Discerning What Power Is For

This essay appears in Issue 26 of The Mockingbird, now available to pre-order. 

It was the 90s, as the kids say. The Pentecostal church where we worshipped in Stratford, Ontario, was swept up in the revival rippling from Airport Vineyard in nearby Toronto. News of strange and miraculous manifestations spread around the world. But the reports that struck me were testimonies about emotional healing — gut-level emotional restoration that overcame years of pain and trauma. I can still picture my friend, Michael, weeping as he bore witness to the work the Spirit had done in his heart and soul. Whatever one wanted to make of the laughing and barking(!) and trance-like states people experienced, this lasting work of someone finding wholeness seemed like exactly what God’s Spirit would be doing in the world: making all things new. Restoring the years the locusts had eaten.

Issue 26 of The Mockingbird is now available to pre-order.

So we made our own pilgrimage to Toronto and, perhaps more importantly, something of this revival wended its way to Bethel Pentecostal Tabernacle where I, too, found the beginning of a sort of healing. Pentecostalism is such a visceral, embodied form of worship it should be described as sacramental. Such worship hinges on the conviction that God’s Spirit courses through matter. When Pentecostals pray, they lay hands on you as a kinetic communication of the Spirit. In Pentecostal worship, the Spirit grabs hold of tongues and buckles knees. The Spirit’s roar is heard in the congregation’s shouts and songs, the soundtrack of restoration. All of these kinesthetic conduits of the Spirit are channels to heart, soul, and mind. This philosopher was surprised and embarrassed to find himself ecstatically raising his hands or sobbing at the altar. That embarrassment, however, turned out to be the path to humility, and on that path I found I was available for the Spirit to do work in me.

We later moved to Philadelphia for me to pursue my doctorate in philosophy at Villanova. We eventually found our way to an Assemblies of God church plant where we forged friendships that remain dear and vital to us. During this time, I began to participate in the Pentecostal and charismatic scholarly community (yes, there is one!). From that community I learned facets of Pentecostal history that weren’t much discussed in our congregations. I learned that the 1906 Azusa Street Revival (credited with the birth of Pentecostalism) was led by William J. Seymour, the son of formerly enslaved parents. I learned that Seymour had had to learn theology from the hallway because his Bible teachers in Texas wouldn’t allow a Black man in the classroom; undoing that history was an important aspect of the revival. Newspaper reporter Frank Bartleman famously said of the Azusa Street meetings: “The color line was washed away in the blood of Jesus.” So at the same time that I was teaching Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in Ethics class, I was reading Empowerment Ethics for a Liberated People: A Path to African American Social Transformation by Pentecostal scholar Cheryl Sanders. While teaching Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation, I was reading Douglas Petersen’s important book, Not By Might Nor By Power: A Pentecostal Theology of Social Concern in Latin America. It turns out the Spirit wasn’t just an “experience” that might change my life; these Pentecostals were suggesting the Spirit was out to change the world, and that Spirit-fueled change looked mostly like liberation.

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The title of the Petersen book, Not By Might Nor By Power, was easily recognizable for Pentecostal folk. It came from a favored verse in Zechariah 4:6, the word of the Lord to the Judean governor Zerubbabel: “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit.” It was the line emblazoned across the top of every issue of the Pentecostal Evangel, the denominational magazine of the Assemblies of God.

This proximity of Spirit and power is fascinating and complicated. Zechariah’s prophetic word sets up a dichotomy: not power, not might, but rather God’s Spirit. The counsel to Zerubbabel is to rely not on his own might and power but to instead make himself available to the Spirit — to, in a sense, relinquish his own power in order to make way for the Spirit’s operation. If I could put an Augustinian twist on this, the prophet tells him to relinquish the libido dominandi, our in-built penchant to control and dominate with might, in order to make way for the Spirit to work in surprising ways.

And yet the Spirit is a spirit of power. This is a seminal and founding conviction of Pentecostalism. Acts 1:8 is taken as something like the Declaration of Independence for the church that will be founded at Pentecost: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you.” This is precisely why Luke is the quintessential Pentecostal gospeler, the author of a two-volume “Acts of the Spirit” we know as the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus too acts in the power of the Spirit (Lk 4:14). And when Peter, preaching in Caesarea, testifies to what God has done in Christ, he tells the gathered crowd: “You know … how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power” (Acts 10:37–38). This twining of Spirit and power is integral to the biblical witness and Pentecostal inheritance. But then in the life Jesus lives, we get a clue that the Spirit’s power often looks like weakness to the world. The power of the Spirit does not call 10,000 angels, but rather empowers the Son to endure the cross. Put away the sword, Peter. I must be lifted up.

Photograph: Room of Shadows by Antone Dolezal.

What has unsettled me over the past decade is the way that charismatic and Pentecostal Christians seem to have blurred Zechariah’s disjunction. It’s as if that proximity of “might” and “power” to the Spirit has morphed into a confusion of the two — as if the Spirit simply baptizes power and might in its “worldly” forms. Again, to use Augustinian categories (pneumatology was crucial for Augustine!), it seems to me that charismatic and Pentecostal Christians today are especially prone to confusing the city of God and the earthly city. Or to put it a little differently: I worry that Pentecostal and charismatic Christians have flattened their conceptions of power, as if the Spirit is a spirit of domination.

Over the past several decades, “Spirit-filled” Christianity in North America has largely left behind classical Pentecostal denominations like the Assemblies of God and migrated to growing independent and non-denominational forms. Sociologists Brad Christerson and Richard Flory explain some of this in their book, The Rise of Network Christianity. They study this migration of charismatic Christianity from Pentecostal denominations into a network of independent congregations, loosely joined by an “apostolic” network (hence “Network Christianity”). The story is long and complicated (and fascinating, if unsettling), but one theme is clear: the centrality of power in this form of Christianity. The claim to “apostolic” authority is a claim to a distinct sort of power. These charismatic apostles exhibit a kind of pious anti-institutionalism that also leaves them without accountability (as witnessed by sexual abuse scandals at the International House of Prayer, a significant “node” in Network Christianity).

Such forms of Christianity prime a populace for deference to charismatic figures, and accords them unchecked authority. At a basic level, this trades on the very title “apostle” or “anointing.” Unhooked from the traditional markers, apostolic authority in Network Christianity is tied to supernatural manifestations that speak to their spiritual power. This power is experienced in ways that are spectacular — amenable to broadcast and the kind of thing you’d travel thousands of miles to see and experience. What apostles expect is “alignment,” a kind of identification expressed through participation, event attendance, donations, and articulated allegiance.

But Network Christianity also ties the evidence of apostolic power to status quo measures of success. Indeed, it speaks of “workplace apostles” who will transform society by corporate revival. A deep thread of prosperity gospel is at work here: manifestation of the Spirit’s power looks a lot like “success” on typical American terms. As Christerson and Flory note, “The way apostles are identified in their various sectors is simply by their success. … The way you recognize workplace apostles is by the amount of respect, money, and influence they command.” In summary, “having access to wealth is seen as evidence of being an apostle.” “Network Christianity” looks for a charismatic strongman whose “success” is a sign of authority, whose refusal to be accountable is a mark of “independence” and disruption, and whose promises sound like those of a savior. Formed by the celebrity worship of wider American culture, it is too easy for these prophets to be taken as substitutes for God rather than pointers to God.

Recognizing all my debts to Pentecostalism, and the gifts I received from charismatic Christianity, I cringe at the mix of magical thinking and libido dominandi that now traffics under the language of “Spirit-filled” Christianity today. What happened?

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Spot Illustration by Melisa Gerecci.

What has been lost, I suggest, is the equally Spirit-ed work of discernment. Discerning the spirits is itself a work of the Spirit (1 Cor. 12:10). Discernment is not easy or straightforward. We’re not working with a simple checklist. There’s no algorithm. We undertake the work of discernment in the swirl of a complex world and an imperfect church, all in the midst of time and history’s unfolding. We are called to discern where the Spirit is afoot in our moment in history (and not only in the church). And if the Book of Acts teaches us anything, what the Spirit is doing now will not always look like the past (see Acts 10, 15, 18). The Spirit is a spirit of surprise who is making all things new.

However, we also know that the Spirit’s work in history is always a manifestation of God’s mission and love for the world. One guide to discernment is a fundamental question: What is the Spirit’s power for? To go back to that Pentecostal manifesto in Acts 1:8: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses.” Somewhere in the past century of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, power to witness morphed into power to win.

The Spirit’s dynamic work in history will always rhyme with what God has manifested in Jesus. Paul tells us that “the spirits of prophets are subject to the prophets” (1 Cor 14:32, NRSV). When Jesus returned to Galilee “in the power of the Spirit” (Lk 4:14), he went to Nazareth, and in the synagogue he announced his own manifesto for his prophetic ministry, echoing the words of the prophet Isaiah (Lk 4:18–19):

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

The prophets are all subject to this prophet. And Jesus’ prophetic ministry was, and is, a ministry of liberation and reconciliation. It is a ministry of empowerment, not domination. It is the announcement that the Spirit frees us from every tyranny, not by our own might or power, but by that strange, beautiful power called grace. You know where the Spirit is afoot when you see the wonder-working paradox of weakness that is a channel for God’s grace and Christ’s power.

I’ll never forget a picture of this I witnessed back when we were a part of Bethel Pentecostal Tabernacle. A young family’s daughter had suddenly and tragically died. We were at their house when Pastor Charlie came to visit. The mother was bereft, undone, curled up in a fetal position under the empty crib, heaving sobs. Pastor Charlie didn’t say a word. With tears in his own eyes, he laid down on the floor beside the young mother and wept alongside her. Present. Praying silently. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a more powerful manifestation of the Spirit who groans for us. When we are trying to recognize the Spirit at work in history and the world around us, this is what the Spirit looks like.