Tag: Christianity

why Pentecostal theology is necessary

First of all, I would like to apologize to my subscribers. I made a concerted effort in 2011 to post regularly and heard from several of you that the Monday Meditations were appreciated. I hope to resume them this summer (once my dissertation is complete and I have recovered from the process).

I am breaking my blog silence today because I wanted to draw your attention to a post I enjoyed reading yesterday by Pastor Jonathan Martin, a pentecostal theology rant, as he called it. There is so much there that I identify and agree with and I wanted to chime in a bit, as this is the driving impetus behind the dissertation I am writing.

With regard to whether Pentecostal theology is icing or cake (or Terry Cross’ older metaphor relish or main dish), it is not just that Pentecostals can do our own theological reflection, that we ought to because we are able and capable of doing so – though this in itself is valid as a claim and reason. It is more importantly the case that we must construct our own theology – from the ground up – because adding on a wing to an existing theological structure makes the whole unstable, unsound, leading us into self-contradiction and to a loss of what makes us who we are as Pentecostals.

For example, our doctrine of initial evidence goes wrong from the start because it builds on too narrow an understanding of atonement. Our failed experience with initial evidence teaching shows us that we need a more robust account, a soteriology dynamic and versatile enough to accommodate the varieties of experience we have witnessed (both in the Acts accounts and in our own lives) when a person comes to trust in Jesus and is baptized in his fire. What we need is an account that acknowledges we have been saved, we are being saved, and we will be saved. And yet what we have are cards with checkboxes. We cannot build on the very limited understanding of atonement our evangelical friends work with and possibly hope to create useful explanations of sanctification and the complex relationship of water and Spirit baptism. Our communities have suffered because of our lack of theological imagination and resourcefulness. It is not just that we can make the cake. It is that our people will remain malnourished until we do.

the importance of the body

The other day I tweeted that I have noticed a troubling trend among my theology students: too few understand or even speak of the resurrection of the body. Most will acknowledge it after I point it out, but by default they tend to discuss the afterlife in terms of a body-less existence. Here are a few more thoughts on that.

In neglecting the teaching of the resurrection of the body, I think we show how little we appreciate the importance of the body – the human body – in the Christian faith. Christianity (especially in its north American Protestant-evangelical form) has become too much of a cognitive religion, more about thinking (we call it believing) the right things, less about doing things that demonstrate trust (what the Bible means by believing) in the Lord. This brings us much too close to the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. In this form of Christianity, we are less able to account for the fact that most acts of sin are bodily acts (e.g., adultery, lust) or involve physical objects (e.g., stealing, coveting).

We are also unable to account for the fact the Jesus required his followers to engage in acts that were primarily physical in orientation, e.g., feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick or imprisoned, laying hands on the sick and healing them of physical ailments. These are things Jesus did and set his followers to doing. Some of them we still do, but we often fail to understand the spiritual import of such acts precisely because we have severed the connection between the physical and spiritual in our thinking. They were not separate in Jesus’ thinking. Feeding the hungry was not some side project for Jesus, he set it as one of the fundmental criteria on which we will be judged – as in eternally judged.

Visiting those who are sick or in prison is not just a nice thing to do, it is a fundamentally spiritual act. Laying hands on someone who is sick and praying for them is a physical act that invokes real spiritual power to gain a phyiscal result. Does that even make sense to us? Or has the physical been so divorced from the spiritual that we cannot even imagine such a thing happening? Is this perhaps why we don’t see it happening?