A very interesting and revealing article in the November edition of ‘Christianity’ deliberates over the recent trend in EPC* of rediscovering and returning to the historic Anglo-Catholic, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. The article is not sure whether this is a ‘trickle or stream’. In this connection one should also include many emerging churches as they experiment with throw-back Celtic practices and proprietary rituals in an attempt to get a handle on the Divine through tangible artifacts of human creation but nevertheless imbued with sacred meaning.
What is the cause of this drift away from standard EPC? It probably has a complex of causes, but I wasn’t surprised to read this:
Many more, weary of hype concerning predicted revival about to head over the horizon, preferred a backward look to creedal faith and practices with firmer foundations than the shifting focus of the latest fad.
I well remember the day circa 1995 when I first saw the title of David Tomlinson’s book, “The Post-Evangelical”. He had come out of the Restoration movement of the 1970s and 1980s a disillusioned man. I had researched this movement myself and that experience was unpleasant enough. Moreover, 1994 was a bad year for my relationship with evangelicalism, but the worst was yet to come: Shortly after followed the Toronto Blessing and its bid for EPC spiritual hegemony. So, the mere reading of the title of Tomlinson’s book struck a chord with me. I never actually got round to reading the book but somehow I knew what Tomlinson was thinking or at least knew how he felt. I had sensed the onset of his disillusionment from the things he was saying even in the early eighties whilst he was still in the restoration movement.
All in all, then, this ‘trickle or stream’ is really no surprise because it is symptomatic of a deep malaise in EPC. The malaise may even have recently deepened as a consequence of the burst of religious histrionics seen during the ‘Lakeland outpouring’. I suspect that ‘false-dawn’ fatigue will ensure that Lakeland will amount to little more than a short lived squall of gullibility and never make the inroads into the mainstream church even achieved by Toronto. But, I suspect, as with Toronto, the gold fillings blessings, and various unfilled prophecies whose failures were at first covered up with spiritual spin, Lakeland will in due course be quietly dropped as if it never happened.
The article in ‘Christianity’ talks about C S Lewis’ concept of ‘Deep Church’ - the nearest equivalent I can find (apart perhaps from the concept of ‘the church invisible’) to my notion of the ‘Open Gospel’: the Open Gospel is by definition a message whose effects manifests themselves across a diversity of Christian subcultures in history. As the article in ‘Christianity’ asks: where was God during the times prior to our favorite Christian revival/reformation/movement? Can we really write-off hundreds of years of pre-reformation/pre-revival church history just like that? Surely their must be something deeper than particular cultural realizations of church?
If ‘Deep Church’ is the rationale for the latest attempt to fix a malaise by seeking the essence of church then this may be an antidote to the spiritual hegemony of those Christians who have a propensity to write the script for other Christians and foist on them either bizarre blessings, spurious prophesies , authoritarian leaders and all sorts of what, in the final analysis, are optional cultural elaborations; all eased through under spiritual duress. Yes, I said ‘spiritual duress’ - I can hear now the echoes of bullying spiritual clichés from the past: “Don’t touch God’s anointed” , “Don’t analyse it”, “Don’t commit the unforgivable sin”, “Don’t lack faith”.
In the NT we find the Apostle Paul tackling two sorts of error: 1) the attempt to articalise the faith - in Paul’s time this was the attempt to combine strict and particular law observance with Christianity. 2) The Dualist Gnostics for whom salvation from an evil material world was bound up with sublime spiritual initiations involving altered states of consciousness etc. We see similar imbalances in EPC today: The hyper orthodox evangelicals have hived themselves off into small marginalized ghettos of strict and particular observance. They are unwilling to speak to anyone else and think of themselves as the truest remnant manifestation of church. The Gnostics on the other hand, have distorted the charismatic message as they interpret the ‘baptism of the holy spirit’ in gnostic, exclusivist and elitist terms, limiting God’s spiritual gifting to a small subset of recognized behaviours. They too also think of themselves as the truest manifestation of church.
Believers so easily fall for an either/or ‘right brain’ vs. ‘left brain’ dichotomy rather than a both/and synthesis. Thus, observance is set against experience, head is set against heart, reasoning against intuition etc. The trickle or stream toward classical church may be good in that it helps sustain a cultural turnover amongst Christians; a turnover that helps break up and renew calcified assumptions. It effectively declares jubilee years that free captives from the bondage of authoritarian movements and constantly redistributes spiritual capital. The Gnostics may believe they have a mandate to spread their latest bizarre initiation rites or revival, but a seething cauldron of change and cultural slipping and sliding prevents any one party getting the upper hand. However, the move into to a traditional ritualized Christianity is neither necessarily good nor bad: It all depends on whether openness and reciprocity is favoured over against exclusiveness and hegemony. I was never keen on Chairman Mao’s concept of continuous revolution for a secular society, but it may well have an important role to play in the history of Christianity!
* EPC=Evangelical/Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity
What is the cause of this drift away from standard EPC? It probably has a complex of causes, but I wasn’t surprised to read this:
Many more, weary of hype concerning predicted revival about to head over the horizon, preferred a backward look to creedal faith and practices with firmer foundations than the shifting focus of the latest fad.
I well remember the day circa 1995 when I first saw the title of David Tomlinson’s book, “The Post-Evangelical”. He had come out of the Restoration movement of the 1970s and 1980s a disillusioned man. I had researched this movement myself and that experience was unpleasant enough. Moreover, 1994 was a bad year for my relationship with evangelicalism, but the worst was yet to come: Shortly after followed the Toronto Blessing and its bid for EPC spiritual hegemony. So, the mere reading of the title of Tomlinson’s book struck a chord with me. I never actually got round to reading the book but somehow I knew what Tomlinson was thinking or at least knew how he felt. I had sensed the onset of his disillusionment from the things he was saying even in the early eighties whilst he was still in the restoration movement.
All in all, then, this ‘trickle or stream’ is really no surprise because it is symptomatic of a deep malaise in EPC. The malaise may even have recently deepened as a consequence of the burst of religious histrionics seen during the ‘Lakeland outpouring’. I suspect that ‘false-dawn’ fatigue will ensure that Lakeland will amount to little more than a short lived squall of gullibility and never make the inroads into the mainstream church even achieved by Toronto. But, I suspect, as with Toronto, the gold fillings blessings, and various unfilled prophecies whose failures were at first covered up with spiritual spin, Lakeland will in due course be quietly dropped as if it never happened.
The article in ‘Christianity’ talks about C S Lewis’ concept of ‘Deep Church’ - the nearest equivalent I can find (apart perhaps from the concept of ‘the church invisible’) to my notion of the ‘Open Gospel’: the Open Gospel is by definition a message whose effects manifests themselves across a diversity of Christian subcultures in history. As the article in ‘Christianity’ asks: where was God during the times prior to our favorite Christian revival/reformation/movement? Can we really write-off hundreds of years of pre-reformation/pre-revival church history just like that? Surely their must be something deeper than particular cultural realizations of church?
If ‘Deep Church’ is the rationale for the latest attempt to fix a malaise by seeking the essence of church then this may be an antidote to the spiritual hegemony of those Christians who have a propensity to write the script for other Christians and foist on them either bizarre blessings, spurious prophesies , authoritarian leaders and all sorts of what, in the final analysis, are optional cultural elaborations; all eased through under spiritual duress. Yes, I said ‘spiritual duress’ - I can hear now the echoes of bullying spiritual clichés from the past: “Don’t touch God’s anointed” , “Don’t analyse it”, “Don’t commit the unforgivable sin”, “Don’t lack faith”.
In the NT we find the Apostle Paul tackling two sorts of error: 1) the attempt to articalise the faith - in Paul’s time this was the attempt to combine strict and particular law observance with Christianity. 2) The Dualist Gnostics for whom salvation from an evil material world was bound up with sublime spiritual initiations involving altered states of consciousness etc. We see similar imbalances in EPC today: The hyper orthodox evangelicals have hived themselves off into small marginalized ghettos of strict and particular observance. They are unwilling to speak to anyone else and think of themselves as the truest remnant manifestation of church. The Gnostics on the other hand, have distorted the charismatic message as they interpret the ‘baptism of the holy spirit’ in gnostic, exclusivist and elitist terms, limiting God’s spiritual gifting to a small subset of recognized behaviours. They too also think of themselves as the truest manifestation of church.
Believers so easily fall for an either/or ‘right brain’ vs. ‘left brain’ dichotomy rather than a both/and synthesis. Thus, observance is set against experience, head is set against heart, reasoning against intuition etc. The trickle or stream toward classical church may be good in that it helps sustain a cultural turnover amongst Christians; a turnover that helps break up and renew calcified assumptions. It effectively declares jubilee years that free captives from the bondage of authoritarian movements and constantly redistributes spiritual capital. The Gnostics may believe they have a mandate to spread their latest bizarre initiation rites or revival, but a seething cauldron of change and cultural slipping and sliding prevents any one party getting the upper hand. However, the move into to a traditional ritualized Christianity is neither necessarily good nor bad: It all depends on whether openness and reciprocity is favoured over against exclusiveness and hegemony. I was never keen on Chairman Mao’s concept of continuous revolution for a secular society, but it may well have an important role to play in the history of Christianity!
* EPC=Evangelical/Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity
