The Head And The Heart

From The Christian Reader:

The Head and the Heart


The history of Christianity in America is a fascinating (and exhausting) study. No more divisive a group of people can be found than in the professing Christians of the United States. When I became a Christian in 1997, I knew that Christianity was not some monolithic, universal cult where every single member believed (or claimed to believe) the very same things. I knew there was diversity and I found this to be a very good thing. But I wasn't prepared for just HOW diverse Christianity really was.





The first three years of my Christian life were spent in a little (and I do mean little), small-town Christian and Missionary Alliance Church. I learned a great deal in this church, but when I left in 2000 to go to work for a major Christian ministry in the Midwest, I was not prepared for the variety of denominational and inter-denominational beliefs that I found in the hallways and cubicles of my new environment. I found it be rather amazing that each of these people, reading the very same Bible that I was reading, could come to such different views and interpretations—and this was in a ministry where we all agreed on the major points of doctrine.



I came to an understanding in those early years of working in Christian ministry. Whether I am right or wrong is not really important, because it reminds me to be sympathetic when I am confronted by differing theological viewpoints. My understanding was this: In their individual efforts to comprehend the incomprehensible Triune God, every Christian puts a heavier emphasis on one particular Member of the Trinity. This may not sound all that profound, but for me it was an amazing revelation. I had already noticed that certain personality types seemed to be drawn to certain types of worship; outgoing, expressive personalities tended to be in charismatic churches (heavy emphasis on the Spirit), action-oriented, "doing" personalities were typically drawn to non-denominational and Baptist churches (heavy emphasis on the Son), and intellectual, introspective personalities seemed to mostly inhabit Reformed and liturgical churches (heavy emphasis on the Father). I realize that this is not exactly what you might call a scientific analysis and many would argue with my compartmentalizing of denominations in this way, but I think you get the idea.



My point in saying all of this is to illustrate what I believe is a (sinful) tendency that we have as individuals—one that seems to be more of an American phenomenon than anywhere else—our willingness to split and fragment ourselves into ever-smaller niches and enclaves over different interpretations of the Bible. Today's excerpt from Jonathan Hill's, The History of Christian Thought, provides just one example—a very influential one—of this tendency. I am not saying that I think all divisions and parting of ways within the Christian Church are sinful, far from it. There are times when separating is necessary and biblical. However, if my observation about different people focusing on different persons of the Trinity is correct, wouldn't separating all the "Spirit" people into a church building, completely removed from the "Father" people, be a bad thing to do? Isn't the Church to be a body, made up of hands and feet, eyes and ears, heads and hearts? In fact, in the very Scripture where Paul teaches about "spiritual gifts," he goes on to make the analogy of the Church being "one body" with "many members" (1 Corinthians 12). I am not endorsing charismatic gifts as being normative for the Church today, but I am saying that charismatic Christians have much to teach those of us who tend to be more reserved and cerebral, and vice versa. The Christian life is one of balance and completion. We are sanctified individually and corporately as we learn to understand and experience other points of view. A body can only function properly when all members are doing their share—together, not separated.



PENTECOSTALISM



In April 1906 a man named William Seymour began preaching at 312 Asuza Street, Los Angeles, California. The venue was a former African Methodist Episcopal church, and the preacher was a former student of Charles Parham, a seminary teacher whose students, given an assignment to study what the Bible said about the blessings of the Holy Spirit, had suddenly begun to experience those blessings themselves.

Parham believed that his students were receiving a "second blessing" of the Holy Spirit, a sort of supplement to the "first blessing" that comes at baptism. The surest sign of the blessing was "speaking in tongues," talking in what sounded like a nonsense language. The phenomenon is mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12 as one of the gifts of the Spirit, and Parham soon experienced it himself and became convinced that a new movement of the Holy Spirit was afoot.

That movement burst forth at William Seymour's meetings. Three services were held every day of the week, and at them the huge congregation would shriek and wail in a feverish excitement. Before long there were miracles too, until the walls of the church were covered with the crutches of those who had been cured.

Perhaps the most striking thing about these meetings was the way they overcame the racial barriers that were prevalent at the time. William Seymour was a black man, but he had been allowed to attend Parham's largely white Bible classes. Most of the worshipers at Asuza Street were black too, but there were plenty of white faces in the crowd. As Frank Bartleman, the most important chronicler of these events, put it, "the color line has been washed away in the Blood."

The dramatic ministries of Parham and Seymour are usually taken to mark the beginning of the Pentecostal movement. The movement takes its name from the Day of Pentecost, when, according to the opening chapters of Acts, the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles and gave them the ability to preach to huge crowds in unfamiliar languages. In fact, of course, Pentecostalism had roots much farther back than Parham: it grew out of 19th-century evangelicalism and ultimately traced its heritage to John Wesley and the revivals of the 18th and early 19th centuries. There had been dramatic signs of the "second blessing" even before Parham and Seymour, but it was only in the 20th century that the movement really spread throughout America. By the 1950s it had begun to penetrate the mainstream churches—Lutherans, Anglicans and Roman Catholics. Because of its transdenominational nature, this new wave of Pentecostalism, sometimes called neo-Pentecostalism or the charismatic renewal, has been much less doctrinally uniform than the earlier Pentecostals; in particular, the strict theology of "two blessings" is much more relaxed, and it is no longer normally claimed that those who lack the gift of tongues lack the Holy Spirit.

In general, Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement have had little direct influence on theology, because of their dogmatic vagueness. From a purely doctrinal point of view, the movement's theology is very similar to that of evangelicalism, apart from the extra emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit. However, the sheer scale of the movement means that it does raise issues for theologians. There are an estimated 100 million members of the charismatic movement today, and that alone means that theologians need to pay special attention to the nature and role of the Holy Spirit in the church.



[Excerpt from Jonathan Hill, The History of Christian Thought (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2003), 312-313.]