The Holy Who?

How can it be that in a charismatic generation we’ve forgotten the Holy Spirit?
—Leonard Ravenhill

Love Ravenhill. No one cut to the chase better than he did. That’s the kind of thinking I pray gets exhibited on Cerulean Sanctum daily.

I wrote on the Holy Spirit last Thursday, but driving home from church today I got overwhelmed with a similar message, so I’d like to go into more detail.

Many people already know that I claim to be a charismatic, though I dislike the term immensely, and hate much of what the charismatic movement has transmogrified into in recent years. You can’t be around charismatics very long and not run into some—for want of a better phrase—serious wackos. Loyal readers will know that I routinely hold the spiritual feet of the charismatic movement to the fire. I simply possess no tolerance for charismania, as I call it.

On the other hand, this post addresses the other side of the issue.

A few questions:

1. Why is it that you can surf a hundred Christian blogs and not find a single mention of the Holy Spirit?

2. How is it possible that you can go to your average Christian bookstore and buy a dozen Christian books and find virtually no mention of the Holy Spirit?

3. Why is it that the institutional churches have either turned the Holy Spirit into a “fairy godmother” or gutted His power to do anything more than help us remember a few Bible verses?

4. In fact, how is it that some Christians routinely allow the Bible to replace the Holy Spirit in the Trinity?

5. How can it be that we can talk about eschatology, soteriology, epistemology, and a hundred other Christian -ologies, but someone casually asks to define pneumatology and entire swaths of mature Christians will scratch their heads?

How are any of these possible?

The inescapable truth is that every aspect of Church that we practice today existed before the Holy Spirit was given, yet we had no Church! The Church exists for one reason only, and that’s the Lord placed His Spirit inside us! Tiffany window - The Holy Spirit Community existed, religious practice existed, love existed, service existed, even the Scriptures existed, but the Holy Spirit did not make his dwelling place in human beings.

Folks, the mark of the Church must always be the Holy Spirit in us. Everything else can be copied by other religions. But they do not have the Holy Spirit. He’s the promise. He’s the seal. He’s the power!

How then can we talk about everything else BUT Him?

One of the most compelling reasons for the Western Church’s comatose state can be found in our non-existent pneumatology. We’ve reduced the Holy Spirit to some index cards with a few memorized Scriptures on them. We’ve taken the Holy Spirit and accepted His seal on us for salvation, but then we move on as if He’s done with us.

Consider this well-known verse:

…Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts.
—Zechariah 4:6b

We’ll quote that till we’re blue in the face and then go right out and minister from the flesh.

I’m not a supporter of the Emerging Church, but I’m sympathetic to some of the reforms they’re calling for in the Church as a whole. Yet I’m utterly mystified that a reform movement could be so lacking in any concept of the Holy Spirit. Pneumatology in the Emerging Church? I’ve not heard one peep about it. As far as I’m concerned, any reform movement that perpetually leaves out the mention of the Holy Spirit is nothing but flesh-centered hogwash.

And you, the institutional church guys. Stop laughing, because you’re the ones who forgot what the Holy Spirit is all about. No wonder your spiritual offspring in the Emerging Church are clueless about the Holy Spirit. You gave them nothing to work with. You’re the one’s who shoved the Holy Spirit in a closet and forgot about Him!

Yeah, I’m a little peeved about this. I hear a lot of pointless talk on the Web about revival and how to rouse the sleeping Western Church, yet almost nothing about the Holy Spirit. I promise this: if we start preaching on the necessity of the Spirit to empower our lives to holiness, evangelism, and true manifestations of the Spirit’s power to a generation unimpressed with talk without walk, we’ll see revival.

Ask yourselves how the Church grew from a couple hundred disciples at Pentecost to around 20-25 million adherents by the time of the First Council of Nicaea in 325. Most people couldn’t read, no NT canon existed, the Gentiles had passing references to the Scriptures, persecution of Christians flourished, Christians didn’t meet in megachurches, and yet Christianity flourished. How?

Not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit!

How is that we’ve forgotten this? Worse, how is it that we’ve forgotten the Third Person of the Trinity altogether?

A Lesson on the Spirit from the Three Little Pigs

My son and I were discussing the moral ramifications of “The Three Little Pigs,” when a thought struck me. A peculiarly theological thought.

Young pigs strike out from home to seek their fortunes in the world. Each encounters a man carrying a building material. Each builds a home from that building material. Depending on which version of the story you read, the first two pigs either wind up as so much meat sticking to the Big Bad Wolf’s ribs or they escape to the third pig’s impregnable fortress of brick wherein they turn the tables on the wolf and make soup out of HIM.

Being the curmudgeonly type, I prefer the more dire outcome for the two foolish pigs. I mean, the wolf was just being true to type. Why should HE suffer?

Anyway…

You can’t read that story and miss the appellation slathered on the first two pigs: foolish.

But do we ever think why?

In the story I read with my son, the pigs went their separate ways. The first one encounters a man selling straw. In some parts of the world straw makes for a perfectly legitimate building material. How smart of the pig to transact some business and build a house. A house is better than no house, right? I would think so. It rains on the just and the unjust—and on pigs, too. A roof overhead when it’s raining feels pretty darn good.

The second pig, having not heard of the misfortune that eventually caught up with his sibling, contracted with another man to buy wood for his house. Seeing as most of us live in houses made of wood, The one who endured to the end... we’re that second pig. Wood makes a fine house save for encounters with F5 tornadoes and wolves of unusual lung capacity. But that pig was still foolish.

The third pig bode his time and just so happened to come across a man selling bricks. The rest is fairy tale history.

“So, Dan,” you’re saying, “I’ve got 1,732 other blogs to read today. Get to the point.”

Some circles of Christianity, at least in my opinion, have a low view of the Holy Spirit. He seals us for salvation and helps us understand Scripture, but He’s sort of shy and quiet otherwise, kind of the introvert of the Trinity. At least as some would paint Him. He certainly doesn’t go around guiding people. We have all the guidance we need from the Scriptures and there’s no possible reason why we’d need the Holy Spirit to tell us anything apart from what any of us would find in the Book.

Tell that to Pig 1 and Pig 2.

So a man comes up to you with some straw. The pragmatist in your swinish self informs you that straw would make a decent house. The opportunity is right before you. You never know when that straw’s going to show up again. Being quite the religious pig, you consider that God makes straw, right? It’s good stuff. God said so. Plus, you hate being rained on.

Straw it is.

Or a man comes up to you with wood. Strong stuff that wood! Would make a fine house. God makes trees. Plenty of God’s little creatures live in trees. They do okay by God’s trees. And then there’s that Noah guy. Gotta love that wooden boat and all the protection it gave. You’ve been to Sunday School, so…

Wood it is.

Next thing you know, you and your brother’s little digested corpses are so much steaming wolf scat on the side of the road.

What went wrong?

I see this happen in the lives of a lot of Christians. Because they’ve chopped out the Spirit’s ability to speak to them, they make pragmatic choices rather than godly ones. Straw and wood may be perfectly good building material in all but the most bizarre cases. But what does the Spirit say? Would He tell us to hold out for something that might be coming down the road that we can’t see, but He can? Would He ask us to endure the rainstorm for a few more days until the man with bricks enters the scene and saves the day?

For all we know, straw and wood may be our only choices. The pragmatist says to strike while the iron’s hot, to make the most of the opportunities God affords us. But what does the Spirit say?

The storyteller deems the third pig wise. In the eyes of the first two, he’s a fool because he had the opportunity to buy decent building material, but he didn’t. Those first two pigs didn’t have the God’s-eye view, though.

For the truly Spirit-led Christian, of which there seems to be few in this age of pragmatic churchmen, heeding the Spirit occurs throughout the day. The kind of guidance received can’t always be traced back to the Book. Consider this disciple:

Now there was a disciple at Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.” And he said, “Here I am, Lord.” And the Lord said to him, “Rise and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul, for behold, he is praying, and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight.”
—Acts 9:10-12

That’s some mighty fine guidance that disciple received, but he didn’t get it by reading the Book, did he? He took that guidance rather conventionally, too, since the next verse finds him arguing about it with the Lord. Perhaps he was used to the Lord speaking to him. I can’t see any of us in the same situation, the audible voice of God telling us to drive to Death Valley to change the tire of some couple who would be open to hearing the Gospel right there amid the rattlesnakes, and us saying, “But, Lord….” I suspect that the vast majority of us would keel over from fright, our hair bleached white, because it’s far too out-of-the-ordinary that the Holy Spirit should actually guide us like the Book says He will.

Straw was good. Wood was better. Brick was best. How often do we settle for straw because we weren’t listening to the Spirit’s call to hold out for something better? Because we’re so deaf to the sound of the Savior’s voice, we may never know the difference between the pragmatic solution and the one that’s spiritually discerned. But difference there is and the only way to know it is to have the Lord shout it right in our deaf ears until we hear it as a whisper.

Then we’re getting somewhere.

Dissing Discernment

Fork ahead Three weeks ago in church, one of our elders quoted T.D. Jakes.

My head nearly exploded.

You see, T.D. Jakes is a cult leader. He’s not a Christian—at least by the standards of orthodoxy. As a leader in a Oneness Pentecostal church group, he denies the classical understanding of the Trinity. (See update below.) Yet Jakes shows up on numerous “approved” lists of Evangelicals that circulate on the Web and in print media. Just the other day, our YMCA (an organization championed by historic Christian evangelist Dwight Moody) held a book sale to raise money. One table included Christian materials. I suspect a quarter of the books had Jakes’s doughy, smiling face on the cover.

A few days later in one of our small groups, someone mentioned a book by another Oneness Pentecostal without understanding the theology. He’d never heard of them or their beliefs.

In my younger days, cults crawled out of the woodwork. Mo Berg, Victor Paul Weirwille, Herbert Armstrong—we knew these guys and knew to stay far away from their pernicious brands of deviancy. I used to spend hours reading up on Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons just so I could show them the truth.

Now you’ve got Mormon books showing up in Christian bookstores and Mitt Romney giving the commencement address at Pat Robertson’s Regent University.

Times were that the marks of a cult stood out like a sore thumb. Three doctrinal denials will usually reveal a cult:

Denial of the Trinity
Denial of the efficacy of Christ’s blood to cleanse from all sins
Denial of the sufficiency of faith in Christ alone for salvation

Apply those three to any religious organization or leader and they’ll snare cultists with an efficiency close to 100 percent.

In most cases, you don’t have to go any further than looking for a group’s flawed view on the Trinity to unmask it as a cult. Nothing marks the uniqueness of orthodox Christianity than the belief that God exists in three full, unique persons in one essence. We believe the unity of the Godhead in essence, the Godhead’s diversity in persons. And we’ve believed that fundamental understanding of the nature of God since the founding of the Church by Christ Himself.

How fundamental? As I see it, every doctrine we hold dear in the Church must begin with the nature of God Himself. If we fumble that, everything that proceeds from it takes on a warped perspective. For instance, the very love of God cannot be properly understood from a Oneness perspective, for the love the members of the Trinity possess for each other expresses itself in God’s love for us and our love for each other. Our concept of what love means can only be fully understood if we acknowledge that God is Trinitarian in nature.

In fact, I can’t see how anyone can possible read the Bible and not see the Trinity on every page. Consider even Deuteronomy 6:4—Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one—the word “one” there is not the word for a single person (yahid), but a unified personna (ehad). We see the same word ehad in reference to husband and wife being one (ehad) flesh. How appropriate that the ecstatic love the Triune God experiences within His persons reflects in the joining of husband and wife, while also mirroring the unification of Christ and the Church in the imagery of Bridegroom and Bride. I’m also one who believes that Man is a tripartite being (body, soul, spirit) in the same way that God is triune, further reflecting the idea that we are made in the image of God.

Just inches away on my library shelf sits James White’s The Forgotten Trinity. Check it out. For more on the error of Oneness (historically known in several minor variants as Sebellianism, Patripassionism, or Modalism), check out Theopedia.

I spoke with the elder Sunday morning about his reference. He wasn’t familiar with Oneness Pentecostals, their beliefs, or the fact that T.D. Jakes is a non-Trinitarian. He expressed surprise about Jakes and he staunchly defended Trinitarianism. While I wasn’t happy about the Jakes quote, I absolutely understood the elder made the comment without knowing the truth about Jakes.

This brings us to the meat of this post.

So why do we diss discernment? The elder made a telling statement as we talked, “There are so many variants of Pentecostalism, it’s hard to know exactly what each believes.” That’s a legitimate comment on Pentecostalism—and Christianity in general. So much fracturing and splintering over a couple millennia have left us all a bit strung out. When the Lord speaks to the seven Churches in Asia in Revelation, it’s hard to miss the different flavors of practice and belief already evident.

I’ve made the Church my study, but I still can’t tell you what the Ukrainian Orthodox believe differently from the Russian Orthodox. Or Regular Baptists from Bible Baptists. I could give you generalities, but generalities won’t cut it when trying to discern truth from error.

The sheer mass of Christian (and pseudo-Christian) thought multiplied over thousands of belief statements is daunting. No wonder so many Christians appear baffled. Still, we can’t excuse our lack of diligence.

In the charismatic and pentecostal ranks, you tend to see a lot of cult of personality issues. Folks get sidetracked by big name preachers and ministries. Prophets, apostles, deacons, elders, pastors—stick a title on someone (usually self-affixed by the Christian celebrity in question) and you’ll find people who immediately succumb to slavish devotion. Obviously, the chance for delusion runs high. Sadly, once a leader proves to have feet of clay, the defrauded simply move onto another hero. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Folks outside charismatic and pentecostal circles will, of course, laugh and mock any follower of Benny Hinn or Jack Van Impe, but those mockers aren’t immune to deception. My experience shows that rather than falling prey to dynamic individuals, the noncharismatics/Pentecostals fall for an even more insidious lie: power structures and systems. They get sucked into thinking governments, organizations (Christian or not), and even church hierarchies are the means by which the world revolves. The faithful tack a veneer of godliness over the top of power structures, but the core’s still ungodly. These folks end up perpetrating great injustices against the poor, disenfranchised, powerless, and even each other, as a result.

Don’t laugh at someone else, because I can promise that all of us have drunk (or are still drinking) from some soul-corroding teat. Even the best of us get off-track or stumble in little ways. Let’s all be humble here.

I talk about discernment quite a bit on Cerulean Sanctum. On the whole, I think it’s the greatest lack in the Church today. I think five reasons drive this:

We’re too busy – Busy people nod their heads and unthinkingly accept whatever comes their way. That’s a recipe for disaster. While the sheer number of lies out there overwhelms the average person, God still holds us accountable for truth.
We’re too apathetic – “Does discernment matter? Why should I care?” Paul warns that many have shipwrecked their faith by lack of discernment. Rank pragmatism within many Christian hearts pushes discernment into the background because its raison d’être doesn’t immediately leap out. We don’t understand that God’s people perish for lack of knowledge and that this knowledge is beneficial for own its sake—because God said we need to know it.
We think we’ve arrived – We’re saved now, so what? But eternal security isn’t license for spiritual sloth. Too many Christians think they’re in, but then fail to work out their salvation with fear and trembling. That fear and trembling includes godly discernment.
We’re naïvely optimistic – Jesus didn’t tempt God by taking a leap off the top of the Temple. The same Enemy that tempted the Lord tempts us. He’s a master at deceiving us into thinking we’re immune from the mess our neighbors made of their lives. It never dawns on us that we could go down in flames, too. So when the Enemy tells us to jump off, we do. That’s pride, and it’s from the pit of hell.
We’re not drilled on discernment – People quote 1 John 1:4 (Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world), but it’s always for some other person in some other church at some other time. Our church leaders should have that 1 John 1:4 filter up at all times and show us how to keep it up as well.

As for me, I side with Jesus here:

Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing. But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.
—John 2:23-25

In this day and age, it’s foolish for any Christian to go blindly out into the world. Jesus had His filter on at all times. He knew the evil that lurked in the hearts of men, so He did not trust them.

That’s wisdom for us, folks. Begin at skepticism. Never assume someone is telling you the truth, no matter how trusted that teacher/leader/pastor/friend might be. Let God alone be true and every man a liar (Romans 3:4). The Scriptures are our source. The Holy Spirit is our interpreter. Run everything you hear past those two. Any human is capable of error, even this writer. Don’t take everything I say as gospel truth. Prove it against the Word of God. Correct me if I need it. I expect nothing less.

Thanks to all who contributed. I’ll unpack some of your comments from Friday’s post tomorrow.

(Update: I made an error in currently assigning Jakes to the United Pentecostal Church. He was once affiliated with that Oneness church, was ordained a bishop in another Oneness denomination, and currently is a high-ranking leader within another Oneness church group. I regret the error.)