Editorial: The ‘Visible Church’.
This issue brings together a multidisciplinary focus on critical issues relating to the visible church. Stephen Fogarty, who spends his days leading a national theological college, is well-equipped to apply leadership theory to one of the key problems of the visible Pentecostal church. Few people who work in organizations long enough manage to remain unaffected by the spectacular fall of charismatic leaders or, worse, by manipulative or self-centred leadership. When this occurs in Churches, the affect on their public witness can be catastrophic. Eric Newberg extends this problem into a critical issue of public policy—evangelical support for the modern State of Israel. Newberg explores the impact of American Pentecostal adoption of fundamentalist dispensationalism on Arabic Christians and displaced Palestinians, and its implications for Pentecostal public theology. The result is a fundamental challenge to the sources of classical Pentecostal theology, a complexus that has always rotated around answering the question ’where are we in time?’ Newberg asks the further question, ‘How can a movement speak to the world when its public positions are open to charges of hypocrisy.’ It is only suitable, then, that consideration of this case study in public proclamation is followed by Newton’s analysis of another form of proclamation—Christian prophecy. Newton’s specialization is in the study of the Revelation. His study adds point to the growing body of literature which unpacks the problems inherent in the classical cessationist interpretations of the charismatic gifts. He then explores those limits which are more faithful to the biblical record and the implications these have for public witness through prophecy. Tanya Riches, a rising young Pentecostal scholar of worship cultures, extends this by applying ritological approaches to the interpretation of one of the world’s leading producers of Christian worship music, Hillsong Australia. Interpreting megachurch ‘inner spaces’ as a form of ‘inner public’ connects powerfully to Goh’s work on the function of “the mega” in creating spiritual plausibilities.[1]
The tensions identifiable here—between Newberg’s charismatic approach, Newton’s correction from a classical Pentecostal perspective, and Riches’ exploration within a functioning spiritual community—imply just the sort of ‘crisis’ in Pentecostal Studies which Wolfgang Vondey explores in his important new book, Beyond Pentecostalism. His use of the metaphor of ‘play’ builds on and expands rather well on many of the themes raised by Riches, providing an exteriorization and agenda to the interiority described in the spontaneity and serious ‘play’ evidenced by worship music. This issue ends with an international symposium considering the issues raised in the book.
Since World War II, scholarship relating to evangelicalism has developed almost to ‘industry’ status. As Pentecostal scholarship develops, paying attention to the parallels will be instructive. In his Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, Donald Dayton makes the observation that the scholarship of evangelicalism was warped by the dominance of the reformed tradition in evangelical scholarly institutions. The result of the observation was to change the thing being observed. A similar pattern can be detected in the growing literature on Pentecostalism, where it has become an object of interest to charismatic scholars and others from outside Pentecostal communities. Vondey’s account—and the surrounding discussion—points to the need for classical Pentecostals to take the study of their own tradition more seriously. The alternative is, as proposed in Vondey’s title, to become a subject, first of sociology, then of theology, and finally, perhaps, of history.
The Editors
---
1. Robbie B. H. Goh, ‘Hillsong and “Megachurch”
practice: semiotics, spatial logic, and the embodiment of contemporary
evangelical Protestantism,’ Material Religion, vol. 4, no. 3, p. 285.