Primal Spirituality Or The Future Of Faith The Shifting Winds Of Pentecostal Studies In The Wider Academy

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Pneuma 33 (2011) 327-329

Primal Spirituality or the Future of Faith? Te Shifting Winds of Pentecostal Theology

in the Wider Academy

Amos Yong

“Te Last Vomit of Satan . . .” — that is part of the title of the fourteenth chapter, on “Pentecostals and the Age of the Spirit” (the subtitle), of Harvey Cox’s most recent book.1 Always the provocateur, this chapter’s title and con- tents captures Cox’s desire to juxtapose the excoriation of Pentecostalism by fundamentalists in the ﬁrst part of the twentieth century on the one hand with his own hopes that Pentecostalism in the twenty-ﬁrst century will represent the vitality of religious life that overcomes the creedalism characteristic of what he calls the “age of belief” on the other hand.2 Cox’s own route toward this thesis is, of course, not a straight one. His earlier volume on Pentecostalism argued that part of the reason for the explosion of Pentecostalism at the van- guard of Christianity sweeping across the global South was what he called its primal spirituality, manifest in its primal speech (especially glossolalia), primal piety (including the emphases on divine healing), and primal hope (particularly

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Harvey Cox, Te Future of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2009).

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Cox delineates a primordial “age of faith,” associated with the earliest Christian movement of the ﬁrst three centuries, followed by the “age of belief,” related to the rise of orthodoxy since the fourth century, and then the “age of the Spirit,” a post-Constantinian and post-Christendom form of Christianity most immediately informed by the emergence of pentecostal-charismatic movements in the twentieth century. Here Cox parallels, although he does not refer to, D. Lyle Dabney’s delineation of Christianity’s theological traditions in terms of theologies of the First (related to God as Creator, reaching its apex in Scholastic theology), Second (related to God as Redeemer, most substantively registered in the christological theologies of the magisterial Reformers), and Tird (related to Pentecostal movements in the twentieth century) Articles of the Creed; see Dabney, “Why Should the Last Be First? Te Priority of Pneumatology in Recent Teological Discussion,” in Bradford E. Hinze and D. Lyle Dabney, eds., Advents of the Spirit: An Introduction to the Current Study of Pneumatology (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2001), 238-61, among others of his essays.

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A. Yong / Pneuma 33 (2011) 327-329

the eschatological fervor of the movement).3 Tus the paradox of Pentecostal- ism, at least in Cox’s interpretation, is that it represents the “future of faith” precisely through its reappropriation of the primal past.

Te articles in this issue of Pneuma both reﬂect and complicate Cox’s ironic thesis. Kimberly Alexander, in her 2011 presidential address to the Society for Pentecostal Theology, urges her fellow Pentecostals to embrace more fully at least one version of Cox’s “age of the Spirit.” While we cannot be sure that Alexander and Cox mean the same thing by talk about “the Spirit,” Miroslav Atanasov’s article on the Roma suggests that the lines between Cox’s primal spirituality and that of Gypsy Pentecostalism may be diﬃcult to draw. On the other hand, if Alexander and Atanasov both call attention to the future possi- bilities for Pentecostalism, Daniel Castelo suggests taking another look back- ward. Yes, the direction of Castelo’s glance, toward the ancient faith of the church, articulated with the help of the “Canonical Teism” project, might be understood in some respects as being precisely in the route away from what Cox wants to rehabilitate. Rather, Castelo’s desire to retrieve classical Christi- anity sits at odds with how Cox envisions the “future of faith” (even if what the former recommends is much richer than the doctrinal orthodoxy and creedal- ism associated with Cox’s “age of belief”).

In the meanwhile, Steven Studebaker’s review essay on Canadian Pentecos- talism puts in stark relief what is at stake for Pentecostal self-understanding, showing that the questions revolve around the relationship between the past and the present/future. Historiographically, is the Hebden Mission continu- ous with (related to) or discontinuous from (independent of) the Azusa Street Mission? Teologically, should contemporary Pentecostals reaﬃrm the classi- cal Pentecostal doctrine of Spirit-baptism or should they be willing to revisit, update, and even revise their views in light of contemporary perspectives and concerns? To put it back into Cox’s terms: will Pentecostalism embrace the more ﬂuid identity associated with the “age of the Spirit,” or will they persist in the more rigid, even ossiﬁed, “age of belief” that, on his reading, has since come to characterize the institutionalizing processes that have followed upon the modern Pentecostal revival at the turn of the twentieth century?

Nimi Wariboko’s critical review of Cox’s work on Pentecostalism opens up an alternative way of framing the issue. For him, that Cox’s primal spirituality anticipates and informs his “age of the Spirit” suggests not that Pentecostals ought to celebrate their form of religiosity as the emergence (arrival?!) of the

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Harvey G. Cox, Fire from Heaven: Te Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the 21st Century (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995).

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“future of faith,” but that they should be concerned about the relativization and secularization of Pentecostalism amidst the future of faiths. Cox’s own response here is to press the distinction between secularization as a historical process of the diversiﬁcation of even the religions and the cosmopolis and secularism as an ideology that attempts to marginalize religion from the public square. As with the conclusion of Fire from Heaven, Cox again wonders if Pentecostalism will retain the vitality of its primal spirituality or ossify into another ism, even if it were to understand itself as opposing secularism.

I argued long ago that Pentecostal self-understanding cannot be forged merely in isolation; rather, it is the nature of identity to be negotiated in pub- lic spaces, even if such negotiations occur “in private.”4 For this reason, Cox’s interpretations are important, not only in generating responses across the spectrum from Alexander to Wariboko, but for the ongoing scholarship on Pentecostalism. In the wider literature, for example, scholars of Pentecostalism as well as Pentecostal scholars have long debated the questions motivating Cox’s inquiries: whether Pentecostalism is a pre-modern, modern, or post- modern form of religiosity. To be sure, insider (emic) perspectives are no less biased than allegedly objectively neutral outsider (etic) stances, but the fact is that identity is never forged in a vacuum. Tis journal exists not only to foster inter- and multi-disciplinary scholarship on Pentecostalism, but also to pro- vide a space for scholarly jousting on the nature and identity of a dynamic religious movement. Harvey Cox has been a dialogue partner for some Pente- costal scholars in this task. Many other views have been registered, and others are welcomed. Te future of faith will decide if the fortunes of religion resides with Pentecostalism’s primal past or not. In the meanwhile, may the conversa- tion continue among those who are desirous of and actively engaged in pursu- ing the shifting winds (spirits!) of Pentecostal Theology in the wider academy.

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I ﬁrst laid out this argument in my dissertation, Discerning the Spirit(s): A Pentecostal- Charismatic Contribution to Christian Teology of Religions, Journal of Pentecostal Teology Supplement Series 20 (Sheﬃeld, UK: Sheﬃeld Academic Press, 2000), ch. 1; it was also in this volume that I ﬁrst engaged with Cox and his interpretation of Pentecostalism.

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