Posts Tagged ‘ecumenism’

Charismatics who sway and wave their arms during congregational singing, or evangelicals who think charismatics swaying and waving are a sign of the Spirit?

I can’t help but wonder after reading David Neff’s wishing happy birthday to the charimsatic movement in his editorial for Christianity Today. He writes:

In April 1960, I was a seventh grader in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, culturally and religiously as distant from Southern California Episcopalians as an American could be. But by 1974, I had a newly minted M.Div. and became pastor of a church near San Diego. There I became friends with Frank Maguire, an Episcopal priest who featured prominently in Dennis Bennett’s autobiographical Nine O’Clock in the Morning.

In 1959, Maguire had invited Bennett to meet members of his parish who were experiencing unusual spiritual phenomena. These folk weren’t doing anything wild and crazy, Maguire told Bennett. They just glowed “like little light bulbs” and were “so loving and ready to help whenever I asked them.” When I met Maguire almost 15 years later, the charismatics I met in his parish still weren’t wild or crazy. And they still had the glow and the love Maguire had told Bennett about.

I had been raised in a sectarian atmosphere, trained to distrust Christianity of any stripe but my own. For me, what made the charismatic renewal remarkable was the ecumenical fellowship it created. American Baptists and Roman Catholics in our community were sharing Communion—even serving Communion at each other’s churches—until the Catholic bishop put a stop to it. Episcopalians were worshiping with an intensity that undercut all my prejudices against written prayers and prescribed liturgies. Formerly competing religious communities were suddenly open to common ministry and shared worship. This was not the classic liberal ecumenism with its “Doctrine Divides, Service Unites” motto. This ecumenism flowed from recognizing that the Holy Spirit was animating and transforming others.

Some analysts say the mainline charismatic renewal fizzled. It is more accurate to describe it the way Jesus pictured the kingdom of God: like yeast that spreads through bread dough. You can hardly identify it as a movement anymore, but it has changed the way most churches worship. Repetitive choruses and raised hands are now common. Except in pockets of hardcore resistance, the fact that a fellow Christian may praise God in a private prayer language hardly elevates an eyebrow.

What I wonder is how Neff can spot the defect of Doctrine-Divides-Service-Unites ecumenism and not see the error in charismatic understandings of the Holy Spirit, the second helping of blessings, the casual worship, and the disregard for ecclesiastical office (for starters). After all, plenty of Charles Erdmans in the Presbyterian world believed that the Spirit was leading the church to a Doctrine-Divides-Service-Unites form of Protestant unity. So how do you deny the blessing of the Spirit to one form of unity but not the other?

Part of Neff’s response may fall back on doctrine, as in the kind of teachings advocated by charismatics are more true than the ideals propagated by Protestant liberals. I would likely agree. But then once you appeal to one doctrine, don’t a lot of other doctrines kick in, like all the ones that tell me charismatics are in error. And then I conclude – contra Neff – that despite talking about the Spirit a lot do not charismatics do not have special claims on the Spirit.

I think I understand Neff’s regard for charismatics. He displays an important part of the legacy of neo-evangelicalism which is to downplay the negative and accent the positive. Neo-evangelicals believed they needed to do this in order to overcome the bad PR of fundamentalism (i.e., a fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry). Neff is trying to be generous and looking for alliances wherever they may be cultivated.

But if doctrine does not unite, and the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is a part of the church’s teaching, then shouldn’t Neff be more discerning about the charismatic movement? In fact, if Word and Spirit ordinarily work together, so that the Spirit is alive and well wherever true teaching from the Word is present, then folks like myself who cringe in the presence of swaying and waving, or when reading approving editorials about such worship behavior, may have the Spirit more than the allegedly Spirit-filled charismatics. (Of course, all such claims to the Spirit need to be read in the context of the battle between the flesh and the Spirit that requires most Augustinian readers of Paul to abstain from saying that they are Spirit-filled.)

John Frame faced a choice. He could have reviewed Mike Horton’s book, Christless Christianity, or he could have abstained. He could have critiqued Horton’s indictment of Joel Osteen. He also could have offered his own critique of Osteen. Even if he disagreed vigorously with Horton, he could have let it go out of a sense of living with the eccentricities of a former colleague and a minister in a church with whom his own communion is in fellowship.

But Frame decided to write a lengthy review in which Horton’s assessment comes off as more theologically flawed than those whom Horton critiques.

On the one hand, according to Frame, Horton is wrong about contemporary evangelicalism:

Speaking, perhaps presumptuously, for “the American church,” let me attempt a reply. For what it is worth, my own perception of American evangelicalism is very different from Horton’s. My observation is anecdotal (just like his, in the final analysis), but based on around 55 years of adult observation in many different kinds of churches including the much maligned mega-churches. In most every evangelical church I have visited or heard about, the “focus” is on God in Christ. There has been something of a shift over the years in what Horton would call a “subjective” direction. But that is best described not as unfaithfulness, but as a shift toward more application of Scripture to people’s external situations and inner life. There is a greater interest in sanctification (not just justification), on Christianity as a world view, on believers’ obligations to one another, on love within the body of Christ, and in the implications of Scripture for social justice.

I don’t see this as wrong, or unbiblical. Indeed, I think this general trend is an improvement over the state of affairs fifty years ago. Scripture is certainly concerned about these matters, and we ought to teach and learn what it has to say.

(By the way, Frame thinks that Horton shares this outlook primarily with secular critics of American religion. But Frame does not acknowledge that conservative Protestants like David Wells and Carl Trueman, or moderate to liberal Protestants such as Douglas Webster, William Willimon, and Stanley Hauerwas agree with Horton more than Frame.)

On the other hand, Frame thinks that the basis for Horton’s critique is theologically defective:

Horton’s alarmism is persuasive to many people, and I have been moved to try to show them their persuasion is premature. The problem is that the yardstick Horton uses to measure the American church’s allegiance to Christ is not an accurate yardstick. Or, to drop the metaphor, Horton measures the American church with a defective theology.

He comes on to the reader as a generic Protestant Christian with a passion for the historic doctrines of the atonement and of justification by faith alone. He writes engagingly. Naturally, then, other Protestants tend to resonate to his arguments. But Horton is not just a generic Protestant or even a generic Reformed theologian. He holds certain positions that are not warranted by the Reformed Confessions and which in my mind are not even Scriptural.

Frame is fully within his duties as a theology professor to review critically the book of another theologian, even one who apparently shares his theological tradition. But he is on shaky ground when he has faulted folks like Horton at other times for being Machen’s Warrior Children, that is, for needlessly criticizing those within the Reformed household. According to Frame:

The Machen movement was born in the controversy over liberal theology. I have no doubt that Machen and his colleagues were right to reject this theology and to fight it. But it is arguable that once the Machenites found themselves in a “true Presbyterian church” they were unable to moderate their martial impulses. Being in a church without liberals to fight, they turned on one another.

For some reason, John Frame thinks he is not a pugilist even after writing reviews like his of Horton (not to mention that the Warrior Children piece contained several punches, some below the belt). If he had a better understanding of “the Machen movement, Frame might realize that every controversy has more than two sides. In the 1920s, the alternatives were not simply conservatives like Machen or liberals like Harry Emerson Fosdick. In between were evangelicals like Charles Erdman who needed to decide whether to agree with conservatives and oppose liberals, or find a way to avoid controversy and work for the unity of the church, even to the point of keeping people who were not Calvinistic in the fold. Erdman never thought that his case for unity was controversial or contested. He thought Machen was extreme and temperamentally defective, and Erdman, an acknowledged evangelical, threw Machen under the bus. In so doing, Erdman made room in the Presbyterian Church for Machen’s enemies.

Blame it on the tri-perspectivalism, but Frame does not see that his notion of evangelical unity does not make room for Horton or other confessional Protestants who critique born-again Protestantism. Does Frame mean to embrace Osteen more than Horton? He may not. But if he doesn’t, why not write his own review of Osteen, instead of waiting to rip Horton’s critique?

John Frame is in denial about being a warrior. But at least he is correct about his family ties to Machen.

I have long wondered about the propriety of military chaplains. Mind you, I know some military chaplains and even have them for friends. But the complications to jure divino Presbyterianism that come from ministering as an agent of the state pale in comparison to the sort of ministerial promiscuity that goes on among the denominations (both liberal and non-Protestant) represented in the chaplaincy.

And sometimes you find support for your views in the oddest of places. I was reading John Frame’s book, Evangelical Reunion, recently and came across this:

A fellow minister in my presbytery is a navy chaplain. He is a pretty strict Calvinist, zealous to maintain doctrinal purity in the church. He would, I have no doubt, strongly oppose any candidate for the Presbyterian ministry who was charismatic in his theology.

Yet, in a recent report of his work as a chaplain, he told the presbytery that God had given him a fellow worker who was a member of the Assemblies of God. The chaplain rejoiced, for this worker was a real evangelial believer who proclaimed the gospel. There was little if any conflict between them; the theological difference seemed small compared with the great gap between the Christian and the non-Christian servicemen.

I could not help but remark (mentally!) that my fellow Presbyterian was rejoicing in a kind of alliance that he would certainly repudiate within his denomination.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Of course, Frame was using this as an argument for greater unity and cooperation among Presbyterians and evangelicals. But can’t it also be used to pull the plug on ordaining men as military chaplains?