The Priceless Contribution of Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity to Modern Academic Theology

Jesus raising Lazarus by Rembrandt

Hello everyone, thanks for checking in on another one of my blogs, I appreciate your time. Those of you who have been tracking with my blog/social media posts have surely gathered that I think that some (far from all) of the Pentecostal/Charismatic expressions of Christianity in North America right now could use some adjustment in various ways. The perceptive among you may also have intuited that I have some personal baggage from my 15-or-so-years of involvement in these circles. I am certainly aware of this baggage, and am trying to sort through it in a Jesus-like fashion, but I probably don't always succeed in doing this, for which I sincerely apologize - I don't want my comments to be coloured in a negative way by my own hurts. By way of cathartic therapy for my heart and hopefully yours also, this blog post ponders a genuinely priceless contribution of Pentecostal/Charismatic expressions of Christianity to modern academic theology.

Some readers may immediately be thinking something along the lines of 'What hath the Toronto Blessing to do with professional academic theology?', or vice versa! But hear me out. As many of you know, I am currently studying for a PhD in New Testament at Wycliffe College/the University of Toronto. Last November I returned from my first Society of Biblical Literature conference and confounded many of my church friends when I got home to Calgary by telling them that the largest and most prestigious scholarly society for the study of the Bible in the world is largely secular. I see the key question clear as day on people’s faces 'How on earth did we get here?'. How is it that many of the people who know the most about the Bible in all of human history, contemporary professional biblical scholars, are oftentimes the same people who not only lack faith in the God to whom these writings testify, but who are also often quite hostile to a more theologically traditional interpretation of the Bible? The answer to this question is most easily explained historically.

The most dominant way in which scholars have studied the Bible over the last two-hundred or so years is known as the 'historical critical method'. This way of approaching the biblical text was essentially invented in the major German universities in the 19th century and into the early 20th century. Although other methodologies are springing up all over the place now, the historical critical method still reigns somewhat supreme. What else was happening in Europe in the 18th century? The Enlightenment and the rise of modern science. The historical critical method was essentially a decision to study the Bible in a manner analogous to how a scientist would study the physical world. The Enlightenment also produced modern liberal Christianity (I am speaking here of theological liberalism, not political), which Roger Olson in his relatively recent book entitled Against Liberal Theology (2022) argues is so distinct from traditional orthodox Christianity that it really constitutes a different religion altogether.

Now this is the point at which many theologically (not necessarily politically) conservative Christians, including many (not all) Pentecostals/Charismatics are fond of trotting out the old 'seminary cemetery' reasoning. Whilst I do not deny that the general nature/environment of modern biblical studies can be challenging for genuine Christian faith, I am personally even more concerned about the price we pay when we entirely abandon the biblical call to love God with all of our minds (Matthew 22:37). Also, I am very troubled by the current Christian trend of rejecting science and professional medical care altogether. No, there must be a better way, a best-of-both-worlds approach. This is where I think Pentecostal/Charismatic expressions of Christianity have the potential to make an enormous contribution to the modern academic study of the Bible. Let me give you an example.

Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), a famous German New Testament scholar, produced an especially infamous quotation in one of his works:

"We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament." (New Testament and Mythology & Other Basic Writings, 4).

Bultmann was a person of his time, as we all inevitably are. He is most famous for his attempt to 'Demythologize' the New Testament, that is, to strip away the external leaves of naive, primitive  belief in things like miracles, demonic spirits, and cosmic principalities and powers, so as to get to the kernel of the core truths of these stories which can reasonably be applied to the modern world and modern people, equipped as we are with our scientific knowledge of how the world works. Although most theologically conservative Christians baulk at the above quotation, Pentecostals/Charismatics don't so much baulk as simply scratch their heads in wonder. I remember watching a YouTube recording of one of John Wimber's sermons where he said something to the effect of (not an exact quotation) 'We had already been praying for God to intervene in all kinds of things in our lives, for broken down cars to restart and people’s bodies to be miraculously healed, and were having much success, when we went to seminary and learned that God actually didn't do any of that kind of stuff anymore.' I have definitely butchered the quote, but hopefully you get the idea. Pentecostals/Charismatics are not only intellectually committed to the idea that Jesus and the Apostles worked miracles in the distant past as a point of doctrine, as are all theologically conservative Christians, we are actually living our daily lives praying for, expecting and sometimes witnessing God doing the miraculous. We simply did not get Bultmann's Enlightenment-derived, anti-miraculous memo. We dodged that modernist bullet. And this automatically brings us much closer to the original authors of Scripture and Jesus himself. This in turn helps us read their teachings with greater insight and also to preserve a thoroughly vibrant faith in the midst of the sometimes-hostile intellectual waters of modern academic theology.