Pentecostalism, Race, and Orthodoxy

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.

My sermon for Lent II

I preached today on the story of the Canaanite woman from Matthew 15:

Let’s take a closer look at the faithful posture of this foreign woman. The text says that she “came out” of the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, suggesting that she has journeyed to find Jesus. Mark’s Gospel explicitly clarifies that her daughter remained at home. If you can picture the scene: she is alone amidst a gaggle of foreign men. Probably she is dusty and bedraggled from travel, a Gentile dog crying out for aid from a man she identifies in explicitly Jewish terms: “O Lord, thou Son of David!” No wonder the disciples find her a bit pathetic. 

Yet her vulnerability does not stop her for a moment, driven as she is by love for her daughter and drawn by faith to Jesus. She is clearly a desperate woman. Pathetic and desperate: not the sorts of adjectives we would be inclined to apply to ourselves. To the contrary, we are competent. Educated. Refined in our judgment, discriminating in our tastes. All of this is good. None of it is bad—unless it prevents us from seeing that, like the Canaanite woman, we too desperately need Jesus. “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” (Mark 10:23b, NRSV). If our wealth, our stability, and our competence prevent us from seeing our need for Jesus—then in that case it is bad. It is damnably bad. If self-satisfaction and complacency are your illness, let this Lent be your medicine.

Read the whole sermon here.

Sermon for Advent I

[I preached my third sermon back in November. The full text is below.]

“Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.”

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Growing up, my family’s church calendar included precisely two dates: Christmas and Easter. Let me be clear: we were distinctly not two-Sundays-a-year Christians. The love of Jesus constituted the beating heart of our family. My day-to-day life was drenched in Scripture. My love for Jesus and for the Bible came from them. But as a nondenominational evangelical, I did not even know such a thing as a church calendar existed. By the time Sean introduced me to the Anglican Church, I was relatively more aware of the church calendar. I knew Advent as a season of joyful anticipation: pre-Christmas, if you will. So you can perhaps understand my confusion and surprise when I started to pay attention to the collects and appointed readings for the season of Advent. They are fierce, even fearsome! And some of my Roman and Anglo-Catholic friends referred to Advent as a penitential season akin to Lent, which left me utterly mystified. So what is Advent, exactly? Is it the same as Lent? Is it Pseudo-Lent? Is it pre-Christmas? That’s a question I have been asking each Advent in recent years. This sermon functions as my provisional attempt to begin to work out some of those questions, guided by our collect, epistle, and gospel.

Sermon for Trinity XIV

I preached my second sermon a week ago. The text was Galatians 5:16-24:

“I SAY then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witch-craft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts.” 

My introduction:

There has never been a person in all human history to whom the truths of Scripture do not apply, and there never will be such a person. The life story of each person, as Fr. Glenn reminds us, will eventually be enfolded into the life story of the Word made Flesh, Jesus. The Scriptures speak to each of our lives. Because of this great truth, I have sometimes tended to read Scripture as though it were a private message composed directly and immediately to me. When I do that, the question I ask at every moment of every verse is, “What is this text saying to me?” Now, that is a crucial question to ask, but if it’s the first and only question I ask, I am liable to end up with some muddled theology.  

Today’s epistle is a prime example. If we read it as though it were written directly to us—if we fail to take into account the context of the letter and the specific recipients of St. Paul’s advice—we will come away with a deeply distorted picture of the Christian life, a skewed vision of what it means to be in Christ here and now.

Read the rest here.

Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people's approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

-Tao Te Ching
(Verse 9; cited in Novak's The World's Wisdom, p. 153)

The close of Fr. Glenn's sermon on the calming of the storm in John 6:

Finally, it is a lovely and warm image of Jesus’ most intimate and faithful Apostles nesting in the bosom of the storm tossed ship as he comes to their rescue. And that is certainly the truth. But there was a snake nesting in the infant Church. Fatal and deadly unbelief was not limited to the Rulers of Jerusalem and the good country people of Galilee, but in that bobbing and careening craft that held the whole future of the world in its bosom cowered the traitor, Judas Iscariot, hanging on for dear life. 

Read the whole thing. 

Praise him who fathers-forth

Here's Fr. Glenn's conclusion to his sermon for Good Shepherd Sunday:

Everything that matters depends on this: Jesus Christ is God and this God became a real human being. He has always been God and he always will be God but has not always been a human being. He became a human being at a specific time in a specific place just like all of us: he had a Mother. He received his humanity, body and all, from Mary. He is of Mary’s flesh. As sure as you are the flesh of your mother, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became the flesh his Mother, thus the Church’s august title for Mary is Theotokos: “Mother of God.” Furthermore God’s human flesh, his human nature, is now part and parcel of God’s interior life and it always will be. He will never cease to be a human being. In Genesis we have the narrative of man made in the image of God while in life of Jesus Christ we have the narrative of God made in the image of man. In the story of God’s life made flesh we see not only the uncreated glory of the only begotten Son, but we also see the created glory of his creature man uplifted as God had always intended. What we think is a dappled worm meant to slug its life through dirt, God means to be dazzling white butterfly fit to handle heavenly things. Glory be to God! Praise him who fathers-forth, praise him “whose beauty is past change.” Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

I love the beautiful interplay with Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Pied Beauty":

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Sermon for Lent III

I preached my first sermon this past Sunday. The text was "kingdom divided" text from Luke 11.

An excerpt:

As today’s Gospel teaches us—and the whole of the biblical narrative seems to shout—experience does not automatically lead to faith and faithful living. Seeing miracles is not enough. Even receiving miracles is not enough. 

In our Gospel reading, Jesus goes on to tell a story about an unclean spirit departing from a man, only to return later with “seven other spirits more wicked than himself.” Now, remember the setting and the scene. Presumably the man freed from his demon is standing right there amidst the crowd, and I have to think the message came through loud and clear to him: having a demon cast out of you does not necessarily put you—or keep you—in a state of grace.

You can read the whole thing over at our church blog.

(You can also, by the way, read Sean's excellent sermon for Lent II from last week)

More grounds for hope in historical unpredictability

Today I read two sweeping narratives (one by Justo González, the other by Bishop John H. R. Moorman) of church history. I had to write a brief response as part of a class on Medieval and Reformation church history, which I thought I'd post here. Alfred the Great figured prominently in both narratives. The theme of my response resonates heavily with a theme I've thought about quite a bit over the last year--call it hope in historical unpredictability.

And there was death on the Emperor
And night upon the Pope;
And Alfred, hiding in deep grass,
Hardened his heart with hope. 

-G.K. Chesterton, 'The Ballad of the White Horse'

As I read through the tumultuous history of the Church from the 5th to the 12th centuries, I was struck by the ups and downs and radical reversals throughout the period. So many unexpected challenges arose, oftentimes just when things seemed to be settling down into a beautiful Christian ideal—the Vikings sweeping through Britain, wealth corrupting the Cluniacs, Islam overwhelming the core of ancient Christianity.

Of course that's discouraging from a Christian perspective. Yet I found myself oddly encouraged by what seemed like the sheer contingency of Christian history, the sense that everything so easily could have been radically different. For me, this historical grounding offers a great sense of hope and confidence.

So many today speak as though the Church were entering a period of unprecedented decline. That's true in the sense that every historical development is unique and unrepeatable. But the Church has weathered greater crises than what we now face, and those who speak of the past as though it were a wonderful period of consistent and universal Christian faith are misguided and misguiding.

As I see it, there are two common responses when faced with the messy complexity of the Church's history. One is to reject the messiness of reality in favor of a comforting fantasy—that the Church has been a solid, stable, monolithic, and unchanging presence from Jesus to Pope Francis. The other is the more postmodern choice: since the Church is historically contingent, the current state of things must be totally arbitrary. Both are lazy options, and both work from an unexamined premise—namely, that a Church reflecting the messiness of historical life cannot also be the true body of Christ.

The reality that things could be different should not drive us to delusion or despair but instead should spur us to gratitude and determination—gratitude for the goodness of our liturgy and common prayer as precious, fragile, and by no means inevitable gifts; determination to preserve the best and mend the worst in each of our churches.

Of course, victory is in the sovereign hands of God, who will accomplish his purposes, and who is ultimately responsible for the survival and health of our Church. As T.S. Eliot wrote in The Four Quartets, "For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."

Epiphany II

Fr. Glenn's sermon this past Sunday was beautiful. Here's the conclusion.

We know Jesus’ parable about the sower going forth to sow the Word of God, and we know that when the seed fell upon good ground, an open heart, it brought forth more fruit than anybody including his disciples could have ever imagined. But we also know — most importantly of all — that for the seed that is sown to burst into life, it must first die and be buried. And we know that because Jesus said so in the very week he would give his life up for the life of the whole world, and the Apostle John recorded it for us in the 12th chapter of his Gospel: 

“And there were certain Greeks (note these are Gentile converts) among them that came up to worship at the feast: The same came therefore to Philip, which was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and desired him, saying, Sir, we would see Jesus. Philip cometh and telleth Andrew: and again Andrew and Philip tell Jesus. And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” -John 12:20-25 

In less than 48 hours from that moment, Jesus was nailed to the Cross. Jesus is the Seed of Abraham, and Jesus’ glory is his death, and his garden tomb is the ground from which he rose, and his rising has brought forth the fruit of everlasting life just as we will sing on Easter Sunday morning: 

Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him.Christ is risen from the dead,and become the first fruits of them that slept.For since by man came death,by man came also the resurrection of the dead.For as in Adam all die,even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

Read the whole thing here.