Pentecostalism and Christian Unity

Ecumenical Documents and Critical Assessments

Wolfgang Vondey, Vondey

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781608990771
  9781498254908
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621897163
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

This volume of ecumenical documents, key texts, and critical essays is the first collection of its kind exclusively dedicated to Pentecostalism and its contributions to Christian unity. In the first part, a cadre of internationally renowned scholars addresses the ecumenical heritage and perspectives of the Pentecostal movement since the early twentieth century. Part 2 offers a collection of final reports from international dialogues with Pentecostal participation. The final part contains programmatic essays in response to The Nature and Mission of the Church, a major study on the doctrine of the church published by the World Council of Churches. Most of these essays were first presented by the ecumenical-studies group of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, currently the only organized ecumenical think tank among Pentecostals in North America. Since its formation in 2001, the group has encouraged Pentecostal participation in ecumenical concerns, has hosted Roman Catholic-Pentecostal conversations at the annual meeting of the Society, has invited international scholarly debates on ecumenical matters, and has engaged in the study of ecumenical consensus statements. The essays and documents in this collection model the dedication and commitment among Pentecostals today that engage the challenges and opportunities of Christian unity from the perspective of a tradition that has often been falsely accused of being anti-ecumenical. This collection presents an invaluable resource for teachers, scholars, and pastors interested in engaging the global Christian arena from the worldwide and ecumenical image of Pentecostalism. Contributors Carmelo E. Alvarez Harold D. Hunter Douglas Jacobsen Veli-Matti Karkkainen Frank D. Macchia Raymond R. Pfister Cecil M. Robeck Jr. Paul van der Laan Wolfgang Vondey

Part 1

The Ecumenical Heritage and Perspectives of Pentecostalism

1

The Ambivalent Ecumenical Impulse in Early Pentecostal Theology in North America

Douglas Jacobsen

The early leaders of the Pentecostal movement in North America were uncertain what to think about ecumenism, the hope and task of fostering visible Christian unity. This essay examines the views of eight influential first generation Pentecostal leaders, their display of ecumenical attitudes, and their division on the issue of Christian unity, both as a group and in their own individual thinking. Early Pentecostal theology could not agree whether Christian unity was an unmitigated good to be pursued with vigor or a false illusion that should be patently rejected. The main body of opinion was mixed, undecided, and confused. This essay will argue, however, that the long arch of early Pentecostal thinking, understood in historical context, bends toward ecumenism rather than away from it.

First Generation Views of Ecumenism

The eight first-generation Pentecostal leaders examined in this essay can be loosely grouped into three categories based on their differing ecumenical perspectives. The first group, which includes Richard G. Spurling and David Wesley Myland, was strongly supportive of the goal of Christian unity. A second group of four—Charles Parham, William J. Seymour, Joseph H. King, and Andrew David Urshan—were moderately supportive of ecumenism (at least in comparison with the first group). Finally a third group of early Pentecostal leaders, exemplified by George F. Taylor and William Durham, were generally anti-ecumenical in attitude. These eight spokespersons do not reflect the total spectrum of opinion that existed within the first generation of the Pentecostal movement in North America, but they are representative of the range of views expressed. They are drawn broadly from the different emergent Pentecostal traditions and indicate that attitudes toward ecumenism were not necessarily directly related to other theological convictions.

Strong Proponents of Christian Unity

Richard G. Spurling Jr. (1851–1935)

Perhaps no one in the early Pentecostal movement was as strong a proponent of Christian unity as Richard G. Spurling, a leader in the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee). His wonderful little book, The Lost Link, lifts up unity and mutual love as the key identifiers of true Christian faith. The Lost Link is an analysis of the demise of love in the history of the church and the beginning of its restoration in the Pentecostal revival. Spurling said, the church had begun as a fellowship of equals bound together by love. It lasted in that form for several centuries, but in the early fourth century, the emperor Constantine launched an effort to Christianize the Roman empire. The result was disastrous. As the church gained political power and became more institutionalized, the inter-personal rule of love was slowly replaced by the impersonal rule of creeds. Division within the church was the inevitable result. For Spurling, the composition of the Nicene creed marked the fall of the church from love. From then on, he said, “heretics” (those who could not agree with the creed) were “expelled . . . from their fellowship and communion regardless of their love for God and one another.”1

In Spurling’s judgment, the next thousand years were truly bleak. Christians began to persecute and even to kill each other in the name of pure doctrine. Spurling saw the popes of the Catholic Church as the chief protagonists in this story of persecution and murder, but he knew that Protestantism had also been infected with the disease of hate. This was true of the larger Protestant denominations, and it unfortunately was also true of many local low-church Protestant congregations where “the little preacher in the stand” would often tout his own hobby horse gospel, “branding all others as heretics or devils . . . bring[ing] division instead of unity, hatred instead of love.”2 Spurling argued that this kind of negative, church-dividing preaching was the “greatest hindrance to the cause of Christ.”3 In his mind, it had done more harm to the faith than all the attacks of all the world’s greatest atheists combined.

Spurling believed that this pattern of Christian intolerance was slowly beginning to falter during his own lifetime. Spirit-filled Christians were slowly beginning “to hew down the walls of prejudice and cut asunder the lines of separation, to shake off the bonds of men-made creeds and laws, to come into the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace unto the faith that sweetly works by love.”4 Spurling did not think this great work of restoring the church to love and unity was anywhere close to being completed, but he was glad it was finally underway. He likened it to the return of the Jews to Palestine after their exile in Babylon, and he warned that “as we return from our captivity in Babylon to rebuild the temple of God, to crown it with the chief cornerstone of Christ and His law,” the proponents of legalism and Christian intolerance “will persecute us, they will mock and say that we are a band of cranks and are fanatic.”5 Although he believed that “preachers and leaders of the various denominations [would] shake their gray heads and wave their palsied hands and cry heresy and latitudinarianism,”6 the cause of love and unity was worth the struggle. The slow return of the rule of love to the church was a sign of God’s promise ultimately to restore the church to its original character before the end of the age, and Spurling welcomed that restoration with open arms. He ended his book with these lines of verse:

Oh God, inspire everyone

Who may read this little book,

For union now to pray and look,

And to adopt God’s blessed law,

And cease to build with wood and straw;

Oh, may some wise and noble one

Complete the work we have begun,

Oh, may it catch on every pen,

And trace the isles from end to end,

And turn each foe into a friend,

And into one God’s children blend.7

David Wesley Myland (1858–1943)

Myland was a free-lance Pentecostal leader of sorts and liked to state his views in his own words. He was also perhaps a bit more creative than other Pentecostals in the rhetoric he used to describe how God intervened in individual lives, assuming that different people often received the experience of Pentecost in slightly different ways. Myland was quite flexible in his evaluation of the evidence that someone had received the Pentecostal blessing. He believed, for example, that speaking in tongues was one indicator that a person had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit (or the “fulness of God”), but there were others signs, as well, and the longing for Christian unity was one of them. Myland declared: “This is the intent of Pentecost, that my heart might be bound with men and women in Africa, in Japan, in the vastnesses of Tibet; that my spirit might be bound with men and women in India and we are made one in working out the purposes of God.”8

From Myland’s perspective, the ultimate goal of Pentecost was “homo-thumadon,” meaning “one-accordness,” and this sense of Christian oneness was rooted in the very character of God. He wrote: “Seeing then that Pentecost results from the absolute oneness of the Godhead what oneness and unity ought it to produce in us who have received! It ought to make us one body, and it will do it. I am one with everybody that is at all one with God. I simply cannot help it. The only thing that can keep me from being one with others is some work either of the flesh or of the devil.”9 He then asked, in Spurling-esque fashion, whether Christians would be willing to “throw away [their] little scruples and colorings and shades of opinion”10 for the sake of unity. Myland hoped they would. He knew that unity–especially doctrinal unity–was hard to come by. In fact, he said it was “awful hard to get minds to think and speak the same thing.”11 But he was also aware that doctrine was not everything. Love, unity, and service to others were also important elements of Pentecostal faith, so much so that he advised that “if we lose the love element out of [our faith] we had better quit preaching and get back to practice.”12 Myland believed that those who opposed unity because of their overly rigorous and detailed definitions of doctrine risked putting themselves in the position of opposition to God—a posture in which no good Pentecostal would want to be found.

Moderate Proponents of Christian Unity

If Spurling and Myland represent the more radically supportive edge of early Pentecostal ecumenism, a host of other early leaders voiced their support for ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Ecumenical Heritage and Perspectives of Pentecostalism
• Chapter 1: The Ambivalent Ecumenical Impulse in Early Pentecostal Theology in North America
• Chapter 2: Global Pentecostalism and Ecumenism
• Chapter 3: Joining the World Council of Churches
• Chapter 4: Guidelines for Ecumenical Dialogue with Pentecostals
• Chapter 5: Ecumenism of the Spirit
• Chapter 6: Lessons from the International Roman Catholic–Pentecostal Dialogue
• Part 2: International Ecumenical Documents with Pentecostal Participation
• Chapter 7: Final Report of the Dialogue between the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity of the Roman Catholic Church and Leaders of Some Pentecostal Churches and Participants in the Charismatic Movement within Protestant and Anglican Churches
• Chapter 8: Final Report of the Dialogue between the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity of the Roman Catholic Church and Some Classical Pentecostals
• Chapter 9: Perspectives on Koinonia. Final Report of the Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and Some Classical Pentecostal Churches and Leaders
• Chapter 10: Evangelization, Proselytism, and Common Witness. Final Report of the Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and Some Classical Pentecostal Churches and Leaders
• Chapter 11: Word and Spirit, Church and World. Final Report of the International Dialogue between Representatives of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and Some Classical Pentecostal Churches and Leaders
• Part 3: Pentecostal Reflections on The Nature and Mission of the Church
• Chapter 12: The Nature and Purpose of the Church: Theological and Ecumenical Reflections from Pentecostal and Free Church Perspectives
• Chapter 13: The Nature and Purpose of the Church: A Pentecostal Reflection on Unity and Koinonia
• Chapter 14: Pentecostal Contributions to The Nature and Mission of the Church
• Contributors