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One of the advantages of not ‘growing up’ in a Vineyard context lies in approaching any discussion of its core values largely free of presuppositions. ‘Re-imagining’ Vineyard values (the reflective series within which this was originally posted) is therefore perhaps something of an overstatement. A corresponding disadvantage, though, lies in having only a second-hand understanding – and that a limited one – of the significance of those values in their original context, of how and why each one came into being, and what they meant to those who authored and inculcated them within the early Vineyard movement. The opportunity to be an original thinker therefore sits alongside the threat of being wrong. The strength of objectivity is undermined by the weakness of ignorance. This gives rise to a particular risk when one is ‘leading the conversation’ by posting a blog. My hope is that those with a more historically informed perspective will be both liberal in correcting the shortcomings in this posting, and generous in recognising that my aim is to add value to Vineyard values, in conversation with the community, not to devalue or reject those values in criticism of the community.

‘Leaders who limp’ is a clear reference to the experience of Jacob, recited in Genesis 32. What we read here is an extraordinary story, that seems to just drop into the narrative from nowhere, of Jacob wrestling with a man. They wrestle all night. Morning comes, and finding himself unable to overpower Jacob (we are not told why), the man touches Jacob’s hip and injures him, causing him to walk with a limp the next day (and perhaps permanently, though the text does not tell us this). However, Jacob will still not let the man go, “unless you bless me.” The man tells Jacob he is hereafter to be named Israel, “because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.” Jacob asks the name of the man but is not told. He calls the place Peniel, “because I saw God face to face and yet my life was spared.”

What are we to make of this story? Abstracted from its narrative context, it has commonly been uses as an exhortation to fervency in seeking God. It is analogised, for example, to praying through the night, until we get what we are asking God for: “I won’t let you go until you bless me, Lord.” Or as an authenticating mark of the Christian leader, that they have similarly ‘wrestled with God’ in prayer, when facing challenges and opposition, such that they bear the beneficial hallmarks of those close, personal experiences of God in their life and ministry.

But is this the message from the text? Is this what’s going on in the story? Or are these simply convenient uses of the text as Christian allegory? We might start with some reflection on this man Jacob.

When Yahweh identifies himself to Moses (in answer to the question “which God are you?”) as “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”, we could be forgiven for wondering how Jacob made the list! It is no surprise, on all the evidence in Jacob’s story up to Genesis 32, that in his first theophany Yahweh describes himself only as “the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac” (Gen 28:10-22). In Jacob and Esau, the twin sons of Isaac, the Covenant Story – which is the key theme in Genesis and indeed, I would argue, through the whole of the Christian scriptures – was facing a crisis. And the crisis was one of character. Esau had such scant regard for his birthright that he was willing to sell it for a good meal. Jacob, meanwhile, was scheming, lying and devious, someone who would be willing to deceive even his own aged father to get what he wanted, for his personal benefit.

Up to this point in the story, Genesis 28, everything we read about Jacob is negative. We see no evidence of any relationship to God, no personal recognition of his destiny in relation to the covenant, and no reason to think of him as a godly person or an example in the faith. Nevertheless, we see two striking things in this chapter: one (in vv.1-5) is Isaac’s blessing of Jacob, despite everything that has happened, as mantle bearer of the covenant promise. However, this reflects only a wish expressed, not a foregone conclusion or statement of fact; it is for God to determine and to verify to Jacob. And this God does, in a dream (vv.12-15).

At first glance, Genesis 28 might be seen as a turning point in Jacob’s life, but really it isn’t. The commitment he appears to make to Yahweh in vv.20-22 doesn’t stand up to closer scrutiny. Jacob’s ‘deal’ is most naturally read as “if you do this for me, God, then I’ll do that for you.” It’s Jacob in charge, Jacob in control, and Jacob’s agenda. Jacob’s offer is conditional. Even his promise to tithe appears to say more about his designs on the other 90%. And yet, as John Walton observes (NIV Application Commentary) “we also see Jacob as a work in process – another of God’s reclamation projects. Jacob has done nothing to deserve God’s attention, yet God reaches out to him at a time when he is probably feeling nothing but despair and vulnerability.” It is ironic that during his subsequent twenty years in Haran, Jacob himself becomes the victim of the very deception and cheating that he had himself earlier used to his advantage with Esau and Isaac. We may detect some slowly growing recognition of the hand of God on his life (e.g. 31:3-5), but deception and scheming continues to be his default approach (e.g. 31:20). Character is still the big issue in his life. Which brings us to chapter 32.

Twenty years after running away in fear of his life, Jacob is returning to the land, as God has told him to do (31:13), where he will face Esau again. As Jacob nears where he will encounter Esau, we see evidence of both the ‘old’ Jacob working every clever scheme and plan he can think of to survive (vv.7-8; 13-21), in great fear and distress (v.7) – his fear being exacerbated by the news that Esau has 400 men in his ‘welcoming party’ – and also, of an emerging ‘new’ Jacob, throwing himself on God’s mercy and promises (vv.9-12). The culmination of Jacob’s personal transformation, his real turning point, comes in the encounter with the man at Peniel. Jacob, alone and afraid, is at the end of himself and his own self-sufficiency. He has lived off his cunning, wits and scheming (and suffered as the victim of it too, although scarcely eliciting our sympathy in the process), but now he is at his wits’ end. He can no longer handle the situation. He can’t fulfil his calling in the Covenant Story through the way he has been, up until now. In fact he can’t even face tomorrow.

The story tells us that the man (identified by Jacob as an angel, in v.30 – the word means a supernatural being; see also Hosea 12:4) cannot overcome Jacob. But if taken as a literal statement of physical prowess, this is absurd, for Jacob is now 97 years-old, and no match for an angel, as is evident from the ease with which the angel wounds Jacob when he determines to do so (v.25). No, this is speaking about (what we would today call) a ‘spiritual’ wrestling, and the reason ‘God’ cannot overcome Jacob is because the battle is to do with character. The question, for which the battle rages all night, is whether Jacob will surrender to God. It is not a question of strength but of will.

This is not a battle that God can win by imposing victory on us: we must surrender willingly, by choice. It takes all night not for the angel to reach a point of overcoming Jacob, but for Jacob to get to a point of overcoming himself. To gain our life, we must lose it.

There are now two crucial things to note in the text. The first is when the angel proposes to leave without giving Jacob any assurance of God’s help (i.e. ‘his blessing’). This would mean Jacob is back where he has always been in the past – operating on his own, off his wits and resources, usually resorting to scheming and devious tactics. But these have run out. He knows they are not enough, and they have no place in fulfilling the Covenant Story. This time, Jacob is a changed man. He is at the end of himself. He has begun to walk in the ways of obedience to Yahweh, and he realises that the weapons of the fight are not those he has been used to relying on. He won’t let go of the angel until he is assured that God will be with him; this is what matters. Jacob’s refusal to let the angel leave, without first receiving that assurance, reflects his final complete surrender to God. As Walton puts it, “As always with God, one has to lose in order to win.”

The second crucial thing is God’s renaming of Jacob, as Israel. In the ancient world, naming was seen as significant to who a person was (see e.g. Abram to Abraham), and the assignment of the new name affirmed authority over the one renamed. Similarly, therefore, Jacob’s acceptance of this new name reflects both his surrender to God and his changed character. So who are ‘leaders who walk with a limp’ today, and why is it a critical Vineyard value? Is it all-night prayer warriors? Perhaps, in part. Is it leaders who are desperate for God’s blessing, and willing to grasp hold of him until he delivers? Maybe, to some extent (although not in the ‘deal or no deal?’ terms Jacob originally proposed in 28:20-22). Or is it leaders whose character has been changed, who have utterly surrendered to God, letting go of self-reliance as their primary resource, and repenting of all scheming and manipulation in the work of the Kingdom? I think so. And particularly so where that character development, that battle of the will, has been a long and painful process in someone’s life, like wrestling all night, such that the scars of the fight are evident. I submit that this is what it means to “have struggled with God and with men and [to] have overcome.”

It might be said that overall, scripture has far more to say about people’s character than their gifting. In the wilderness temptations of Jesus, one might say that the issues and choices he faced were to do with character (this would be unsurprising, given his humanity, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the story appears at the outset of his ministry). This, then, is the message of Jacob and his wrestling with the angel of God, and it is a wrestling that each of us must go through, if we wish to contribute to God’s mission in God’s ways. The battleground is personal character. It is not a fight that God can win, though, not a victory he can impose on us, however long the fight goes on; it can only happen through our willing surrender.

If this is what John Wimber meant by ‘never trust a man without a limp’ then I couldn’t endorse it more.

Originally posted at http://deepchurch.org.uk/

This will be the last of my posts exploring an emerging theology of the Spirit in a ‘post-charismatic’ world.

Let me first be clear that by ‘post-charismatic’ world, I do not mean a world devoid of the Spirit’s personal presence and tangible activity.  I am committed to the belief that the Spirit is present in this world as God experienced, an incarnational role, in which the Spirit’s actions are in full continuity with the incarnate Son who came to be God with us.

The early charismatics were right, then, to have a deep desire for authentic engagement with the Spirit, and so too, are those of us who continue to hold this desire.  Unfortunately, many of us, while still clinging to these beliefs and desire, have ceased to be convinced by popular charismatology.

My proposal in the recent series of posts has been that more than anything we need to reimagine our core theology of the Spirit and allow this renewed understanding to inform our interpretive lens concerning our experience of the Spirit.

It seems to me that we are generally lacking a sufficiently well developed framework of the Spirit – of who he really is, what he’s really like, and what he sees his mission is all about.  Because we lack this ‘big story’ of the Spirit, we are without clear and informative points of reference against which to ‘test’ either expectations or experiences, and the debate too easily slips into the narrow exegesis (or eisegesis) of a handful of NT proof-texts.

We post-charismatics are therefore frozen to the spot, theologically-speaking, in being unsure what to expect of the Spirit.

We are also somewhat reluctant to appear, by questioning popular charismatic assumptions and practices, to be ‘speaking against the Spirit’, which I suggest is due to (1) awareness of the scriptural injunction, and (2) our deep desire to find authentic, contemporary experience of God, beyond the confines of intellect and reason, which impels us to ‘want to believe’ experiences of the Spirit are authentic.

What, then, might a reimagined core theology look like and how practically might it inform us as people open to becoming ‘new charismatics’?

Here are my own thoughts – I am sure there are more.  I see these not as a hierarchy, or a closed list.  Rather, they are like different viewing angles on a fascinating historical building – from north, south, east and west, and perhaps also from above – where all the views show part of its beauty, and no single view is more important, or tells more about the building.  The views are not in competition, they are complementary.  Only in absorbing all the viewpoints does one get to know the building intimately.  And any number of additional views, most of which we can expect to be able to locate in relation to the principal or ‘bigger picture’ views, can potentially add to the richness of the overall picture.

1.  Spirit cannot and should not be separated from Trinity.  Before he is anything else he is an intrinsic part of the Godhead.  The Spirit has no independent agenda for action.  His purposes are God’s purposes.  It is unhelpful and misleading to detach certain verses that speak of the Spirit or his work and place them in a separate, independent category.  Whatever is the authentic work of the Spirit will always be advancing, enhancing and empowering God’s revealed purposes for humanity and creation.

No work or action properly credited to the Spirit, then, will ever fail to be entirely in harmony with what we know to be God’s present purposes.  He will never appear to be pursuing different priorities.  He will never detract, or distract, from those purposes.  Nothing he does will be irrelevant. (more…)

Inherent in the title of this series of blogs is our ‘imagining’ of the Holy Spirit, since we cannot ‘re-imagine’ except in relation to how we currently imagine.  We need therefore to ask ourselves: “How do we presently imagine the Spirit?” and to identify the influences reflected in it.

It is useful at the outset to remind ourselves that all our imagining should be both grounded in Scripture and, at the same time, sensitive to the context in which we are imagining, which is the contemporary culture (people will need to find the fruit of what grows out of it to be satisfying and nourishing).

In this post, I want to focus on what I see as some key foundational aspects to the Spirit’s person and work, which I think should inform our understanding of his identity, mission and purposes in and amongst us, and consequently have much to say about our experience and discernment of him in both Church and world. 

Since the Spirit is, fundamentally, ‘God, experienced’ – in continuity with the Son’s ‘God with us’ - we are right to have a deep desire for authentic engagement with the Spirit, understood in terms of the promise of Acts 1:8.  However, we are also cautioned by the biblical injunction to correctly discern his moving (1 John 4:1).   To fulfil both the desire and the constraint requires that we are informed by the overarching biblical narrative of the Spirit.  In other words, we will be ill-equipped to judge the authenticity of any experience unless we have an understanding of what he is about.   Without a clear view of his mission and purpose, we won’t know what answered prayer for the Spirit’s moving will look like, or what it means to cooperate with the Spirit (rather than hinder, or even quench).

Quenching the Spirit has usually been seen in terms of questioning or de-emphasising “exotic manifestations” – but what if it’s a great deal more than that?   Might it be that any failure to correspond our mission and praxis to the Spirit’s mission and praxis represents a quenching?  

To be ‘informed by the overarching biblical narrative of the Spirit’ is more than doing a Bible word-search.  It is also more than a systematic theology of the Spirit (i.e. a re-sorting of the biblical data in the ‘correct’ order, so that we know what to believe about the Spirit).

(more…)

I was recently invited to contribute a short series of guest blogs on Jason Clark’s Deep Church website www.deepchurch.org.uk   and thought it may be of interest to post them here also.  To engage with the comments, do visit Jason’s site.  The blogs here have been adapted slightly, for ease of reading in a different context. 

My first blog in this series of three began with some reflections on comments made by Jason Clark, when he initiated this series.  

Firstly, he observed “how little there is within emerging church resources about the Holy Spirit.”

Secondly, how Jason’s own church plant within Vineyard has “tried to explore our emerging identity and remain within our charismatic tradition” (my italics).

Thirdly, that many of his longstanding emerging church friends are “post-charismatic.”

These suggest two related tensions at work.  One, a loss of confidence in the ‘received wisdom’ about the Spirit bequeathed to us by the 20th Century charismatic movement and Pentecostalism.  The other, a discomforting awareness that while we may no longer feel able to embrace 20th Century charismatic understandings, a fresh pneumatology with which we are comfortable has yet to emerge.

The combined result is an ‘unfilled space’, precisely where a vibrant theology and praxis of the Spirit ought to be located.

It’s like an empty lot, that we drive past each day, on our journeys to and fro other places, with no reason to stop by.

It’s time to rebuild, but many of us find ourselves in reaction:

• For some of us, a virtual wholesale rejection of that tradition, having witnessed such embarrassments, errors and abuses under the banner of ‘charismatic spirituality’ that we feel nothing good can come out of it.   Commenting on another blog at Deep Church, Mike McNichols spoke of “an understandable reaction to groups that have caricatured the Holy Spirit into the facilitator of exotic manifestations.”

In this view, 20th Century charismatic and Pentecostal pneumatologies are simply irredeemable, in anything like the form they are currently practiced at the popular level – we simply have to close that chapter and open a new one.  The extent to which this is a reaction against the pneumatology or against the ecclesiology, theology and culture of its practitioners is another question.

• Some of us, meanwhile, are still clinging precariously to a certain element of our inherited ‘charismatic tradition’, on the basis that it (or something quite like it) simply must have a place in our experience of a deeply relational God who tangibly engages with us in Christian life.

In other words, since we (rightly) see personal, experiential relationship with God as central to both gospel and ecclesiology, and believe in God’s personal activity in the world, we are loathe to ditch ‘the charismatic’ entirely, despite some considerable discomfort with it as widely practiced. So, with no clear way forward, as an interim measure we scale back, but without abandoning all charismatic praxis (because, like Fox Mulder in the X-Files, it is still the case that “I Want To Believe”).

• Others, though,  find themselves simply fearful of engaging with the Spirit at all, or afraid of trying and getting it wrong,  and so withdraw into what feels like safer (but is also emptier) territory.

All of these positions, and no doubt others, might be dubbed ‘post-charismatic.’   But as we know from postmodernity, the prefix ‘post-’ simply indicates a moving beyond.   It does not tell us anything about what might replace it.   It’s an in-between state, primarily defined by its negative critique of what came before.

One or more of these positions, then, may be where we currently find ourselves,  in our own relationship with the Spirit.

Our position is not helped , on the one hand, by the elusiveness of the Spirit, as part of his very nature, and on the other, by the scantiness of biblical instruction on the Spirit.

Not only is pneumatology somewhat underdeveloped in Scripture, it is notable that the Creeds offer us relatively little.  The Apostles Creed, for example, is content simply to state “I believe in the Holy Spirit”, without further elaboration.   Creedal references to the Spirit are, as Clark Pinnock notes, “brief and occasional, at times sounding almost perfunctory” (Flame of Love, Downers Grove: IVP, 1996, p.10).

If, then, we are earnestly seeking to re-imagine the Spirit in our emerging context, but we find the inherited legacy of 20th century charismatic and Pentecostal teachings and praxis an unsatisfactory place to start, how might we develop an orthopraxy of the Spirit that:

• is faithful to canonical Scripture,
• respects tradition, especially creedal affirmations, and
• wholly engages with ‘who we are’ in our contemporary culture?

In another blog at Deep Church, Steven Hamilton suggests we explore some impulses from our deep church history, such that our forebears’ understanding and praxis might inform our own experience of God through the Spirit.   Since the Holy Spirit “epitomizes the nearness of the power and presence of God” (ibid. p.9), this seems an entirely valid starting point, for the Spirit is, fundamentally, God experienced.

It was the Early Church’s reflections on their own experiences of the Spirit that led them to a fully-Trinitarian theology.*   Just as their experiences of Jesus inevitable led them to certain conclusions as to his Person, so also did their subsequent experiences of the Spirit’s work – it is clear in Luke’s narrative that he sees the Spirit continuing to do what Jesus began to do and to teach (Acts 1:1).

Fundamental to our conception of this ‘doing’ and ‘teaching’ is his ‘being with us’ (Matt 1:23; Jn 14:9), which ‘the Spirit of Jesus’ continues (Jn 14:16; Acts 16:7).   To ‘experience’ the Spirit, then, whatever else it may be, is – first and foremost – to engage in a relationship with a Person, who has come to be with us.

Following Steven, I would strongly encourage our exploration of the mystic impulse, particularly within an environment of sacred space; for whatever our emerging doctrine of the Spirit looks like, it is to be experienced, not just framed and hung on the wall.

At the same time, we shall need to ‘deconstruct’ all our assumptions about the Spirit inherited from the charismatic traditions.  The Spirit is not simply some amorphous ‘mode of operating’ of God.   He is not a set of gifts, or a power we call down, or an extra-sensory spiritual encounter.   Neither is he here to perform ‘magic tricks’ to order, to endorse or validate human ministries or callings.

We shall also need to unpick the threads of the Gnostic and dualistic characteristics that are so deeply woven into the fabric of much Christian understanding of charismatic ‘spirituality’.

* Against the backdrop of a religious paradigm in which monotheism was the overarching and ‘non-negotiable’ tenet, a Trinitarian conclusion was remarkable, and speaks to the deep authenticity of those Spirit-experiences.