What Sort of Power Does the Holy Spirit Work Through Christians? Similarities Between the Corinthians and the Contemporary North American Charismatic Movement

I have been in some form of ministry in the charismatic movement since I was 18 years old, so for around 15 years now. I have heard dozens of sermons, bible studies, testimonies and talks about the present-day use of spiritual gifts in the Christian church. These messages normally take the form of either 1. An attempt to justify the validity of spiritual gifts for today (rather than just during the lives of the Apostles) and/or 2. Practical tutorial on how to use these gifts. I have benefitted greatly from these kinds of talks and am very thankful for the many leaders, both those with big, influential ministries and those with small, local ones, who have taken flack for their advocation that these gifts are for today and are essential to the witness of the Church in all ages. Having said that, I find it very curious and, based on the many things coming to light in the charismatic movement today, downright alarming that I don't think I have ever heard a talk from a practising charismatic about the dangers of misusing spiritual gifts and how easy it is for us frail humans to engage in this misuse. We are certainly not short of folks outside the charismatic movement who are critical of the charismatic movement's use of the gifts. But I have found there to be very little self-reflection on this darker side of the charismatic gifts within the movement. I think that this is strange because, as we know, the two largest chunks of New Testament teaching on spiritual gifts are found in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12-14. There are other smaller sections in various other New Testament letters, but these two are the most sustained and, of the two, the 1 Corinthians section is by far the largest in terms of word count. Many Christians are aware that the Corinthians were Paul's 'problem church', the most spiritually dysfunctional church under his influence. In chapters 12 through 14 Paul is not providing generic, context-less instructions on spiritual gifts. His goal in these chapters is to sternly correct the ways in which the Corinthians were misusing the gifts of the Spirit. This means that the largest body of teaching we have in the New Testament on spiritual gifts is centrally focused on correcting their misuse. I think that in the charismatic movement in North America today, with all the abuse scandals now coming to light, we are experiencing the consequences of not heeding this fact. When God inspired the writing of the New Testament through the Spirit, he could have chosen any contextual human situation within which to provide us with his teaching on spiritual gifts. The fact that he chose to communicate most of what we know about spiritual gifts through a forceful and authoritative correction of their abuse, should tell us something.

To be clear, it is not that there is anything wrong with the gifts themselves, but God knows that even once we are followers of Christ, the human heart has a deep-seated attraction towards self-exaltation. This means that we human beings oftentimes struggle to use power in ways that do not exalt ourselves and demean others. Gordon Fee, the esteemed Pentecostal biblical scholar ('Pentecostal biblical scholar' seemed to many people for many years to be an oxymoron, but thankfully now more Pentecostal/charismatic folks are engaging with academic, scholarly theology) named his magnum opus God's Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul. One of (not the only) roles of the Holy Spirit is to empower the church's witness, both in the early church and throughout every age. But humans, even those already apprenticed to Jesus, are remarkably good at misusing any and all kinds of power available to them, even the gifts of the Spirit. I have found in my own ministry journey that God has given more examples of how not to do ministry rather than how to do ministry. For years I harboured a little resentment that so much of my experience of church in the charismatic movement had involved witnessing poor and sometimes downright immoral spiritual leadership. But nowadays, I am beginning to see God's wisdom as he has sovereignly led me over the past 15 years: knowing what not to do can sometimes, by God's grace, be even more instructive that knowing what to do. If there was ever an example of this principle in action, it is the letter we know as 1 Corinthians.

I think that the 21st century charismatic movement in North America has a great deal to learn from 1 Corinthians. For the last several decades a prominent trend in biblical scholarship has been what is known as rhetorical-criticism. As we know, any attempt to understand Paul's letter 1 Corinthians must attempt to understand the original context in which the letter was written. When Paul wrote 1 Corinthians, the dominant cultural forces were Greek and Roman. In ancient Greece and in later Roman society, one of the most prized skillsets and areas of study was rhetoric, which was the art of persuasive speech and also writing. In Paul's day, the known world was steeped in this Greco-Roman culture. When young Greek or Roman men aspired to lead a successful public life, one of the key skills and areas of education they sought was training in rhetoric. This means that even though Paul was not formally trained in Greco-Roman rhetoric, it was such a part of the culture of his day that he seems to have known some of the conventions of this style of writing. This analysis has led some scholars to suggest that many of Paul's letters were written in a rhetorical fashion and therefore can be understood more fully through this lens.

Many scholars have identified 1 Corinthians 1:10 as Paul's propositio in 1 Corinthians (see, for example, Ben Witherington III, Conflict and Community in Corinth: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on 1 and 2 Corinthians (Chicago, IL: Eerdmans, 1995)). The propositio in Greco-Roman rhetoric was like a thesis statement, that is, a concise statement of the author or speaker's main point in the letter or discourse. In the NRSV, this verse reads "Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose." Scholars then go on to identify various other components of Greco-Roman rhetoric in 1 Corinthians and other letters like Galatians. The significance of 1:10 being the propositio is that this means that in every problem that Paul addresses in the letter, whether of factionalism, or sexual immorality, or marriage and celibacy, or spiritual gifts, his main concern is the way in which the Corinthian's spiritual immaturity is resulting in division and disunity in the Corinthian church. In chapters 12-14, Paul is addressing the ways in which the Corinthians were misusing spiritual gifts with this resulting in division. Some readers find it strange that sandwiched in the middle of chapters 12 and 14 we find Paul's famous teaching on Christian love in chapter 13. Why does Paul seem to abruptly abandon the topic of spiritual gifts and then pick it back up again with no explanation? In reality in chapter 13 Paul has not changed topics, he is still speaking about the Corinthian's misuse of spiritual gifts, but he is in chapter 13 providing the solution to their abuse of the gifts - other-focused, Christ-like love, which is the opposite of the Corinthian's self-exalting, other-abusing, division-creating misuse of the gifts. Although chapter 13 is Paul's immediate answer for the Corinthian's misuse of the gifts, it is in chapter 1 at the start of the letter than he outlines his overall diagnosis of the Corinthian's problem, which is a problem that all human beings have in common: a failure to fully conform our lives to Christ's character and way of life.

Many a PhD dissertation has speculated on the exact source of the Corinthian's theology/philosophy that Paul is seeking to counter/correct in 1 Corinthians. Were some of the Corinthians Stoics? Or Epicureans, perhaps? The challenge with this kind of scholarly work is that we of course do not have the Corinthian's own testimony about themselves, we can only access their thinking through Paul's correction of it. The oft-used analogy is that this is like listening to someone take a phone call nearby - you can only hear one side of the conversation, but that side might help you intuit some of what the other person is saying. This interpretive approach is fraught with potential methodological pitfalls, but can be done well. Regardless of what exact theology/philosophy the Corinthians were espousing, Paul's most thoroughgoing correction of it comes in 1:18-31. This is one of Paul's many 'mic-drop' moments, one of his most profound expositions of Christ's person and work. As a young and pretty foolish 18-year-old, newly immersed in the charismatic stream of the church, I was quite chuffed that in 1:18-20 Paul was clearly saying that there was no need to formally study theology in a seminary setting, because God clearly did not approve of such "wisdom of the wise" or "discernment of the discerning". Needless to say, this has nothing to do with what Paul is discussing here.

In this section of text, Paul is contrasting the dominant social and cultural norms of the Greco-Roman world with the character and ways of God revealed in Christ, especially in his death on the cross for humanity. Remember that the Greco-Roman world was steeped in philosophy and wisdom (the word 'philosopher' etymologically is 'a lover of wisdom'). The prevailing culture was centrally focused on the ambitious accumulation of social status and glory through the learning and practice of philosophy and other cultural norms. Young, aristocratic Greco-Roman boys were groomed from day one to one day ascend the cultural ladder of success, and philosophy was one of the main ways in which this could be done. So, when Paul in 1:18-31 summarizes the entire Christian message as "the message of the cross", he is contrasting this Greco-Roman worldview and culture, self-exaltation and social ascension and domination, against the message of the God who dies naked, beaten, bruised and shamed as a criminal upon a cross. Paul in this section is saying that the Greco-Roman world thinks it understands wisdom and strength, so when it looks at a crucified man who claims to be God-in-the-flesh, all it sees is foolishness, shame and weakness. But Paul's most spine-tingling move in this letter comes at 1:21b - 'εὐδόκησεν ὁ θεὸς διὰ τῆς μωρίας τοῦ κηρύγματος σῶσαι τοὺς πιστεύοντας' - 'it pleased God, through the foolishness of the cross, to save those who believe.' God's response to the Greco-Roman world's pomp, self-exaltation, other-crushing 'wisdom' was to please himself by overturning this kind of 'wisdom' with his own kind of wisdom - the self-lowering, humble, servant-hearted death of his own guiltless son for the sake of a guilty world in shame, misery and suffering. And what was God's end-game in all of this? 1:27-31 in the NRSV reads - "But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” In short, for Paul, the message of the gospel is how God, by lowering and humbling himself in Christ's death on the cross, saved humanity from its own captivity to sinful self-exaltation, self-aggrandizement and the always-accompanying mistreatment of others that comes with these things, so that we could worship and exalt him alone and not ourselves.

As I survey the wreckage of many parts of the charismatic movement in North America right now in the wake of all of these recently-revealed abuse scandals, if I were to try to diagnose our collective problem, I think "self-exaltation, self-aggrandizement and the always-accompanying mistreatment of others" goes some way towards showing us where we have gone wrong. Just as the 1st century Corinthians were using the gifts of the Spirit to exalt and esteem themselves over others to their detriment, in keeping with the prevailing Greco-Roman culture of their day, so some parts (not all parts) of the 21st century charismatic movement now have a penchant for this same self-exaltation, self-aggrandizement and use and abuse of vulnerable people to get what they want, in keeping with much of our 21st century culture.

Although Paul was taking issue with the dominant culture's understanding of wisdom in 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, the ultimate culprit was not Greece or Rome, but the collective and individual sinfulness of the human heart. The outward expression of this sinfulness in the 1st century Corinthian church may have been some form of stoicism or epicureanism. But I think that the very same state of affairs, the profoundly sinful human heart apart from/not conforming itself to Christ, is behind some (but importantly not all) parts of the 21st century North American charismatic movement which are obsessed with the health and wealth gospel (God exists to make me happy and wealthy), the new apostolic reformation (concentrating almost all of the authority in a small number of specially 'anointed', untouchable, unaccountable leaders), word of faith teaching (self-centredness which makes God a vending machine for 'blessings'), 7-mountains dominion theology and seeking to gain political power (both of which are domination by force not love by suffering servanthood). What are these teachings and practices if not contemporary use of spiritual gifts/charismatic theology to exalt and benefit the self at the expense of others? At this point, these teachings, beliefs, and practices have born the negative fruit (especially the abuse of vulnerable people) that was always within them. The only solution is continual co-crucifixion with Christ (Galatians 2:19-20) and a stubborn, grace-reliant determination, especially from Christin leaders, to walk the path of the wisdom of the cross not the wisdom of this age. For charismatic Christians especially, I think the onus is on us to insist that the power that the Holy Spirit brings to Christians individually and the Church collectively is the power to overcome our self-centredness and live out the wisdom and power of the cross. It is not the power or wisdom of self-glorification.

Does all of this mean, in my opinion, that the charismatic movement in North America has nothing going for it? Definitely not. It is clear to me that some parts of this movement are sticking with their dedication to the use of spiritual gifts today but are doing so in a wisdom-of-the-cross fashion, rather than a wisdom-of-the-world fashion. I am immensely grateful for these movements, churches, leaders and people; they are lights in a dark place at the moment. I also think that charismatic theology as a whole is still viable theologically, intellectually and morally. In fact, I think we have much to offer the rest of the global Church in this time. But we, myself very much included, need to be willing to re-examine some of our beliefs and practices to become all that God has called us to be at this time in history.