Bruised Gifts

Another place where conversations about the Holy Spirit’s place in the Church short-circuit is with fear of their abuses.  “Many churches are full of abuse of the gifts of the Spirit”, it is said, “so therefore we must exercise extreme care in admitting the gifts into regular practice”, which is a wise bit of counsel provided that by “extreme care” one does not mean “completely squelch all but the most mundane and non-specific manifestations under all but the most extraordinary of circumstances”.

Now, you will never hear me argue that Spiritual gifts and giftings have not been abused in many churches.  The observation is true enough, so far as it goes.  Its flaw is not that the observation is false, but that its scope is misleadingly narrow.  “People born in 1971 are susceptible to the influenza virus.”  “The water of the Massachusetts Bay is too salty to drink.”  “The city of Mogadishu does not receive enough rainfall to support a deciduous forest canopy.”  Yes, true, fine, but I think you will find that all years, whole oceans, and vast swaths of the African landscape share the same problems.

The abuse of tongues, prophecy, and healings are instances of the much broader pattern of abuse of what would otherwise be legitimate ministries.  Is it possible to abuse pastoral authority?  Yes.  Preaching?  Yes.  The Lord’s table (communion/eucharist)?  Yes.  Prayer and fasting?  Yes.  Bible study?  Yes.  Accountability/confession?  Yes.  Church discipline?  Yes.  Yes, all of them, yes; we can even find biblical examples of these abuses and God’s rebukes against them!  And while some sins are obvious to all — the prophet who is overly impressed with himself, the tongue-talker who shows no love and consideration for her fellow parishoner, the healer who is more show than good fruit — many more sins hide behind the facades of formal piety, personal sincerity, and institutional legitimacy in the guise of preaching, counseling, and fellowship.  But I’ve rarely heard it suggested, in spite of countless Scriptural rebukes of false teachers and the centuries of history testifying to the immediacy of this danger, that we should cease from preaching and only gradually, cautiously, reluctantly, and timidly re-introduce it.

By contrast, we see in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians a very different pattern.  The Corinthians made a mess of the Lord’s table; Paul’s response was not to declare a moratorium on the Eucharist, but rather to correct the error and encourage the church in doing what it ought.  The Corinthians made a mess of their sexuality; Paul’s response was not to call for mass castrations or universal abstinence but to tell those who struggle to be faithfully available as spouses to one another and those so-gifted to continue in their chastity.  The Corinthians made a mess of the exercise of the charismata when they gathered; Paul tells them he practices the gifts even more than they do, offers strong corrections to their abuses, and encourages them to continue prophesying and speaking in tongues, but to do so rightly.  He does not say “do so only so much as you are able to do it rightly”, but rather “do it rightly”.  The distinction is subtle, but the implications are huge: what God has commanded and commended we must not neglect, but rather must seek to do faithfully and consistently with His loving wisdom.

The charismata are no more the problem than prayer and preaching are the problem; all afford opportunities to love God and serve others, and all afford opportunities to sin against God and His people.  The ministries are not the problem; we are the problem.  Left to our own devices, we turn every good thing on its head, weaponizing and warping that which God has given to be balm for our wounds to straighten our paths.  And I find it ironic that the Scriptural prescriptions for our flesh’s predilection for sinful abuse are “do by the Spirit” and “be in the Spirit”, but that the ministries we most quickly and willingly quench for fear of “sinful abuses” are precisely those most evidently associated with the Spirit’s being and doing in and through us!

A Theological Forest of Holy Spirit Trees

Many “New Calvinists” are under the impression that their theology is “charismatic” and not “cessationist” because they would say “yes and amen” to a few confessional statements regarding the Holy Spirit (“We believe that all of the supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit remain active in the Church until the day of the Lord’s return”, etc).  I’m glad for such confessions — they’re a good place to begin a conversation.  However, I worry that in many such churches the conversation is short-circuiting in one or more fairly predictable ways.  Let me point out one that I’ve only recently put my finger on.

It’s possible to read Oliver Twist, and to be able to correctly answer a battery of questions about all of the horrible injustices and cruelties visited upon poor Oliver, but to completely miss that Dickens is commenting on the economic brutality of 19th century British industrialism.  This is why theologians make a distinction between exegesis (the correct reading of the words in a particular text) and hermeneutics (the interpretation of those texts in the context of the whole of Scripture) — to remind us to look not only for trees, but for the forests they belong to.  This is the first short-circuit of many would-be charismatic New Calvinists: they are content to be exegetical charismatics, but the hermeneutic which they apply to the remainder of Scripture — including many texts which refer to the Spirit directly — is still dominated by the categories and principles of cessationism.

For example, an old-school cessationist will insist that the New Testament’s exhortations to “prophesy” really mean to “carefully prepare a sermon, and then deliver it publicly”.  In spite of centuries of prestigious written tradition backing it up, such a reading is hopelessly unfaithful to the text, so a New Calvinist rightly concedes that Scripture says what it says, that there must be some sort of place for prophecy (an unpremeditated utterance under divine unction) in the believer’s life.  But he moves on to 1 Cor 14:26-31 and is at a loss as to its application, because he has taken the command for an “orderly” Church gathering below (1 Cor 14:32) and read into it ideas from Congregationalism, or Baptist tradition, or the regulatory order of his Presbytery, which esteem formal reverence and despise anything which smacks of spontaneity.  Because he has not yet kneaded the idea of prophecy as corporate ministry into the dough of his thinking, he fails to recognize that the Lord gives us prophecy for an essential and integral part of orderly worship, and not as an exception to it or violation of it.

This is often a throughgoing problem with our New Testament scholarship and preaching.  Cessationist tradition has taught us to treat “The Spirit” as a gloss for the Bible, or for self-discipline, or for education, or for the ordinances of the church, or for perseverance, or for maturity of mind or heart; but if we confess that the Holy Spirit is a person, then every time we encounter a reference to Him in Scripture we must immediately think of Him as “Him” — a personality, a will, a doer, an agent, an active participant.  I found this exercise illuminating: read Romans 8 or Ephesians 5, and every time you come across a reference to “the Spirit” write down everything you’ve been told (in sermons, bible studies, books, blogs, etc) that is referring to.  If you’ve been around the Christian block a few times in virtually any protestant circles (charismatics included, sadly), you will be shocked by just how many times and in how many ways you’ve been told to substitute some instrument, action, technique, idea, or inscrutable truism for the Spirit Himself as our constant companion, helper, and sanctifier.

And all of this is not to say that I’ve arrived at a correct pneumatology, by the way.  This is not a true/false criterion, it’s a journey of discovery and a discipline of learning and experience that, if all goes well, will span the rest of our earthly lives.  This is just a brother pointing out a stumbling block in the hopes of helping others clear it.