Pentecostal Discussions

Apologies

Well, i discovered last year that blogging was hard work and, sadly, i did not have the energy to keep it up.  My apology for those who kept coming back to the site and hoping for more.  I am, however, going to try again - perhaps hesitatingly and a little bit slowly (if i drip feed the blog then perhaps i can keep it up).

On a different note, I realise that boasting is a sin - in which case i ask for your forgiveness (for the second time this post).  I am excited to announce that i have recently had two journal articles published in international pentecostal journals.

The Spirit and doctrinal development: a functional analysis of the traditional pentecostal doctrine of the baptism in the holy Spirit - Pneuma 29 (2007): 4-22

Pentecostal ecclesiology: a methodological proposal for a diverse movement - Journal of Pentecostal Theology 15/2 (2007): 215-234.

I am under copyright restriction in respect to these articles - so cannot publish them the details on this blog - but i might, in the next little while, give you a taster of a few ideas (so that you have a look at the journal!).

The Saints Are Coming

by Shane Clifton

Just to make you all jealous, my wife and i are off to the Sydney u2 concert this monday night.  Here's a video of u2 with greenday in celebration.

Pentecostal Apostate

by Shane Clifton

Chris Tilling, on his brilliant (if not sometimes irreverent) blog “chrisendom,” regularly highlights the amusing conclusions reached by various fundamentalist Christians. Recently, he noted that Dial the Truth Ministries” have labelled Amy Grant a witch. Their logic is:

On , Amy's video, That's What Love Is For Amy is dressed in a red robe, (used in witchcraft rituals) flashing on the palms of her hands, a six-pointed-star — A HEXAGRAM! … The word hex which means to place a curse on someone, originated from this sign." And the primary point of contact in the transmission of spirits — is the hand!”

 

I am proud to announce that I have also joined the illustrious ranks of the apostate. As some of you may know, I completed my PhD with the Australian Catholic University (I am a Pentecostal who has studied with the Assemblies of God, Wesleyans, and Catholics), under the supervision of Professor Neil Ormerod and Anne Hunt. Neil and I have continued to work together – including my asking him to teach on the doctrine of the Trinity at Southern Cross College. Recently, the college published a photo of Neil in my classroom, after which I received the following response:

Rebuilding 'The House' III: Martha's House

All the above said, there is nothing as powerful as a properly functioning, healthy church community. It was this that turned over the Roman Empire, revolutionised Western Culture, gave the world an inestimable heritage of service and value. What is it that makes such a thing work? Systems theorists tell us that all social organisms need maintain the balance between task and maintenance. Task is the exciting stuff – it is the stuff that ‘we are here for’, it is what pastors love throwing vision at. It is assumed to be the task of the leader, whether in the business corporation, the NGO or the church. Maintenance is what holders of such conceptions of leadership like to leave to others – it is the vocation of the ‘pastoral care’ pastor, the ‘administration guy’, the facilities and programs director. The systems theorists, however, would point out that vision is not the only task of leadership. The task of leaders is to act as the cut out switch, the holder of the balance between the demands of maintenance and task. To set task without reference to maintenance is to invite burn out and the phenomenon of the ‘big back door’; to set maintenance without reference to task is to freeze into self-satisfied irrelevance. The reaction of Pentecostal churches in particular to the latter model of church has meant a distorted preference for the former model of leadership – the model which leaves the leader with the task of vision, but no responsibility for what happens in the rest of the organisation. This flows through into what our ruling metaphors for church will be: house or Temple, home or mission. Any one of these models can be made to work – the trick is for it to know what it is, and to do that well, without denying the vitality of the other metaphors.

Diving in the Pneumasphere II

This combination of reference points necessarily takes the Christian life out and beyond the ‘statusphere’. Physical life, which we share, is supported and implied by the biosphere. The discursive, cultural life implied by being a living human is described by the statusphere – and indeed, much of the biblical record is dedicated to dealing with the problems which arise when one places physical life in culturally charged settings. But the biblical record also deals with the interactions of physical and humano-cultural life with a higher sphere, that of the spiritual order. Coming from a Pentecostal worldview, one could look at much of Jesus’ earthly ministry as being dedicated to the declaration of a ‘pneumasphere’, a ‘third economy’ where the actions of physical and enculturated life take on new meanings because they are submitted to the will of God. Jesus calls this state ‘the Kingdom of God’. Like the biosphere, it is coextensive with the statusphere (ie., one must be physically alive to be a subject within the statusphere, and likewise, ‘it is given unto man to die once’ – one must also be physically and culturally located for the Kingdom of God to come among amongst us, ‘Your Kingdom come, Your Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.’ The Kingdom includes those who are disembodied, but their fates with regard to the Kingdom are not the business of those who are embodied – it is among those who are embodied participants of the three spheres that the Kingdom is coming, as opposed to having already come.) And like the statusphere, the function of the pneumasphere constrains the range and quality of choice and self-construction. Dogs struggle for priority in the barking order in order to maximize their chances of survival; humans struggle for priority in the statusphere, in order to maximize their opportunities for self-actualisation; seekers embrace disciplines in the pneumasphere because ultimate actualization is not actualization of the self, but of finding fulfillment of the self in the Other. In the statusphere, I judge my own liberty, in the pneumasphere, my liberty is judged by others: ‘Conscience, I say, not thine own, but of the other: for why is my liberty judged of another man's conscience?’ (1 Cor 10: 29) In the Christian view, we cannot simply choose to be like God. Humanness is embedded in bodies; Godlikeness is imbedded in Personhood – and Personhood implies otherness. We must choose Him who first chose us. In the statusphere we wrap who we are in the products of the biosphere so that who we are might be reflected in ways which are then reflected back to us. In the pneumasphere we are reflexively made by our experiences of projecting the ‘will of God in us” into the statusphere. We wrap ourselves in revealed knowledge, in prayer, in spiritual disciplines, song and sacred hymns, so that we are likewise reflexively made by the rules of that sphere. And thereby are we citizens of both, made by choice and desire of the things of God: “All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not.” (1 Cor 10: 23)

Diving in the Pneumasphere - part I

by Mark Hutchinson

This blog, I am told, is a place to do our ‘stream of consciousness’ stuff – you know, the ideas we have when we are not really thinking about anything, the things which just drop into your head while reading a book and looking out a bus window. Me, I am an Australian-born, Christian social scientist who is married to someone from an infinitely older culture than my own (Italy). As I teach and think, I am a reticulating experiment in observing myself – my life regards my faith and my discipline, my faith my undisciplined life, and my discipline my living faith. It constantly escapes nice dualities, logical dialectics. And that is how I started following this particular idea by one of America’s (many, various and seemingly omnipresent) public intellectuals, Tom Wolfe. As a church historian interested in Italy, I was reading on Savonarola and the Bonfire of the Vanities, a term which I knew had been used by Wolfe as a book title. It seemed an apposite thought in a religious tradition (Pentecostalism) more marked by shiny new PDAs than Franciscan apostolic poverty. And so the ideas come together and spark off one another…

Random Interlude

by Shane Clifton

Mark Hutchinson is about to commence the next series of posts, on the topic of pentecostal identity.  While we get him set up, i have come accross a brilliant extract from an episode of the simpsons dealing with evolution and creationism.  Whatever your view on this topic, this episode is funny.

http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2006/05/the_simpsons_an.html