Where were the gifts of the Spirit between the New Testament and 1900?

The Healing Reawakening: Reclaiming Our Lost Inheritance by Francis MacNutt

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had the opportunity to speak with Beth on the phone last night (she was making sure that I wasn’t stranded in London as the hijacked email purported. Thanks). I realized that while she said she was struggling to square MacNutt’s use of scripture, I had glossed over it. Perhaps it was because I have heard similar arguments all my life, but I found when I came to a block quote of scripture I said to myself, “ah that one” and skimmed through it.

Nothing jumped out at me as being way off. There may have been some isogesis evident in his insistence that the open-endedness of Acts made implicit that early church ministry was expected to continue (73). Was that Luke’s intention, or was it simply that he could not yet comment on Paul’s death.

Also the case he built that healing on the Sabbath was specifically a cause of his death seemed a bit of a stretch (43). Surely it was part of it, but Jesus’ conflict with the religious authorities stretched well beyond that. Still the one-sidedness of this argument doesn’t detract from the conclusion that Jesus really valued healing. That is evident in every gospel.

Overall his use of scripture seemed fair, obviously used in service of his point, but not out of context, if without the benefit of higher biblical criticism.

For me, the greatest value in MacNutt’s book is answering the question I have always had, “what happened to the Baptism in the Spirit from the time of the New testament to 1900?” It is, I think, easy for classical Pentecostals to think that they disappeared from the church completely until we came along. That has always been a sad thought to me, and indeed, if it were true, it would lead me to question the validity of our Pentecostal experience.

I appreciate how MacNutt traces both the factors that lead to minimizing the charisms, particularly healing, as well as the remnant of the saints of God who kept the memory alive.

I think he made his case powerfully with me. I fell at times, into reverie, imagining myself praying for the healing of people in my church. I saw myself setting people free from demonic oppression and addictions. It seemed just the thing our village needs.

Repeatedly in the Masters in Spiritual Formation program, I have been faced with the irony that as we study the richness of the various streams of Christianity, God is, at the same time, drawing me deeper into my own.

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Healing

I watched a healing service conducted by Kenneth Haggin at a church in Sterling Heights, MI. He spent perhaps a half hour preaching about the woman with the issue of blood. Many of his phrases sounded like he had just read MacNutt (The Healing Reawakening: Reclaiming Our Lost Inheritance). The second half hour showed him praying for the people in need of healing in rapid fire. He explained that it worked better for him that way, when he felt he had the anointing, which presented itself as a burning in his hands, he had to use it quickly. I also found I interesting that he distinguished between the gift of healing (restoring what is already there, like bringing hearing to a damaged ear drum) and miracles (creating something that wasn’t there to begin with, like bringing hearing to someone born with out an ear drum). He had the gift of healing, he said, but he would believe with people for a miracle as well.

Many fell under the power of God as he prayed for them. I have been in these kinds of services and have no problem with people falling. I watched the people who didn’t fall when he prayed with some amusement. I watched their faces as they tried to figure out what to do next. I noticed that Hagin laid his hand on the top of their head with the heel of his palm resting on their forehead. He would push back as he proclaimed, “Receive!” I have had strong physical reactions to the Spirit as people have prayed for me, and I also know what it is like to loose your balance as a minister pushes on your head. I found myself trying to identify which ones just lost their balance and which were overcome by the power of the Holy Spirit (like the lady with the cane who started quaking before she fell.)

Even in the midst of my amusement and critical ogling, a curious thing happened. Toward the end of the video, the Spirit was working on me too! At times when he said, “Receive” my arm would have a strong reflexive twitch. It is weird I know, but that is a way my body has routinely reacted to being overcome by the Spirit. I wanted to find someone to pray for when I was done watching to see if I could share some of that “anointing.”

I have continued to experience this as well. As I read scholarly treatments of healing, the Spirit overtakes me and my shoulders quake. Tonight as Cliff was playing the part of the man born blind at our lenten service, I felt that same electric shock move through me when we described how he was healed.

That's what it is like too... just now I remembered the time that I leaned one hand on a cooler in the coffeehouse and the other hand on a display case with faulty wiring and had a nice jolt of 220 run through my arms. That same jerk reaction is what happens to me still when the Spirit is on me. Tears come to my eyes after it happens and a tenderness rests on me.

As I said this has happened several times now as I have been reading about reading, especially when I start daydreaming about God using me in that gift, strengthening the latent gift of healing I have identified might be in me. Perhaps it is the Holy Spirit dreaming along with me and encouraging me to go for it.

Pentecostal Spiritual Direction

Dallas Willard told us that everyone has a spiritual formation the question is: what kind of formation will it be? In the same way Moon and Benner’s book Spiritual Direction and the Care of Souls has shown us that every tradition has ways of offering guidance for that formation, though it may not traditionally look like spiritual direction, as we know it.

This is true of the Pentecostal tradition as well. I found the places where McMahan found spiritual direction in my own tradition interesting. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms. (The terms the other authors who write about spiritual direction use make these ideas foreign and in many cases McMahan seems to find it hard to distinguish between pastoral council and spiritual direction.)

I remember many times growing up when the Spirit would talk to us in the midst of a service. Talk about spiritual direction! There he was, the Spirit speaking directly to us. I’ve often wondered why God would choose this method to address us, and why we didn’t take it even more seriously.

Here’s how I remember it happening then: the service would come to a place where it was particularly warm, what I would call today, consolation. Sunday nights were always warmer to me, they were less restricted, or stuffy, no one seemed in a hurry to leave. Often it would happen even before the sermon was given (the sermon would always still be given) when the time of singing was coming to an end and this feeling of consolation was over us. The music would be playing and we’d all be worshipping on our own a sort of melding of voices all expressing the worship of each heart. The voices would rise and fall together, and in some beautiful moments create new harmonies – a new song that would build, as a group and no one knew where it was going or even what language it had become. Then in the midst of this someone would feel a bubbling with in him or her, the Spirit tugging on them to speak out. They didn’t know what they would say, but they yielded and words came out – they spoke out loud sensing that what the Spirit was about was for everyone, they would raise their voice above the rest. As those around them recognized that a voice was standing out, they would hush and soon the whole room would be in hushed, uneasy silence as we waited hearing a message in a language not our own, perhaps not of this earth. The speaker would finish and we would wait. We understood that if this was of God, there would be an interpretation we all could understand. So I would continue my uneasy silence with the rest, listening to the Spirit afraid he might want to use me to bring his message. Then the interpretation would come, in the same way as the message in tongues. I don’t think the interpreter would know what she was going to say ahead of time, perhaps just a phrase or a word would come to her mind and as she said it the Spirit offered more.

There were of course times they would get it wrong, times when you could sense where they left the trail and finished under their own power. The message always had to be weighed against scripture and understood. Then there was the matter of responding. Often it would be something like, “This message was for someone here to night, if you sense it was you take the message to heart and do what it says,” though I wonder if the message wasn’t always for all of us, since it was given to us all and we had to do more wrestling with how it applied to each of us.

Sometimes it would be a comforting reminder that Jesus would come for us soon. Sometimes it was a warning to get our house in order, or to love more fervently.

Sometimes the interpreter would preface the message with “thus saith the Lord…” echoing the words of the prophets in the King James Bible that they undoubtedly loved very much. We pastors usually teach people to offer a little more wiggle room, “I feel the Lord may be saying…” Either way we recognized that the words coming from the voice of God had great authority and importance.

In this way the direction offered by the use of the gifts of the Spirit is like the direction of the Russian Staretz, it can be very directive and authoritative when truly discerned and spoken.

McMahan mentions also the use of testimony (155). From the very beginning of our movement publications spread the testimony of what God was doing in the lives of individuals. The Apostolic Faith was a publication from the Azuza street revivals covering 1906-08. They contain direction in the form of testimonies, instruction and answers to questions. This tradition still continues with Today’s Pentecostal Evangel.

There is a danger of the Spiritual Direction becoming too individual. I think McMahan is wrong to suggest that meeting one on one with a spiritual director increases that danger. The spiritual director as another human member of the body of Christ is a point of contact with the community that can be lacking in the anonymity of the worship service. I dare say every believer finding growth through the charisms (charismata) of the Spirit would do well to find a mature director.