Charismatic Renewal — Its Wisdom and Its Limits

Today's Reading

Read 1 Corinthians 12:31 and 1 Corinthians 14:1 together: "Earnestly desire the higher gifts... Pursue love, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy." Two imperatives from Paul, in plain Greek, telling the church to want the gifts.

Read Acts 4:29-31: "And now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus." The early church's prayer.

Read James 5:13-16: "Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up." Notice this is in James, not in the most charismatic of the New Testament writers, and it is given as a normal pastoral practice for ordinary churches.

Read 1 Thessalonians 5:19-22 once more — do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophecies, but test everything.

Reflection

If yesterday belonged to the cessationist tradition, today belongs to its mirror. The charismatic and Pentecostal renewal of the twentieth century — beginning at Azusa Street in 1906, spreading through classical Pentecostalism, then through the Charismatic Renewal that touched mainline and Catholic churches in the 1960s, then through the Third Wave of John Wimber and the Vineyard movement, and now through the global Pentecostal Christianity that is the fastest-growing form of Christian faith on earth — has, for all its excesses, given the church things the cessationist tradition cannot, and a Christian who refuses to learn from it is also losing something the church needs.

Begin with what charismatic Christianity gets right. Five things, again.

One: it takes Paul's imperatives seriously. "Earnestly desire the higher gifts." "Pursue love, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy." Charismatic Christianity actually does what Paul there commands. It wants the gifts. It expects them. It pursues them. This is not a defect to be lectured out of charismatics; it is obedience to a verse cessationists have to find ways to soften. The charismatic Christian reads 1 Corinthians 14:1 in plain English and does what it says. There is something deeply healthy in that.

Two: it expects the Holy Spirit to act. Acts 4 is a charismatic prayer. The early church gathered after Peter and John had been threatened by the authorities and prayed not for protection, not for political maneuvering, but for boldness while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus. The charismatic instinct is to pray that prayer and mean it. To ask God to act. To come to him not just with confessions of sin and requests for fortitude, but with concrete asks — heal this person, deliver this addict, intervene in this situation — and to live in expectation that he might. Cessationist evangelicalism, in many forms, has functionally lost this. Charismatic Christianity has kept it alive.

Three: it has recovered the joy of New Testament Christianity. Read Acts and you find a church that worshipped with what can only be called gladness, that ate together with rejoicing, that suffered with songs in their mouths. The Spirit, in the New Testament, is repeatedly described as producing joy (1 Thessalonians 1:6; Romans 14:17). For complicated reasons, much of confessional Western Christianity drifted toward a sober, somewhat heavy aesthetic. The charismatic tradition has insisted, sometimes immaturely but often rightly, that the Holy Spirit is the Comforter and that his presence with his people is good news that should produce something like delight. The global Pentecostal church, particularly in the global South, frequently displays a kind of joy in worship that more buttoned-up traditions can find disorienting and that, on closer examination, looks startlingly like the Acts churches.

Four: it has prayed for healing in ways the older church always did. James 5:13-16 is not a charismatic peculiarity; it is canonical instruction to ordinary churches. Call the elders. Anoint with oil. Pray over the sick. The Lord will raise him up. Cessationist evangelicalism, in many quarters, has given up actually doing this. Charismatic Christianity, for all its abuses around healing claims (and they are real abuses, including the prosperity gospel's exploitation of the desperate), has at least kept the pastoral practice of praying expectantly for the sick. Many believers — including reflective non-charismatics — would acknowledge in private that some of their most striking experiences of God's mercy in physical illness have come through people who actually prayed for them as if God might act.

Five: it has reminded the church that the Spirit is a person. Charismatic Christians address the Holy Spirit. They speak to him. They ask him for things. They expect him to lead them. This is sometimes overdone — there is a cottage industry of dubious "what the Holy Spirit told me this morning" devotional writing — but the underlying instinct is correct. The Spirit is a person, the third of the three of the Trinity, and the New Testament treats him as someone who can be grieved (Ephesians 4:30), quenched (1 Thessalonians 5:19), lied to (Acts 5:3), and walked with (Galatians 5:25). A tradition that has functionally addressed only the Father and the Son in prayer is missing a piece of the Trinitarian life of the church.

J.I. Packer himself, the most respected Reformed evangelical of the second half of the twentieth century, wrote about charismatic Christianity not as an outside critic but as a sympathetic, careful evaluator. Keep In Step With the Spirit refused both to dismiss the renewal and to baptize all of it. He argued, in essence, that the charismatic experience, with all its limitations and ambiguities, was best understood as God genuinely quickening his people to a deeper devotion to Christ. He thought the Reformed tradition had something to learn from charismatic seriousness about the Spirit's active work, and he thought charismatic Christianity had something to learn from the Reformed tradition's seriousness about the Word. Tim Keller, in his preaching on the Spirit, made the same move: "We must reject the dichotomy between the Word and the Spirit." Both belong to the same God. Pitting them against each other is pitting God against himself.

But — and again this is the second half of today — charismatic Christianity has its limits, and they are worth naming with the same honesty.

One: the temptation to confuse emotional intensity with the Spirit. This is the warning of every Edwards we have read this week. Strong feeling is not, by itself, the Spirit. Animal heat is not the Spirit. Worship choreography that produces tears is not, on its own, the Spirit. The charismatic tradition has, at its worst, conflated these — and produced converts whose Christianity collapses the moment the music stops. Edwards's negative marks need to be heard especially clearly here.

Two: the abuse of prophetic authority. We have already seen this. Untested prophetic words have wrecked careers, marriages, finances, and faith. The category of prophetic ministry is real; the contemporary practice has often discarded the testing Paul commanded. Charismatic leaders who have built platforms on the credibility of dramatic prophecies and never publicly accounted for the ones that failed have done damage that will take generations to heal.

Three: the prosperity tendency. Some streams of charismatic Christianity have allowed the gifts of the Spirit to be coupled with promises of wealth, health, and worldly success in ways that are not in the New Testament and are demonstrably damaging in the lives of the poor who can least afford to be deceived. This is not charismatic Christianity at its best; the best charismatic teachers reject it; but it grows in charismatic soil with disturbing regularity, and the tradition as a whole owes the world more vigilance about it.

Four: the under-appreciation of the ordinary means. The same instinct that values the dramatic can devalue the slow. A church that is constantly chasing the next conference, the next move, the next anointing can starve its people of Word and sacrament — the things the Spirit primarily uses. The healthiest charismatic churches treat the gifts as servant of the ordinary means, not substitute. Many do not.

Five: the difficulty of sustained discipleship. Charismatic conversion is often vivid; charismatic discipleship is often thinner. The fruit of the Spirit (day five) takes years to grow; the gifts of the Spirit (day six) can fire on a Friday. A tradition that overweights the latter can underweight the former. Some of the most beautiful charismatic Christianity in the world is now consciously building the discipleship infrastructure that holds the experiences accountable to long-term character — but it has had to be built, deliberately, against the grain.

The both/and is again not hard to state. Take from charismatic Christianity its expectation, its prayer for the Spirit's action, its joy, its willingness to ask God to heal, its sense of the Spirit as a person. Refuse the temptation to make intensity itself the test, the temptation to silence the testing of prophecies, and the temptation to fuse the Spirit's work with worldly success. The charismatic tradition has the New Testament wind at its back on more verses than its critics admit. It also has Edwards's negative marks at its throat on more services than its defenders admit. Both are true.

Going Deeper

If your tradition is broadly charismatic, ask honestly today: when was the last time you tested a prophecy, weighed a worship moment, or examined a "move of the Spirit" by Edwards's positive marks? When was the last time you sat with a Bible commentary instead of a stream? If your tradition is broadly cessationist, ask honestly: when was the last time you prayed expectantly for healing, or asked the Holy Spirit to act in a specific situation, or even spoke to him by name? Both are diagnostic.