Since starting postulancy and seminary work, I've gone mostly silent here but for the occasional sermon. I am embarking upon a haphazard plan to go back through some of the shorter and more interesting (I say) 'reading response'-type assignments and post them here. The one below is the first of a three-part series from a course I took at UVa this summer on The Black Church and American Culture. In the future, I hope to take up the more general question of the apparent connection between trinitarian heresy and racial justice.
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Christians in general believe that God will eventually (re)unite his Church, and thus most believe that the Holy Spirit’s work results in Christian unity. Vinson Synan’s The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition outlined the ecumenical impulse of Pentecostalism that initially united a diverse group of Baptist and Methodist Christians, but it also showed how the movement eventually broke down along racial and theological lines. Pentecostals could not (would not) overcome segregation and prejudice, Trinitarian debates, and disagreement over the “second work of sanctification.”
Meanwhile, in The Black Roots and White Racism of Early Pentecostalism in the USA, Ian MacRobert suggests that disagreements over the “Oneness” doctrines “were more probably rationalisations for schism than genuine reasons” (70). Without in any way diminishing the animating and perhaps even overwhelming influence of race in Pentecostal history, I also want to point out that Trinitarian theology and Christology functioned as the central and almost sole cause for excommunication and schism across the first thousand years of Christian history and continued to be the sine qua non of defining Christian orthodoxy for the next thousand. Moreover, the division over the “second work of sanctification” reflected the reassertion of prior denominational lines that had been blurred but not eliminated by the Pentecostal explosion. It seems implausible (and uncharitable) to reduce these issues into fig leafs for racism.
Later on, MacRobert suggests that the “attempt to fit the presence and power of the Holy Spirit into existing theological categories” prevented “most of the white Pentecostal sects and also—though to a lesser extent—many of the black ones” from following the true leading of the Spirit. “However,” he says, “Black Pentecostalism—particularly Oneness or Apostolic Pentecostalism—has retained more of the ‘original’ Pentecostal message and power” (86-87). Perhaps this apparent endorsement of Oneness Pentecostalism explains his downplaying of Nicene Trinitarianism and Chalcedonian Christology.
By contrast, I am writing as an Anglican devoted to the orthodox and Catholic faith of the creeds and ecumenical councils—and thus rather inclined to a hermeneutic of suspicion towards contrary (“heretical”) movements. If MacRobert’s operative premise is that Oneness Pentecostalism is a work of the Holy Spirit, mine is quite the opposite.
Synan, meanwhile, asserted that “many periods of Christian history from St. Paul to Charles Parham had been punctuated by occasional outbreaks of glossolalia.” However, he only mentioned three movements from the first sixteen centuries of the Church’s existence—all three of which were denounced as heretical (though not because of speaking in tongues, and only the Albigenses would be broadly rejected by Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christians today). The first two post-Reformation groups mentioned—Shakers and Mormons—fall outside of even the broadest definition of Christian orthodoxy.
So, for me, Synan’s attempt to established the historical bona fides of glossolalia in the Church was extraordinarily counterproductive. I am still figuring out what to make of the charismatic movement. I have very little firsthand experience with it, but given the vibrant and growing charismatic branch of Anglicanism, as well as the experiences of some people close to me, I am much inclined to embrace it. But the association Sinan and MacRobert made between the charismatics and historic heresies is giving me serious pause.
Note: my paraphrase of MacRobert's "apparent endorsement of Oneness Pentecostalism" may not have done full justice to his argument. Here's the context, starting with the last paragraph on page 86.
