The Pentecostalist Error.

Today’s text is important, because it moves from giftedness to love. We are not given gifts — what in the combox a couple of days ago were called packages — for ourselves. We are given them to do jobs within the church and community. But this passage has caused conflicts among the protestants at the crunchy end of theology. I am not sure how this happened among the Catholics and Orthodox, who were fighting bigger battles during this time, but among the Evangelicals there is a background.

One of the books my Dad had in his library — and in the days before the internet, I read everything in his library, for good or ill — was a book that accused those who work dispensationalism. This is the basic theology behind the interpretation of revelations and daniel, made popular during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and drove the commentaries in the Scofield reference bible, which was used by many serious laypeople for generations.

The criticism was driven by the move to Pentecostal theology — based on a revival in Los Angeles where people started speaking in tongues. Speaking in tongues became the sine qua non of Pentecostalism — where you were not “sealed in the spirit” unless this happened, and you had an experience of emotion an ecstasy. During my teenage years this theology entered the (then quite orthodox) Presbyterian Church. The Church split, and the liberals led many to error.

But this is an error. The giftedness is not a sign that you are of Christ, but the test is your fruits: it is love.

1 Corinthians 12:27-13:3

²⁷Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. ²⁸And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. ²⁹Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? ³⁰Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? ³¹But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.

¹If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ²And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. ³If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

The plain reading of this is best. Not all will have all gifts. To require any one gift is the Pentecostalist error. I grew up among these people, and I have a great affection for them: I approve of their attitude to church buildings (buy a warehouse and stick a sound system in it) and that they accept that we should love with emotions and not with our intellect.

But I do not belong there. In part, because we shoudl also love God with our mind, but there are two other errors they are vulnerable to. Pentecostals may consider themselves freed from liturgy and tradition, but they over value experience and feelings. They tend to consider that if something is successful, it is right. They also tend to lack credal theology.

And over the years, I have found that these things matter. We deceive ourselves all too easily: we think that what we want is the work of the Spirit (when it may not be) and we are looking for the spectacular when God most frequently calls us to do the mundane, the ordinary. Our primary call in this time is to be faithful to the word of God and to live in righteousness and justice, when the times are evil, and when we will stand out from the herd by having a standard, any standard.

I have also seen far to many Pentecostal churches implode. In one of three ways. The first is that the chief pastor runs off with his secretary or boyfriend. The second is that the church becomes in effect wiccan, considering that this ritual or that superstition can bind a sovereign God. And the third is that they move into a Churchian compromise with our society, where church is something you do on SUnday, and the rest of the time you are to be a materialistic, ambitious, driven, competitive bastard: no different from the pagan in the next cubicle.

And if we do that, we are no longer loving, and are music, our intelligence, our gifts, our wealth… become as trash.