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Pentecostal Theology, Volume 28, No. 2, Fall 2006
The Hazards of Writing a Book on
Global Pentecostalism
Allan Anderson
Writing a global introduction to Pentecostalism was no easy task, and I was aware of some of the perils involved. I was given short notice by Cambridge University Press, who wanted this as part of a series on Christian traditions, and I had less than a year to complete it. Someone else (more “classical Pentecostal” than I) was supposed to have written this book but had been unable to do so. I had taught Pentecostal Theology to a post- graduate class for seven years, and so worked on my lecture notes and mostly secondary literature to write this book, which was intended as a relatively short and necessarily selective treatment of global Pentecostalism. A restriction in the number of footnotes in each chapter was also frus- trating, as readers familiar with my other writings will realize. Obviously in a book of this nature, the interested reader will want to find more detail elsewhere. I also admit that since the publication of the book I have become aware of a few factual errors that will be corrected in future. This is not to excuse such errors, but they are inevitable in a panoramic work like this, as has been the case with its predecessors. What I tried to achieve was an historical overview of the development of Pentecostalism glob- ally followed by a shorter discussion of some of the main theological and social issues as I saw them. In particular, I tried to read the history and theology from a global perspective and wanted to bring across a view influenced by my years of activism in African Pentecostalism and my reading of such “subversive” texts as that of Walter Hollenweger. Pentecostalism is more diverse than any other Christian tradition, pre- cisely because, as Michael Wilkinson points out here, its different forms of expression are rooted in the local. The Spirit blows where s/he wills, in ways consistent with different contexts. It is this local-ness that makes any attempt to describe global Pentecostalism with any comprehension a hazardous, perhaps even impossible exercise.
These three reviews illustrate that my Introduction has had a con- trastingly mixed reception: you either love it or hate it. Thankfully, most people who have read it and two of these reviewers seem to appreciate it. To quote just two: David Martin, renowned sociologist, wrote that it is “full of information and analysis well designed to undermine such casual stereotypes” (as would reduce Pentecostals to Christian fundamentalists).
© 2006 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden pp. 283–288
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It is “as clear and comprehensive an introduction as one could hope for.”1 Martyn Percy, a British Anglican theologian, called it “a thoughtful and probing account,” and stated that “Anderson’s depth of knowledge of Pentecostalism and Charismatic renewal is probably unrivalled.”2 Within two years of publication the book had sold over two thousand copies and a Spanish translation is about to be published.3 This book was bound to be controversial. I have had my own agenda in writing it and am pas- sionate about drawing attention to things I see as shortcomings in the Pentecostal Movement and that need correction. If my work irritates and provokes people enough to cause them to be more culturally and theo- logically sensitive, more politically and socially aware, and more glob- ally oriented, then I will have succeeded. As Daniels and Wilkinson both perceptively note, my treatment of Pentecostalism is an attempt to be inclusive and intercultural in resisting exclusive, expansionist, and Western- centred approaches.
The tone of Joseph L. Castleberry’s review as an U.S. American Assemblies of God (AG) missionary-scholar is not unexpected—although I suspect that some of his colleagues might not entirely agree with his negative analysis. What seems to irk him most is my portrayal of mis- sionaries in general and of Hodges in particular. Perhaps this is what he means by my “wounding” my subject. However, I have been a “mis- sionary kid” and missionary in Southern Africa myself for most of my life, the product of five generations of missionaries since my triple-great grandfather arrived in South Africa as one of the first missionaries of the London Missionary Society in 1800. I was a Pentecostal missionary for twenty-three years. I am deeply appreciative of the efforts and sacrifices made by Pentecostal missionaries, as my new book will reveal.4 I am not criticising missionaries per se. If I display an “irritating bias” against mis- sionaries, then I am only critical of a particular type—the type who is still patriarchal and power-hungry for control of national churches, theo- logical institutions, and leaders, especially through the manipulation of financial power from the Western world. That type of missionary should “go home”; he represents a past tradition we should be ashamed of. I do not apologize for this.
1
David Martin, review, Times Literary Supplement 5288 (August 6, 2004), 28–29.
2
Martyn Percy, review, Church Times, September 2004.
3
Allan Anderson, El Pentecostalismo (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2007).
4
Allan Anderson, Spreading Fires: The Missionary Nature of Early Pentecostalism (London: SCM Press, 2007), forthcoming.
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I do not, however, think that Hodges was one of that type, and Castleberry’s drawing attention to what he considers my “unfair” treat- ment of Hodges is puzzling. I wrote less than two pages on Hodges (pp. 209–10), and most of that is wholly positive, pointing to his great significance in Pentecostal mission strategy. In the final paragraph of this summary of Hodges’ ideas in The Indigenous ChurchI wanted to show that even the best-intentioned and high-principled of white Pentecostal missionaries were victims of their own context—and here I used a phrase from an SPS meeting theme—they saw their mission from a Christian “home” to a pagan, heathen “abroad” (from “us” to “them”). I simply illustrated this tendency from Hodges’ own writing in 1953. He, too, was a product of his time and of his denomination’s presuppositions. I fully accept (and I think my book accepts) Castleberry’s point that his contri- bution (and that of other pioneer missionaries), especially to the AG, was enormous. But I have also been seriously conscious of the very impor- tant need to tell the stories of those national workers whose contribution to the growth and expansion of Pentecostalism was at least as important as that of foreign missionaries like Ralph Williams, and who have largely been neglected in the historical records. Effective missionaries are cata- lysts, not dominators. I am unable to use other language sources, partic- ularly not Spanish ones, which would have obviously benefited my treatment of Latin America. I accept that my knowledge of this region is overly reliant on secondary, English sources, and that some of these limited sources have been inaccurate.
The other bone of contention with Castleberry seems to be my account of Pentecostalism in China, which he considers not detailed enough and reticent to declare the Pentecostal nature of Chinese Christianity. The lat- ter point I do not accept, as I have clearly indicated the remarkable growth of Chinese Pentecostalism here—even though reliable information is still hard to obtain. Luke Wesley’s short book on the house church networks had not yet been published when I wrote mine, and his analysis, like my own, is based on subjective fragments of information and sources that are not interrogated in his text.5 I have to say that the jury is still out on this subject, and when it comes to making claims about statistics and “Pen- tecostal” churches in this most populous nation on earth, we have to tread carefully and critique our sources. What is true of one province of China, such as Yunnan (where a concentration of Western Pentecostal
5
Luke Wesley, The Church in China: Persecuted, Pentecostal, and Powerful (Baguio City, Philippines: APTS Press, 2005).
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missionaries worked for over four decades), is not usually true of others. Nationally, the Oneness Pentecostal True Jesus Church is one of the larg- est denominations, certainly in some provinces; but Watchman Nee’s Little Flock is equally significant and not “Pentecostal.” Saying that the largest Pentecostal church in China is Oneness is not the same as saying that most Chinese Pentecostals are Oneness, as Castleberry suggests. Furthermore, even Luke Wesley does not “affirm the clear Pentecostal identity of the majority of Chinese Christians,” as Castleberry thinks. While this “Pentecostal identity” may indeed be true (depending on the definition of “Pentecostal”), I think that caution is necessary and that the advice of seasoned China watchers like Bays, Deng, and Lambert should be taken.6
An American evangelical, ex-AG historian Edith Blumhofer, has also stridently criticised my book.7 Neither she nor Castleberry will recom- mend this book to students or to general readership. Daniels’ comment about specialists quibbling about the specifics of my portrayal of their particular regions is appropriate here. Castleberry’s critique is based largely on his Latin American experience and American AG sources like Melvin Hodges and Luke Wesley. Blumhofer similarly centers on her own under- standing of North American Pentecostal prehistory, in which she amaz- ingly refers to the “mythical Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles” and writes of my overreliance on the Wesleyan roots of Pentecostalism.8 She suggests that I regurgitated Hollenweger’s ideas and those of his students. However, I am neither a blind disciple of Hollenweger, nor has he ever been my “mentor” (as Blumhofer states), much as I appreciate his enor- mous and unparalleled contribution to Pentecostal scholarship. I came to Birmingham six years after Hollenweger had left and was never his stu- dent. True, I shelter in the long shadow he left and am indebted to many of his insights. I was affected by the sheer inspiration of his visit to Birmingham for a conference I organized in 1996, near the beginning of my time here. But the careful reader will notice that I differ with Hollenweger in possibly as many aspects as I agree with him. Blumhofer
6
E.g., Daniel H. Bays, “Indigenous Protestant Churches in China 1900–1937: A Pentecostal Case Study,” in Steven Kaplan, ed., Indigenous Responses to Western Christianity (New York University Press, 1995), 124–43; Deng Zhaoming, “Indigenous Chinese Pentecostal Denominations,” in Allan Anderson and Edmond Tang, eds., Asian and Pentecostal: Charismatic Christianity in Asia (Oxford, UK: Regnum, and Baguio City, Philippines: APTS Press, 2005), 437–66; and Tony Lambert, China’s Christian Millions(Crowborough, UK: Monarch Publications, 2006).
7
Edith Blumhofer, review, Church History (2005): 238–40.
8
Ibid., 239.
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did not read my book carefully, alleging, for example, that my portrayal of pre-Reformation Catholicism is an “unnuanced harsh judgment” that ignores the mystical tradition represented by Hildegard of Bingen—whereas I drew attention to Hildegard and other Catholic mystics (p. 22).
Blumhofer correctly points out my taking issue with the ways in which American historians have conceptualized the movement, and she defends this by saying that only recently have these historians become more nuanced by referring to the global context. But it is precisely those his- torians of Pentecostalism who do generalize about the global movement as if it originated in America with whom I have taken issue—and not those like Robert Anderson, Grant Wacker, Douglas Jacobsen, and, most recently, Cecil M. Robeck, who have concentrated on the North American context.9 I take issue with those who quote Barrett’s statistics about half a billion “Pentecostals” in the world (suggesting origins in the USA) with- out realizing that the vast majority of these include Catholic Charismatics and African and Chinese independents. If you want a “made in America” global religion, take Mormonism, not Pentecostalism!
Obviously, I am much more comfortable with the generous reviews of Daniels and Wilkinson. They too discuss the book from within their own specialities and raise important issues. Daniels adds the historical per- spective of revivals among the African American and African Caribbean peoples, information about revival movements to which I did not have access. I could have benefited from research in this area and that of the black Holiness movement. But this introductory chapter was intended mainly to emphasise that Pentecostal phenomena are as old as the church, and not to establish diachronic or synchronic connections. Daniels also has a useful discussion of the “multiple Jerusalems” of Pentecostalism and asks how they interact. This book does not answer that question com- prehensively, but I hope the forthcoming one will. For example, the role of the Mukti Revival in India is very significant in discussing Pentecostal origins, as I have pointed out in recent writings.10
9
Robert M. Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1979); Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Douglas Jacobsen, Thinking in the Spirit: Theologies of Early Pentecostalism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003); Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., The Azusa Street Mission and Revival (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006).
10
Allan Anderson, “‘The present world-wide revival… brought up in India’: Pandita Ramabai and the Origins of Pentecostalism,” an unpublished paper presented at the Society for Pentecostal Theology Annual Meeting, Regent University, March 10–12, 2005; and Allan Anderson, “Pandita Ramabai, the Mukti Revival and the Origins of Pentecostalism,” Transformation 23, no. 1 (2006): 37–48.
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Wilkinson points to the subjectivity of definitions and my setting out an agenda for further research. I am grateful for his sociological focus on questions of methodology and theory. Globalization involves the migra- tion of peoples across the world, and we should know how this affects Pentecostalism, as it surely does. I did not intentionally write this book with an overarching theoretical framework, but perhaps I should have done so and made that more clear. I endorse Castleberry’s comment that the field of global Pentecostalism is too large and diverse for any one per- son to succeed in capturing it in a single book. I have attempted to do this elusive task; and readers will have different opinions as to whether I have succeeded. In the attempt I have probably raised more questions than answers. But it is in provoking such questions and stimulating fur- ther research that Pentecostal scholarship will hold its own.
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