The following is my replay to someone who challenged me to explain what I meant by the phrase "theology of the Pentecostal liturgy."
Let me begin with what I do not mean - the theology of Pentecostal liturgy is not some carefully systematized formulation of religious ritual. When I use the term "theology," I know others will probably understand me to mean something more systematic than I intend. For me, theology is an account of encountering or attempting to encounter God - "this is my story, this is my song ..."
In referring to "those more experienced in the theology of Pentecostal liturgy" I am thinking specifically of the congregation in which my family worshipped when I was growing up and the larger fellowship of the Assemblies of God with whom we were affliliated. "Liturgy" can be translated as "the work/duty of the people" and that is the meaning I intend. By Pentecostal liturgy I mean what people led by the Holy Spirit do when gathered together in the name of Jesus - this is called worship.
The theology of Pentecostal liturgy, then, is one's understanding of Pentecostal liturgy (Sprit-led public worship) in reference to one's own considered experience of encountering God. And since all understanding is socially contextualized, the theology of Pentecostal liturgy is not some individual fancy but the common reflection of one's community.
In seminary I took part in a student/faculty seminar in which the topic of discussion was Pentecostal worship. My contribution was to consider the impact of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements on Worship. I entitled my presentation "Immediate Encounter With God." The following is an excerpt from that presentation:
This [my title] reflects first Rudolph Schnakenburg's definition of worship as being "an encounter with God for which God must make man capable by his grace." It also is influenced by Peter Hocken's repeated references to immediacy in speaking of what the grace of Pentecost brings. The challenge of discussing the impact of something on worship is that the word impact implies that worship has somehow been shaped by this thing. One may recall Dom Gregory Dix's classic study, THE SHAPE OF THE LITURGY, in which he ostensibly examines the history of Christian worship by reviewing various liturgical approaches throughout Church history. Is the question then, "How has 'the Liturgy" been reshaped by the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements?" I hope not because that question demands a complex answer which is beyond the scope of this forum. A simpler answer may be given if one were to ask how worship has been affected by the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements.
I offer than a tentative definition of worship: True worship is faithful response to an immediate encounter with God. A response because God is gracious to initiate such encounter; immediate because worship is no mere memorial service but a realization of the shekinah Presence of God. When God's presence is made manifest, things happen! Look at Pentecost in Acts 2; look at the Pentecostals in Azuza Street. Perhaps this is why initial evidence is still such a significant concern of our Movement. How does one know whether this is that which was prophesied? The charismata manifest God's grace and God's grace is uniquely revealed in Jesus Christ.
Our liturgies must allow for this great truth. When Spirit-filled people are involved in Christ-centered liturgy, God Almighty makes Himself manifest and worship happens. We see this in Acts 13:2 when, in the midst of some Christian liturgy (NRSV translates leitourgounton as "worshipping"), the Holy Spirit spoke. What that liturgy was is unknown to us except that it involved fasting and prayer. What we do know is that those liturgical participants did not resent the Spirit's interference but rather responded in obedience.
So one may hope that this is the legacy bequeathed by the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements to the Church at large, that Christians faithfully involved in whatever liturgical form of worship will welcome the "interference" of God's Holy Spirit and be willing to respond obediently to His voice. ....
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My correspondent provided an insightful point-by point response, to which I replied in kind (the correspondent’s comments are bracketed):
ReplyDelete[1. Theology should have a substantially set defintion to enhance everyone's ability to contribute to the discussion and knowledge and study of God works quite well in my opinion.]
I do not limit theology to mere study; in fact, doing so restricts possible ways of understanding in such a way as to lead to Kantian-type efforts to keep religion within the bounds of reason, where reason ends up being quite unreasonable when it comes to thinking God's thoughts after Him. I prefer to consider theologia in terms of telling rather than just studying, giving an account (logia) of God (theo). Good theology produces the spiritual story that goes beyond religious study.
[2. It appears that only experience and encounter, terms you use interchangably, are the foundation to your defintition of theology.]
Encounter denotes for me interpersonal interaction, while experience is less so as I am using the term.
[3. Pentecosal seems to have another connotation than that of the broader idea of the Body of Christ or Christian generally speaking in terms of liturgy and worship.]
"Pentecostal" as I mean it refers to spiritual experience akin to that which the disciples encountered on the day Pentecost came as they were prayerfully waiting in obedience to the ascending Christ's command.
[4. Your definition of "the theology of Pentecostal liturgy" seems to be " one's understanding of Spirit-led public worship."]
Yes, this is my definition, but, as I also wrote, "in reference to one's own considered experience of encountering God." Such "considered experience," I would hope, is in accordance with the discernment of the Holy Spirit.
[5. There seems also to be an aspect of social context to your definition in that the theology of Pentecostal liturgy must incorporate the common reflection of one's community.]
Indubitably, to be sure.
[6. You further appear to expand the idea of Pentecostal to people who are led by the spirit.]
Expand the idea? "People who are led by the Spirit" epitomize the idea of Pentecostal !!!
[7. So the theology of Pentecostal liturgy is public worship by people led by the Spirit (Pentecostal) who experience or encounter God in worship understood in the context of one's community.]
Understanding as the goal of theology is complete in obedience. Pentecostal liturgy is the dutiful worship of people gathered in the name of Jesus together open to whatever God's Spirit wills to do among them; the theologian who strives to understand such liturgy must do so with the intention of perfecting participation in the same through faithful teaching (oral or written).
[8. In your included presentation you appear to limit the definition of worship to a "response to an immediate encounter with God" which sounds as if God is the first actor in worship which you confirm later, "because God is gracious to initiate such encounter.]
Yes, God is the first actor who sets the scene; worshippers take their cue from Him, saying "Yes" to His offer of grace, beginning with repentance and going on to thanksgiving and praise.
[9. The scripture says that when we initiate the gathering of ourselves as Christians He is there with us.]
The scripture says that it was He who first loved us.
[10.It seems that you believe that God manifests Himself first and then "things happen" however I would submit that as we are obedient and make ourselves available to Him then He manifests Himself.]
I do indeed believe that God manifests Himself first; our obedience is the proper response to that initial manifestation.
[11. I think you may have the action and reaction reversed.]
I think you are mistaken to think so.
[12. Pentecostalism and the Charismatic movement are only 2 recent attempts to reinstitute the first church and not the most recent at that. Right now both are in the throes of trying to reinvent themselves as if it were 1906 and 1956 respectively.]
I agree. One way to understand this is to consider the notion of what Victor Turner (a Roman Catholic anthropologist who pioneered, with Richard Schechner, the field of performance studies) terms "communitas." (In a paper I presented to the Society for Pentecostal Studies, I discussed the similarities and differences between Turner's notion of communitas and the scriptural concept of koinonia, finding it interesting to note how Turner himself looked to Pentecost as "a famous case" exemplifying spontaneous communitas.) The following is excerpted from Turner’s insightful book, FROM RITUAL TO THEATRE:
When even two people believe that they experience unity, all people are felt by those two, even if only for a flash, to be one. Feeling generalizes more readily than thought, it would seem! The great difficulty is to keep this intuition alive ... We thus encounter the paradox that the experience of communitas become the memory of communitas, with the result that communitas itself in striving to replicate itself historically develops a social structure, in which initially free and innovative relationships between individuals are converted into norm-generated relationships between social personae. ... Yet when this communitas or comitas is institutionalized, the new-found indiosycratic is legislated into yet another set of universalistic roles and statuses, whose incumbents must subordinate individuality to a rule.
Looking back at the historical fate of communitas I [Turner] identified [in a previous book, THE RITUAL PROCESS] three distinct and not necessarily sequential forms of it, which I called spontaneous, ideological, and normative. Each has certain relationships with liminal and liminoid phenomena.
(1) Spontaneous communitas is "direct, immediate and total confrontation of human identities," a deep rather than intense style of personal interaction. ... Is there any of us who has not known this moment when compatible people - friends, congeners - obtain a flash of lucid mutual understanding on the existential level, when they feel that all problems, not just their problems, could be resolved, whether emotional or cognitive, if only the group which is felt (in the first person) as "essentially us" could sustain its intersubjective illumination. This illumination may succumb to the dry light of next day's disjunction, the application of singular and personal reason to the "glory of communal understanding. But when the mood, style, or "fit" of spontaneous communitas is upon us, we place a high value on personal honesty, openess, and lack of pretensions or pretensiousness. We feel that it is important to relate directly to another person as he presents himself in the here-and-now, to understand him in a sympathetic (not empathetic -which implies some withholding, some non-giving of the self) way, free from the culturally defined encumbrances of his role, status, reputation, class, sex or other structural niche. Individuals who interact with on another in the mode of spontaneous communitas become totally absorbed into a single synchronized, fluid event. ...
(2) What I [Turner] have called "ideological communitas" is a set of theoretical concepts which attempt to describe the interactions of spontaneous communitas. Here the retrospective look, "memory," has already distanced the individual subject from the communal or dyadic experience. Here the experiencer has already come to look to language and culture to mediated the former immediacies ..... [Turner goes on to discuss attempts to expand the remembered experience into a "utopian" model of society; he distinguishes some utopias from others] ... There are many ... utopias. Nevertheless, the communitas "utopia" is found in variant forms as a central ingredient, connected with the notion of "salvation," in many of the world's literate, historical religions. "Thy Kingdom" (which beign caritas, agape, "love," is and anti-kingdom, a communitas) "come."
(3) Normative communitas, finally, is, once more, a "perduing social system," a subculture or group which attempts to foster and maintain relationships or spontaneous communitas on a more or less permanent basis. Tod do this it has to denature itself, for spontaneous communitas is more a matter of "grace" than "law," to use theological language. Its spirit "bloweth where it listeth" - it cannot be legislated for or normalized, since it is the exception, not the law, the miracle, not the regularity, primordial freedom, not anangke, the causal chain of necessity. But, nevertheless, there is something about the origin of a group based on even normative communitas which distinguishes it from groups which arise on the foundation of some "natural" or technical "necessity," real or imagined, such as a system of productive relations or a group of putatively biologically connected persons, a family, kindred, or lineage. Something of "freedom," "liberation," or "love" (to use terms common in theological or political philosophical Western vocabularies) adheres to normative communitas, even although quite often the strictest regimes devolve from what are apparently the most spontaneous experiences of communitas. ...
Groups based on normative communitas commonly arise during a period of religious revival. When normative communitas is demonstrably a group's dominant mode, one can witness the process of transformation of a charismatic and personal moment into a ongoin, relatively repetitive social system. The inherent contradictions between spontaneous communitas and a markedly structured system are so great, however, that any venture with attempts to combine these modalities will constantly be threatened by structural cleavage or by the suffocation of communitas.
[It simply doesn't matter how spiritual one is or how often one speaks in tongues if we cannot or will not be obedient to the commands of Jesus then we will seen as we are hearers but not doers of the word.]
Amen, Amen! I wonder if perhaps spontaneous communitas is the flickering spark that God's Holy Spirit continually wills to fan into flaming koinonia if only the name of the Lord Jesus Christ would be lifted high as every knee is bowed low. ALL HAIL THE POWER OF JESUS NAME!