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Citation: Neumann, Peter D. “Pentecostal Mediated Immediacy: Overcoming Experience 
of God as Ecumenical Barrier.” Paper presented at the Annual Wesley Studies Symposium, 
Tyndale University College & Seminary, March 22, 2016. 
(MPEG-3, 32:31 min.)

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Okay, folks, we welcome you all back in. These breaks seem to go by very quickly and the day is just flying by and we are down to our final two plenary sessions. I like the way the schedule reads. We will have you on the road by 04:00. We are dismissing at 355. And I think James Peddler, who was presenting last, might have put 355 to make it possible that there'd be 5 minutes less worth of questions for him. So the programmer always has the advantage, no doubt about it. So Peter Newman, who is the associate academic dean at Master's Pentecostal College and also teaches pastoral theology or Pentecostal theology here at the seminary in the MTS. Pentecostal studies program. We'll begin. And then James Peddler will follow him, of course. The assistant professor of Wesley studies here at Tyndale. So, bless.

You. Good afternoon. It is a privilege to be invited to speak and represent Pentecostalism in this symposium today. So I really appreciate this opportunity. The title of this presentation is pentecostal Mediated immediacy overcoming Experience of God as Ecumenical Barrier. So traditionally, Pentecostals have enjoyed half of the Wesleyan quadrilateral. Quadrilateral refers to something that Albert Outler identified as identified really John Wesley's theological methodology in a way of using Scripture and experience and tradition and reason. Well, Pentecostals have eagerly affirmed Scripture and experience as resources by which to know God and his will. But they've been much more suspicious of perhaps what they considered the dark side of the quad, the resources of tradition and reason. And the suspicion of tradition is in particular what concerns us in this paper since it's contributed, I believe, to a barrier in ecumenical relationships. And that is directly related to the high level of authority that Pentecostals have entrusted to experience. So in brief, Pentecostals have usually viewed experiences with the Spirit as being direct or immediate encounters with the divine and therefore in some sense revelatory. So whether an experience involves prophetic utterance, empowerment for witness or simply an intensified assurance of sins forgiven, pentecostals have appealed to such experiences as helping them know God and his will.

By doing so, they are granting experience a measure of divine authority. If an experience of God bears immediate authority, then it can sort of serve as a trump card when it comes to any type of conversation with a Christian from another tradition. So the stereotype, well, you have theologians and biblical exegesis to support you, but I have my experience of God. It's not quite that extreme. But one historian, Russell Spitler, notes an early Pentecostal adage to go something like this the man with an experience is never at the mercy of another with a doctrine. So such an approach holds the capacity to quickly bring ecumenical conversation to an awkward halt. So is there a way for Pentecostals to preserve their belief in transformative encounters with the Spirit on the one hand, and at the same time be open and willing to learn from other traditions. And I believe that a possible way forward here lies in recognizing that experiences with the Spirit are not entirely as immediate or direct as may sometimes be assumed, and so they're not straightaway authoritative. A more helpful way to understand such encounters with God is perhaps to see these as having, in the words of Dale Schlitt, a mediated immediacy.

And so I'll say more about that as we go along. But I believe this type of approach will enable Pentecostals to more easily embrace tradition as a theological resource, a tool of the Spirit, and it will help lower this barrier to ecumenical conversation. So to demonstrate this, we need to briefly review some characteristics of Pentecostal experience and how this has created some tensions with ecclesial tradition. And then I'm going to look at two Pentecostal theologians, simon Chan and Frank Makia, who serve as examples of how current Pentecostal theologians have adopted a more nuanced mediated immediacy view of the experience of God. And they've done so utilizing post liberal theologian George Lindbeck's cultural linguistic theory of doctrine. And that's allowed them basically to appropriate the theological resource of tradition and construct their respective Pentecostal theologies using or drawing from significant ecumenical input. So first of all, the immediacy of Pentecostal experience. Experience is the heartbeat of Pentecostal spirituality and worldview. And further, Pentecostals value experience in two forms of life in general and with God in particular. Experience of God is what Pentecostals are primarily known for. But it's worth noting that concerning life experience, pentecostals are empiricists and pragmatists.

As Brad Noel mentioned earlier in his presentation today. This means they would share some affinity with Wesley's experiential approach to religion, or rather he would use the word probably experimental approach to religion, which needed to be, as Wesley and scholar Timothy Crutcher describes, worked out in The Crucible of Life. Pentecostals have always been committed to popular empirical, method beliefs needed to work out in practice, doctrines needed to be proven, a doctrine needed to be proven worth its salt if they were going to adopt it. And so experiences with God should be accompanied, they thought, by some form of tangible authentication, or at least they should reap some sort of quick results. All right. So having noted this Penchant for empirical verifiability and pragmatism, I want to identify briefly some characteristics of this, what we can call a religious dimension of Pentecostal experience of the Spirit. So first of all, for Pentecostals the experience of God by the Spirit is the point of departure for their spirituality. It's not simply the talk of experience of God, but the experience of experience of God. Douglas Jacobson summarizes in short, he says Pentecostals are Spirit conscious, spirit filled and Spirit empowered christian believers in contrast to other groups or churches that emphasize either doctrine or moral practice, pentecostals stress affectivity.

It's the experience of God that matters. The felt power of the Spirit in the world, in the church and in one's own life. Pentecostals believe the doctrine and ethics are important, but the bedrock of Pentecostal faith is experiential. It is living faith in the living God, a God who can miraculously palpably intervene in the world, that defines the Pentecostal orientation of faith. I find that very helpful. And it leads into this second characteristic of Pentecostal experience, which is that Pentecostal experience of God should best be understood by the term encounter. Experience with the Spirit is a personal encounter with the God who is other. So God is imminently close for Pentecostals, but they are less apt to adopt, for example, Ergen Moltman's emphasis on God's imminent transcendence. Instead, Pentecostalism leans toward what might be called a transcendent imminence. When it comes to experience of God. Meeting the Spirit is, says Jean Daniel, plus an encounter of the other. And as such it relates to the otherness of God and yields meaning that goes beyond human experience. So, in other words, encounter with the Spirit provides revelation of something other than what is imminently found in everyday human life, and in doing so, it provides invasive transformative power.

Thirdly, encounters with God are very personal, direct or immediate, touching the individual deeply in the affections and motivating them to mission of some sort. And two particular transformative experiences for Pentecostals have been paramount the new birth and a post conversion baptism with the Holy Spirit understood to provide empowerment for witness. These types of experiences are focused moments with God, or as colleague of mine Andrew Gabriel speaks about it, he suggests these might be known as intensifications of the Spirit's general presence and activity in the world. And so such experiences are transformative. Since the affections are deeply moved and changed, experience of God is felt, and these encounters frequently propel Pentecostals into mission, particularly evangelism. Fourthly, because Pentecostals believe they are encountering God immediately or directly, and as such are open to ongoing revelation in discursive and nondiscursive forms. For example, be open to things like prophecy or dreams or visions or simply nondiscursively, you would be feeling the presence of God in some way difficult to put into words. While these experiences bear a measure of revelatory authority, it should be quickly added that any experience of God for Pentecostals needs to be qualified by Scripture.

Okay, this is very important. An experience with God for Pentecostals is not generic, it's not free floating out there somewhere. Rather, it is an experience with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, the one found in the pages of the Bible that is very, very crucial for Pentecostals. So we could say a lot more about characteristics of Pentecostal experience, but these four, I think, are sufficient for our purposes. The assumption of Pentecostals that experience of God is personal, immediate, bearing theological authority has, however, created attention when it comes to interacting with other denominations and church traditions. And so we want to look at that for a few moments. Pentecostals have typically been less than trusting when it comes to the broader Christian theological tradition and its institutions. Early Pentecostals were especially suspicious of anything that seemed to come in the way of a direct experience of their Lord, and so also suspicious of anything that would come in the way of their direct experience and interpretation of Scripture, especially the book of Acts. And so they spoke passionately and often about over reliance on theology and what one early Pentecostal said men made creeds. We don't want to be reliant on these.

Men made creeds because, in their view, the Church had created these through the centuries, and it made the Church anemic and worldly. What was needed instead was the Bible, that's all. An experience of the Spirit who was readily and immediately available for anyone who would sincerely seek the Lord. And so adding traditions, adding doctrines to God's word, was a sure way to become derailed from God's mission and to miss out on the life giving experience of the Spirit. Now, to be clear, I think that despite the rhetoric sometimes found especially in early Pentecostal literature, pentecostals were not rejecting orthodox doctrine. Although sometimes interesting, the directions that they go douglas Jacobson, I think, is helpful here. He discerns what Pentecostals were resisting was dry and brittle theology, incapable of conveying the living truth of God's love to anyone. That's really what they were reacting against. And when it came to their dismissing of creeds and such, along with doctrine, pentecostals eschewed the institutions and liturgical traditions that had arisen in Church history. Denominations were viewed as having placed a straitjacket on the Spirit. The scope of the Spirit's work was simply too grand, too marvelous, too wonderful to be contained by human made organizations.

One anonymous Pentecostal wrote in the Azuza street newspaper, the Apostolic Faith. This is probably William Seymour, who was the leader of the movement, but anonymously listed here. Here's what he says the Pentecostal movement is too large to be confined in any denomination or sect. It works outside, drawing all together in one bond of love, one Church, one body of Christ only the Spirit could create. Unity is what they believed. And so the Pentecostal suspicion of human made creeds or institutions, including ecumenical endeavors, in a formal sense, that suspicion lasted far into the 20th century. Ironically, at the same time, we can find an early Pentecostal writing, an emphasis on unity among believers. While railing against creeds and traditions and institutions, they proclaimed unity. One early Pentecostal woman named Anna Hall stated this if this movement stands for anything, it stands for unity of mind. It was raised up to answer the prayer of Jesus that they might be one. As the Father art in me and I art in thee. What's the matter with the world today? Here a little selfish sect, and there a denomination by itself. They do not love one another as God would have them.

Let us honor every bit of God there is in one another. Let us honor the Holy Ghost to teach men to get them out of their error. And so there is a sense in which Pentecostalism has always had an ecumenical impulse, although it was not usually expressed in formal, organized ecumenical endeavors. Pentecostal ecumenist Cecil Mrobic remarks pentecostals are ecumenical. We just don't know it. Now, despite this ecumenical impulse, the Pentecostal scripture and experience only approach made it easy for them to disregard other churches and to stereotype a little bit. Here they were hearing from the Spirit, others were probably not, or at least only deficiently. So some of this again was defensive rhetoric in response to having been rejected from other denominations. But their confidence and experience and the doctrines that it produced for them even resulted in intra Pentecostal friction. Pentecostals were very willing to fight over their beliefs, making it difficult to accommodate differences. Jacobson again states that early Pentecostal theological creativity led to division, and division slowly led to the institutionalization of doctrinal and denominational differences. So much so that by the 1920s many Pentecostals were no longer talking to each other.

And unfortunately, this divisiveness has continued. Another scholar, Alan Anderson, concludes that the legacy for Pentecostals is that they have been responsible for more divisions in the last 100 years than it has taken the rest of Christianity 2000 years to produce. In sum, the Pentecostal way of understanding experience of God as immediate has contributed to a distrust of tradition as a theological resource for theology and devaluation of ecumenical relationships. And this ethos has notably evolved in positive ways. However, things are looking up, and Pentecostals have more recently made concerted efforts to enter into ecumenical dialogue. A willingness to listen and learn from other traditions is becoming far more commonplace among Pentecostals, and there's a number of reasons for this. But the one that I'm interested in here today is a shift in the understanding of experience of God among some Pentecostal theologians. So the experience of God as mediated the past two decades or so, there's been development in the way some Pentecostal theologians are understanding the experience of God. The story goes something like this. First, in an effort to perhaps gain affinity with their evangelical brethren, some Pentecostals began to, let's say, put a little bit of a damper on their emphasis on experience and began to qualify the importance of experience of God by emphasizing that it should be only used to confirm and not so much inform biblical interpretation.

But this approach soon became unsatisfactory to many Pentecostal theologians, who advocated that experience of God should be allowed to inform theology in a more explicit way. And by the mid 1990s, a growing optimism concerning the place of experience of the Spirit for explicitly informing theology was notable among Pentecostal theologians. At the same time, however, Pentecostals were mindful that not just any experience could be considered authentically of God or of the Bible. And this began to be especially the case among Pentecostal theologians who were growing in their awareness that any experience, when one attempts to understand or articulate it, is already in some ways interpreted experience. And so they're beginning to qualify how experience works. The experience is influenced by the social context in which the experience is received, even if that experience is with God. And so culture, language and the theological tradition, for example, in which one exists, will always influence the interpretation of one's experience of God. In other words, Pentecostal experience of God happens within a tacit confessional framework or an ecclesial tradition. So the ecclesial subcultural linguistic and theological context serves to mediate in some ways the experience of God. And this understanding of God begins to nuance the way some Pentecostal theologians are thinking about the experience of God.

Spiritual experience is expected. Spiritual experience is important. Pentecostals cannot give that up. There is an encounter with the other who is God. But the theological understanding of such experience is recognized as being an interpreted understanding. And this view acknowledges that being immersed in the Pentecostal tradition, even that perhaps one grew up in, that affects one experience, one's experience of the Spirit. And so any theological conclusions derived from Pentecostal experience of God must be understood to be provisional, not necessarily the final word on the matter. In other words, it's not so simple to just say, well, I heard from God and that's the final word. Rather, that's not quite how experience of God works for human beings. So if an ecclesial context and tradition has informed Pentecostals in their experience, in other words, if they've grown up in one environment and that has affected the way they understand their experience of God, that means that the Holy Spirit has been working in and through the structures and teaching of their tradition. Which means there's a mediated sense even as they're directly encountering God. It's being interpreted through the framework that they've received. Now, if that's true for Pentecostal tradition, and even helping Pentecostals recognize they have a tradition is part of this, then it perhaps means that the Spirit has been involved in other ecclesial traditions.

Maybe institutions and doctrines are ways that the Spirit has used to help guide the Church, and perhaps we can talk to these folks and gain more understanding of this God who we are encountering. And so the barrier to ecumenical conversation begins to be lowered. Helping a number of Pentecostal theologians move in this direction has been George Lindbeck with his post liberal cultural linguistic theory of doctrine. Too big to really talk about here. But let me try to summarize in one sentence. In Lindbeck's theory, the doctrine of a given ecclesial community serves as what he calls second order discourse, a second order discourse, and therefore is true insofar as it bears faithful witness to the community's first order practice of worship. So when we sing or we preach, that is really we're exercising our belief in practice. When we do doctrine, we're talking about our practice. And so our doctrine should match up to what we're practicing. In any case, what it does is it helps Pentecostals realize that when they attempt to talk about their experience, what they're doing is trying to put into words what they do and make sense of their tradition and those types of things.

So that's probably poorly explained, but I have a book you can read more about that. Okay? Joel Schumann, for example, utilizing Lindbeck, argues that Pentecostalism needs to be viewed as a subcultural linguistic community, and in this context, the personal experience and doctrine of Spirit baptism, so important for Pentecostals, needs to be understood as intricately tied to and shaped by the beliefs and practices of the community. This approach relativizes Pentecostal doctrines to a particular ecclesial context despite being informed by an experience of God, an encounter with God. There's also been a little bit, I should need to mention this some pushback or qualification of cultural linguistic theory among Pentecostal theologians because what they want to make sure to do is preserve the possibility that an encounter with God could disrupt the subcultural linguistic community, bringing new revelation and transforming theological understanding and practice. Cultural linguistic theory, in other words, should not be allowed to overdetermine or put it in other words, should not be allowed to restrict or box in experience of God too much. Paul Lewis, for example, believes Lindbeck's theory holds potential to reduce religious experience and theology to anthropology without the divine ability of immediately impacting the individual apart from the cultural linguistic group.

The direct interaction of God with the world, he says, is a basic tenet of Pentecostal belief. And so while cultural linguistic approach has value in that it can describe the provisional nature of experience of God, he says, such an approach should be seen as normal without being normative. And so with that qualification, in the time remaining, I want to highlight how this mediated understanding of experience of God is allowing some Pentecostal theologians to engage in intentional and very significant ecumenical conversation because they believe that experience with the Spirit is in some way mediated through the broader church tradition. Pentecostal Humanism and Mediated Experience pentecostal theologians Simon Chan and Frank Makia both draw on Lindbeck's cultural linguistic theory to nuance their view of experience of the Spirit and fit into what I consider a mediated view of experience of the Spirit. Both intentionally utilize other Christian traditions in constructing their Pentecostal theologies, hoping to learn from and contribute to the broader Christian spiritual and theological tradition. Simon Chan explicitly draws on Lindbeck in his work on Christian spirituality and ecclesiology. One of Simon Chan's major projects is to convince evangelicals of the need to recover and integrate what he calls the Pentecostal reality into their spirituality.

So you can see that in his book, for example, Spiritual theology. But here what I want to do is focus more narrowly on what Chan believes will help Pentecostals preserve their belief in Spirit Baptism as an experience subsequent to conversion, accompanied by speaking in tongues. So first of all, he says that Pentecostals need to recognize that in early articulations of their doctrine of Spirit baptism and speaking in tongues, these were developed within the framework of a subcultural linguistic community. But culture has moved on, and even Pentecostal practice in some ways has evolved or devolved depending on who's looking at it, with less occurrence of and emphasis on the practice of tongue, speech and other types of things. And Chance point is, I think Pentecostal doctrinal articulations just did not keep up with the practice of what was going on in the Pentecostal community. So the doctrines no longer represented what's actually happening in their midst. And so Pentecostals have become far less effective in communicating and traditioning Pentecostal beliefs and values. Chan believes that Pentecostals need to recognize that doctrines need rearticulation. And further, Pentecostals can overcome some theological weaknesses by abandoning an ahistorical view of the work of the Spirit.

I think Brad Noel mentioned this earlier today. He just sort of have Pentecostals and early Pentecostals just saying, okay, Book of Acts and then 1900 years of disaster, and then the Pentecostals came along, just sort of ignoring the Spirit's work through history. So Chan wants to move away from that. He also wants to move away from the Pentecostal Penchant to reduce spiritual experiences to merely a private matter. Instead, they should recognize that they are in fact part of the larger Christian tradition being led by the Spirit. Appreciating the Spirit's operation in the broader Christian theological and spiritual tradition will allow Pentecostals to, quote, draw on its resources to interpret, revise and rearticulate their doctrines of Spirit baptism and initial evidence in a way that will allow these experiences to be passed on in a meaningful way. But along with this, Chan argues that Pentecostals need to adopt a more robust ecclesiology because he believes that ecumenical resources are actually necessary in order to accomplish moving Pentecostals toward a higher view of the Church. You'd be very excited to be in this room here today, in this chapel, Chan intentionally integrates theological insights from the Western and Eastern Christian traditions.

He demonstrates, for example, that parallels exist between Pentecostal experience of Spirit baptism and experiences with Roman Catholic mystical tradition, although we probably need to qualify that mystical aspect. Not entirely convinced that Pentecostals are mystics in that sense, he also utilizes Eastern Orthodox theologian Sergius Bolgakov in developing his theology of the Church as the locus of the Spirit, which is the divine humanity. That's what the Church is to him. And so on this basis, he argues that the ongoing development of Christian doctrine through the centuries is in fact an outcome of the Spirit's focused activity in the Church's spiritual and theological traditions. The point is that Chan is able to reap the benefits of ecumenical conversation, in part due to his reliance on lindbeck and a nuanced view of the experience of God, which includes the Spirit's mediation through the broader Christian tradition. Lastly, Frank Makia he also exhibits a nuanced mediated understanding of experience of the Spirit that draws on Lindbeck's cultural linguistic theory. He is, however, more cautious of Lindbeck than Chan, wanting to ensure the preservation of the transformative potential of a divine encounter right. He doesn't want the Spirit to be boxed in.

So on the one hand affirming Lindbeck. He wants Pentecostals to recognize that they exist in a particular theological symbol system, a cultural linguistic setting. He states it's difficult to conceive of a religious experience apart from a symbolic framework that includes deeply and corporately held doctrinal concepts which function not only to express but also cradle such experiences. Recognizing the mediated nature of experience of God in this symbol system can help Pentecostal recognize their doctrinal confessions as provisional and open to possible revision. But on the other hand, Makia is not convinced that cultural linguistic interpretation can fully account for the Pentecostal understanding of experience of the Spirit. He describes such experiences with the Spirit, and he describes his own encounters with the Spirit as being overwhelming. He says it's a time in which the individual's consciousness is wholly taken up with God so that one feels especially inspired to give of oneself to others in whatever gifting God has created within. So this cultural linguistic theory, it needs to be qualified. He asserts. Our religious experience is to be experience of God and not most fundamentally, of our interpretive frameworks. Makia's mediated view of experience of the Spirit preserves the interruptive direct nature of encounter with God while also allowing him to value the Spirit's work in other traditions.

Makia's most significant book arguably is Baptized in the Spirit a Global Pentecostal Theology, and in it he argues that true Pentecostal experience of God must be able to account for and apply to global Christian experience. He states this the ecumenical challenge for Pentecostals, therefore, will be to develop their central distinctive Spirit baptism in a way that cherishes what is most important to their understanding of Christian life and the Church while contributing to a broader ecumenical pneumatology. Such a task cannot be confined to North American Pentecostal voices. The need is for Pentecostals globally to reflect on the ecumenical challenge behind their understandings of Spirit baptism as focused on a vocational or charismatic empowerment, as well as on how that notion relates to the greater breadth of the Spirit's work in the Scriptures and among other world Christian communities. William Oliveirio highlights how Makia's constructive theology of Spirit baptism intentionally takes into account the emphasis of various traditions, including the reform tradition's emphasis on regeneration, the Catholic and other sacramental traditions understanding of it as a sacramental initiation, and the classical Pentecostal tradition's understanding of it as empowerment for witness. Throughout his work, Makia draws on a number of theologians outside of his own tradition, including Karl Bart, Paul Tillek, Carl RONNER, especially Jurgen Moltman.

And part of what allows Makia to engage in ecumenical conversation is his more nuanced view of experience of the Spirit as mediated through the broader Christian tradition. To conclude so while Pentecostals are most comfortable with a half of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral scripture and experience as the ways by which the Spirit speaks, the other two resources of the Quadrilateral tradition and reason also need attention if Pentecostalism is going to continue to mature in its theology. And what I've attempted to do in this presentation is just show that there's growing openness within Pentecostal theology to view at least one other quarter of the Quad tradition as a potential resource through which the Spirit speaks. And this is enabled by adopting a more nuanced idea of the experience of God as mediated immediacy. It's assisting theologians like Makia, like Chan, to remain true to their Pentecostal heritage on the one hand while also reaping the fruit of ecumenical conversation. And this fruit of conversation should encourage other Pentecostals to appreciate that the Spirit is and has always been present, active and experienced in other Christian traditions. Thank you.


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