On Tradition, Local Traditions, And Discernment

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PNEUMA 36 (2014) 1–3

On Tradition, Local Traditions, and Discernment

Dale M. Coulter

“Why should everything that does not reach the high standard of English and American civilization be taken as coming from the devil?” Such was the question Pandita Ramabi posed to A.T. Pierson after Pierson accused the Mukti Mission revival of allowing “hysterical women” to commit such strange acts as speaking in tongues.1 As the daughter of a Brahmin priest who knew Sanskrit and was educated at Cheltenham Ladies College in England, Ramabi was a formidable thinker who understood the cultural and imperial dynamics at work in such verdicts. Ramabi’s question placed in stark relief an issue that has been central to Christianity from its inception: the relationship between a common tradition and local traditions. By raising the issue of culture, Ramabi challenged Pierson’s implicit claim to represent Christian Tradition.

From its inception Christianity had to deal with spreading a message through a number of diverse cultural contexts. As many historians have noted, Christianity’s early growth occurred primarily through itinerant charismatics who practiced some form of ascetic renunciation of family, home, and posses- sions in order to become bearers of the gospelkerygma. Early Christian textsare replete with warnings about false prophets and instructions on how to tell false prophets from true prophets. The criteria were some combination of ortho- doxy and orthopraxis with the emphasis on the latter. Hence, the Johannine insistence on confessing Christ in the flesh as the mark of discernment was coupled with theDidache’s andShepherd of Hermas’ looking to abuses of hospi- tality, quests for monetary gain, and other behavioral criteria. What these texts suggest is a tension between local communities and traveling prophets or evan- gelists, which explains in part the emergence of offices in the latter half of the first century.

An important way in which early Christians began to deal with these matters was to forge a narrative identity. When Clement composed First Clement on behalf of the Roman house churches to deal issues of schism and division

1 See Jay Riley Case, An Unpredictable Gospel: American Evangelicals and World Christianity,

1812–1920(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 241.

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in Corinth, he appealed to the “canon of our tradition” (τής παραδόσεως ήμών κανόνα). This canon was a narrative construal of Christianity through a fusion of the Old Testament story, the story of Jesus, and the instructions of the apostles. Central to this narrative was the encounter with the risen Lord through the Spirit in which a new way of life (immortality, spiritual gifts, righteousness, and so forth) was transmitted to believers. This completed the circle insofar as Clement’s implicit call for a narrative construal of doctrine informed Christian praxis and placed both in the context of encounter. A spirituality grounded upon a union that created a new identity both affirming and yet transcending local traditions was being called for.

Clement’s call for a common identity through a new narrative that held together orthodoxy, orthopraxis, and orthopathy became the rule of truth in the second century and thus gave birth to Tradition. Tradition was nothing less than a common narrative identity into which persons became caught up as they encountered Christ in the Spirit. Such an understanding of Tradition became embodied in the rule of faith articulated by such second-century fig- ures as Irenaeus of Lyons, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian of Carthage. It did not remove the need to negotiate between local forms of inculturated Chrisitanity, but it implicitly called for such forms to dialogue with the whole by calling parts of the common identity into question without fundamentally altering the basic contours of the narrative that God was in Christ reconciling the world. As Ireneaus saw it, the fundamental problem of Gnostic Christian- ity was a secret gnosis that reworked the entire narrative from the bottom up.

Indeed, one could see the dialogue between local forms of Christianity and the broader narrative of Christian identity as occurring in and through renewal. This may be one of the contributions Pentecostalism makes to the broader academy. The Spirit gives rise to movements of renewal at the local level, which then call for a greater dialogue about the nature of Christian iden- tity as a whole. Cartledge’s exploration of an “ecclesiology from below” and Ambrose and Payne’s call for a focus on gender roles both seem to exemplify the way in which renewal challenges and affirms the broader tradition. Like- wise, Korb’s exploration of Nigerian Pentecostalism’s use of warfare language in the engagement with Islamic groups and Hudson’s attempt to “listen” for the collision of cultures in Appalachian Christianity at the roots of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) underscore the need to cultivate historiographies that unearth the multifaceted nature of local Christianities. As Lamp’s analy- sis of early Pentecostalism suggests, when scholars engage the past, they can invariably discover features of the common Christian identity submerged or forgotten. What holds these articles together, then, is the opportunity for Pen-

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on tradition, local traditions, and discernment

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tecostal scholarship to explore how renewal facilitates an ongoing conversation between traditions and Tradition without sacrificing one or the other.

For Pentecostals, the quest for balance was between personal testimony, the testimony of the local community, and the broader historical narrative that defined the community. The historical narrative of restoration and the return to the apostolic faith moved alongside local narratives emerging from the outbreak of “revival fires,” and these gave rise to personal testimony. Apart from the spirituality of encounter within the pentecostal ethos, however, these narratives lost meaning. At the same time, what held these narrative layers together and formed a coherent basis upon which they could be critically engaged was the biblical narrative of creation, fall, and redemption as told in the stories of Israel and the church. Theology was conceived as a narratively construed discipline in which the individual searched for coherence between these multiple levels of “story telling” in light of the scriptural narrative. Amos Yong’s claims regarding a coherence theory of the truth “whereby the truth of any one statement follows from and depends on its relationship to and consistency with other statements and claims” thus ought to be an important feature of the pentecostal quest for balance among the narratives to which the movement lays claim and that lay claim to it.2 Such a framework points toward a renewal methodology as critical to the dialogue between Tradition and traditions.

Tradition speaks to a common Christian identity, but this identity must be narratively construed. Most likely stemming from catechesis surrounding bap- tisms, the earliest creedal formulations, such as the Apostles’ Creed, remained narrative in form. They reminded Christians of the story that bound them together as one new people, called into existence by Christ in the power of the Spirit. This narrative gave local expressions of Christianity a field of discourse within which to situate their own stories and testimonies. In this way, the rule of faith was an organic expression of the spirituality so central to Christian notions of encounter. It became a negotiated space within which charismatic renewal through itinerancy and institutional stability through offices could affirm and critique each other as together they attempted to discern the Spirit’s ongoing activity. This delicate dance between Tradition and traditions con- tinues in the churches and Pentecostals must find a way to participate in it. Renewal may just be the way.

2 Amos Yong,Spirit-Word-Community: Theological Hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective(Bur-

lington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 171.

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