Revival and Revivalism Part 1: An Autobiography Sketch and some Thoughts on Charismatic Churches
- Rubin
- Mar 18, 2023
- 9 min read
Updated: May 1, 2023
Part 1: The first part of of this blog series on revival and revivalism will look at my own experiences in US charismatic contexts as well as paint a picture of the state of many of these churches today.
Asbury University and Asbury Theological Seminary (ATS) in Wilmore Kentucky have recently experienced an “awakening” or “revival” on campus. What began as a regular chapel service for university students, led to a two-week 24/7 worship event. In American and global Christian history, times like this are not uncommon. American religious life is much indebted to revivalism, and regardless of how we appraise these moments in American history, one cannot deny its overarching effect on religious life. For those who are not familiar, revival is defined as a time of special divine grace for communities of believers resulting in a heightened sense of God’s presence, leading them to pursue the Lord more vigorously, and empowering them to witness to those around them. To see a revival historian's definition of revival, see here.
Although I did not visit Asbury during this time, I have a personal connection to this institution. I spend two years pursuing a ThM in Biblical Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary (2018–2020). So, as I kept myself informed about the developments at one of alma maters, I took this as an opportunity to think more intentionally about revival, revival history, and my own Pentecostal roots. I do not typically write about charismatic or pentecostal issues, and when I do, it is usually framed in relation to concerns of praxis—meaning right action, as opposed to its doctrine. See my last public comment about revivalists and social justice here, back in April of 2021, where I talk about famous figures in charismatic history like Charles Finney and Aimee Semple McPherson.
However, my lack of public engagement with these issues does not mean that this identity is not integral to who I am. For instance, I grew up in a Korean Pentecostal Assemblies of God church. I worked as a youth intern at an Assemblies of God megachurch. For almost a decade, I attended and served at a charismatic house church community and enrolled in a ministry school that was rooted in the Brownsville Revival. It was here that I learned about revivalists such as Charles Finney, William Seymour, Aimee Semple McPherson, and others. Even now, I am currently a part of an Elim Pentecostal church in South-West Scotland. In other words, I am deeply shaped and informed by charismatic doctrine and experience.
Yet, for myself, it is not necessarily reflected in my public output or academic work. For some folks, they might consider themselves “charismatic scholars” for whom their primary role is to write about pentecostal or charismatic issues in scholarship and for whom their identity is inextricably tied to their scholarship. For me personally, I see myself as a PhD student, who is also charismatic. That is, I am interested and write about many issues, and I am charismatic. This means that it is not the focus of my scholarly work, nor does it occupy much of my writings, even on forums like my blog. I say all of this to underscore the importance these experiences in my life, even if I am not always explicit about them. This history and experience also provides valuable context to why I am writing this piece.
So after years of being a part of a charismatic house church in Chicago, I unintentionally took a detour from “spirit-filled” communities (2018–2022). But this time was not completely disconnected from my tradition. For example, I attended ATS which is connected to the Wesleyan Holiness tradition. So although I attended an institution like ATS, I was not officially a part of an ecclesial community that shared my doctrinal beliefs on a regular basis.
This hiatus was sustained by growing disillusionment with my own tradition. Seemingly at every opportunity to join a charismatic community, I became dismayed at what I experienced. Spiritual gifts were utilized in manipulative ways to demonstrate authority instead of building one another up. Words that signified spiritual authority like “revelation” and “thus says the Lord” were overused and under explained, which consequently perpetuated the lay/clergy divide. And when the text was consulted, it was often dislocated from context, leading to sermons that was based on personal experience and truisms. Inevitably, the basis for these teachings was revelatory rather than textual. The frequency with which Charismatics appeal to "revelation" is simply astounding. This is not to say that this is a frivolous exercise, but at times it positions revelatory experience over-against the text.
At other times, political Christians dominated these spaces. I attended prayer meetings where the “intercessors” prayed against democrats while advocating for spiritual warfare against political agendas with which they disagreed. This was typically coupled with blind support for their own candidates. And so, without critically examining their own assumptions, they ended up mixing faith, politics, and fanaticism—a sure recipe for idolatry. Further fracturing my own confidence in the Church was the false prophecies surrounding the election of Trump in 2020. The fanaticism that many charismatic communities held for their political candidate signified to me a new era of American Christianity. Of course, this tradition has been shaped by historical precursors that make sense of where we are today, especially in the past fifty years or so, but the degree to which this manifested was unprecedented. In short, evangelical Christians have widely substituted the Lordship of Christ for political power. Two resources that have helped me to identify this phenomenon is John Fea’s, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, and Katherine Stewart’s, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.
Then, COVID happened. The Church was swept away by every source of misinformation imaginable. Skepticism toward medicine, the State, and public health measures plagued the Church. This is not to say that there are not reasons to question governing authorities, but this recent refusal to obey the State was ultimately a conflict between protection of one's neighbor and personal freedom. The endless criticisms that were raised of the State prior to this were virtually ignored by Christians, which presented an odd dislocation from the historic and prophetic strains of Christianity in liberationist theology of Native, Black, and Latin American contexts. So, it was through these dominate expressions of science skepticism, political fanaticism, and dislocation from POC and historical memory, that I felt, like many others, a growing chasm deepen between believers.
Throughout this season, I was still connected to Christian communities, but they were other traditions besides my own. When I attended ATS, I was a part of a non-charismatic house church network in Lexington, and more recently, an anabaptist community in Glasgow. These were incredible experiences, and I grew much in my faith. But during my first year in the UK, I felt a growing desire to reintegrate into my tradition. One reason I have been able to do so here in the UK is because European Christians do not have the same history and assumptions about political participation and science in general. Although much of my consternation at how I view myself in relation to American Christianity is not resolved, I appreciate that I have the capacity to think through my own faith in a different context.
Some may consider my time away from these communities a form of “deconstruction”, which I see more clearly in hindsight. It was during this time where I seriously reflected about what I believed and why. Through this deconstruction, I came to stronger convictions about what I hold as fundamental to my faith. I was also afforded the space to think more about my charismatic tradition and how it existed in history in relation to other forms of Christianity. And most of these concerns are not exclusive to Pentecostalism, but one of a larger Protestant legacy. Randall Balmer observes in his work, Evangelism in America, that the very phenomenon of Protestant religious freedom, both fostered a vibrant religious life resulting in revivals, as well as the fractures into endless denominations (Balmer 2016). The dual legacy of freedom and fissures in American religious life is a part of its Christian identity and one that I still struggle to understand.
Another connecting thread to this very broadly brushed Protestant landscape is the Christian intellectual milieu. This reminded me of the famous lines penned by Mark Noll, in his text, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, where he writes, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind….Notwithstanding all their other virtues, however, American evangelicals are not exemplary for their thinking, and they have not been so for several generations.”[1] Written almost thirty years ago it still profoundly exposes a lost element in our climate in US Christianity.
Noll’s analysis focuses more broadly on evangelical history, fundamentalism vis-à-vis liberalism, and the resulting dislocation of higher-ed institutions, among other things. But I think Charismatics exemplify this history quite well. For Charismatics specifically, we have a tradition that has raised leaders from broken, oppressed, and often overlooked communities. The tradition, as it was birthed out of revival, led to the empowerment of disenfranchised people such as women and people of color. Especially considering the time, this was an incredibly potent force in society. Although revivalism has reframed leadership over against the established educated clergy of the day and empowered people that would have otherwise been neglected, the other side of this revivalism sword is that it has simultaneously fostered a suspicion of education. This suspicion is even couched in binary language such as “head knowledge," which is opposed to a more pure and experiential “heart knowledge," as if they are mutually exclusive claims.
The disregard of formal education in charismatic communities is apparent as well when most pastors do not have any extensive theological education. This is a broad characterization and it is important to note that formal education is not a prerequisite to being used by God or faithfully understanding the text. While there are some leaders I look up to who are formally educated, many are not. But I cannot overlook the fact that there is a general tendency of pastors in charismatic communities who disregard theological education as elitist or unnecessary.
To be fair, there are traditions that predate our modern pentecostal/charismatic movements that also appealed to personal experience over against intellectual knowledge or inherited faith, like reformation thinkers, German Pietists, Moravians, and earlier monastic traditions. I am currently reading the Medieval writings of Symeon the New Theologian who writes against the scholastic theological methods of his day. Symeon argued that mystical experiences validate spiritual authority.[2] Now lest we assume Charismatics find an ally in Symeon’s mystical theology, we might be mistaken. His criteria for spiritual authority are much more stringent than our own. He says, “You who ignore everything we have been saying, and who have not arrived yourselves at the perception and knowledge and experience of divine illumination and contemplation, how can you talk or write at all about such things without shuddering?”[3] For Symeon, mystical or ecstatic encounters with God are authorizing events in the lives of leaders. If Symeon were somehow transported to our own day from his 10th–11th century medieval spiritual climate, he probably would not recognize the authority of most pentecostal and charismatic leaders.
All of this to say that this type of understanding is not just rooted in modern Pentecostal thought but has a long tradition. However, even though some ancient monastic and ascetic traditions emphasized profound spiritual experiences over their intellectual abilities, they were certainly not void of such rigor. Another point of difference is that they also coupled their mystical experiences with lives of intentional deprivation, scarcity, and austere living. The modern church instead emphasizes grace, easy living, wealth, security, and blessing which would be utterly unrecognizable to many of these traditions, especially those exemplified by Symeon. So, as I read his Discourses, I am struck by how similar our spiritual kinship is but also aware of the vast canyon that separates our assumptions about faith and theology. Although we are connected and indebted to the traditions that come before us, even if we are not cognizant of that fact, we are also worlds apart in terms of their presuppositions to faithful Christian living.
But all of this comes back to the central point of my autobiographical sketch and my framing of modern charismatic thought and practice: our churches are often isolated from the context of Scripture, history, and decoupled from the very foundations that make our expression of faith so powerful. My prayer for our charismatic communities is to see themselves in relation to the larger context and narrative of God's plan in history, in other words, the cosmic scope of God's plan. This posture allows us to see the big picture of what God has done and is doing. This also forces us to see how we are situated in history and understand the legacy of revivals in our traditions, and some of the issues related to these movements. Hopefully, revivals like this will not only deepen a desire to pursue God more, but will cause us to further evaluate the current state of our communities, so that we can be better prepared to understand and receive what God is communicating to us.
Endnotes:
[1] Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1994), 1. [2] Hannah Hunt, A Guide to St. Symeon the New Theologian (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015), 70. I am indebted to the connection between modern day charismatic doctrine and theologians like Symeon because of Heidi Baker's work, Heidi Baker, “Pentecostal Experience: Towards a Reconstructive Theology of Glossolalia,” (PhD diss., The Kings College London University of London, 1995). [3] Hunt, A Guide to St. Symeon the New Theologian, 70
Bibliography:
Balmer, Randall. Evangelicalism in America. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016.
Fea, John. Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018.
Noll, Mark. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1994.
Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. New York, Bloomsbury, 2020.
Symeon the New Theologian, Discourses. Translated by C.J. deCatanzaro. In the Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.Hannah Hunt, A Guide to St. Symeon the New Theologian (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015).
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