A modest proposal...

Continued from last week…

It’s time to wrap up another whiny harangue. I think I see some light at the end of the tunnel. Remember when I talked about those youth rallies on the Puerto Rican west side during which a thousand Puerto Rican teenagers surged forward to give their lives to Jesus and be filled with the Holy Spirit? 

Remember, I said they were totally hokey, with tears and slobber and people walking around with Kleenex boxes. I just got back from a wonderful retreat, at the highlight of which the gathered congregation surged forward to be filled with the Holy Spirit. It was totally hokey, tears and slobber and people walking around with Kleenex boxes and it was wonderful. It occurred to me that the whole thing is about conversion. 

To the degree that we - the church - understand and pursue personal conversion as our first priority, we will flourish or perish. The days of assuming conversion are over. Most young people in our culture don’t pray. Why do I mention prayer? It is in prayer, the lifting of the heart and mind to God, that we have the encounter with the Almighty. It is that personal, though not private, encounter that empowers and motivates the Christian life. Our young people have never learned how and they don’t see the point of it. Check out the Pew Surveys on the subject. They have never encountered God. If people do not have an encounter with heaven, they are not going to live the Christian life on earth.

There are moments when the world changes. The life of William Wilberforce was one of those moments. Born in 1759, he experienced a conversion in 1784 and thereafter dedicated himself to the abolition of slavery and came to be that movement’s de facto leader. He and his movement succeeded in ending slavery in the British Empire by 1833, which in turn made abolition inevitable in the United States and the rest of the Christian world.  Wilberforce was part of the very unfashionable Anglican evangelical movement. The upper-class sneered at evangelicals, especially those who, like Wilberforce, came from their own numbers. An evangelical Englishman had no future either in politics, or high society. They were a bunch of fanatics who distributed religious tracts outside taverns and one really wouldn’t want to be seen with or, infinitely worse, be one of them. Well, they changed the world and ended one of the greatest crimes of human history. 

If one can speak of a leader of the Anglican evangelical movement the nod would have to go to John Wesley who lived and died an Anglican – an ordained one to boot! Wesley’s tireless missionary work among the poor of England started after a horrible ship ride home from a failed missionary journey to the Americas. Onboard he encountered a group of German Pietists and their pastor who maintained complete calm during a ferocious storm. As they prayed in the bow of the boat the English ran about in panic. Wesley asked the Pietist pastor why the Germans had been so calm while the Anglicans had been terrified. To which question the pastor posed another: “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and have you been sealed with the Holy Spirit?” Wesley had to admit that he didn’t know. After he arrived back in London he started to attend Pietist prayer meetings and on May 24, 1738, he experienced what he called a strange warming of the heart. From then on he was a fearless preacher throughout Great Britain despite persecution by his fellow Anglican clergymen. Wesley and his friends preached wherever they could despite the opposition of the less enthused. He was accused of all sorts of horrible things, including an attempt to re-establish Catholicism! Heaven forfend!! 

Wesley believed that the government sponsored Anglican Church had failed to call sinners to repentance, and these sinners even included corrupt clergy! Despite the great opposition, Wesley travelled Britain preaching the Gospel, mostly on horseback, until his death in 1791 at the age of 87.

So, am I suggesting that we all become Methodists? Wesley was never a Methodist. He died as an Anglican priest. I am merely suggesting that we answer the question that Wesley had to answer. Have you accepted Jesus Christ as the Lord of your life? Have you been sealed with his Holy Spirit?

Rephrase the question anyway you pleased but ask and answer it honestly. Can you honestly say that you have met Jesus of Nazareth in a personal way, or is he just a dead philosopher who has a lot of followers? And the second question: When was the last time the Holy Spirit spoke to you? If the answer is, “a long time ago,” then perhaps it's time to renew an old relationship. If the answer is never, maybe it’s time you asked the Holy Spirit to intervene in your life. If we all did this, I have a feeling things would be quite different.  

Imagine a Church that expected the Holy Spirit to speak at staff meetings, parish councils, planning sessions, finance committees and even from the pulpit!!! I said a while ago, that just citizens make a just society not the other way around. If we could only expect God to speak, and if we learned to hear clearly, I suspect that the Church and the world would be very different places. 

 

Yours,

the Rev. Know-it-all

Is Charismatic Renewal for Real? part 9

Letter to Kerry Zmatick, relentlessly continued…..

Let us move on, like a herd of turtles, to the essential expression of the Charismatic/Pentecostal movement: the prayer meeting. That the prayer meeting is a fairly recent historical invention may have surprised some of you, my faithful readers, who at this point are probably down to two or three. I have it on good authority that the two canaries who used to follow the column, have given up reading  my articles that line the bottom of their cage and are using them in a more appropriate  way. Again, I digress. The prayer meeting!

Perhaps you recall that the prayer meeting as a regular thing did not really exist until after 1675. It was a reaction to the publication by Philip Jakob Spener of the pamphlet, “Pia Desideria” roughly translated, “Pious Desires”.  This 200 page “pamphlet” was published as an introduction to the vastly larger and more turgid masterpiece, “Four Books of True Christianity”, by Johann Arndt. Arndt’s book reached back into pre-Lutheran, medieval Catholic mysticism and was thus suspect. Both Arndt and Spener were called heretical by Protestants. (That’s a hoot, the pot calling the kettle heterodox.) In 1590, Arndt was deposed from his pastorate by Calvinists for refusing to remove pictures from his church and using exorcism in the administration of baptism. Similarly in 1695 the theological faculty of Wittenberg charged Spener with 264 errors. The pietism Arndt and Spener initiated was too emotional and too Catholic.  Protestantism was rational and forensic (a polite word for legalistic).

Spener made Arndt’s ideas available to a wider audience. His pamphlet sold like “heisse Kuchen.” (That’s “hot cakes” for all you who don’t keep up with German theological terms.) Wherever it was read, people formed prayer groups that would meet in public places and pray spontaneously. The horror of it! There were three legal religions in the German Empire: Catholicism, Lutheranism and Reformed Protestantism (Calvinism) This wasn’t any of those. Protestants decried the prayer meetings as “Catholic monasteries on Protestant soil!!!”  Pietists would routinely be arrested for public, spontaneous prayer. A Catholic was supposed to go into a church, kneel in back and mind his own business as good Catholics do to this day. Protestants were expected to go into unadorned meeting halls, sit on hard benches, listen to very long, heady sermons and then to go home and do something useful like make money. These Pietists getting all emotional about religion in public were just beyond the pale.

Certainly, you must be thinking, there were prayer meetings before 1675. Not really. St. Francis and his followers were known to break out in spontaneous prayer as they traveled the roads of Europe. They loved the Lord so much they just couldn’t help themselves. Certainly people have always prayed spontaneously. But a prayer meeting as a regular structure? Can’t find it before 1675. Surely the first Christians prayed spontaneously! You are forgetting that the first Christians were Israelites mostly from the tribes of Judah and Levi. Do you know any modern Jews? They are nothing if not liturgical.

We Catholics and our Jewish friends get our sense of liturgy and the idea of the liturgical calendar from the temple liturgies of the time of Christ. If you go to an orthodox Jewish synagogue, there is nothing spontaneous going on. Passionate yes, spontaneous no. There are certain prayers that one says on certain days of the week, month and year. The Roman Catholic missal is nothing compared to the synagogue prayer book. The flipping of pages, rolling of scrolls and bowing up and down make the Catholic Mass look simple. 

In short, the first Christians being orthodox Israelites didn’t have prayer meetings. They had liturgy. I’m sure they were passionate, and they often prayed spontaneously. We see it in the Acts of the Apostles, but in their coming together they were liturgical. I doubt that any of the first disciples ever said, “Hey, I’ve got an idea! Let’s just make this up as we go along!” The had a hymnal, the book of Psalms, and the melodies that went with it, some of which we still sing today in the Catholic Mass as psalm tones. They had liturgy that involved bread, wine, oil, and possibly even incense and holy water, the whole panoply of sacrifice. Their direct heirs, the Catholic and Orthodox wings of Christianity still have these sacrificial accouterments. But prayer meetings?  The prayer meeting is a modern thing, modern at least by Catholic standards.

I remember those who participated in the events telling the stories of the first days of Catholic Pentecostalism (Charismatic Renewal, most people now call it). This great outpouring of the manifestations of the Holy Spirit happened in 1967 during the second semester at Notre Dame and Dusquesne universities. These people were students. They only stopped to figure things out after final exams were done in spring. As I heard the story that they met not quite under Notre Dame’s golden dome to figure out “What next?” Suggestions were made: retreats, days of renewal and, of course, prayer meetings. After all, the first stirrings of the New Catholic Pentecost at Dusquesne University had been a result of a few students and faculty attending the Chapel Hill prayer meeting in the home of Miss Flo Dodge, a Presbyterian. The prayer meeting had entered American Protestantism through the Methodist movement, which was the English version of Pietism. By 1967 the prayer meeting was a standard part of Protestant life. When enlivened by Pentecostalism, the prayer meeting was actually worth going to. People were passionate about faith and expected God to actually do something! The students went home for the summer where they started prayer meetings.

Imbued with the Spirit of Vatican II, throngs of priests and nuns who wanted to take summer courses came to Notre Dame and Dusquesne where they were introduced to the prayer meeting. The whole thing was like throwing water on a grease fire.  In the Winter of ‘67, that’s where I come in.  I started investigating the whole deal, and was “baptized in the Holy Spirit” following a phone conversation in January of ‘68. I cherish the experience to this day, and still think of myself as a Pentecostal Catholic. I was invited to attend a prayer meeting conducted by a Methodist minister in a Presbyterian church. The Methodist minister eventually edged out the Presbyterian congregation, bought the church building and started a cult in which he made all decisions for the faithful down to who they would marry and what kind of kitchen table they should buy. I was long gone by that time, thank Heaven. 

You have perhaps heard the line about “assume.”  To assume makes a mindless beast of burden out of you and me. When we assume that the prayer meeting is a given, a structure that just is, we are making a very foolish assumption. The great weakness of Catholic Charismatic Renewal lies in this assumption. The Protestant error rests on the assumption that the first Christians were simpler, non-liturgical  people. This just isn’t true. Things don’t always get complicated, they often start out complex and then simplify. The Protestant error is to try to recapitulate an early  Christian simplicity that never existed. In trying to simplify the Church, they conformed it to their own expectations. The liturgy of Protestantism would be absolutely foreign to the first disciples. The liturgical movement of the 60's and 70's made the same mistake. 

The Charismatic Renewal drank the liturgical Kool-aid of the era and somehow assumed that the prayer meeting with a brief Mass tacked on to the end was closer to the early Christian experience than those boring dry Masses they had to endure on Sunday at St. Apathia’s church, or wherever they happened to be members.  They looked forward to the prayer meeting, which, if they could find a priest who was “spirit-filled” became a CHARISMATIC MASS, infinitely better than a dry boring regular Mass. The prayer meeting became the norm. Mass was an invalid who needed to be revived by dancing about and babbling in Babylonian. Since the prayer meeting became the new liturgical expression, the prayer meeting took on structure and became, you guessed it, boring,  but with tambourines. Sunday obligation became a thing of the past, because, unless it was Charismatic, some people didn’t “get anything” out of it.

The prayer meeting, on the other hand became an obligation. If one said “You  know, I’m not going to prayer meeting this Thursday. I’m going to stay home and watch television.” It was sure sign that you were, heaven forfend, backsliding and prayers were said for your repentance. To say “I don’t get anything out of Mass,” excused one from Sunday obligation. To say “I don’t get anything out of the prayer meeting," meant that you were obviously in sin and probably running around with a disreputable crowd. The whole thing eventually became absurd. Sunday was not  obligatory. Thursday night prayer meeting was. 

It got even sillier. As the prayer meeting took the place of Sunday Mass, it became structured, even quasi-liturgical. The structure was as follows. A half hour of spontaneous warm up that involved lively music and prayer “in the spirit.” If the throng was not excited enough, the prayer group “leader” usually at a microphone, would say something like, “Let's stand up and really let the spirit just flow. Or, “We are just going to praise the Lord.” Or, “We are just going to really seek the Lord.” The leader might start shouting over the microphone in an attempt to get people excited. The leader might start speaking in tongues with the volume turned up. I often wondered exactly to whom were these utterances were addressed. The whole nonsense gave rise to the saying, “Charismatics are people who believe God is deaf.” 

“Just” was a very important word. I’m not quite sure what it meant in the context, but it was pivotal. I think it implied that anything the prayer group leader was saying was “just” not important, or perhaps, “Let’s focus here group. We’re not as excited as we should be!” After the “spontaneous” half hour was over there would be testimonies, “I used to be messed up on drugs, but now I’m messed up on religion, hallelujah!” Then there would be a teaching, usually about a half an hour, given by someone who was as clueless as most of the participants, but his clueless-ness was inspired by the Holy Spirit. Sometimes rather than a clueless Catholic, a Protestant minister would come and explain the gifts of the Holy Ghost and lead everyone in prayer for the “release of the gifts.” In effect, you weren’t getting out of there until you could speak in tongues, no matter how late it got. Then there would be a time of quiet, or waiting on the Lord, during which people would prophesy.  “Thus says the Lord, My children I am coming very soon.” Or, “Thus says the Lord, My children, I love you very much.”  I believe in the prophetic gift, about which I will speak later, but prophesy, so called, really took a nose dive in 1982 after Assembly of God minister, Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, said that if you stayed Catholic you were probably going to hell.

We suddenly got very Catholic. If they were going to beat us with their Bibles, we would strangle them with our Rosaries. In order to make sure that prophesies were Catholic, they really should be written down, checked for doctrinal error and delivered only by approved prophets. A good prophesy makes the hair on your arm stand up and makes you want to run out of the room because it cuts to the heart. It’s usually one sentence long and gets to the point immediately. A good prophesy is embarrassing. It’s supposed to be. These written prophecies that became popular were merely tedious. They went on and on and on and drifted into that foggy realm called “locutions.” I wont discuss locutions here. I have enough enemies. 

After the prophecies, came healing, perhaps prefaced by testimonies. I remember one deacon saying, as he looked at his watch, “the time of healing has now arrived.” What he meant was, “I’m tired and have to get up fairly early in the morning. So let’s wrap this up.” And then announcements and a final rousing song. “Go in peace the prayer meeting is ended.”   

So we came to an absurd position. We had structured prayer meetings and spontaneous Masses. It never occurred to us that a Mass and a prayer meeting are completely different things. Again, we were through the looking glass!

Next week: Despite all I’ve said, I actually like a good prayer meeting and wish I knew where there was one.

Is Charismatic Renewal for Real? part 7

(Letter to Kerry Zmatick continued)

Once again, I apologize to my faithful readers (a group of about eight, two of whom are canaries anxiously staring at the bottom of their cages.) You probably have no interest in all this nonsense, but I think it may be of some importance.

The  Charismatic movement is bigger and more dynamic that most people think. It has lost a lot of steam here in the USA where it started, but among African, Asian, and Latin American Catholics it is huge and very influential. Years ago, in 2002 in his article “The Next Christianity”, (Atlantic Monthly October 2002) Phillip Jenkins claimed that the future of the world is the southern hemisphere, it is Christian and it is Charismatic. This was before the recent explosion of Christianity in China. He challenges the much touted claim that Islam is the fastest growing religion. It seems that in terms of adult conversions to the faith, Charismatic Christianity is the wave of the future. We don’t see that here because not only is the “American” church dying, America is dying. The vitality of the Church in this country is pretty much found among immigrants from Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Face it. If this is true, then we Catholics had better make sure we get it right and continue to offer the unchanging truth of Catholic Faith and its two thousand years of unbroken tradition. That means that those who are Charismatic had better do their best to understand what the Holy Spirit is doing among them and to integrate what they have received into the whole Church for the well being of the whole Church. To summarize the axe that I have been grinding for the past few weeks, I will try to get it into a sentence so simple that even the two canaries above mentioned and I can understand. Here goes:

About a hundred years after the Reformation, there was a reaction to the dryness of classical Protestantism that resulted in the Pietist movement (1725). This in turn resulted in the Methodist movement (1800) which in its turn engendered the  Pentecostal movement (1900) now called the Charismatic movement. This world-wide movement is thus an odd hybrid of Catholic spirituality clothed in definitions and theology taken from Protestantism. Such phrases as “Are you saved?” and “Have you been baptized in the Holy Spirit?” are understood more in terms of Reformation legalism than Biblical conversion. The terms in which these realities are described are important.

The movement is important and so the terms are important. To inaccurately define these experiences limits and even diminishes them. If for example you have a forensic -- that is legal -- understanding of salvation, you will answer certain questions differently. To the question, "Are you saved?"  You might answer, “Yes, I am saved and  I needn’t do anything more until Jesus comes except go to the occasional prayer meeting.”  If you have a Catholic, i.e. Biblical, understanding of the question, you might answer, “Yes, I am being saved, changed day by day into the image of Christ for the salvation of the world.” 

If you have a forensic understanding of this outpouring of the Holy Spirit you might say “Yes, I have the Baptism in the Holy spirit. I know because I have the gift of tongues as evidence and I have the other gifts of the Holy Spirit.” Remember, as mentioned earlier, the phrase, “Baptism in the Holy Spirit” appears nowhere in the Scriptures, and speaking in tongues, prophecy, healing discernment of spirit, are never called gifts. They are charisms. So what’s the difference? You can have a gift (in Greek: “dorea”). You can only receive a charism (in Greek “charisma”).

If I give you the gift of a large picture of dogs playing poker, it is yours. You may keep it. Please do. The word charism has the sense of a favor, a blessing. It is related to the word for grace, “charis” It is grace operating in you, not a trophy to be displayed on your mantle. A charsim would be if I extended you the honor of representing me at the Frostbite Falls Religious Broadcast of the Week Award Banquet were I to receive the “Loony” (the coveted plastic trophy that depicts a loon holding a microphone). That would be a charism. Were I to say, "Keep the trophy," that would be a gift. 

They are different. A gift is mine. A charism is not mine. It is God’s favor, allowing me to be used for the preaching of His kingdom and the up building of His Church. It proves nothing about me, except that God loves me and is generous to a sinner. Gifts are to own. Charismata are to use. This is at the heart of the Charismatic problem. For many of us, to be Charismatic is to go to a wonderful prayer meeting where I really feel the presence of God and there is a really good music ministry and the speaker is dynamic and there is healing and people falling out in the Spirit, and then we go to Bakers Square afterwards for coffee. Hallelujah. For some people, the Baptism in the Holy Spirit is a kind of hobby.

To be baptized in the Holy Spirit has nothing to do with the Baptism in the Holy Spirit. “Huh?”  I can hear you say. “Now Father! You are just being irritating.” That may be true, but I have a point. Let us look at the text. The verb phrase “to baptize in the Holy Spirit” appears only twice in the new testament, both times referring to the same sermon of St. John the Baptist. (Cf. Matt 3:12 and Luke 3:17)

“The ax is laid to the root of the trees. Therefore every tree which does not produce good fruit is cut down, and cast into the fire. I indeed baptize you with water for the sake of  repentance. but He that comes after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to carry. He shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit, and with fire. His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly purge His floor, and gather His wheat into the barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

To make bread before this marvelous mechanized age, you started by cutting wheat and throwing it onto a threshing floor, which was usually a large flat stone on top of a hill. You brought up oxen, harnessed to a heavy sledge. The oxen would then tread out the grain, going in circles dragging the sledge behind them. The crushing of hooves and sledge broke open the hulls of the grain and separated the grain from the chaff. Then you would take a large flat wooden shovel and toss the crushed wheat into the air until the wind separated the lighter chaff from the heavier grain. Two piles would form, a large one of chaff, then a small one of wheat kernels. The chaff would be burned and the wheat ground once more to make flour which was once again subjected to fire in order to make bread. 

The temple was built over what had once been the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. The rough stone of the threshing floor was the very floor of the Holy of Holies where rested the ark of the covenant. The center of Israelite worship was a threshing floor like the one John spoke of. This Baptizing in the Holy Spirit was symbolized in the very heart of the old covenant and there was to be a new temple and new threshing floor to make a new bread for sacrifice when the old covenant was at last fulfilled. Threshing involves crushing and burning and the separation of chaff from wheat by the wind. It is telling to realize that in Greek and in Hebrew “wind” is the same word as “Spirit”. Crushing, burning, separation from what is useless. Does this sound like what most people mean when they talk about the Baptism in the Holy Spirit? No, they mean a seminar after which there is usually coffee and cookies. The immersion in the Divine Presence is not an experience. It is a roaring and mighty wind that separates one from what one holds dear. It is a fire that purifies by steady and repeated  burning away of whatever is useless.

That is certainly what started in my life on January 24, 1968.  I cannot say that I have the Baptism in the Holy Spirit. I have been Baptized in the Holy Spirit and that night so long ago was when the fire was lit, that continues to burn and crush and purify, if I let it. To be washed in the Divine Presence is a fearful thing. It is not some kind of merit badge or graduation ceremony. It is a like the wrestling match between Jacob and the angel of God.  There is joy, but it is hardly an entertainment. It is fire and it is a mighty wind that will take you away from all that you thought was important to you. It is not given to anyone to make life better. It, like love, makes life in this world much more difficult and at the same time infinitely more purposeful. To be Baptized in the Holy Spirit is to offer yourself on the altar of the new temple, and having passed through the fire in the altar of sacrifice, to enter the threshing floor, the true Holy of Holies.

Next week: so what about the gifts of the Holy Spirit that you say aren’t gifts?

Is Charismatic Renewal for real? part 6

(Letter to Kerry Zmatick continued)

From its very beginning the Pentecostal/Charismatic Movement/Renewal suffered from the coming together of two incompatible things: Catholic spirituality and Protestant theology. The experience of Pentecostals is very Catholic. Classical Protestant theology taught that the age of miracles was over. Pentecostalism is all about miracles. 

I remember hearing a Pentecostal pastor who came over into Catholicism with his whole congregation. He said that Pentecostals and Catholics have a lot in common. Pentecostals love miracles and it seemed to him that Catholics actually had some real ones. Pentecostalism was rejected by mainline Protestantism precisely because it was, in their eyes, too Catholic. Miracles were for Bible times and not for the present day. 

As I have already explained, when I returned home to my parents to tell them about this wonderful new thing God was doing, they pointed out that it wasn’t new to them. They sure took the wind out of my adolescent sails. The supernatural intimacy that traditional Catholics take for  granted is not part of mainline Protestantism. Classical Protestantism was a very dry thing until the Pietist movement rocked Germany in the 1700's. It always seems that Reformation theologians assumed that the Almighty had been on sabbatical from the death of St. John until the birth of Martin Luther, at least until Wycliffe and Huss. Luther and Calvin laid down the law, trimmed down the rituals and that should have been enough. 

It was until another German named Johann Arndt, (1555-1621) decided to stir things up. He was a general superintendent (sort of a Lutheran Archbishop) who read the writings of St Bernard, Johannes Tauler, Blessed Angela of Foligno and Thomas à Kempis, all pre-Lutheran Catholic mystical authors. That got him into all sorts of trouble for being too Catholic. He was criticized for religious art on church walls and exorcisms at Baptism and all that sort of Catholic mumbo jumbo. He wrote about his  rediscovery of pre-reformation Catholic mysticism in his magnum, and I do mean magnum, opus “Four Books of True Christianity” 300 plus exciting pages. It was by no means a best seller. It was all about the mystical union between Christ and the believer. Arndt was more interested in Christ's life IN the believer than classical Protestantism which is all about Christ’s death FOR the believer. Calvin and Luther, both former law students, were interested in the legal, forensic work of Christ. For them it was as cut and dry as a law court. They weren’t big on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Catholicism for all it’s complexity has always believed that Communion, the deep, intimate  union between Christ and believers is at the heart of the faith.

Arndt’s book wasn’t that popular. We Germans can be a bit tedious even for those who like things tedious. Another German fellow name of Jakob Spener (1635-1705) really loved  “Four Books of True Christianity.” He wrote Pia Desideria, as a preface to Arndt’s book. His preface was a mere 75 pages. It sold like hot cakes. In it, Spener emphasized personal transformation through spiritual rebirth. These were fighting words for orthodox Protestantism. If one was among the elect, what did personal piety matter? In 1695 the theological faculty of Wittenberg charged Spener with heresy, citing 264 errors. Interesting how the worm turns, Protestants charging someone with heresy? Fortunately Speer died before he could be condemned.  How lucky for him.  

Pia Desideria went through the German Empire like Imelda Marcos though a shoe store. Wherever it was read people would gather for spontaneous prayer in, heaven forfend, PRAYER MEETINGS!  These were forbidden innovations. In the German Empire, there were three permitted religions. Catholicism, Evangelisch (Luther’s brand of Protestantism) and Reformed Protestantism (Calvin’s brand).  Prayer meetings were absolutely non-Protestant, and absolutely forbidden.  In fact Protestant theologians called them “Catholic Monasteries on Protestant Soil. Impossible! People were jailed for public, spontaneous, shared  prayer. Thus was born Pietism and the prayer meeting. (Interesting to think there were no such things as prayer meetings before 1700. The prayer meeting was invented, not revealed.)

In 1738, John Wesley, an Anglican priest, encountered Pietism at the Aldersgate Pietist prayer meeting in London among emigrants from Bohemia, then part of the German Empire. Wesley eventually wrote, 

“In the evening I went unwillingly to a society (prayer meeting) in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter to nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine and saved me from the law of sin and death.”   

This may not seem like a big deal to you, but it was a world changing event. Thus was born Methodism, founded by Wesley. Catholic piety was fused to Protestant theology by means of Methodism and the prayer meeting. It was Methodism that ended; slavery in the British Empire and ultimately in America. 

Methodism was an amazing movement before it ran out of steam. Good English Protestants did not have warmings of the heart, nor for that matter, did German Lutherans and Calvinists. Italian and Spanish Catholics had warmings of the heart and all that emotional rubbish. What we today think of as Evangelical Protestantism is, in fact, a strange hybrid of Catholicism, Lutheranism and Calvinism. About a century and half later, Pentecostalism exploded among disappointed Methodists as I have already pointed out, and the hybrid got even stranger.   

When the first Catholic Pentecostals met in 1967 to ask “Well, what do we do now?”  There was no one there like my wise and wonderful parents to tell them that this was really nothing new. I remember hearing about local Assembly of God Ministers from the South Bend area who invited to help guide those first prayer meetings. They meant well, but they came with the inadequate Biblical theology that has kept Protestant Pentecostalism divided for its entire history. They brought inaccurate uses of Biblical terms such as “gifts of the Holy Spirit” and “Baptism in the Holy Spirit.” 

The exact phrase “baptism with the Holy Spirit” is not found in the New Testament, the verb from baptize in the Holy spirit occurs twice, both in reference to the same words of John the Baptist (Mt 3:11 and Lk 3:16). It occurs twice in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 1:4-5, and Acts 11:16). There are a lot of other references to an encounter with the Holy Spirit such “poured out upon”, “falling upon”, “coming upon” , “pour out” , “clothed with power from on high”.

Protestant Pentecostal theology makes the assumption that these are all the same thing and that they constitute a quasi-sacramental, initiation that demands evidence for veracity. It confers status as a full believer. It makes one a member of the true church, whichever true church that happens to be. There is a whole theological wing of Christianity that assumes an experience that the Bible calls the Baptism with or in the Holy Spirit. There is no such thing. 

"Wait a minute? I thought you were baptized in the Holy Spirit!" 

If by this you mean that night in 1964 that altered my life’s course irrevocably why are you using a non-biblical phrase to describe it? Why not call it an encounter with the Holy Spirit? Or a pouring out? Or a clothing with power? The best I can make of it was that it was an encounter with the Third Person of the Trinity in which I found myself in the Holy Spirit who had been in me most of my life. It was the difference between taking a life giving drink of water and falling into a swimming pool. I felt quite literally in the Holy Spirit, the way one might be in a room. It was external, more than internal. It was not a gift made to me, it was something that  made me a gift to the church, at least to the degree that a sinner like me would respond to it. 

A noun is not a verb and a verb is not a noun and there is no such thing in the Bible as the Baptism in the Holy Spirit.  Catholic Charismatic  theologians have danced around for years trying to explain how the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the Baptism of the Holy Spirit relate to the sacraments. We would split hairs about receiving the Holy Spirit in Baptism and then accepting the grace of Baptism in the Baptism of (or in) the Holy Spirit. Was it an experience? Was it what one should have felt at confirmation? Was it necessary to feel something? Was it necessary to speak in tongues as evidence of the Holy Spirit? What if you spoke in tongues at Sunday Mass and the pastor threw you out?  Should there be Charismatic parishes?  The questions and the arguments went on and on all because there was no one there at the beginning who was as reasonable as my parents. In the earliest days, we just accepted the protestant definitions.

Our Protestant teachers told us that speaking in tongues, prophecy healing, the gift of knowledge, and all the rest are the gifts of Holy Spirit. St. Paul says so in his letter to the Corinthians, no? WRONG!  In the text St. Paul talks about “charismata” and “phanerosis”.  He doesn’t mention gifts. The word St. Paul doesn’t use is “dorea”. It means “gift”. 

St. Paul does mention “charisma”. It means attractiveness or charm, kindness, a favor or service bestowed. Grace is “charis” and charisma is the result of grace. Gift and charisma are two different things. The phrase “charismatic gifts” doesn’t appear in the text. The word gift isn’t in the text at all. The Catholic Church teaches that the charismata are spiritual graces and qualifications granted to every Christian to perform his task in the Church. That’s pretty much what St. Paul says, but the so called gifts of the Holy Spirit, as the Pentecostals call them, are a very specific kind of charisma, called “phanerosis”, or “manifestation”, a word related to the English word phenomenon. St Paul is talking about the external manifestations of the Holy Spirit, whose gifts are internal. Our misuse of the term “gifts of the Holy Spirit” ran right up against Catholic doctrine. There are seven  gifts (doreai) of the Holy Spirit:  wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude (or courage), knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord.

Not many Assembly of God ministers nor prayer group leaders were nuancing Greek texts and Catholic theology back then. Rather than look carefully at the text of Scripture, we accepted inaccurate descriptions for what was happening among us. We failed to understand these things in their relationship to the wider Church and we were unable to integrate ourselves into the Church as a whole. 

We became a strange group of fringe Catholics who had prayer meetings on a Thursday or a Monday, where we jabbered in tongues and sang rather maudlin songs. All along these prophetic manifestations should have been a blessing to the wider Church. We were unable to describe these things in terms comprehensible to the Church. We kept our light under a charismatic bushel, we had our own little groups often separated from the life of our parishes. They looked down on us and quite frankly we looked down on them. We were weird, they were lukewarm. Both sides were mistaken.  Now the imprecise definitions are entrenched and the Renewal has failed to live up to its promise.

Next week: Gift schmift, charism schmarism. Big deal.