Well, it is wonderful to be a part of this
great event, Wesleyans and Pentecostals together.
It's nice to know that we've gotten you
out of the basement and brought you to church.
Our histories are so entwined.
It just seemed natural that what is occasionally done in North America amongst
the Wesleyan and Pentecostal learned societies, we might be able to do here.
Obviously, whenever anybody blames me in
being too experiential in my theology, I just blame it on the Wesleyans.
So it is good that we are here together to hash this out and find common cause.
So great to be with you today.
If there is any one
individual who has done more for Pentecostals to understand theological
roots, I know of no one other than Donald Dayton.
So we are thrilled in a moment to present to him to you as our keynote speaker.
May this day just be a wonderful day.
Thank you for including us in laying the
structure and appreciate it very much, James.
And although Pentecostals seem to be very glad to take credit for whatever God is
doing anywhere in the world, in this case, it's all the work of the Wesleyan
Committee and James Peddler that has pulled this session off.
So I thank you, particularly James. Thank you.
So I want us to move fairly quickly into Dr.
Dayton's keynote address so that he has time to present.
You should have received a schedule,
however, when you came in, so please take a look at that.
Start thinking about what sessions you want to go to later in the day.
On the back of the schedule is a map
of this level of our campus, and the rooms that we're going to be using are circled.
So you can see there where you need to go.
When we go for lunch, we're going to go
down the hall to the right and downstairs one level.
Or there's also an elevator at the end of that hall, and that will take you down.
And there's lunch is provided in your
registration, and there'll be a buffet there, and you can sit wherever you like.
If you're struggling over which presentation to attend, and you really
would like to be in two places at once, we are going to attempt to make audio
recordings of all of the papers and then post them online.
So if you really want to hear Brad Noel,
but you're interested in what John Blenck has to say, you can have it both ways.
Our bookstore is also just down that hallway to the right.
When you leave this room, please visit it at some point today.
They have some copies of Dr.
Dayton's books and other Wesley books that they've gathered together, and Pentecostal
books that you might be interested in, and they have a sale table.
I also just want to mention briefly, we
have an author here today, Grant Gordon, who has written a book on it's.
Whitfield, right? Yes.
If you want to wave grant and he's got
copies of his book here, please seek him out and find out about that book.
It has some very fine endorsements.
So, as Van has already said, we're very
pleased to have Donald Dayton here with us today.
When we sat down and said we want to do a
Wesleyan Pentecostal event and we started to think, who should we invite?
He was at the very top of the list.
So we were so pleased that our first choice said yes and agreed to come here.
I'll just read you a little bit about a tribute that was written about Dr.
Dayton a few years ago when he was given
the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Wesleyan Theological Society.
And it says this scholars generally become
great through their various accomplishments and publications.
However, few of them dramatically change the way we think.
Such scholars provide contribute to a
paradigm shift, so to speak, in how we understand the world in which we live.
Donald Dayton is a scholar who has
dramatically changed the ways we view Christianity, theology, and ethics, and
not just in the United States, but around the world.
In addition, his influence extends beyond accomplishments within the scholarly
purview of the Wesleyan Theological Society.
He has impacted both church and academy,
mainline and evangelical, Wesleyan and Pentecostal.
Would you please welcome Donald Dayton as he comes to speak to us?
Very honored and pleased to get the invitation to be here with you.
Over the years, this area is very familiar to me.
I used to come up annually for the Carl Bart Society meetings on whose board I
serve and still continue to serve for a total, I think now of 40 years.
God forbid I should say that in the middle of the night.
I decided to completely reorganize what I was going to say today, making it more
autobiographical and less technical, thinking more about the
diversity of persons attending this symposium.
Perhaps I should also mention that I took a slightly early retirement.
So I've been retired for twelve years, and
I'm not sure that I have kept up well with the literature of both these movements.
But I hope that you will attribute any
incoherences to this last minute reorganization and leave me free of blame.
First of all, I want to remind you
of what an extraordinary event a meeting like this is.
And to illustrate that, I'm going to do some autobiographical reflections.
I grew up in the Wesleyan Church, the
Wesleyan Methodist branch, which were the antislavery folks pushed out of the
Methodist Church in the States over the slavery question.
We were the antislavery party, and the majority church thought we were getting in
the way of their advancement and assimilation into American society.
In the Wesleyan Church,
speaking in tongues when I was growing up meant instant excommunication.
My father, who was New Testament scholar
primarily at Asbury Seminary but also elsewhere, wrote articles and books
against the holy against the Pentecostal tradition, explaining that there was no
such gift of tongues in the New Testament as it is commonly perceived.
I remember with Howard Snyder, who, as most of you know, I'm sure, was here
for several years recently in the early seventy s, I attended with him a meeting
of Wesleyan Holiness participants in the Charismatic Renewal at that time.
This was a very small group,
and I have never been in a meeting with such psychologically devastated, brow
beaten leaders who had been driven out of the Nazarene Church, the Wesleyan Church,
the Free Methodist Church for their having moved into the Charismatic Renewal.
Fortunately, a lot of this did not take well with me,
not by intention, but just by I was sort of reacted against the Holiness tradition
and had to find my way out and then back in Christian faith.
And so, as I say, I didn't carry in my bones all of this and my father's
teaching, and I started my theological studies at Yale Divinity School in 1964,
just after the event of the Charismatic Renewal at Yale Divinity School.
In the university group.
You can read about that in almost any
history of the early Charismatic Renewal, and it was quite an explosive event.
It split the university into three groups.
It spun off several in, a kind of post charismatic burnout who left the faith,
and then it split the university into two groups.
One wing who insisted on the charismatic gifts.
They became a cause celeb in Yale College and became known as the God Squad and
created a lot of havoc in the ministries on Yale campus and so on.
The other party with which I had the most affinity was a more moderate group which
allowed charismatic gifts but did not require them.
I ended up in the university with those
groups and ended up actually rooming with a couple of the guys who had
been a part of that renewal, an Episcopalian and a Presbyterian.
And it was that experience that raised for me the question of the status of the
Pentecostal tradition more widely
evolved over a couple of decades in my understanding of all this.
And I think I could tell you
a number of interesting stories, but I don't really have time, although I prefer
often to tell stories, to make theological points.
When the in mid 60s,
both the Society for Pentecostal Studies and the Wesleyan Theological Society, the
constituency as it developed of those two groups left in effect the Evangelical
Theological Society and set out on their own.
But they took with them the evangelical
articulations of the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture, and both the SPS
and the Wts in early years were advocates of that.
This created a lot of difficulty for the new generation who were not able to affirm
those articulations, and so many of us had to wait a few years until both societies
became convinced that they should abandon that formulation and declare somewhat
independence from the evangelical traditions.
So I was finally able to join about 1970,
and I went to an early meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society, met in
Oklahoma City, and one week later the SPS was to have its first meeting outside the
auspices of the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America in Oklahoma City as well.
And by this time I had begun some of my study of Pentecostalism.
And I rather brashly made a motion in that meeting that the
Wesleyan Theological Society send greetings to this new fledgling society
which had followed them out of the Evangelical Theological Society and was
modeling a society after the Wts as their model.
And so I said, it would be nice if we would send fraternal or sororal greetings
to the Society for Pentecostal Studies and encourage them in their work.
As soon as I made the motion, deathly silence fell over the Wts.
Nothing happened for several minutes.
Finally, someone seconded the motion,
making clear that they did not support it, but so that it could be discussed.
It was discussed.
It was voted down.
I was the only one that voted for it.
And then immediately there was a motion that we should expunge from the minute any
hint that we had ever contemplated such an act.
This was the level of antipathy between the SPS and the Wts.
The Westland Theological Society and Society for Pentecostal Studies.
Soon after that, in 72,
I began my doctoral studies at the University of Chicago.
And following, as I've indicated, my interest in Carl Bart, I intended to write
a dissertation on Carl Bart's doctrine of sanctification.
In the process of taking what they called
a contextual minor at the University of Chicago, I studied Early Oberlin College,
which resulted in a book which has just been reissued in a second
edition 40 years now after its original publication.
And I discovered in exploring Early Oberlin College that I had accidentally
fallen into keys to understand the emergence of Pentecostalism.
I didn't know what to do.
I consulted with the chair of my
department, the Greek Catholic theologian David Tracy, and he said, Don.
He said, Everybody and their uncle in Europe is writing a dissertation on Bart,
and it's in the DNA of their bones to understand it.
You'd be much better off and make a much greater contribution to scholarship.
He says, There may be half a dozen people who have any idea what you're talking
about about this mid 19th century development, and you should pursue that.
Well, this caused a great deal of
reorientation in my self image, but I decided to pursue that.
And the result of that was the book theological Roots of Pentecostalism.
Took me about 15 years to write that book.
I built up a personal collection
of which only a part but 10,000 volumes were collected.
For the writing of that dissertation,
it meant that I had to not have a bibliography when the book was published,
because it would have taken up the whole book.
So if you take a look at it, you'll see that it's a bibliographic essay.
I'm going to go on a little bit more with
this story just to explain how we came to the point of
having, as we do now, joint SPS W
Theological Society meetings in the 1980s.
I began because of my interest in SPS,
in the Pentecostal tradition, to attend SPS,
and it was a somewhat difficult position because I am not a Pentecostal.
I have never had charismatic experience so on.
A lot of people assume I'm a Pentecostal because of my book and my advocacy.
I've been interviewed as a Pentecostal,
and they discover in the middle of the interview that I'm not.
One issue of Modern Reformation was
completely rewritten because they were fascinated with the interview.
So they changed the theme of the meeting and had it on has the reform tradition,
hijacked evangelicalism and left out the Pentecostal and Holiness traditions.
But I could not be a member because I was not a clear Pentecostal.
They struggled with that for a long time,
and I was very moved in the mid 80s when they changed the Constitution so that I
could be a full member and then be eligible for election to office.
And I was absolutely stunned when they proposed me as a President Elect
of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, the first, and I think still the only non
Pentecostal, non charismatic to be president of that society.
I knew immediately, I was sure that if I accepted that invitation, that would be
the end of my career in the Wesleyan Theological Society.
Not that I have calculated those kinds of career paths on that kind of basis, but I
was so moved to be invited that I said yes.
And
I was absolutely stunned when Bill foffle, the librarian at Asbury Seminary,
manipulated behind the scenes to invite the SPS to meet at Asbury Seminary
and arranged behind the scenes for me to be elected President Elect of the Society
for Pentecostal I mean, of the Wesleyan Theological Society.
I could not have believed in a million years that this could ever have happened.
And I've sometimes suggested, jokingly,
that my tombstone should read that for one week because of the schedule.
I was president of both the Wts and the SPS only a dozen years after my ill fated
motion at the Wesleyan Theological Society in Oklahoma City.
And at that meeting we began a I had
the Saturday afternoon session of the Wesleyan Theological Society devoted to
the relationship between the Holiness and the Pentecostal traditions.
Howard Snyder gave a presentation out of
his book The Divided Flame, arguing that the two emphasis of the two traditions
were complementary and need to be brought into dialogue.
And one of my favorite papers of all time
was given by Susie Stanley, who used the biography of Alma White, the founder of
the Pentecostal Union, Pillar of Fire movement.
Her husband became a Pentecostal, and they separated over that question.
He went to England.
She took a boat over to England to try to
reconcile and wrote a book of model and poetry entitled My Heart and My Husband.
And the story of their marriage is, in effect, the story of the alienation of the
two movements and the difficulty that they've had relating to each other.
Anyway, we began to push the questions of
whether we could meet together, and that was the beginning of that.
A few years later, Cheryl Bridges Johns and Susie Stanley, both of whom had been
president of their respective societies, met at a meeting, interestingly enough, of
the Faith and Order Commissioner of the World Council of Churches in Santiago de
Compostela in Spain, and they decided to propose actual joint meetings.
And soon thereafter that came into eventuality,
so that now the two societies meet jointly as like this meeting every five years.
And two years from now, we will meet again in Cleveland, Tennessee, at the Church of
God headquarters, where we held our first joint meeting a couple of decades ago.
Now, let me talk just a little bit
about the book theological roots.
To expound the relationship theologically between the two traditions.
As I've indicated, this book took about 15 years of research.
It it traces a development from the time of Wesley
and his struggles with his designated successor, John Fletcher, over certain
certain theological questions, particularly about whether Pentecost
should be described as an event of entire sanctification in the Wesleyan tradition.
Wesley rejected that notion.
Fletcher advocated it.
These two streams circulated and caused trouble for about a century.
And finally, the Fletcherian articulation
won out starting in mid 19th century to the end of the century, when
Pentecostalism emerged, in effect, out of that struggle.
Let me risk
my current articulation of what was going on at that .1 of the problems with the
sort of Fletcherian articulation, the Pentecostal articulation of the Methodist
tradition was that Wesley's theology was derived
primarily from the Johanne literature, a couple of verses in Hebrews and so on.
But it was primarily a Johanne vision.
The late 19th century
Holiness Movement began to preach Wesleyan themes out of the Book of Acts.
The problem was it didn't work.
Acts is not particularly congenial to the Wesleyan themes.
It comes as a shock to most people, for example, that the word love and any of its
cognitive never appears in the Book of Acts.
There is one text in chapter 15 purifying their Hearts by Faith, which has a
somewhat Wesleyan is amenable to the Wesleyan interpretation.
So I view what happened then as distinctly unstable.
It couldn't go on like that.
And so what happened was that the
Pentecostals or the wing that would become Pentecostalism began to preach out of the
Book of Acts with the themes that were in the Book of Acts.
And the Pentecostalism then broke out about 1900.
And as I say, did a much more successful
job of the interpretation of the Book of Acts.
And I'm sure you know the story from then.
During the next century, Pentecostalism
went from nothing to becoming the second largest tradition in the Christian fold.
Most estimates run
half a billion adherence to Catholicism's,
1 billion adherence the Westlands.
A lot of the readers of my book assumed
that I was trying to break down the defenses of the holiness movement to
Pentecostalism, and I was advocating moving toward Pentecostalism.
If anything, I was advocating that the holiness movement,
with its sort of failure to find an articulate interpretation of the Book of
Acts, ought to move back to more Westland motif.
Well, the Wesleyan tradition, holiness tradition
in particular, was in effect shunted to a sidetrack
by this experience in conflict with Pentecostalism and
lost a lot of its dynamic in its pyrophobia or pentecostal phobia, which it
withdrew from the themes of pentecostalism
so that the Holiness movement as such was
relegated to the 9th place in the Christian tradition.
Demographically, it's number nine, whereas
Pentecostalism has become demographically number two.
Now,
I expected theological risks of Pentecostalism to be controversial,
but I had no idea how vehement the response would be.
This was particularly true in the holiness movement.
People hated my book, and I will use as an illustration the Nazarene's Church of the
Nazarene and Timothy Smith, its great historian.
The problem was
that three places in the articles of religion of the Nazarene Church, it
indicates that entire sanctification comes by the baptism of the Spirit.
And part of the results of my dissertation
work and book was that Wesley rejected this position.
And once Timothy Smith made me mad.
So I said in public that he was closer to
Pentecostalism than he was to Wesley in his theology of late 19th century, more
Pentecostalized articulation of the Wesleyan tradition.
This was like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
And he, in effect, spent the rest of his life trying to refute me.
I think he did not succeed,
but he launched a vicious campaign that lasted maybe two decades.
He assumed, as I said, that I was trying to destroy the holiness movement by
breaking down the barriers to Pentecostalism.
And he called secret meetings of the
Christian Holiness Association leadership about how they could put a stop to me in
my efforts to destroy the holiness movement.
I understand
that at the Nazarene Theological Seminary, my book was forbidden to be discussed
for at least three years for fear it would split the Church of the Nazarene into
those that accepted my analysis and those who tried to buy into the Timothy Smith
articulation of the development of the kind of
Pentecostal articulation of Wesleyan theology.
And for a decade, Timothy Smith would propose one or maybe two papers to the Wts
program, all designed to refute my theological articulation.
I'm told that he even bought a cottage in the Cotswold in england to be near Oxford.
So every summer he could do research to prove that the Pentecostal and Nazarene
articulation was appropriate reading of Wesley.
And as I say, he published several books going after me.
I said, by my judgment at least, he failed in that I recently was at
Asbury, and the head of the Nazarene College in Australia indicated that.
Now, most Nazarenes agreed with me, but it was a pitch battle for a couple of decades
over these questions, because, in a sense, the Nazarene tradition in effect had
articulated itself over against Pentecostalism.
And it was originally the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene.
But very early on, Pentecostal was dropped from the name of the church.
The Pentecostal response was also very,
very negative, somewhat to my surprise.
And here I'm going to illustrate this with some incidents from the Assemblies of God.
And I have in mind in particular the work of Edith Bloomhoffer, who is more or less
the semi official or maybe even official historian of the Assemblies of God.
As I was writing my dissertation, I used
to send her chapters, and she never responded in like manner.
And when she finished her dissertation,
she instructed Harvard not to release it to anybody.
And I had to send a spy into the
Central Bible College to make a photocopy of the copy she had deposited there and
smuggle it out and send it to me so that I could understand what she was doing.
Now, these are harsh words, but I think in many ways her dissertation is dishonest.
She was writing on the Reformed roots of Pentecostalism.
She uses figures like AB Simpson, who was
a Canadian Presbyterian originally, and DL.
Moody to illustrate this. Well, DL.
Moody was a Methodist originally, a Methodist layman, and he
was approached by two Free Methodist ladies to say that your preaching lacks
power, and we would like to pray for you with power.
And then he had this famous experience in
Wall Street which launched him into an international career.
Now, Edith never mentions that experience, the role with the Free Methodist ladies.
She traces back in all these half dozen figures to where if she went another two
or three years, you would see the holiness influence.
But she stops before you get to that.
So, like AB Simpson, she traces back as Canadian Presbyterian, but never mentions
the Holiness Evangelist, which drew him in to the Holiness movement.
I think it's also true
that she never really grasped the radicality of my argument.
I'm not arguing that the Wesleyan Holiness
movement was one of the influences in bringing about Pentecostalism.
I'm arguing that it was the determined
influence, and that this is to be seen in a chapter, the
chapter on healing, which most people seem to ignore.
But I consider it the capstone of my
argument where I demonstrate that the rise of the healing movement
I demonstrate this both historically and theologically, historically,
that each figure in the early healing movement went through a series of crises
conversion, sanctification and then raised the question about healing.
And that I argue that theologically
the development was it was a radicalization of holiness.
Soteriology that if I can be saved in a moment from the guilt of sin and if I can
be saved in the moment from the power of sin and entire sanctification, can I be
saved from the effects of sin in a moment in an experience of divine healing?
As I say, every one of those figures shows
that theological pilgrimage so that the healing movement was
originally not so much a gift of the Spirit as it was so theological.
Healing was part of the salvation that God provided for his people.
And it contradicts a lot of the
stereotypes of both Pentecostals and the holiness movement by
asserting that their vision of salvation includes the body and this world.
And it's not just a vision of salvation in heaven or beyond this world.
I think this should be the center of
theologizing in the Pentecostal and holiness traditions.
Also in the Assemblies of God tradition
they claim to be followers of William Durham's finished work theology that
developed in Chicago after about a decade of Pentecostalism.
The problem with that is, if you read the
Articles of Religion or Fundamental Truths of the Assemblies of God until mid 20th
century, their article on sanctification was called Entire Sanctification.
This blows the mind of most Assemblies of God types.
And as I understand it, what was going on
was that the people in the Assemblies of God believed an entire sanctification.
They just disagreed about how you got there.
Some taught a second blessing in the Wesleyan tradition.
Some taught that you got it in conversion.
Now, the Articles of Religion of the assembly
of God have been rewritten several times to make it more appropriate approximate to
a sort of baptistic or evangelical doctrine of sanctification.
Whereas actually I tend to follow a doctoral dissertation of Larry Farkis done
at Southern Baptist Seminary in which he argued.
He calls Durham's position zinzendorphian, that you get everything at conversion,
but that you get entire sanctification at conversion.
I think 95% or more of the Assemblies of
God people who claim to be Durhamites don't understand Durham and therefore they
misunderstand their relationship to the holiness movement.
I've puzzled a long time as to why this duramite stream of the Pentecostal
tradition dislikes the holiness movement so much.
And as I reflect on this antipathy,
I think it has two sources the Assemblies of God in the United States.
And I'm going to use strong language lust to be evangelicals and lust
to escape the disapprobrium that they experience widely.
As for being Pentecostals by retooling
themselves as evangelicals, they also, on the other side, tend to
think of holiness movement almost entirely in terms of behavioral patterns.
So that holiness means no wedding rings,
no makeup, long skirts, black stockings, et cetera.
And I'll be blunt.
I think in the case of Edith, who may have spent her life struggling to get out from
underneath these inhibiting holiness codes for her behavior has come to hate
the holiness movement so much over those behavioral standards that she cannot abide
the thought that holiness movement is the major source of the pentecostal movement.
But anyway,
I want to finally make just a few comments about what I consider to be misreadings of
both the holiness and the Pentecostal tradition.
I think one common cliche almost is that they are both
numerological movements emphasizing the Holy Spirit.
I think this vastly overstates that question.
I think they are both in profound ways, christological in their orientation
took me a long time to work my way out from under the inherited understandings of
Wesley's theology as essentially numerological.
And they began when I began to notice things like
in the Plain account, wesley says that an entire sanctification
is having the mind of Christ in you and walking in the way that Jesus walked.
He says that over and over and over again.
And the language of an encounter with the
Spirit is, I think, almost totally foreign to Wesley's theology.
And we need to do our work and to explore
the theme of this conference with those kind of questions in mind.
When Wesley began to articulate the meaning of entire centurion, he did it in
his preferred expression of perfect love, and he moved immediately to the twofold
commandment of Jesus the love of God and the love of neighbor to express his
understanding of the nature of the height of Christian experience.
But I think the case can be made similarly for Pentecostalism.
I had no intention of arguing this, but my
friends in Cleveland, Tennessee, the Church of God, Cleveland, say often in my
book that I have demonstrated the Christocentric nature of Pentecostalism.
I say I had no intention to argue that, but it was a product of my using Amy
Semple Mcpherson's Foursquare gospel jesus is Savior, Baptizer, Healer, and Coming
King as the center of my analysis of the theology of Pentecostalism.
The point is that it is always Jesus as
the actor enabled by the Holy Spirit, not the Holy Spirit as the actor.
And I think those themes are often suppressed.
And I'll never forget an experience that I had in an early society of Pentecostal
studies meeting in Cleveland, Tennessee, where I was sitting in the college chapel
listening to the Pentecostal choir sing profoundly moving experience.
And suddenly listening to that, I said,
you know, this is a Jesus piety, not a Holy Spirit piety.
But I think we need to think profoundly
about those questions, because I think that leads to a lot of confusion if one
doesn't qualify that numerological, I have two more statements, and then I'm done.
Often
there is a tendency to suggest that both Pentecostalism and
the Wesleyan tradition stand in the tradition of mysticism.
I was astounded as I got.
Into Wesley to discover that Wesley did not like mysticism at all.
And this is clear in his interaction with Luther, in that he
was friendly to Luther after the Aldersgate experience, which was based on
a reading of the Luther's preface in the Book of Romans.
When he actually got around to reading Luther, he was horrified.
He read the commentary on Galatians, he
called it blasphemous, et cetera, et cetera.
And he says that the commentary
on Galatians is tinged with mysticism throughout, obviously a negative judgment.
Now, I think he doesn't say exactly what he had in mind.
I think he meant that a danger of mysticism.
Every enemy that he had, he called Antonomian
Calvinists were Antonomian against the law because of one saved, always saved.
Lutherans were Antonomian because they
separated law and gospel and faith and works and so on.
Mysticism was Antonomian because it seemed to advocate it was possible to have union
with God apart from law, fulfillment of the law, ethics and so on.
So I think one should be somewhat nervous
about that particular kind of articulation.
And I think Wesley's response to
experience was much more restrained and much more much different.
So I've come to doubt whether both Pentecostalism and the Wesleyan tradition
should be interpreted in terms of traditions of experience.
I told James Peddler when he asked me to
be here, I said, I'm not sure I'm the best keynote speaker for the way you've set up
the questions in the theme of the conference.
And I certainly reject the more extreme expressions of this.
I'm a little friendlier to the more moderate, but I'm thinking of Harvey Cox,
who likes to think of Pentecostalism as a primal religious experience.
And in the case of interpretation of Korean Pentecostalism, which is so
important for him, he tips toward the dependence of Korean Pentecostalism on
shamanism and other things out of this kind of experiential interpretation.
More moderate and much more sympathetic.
I'm much more sympathetic to Walter Hollandeger's articulation of.
He was concerned primarily out of his ten years or so working in the World Council
of Churches with the condescension of the established churches
to Pentecostalism, viewing it as an a theological experiential movement.
And he was trying to defend Pentecostalism in that kind of context by
affirming different styles of theologizing and so on.
I had occasion to discuss with him on several times the question of the status
of theology in the articulation of Pentecostalism, and he did not like my
dissertation, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism.
He had to admit that my four themes occurred regularly in Pentecostalism, but
he did not want to say that they constituted theology.
As I say, I'm sympathetic to Holland Vega's concern to find a way to articulate
the significance of Pentecostalism in the large ecumenical movement.
But I think he chose the wrong path.
And I chose instead to try to articulate an implicit theology of Pentecostalism, to
argue that it was as sophisticated as other traditions.
It could be developed in academic theology
and could be defended articulately, as we see.
Sometimes it occurs to me we can't exactly compare Lutheranism after
five centuries of life in the universities to Pentecostalism born in the Azusa
Street, stable fairly, but after only a century, we have
rather exciting, profound Pentecostal theology being articulated frank Mackey,
Amos Young, and on and on down the list of figures, and profoundly so.
So I think we should continue the
trajectory of the theological interpretation of Pentecostalism and argue
that it has a reading of New Testament and Christian theology that
is as profound, as important as other readings.
I sometimes think both the Wesleyan
movement and the Pentecostal movement have a theological inferiority complex and want
to bring their traditions into dialogue with the larger Christian tradition by
appending Wesleyan or Pentecostal themes to somebody else's theology.
So you have Reformed articulations, you
have process theology articulations, you have whatever.
And I think this may be the greatest
temptation to both the Wesleyan and the Pentecostal tradition and a failure of
confidence in their own sources, in their own tradition.
So my own calling would be to pursue that
line of the interpretation of Pentecostal and holiness wesleyan theologies on the
basis of its own sources and as a significant tradition
with much to contribute to the larger Christian tradition.
So thank you very much.