After Twenty Years of Research on Pentecostalism

GUEST EDITORIAL

AFTER TWENTY YEARS' RESEARCH ON PENTECOSTALISM

WALTER J. HOLLENWEGER*

Twenty years ago I wrote my dissertation on pentecostalism. Since then both the world in which we live and pentecostalism have changed. Through the work of my students and other researchersl1 have been able to gather information on aspects of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movement of which I was not aware when I wrote The Pentecostals. I shall therefore try to take stock and fill in the gaps.

In this article I divide the movement into its three main streams: the classical Pentecostal denominations (including their mission churches), the Charismatic movements within all traditional churches (including their mission churches), and a new type of emerging Christian church, which David S. Barrett in his World Christian Encyclopedia (1982) calls indigenous non-white churches.

The total membership of all three streams was over one hundred million in 1980 and is expected to grow to 250 million by the year 2000. Thus in the not too distant future there will be more Christians belonging to this type of Chris-tianity than to the Anglican community. They will number almost as many as all other Protestants together.

More challenging, however, is a look at the geographical breakdown. It reveals that the overwhelming part of this Christianity belongs either to the indigenous non-white or to the third world Pentecostal churches. Taken together with general trends in the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, this indicates that the numerical and perhaps also the spiritual centre of Christianity will shift away from white western forms to this new type of Christianity. Christianity as a whole will no longer be a predominantly white person's religion.

* WALTER J. HOLLENWEGER is professor of Mission at the University of Birmingham and lecturer at the Selly Oak Colleges, Birmingham, England. An earlier version of this article was published in Theology in November 1984. 1 Important material for the study of Pentecostalism is now available, namely: EPTA Bulletin (45, chausse de Waterloo, 1640 Rhode-Saint-Gense, Brussels, Belgium) with regular reviews on publications on and by Pentecostals not just in English but also in Eastern European and Scandinavian languages. The bibliography by Charles Edwin Jones, A Guide to the Study of the Pentecostal Movement (Metuchen, N.J. and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. and The American Theological Library Association, 1983, 2 vols) is a great step forward, although its entries on literature and institutions outside the USA are dated and incomplete. W. J. Hollenweger (ed.), Pentecostal Research in Europe: Problems, Promises and People. Proceedings from the Pentecostal Research Conference at the University of Birmingham 1984 (Bern and Frankfort: Lang, Studies in the Intercultural History of Christianity, vol. 37). This volume contains research written by younger Pentecostal scholars and ample bibliographies.

3

INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF MISSION

How was such a major development possible, almost unnoticed by religious and secular historians? Sometimes one gets the feeling that what has not been recorded in certain leading quarters has not happened. Nevertheless the hard facts are there for us all to see. I shall return to this question after I first outline the history of the Pentecostal denominations on the basis of newly available data.

The Pentecostal denominations

Classical pentecostalism (or "the Pentecostal denominations") originated in the encounter of a specific Catholic spirituality with the black spirituality of the former slaves in the United States.

The Catholic spirituality was represented by the Holiness movement of the nineteenth century. Its grandfather was John Wesley (1703-91), founder of Methodism. He translated the writings of Catholic devotional writers and recommended them to his lay preachers. The most important of these were the Italian Lorenzo Scopuli (1530-1610) and the Spanish Benedictine Juan de Castaiza (d. 1598), the Spanish writer Gregor Lopez (1542-96), the French nobleman Jean Baptiste de Rer y (1611-49) and a number of Anglican divines such as William Law (1686-' 761) and Jeremy Taylor (1613-67), who prop-agated similar Catholic dev tional practices. While it is not sure how far Wesley agreed with all their ideas, he certainly accepted their plea for a second religious crisis experience, subsequent to and different from conversion. It was this experience that played a major role in the nineteenth century American Holiness movement. Their best-known representatives were the so-called Oberlin theologians (named after Oberlin College, Ohio, their spiritual and organizational centre): Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1876), Dwight Lyman Moody (1837-99), Robert Pearsall and Hanna Whitall Smith (1827-98; 1832-1911), Thomas Gogswell Upham (1799-1872) and Asa Mahan (1799-1899). They stressed the necessity of holiness or sanctification, sometimes called "second blessing" or "baptism of the Spirit." They understood their social and political pioneering work, such as inviting black and female students into their educational institutions and a plan for world peace through a worldwide institution similar to the present-day United Nations, as part of this religious experience. Very quickly, however, this side of their message of sanctification was forgotten.2

The black spirituality was represented by scores of black hymn-writers and evangelists in early pentecostalism and above all by William James Seymour (1870-1922), a son of former slaves from Centerville, Louisiana. Seymour taught himself to read and write and was for a time a student in Charles Fox

2 Charles Edwin Jones, A Guide to the Study of the Holiness Movement (1974, same publishers as the above-mentioned study-guide on pentecostalism by Jones). See also the forthcoming ambi-tious reprints of significant authors from the Holiness Movement in the series "The Higher Christian Life, " edited by Donald W. Dayton and published by Garland Publishing Co., New York, and the periodical Wesleyan Theological Journal (Lakeville, Ind.).

4


Parham's Bible School in Topeka, Kansas. Parham (1873-1929), often described as a pioneer of pentecostalism, was also a sympathizer of the Ku Klux Klan and therefore he excluded Seymour from his Bible classes. Seymour was allowed only to listen outside the classroom through the half-open door. Nevertheless, Seymour accepted Parham's doctrine of the baptism of the Spirit and began to teach it in a Holiness church in Los Angeles.3

Seymour and his black brothers suffered bitterly. During Seymour's adult lifetime 3436 black persons were known to have been lynched, averaging two a week. Innumerable brutalities took place around him, many of them instigated by Christians. In spite of constant humiliation he developed a spirituality that in 1906 led to a revival in Los Angeles that most Pentecostal historians believe to be the cradle of pentecostalism. The roots of Seymour's spirituality lay in his past. He affirmed his black heritage by introducing Negro spirituals and Negro music into his liturgy at a time when this music was considered inferior and unfit for Christian worship. At the same time he steadfastly lived out his understanding of pentecost. For him pentecost meant more than speaking in tongues. It meant to love in the face of hate, to overcome the hatred of a whole nation by demonstrating that pentecost is something very different from the success-oriented American way of life.

In the revival in Los Angeles, white bishops and black workers, men and women, Asians and Mexicans, white professors and black laundry women were equals (1906!). No wonder that the religious and secular press reported the

3 Douglas J. Nelson, For Such a Time as This: The Story of Bishop William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival, unpubl. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1981. See also Iain MacRobert, "African and European Roots of Black and White Pentecostalism in Britain," in Hollenweger (ed.), Pentecostal Research in Europe. Also W. J. Hollenweger, Pentecost Between Black and White. Five Case Studies on Pentecost and Politics (Belfast: Christian Journals Ltd, 1974) and W. J. Hollenweger, "Dietrich Bonhoeffer and William J. Seymour. A Comparison between two ecumenists," FS Bloch-Hoell (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1985, 192-201).

5


extraordinary events in detail. As they could not understand the revolutionary nature of this Pentecostal spirituality, they took refuge in ridicule and scoffed: "What good can come from a self-appointed Negro prophet?"

The mainline churches also criticized the emerging Pentecostal movement. They despised the Pentecostals because of their lowly black origins. Social pressure soon prompted the emerging Pentecostal church bureaucracy to tame the Los Angeles revival. Pentecostal churches segregated into black and white organizations just as most of the other churches had done. This did not hinder the Pentecostal denominations from developing on a worldwide scale. They are strongest, however, in certain countries of the third world, such as Brazil, Chile, Central America and the Caribbean, Indonesia, Korea and the Soviet Union, and many countries in Africa.

The reason for this fast growth does not lie in a particular Pentecostal doctrine. Doctrinally pentecostalism is not a consistent whole. There are trinitarian and non-trinitarian, infant and adult baptizing Pentecostals and many other ver-sions. There is no worldwide Pentecostal organization. The reason for its growth lies in its black roots, which can be summarized:

orality of liturgy; narrativity of theology and witness; maximum participation at the levels of reflection, prayer and decision-

making and therefore a form of community that is reconciliatory; inclusion of dreams and visions into personal and public forms of worship;

they function as a kind of icon for the individual and the community; an understanding of the body/mind relationship that is informed by

experiences of correspondence between body and mind; the most striking application of this insight is the ministry of healing by prayer.

In Europe and North America, pentecostalism is fast developing into an evangelical middle-class religion; many of the elements that were vital for its rise and expansion into the third world are disappearing. They are being replaced by efficient fund-raising structures, a streamlined ecclesiastical bureaucracy and a Pentecostal conceptual theology. In Europe and North America this theology follows the evangelical traditions to which is added the belief in the baptism of the Spirit, mostly but not always characterized by the "initial sign" of speaking in tongues.

The doctrine of the baptism of the Spirit, to quote the US Assemblies of God, states: "The baptism of believers in the Holy Ghost is witnessed by the initial physical sign of speaking with other tongues as the Spirit of God gives them utterance (Acts 2:4). Speaking in tongues in this instance is the same in essence as the gift of tongues (I Cor. 12:4-28) but different in purpose and use." In other words: each believer is expected to undergo, subsequent to and different from conversion, a second religious crisis experience whose outward sign is speak-ing in tongues. After this experience of the baptism of the Spirit, however, not all believers will be expected to exercise the gift of speaking in tongues.

6


Speaking in tongues (or glossolalia) is considered a gift of the Spirit. It is the ability to speak (human or heavenly) languages without ever having learned them. It therefore sounds to the listener like a language that he does not know.

Both inside and outside pentecostalism there is criticism of this doctrine and practice. Important Pentecostal churches (for example, in Chile or certain countries in Europe) disagree with the doctrine of "the initial physical sign" and believe that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is not always accompanied by this sign. In fact in many Pentecostal churches a great proportion of the members (and sometimes even some of the pastors) have never spoken in tongues. How the Assemblies of God and other similar bodies are going to solve this conflict between their doctrine and their praxis is an open question.

According to William J. Samarin (Tongues of Men and Angels, 1972) and Cyril G. Williams (Tongues of the Spirit, 1981), speaking in tongues is a human ability that may or may not be used in Christian spirituality. It is not abnormal, only uncommon in certain cultures. It also occurs outside Christianity. Just as music, normal speech and the bread in the eucharist are common gifts of creation and may be used for religious purposes, so speaking in tongues is a natural gift that many human beings possess. If they live in societies in which speaking in tongues is considered eccentric or even insane, they do not have a chance to discover this natural ability. In a society in which singing or dancing is ostracized, few people would discover their gifts in these fields.

The function of speaking in tongues is similar to that of dreaming, singing or dancing. It is a means of communicating without grammatical sentences, a kind of atmospheric communication. When a whole congregation sings in tongues in many harmonies (without following a set piece of music), Pentecostals are building a "cathedral of sounds," a "socio-acoustic sanctuary," which is particularly important for Pentecostals who do not have cathedrals. By speak-ing in tongues the individual can pray without being forced to express himself or herself in semantic sentences. That is why Paul says the one who speaks in tongues learns to live with himself (I Cor. 14:4), that is to say, together with its use as a vehicle of prayer it has a psycho-hygienic and spiritual function.

This interpretation is not usually accepted by Pentecostals because they make a sharp distinction between the reality of God's Spirit (with speaking in tongues, Christian spirituality, Bible exposition, healing by prayer) and the reality of "the world" where the prince of this world reigns. But a problem arises when the very same phenomena, which are thought to be exclusively Christian or Pentecostal, appear in other churches or even in non-Christian religions. As I see it, there are only two ways open to solve this problem. First, if this dichotomy is accepted, "Pentecostal phenomena" outside one's own plausibil-ity structures have to be condemned as evil and ungodly. The alternative would be a thorough rethinking of the doctrine of the Spirit, seeing it much more as the ruach Yahweh, the life-giving and life-sustaining spiritus creator. This would open the door to accepting genuine religious experience outside one's own church and, in fact, outside Christianity.

7


Charismatic movements

Charismatic movements are those groupings that have accepted some elements of Pentecostal spirituality, but remain within the confines of the traditional churches. They exist today in all mainline churches (and their missions). The greatest growth appears in the Roman Catholic Church, a development that only astonishes the uninformed observer, as pentecostalism has accepted some important elements of Catholic piety.

Charismatic prayer groups within the mainline churches have existed in Europe from at least 1910. The German Pentecostal leader, Jonathan . A. B. Paul (1853-1931), remained a minister within the German Lutheran Church until his death. He taught and lived a kind of pentecostalism that tried to blend Lutheranism (including infant baptism) with pentecostalism. So did the great majority of his followers. The British Pentecostal pioneer, Alexander A. Boddy (1854-1930), remained an Anglican clergyman until the end of his life and triedthough unsuccessfullyto shape early pentecostalism as a renewal movement within the Church of England. In France there has been an ongoing tradition of a Charismatic movement within the Reformed Churches since the early 1930s. Louis Dallire, one of its foremost theologians, opened the dialogue with the Catholic and Orthodox churches and the Jews at a time when this was unheard of in the mainline Protestant churches. The ministry of the Pentecostal ecumenist David J. Du Plessis (b. 1905 in South Africa), the banquets in fashionable hotels of the California-based Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International (a Pentecostal laymen's movement), and the Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, were instrumental in the outbreak of Pentecostal spirituality in the American mainline churches. Later, the official dialogue between the Vatican and leading representatives of the Charismatic and Pentecostal movements, the influx of third world Pentecostal churches into the World Council of Churches and a number of consultations between leaders of the Charismatic and Pentecostal movements with the World Council of Churches contributed to their growing respectability.4

Initially the Charismatics accepted the theology of pentecostalism along with the Pentecostal experience. This has brought them into conflict with their own traditions. At the present time great efforts are being made to interpret Pentecostal spirituality within the categories of their own denominational traditions. Witness to that are the over one hundred official church documents that Kilian McDonnell has collected in his highly informative Presence, Power, Praise (Collegeville, Minn., 1980, 3 vols). In general the argument runs like this: Since we have become Charismatics we understand our own

4 Arnold Bittlinger, Papst und Pfingstler, Der rmisch katholisch-pfingstliche Dialog und seine kumenische Relevanz (Frankfort/Bern: Lang, Studies in the Intercultural History of Christianity 16, 1978). A. Bittlinger (ed.), The Church is Charismatic. The World Council of Churches and the Charismatic Renewal (Geneva: WCC, 1981; particularly important in this volume is the report by Philip Potter). Rex Davies, Locusts and Wild Honey. The Charismatic Renewal and the Ecumenical Movement (Geneva: WCC, 1978). See also the articles by van der Laan in this issue, and Bittlinger and Michael Harper in the next issue of IRM.

8


(Catholic, Reformed, Anglican, Lutheran) tradition better. There is no need for a critical review of the theological position of our church. There is, however, a need to prove that we are very faithful adherents of our denomination. Charismatic spirituality does not change any of our melodies, but it changes the rhythm and sometimes the key. It does not change our churches, but it lights them up. It does not change our ministry, but it makes it more credible. It does not change our ecumenical commitment, but it makes it more alive.

In my opinion this is wishful thinking. If Charismatic spirituality does not change our traditional denominationalism, what is the use of it? In fact there are signs that certain things are being challenged. I mention only two areas of possible conflict.

The first is the area of ecumenical relationships. It is obvious that the creation of ecumenical fellowships, sometimes even communities, at the grassroots level, especially between evangelicals and Roman Catholics, as has happened in particular in the United States, Ireland, France and Italy, is both an embarrassment and a source of rejoicing for church leaders and ecumenists. The embarrassment is caused by the fact that ecumenists and church leaders are alarmed by their own (verbal) courage when at last the people of God put the ecumenical appeals of their leaders into practice and begin to pray, to celebrate and to think together.

The second area of conflict is the area of authority. Who has authority in the church: the prophet-leader of a Charismatic movement or the bishop, the synod, the executive committee? This is only an academic question as long as the Charismatic movement has no power. When, however, as happens now, the Charismatic movement hires its own staff, raises substantial amounts of money, communicates its decisions to society at large through the media, the opinions of these Charismatic leaders become important. Many observers therefore detect clashes between different power structures within the Charis-matic movement and between the Charismatic movement and the authorities of the churches.

The third world5

The most important churches and movements, however, one finds in the third world. We owe it to Harold W. Turner that we now see these non-white indigenous churches as one cohesive movement. There are observers who question whether all these churches belong to the Charismatic/Pentecostal movement. A minority of them might in fact not belong to the family of Charismatic/Pentecostal movements. On the one hand, if we take as criteria those which I have set out to define the original Pentecostal movement (p. 6),

5 See in this issue the articles by Susana Vaccaro de Petrella, John Wilkinson, Karl Westmeier, Solomon Raj, Boo Woong Yoo, E. Y. Lartey and George Mulrain.

9


most of them would belong to our category. If, on the other hand, we take as our guiding criteria the doctrinal beliefs of the US Assemblies of God, or of one of the Charismatic movements in the mainline churches, they would not fall into our category.

In my opinion these third world churches are a legitimate expression of pentecostalism. Historical links between early Pentecostal missionaries and the founders of these independent churches can be established in the case of the Zionists in South Africa, the Aladura churches in West Africa, the "Spiritual churches" in Ghana, many similar churches in Central Africa, the indigenous churches in India, almost unknown in the west, and most of the indigenous Pentecostal churches of Latin America. In other cases such historical links do not exist; for example, the Kimbanguist church in Zaire, member of the World Council of Churches. Nevertheless, the phenomenological pattern of spiritual-ity, worship and theology is so strikingly similar to early pentecostalism that one can speak with justification of one movement, even if there is no organizational link between the different churches.

As many of the characteristics of these strongly growing non-white indigenous churches are very close to those of early pentecostalism, it comes as no surprise to discover that they live in tension with the churches that were exported from Europe and America. The tensions can be described as follows:

racism (or European/American superiority complex) versus an intercultural and inter-racial understanding of Christianity;

literacy versus orality; abstract concepts versus narrativity; the anonymity of bureaucratic organizations versus family and personal

relationships; medical technology versus a wholistic understanding of health and sickness; western psycho-analytical techniques versus a group and family therapy

that centres on the human touch, prayer and a daily informal education in dreams and visions.

Some of these non-white indigenous churches will doubtless accept western teachers, western technology and theology. Thus they will partake of the blessings and pitfalls of western culture. I suspect, however, that the majority of them will not want to choose this road. On the contrary they will develop their own theology, church organization and liturgy, whose future outline we can only guess. But one thing is sure: for them the medium of communication is, just as in biblical times, not the definition but the description, not the statement but the story, not the doctrine but the testimony, not the book but the parable, not a systematic theology but a song, not the treatise but the television programme, not the articulation of concepts but the celebration of banquets.

This is not a primitive but a prime and highly complex mode of communica-tion. Songs and stories, prayers for the sick, pilgrimages, exorcism, conversa-tion with the "living-dead" (in western parlance, the ancestors), in short all the elements of oral theology, function as a logistic system for passing on

10

^


theological and social values and information in oral societies in a way that can be likened to a modern computer. The individual memories can be plugged into the communal memory in such a way that, although no one person actively communicates the whole tradition, in principle everybody has access to the total information of the community. This communication system is vital for pre- and post-literary cultures. As these cultures are becoming more and more important, it becomes imperative for western thinkers to be able to read these "oral books," to tune into these socio-psychological information systems and to communicate with the theologians of these oral cultures.

The consequences of this insight for Christian theology and mission are far-reaching. For if mission is not just the export of our own culturally determined understanding of the gospel into other cultures, but if it isas is my conviction that process by which Christians from all cultures enter into a global learning process (both in the interest of the gospel and in the interest of world peace), then we must learn, and learn fast, to communicate with these emerging forms of Charismatic religion, inside and outside the Christian church.

Problems and promises

Statistics on Pentecostal and Charismatic movements can be summarized as follows:

1980 2000 Charismatics 11,005,390 38,861,300 Non-white indigenous 82,181,070 154,140,440 Pentecostal denominations 21,909,779 perhaps 50,000,000

115,096,239 243,001,740

While these figures from Barrett's World Christian Encyclopedia are fairly accurate for the year 1980, one may doubt his extrapolations for the year 2000. In my opinion it is questionable whetherto take a few examplesthe Anglican Charismatics in Europe (i.e., mainly in the United Kingdom) will double in the next twenty years. Whether there will be almost ten times as many Catholic Charismatics in Latin America in the year 2000 as in 1980 depends on a number of factors that are difficult to foresee (e.g., the policy of the Vatican, the general increase or decrease of the Catholic population in Latin America, any major political development in Latin America). In fact one can even ask the question whether or not in the year 2000 our denominational set-up will still be the same. It is not impossible that large parts of Catholicism in Latin America, or of protestantism in Africa and Asia, might sever their theological and organizational links with Europe and America. This would drastically change our denominational map.

11


For this reason I shall confine my theological reflections to the accurate table of figures for 1980. The main question of our statistical tables is posed by the 82,181,070 adherents of non-white indigenous churches. A western theologian will have to ask himself/herself whether our mission policy and our theological and cultural export into the third world does not demand some drastic revision. Up to now we have believed that our way of culture and theology was the norm to which third world Christians and non-Christians would eventually conform. That is why we have built and subsidized theological schools all over the world. Now we observe that crucial theological, spiritual and cultural insights and challenges do not emerge from these schools but from groups of churches that many western Christians have difficulty in even recognizing as churches.

The most painful self-examination, however, is reserved for the members of the Pentecostal denominations because they must ask themselves: How is it that these non-white indigenous Christians have all the hallmarks of pentecostalism and yet do not conform to the cultural patterns and ideologies of pentecostalism as they were forged in the west?

Equally difficult challenges await the theologians of the non-white indigenous churches. They must ask themselves what they are going to do with the western theological and cultural heritage, for example, the trinitarian doctrine, the christology, the western critical approach to historical and religious documents. Do they reject it outright?

In any case the statistical constellation makes for a challenging either/or, which is not confined to our category of churches but is relevant for the whole of Christianity. The either/or, however, is posed in a particularly telling and illuminating way within our group of churches. It is this: either the Christians are successful in finding a new unity, which is not based (or at least not entirely based) on the traditions of the west and its organizational models, or we will face a split in Christianity that will have more painful consequences than the split between Catholics and Protestants. It will be a split that strengthens the already existing political and economic antagonism between the north and the south. Such a development would contradict the very essence of twentieth-century ecumenism. It can only be avoided if we resolutely develop tools for the forging of an intercultural theology that will not be conceptually uniform but still nevertheless provide the basis for a mutual recognition and a global learning process. Such an intercultural theology would have to make use of parabolic, dramatic and narrative patterns and shift the emphasis from the debate of conceptual consensus statements to the exploration and identification of those questions that matter for our cultural, spiritual and physical survival. Such a theology would not rule out the use of Mediterranean European categories but their use would not be governed entirely by faithfulness to the historical heritage but equally by commitment to the vital issues of our time.6

6 Since the late '70s the WCC has pioneered this kind of intercultural theology. See in particular H. R. Weber, Experiments with Bible Study (Geneva: WCC, 1981). See also W. J. Hollenweger, Interkulturelle Theologie (Munich: Kaiser, so far 2 vols).

12

^ s

Copyright and Use:

As an ATLAS user, you may print, download, or send articles for individual use according to fair use as defined by U.S. and international copyright law and as otherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement.

No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without the copyright holder(s)' express written permission. Any use, decompiling, reproduction, or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be a violation of copyright law.

This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permission from the copyright holder(s). The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journal typically is the journal owner, who also may own the copyright in each article. However, for certain articles, the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the article. Please contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specific work for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or covered by your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement. For information regarding the copyright holder(s), please refer to the copyright information in the journal, if available, or contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s).

About ATLAS:

The ATLA Serials (ATLAS) collection contains electronic versions of previously published religion and theology journals reproduced with permission. The ATLAS collection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc.

The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the American Theological Library Association.

Documents

After Twenty Years of Research on Pentecostalism