Nature of the Church

The Church is the work of the Trinity—I think it would be safe to say that this statement could serve as a common starting-point for both Pentecostal and Orthodox Christians concerning the nature of the Church. The Church was conceived from eternity in the will of the Father, and realized in ‘the fullness of time’ when the Father sent his Son into the world and, through the Son, sent the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to indwell the body of believers constituting it the Church. The Church is the result of the two sendings from the Father seen in two pivotal events: Incarnation and Pentecost. Whether the Church belongs to the Trinitarian event is another question which I will not consider here.

Nikos Nissiotis once said, ‘We are superb pattern makers but lack the equivalent skills to be practical technicians.’^{^[i]} Pentecostals, by contrast, are superb practical technicians but lack the conceptual skills to be ‘pattern makers.’ Perhaps through this dialogue we may discover that our spiritual kinship runs deeper than we thought.

There are many areas of Pentecostal faith and practice which could be honed by Orthodox theological tools, such as:

1. The relation between personal and ecclesial experience: for Pentecostals, personal experience tends to become privatized and divorced from ecclesial experience.

2. The concept of authority: the tension between freedom and authority has always been problematic for Pentecostals. They tend to vacillate between the extremes of chaotic freedom and stifling authoritarianism.

3. The relation of the Son and the Spirit to the Father: Pentecostals, like their evangelical counterparts, have generally forgotten the Father.

At the same time, I hope that the Pentecostal practical skills and experience could add some depth and meaning to the ‘patterns’ created by our Orthodox brethren. Pentecostals could demonstrate that Orthodox doctrines are workable in more ways than they realize. In this paper, I would like to concentrate on three crucial points where Pentecostal experience and Orthodox theology converge.

1. The Pentecost Event is the coming of the Spirit into the church in his own person.

3. In the church, personal relation is not purely egalitarian by differentiated and ordered.

I think these points of convergence could be a fruitful way of beginning our dialogue on the church.

1. The Pentecost Event is the coming of the Spirit into the church in his own person.

Although Pentecostals speak of the day of Pentecost as the ‘birthday of the church’ their practical focus is on a personal Pentecost. Yet even a personal Pentecost, individually conceived, is not entirely off the mark. Vladimir Lossky, for one, believes that the distinctive work of the Spirit at Pentecost is the coming of the Spirit to indwell each person:

[The Spirit] appeared as a Person of the Trinity, independent of the Son as to His hypostatic origin, though sent into the world ‘in the name of the Son’. Then He appeared under the form of divided tongues of fire which rested upon each one of those who were present. This is no longer a communication of the Spirit to the Church considered corporately…. The Holy Spirit communicates Himself to persons, marking each member of the Church with a seal of personal and unique relationship to the Trinity, becoming present in each person.^{^[ii]}

Pentecostals, therefore, are quite right to emphasize the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in each person. What they generally lack is the corporate dimension. In my book Pentecostal Ecclesiology, I have tried to show that if Pentecostals could ‘corporatize,’ so to speak, their Pentecostal experience, they would not lose anything that is quintessentially Pentecostal; in fact, they would discover that much of what they treasure as Pentecostals would make even better sense. This is so because the Pentecostal experience of the Spirit is a true experience, even if Pentecostals had not been able to explain it adequately. We lack the conceptual tools to make sense of our experience to ourselves, but (speaking personally for myself here) I have found that Orthodoxy has on hand a set of conceptual tools with which Pentecostals could begin to think theologically about their experience of the Spirit’s personal indwelling.

Nikos Nissiotis, again, could serve as representative of Orthodox teaching on this point:

…the communion of the Holy Spirit is not merely the actions, the charismata, the enthusiastic elements of the community life of the Christians but the personal ‘hypostasis’ of the Holy Spirit. Church communion is not a category of the action of the Holy Spirit but the visible reference to his presence among men. The Holy Spirit is koinonia because in him and through him, the Father and the Son are One and present in the church. The communion of the Holy Spirit is his personal revelation as the Creator of the church in time in the grace given by the redeeming act of Jesus and the love of the Father.[iii]

The Pentecostal experience is in the main an experience of this statement. Pentecostals may not have a clearly articulated doctrine of the Spirit’s personal indwelling, but in their practice and testimonies, the Spirit’s personal presence is often specifically recalled. Pentecostals often use language that suggests a more direct working of the Spirit that impinges upon their senses. The Spirit is referred to not only in terms of powerful and supernatural activities, he is often spoken of as the subject of those activities. The Spirit guides, speaks, empowers, restrains, etc. This is the language used in the Book of Acts (cf. Acts 13.4; 16.6-7; 20.22, 23, 28). E.g. in David du Plessis’ classic The Spirit Bade Me Go (cf. Acts 11.12 KJV) we read: ‘I suddenly felt a warm glow come over me. I knew this was the Holy Spirit taking over….’ ‘I knew that the Holy Spirit was in control….’[iv] Dennis Bennett, one of the early Episcopalian charismatics, has something similar: ‘I feel peaceful. I don’t understand why…. Quick as a flash, the Holy Spirit said in my heart: “Of course you don’t. This is the peace that passes understanding.”’^{^[v]}

Although in speaking in this way there is sometimes a danger of fixation on the third person of the Trinity, yet there is no question that what clearly distinguishes Pentecostal spirituality is the experience of the Spirit, not as an impersonal force, but as personally present and active, carrying out certain actions as an active, personal agent. This was what Bennett noticed when he first encountered two Pentecostals who made a deep impression on him: ‘They seemed to know God—to be so sure of Him.’^{^[vi]} In contrast, evangelicals are not likely to use expressions that suggest the Spirit’s personal presence or direct action. They may speak of being ‘born again’ or illuminated by the Spirit. For them, the person of the Spirit is not the direct subject of their spiritual experience; rather, in typically Reformed fashion, the focus is on the ‘secret working of the Spirit.’[vii] If we are to use scholastic categories, evangelicals tend to focus on the ‘created graces’ of the Spirit while Pentecostals tend to speak in terms of ‘uncreated grace’. The Pentecostal language of personal presence would seem to make their understanding of the Spirit’s working in the believers closer to Rahner’s concept of ‘quasi-formal causality’ rather than the concept of ‘asymmetry’ among evangelicals which sharply distinguishes Christ from the church.^{^[viii]}

It is also in light of personal relations that we can understand the Pentecostal emphasis on supernaturalism and spectacular manifestations, and its evangelistic zeal. Pentecostals are supremely interested in the truth not as an abstraction, but in Truth as a concrete manifestation—as person, specifically the second and third persons of the Trinity. The second person is usually at the centre of their devotion.[ix] As Steven Land puts it, ‘Jesus is the center and the Holy Spirit is the circumference’ of Pentecostal spirituality.[x]

The centrality of Jesus is evidenced by the fact that the four- or five-fold gospel that defines Pentecostal spirituality is essentially Christocentric. It is about Jesus as savior, sanctifier, baptizer, healer and coming king. In much of the early history of Pentecostalism, a strong Jesus devotion, especially devotion to the Name of Jesus, was quite pervasive, as David Reed has shown. Their songs were mostly about Jesus. The Holy Spirit is at the ‘circumference,’ but no less a real person, energizing the people of God to focus on Jesus. Pentecostals talk mostly about the Spirit, but they talk mostly to Jesus. This instinctive correlation between Jesus and the Spirit is very much in keeping with the larger Christian tradition. Historically there is a general reticence to speak directly about the Spirit and more in terms of his hidden workings. We see this across the major Christian traditions.[xi] This reticence may be due to the practical fear of enthusiasm.[xii] But a theological reason for this ‘apophaticism of the Spirit’ is that it is in the very nature of the Spirit to efface himself; he is ‘the person without a personal face.’ Therefore the kind of intense focus involving direct address to the Spirit seen, for example, in Benny Hinn and Cho Yonggi is aberrant and does not represent what is best in Pentecostal spirituality. I am not saying that no form of direct address to the Spirit is ever justified. We do in fact have a few such prayers in the Christian tradition. Perhaps a better known one is the ‘Veni Creator.’ But another less well known but certainly familiar with the Orthodox is the opening prayer at Matins: ‘O Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth, Who art everywhere present and fillest all things, Treasury of good things and Giver of life: Come and dwell in us, and cleanse us of all impurity, and save, our souls, O Good One.’ Given the tendency in modern theology to reduce the Spirit to an impersonal force or immanent principle in the world, perhaps we do need a few prayers to the Spirit if only to remind ourselves that He is the Third Person of the Trinity. But we, Pentecostals, must beware of a pneumatological fixation that distorts the Trinitarian relationship.

It is the Pentecostal focus on personal intimacy with Jesus that makes sense of their most distinctive spiritual marker: glossolalia. Glossolalia, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is ultimately about personal relationship with God through the Holy Spirit.[xiii] Personal intimacy is what Pentecostals treasure. But in ways that they themselves could not fully explain, personal intimacy is somehow linked to glossolalia. We see this connection often recounted in Pentecostal testimonies. As Jack Hayford, a leader of the Foursquare Church tells us, he could not explain why speaking in tongues is associated with the filling of the Spirit, but each time he prays for people to be filled with the Spirit they speak in tongues.[xiv] Early charismatics, too, seemed to have similar experiences with respect to tongues.^{^[xv]} In short, early Pentecostals and charismatics had an ‘initial evidence’ experience; I think what caused many today to question of the ‘initial evidence’ doctrine was simply their inability to explain it theologically.

But there is perhaps a better theological explanation for the Pentecostals’ privileging glossolalia. It has to do with a characteristic that is proper to the Holy Spirit. David Coffey has observed that ‘alone of the three the Holy Spirit in his personal property is the Godhead in purely receptive mode’ and as such ‘he is the only one who can be, and is, communicated in absolute (unqualified) immediacy to a created spirit, which itself can only be understood as pure receptivity to God.’[xvi] Or, as a more recent writer has put it, the most distinctive work of the Spirit is rest:

Is there anything the Spirit can do, that the Son can’t do better? Yes, rest. The logic of the Spirit is not the logic of productivity, but the logic of superfluity, not the logic of work but the logic of Sabbath. The Spirit like the Sabbath sanctifies.[xvii]

If receptivity is the distinctive mark of the Spirit in the Trinitarian relationship it would explain the special significance of glossolalia as the sign of the Spirit’s personal and immediate indwelling. Speaking in tongues, as Pentecostals have found out experientially, involves a crossing of the threshold where one gives up control and discovers a new freedom by being fully yielded to the Spirit.[xviii] This transition can also be found in the contemplative tradition where one moves from active prayer to passive or ‘mental prayer.’[xix] Pentecostals understand this truth implicitly when they counsel total surrender, the need to ‘let go and let God’ as a prerequisite to being filled with the Spirit. The sign of total surrender is the moment they cross the threshold and break out in tongues. In other words, in the experience of Spirit-baptism, the Spirit indwells the Christian in his proper mode as pure receptivity. In such a state, as St. Teresa of Avila puts it, the contemplative becomes ‘all tongues.’ As in water baptism where the baptizand passively submits to the watery tomb and emerges to new life, the candidate of a personal Spirit-baptism surrenders himself to death and is raised to new life of spiritual empowering. In summary, the personal immediacy that Pentecostals cherish has its basis in the Spirit’s proprium as ‘pure receptivity.’

Pentecostals, of course, also believe that the mode of the Spirit’s presence is not merely receptive. The Holy Spirit who is the Gift of the Father (passive) is himself the giver of diverse gifts (1 Cor 12) and therefore also very much active in the church and in individual lives. Pentecostals, however, tend to see the passive and active modes of the Spirit’s presence as sequential rather than dialectical and on-going. After one has received the Spirit in the initial act of total surrender, one must henceforth become active as one is empowered by the Spirit. Thus, the ‘active’ rather than ‘contemplative’ life tends to become more definitive of Pentecostal spirituality.

Orthodox Christians speak of the church as constituted eucharistically by the Spirit. Pentecostals have no such doctrine, but in practice, the early Pentecostals manifested an implicit sacramental theology especially in worship. The Lord’s Supper appears to hold a special place in early Pentecostal worship. While they might not use the term ‘sacrament’ they certainly did not treat it as a mere memorial either. Some early Pentecostals referred to the Lord’s Supper as a ‘healing ordinance.’ They saw in the Supper a special focused presence of Jesus Christ who is present to heal. More significantly, the ministry of the gifts of the Spirit in 1 Cor 14:26 is associated with the breaking of bread.[xx] According to Zizioulas, this juxtaposition of worship, spiritual gifts and the Lord’s Supper accords with the practice of the early church.[xxi] The Apostolic Church of Britain even had a collection of Eucharistic hymns called Hymns at the Lord’s Table.[xxii] Here is one of the hymns written by Ian Macpherson, a minister of the Apostolic Church:

There were also other practices that suggest an implicit sacramental theology, such as the service of divine healing in which the sick were anointed with oil. The ethnographer Marie Griffiths has noted the pervasive use of the ‘anointed cloth’ among early American Pentecostals.[xxiii] Among Pentecostals of the Global South, sacramental practices are more widespread and continue unabated especially in the African contexts, such as the use of ‘blessed’ or holy water and various objects used in prayer for divine healing.[xxiv]

3. In the church, personal relation is not purely egalitarian but differentiated and ordered

The Pentecostal communal life could be best described as egalitarian and hierarchical rather than purely egalitarian. Its egalitarian nature could be seen in the way members of the congregation address each other as ‘brother’ or ‘sister.’ If God is our Father, then all members of his household are brothers and sisters. If the Spirit is poured out on ‘all flesh,’ then potentially everyone—young and old, men and women—could be used by God. God is no respecter of persons.

This egalitarian impulse, however, sits uneasily with the hierarchical impulse. While Pentecostals believe that all are filled with the Spirit, they also seem to accept the idea that the minister of the gospel has a special calling and is therefore a ‘specially anointed servant of God.’ How this idea arises is hard to say, but it is quite pervasive among ordinary Pentecostal believers all over the world. The lengths to which this concept is taken could be quite astounding at times. I have known of older Pentecostal churches in our part of the world where the congregation would put up with a dysfunctional pastor for years for fear that something terrible would happen to them if they should ‘touch the Lord’s anointed.’ This kind of understanding could be open to serious abuse; in fact, in the history of Pentecostalism there were attempts to legitimize the ‘apostolic’ authority of the minister with disastrous consequences: the Latter Rain movement in the 1940s, the Shepherding movement in the 1970s, and most recently, Peter Wagner’s the doctrine of apostleship. Yet, there is an element of truth in the spiritual instinct of ordinary Christians which should not be lightly dismissed. I think we could call it the Pentecostal ‘episcopal’ instinct.

These two impulses are not wrong in themselves. But the failure to hold them together has resulted a history of vacillating between an extreme egalitarianism resulting in chaotic freedom, which is then over-corrected by an extreme authoritarianism and vice versa. The problem is pervasive, not only among Western Pentecostals, but more especially with Pentecostals in the Global South. We must freely admit that at this point Pentecostal experience needs to be chastened and purified. The question is how? Perhaps we could learn from the Orthodox the concept of an ordered but mutually dependent relationship. But for the Orthodox this taxis has its source in the liturgy which enacts the revelation-response dynamic, where the leader of the liturgical assembly proclaims the revelation of God and the people respond with the liturgical ‘Amen.’ In the liturgy, the absolute equality of the priesthood of all believers is expressed in a differentiated and ordered relationship between the leader and the people of God. The relationship is not one of domination but of mutual dependence. Thus ‘no church without bishop’ is complemented by ‘no bishop without the church.’[xxv]

Pentecostals, however, do not have the liturgical experience to hold these two impulses together. Why is it so? We have noted in the previous point that early Pentecostals had a sacramental practice centring on the Lord’s Supper, but this sacramental instinct was suppressed in its later history. Without a Eucharistic centre it would not be possible to develop a liturgy to hold these opposing impulses in a healthy tension.

But what is the liturgy? The question needs to be asked because even among Pentecostal theologians the theological dimension of the liturgy is often missed. E.g., when they make statements like ‘any form of worship is a liturgy’ they are already presupposing a social science definition. Worship, then, becomes a matter of personal tastes and preferences. Paul Bradshaw’s distinction between two ways of praying might help to clarify its theological meaning. Bradshaw distinguishes between what he calls ‘monastic’ prayer and ‘cathedral’ prayer. In cathedral prayer worshippers are praying the prayer of the church, while in monastic prayer, worshippers are engaged in a kind of meditative prayer in which the truth is assimilated for one’s own spiritual benefit. Cathedral prayer presupposes the givenness of the liturgy: worshippers participate in, enact or ‘indwell’ (to use a term from Michael Polanyi) the prayer of the church. In monastic prayer, the need of the worshipper is foremost; the worshipper seeks through affective prayer to apply the truth to oneself.[xxvi] From this broad distinction, Pentecostal worship is quite clearly ‘monastic,’ and it is becoming more and more so, such that much of modern Pentecostal worship has become highly subjective and individualistic. This trend is particularly disturbing as it shows that the Pentecostal identity is increasingly being shaped by the consumerist culture of this world.

If Pentecostals had continued to nurture their sacramental instinct especially by focusing on the centrality of the Lord’s Supper, they could have developed a tradition of ‘cathedral’ prayer, that is, a liturgical tradition capable of holding together the egalitarian and hierarchical impulses. Here is where Pentecostals must be open to learning from their Orthodox counterparts.

In the foregoing I have briefly shown that in three crucial points concerning the nature of the church, Pentecostal experience and Orthodox theology converge. Of the three, I think the most basic is our shared concern for personhood.

It is quite fashionable in certain theological circles to reduce the concrete particularity of truth as a person, more precisely, the Truth as the Person of Christ, to an abstraction, a cosmic principle, all in the interest of inter-religious harmony and inclusiveness. Against this trend, Pentecostals and Orthodox Christians share a common concern in proclaiming and exemplifying the truth of personhood. Personhood is the key to understanding the whole creation; and it finds its most concrete embodiment in the church as the communion of persons. But the church is more than a communion of persons; if it were, it is no more than another sociological reality. The church is a ‘divine-humanity’ indwelled by the person of the Spirit. The church is the communion, not just of persons, but of ecclesial persons, the communion of saints (sanctorum communio), a people shaped by a distinctive story: the Trinitarian story of the two sendings. But as Stephen Benko has argued, the original and primary meaning of sanctorum communio is not of saints (sancti) but of holy things (sancta), that is, the sacraments.[xxvii] Or, we could say that the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, are the basis for the communion of saints. In some modern Eucharistic prayers, following the Eastern rites, the celebrant declares before the distribution of the bread and wine: ‘Holy things for holy people (sancta sanctis). The people are made holy because they receive holy things.[xxviii]

The church is also the key to the hypostatization of the entire creation. Through the church the entire creation will attain their distinct hypostases. In other words, God did not create the church to fulfil some bigger purpose in the world, such as peace and justice; rather, God created the world in order that the world would become the church or find its fulfilment in and through the church. Pentecostals understand this truth instinctively with their focus on personhood, but it takes the Orthodox to explain it, giving it a concrete shape and pattern. E.g. Zizioulas envisions reality in terms of a ‘chain of hypostatic existence’ with the triune God as the source of personhood and particularity; then human persons made in the image of God; and the rest of creation hypostatized by ‘incorporation in the human being’.[xxix]

Pentecostals have much to learn from the Orthodox ‘pattern makers.’ But they also have much to contribute. In the area of sacramentology, they demonstrated practically that sacramental healing is no mere ritual. Healings did take place during the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. More importantly, their spirituality focusing on personal relationship could contribute to strengthening the ‘chain of hypostatic existence’ which embraces even the non-human creation.

[i] Nikos Nissiotis, ‘The Theology of the Church and its Accomplishment,’ Ecumenical Review 29.1 (Jan. 1977), p. 75.

[ii] Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London: James Clarke, 1957), p. 168. Lossky sees the communication of the Spirit to the church corporately in the Johannine Pentecost in Jn 20.19-23 (pp. 166-168). Lossky is perhaps correct if the first communication is to the ecclesia congregans while the second (Pentecost in Acts) is to the ecclesia congregata.

[iii] Nissiotis, ‘Spirit, Church, and Ministry’, Theology Today 19 (1963), 485.

[iv] David du Plessis, The Spirit Bade Me Go: The Astounding Move of God in the Denominational Churches (Oakland, CA: David du Plessis, 1960), p. 16.

[v] Dennis J. Bennett, Nine O’ Clock in the Morning (London: Coverdale House Publishers, 1974), 80.

[vi] Bennett, Nine O’ Clock, 20.

[vii] This and similar phrases are used frequently by Calvin. See Institutes of the Christian Religion 3.1.

[viii] E.g. John Webster, ‘The Church and the Perfection of God,’ in Community of the Word, eds. Mark Husbands and Daniel J. Treier (IVP, 2005), 47.

[ix] David Reed, ‘In Jesus’ Name’: The History and Beliefs of Oneness Pentecostals (JPTSup 31; Blandford Forum, Dorset: Deo Publishing, 2008), 32-68.

[x] Steven Land, Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom, JPTSup 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), p. 23.

[xi] Eugene Rogers, Jr., ‘The Mystery of the Spirit in Three Traditions: Calvin, Rahner, Florensky Or, You Keep Wondering Where the Spirit Went’, Modern Theology 19.2 (April 2003), 243-60. See also his After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources outside the Modern West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), chap. 1.

[xii] After the Spirit, 28.

[xiii] See Simon Chan, ‘The Language Game of Glossolalia, or Making Sense of the “Initial Evidence”’, Pentecostalism in Context: Essays in Honor of William W. Menzies, eds. Wonsuk Ma and Robert P. Menzies (JPTSup 11; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), pp. 80-95.

[xiv] The Beauty of Spiritual Language: My Journey Toward the Heart of God (Dallas, TX: Word, 1992), pp. 189-91.

[xv] E.g. Bennett, Nine O’ Clock; John Sherrill, They Speak in Other Tongues (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964).

[xvi] David Coffey, ‘Did you Receive the Holy Spirit When You Believed?’ Some Basic Questions for Pneumatology (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette U. Press, 2005), p. 38.

[xvii] Eugene Rogers, After the Spirit, 71.

[xviii] This is the image used by Léon Joseph Suenens in his discussion on glossolalia. See A New Pentecost? trans. Francis Martin (New York: Seabury, 1975), 102.

[xix] Chan, ‘The Language Game of Glossolalia’, 87-88.

[xx] Jonathan Black, ‘Toward the Possibility of a Pentecostal Ecclesiology,’ 7-8. http://apostolictheology.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/toward-the-possibility-of-a-pentecostal-ecclesiology.pdf (assessed 1 Oct 2012)

[xxi] John Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, ed. Paul McPartlan (London: T and T Clark, 2006), 193.

[xxii] Black, ‘Pentecostal Ecclesiology,’ 10.

[xxiii] R. Marie Griffith, ‘Material Devotion--Pentecostal Prayer Cloths,’ http://www.materialreligion.org/journal/handkerchief.html. Accessed 1 Feb 2011.

[xxiv] Allan Anderson, Zion and Pentecost, 290-300; ‘African Initiated Churches of the Spirit and Pneumatology’, Word and World, 23.2 (Spring 2003), 178-186.

[xxv] Nicholas Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit, trans. Vitaly Permiakov; ed. Michael Plekon (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), p. 37.

[xxvi] Paul F. Bradshaw, Two Ways of Praying: Introducing Liturgical Spirituality (London: SPCK, 1999). Bradshaw’s cathedral and monastic prayers should be understood as ideal types and should not be taken to imply that monastic prayer exclusively defines the spirituality of the monastic orders.

[xxvii] Stephen Benko, The Meaning of Sanctorum Communio (London: SCM, 1964).

[xxviii] Catechism of the Catholic Church, §948.

[xxix] Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, p. 67.