Who can tell the Spirit’s story? Who, indeed, would dare to attempt to? Of all the pieces and parts of theology and religion, faith and belief, talking and wondering, it is the nature, substance, and function of the Spirit that are sacrosanct and the most fraught with danger, should error be committed. Our forefathers and mothers have threaded their way very cautiously over the centuries, and we would do well to remember that. Yet there is a story to be told here—or better said, there is the beginning of a story, and it wants telling, albeit carefully.
Azusa Street and what happened there is of direct and very personal importance to those Christians who, by formal affiliation, are Pentecostals or Charismatics; and their number is indeed considerable. Current surveys show that there are at least as many Pentecostal Christians in the world today as there are citizens of the United States. And while available estimates may vary from a quarter billion to well over three hundred million, one thing remains very clear, namely that the numbers are growing exponentially every day. If, moreover, one adds as well those who self-identify as “Charismatics” rather than “Pentecostals,” the total number of Christians whose faith tradition was either born or revived, shaped, or informed at the Azusa Street Mission increases to a half billion people—or, one full quarter of all of the Christians in the world today.1 The influence of Azusa Street and all that has resulted from it is also of great if somewhat more diffuse importance to latinized Christianity in general and to the cultures that it informs.
No human agency could have created what happened in 1906 in Los Angeles, nor could any human agency have either contained or interrupted it. What roared out of William Seymour’s re-consecrated stable was a Presence; and what that Presence brought, among other things, was freedom—the freedom to think and to know the Holy in an unfettered, unmediated way that was frightening and exhilarating and soul-sustaining all at the same time.2 God had been among humankind from the beginning as Creator and Source and Sum. God had been among us as Divine Human and Bridge into Deity for centuries. Now, God was . . . ?
Now, God was not over there or up there or in the later and the hereafter and the someday. The story was complete—or at least had begun the move toward its completion. The kingdom of God was among us—was and is and evermore shall be. And It is pouring into Its people and out through them until all the world shall know and be subject to It and . . .
. . . and one of the things that Azusa Street also taught us was that the gift of speaking in tongues is necessary, for no human words or language can express what there was, and is, to articulate. Words, as we know them, cannot record or convey what wanted expressing. That circumstance is still valid and probably always will be, which is why all words—including ours above—still fail and wilt away. But failed and wilted as the words here may be, they nonetheless are congruent with what happened and continues to happen among Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians. They also are congruent with, and have formative implications, for both Emergence Christians and non-Emergence or traditional Christians.
To know God without a priest or pastor either funneling and directing the experience or laying down the instructions for placing the call is exhilarating. It may be frightening, in fact, for the first time or two, but ultimately it is exhilarating, not to mention habit-forming. And whether one intends it or not, inevitably it leads to circumventing much of the system. It is, in other words, not unlike what happens when one gives up telephone wires for Wi-Fi. It also leads to a certain amazement that a conversation is even happening. That, in turn, translates to a kind of reverential daring that is hungry to conduct conversation more frequently in more places and within more strange circumstances than once were even possible.
The Pentecost of 1906 was startling at first, and the subject of scathing commentary, as we know. Lifelong, convicted, and good Christians ignored it, or learned of it with indifference, or began to read magazine snippets about it, or engaged in a little parish-hall-coffee-hour fun about the crazies in the Church today, or discovered an otherwise-sensible colleague who thought something valid might actually be going on, or got hold of a book by Dennis Bennett or Jack Deere because a really responsible friend had recommended them, or . . .
. . . or finally sank into the realization that not only had something shifted, but also that the most profound change theologically and conceptually in Christianity in our era has been and is the shift toward emphasis on God, the Holy Spirit.
It would be inaccurate to say, or even imply, that Azusa Street bears the whole credit for that shift, just as it would be inaccurate to act as if the implications of that and consequent shifts were limited to Christianity. Neither of those things is true. Azusa was only one part of the peri-Emergence, though admittedly one of its more discrete and certainly more dramatic ones. What Azusa did do, however, was to help in a substantial way to open the floodgates for Christians, and by extension to Christianized culture in general, to non-hierarchal experimentation, to an openness to perceived as opposed to structured reality, and to conversational candor that enjoyed an ever-lessening fear of social and political reprisal.
This new and burgeoning freedom to speak of the Spirit and to wonder at a dramatic new way of knowing extended over the decades of the twentieth century into questions about doctrinalized religion in general, about institutional Church, and about pragmatic rather than inspired authority. It extended, in other words, to a whole list of questions that, at their core, looked remarkably like those that had plagued Luther five hundred years earlier, when he had not known exactly how to engage and/or where to place the Holy Ghost. There were, however, two or three other significant new twists to the road.
During the second half of the last century, post-Holocaust Judaism was received into mainstream Christian culture, especially in the United States, with more cordiality than it had ever enjoyed previously. The result was a ready exchange by default, if not intention, between the two faiths, an exchange that at times could become almost a blending. At the same time, as post-war concern for equality of rights and full citizenship grew all over North America, so too did an awareness of indigenous peoples and, most particularly and popularly, of native spirituality with its mystical engagement of the “Spirit”—an engagement and a Spirit free of doctrine and of particularities.
In the United States especially, changes in immigration laws opened North America’s doors to new citizens of Asian descent, and in their coming, many of them brought with them Buddhism and Vedantic philosophies, with rich traditions of spiritual and, in some of their divisions, non-theistic, aphysical experience. At the same time, while relations with Islamic culture as a political construct grew more strained in most parts of the Christian world, so too did the need to know Islam as a faith. The inevitable result of increasing knowledge and familiarity was the discovery not only of similarities of principles but, and perhaps most foundational, of a congenial mysticism or spirituality in the writings of men like Rumi and Hafiz, or the Sunni scholars.
Over those same and earlier decades, psychology had grown—exponentially, in fact—from a pseudo-science of gentlemanly fascination to a formal discipline that spun off into and/or matured with other new disciplines like psychiatry and neuro-chemistry, neuro-biology and neuro-pharmacology, etc., all of which opened the world of the mind and the psyche and then asked, by default, where now and what are the soul and its longings in all of this? And then mind and psyche received unnaturally gifted communicators designed for a television age in the forms of Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers.
In sum, both in North America and the other parts of latinized Christian culture, we passed in the twentieth century through decades of upheaval about what faith was and how it should or should not be structured, about what subjective experience is and how it should be employed, about who/what/how it is that “knows” the aphysical, about God as ground of being for all creatures, and, in the sum of it all, about what the non-historical, inconceivable Spirit of God is that moves across the waters from which we physically come and to which we all return.
The decades of unease and the loss of absolute knowing would make atheists of some of us and agnostics out of others of us. Of many of us, those decades would make the more-difficult-to-define “nones,” and of many more of us, the much more outspoken spiritual-but-not-religious. But those decades would also make a new kind of Christian out of essentially all of us.3
Either we would become refurbished and more appreciative of what had been before the chaos began, in which case, we would give ourselves over to refining and reverencing the institution and institutions that had conveyed our heritage to us and mediated our theological understandings for us.
Or we would remain where we were within that beloved structure and polish and support it with gratitude and renewed affection, as well as with our substance and influence.
Or we would remain Pentecostals or Charismatics by inherited custom, or become one by conversion in the face of changing theology and pneumatology.
Or we would become, like many of our fellow citizens, spiritual within a Christian context, but not religious in a formalized or affiliated one.
Or we would move along the tracks and open lines of recently discovered human commonality to a Christian universalism that seeks to find in all religions an equal way to God.
Or we would become some variant of any of those broad categories.
Or we could become a new kind of Christian, one that has not been before, one that is the first fruits, so to speak, of Joachim’s Age of the Spirit and that is a kind of convergence of believers drawn from all the others into another and unknown vortex.4 We could become Emergence Christians.5
Whatever we are and by whatever communion label we categorize and govern ourselves, all of us who call ourselves Christian today and for many days to come are going to have to wrestle, whether we wish to or not, with the foundational questions of What/Who is the Holy Spirit? What, indeed, is the Trinity Itself? And if, like our ancestors, we cannot answer those two questions—and we may not be able to—how are we to understand this new, or perhaps better said, renewed Presence? How now shall we worship? How now shall we live into this new era, this Age of the Spirit, in which we find ourselves?
No one knows, of course, but that ignorance does not grant us any relief from the fearful solemnity of the questions, nor does it grant us any release from the necessity of dealing with them. And because Emergence Christianity in all its varying presentations is a product of these times and, as a result, is the most unencumbered movement among us, it is also the nimblest of us as well. So it is that at least some of the answers and much of new Christian theology will come from Emergence and Emergence thought. Certainly there are evidences of that already.
While Emergence is clearly the most nimble and unencumbered movement within latinized Christianity, it also enjoys one other—and very telling—advantage over the other communions in that grouping. That is, it not only enjoys the shared heritage and tradition of the first millennium of the faith, but it has unprejudiced access to the treasures and traditions of Orthodoxy that were lost to much of Latin Christianity a thousand years ago in the Great Schism. Ironically, or perhaps providentially, the greatest treasure—the signatory characteristic—of Orthodoxy has been its non-manipulative reverence for the mysteries of the Spirit. If the Spirit is to be known and engaged and wholly honored among us, then it is to Orthodoxy first that Emergence theology has turned.
Orthodox theology has always assumed a progression of Christian experience, both individually and corporately, from the kataphatic to the apophatic. Kataphatic theology has characterized latinized Christianity in all the centuries since the Great Schism. Some would even argue that a Latin proclivity for the kataphatic was part of what led to the Schism in the first place. Be that as it may, kataphatic theology seeks always to define and describe what God is. Apophatic theology, by contrast, seeks to know God in terms of what God is not. That is, as either the individual believer or the corporate body moves deeper into union in prayer with the Beingness of God, they are drawn more deeply into communion with the ineffable and transported ever more deeply into the mystery whose beauty would be defiled by overmuch defining and describing.
Emergence Christianity finds in this distinction much that is cordial to its own theology and especially to its way of approaching the Spirit and, most certainly, to its way of talking and theorizing about the Trinity. The Trinity, which is prior in any real discussion of the Spirit, is probably best conceptualized in Emergence thought as like unto fire. That is, fire has no disunity or separateness. It is. It is fire and, as such, is multi-hued flame of reds and yellows and blues. Its property is heat. In none of these is there division, and in all of this non-division there is variousness that can be seen and touched and consumed by, but never grasped nor rendered constant.6
One of the felicitous parts of this way of being with the Trinity is that it avoids, almost unconsciously, the trap of thinking biologically about the Trinity and its components. The “persons” stance of traditional Christianity withers away, exposing itself as a kind of rhetorical trap or cul de sac and opening the way to thinking theologically instead. It would be false to say that that shift has entirely happened. It is very accurate, however, to say that the process leading to it has begun.7
It is also quite accurate to say that among many and probably most Emergence leaders even the need to think theologically about either the Trinity or the Spirit is often lost. It has been drowned out in the exponentially expanding reality of the Spirit’s presence among us, drowned out in the same way that erotic love drowns out any need for discussion of physical particulars.
Some Emergence leaders and theologians are moving away from biological thinking so completely as to resist even such talk as this. They have moved instead to asking us to know God as an activity rather than as an entity. They celebrate the “I am” of God’s first declaration of His identity to Moses as being a declaration of “Is-ness” that is everywhere and always present.
There is, in all of this, clearly no uniformity of thought, even as there is some obvious urgency in the inquiry. As this new form of Christianity and this new way of being Church and Kingdom mature, they, like their predecessors in earlier upheavals, must soon come to address the question of authority—to address the question of how now shall we live and by whose definitions of right and wrong, correct and incorrect, holy and heretical.
When they and/or we fully engage that dreaded question, it will be in terms of the Spirit and of holy discernment. The center of our new authority will not lie, as it did in earlier presentations, with the Church fathers and mothers or with Church councils, not with politico-ecclesial hierarchies, nor even in sola scriptura and inerrancy as it is popularly defined. Rather, it will lie within the realm of the Spirit and an awe-filled, discerning intercourse with It.
Writing some eighteen centuries ago, Basil the Great expressed what would have been the crux of that problem for his own time. “What,” he asked, “are the energies of the Spirit? Their extent cannot be told, and they are numberless. How can we comprehend what is beyond the ages?”8
His question was a sound one, and its truth appertained from his own time in the fourth century right up until shortly before our own. The difference between our world and Basil’s, though, is that the Spirit now wants to be known as It was known in the days of our beginning. And in that truth lies the Front Story for us as this Age’s people of God.
1. “Pentecostal Resource Page,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, modified October 5, 2006, accessed July 22, 2011, http://www.pewforum.org/Christian/Evangelical-Protestant-Churches/Pentecostal-Resource-Page.aspx.
It is also worth noting here that some several years ago, Pew began to employ the term “Renewalists” for naming the larger whole that occurs when demographers put Pentecostals and Charismatics into a shared grouping. The result has not only been a considerable reduction in rhetorical awkwardness but also a formal and very useful recognition of the shared sensibilities that bind the two groups to one another.
2. Tanya Luhrmann, a psychological anthropologist and professor of anthropology at Stanford University, is a brilliant student of these shifts and changes, as well as a gifted recorder of their presentations in real life among real people. In particular, interested readers may want to see her volume, When God Talks Back (New York: Knopf, 2012), in this regard.
3. While we speak, in all of this, about Christians, because that is the focus of the present discussion, it is important that we recognize as well that these same cultural forces and swirling questions have impacted other faith groups as well, especially Judaism.
4. The term, “a new kind of Christian,” has become almost a byword or specific descriptor for Emergence Christians. It takes its importance and origin from a pivotal book by Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001) and was reenforced by the publication in 2008 of Tony Jones’s The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass).
5. The choice of the word convergence here is not accidental. Within Emergence Christianity or running alongside of it—and no one is quite sure yet which is the accurate assessment—is a move on the part of some Christians toward a universalism that is non-doctrinal, empathetic, and immediate. Those moving in this direction now refer to themselves as Convergents and to their movement as Convergence Christianity. Their numbers are drawn primarily from Progressive Evangelicals, Progressive Roman Catholics, Missional mainliners, and social justice–oriented Pentecostals and Evangelicals. The curious readers may find a very complete statement of Convergence postures at Brian Berghoef, “A New Convergence,” The Musings of a Pub Theologian (blog), December 12, 2012, http://pubtheologian.com/2012/12/12/a-new-convergence/.
6. There is much seminal work being done in this area, but perhaps the most complete and most accessible introduction and overview is Ian Mobsby, The Becoming of G-d: What the Trinitarian Nature of God Has to Do with Church and a Deep Spirituality for the 21st Century (London: YTC Press, 2008).
7. One variation on this conceptualizing is at least semi-biological or “personed.” Perichoresis is a Greek word that originally had to do with the relationship of performing parts among themselves and with the whole they were and were creating. It was especially understood to describe dancers and the dance and is, quite obviously, the root word for our English choreography.
As a theological conceptualization, perichoresis has a sometimes tenuous history of usage in Christian thought. It was first applied to Christian theology, apparently, by Gregory of Nazianzus. John of Damascus, in the early eighth century, employed it more fully and, more or less, popularized it as naming a “cleaving together” within the Trinity.
A kind of either “person-ness” or “entity-ness” is implied by the very logic of such a definition, of course, but the term fell into relative disuse until recently, where it has reappeared in the teaching of some of our most gifted and influential theologians and thinkers like Miroslav Volf and Jürgen Moltmann.
8. See Augustine, Serm. 81.8.