could be articulated in a demographic language borrowed from the “harder” social sciences. The second purpose, however, regarded quantification at a different level. By charting how various churches were growing and what kind of growth they were experiencing, it would now be possible to allocate resources, both human and financial, in places where there would be the most reward for the investment. For McGavran, the parable of the sower did not mean that the proverbial seeds are to be scattered indis- criminately, but rather that some soils were better than others.

The swm, then, was originally envisioned as a place where this quantifica- tion could be championed, but also as a space in which hypotheses derived from the field could be transferred, to see how they would work out in other domains. Thus it was no accident that when he set up the school, McGavran

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originally demurred from offering degrees to merely aspirant missionaries who would come with little data and fewer ideas from the missions field; rather, he desired to educate only already practicing missionaries on furlough (for instance, three years of foreign service and fluency in a field language was an original entrance requirement for students). The purpose behind this arrange- ment was that this would help position the schools as a central hub through which church growth information would flow globally; in a sense, it was an attempt to make the very campus itself part of a recording apparatus as it not only served to distribute church growth findings, but also became a node to which field reports could be brought and pooled for testing purposes.27

One of the first problems that theswmaddressed was the difficulty posed by indigenous practices considered supernatural or magical in nature. The prob- lem was not the presence or the continuing acceptability of magic in recently converted populations, but rather the danger caused by its absence. The dif- ficulty was that conversion had taken too well. This was a particular concern for swm faculty with a background in anthropology. While they would end up going quite different ways, both Paul Hiebert and Charles Kraft were experi- enced missionaries with cultural anthropological training. Kraft reported that, when participating in missions work with the Higi in Nigeria, he was repeat- edly asked by recent converts what the practical Christian response was to evil spirits, a question for which he felt he had no adequate answer. Hiebert noted a similar phenomenon in his work in India; during a smallpox outbreak, con- verted Christians, unlike the other inhabitants of the village, had no supernat- ural method of treating themselves that harmonized with their understanding of the tenets of their faith.

Hiebert gave a name to the evangelical-caused vacuum in magic. Framing it as an inability to conceive of ways of engaging with supernatural forces that are imagined to occupy an intermediary space between the human and the fully divine, he labelled it the “flaw of the excluded middle.”28 He concluded with a suggestion that this flaw might, in some ways, be evangelical Christianity’s strength as well. The final scene in the essay is of villagers becoming not less interested in Christianity after the smallpox epidemic, but rather more open, moved by the way in which a funeral for a small child displayed both the resolve of the village Christians and their faith in the resurrection. This

27

28

See Charles Kraft, swm/sis at Forty: A Participant/Observer’s View of Our History (Pasa- dena,ca: William Carey Library, 2005).

Paul Hiebert, “The Flaw of the Excluded Middle,” Missiology: An International Review 10 (1982): 35–47.

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might have been God’s purpose, Hiebert offers, and he warns the reader against making “Christianity a new magic in which we as gods can make God do our bidding.”29

In contrast, Kraft’s solution is to adopt Wagner’s solution to the challenge posed by pentecostal growth. Kraft, in effect, was suggesting that the pente- costalization of evangelical missions would not only serve as a stop-gap against pentecostal competition, but would also enable a way of competing with non- Christian supernatural practices. Kraft was not alone. Even McGavran was becoming more interested in what could be done with Christian healing, stat- ing in a 1979 lecture that it was “unscientific” to “close one’s eyes to the fact of faith healing” and that at “suitable times” it should be introduced as way of accelerating church growth.30

In one way this is not too surprising; there are accounts of discussions at Fuller School of World Mission as far back as 1969 about the higher growth rate of Pentecostalism, which gave rise to Wagner’s Look Out.31 But there has been one subtle shift. In Wagner’s earlier account, the pentecostal capacity for engaging in supernatural feats such as healing and deliverances was only one aspect, and in some ways not the most important aspect, of the pentecostal church growth apparatus: divine healing and demonic deliverance would be more important factors because they play to the interests of the population; whether or not they were true was to some degree beside the point. In these later accounts, however, we see an interest specifically in these pentecostal- type supernatural practices, and a shift from stressing that their effectivity lies in the particular audience being addressed to stressing that they are valid because of the supernatural effects they achieve. That is, people are not going to Pentecostals because there is no other place to go for healing; rather, they are doing so because pentecostal healing works.

29 30

31

Ibid., 47.

Donald McGavran, “Divine Healing and Church Growth,” in Power Evangelism(New York: Vineyard International Ministries, 1984). This is not the John Wimber and Kevin Springer text of the same name, but rather a series of printed commentaries in a three-ring binder that was supposed to accompany the Wimber-Springer text during Vineyard training exercises.

Charles Kraft,Christianity with Power: Your Worldview and Your Experience of the Supernat- ural (Ann Arbor,mi: Vine Books, 1989), 6.

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John Wimber, a Respectable Charismatic Option

The difficulty is that attributing effectivity to the charismatic gifts is not the same thing as being able to invoke those gifts. Neither McGavran, Wagner, nor Kraft had any idea how to perform any of the charismata they now found them- selves endorsing. Learning it from American Pentecostals was not an option: again and again, in writings and during public interviews, Wagner and Kraft say that they were hampered by their perception of American Pentecostals as not just doctrinally suspect, but as just plain weird. Kathryn Kuhlman in par- ticular is mentioned, serving as a metonymic representation of all that was unsettling in pentecostal practice. This “weirdness” probably has several roots. It was most likely an expression of the self-perceived class difference between Evangelicals and Pentecostals referenced earlier; undoubtedly, part of it was also a reaction to Kuhlman’s heavily mannered public speaking style, a mode of self-presentation that ran contrary to a wider Protestant speech ethic that valued sincerity and transparency in language.32

What was needed was someone who could engage in pentecostal gifts and around whom they were not nervous. That person would be John Wimber. An affable colleague with evangelical credentials, Kathryn Kuhlman he was not. Between 1974 and 1978, Wimber was responsible for a new initiative of Wagner’s: taking the church growth techniques McGavran originally forged for the missions field and bringing them to domestic Evangelicals. Wimber was a former pastor of an Evangelical Quaker church in Yorba Linda, California, the same part of Orange County that Richard Nixon came from. Despite his Quaker background, he was a committed cessationist. By the mid-seventies, that actually put him out of step with the faculty to which he was closest in the Fuller School of World Missions; there is a story of him walking out, seemingly in some mixture of disbelief and amazement, of a meeting at Fuller when some faculty were recounting hearsay miracles.

32

On Kuhlman, see Todd V. Lewis, “Charisma and Media Evangelists: An Explication and Model of Communication Influence,” Southern Communication Journal 54 (1988): 93–111; on Protestant speech ethic, see Webb Keane,Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). This Protestant speech ethic still exerts some influence in the contemporary Vineyard, though ironically it has been supplemented by other speech ethics that have a structural, if not genealogical, kinship with that of Kuhlman; see Jon Bialecki, “No Caller idfor the Soul: Demonization, Charisms, and the Unstable Subject of Protestant Language Ideology,” Anthropological Quarterly84 (2011): 679–703.

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By the late 1970s, however, Wimber’s position had substantially changed. Overworked and in need of inspiration, Wimber started pastoring a church on the weekends, experimenting directly with the church growth techniques that had been honed outside of the United States. Much of what he employed was the more tradition social science-oriented techniques from the McGavran period. For much of the 1980s Church Growth continued to be an element not only of his church but also of future Vineyard church conferences and training for church-planters, and even to this day there is among many older Vineyard pastors an interest in the sort of business-efficiency literature fetishized by the Church Growth movement.

More than anything else, however, it was healing that fuelled the rapid growth of Wimber’s church, which in five years grew from a small home church to one that had two large services each Sunday attracting two to three thousand persons. The attendees were primarily people who either participated in, or were attempting to emulate, the Jesus People movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.33 By the early 1980s, Kraft and Wagner started regularly making the one-hour drive south from Pasadena to Yorba Linda to see how Wimber’s church was developing.

It was about this time that Wimber, who was already teaching part of a Church Growth course at Fuller as an adjunct, offered also to teach a course on healing. Kraft and Wagner felt obliged to offer this course first to Fuller Sem- inary, since it came out of an “American church,” but the seminary declined. Deciding to offer it themselves, they listed a course in the swm catalog for the 1982 winter term called “mc510: Signs, Wonders, and Church Growth.” It was taught for three hours on Monday evenings; about seventy people were enrolled, and both Wagner and Kraft attended each session as well. Techni- cally Wagner was the actual course convener, but the de facto instructor was Wimber.

The class had two parts: first a lecture by Wimber, and afterward a practicum in which students would attempt to heal other students on stage, all while Wimber gave running commentary. The lecture half of the class left little impression. Wimber’s lecture notes are incredibly vague, and I have never spoken to anyone who took the class who had a very detailed memory of what was covered. The Fuller Library reserves list consists of books by David Yonggi Cho on growing “cell groups,” Hollenweger’s The Pentecostals, and numerous

33

In fact, around this time Lonnie Frisbee, an influential figure in the original Jesus People movement in the 1960s, had joined Wimber’s church in a leadership capacity. Frisbee the Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher,dvd, directed by David Di Sabatino (Warren River,nj: Passion River Productions, 2008).

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books by the Catholic charismatic Francis McNutt; the list even includes one of the classic cessationist texts, Warfield’sCounterfeitMiracles.34Just as notable is the presence of important Church Growth texts, such as Alan Tippett’sPeople Movements in Southern Polynesia.35

The lecture notes are another clue: they include a review of signs and won- ders in the Bible, a brief tour of the miraculous through church history, and case studies of signs and wonders from abroad. The last is interesting in how it sug- gests the connection between this course and anxieties about worldwide global and pentecostal Christianity. Along the same lines was Wimber’s discussion of the relationship between culture and a capacity to invoke the Holy Spirit. Borrowing Kraft’s term for culture, Wimber states that various “worldviews” obscure or facilitate charismata: the western worldview, characterized by “sec- ularism,” “self-reliance,” “materialism,” and “rationalism,” is an impediment to praying in the Holy Spirit, but in contrast, various non-western worldviews, including the Christian worldview, facilitate it.36

What happened in the second half of each class, however, is clearer. A sense of the instruction offered for the applied section is provided in course log reports of Wimber’s pneumatic grand rounds.37 In one case a student comes to the stage, complaining about back pain. Wimber first interviews her to try to determine all he can about the symptoms of the disease she wants healed. Next, he prays for her; we are told that Wimber held her hands and then “spoke to the pain in her back, spoke to her glands and commanded them to be well.” Wimber then explains that he first formed a personal connection with the student through the “prayer interview” and that he then “was exercising authority over the illness.” He bids the audience to take a look at the transient affective moments of the person being prayed for, the small indications that the

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Walter Hollenweger, The Pentecostals: The Charismatic Movement in the Churches (Min- neapolis: Augsburg, 1972); Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, Counterfeit Miracles (New York: C. Scribner, 1918).

Alan Tippett,People Movements in Southern Polynesia: A Study in Church Growth(Chicago: Moody, 1971).

This is drawn from John Wimber’s lecture notes for the first offering of the class, archived in the John Wimber Collection, which is housed in the library at Regent University; this reading of the material is informed by John Wimber and Kevin Springer,Power Evangelism (San Francisco, ca: Harper & Row, 1986). Wimber and Springer’s course presents itself as partially based on the notes for the course, and sources who have attended the class and are also familiar with both the production and content of the book have confirmed this. These notes on class proceedings are archived in the John Wimber Collection, Regent University.

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process is advancing. “When the Holy Spirit rests upon a person,” we are told, “there are many symptoms, such as a fluttering of the eyelids, and a sheen on the face.”

This was not an isolated occurrence. The same course log lists words of knowledge received: on the first day of class, Wimber reports that one stu- dent will have her stomach flu’s symptoms temporarily abated, only to return again as “an attack of the devil.” At this point “she will have to make a decision … whether she will have healing or not.” Sometimes people demurred when there were specific words of knowledge: no one responded when there was a word of knowledge about a “yeast infection,” though a woman came forward after class the next week to report the condition being cured. Often a word of knowledge would be given, garnering no response at all (“angina” and “cystitis” and repeated words of knowledge about toothaches, for instance, went unan- swered).

Words of knowledge usually led to prayer and healing, however. One student received prayer from peers for a sore throat after Wimber gave a word of knowledge about a systematic, persistent ear, nose, and throat infection; the log reports that “while the group was still praying she said ‘I’m healed!’” and notes that she “[l]eft with a slight sore throat.” Malaria, dislocated fingers, various colds and various sprains are all listed as being healed during the run of the course; at one point a “spirit of allergies” is cast out. Even faculty were affected. Peter Wagner’s high blood pressure was healed at one point; during the prayer for Wagner’s condition, Wimber noted for the benefit of the class “Peter’s … fluttering eyelids” and his “heavy breathing.”38

The log also informs us of material that occurred after or outside of class. One student self-reported “body tingles and muscle spasms” as he fought spir- itual oppression; another log states in a matter-of-fact way that after class four students were “slain in the spirit.” We are told about other extra-class incidents, such as a lump in the side that shrank to half its size. One telegraphically con- densed report read thus: “Chinese lady with advanced cancer in lung, throat. (Bad breath stopped the next day). This lady was a backslidden Christian, and during prayer she was ‘slain in the spirit.’”

Despite the course’s formal status as a clinic, Wimber at times also seemed to present it as something that stood outside not only the formal rules of the academy but its scholastic imperative as well; one student who would go on to become a Vineyard pastor recalls being seen in the audience by Wimber. At

38

This account is confirmed both by statements made by Wagner himself (Wrestling, 130– 131) and by accounts from interviews.

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the time Wimber’s eyes caught him, the student was holding Greek flash-cards in his hand; during the raucous prayer session that shortly ensued Wimber shouted out to him (apparently in reference to the student’s earlier attempt at multi-tasking), “This is a lot better than parsing Greek verbs, isn’t it?”

The course was well received, though that does not mean that it did not evoke some criticism. The student comments turned in at the end of the first term contained the usual complaints about course mechanics (too much time wasted in outlining the course, dissatisfaction about the small size of the room, and unhappiness with the syllabus, which had numerous typos and misspelled the names of some healers). These complaints were often accompanied by lists of specific miracles that the student had performed or received. Many called for “more doing,” or for the lecture portion to be shortened to allow more time for prayer.

Primarily, however, the comments affirmed the course and the subject. There were statements such as “This course has changed my life.” One called the class the most “practical” taken at Fuller. Another student went further, predicting confidently that “this course will change the world.” The comments from other students stress the orientation to global Christianity, such as “It’s nice to see what God’s doing in the rest of the world.” Many state that they will be using these techniques when they return to the missions field; this is fitting, in view of the fact that it was the competitive ability of evangelical missions that had motived this turn to the charismatic in the first place.

Not long after the first course was completed, the American Christian media started circulating reports about it; in October of 1982 Christian Life magazine devoted a special issue to it, which was reprinted as a book in the next year, and Fuller began to receive what has been described as “overwhelming” mail and phone calls.39 Not all were positive. While many phoned to support the class, or even to inquire about the possibility of taking it, many others were alarmed by the introduction of pentecostal practices in what was then arguably America’s leading evangelical seminary. By 1985 this came to a head and the course was cancelled, with a book-length committee report documenting the decision published in 1987.40Part of the complaint was about the bureaucratic mechanics. Some claimed that Wimber as an adjunct should not have been

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C. Peter Wagner, ed.,Signs and Wonders Today: New Expanded Edition with Study Questions and Applications(Altamonte Springs,fl: Creation House, 1987).

Lewis Smedes, Ministry and the Miraculous: A Case Study at Fuller Theological Seminary (Waco,tx: Word Books, 1987).

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teaching the course, which seems like an objection invented after the fact.41 The report also states that the class’s disruptive effects were a more important issue. We are told that “[f]aculty members were called to counsel students or members of their families when disillusionment followed their failure to experience the power of healing proclaimed in the classroom; a few persons were caught in a backlash of naïve attempts to discern demons.”42

The report also mentions a complaint that seems tohave been the real nub of the problem: “John Wimber—founder of the Vineyard movement and adjunct instructor along with C. Peter Wagner and Charles Kraft, our professors respon- sible for the course—came to be linked much more closely with Fuller in the minds of the public than his busy schedule of pastoral and conference ministry warranted; his audiences and readers were tempted to impute his opinions and approaches to our faculty more readily that the facts would support.”43In short, the course had made Wimber a celebrity in evangelical and charismatic circles, and Fuller was regarded as unquestioningly endorsing all that Wimber said. For an institution that saw itself as having only recently overcome fundamentalist supernaturalism for a moderate evangelical rationalism that could engage with the wider scholarly world, this was a disaster.44What was worse was that it was spilling over to other courses. I have been told about different class sessions at Fuller during this period that began with long student-led invocatory prayers against demonic forces who sought to wage spiritual warfare against the course, instructor, and students; this is not what the more classically evangelical fac- ulty wanted Fuller’s profile to be. A new version of the class was offered, this time taught by Paul Hiebert, who was never close to Wimber despite Wimber’s adoption of much of Hiebert’s language.45In Hiebert’s version of the class ces- sationist views were given equal time, and there was no applied section.

41

42 43 44 45

There were numerous letters written before the fact showing Wagner, Wimber, and Pier- son, the dean of the School of World Missions, getting advance approval for both the course and for Wimber’s participation. Before the course was taught, a letter was sent to Wimber from Wagner and cc’d to Dan Pierson, the dean of the school, in which Wimber is “formally invited” by theswmfaculty to teach the course. Another letter explains that it was to be listed as cotaught by Wagner and Wimber. Furthermore, there were letters from Pierson himself discussing Wimber’s remuneration ($990) for his part in the course, and many letters to Pierson from Wimber referring to “his” course.

Smedes, Ministry, 7.

Ibid.

Marsden, Reforming, 292–295.

During talks, but in writing as well, Wimber would often positively reference Hiebert’s workonboundedversuscenteredsetsasecclesiasticalforms.See,e.g.,JohnWimber,“Stay-

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Conclusion

But by then it was too late. Kraft and Wagner had changed, Church Growth had changed, and the Vineyard had changed too. The shift in Church Growth was in some ways the most obvious. The shift to the miraculous denatured the sureness, the positivism, and the utilitarianism that was the initial promise of McGavran’s Church Growth movement.46 Part of this has to do with a reimag- ination of who the vital actors were. The miraculous was understood to be a function not of the evangelist’s own exercise of agency, but rather of the Holy Spirit’s: all initiatives come either from God or from evil spirits. This is in oppo- sition to the old church growth model that saw initiatives as human initiatives, and the question was not whether they sprang from God, but whether they were pleasing to him to the degree that they were carrying out the Great Com- mission. This loss of a kind of agency also means a loss of sureness. Working with an “already/not-yet” logic in which the kingdom of God was supernatu- rally present but only at times and not in any predictable way means that one cannot assume that techniques will work automatically.47One cannot know in

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ing Focused: Vineyard as a Centered Set,”VineyardReflections:JohnWimberLeadershipLet- ter(July 1995–February 1996); On centered and bounded set theory, see Paul Hiebert, “Sets and Structures: A Study of Church Patterns, and Reply to Respondents,” in D.J. Hesselgrave, New Horizons in World Mission: Evangelicals and the Christian Mission in the 1980s (Grand Rapids, mi: Baker, 1979). After Hiebert left Fuller for a post at Trinity, he would coedit a monograph critical of Wimber and of the Vineyard, which included a contribution that he penned himself. James Robert Coggins and Paul G. Hiebert, eds., Wonders and the Word: An Examination of Issues Raised by John Wimber and the Vineyard Movement (Winnipeg, mband Hillsboro,ks: Kindred Press, 1989).

Evidence for this can be seen by comparing the differences between the first and third edi- tions (1970 and 1990, respectively) of Donald McGavran’s Understanding Church Growth, a book that I have heard sometimes called (with tongue in cheek) “The Church Growth Bible.” The first edition favors the non-western missions field and thus contains no domes- ticexamples,anddoesnotaddressthe sortofsupernaturalphenomenathatheldWagner’s interest. The third edition, which was revised and edited by C. Peter Wagner, not only con- tains examples taken from inside the United States, but has an additional section entitled “Divine Healing and Church Growth.” Donald McGavran, Understanding Church Growth (Grand Rapids, mi: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1970); Donald McGavran, Understanding Church Growth, 3rd ed., rev. and ed. C. Peter Wagner (Grand Rapids,mi: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1990). Jon Bialecki, “Disjuncture, Continental Philosophy’s New ‘Political Paul,’ and the Question of Progressive Christianity in a Southern California Third Wave Church,”American Ethnol- ogist36 (2009): 110–123.

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advance whether a prayer request will succeed. So much for the certitude given by Church Growth’s empirically tested tenets.

But there was a shift that was in some ways more subtle than the shift from the agentive and the sure. It was a shift to what might be called the chief mode of intelligible apprehension. For the Church Growth movement, things were actual if they were numerable. This had roots in a kind of scientism that, as Matthew Engelke’s work on the history of the British and Foreign Bible Society suggests, has its own evangelical lineage.48 Just as much as it is numerical, however, it is a form of thought that lives in an abstract yet chartable space. Church Growth literature pays exquisite attention to when a bar graph as opposed to a line graph should be used and to the advantages and disadvantages of charting information on semi-logarithmic graph paper. This spatializiation of the temporal serves not only to disaggregate time, but also to make both it and the demographic data embedded in it quantum in nature, fixed in a series of snapshot-like measured amounts. Indeed, the intelligibility of numbers, by their being spatially fixed and broken into discrete instances, is in some ways the core of the Church Growth project as a mode of representation.

In contrast, I would suggest, after charismatisization the chief mode of apprehension is a qualitative one, shot through with various registers of affec- tive intensity and prone to stark discontinuities. The vision of church growth, and of religious life in general, was not an increasing line segment that mea- sured a growing congregation but a surge of power associated with the Holy Spirit and revival, indexed not just by miracles but by degrees of physical and emotional intensity as well. As such, this was a measure of success that resisted quantification, spoken about in gradations (a “powerful” church conference, someone “blessed” with gifts, a church service in which the Holy Spirit “poured out”) that resisted comparison because they were, in the end, speaking not about types but about singularities, irreproducible events comprised of unique constellations of particular peoples, places, and moments. This does not mean that quantification, or at least the deployment of numbers, disappeared, but rather that their role changed. Numbers were no longer for use through com- parison with other numbers, presented in sets, but instead were presented singularly, as a sign of the power of the associated event, or as a phantasmic (and hence supernatural) goal: a boast of planting a hundred new churches in a year, a vision of ten thousand churches that will be planted. This also meant

48

Mathew Engelke, “Number and the Imagination of Global Christianity; or, Mediation and Immediacy in the Work of Alain Badiou,”South Atlantic Quarterly109 (2010): 811–829.

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that there was a certain emphasis on the now, on what God wasdoingthrough the church in this instant, that differed from Church Growth’s more longitudi- nal sensibility, made of “homogenous, empty, time.”49

There were effects on the Vineyard as well, that could be seen as the com- plement of the effects on Church Growth. Wimber’s prayer practice, which he would later call “Power Evangelism,” was in the end a foreign object translated into the technical idiom of Church Growth and intended to be transmitted in a pedagogical setting (even if Wimber’s clinics were a teaching environment like no other to date in the academy). Because of this, I would argue, we find odd moments of an instrumentalization of charismata in Wimber; this differs from the pentecostal gifts, which were not intended for a didactic situation. This is an instrumentalization not in the sense of a human control over the phenomenon, but rather a feeling that the language of procedure and process could convey how to account for and engage in this work, be it either the actual prayer itself, or the at once supplementary yet central testimony regarding it. We see this frequently in Wimber’s presentations, ranging from the endorsement of a ten- point “Engel scale” to fix one’s exact stage in the evangelizing process to the schematic five-step, prayer-interview checklist for spiritual healing that was a Vineyard hallmark during the eighties and early nineties.

The change to note, however, is not the way in which a charismatic move- ment became schematized, or how a schematic intellectual movement became charismatic. What should be noted is that both were reactions toa crisis located not in the heart of the Third Wave, nor in California, but in the places referred to then as the Third World. Whatever else this means, it suggests that even in the late twentieth century, to speak unproblematically of a Christian metropole and a Christian periphery is a mistake, and that seemingly unconnected move- ments can have the same red thread running through them. The Third Wave and the Third World were separate geographically but in other ways quite close; but the details of the institutional paths that charismata traversed as they jumped that gap would still leave a mark on an influential part of the late twen- tieth century’s charismatic revival.

49

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 261.

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Aesthetics and Pathos in the Catholic-Pentecostal Encounter

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S SP

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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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.

Church of God Holds Two Parallel National Assemblies in Bulgaria

Above Dr. David Kemp speaking on National Assembly in Sliven, Bulgaria (March 29, 2025)
Below Dr. Tom Rosson speaking on National Assembly in Stara Zagora, Bulgaria (March 29, 2025)

The Bulgarian Church of God has split in no less than 10 since the early 2000s as following:

1. Bulgarian Church of God (27.12.1990)
2. Church of God in Bulgaria (23.01.2006)
3. God’s Church (13938/2006: 07.02.2007)
4. Church of God-12 (Sofia, Rodostono)
5. New Generation Church of God (05.04.2000)
6. Bethesda Church of God (27.12.2010)
7. BulLiv Church of God (15.01.2000)
8. New Life Church of God (06.11.2000)
9. Bulgarian Church of God – Sofia (4996/2003 Sredetz, E.Georgiev Bul. 2, apt. 4)
10. Bridge Church of God (50/2013)

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