The Pentecostal Pedigree: How Evangelical Is It?
Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, by Donald W. Dayton (Zondervan, 199 pp.; $19.95, paper). Reviewed by Roger E. Olson, assistant professor of theology, Bethel College, St. Paul, Minnesota.
If anyone doubts the evangelical pedigree of the Pentecostal movement, this book should remedy the confusion. Donald Dayton, an evangelical historian and theologian, locates the source of Pentecostal theology in the tradition of American popular evangelicalism. Among its precursors are such nineteenth-century revivalists as C. G. Finney, R.A. Torrey, A. B. Simpson, and A. J. Gordon. In fact, Dayton claims that “the whole network of popular ‘higher Christian life’ institutions and movements constituted at the turn of the century a sort of pre-Pentecostal tinderbox awaiting the spark that would set it off.” That spark, apparently, was the great Azusa Street Revival and associated events, which gave rise to the Pentecostal movement in the first decade of this century.
Tracing the lineage of Pentecostalism back through nineteenth-century revivalism and holiness movements to Wesley is hardly new, or even interesting, in itself. What is more novel and perhaps controversial is Dayton’s thesis that only a “hairsbreadth” of difference separated the popular evangelicalism of the 1890s from Pentecostalism when the latter emerged. This thesis is bound to raise objections from both Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal evangelicals who consider the Pentecostal dogma of tongues as the initial evidence of baptism with the Holy Spirit more than a “hairsbreadth” of difference between them.
Fourfold Gospel
According to Dayton, Pentecostal theology is characterized by a pattern of four Christological themes: Christ as Savior, Baptizer with the Holy Spirit, Healer, and Coming King. This common fourfold pattern (“full gospel”) underlies all the different sects and denominations of Pentecostalism and is what binds the movement together.
Dayton identifies the second theme (Christ as Baptizer) as the key one for Pentecostal theology but refuses to separate it from the others. All four, he argues, arise from, and together reinforce, an implicit spiritual perfectionism that runs from the deepest roots to the newest offshoots of Pentecostalism.
Again, while there is nothing new in Dayton’s identification of the “fourfold gospel,” his emphasis on the interdependence of the themes is fresh and serves to counteract two mistaken notions about the movement: that it has no coherent theology, and that it has only one central feature—glossolalia, or “tongues.”
Much of Dayton’s book is concerned with demonstrating that this constellation of four defining beliefs did not appear suddenly but had its beginnings in the explicit identification of sanctification with the baptism of the Holy Spirit. He suggests that this identification first appeared in the writings of John Fletcher, a nineteenth-century Methodist theologian who greatly influenced American revivalism.
Throughout that era, both Reformed and Wesleyan revivalists gradually adopted the idea that the “second moment” of Christian experience is the Holy Spirit baptism, although some interpreted this more as eradication of sin (“sanctification”), and some others interpreted it more as “enduement with power.” According to Dayton, the latter interpretation tended to win over the former. Through the influence of such men as Finney, Moody, Torrey, and Asa Mahan, president of Oberlin College, nineteenth-century popular evangelicalism became obsessed with a “Pentecostal fixation” that made the “second blessing” a prerequisite for powerful Christian living.
Dayton shows that this same revivalistic evangelicalism almost universally emphasized divine healing and the imminent premillenial return of Christ, thus completing the “fourfold gospel” and setting the stage for Pentecostalism.
Significance Of Tongues
Readers who look for some discussion of Pentecostal ism’s distinctive doctrine of speaking in tongues as the evidence of Spirit baptism will be disappointed. According to Dayton, this feature of the movement’s theology has no historical antecedent and is a “significant novum … that truly does set Pentecostalism apart from the other ‘higher Christian life’ movements.”
The overall thrust of this book, however, suggests that this emphasis on tongues places only a “hairsbreadth” between classical Pentecostalism and evangelicalism. But this underestimates the practical significance of tongues for most Pentecostals as well as the discontinuity with the rest of evangelicalism that glossolalia represents.
Nevertheless, Dayton’s book makes a significant contribution to the evangelical community by placing Pentecostalism in its proper theological and ecclesiastical context. Far from being relegated to a lunatic fringe or castigated as a “cult,” it should be recognized as a vital branch of the evangelical family tree with deep roots in the American revivalist tradition.
A Scapegoat’S Death
A Southern Family, by Gail Godwin (Morrow, 540 pp., $18.95, cloth). Reviewed by Katie Andraski, a poet living in Belvidere, Illinois. She is the author of When the Plow Cuts (Thorntree Press).
Theo Quick is dead. On a Sunday afternoon he killed his girlfriend and himself. At least, that is the simplest explanation of the facts. But no one really knows what happened.
“It was his own family that killed him, and he let them do it,” says Snow, his ex-wife. The Quicks are shaken. They did not hate Theo, the most sensitive and most obnoxious member of the family. They ignored him. After his death they become aware he was the scapegoat, the sacrifice for their sins.
Who is to blame, and why? That is what A Southern Family, by Gail Godwin, is about. The book is divided into two parts. In part one, Theo’s parents, ex-wife, brother, half-sister, and her friend tell their individual stories in relation to Theo. The result is an insider’s look at the dysfunctional family, where appearances are more important than the substance of the love, where the members are required to fill rigidly defined roles, where the family cannot talk about root problems.
Godwin flashes light on each character, showing how each family member contributed to Theo’s death. But she does so without judgment. She portrays characters the reader would normally shun—the possessive mother, the adulterous father, the hillbilly wife—so humanly that the reader sympathizes with them and even begins to like them.
In part two, time adds to the insights the family has gained in Theo’s death. His half-sister, Clare, throws away a novel she is working on and writes a letter to Theo instead. Snow fights for the custody of their son and wins, even though the family sees her as white trash. Theo’s father freezes in denial. He persists in believing that someone else killed his son, putting ads in the paper offering a reward for any information. Rafe, Theo’s brother, medicates his pain with booze. And Lily, Theo’s mother, digs deep into her religious convictions.
Through Lily, hope emerges. She interprets a dream about Theo: “But in the realm that matters, the realm where the indestructible personality lives on, the realm mere history can’t touch, Theo lives. He lives, and right now he’s in the process of climbing a very steep hill to sanctity; he’s on the way to wash his hands so that he’ll be fit to … shake hands with God.”
Echoes of sacrifice
Godwin claims A Southern Family is her most personal novel yet, born out of the death of her own brother: “It remains unsolved just like [the death] in the book. The only way I could express myself about it or even think about it was to write a novel about it.”
The author also says her religious background and ties show through (as much as she wishes to reveal) in this novel. In light of those comments, it is interesting to note that Theo, the Greek word for God, is the name she chose for the character who portrays her brother. And that the name Quick may be taken from the Apostles’ Creed—” From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” The line echoes through the novel. Theo judges the family by his death. Each member stands in the dock and must answer. As in the Bible, the sacrifice permeates the story.
Load of sorrows
In the end, Lily opens herself to the grace of repentance. She contemplates walking up the gravel road leading to her home, barefoot, “letting desolation and hopelessness embrace her like a lover, feeling the ache in her heart swell and swell like a sponge as it absorbed death and betrayal and cowardice and willful, damaging ignorance—her own as well as other people’s. If she could make it to the top of the hill carrying her entire and acknowledged load of sorrows and mistakes, as well as the evil [that] experience had taught her human beings were capable of visiting on one another, it seemed to her she might be granted a kind of spiritual second wind.”
Godwin leaves the reader with hope, closing the novel with a prayer: “May the Lord bless us, protect us from all evil, and bring us to everlasting life.
“Amen.”
A Southern Family offers us a long, thoughtful examination of dysfunctional relationships, something from which our doctrine does not exempt us. It respects the power of faith, and through its wounded and grieving family, offers us insight and hope into our own guilt and sacrifice.
The Tension Of Mind And Heart
A Pauline Theology of Charismata, by Siegfried Schatzmann (Hendrickson Publishers, 117 pp.; $7.95, paper); Spirit and Gospel in Mark, by M. Robert Mansfield (Hendrickson Publishers, 191 pp.; $9.95, paper). Reviewed by Gordon D. Fee, professor of New Testament at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia.
Despite their diverse contents, these two books hold several things in common: Both authors are New Testament professors at Oral Roberts University; both books reflect their authors’ doctoral dissertations; and both are serious pieces of scholarship by Pentecostals, though clearly both are intended for a much larger audience. With these and several other books of note, Hendrickson Publishers is establishing itself as the leading outlet of Pentecostal and charismatic scholarship. Siegfried Schatzmann’s study is as straightforward as its title suggests. The first half is an exegetical study of the passages in which the term charisma(ta) (defined as “concrete expressions of grace,” usually “spiritual gifts”) occurs in Paul’s letters.
The final three chapters are theological, discussing in turn charismata as “the church’s equipment for service,” as “ministerial function,” and as “expressions of authority.” In these final chapters, Schatzmann moves far beyond traditional Pentecostal/charismatic concerns, engaging the scholarly literature of the past several decades (for the most part, non-Pentecostal) in a discussion of these topics.
The result is a book that takes some unexpected turns. Discussion of the gifts as such is limited to the exegetical chapter. The theological chapters do not deal with the individual gifts at all, but with the role of charismata in Pauline theology. This is a refreshing discussion from a Pentecostal, and one that scarcely surfaces in the popular literature.
Although I disagree with the author at places (e.g., on the “discerning of spirits” and the meaning of 1 Tim. 4:10), the exegetical work is carefully done. But one wonders why it was limited only to those places where the term charisma(ta) appears. After all, since Paul twice calls “prophecy” a charisma, the omission of such texts as 1 Thessalonians 5:19–22 and Ephesians 4:11–16 seems unfortunate for what is otherwise a very helpful study. Indeed, scholar and lay person alike may benefit from this volume.
Combating The False Prophets
M. Robert Mansfield’s study, on the other hand, is not a book for beginners. He carries into his study a clearly Pentecostal concern: to demonstrate a much greater role for the Spirit in Mark’s gospel than previous scholarship has been willing to concede. Mansfield is not writing with an eye toward either the lay person or the traditional Pentecostal / charismatic reader. Here is heady stuff, written by a New Testament scholar for other New Testament scholars.
His thesis can be simply put: Two themes dominate Mark’s presentation of Jesus—“gospel” and “Spirit.” These two themes are his special interest because of the situation in the church in Rome in the A.D. 60s, a situation Mansfield understands to be reflected in one text in particular, Mark 13:22. Here the church in Rome has in its midst a group of “pneumatic-prophetic ecstatics,” who “rely upon immediate revelation or signs and wonders from the Spirit for authority” and thereby are making “exaggerated, erroneous claims” both in doctrine and practice.
Mark intends to counteract these false prophets by insisting that the “gospel,” which is preached in the church by the “orthodox,” is based on the preaching/teaching/healing of Jesus himself, who above all else was empowered by the Spirit. Indeed, it is argued that Mark understands “the Risen Christ and the Holy Spirit [to be] inseparable, if not identical.”
Since the risen Christ is also identical with the historical Jesus of his gospel, Mark expects his readers’ encounter with Jesus in the gospel to be a genuine encounter with the Spirit. At the same time, he expects his readers not to lose touch with the historical character of the story itself.
Unproven Thesis
Although the author is to be praised for this provocative study—one is certainly forced to think through Mark’s gospel all over again—and for his thorough knowledge and critique of Markan studies over the past three decades, one suspects that these studies provide the basic premises for this book far more than does the text of Mark itself. My own Pentecostal instincts resonate with the author’s thesis; but my better judgments as a New Testament scholar conclude that it is finally unproven. The author’s thesis seems to fit contemporary Tulsa far more than what we know about first-century Rome.
These two books together highlight some continuing tensions in Pentecostalism. On the one hand, they offer clear evidence that Pentecostal scholarship is coming of age. However, how much Pentecostals will find to rejoice in that maturation remains moot—at least as far as these two books are concerned. My guess is that the age-long tension in Pentecostalism between mind and heart (education and experience) will scarcely be ameliorated by such books.
