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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 Ifirstoutline 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 propagated 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; 18321911), 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 ambitious 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.).
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).
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.
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.
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 spirituality, 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 communication. Songs and stories, prayers for the sick, pilgrimages, exorcism, conversation 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
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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 farreaching. 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.
1980
11,005,390
82,181,070
21,909,779
115,096,239
perhaps
2000
38,861,300
154,140,440
50,000,000
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 infindinga 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 twentiethcentury 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).
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