Pentecostals & Progressives

My vision is a church combining signs and wonders with peace and justice: http://poweractivism.wordpress.com/ I've written a lot about it here (I hope Google can translate it for you): http://helapingsten.wordpress.com/om-den-har-bloggen/ God bless you!

Bo i just wanted to say i really was thrilled you shared your story amidst our theological chit-chat. We should totally expand the miracles but not supernatural conversation. I think we would both agree with the statement and probably have different meanings.

Peter B--yup, we're on the same page here. I guess I was responding more to a general group of process/progressive types (like Philip Clayton) with my statement than I was specifically to you, or to Bo.

Thank you all SO much for the feedback and clarification. It has helped me think through some stuff I have been chipping away at in the workshop. This is great - SO glad to be comparing notes with others and learning how to frame that thoughts better. I had written a quick response to Wendy's initial question but now I am working on larger post. -Bo

Dan, Just a P.S. for clarification (I'm not sure whether you're addressing just Bo or myself as well). I'm not for one second downplaying the reality of the healings that Leif, Bo and so many others describe. My own niece by marriage was cured of leukemia as a child in a way that was certainly extremely unusual, left all the doctors astounded, and which I and everyone who knows her can only call 'miraculous'. It's our notions of what is 'natural' which are too small and may need re-thinking - which is what I guess you're saying too. Peter B;

I appreciate this post a lot--and I would also like to further unpack what it means to 'believe in the miraculous but not the supernatural'. I completely get the emphasis that God is at work in all things, meaning 'natural' processes. But is there room in this conception for what I am starting to now call "unusual" (as opposed to "supernatural") events? Like, say, a blind man seeing again after Jesus puts some dirt in his eyes? I think it is possible to open the possibility of unusual events and still conceive of them as within what we call the space time universe, given that our understanding of said universe is limited and constantly shifting and expanding. (On another note, completely with you on the need to understand and incorporate systemic power and justice issues.)

Bo and Tripp, Thanks for having the courage to put this out there (both the interview and the great discussion afterwards). This is one dialogue which I suspect has been brewing in many people’s minds - and hearts - for a long while, but it’s the first time I’ve heard it articulated in this way. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have found your personal story very powerful, Bo, and I appreciate the risk you’re taking by talking about these real-life issues from within the context of an academic environment where some people may feel you've gone nuts. You’ve both thrown up so many questions that’s it’s even difficult to react in the space of one comment, but some immediate (and pretty unstructured) thoughts : - I fully agree that there is a disconnect between the Pentecostal focus on individual healing/liberation from sin and the Progressive emphasis on confronting idolatrous human power structures. My intuition is that there has to be a way to bridge this gap, as you put it, as ultimately we’re talking about the same reality seen from different angles. Philip Jenkins, to whom you refer, makes the striking point that in Africa, the two most consistent phenomena in contemporary Christianity are i) conflict with demons (however you want to interpret that – remember that the African interpretive framework is still a pre-modern one) and ii) liberation of women. This combination surely isn’t a coincidence, as it reflects an absolutely Biblical complementarity between healing and justice as proleptic signs of the Kingdom. This needs some serious exploration. - What we don’t yet have is a shared conceptual vocabulary to interpret the Biblical language of a supra-human dimension to the struggle of good and evil in a way that doesn’t either a) sound like mumbo-jumbo or b) it’s opposite, i.e. a total rationalization of the ‘powers’ language of the New Testament. At a theoretical level, Walter Wink’s ‘Powers that Be’ is perhaps the strongest attempt to date in this direction (together with René Girard’s astonishing anthropological work in books such as ‘I saw Satan fall like lightning’), but there is a huge theological challenge there which somebody really needs to take up. - Another urgent necessity is to find a way to talk positively about ‘popular’ religion (which constitutes the vast majority of religious practice in the world) in a way that doesn’t put it in an ‘either-or’ relationship to more intellectual approaches or simply patronize it. The relationship of systematics/philosophical theology to the reality on the ground is something which seems to leave even someone as erudite as John Milbank stumped. For too long the mainline academy – with the exceptions of a few brave souls such as Harvey Cox (in his wonderful ‘Fire from Heaven’), has simply stuck its head in the sand about Azusa Street 1906. Phyllis Tickle is surely right to call the mainline Church to task for this in 'The Great Emergence'. This lack of engagement may be one of the reasons why Pentecostalism has been led in the direction both of the prosperity Gospel and fundamentalist Biblical interpretation, whereas that surely isn’t a logical necessity. - If social justice issues need to be a central unifying element of the Pentecostal-Progressive dialogue, the other area that could be extremely helpful is the faith-science interface (which of course also where Claremont comes in). Again, Wink hints at this in ‘The Powers that Be’ in terms of the New Physics, but doesn’t really develop his thesis as far as he could. What needs deconstructing is the unhelpful ‘natural-supernatural’ opposition that effectively posits an inert (i.e. ‘Godless’) universe into which Divine action must ‘break’. I’m with you, Bo, on this – that metaphysical model isn’t credible, not only because it follows an outmoded ‘three-tier’ structure but also because mechanistic Newtonian notions of causality are now a dead duck. - However, if we follow the holistic line of thought that comes through Moltmann and Pannenberg on the Protestant side, Teilhard and Rahner on the Catholic, as well as through process thinkers (and maybe even a few postmodern philosophers who think Hegel has had a bad press...), then we come to something like your statement, Bo, affirming the ‘miraculous’ while questioning the ‘supernatural’. Limiting Divine action to 'intervention' surely has to be a category mistake. Looked at eschatologically, isn’t healing in the Spirit the most natural thing of all ? What if 'nature' in its present, incomplete reality is not yet its true self ? This is where Leif’s beautiful remark of looking at people as they will one day be seems to have the deep ring of truth to it. Shalom, Peter

Love this post Bo. I'd like to think that you having a progressive pentecostal brother in law has been a plus for you :-) I have to say, speaking as an Ordained Assembly of God Minister, you couldn't have framed it better. 100% hitting the nail on the head. I have found letting these two flow together has been not only incredibly liberating & freeing but also made me much more "hands on". Being a progressive pentecostal I feel what I have to share is truly good news! Thanks for the post.

I would suggest that key figures in the dialogue between Pentecostals and Progressives would be Johann Christoph and Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt. The former, known as the "elder Blumhardt", had his ministry begin with an event of demon possession and exorcism which was then followed up by a localized revival and a 30+ year healing ministry, that was highly nuanced in its understanding of healing, the body, prayer and social forces. This ministry was then taken in a social direction by his son, Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt who became a central figure in the Religious Socialist movement in southern Germany and Switzerland, all the while retaining his father's basic notions regarding the centrality of prayer and the healing of the body. Only now, the son spoke about the healing of the body politic.

Thank you for posting this. Could you unpack "I believe in the miraculous but not in the supernatural" a bit more?