Pentecostalism and the Three Ages of the Church

Introduction

In this article I will be presenting the notion of the three ages of the church: the Petrine, the Pauline and the Johannine. The Petrine age refers to the Petrine Church, the Church of St. Peter, or of Rome. The Pauline era refers to the Church of the Protestant centuries. The Johannine Church refers to the Church to come, which is the Church of the Holy Spirit. My point in this article will be that global pentecostalism (defined in its broadest and most inclusive sense) is the third, Johannine age of the Church. I will argue that this idea of the three ages of the Church provides pentecostalism, as a global movement (rather than a ‘denomination’ of Christianity) with a philosophical basis for self-understanding, which is not dependent upon how Protestant denominations understand themselves and articulate themselves theologically.

My starting point for this article is tradition. Christianity has always thought in terms of ages. The Bible is divided into the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Covenants, marking different epochs. Epochal thinking structures the Bible itself. For Christians, there are the two covenants plus the third age, which is the Age to Come or the Second Coming of the Messiah. Jesus’ life has also traditionally been seen as divided into periods: the hidden years in Nazareth, the years of his public ministry, and his Passion. In the notion of the three ages of the Church we have a narrower Christian-specific kind of epochal thinking, which represents Christian self-understanding. I will show in what follows that the idea of the three ages of the Church dates back to the time when the New Testament was being consolidated by the Church into the book we know today.

The starting point of my subject - the three ages of the Church – is Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), and his major work, The Star of Redemption (1920).¹ Rosenzweig is regarded as the greatest Jewish philosopher since Spinoza (1632-1677). In The Star Rosenzweig reiterates in a modern idiom the ancient Christian prophecy of the three ages of the Church. In Part Three of The Star, the section entitled ‘On the Possibility of Obtaining the Kingdom by Prayer’ Rosenzweig distinguishes three ages as historical epochs of Christianity, in which and through which God is redeeming the times. We are not concerned with Rosenzweig so much in this article, nor with The Star of Redemption as a key work of theological philosophy for our time, but we start here. It is Rosenzweig who broaches the idea of the three ages of the Church within theological philosophy at our point in time. In this article I shall just describe the idea and provide some background to it.

I will proceed by providing my interpretation of Rosenzweig’s description of the three ages of the Church, age by age (although of course they are not strictly chronological and we would be wrong to think of them as such), then I will provide some background to the notion, aiming to show something, in summary form, of its spiritual pedigree.

The Petrine Church

The first age of the Church is that of the Petrine Church. The starting point is in the ancient world. Christianity was born into a world (and Christ was born into a world) which "was united under the sceptre of Caesar".² Although the Roman Empire was a unity founded on force and violence and – as Rosenzweig points out – it was a limited unity and something of a superficial one, nevertheless, the Roman Empire, founded on the Greek oikoumenê³, "offered favourable soil to Christianity".⁴

The Petrine Church gathered people by persuasion, by the word, not by force and violence. The Petrine Church offered itself as "Mother Church". In throwing "its protective cloak around the destiny of the whole world" Rosenzweig says it offered a visible body of unity that knew no borders of either time or place. "Within its bosom, no one may remain only for himself." ⁵ People became for the Church as well as for themselves and others. Yet this situation paved the way for the Reformation because the Church as an institution came between man and God. Real seekers of the Lord (like Luther) could not find Christ directly, personally, immediately, as the apostles had, and as Paul had made it clear you should.

There is a popular tendency from Luther to Dostoyevsky to see the Church of St. Peter as having historically succumbed to the third temptation of Christ. The devil took Jesus to the top of a high mountain from where he could behold all the kingdoms of the world, and said, "All this I will give you if you will bow down and worship me." (Mt. 4: 9). Jesus banished the devil once and for all with the emphatic words: "It is written, you shall worship the Lord your God and only Him you shall serve" (Mt. 4:10). But later, says this popular tendency, in order to win the kingdoms of this world, the papal Church had bowed to worship the devil. Rosenzweig, more rightly, sees the Petrine Church not as a fake spiritual version of the Roman Empire, but as the opposite of that Empire, as the complete transformation of it in the light of eternity.

"Caesar’s Mediterranean empire secured its existence by means of walls and moats throughout the mainland, against the rest of the earth, on which it had given up conquering." ⁶ Then comes Rosenzweig’s reversal of the idea of the Roman Catholic Church as a continuation of the Roman Empire: "It is into this illusory image, into this mirror of a world-wide empire, that Christians came to place its exact opposite: externally with its back against its organisation, it survived the collapse of the empire brought about by the throng of the world’s peoples, kept out in vain by the moats and ramparts, and it survives into our times: the Church of Rome." ⁷

One last point about the Petrine Church, Rosenzweig’s philosophical (rather than theological) reading of the closing of Plato’s academy in Athens and of philosophical schools generally is interesting. "The closing of the philosophical schools in Athens by the authorities who had become Christian marks the end of ecclesiastical antiquity and the beginning of the ecclesiastical Middle Ages, or in other words: the end of Patristics and the beginning of Scholasticism." ⁸ While these schools of philosophy were open and centres of learning, Christianity did battle with them, as we see in Paul, and as we see in Augustine and all of the greatest Church Fathers and Mothers. The relationship between Christians and philosophers, between catechetical schools and schools of philosophy was one where those of Christian faith persuaded the pagan philosophers of their position with the philosopher’s own instrument of reason. When the philosophical schools were closed, in the sixth century, it marked a shift in Christianity’s relationship with paganism. ⁹ Of the closing of the schools of philosophy Rosenzweig writes: "From then on, pagan antiquity became for the Church an opponent as intangible as a phantom and yet very colourfully visible and hung as it were like a painting on the wall, against which the power of action – and here, the power of love – was inadequate to win the victory." ¹⁰ Paganism becomes "like a painting on the wall" because it is no longer something embodied ‘out there’ in the Christianised Empire, but it is ‘in here’, internalised, but expressed in representations. Christians no longer dialogued with pagans and paganism, but discovered it reflectively, by looking within themselves. And from within themselves Christians were able to bring paganism back to life. The Roman Catholic Middle Ages would break up as men and women found the pagan within and brought it to life in what we know as the Renaissance, the trigger in some sense of the Reformation.

The Pauline Church

Rosenzweig’s philosophical reading of the emergence of the Pauline Church, that is, of the Protestant era, is not a common view. A common view is that the corruption of the Roman Church became so extreme that a movement rose up within the Church, which Frederick the Wise fostered, ¹¹ which tried to purify the Church of traditions and customs that were judged inauthentic, that did not reflect the Gospel message understood in terms of the Bible as a whole. The Epistles of Paul, particularly that to the Romans, became the main lens through which the ‘whole’ Bible was brought into view.

Rosenzweig’s analysis is again philosophical not historical. Essentially he sees a move from a Church driven by love, to a Church driven by faith. The classic Protestant formula for redemption is "justification is by faith alone", but this leaves love out of the picture, at least by name. The love of the Petrine church is a like a mother’s love for her children who she shelters, protects and supports (rather more like the old fashioned rather disciplining mater, than the cosy modern ‘mum’).

The faith of the Pauline Church is based on a particular belief, or confession, of which there are many, and of which Luther’s stand at the Council of Worms (1521) is the type and the paradigm. At Worms, Luther stood before the symbolic assembled might of the world and the Church, but he would not recant what he taught and wrote. He stood alone by what be believed. He had taught and written that salvation was decided between God and the individual. Salvation was dependent upon God, not Rome. Salvation was decided by faith and faith was a personal matter before God, and Luther had the Bible to back him up. After Luther, founders of other Protestant denominations, like Calvin and Wesley, shared Luther’s individualism, but disagreed with him sufficiently to confess their basic beliefs slightly otherwise. Protestantism is always like this, belief-led, and always has the propensity to fragment, and for new break-away belief-led churches to start up.

In the Petrine age, therefore, the Church is very much part of the world, and world-directed; but having won the world, in the Pauline era, the Church turns inward and individualises. Christianity becomes what Rosenzweig describes as "an inner activity of the soul on itself, a self-conversion of man that turned its eyes away from the world in order to win the soul and only the soul, the lonely soul of the individual, without regard to any world." ¹² We go from a social Church with cultural political presence – indeed, an Imperial presence - to an individualistic Church with emphasis on the individual’s private world. Insofar as there remains a social political world, it is that of a collective of such individuals.

Love is not guaranteed by faith. In the Pauline Church faith is guaranteed by correctness of doctrine. In terms of the Christianisation of the world, initiated by God ("for God so loved the world…"), once paganism was made "like a painting on the wall", once the philosophical schools were closed and Christianity closed in upon itself, and paganism began to be internalised as memory and imagination, then, Rosenzweig says, "the power of love – was inadequate to win the victory over paganism." ¹³ It would take the powers of faith to drive the internalised pagan from his harbour in the human heart, a faith that purged and cleansed the heart, a puritan faith, an evangelical faith, that spread from heart to heart. If the Petrine Church was this-worldly and other-worldly, the Pauline Church was unworldly. But the unworldliness of puritanical Christians was set within a counter-movement of bourgeois worldliness, a saeculum¹⁴ from which of course we get the idea of the secular, or rather, from which that idea comes to be. The unity of the Petrine Church established after the fall of Rome in the fifth century, was shattered on all sides, in the sixteenth century, by the Church of the Pauline "epoch" which is a saeculum, because it desecrates the past. Secularity refers to a "drift" from the sacred, which is exactly what commences with the Pauline centuries. They are established not so much by a love, but by a doctrinal faith, and subscribing to a formal confession of faith that would be adhered to and anchored within in the ego.

If the typical book of the Petrine Church is Augustine’s City of God (De Civitate Dei), in which the Christian City of God, the Church on its pilgrim way down the centuries, is defined over against the polymath pagan Varro, the typical text of the Pauline Church is Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ (De Imitatio Christi) concerned as it is only with the eradication within the Christian individual of the inner pagan, defined in terms of sin. While in Augustine’s Confessions, a classic of the Petrine epoch, God seeks Augustine personally and calls him to the Church, in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a classic of the Pauline epoch, the person seeks heaven with God’s guidance in an allegory, which is by definition abstract, referring to Everyman and no-one, but tracing the journey of the individual soul in search of God. In these rough contrasts we may glimpse the contrast between two Christian epochs and their Churches.

The Johannine Church

The third age of the Church, the Christianity of the future, as Rosenzweig calls it, is that of the Johannine Church, the Church of the Christian completion, of the eschaton or proverbial End Time. The Johannine Church is what we call global pentecostalism in its most generic and inclusive sense. I want to make some very brief summary remarks about this claim here. It is a large and important topic. Here I will confine myself to commenting on what Rosenzweig says in the relevant section of The Star. He distinguishes the three ages of the Church. If pentecostal Christians recognise that the global pentecostal movement belongs to a different Christian paradigm, pentecostal self-understanding will be better grounded.

Pentecostals will be less inclined to confuse themselves with the Pauline age of Protestantism, and better able to work out a theology appropriate to their churches. Of course there is overlap between the ages of the Church and therefore between Protestant and pentecostal churches and theologies. Here, however, I will chiefly be speaking of the difference. The essential difference between spiritual ages needs to be clearly appreciated before the question of ‘overlap’ and ‘exchange’ can be studied.

If love characterised the Petrine Church, faith the Pauline Church, hope characterises the Johannine Church. Global pentecostalism is third era Christianity, the Johannine Church of prophecy and hope. Hope is different from expectation. Expectation is continuous with the past and on the basis of the past has certain expectations, perhaps the Second Coming of the Messiah, perhaps a sense that justice upon the earth follows necessarily from holding a certain set of Christian beliefs upheld as orthodox or evangelical. This is expectation; there is continuity between ‘now’ and ‘then’. This expectation may even be called hope. However, pentecostal hope is discontinuous with the past and with expectation. Pentecostal hope is not founded upon expectation, but upon a caesura, a break. Pentecostal hope and the activity that is a mark of that hope are not based on expectation. Hope, instead, rests its confidence in God doing something unexpected - miracles. Pentecostal churches do not just talk of miracles, they absolutely depend on them. And cannot survive without them. This is real hope, to live depending on a miracle to be there for you. This is of course to live dangerously, and to live like this in another name than that of Jesus is liable to be fatal. Pentecostal churches therefore cannot survive without the real presence of Jesus. For the Christian of the Johannine era, "to be a Christian does not mean: to have accepted any dogmas; but to live one’s life under the rule of another life, the life of Christ and, once this has happened, then to live one’s life solely in the effect of the power flowing from there." ¹⁵ This means forever getting out of the boat, as it were, and walking on the water to the Lord. Jesus needs to actually be there, outside the boat, or it is all a lie and there is no miracle. But stepping out of the boat, as it were, is absolutely normal behaviour in pentecostal churches and why they go from strength to strength, by God’s hand. Others, outside, have expectations of pentecostal churches that it will do this or go in that direction. But the expectant one’s live within a different Christian paradigm that does not have a real grasp of pentecostal hope except in terms of good old fashioned prediction, upon which alone it can base its judgement. Moreover, it is the success of hope that brings the real joy. Met expectation can make you pleased and perhaps happy. But joy comes in the morning when it is a whole new amazing miraculous new day without precedent. This is the pentecostal paradigm.

Pentecostal churches are moved by love and faith that has the dynamic and dimensions of a great unquenchable hope which is strictly evangelical on the model of the book of Acts and the attitude of John. Why hope? While Peter commandeered the realm of the Church’s authority, Paul commandeered the realm of the Church’s belief. Jesus gave the care of his mother to John, traditionally the author of the fourth gospel and Revelation, the book which does not make hope thematic, but dramatises it.

When we speak of the Johannine age, in Scriptural terms we refer to the Gospel and Epistles of John as well as the Book of Revelation. The Johannine Gospel and Epistles were written to those Jesus called his friends (Jn. 15:15). Johannine Christians are not subjects as in the Petrine age, or believers as in the Pauline age, but he has called us friends. John wrote Revelation for our perseverance and to inspire us to the ministry of arts. Our hope is of the consummation of God’s kingdom on earth and also the hope of the past: "For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope." (Rom.15:4)

Never before have Christians needed hope like now. Rosenzweig says, "love is given to the hard heart, and faith to the heretic, God gives hope only to the one who hopes. For that reason hope does not found a new Church." That is precisely how it is with pentecostal churches. It is not a Church as such, like the Petrine Church, or even a movement, like the Pauline centuries, but in every case a local Church in a state of overflow. Global pentecostalism resembles a denomination, but is actually more of an affiliation. While the Reformed churches started out centrally, like a denomination, but over time split into innumerable sectarian camps, the pentecostal churches start at those very splintered margins and grow up from there. In some local churches of the Johannine completion the overflow of blessing from the Church upon the world is massive and historically significant, although this significance can only work itself out in hope.

If, as I quoted Rosenzweig saying above, "to be a Christian does not mean: to have accepted any dogmas; but to live one’s life under the rule of another life, the life of Christ and, once this has happened, then to live one’s life solely in the effect of the power flowing from there," ¹⁶ then belonging to the Church in the Johannine age cannot mean what it meant in the previous eras. In the Petrine era being a Christian meant belonging exclusively to the Church and being under its authority. In the Pauline centuries being a Christian meant subscribing to a particular confession of belief upon which the Church stands. Only in the Johannine Church is it about the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Spirit. On that basis uniformity of belief is less important than tolerance and consensus and the only real authority in the Church is that of spiritual anointing, which is personal, not an objective office of Church hierarchy.

Background in Joachim of Fiore

The idea of the three ages of the Church is not new. Joachim de Flore or Joachim of Fiore is accredited with developing it in the twelfth century. Joachim of Fiore (1135-1200) was an apocalyptic Cistercian monk from Calabria, the region comprising the ‘foot’ of the Italian peninsula. Joachim does not explicitly teach of three ages or three statuses of history, as the ages are otherwise called, but we glean it through his writings and that of his disciples. He envisioned the dawning of the third age as an age of the Holy Spirit, as a time of a spiritually transformed and transforming Church.

Those who perpetuated the idea of the three ages of the Church were commonly known in Catholic circles as Joachimites. But Joachimism itself has a pre-history. As I pointed out in my Introduction above, the idea of time and history being divided into dispensations, or time and history as epochal or episodic, is primordial. The early Church Father Sabellius, was condemned for ‘modal monarchism’ because he divided time and history into the Age of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – the Old Testament, the New Testament (up to the Ascension of Christ), and the age of the Church, of great commission to teach the gospel to all. His condemnation in 262 proved you couldn’t understand the Holy Trinity in terms of the world. In the early fifth century in north Africa Augustine wrote, more authoritatively, in The City of God, about the six ages of history. ¹⁷

The pre-history of Joachimism most definitely starts with Gregory of Nazianzus – known as ‘the Theologian’ in the East – because of his theological authority (he was the first to call the Holy Spirit ‘God’ unequivocally). ¹⁸ Gregory speaks of three ages of the Church in his Fifth Theological Oration on the Holy Spirit where he discusses the doctrine of God. He refers to the epochal change of divine-human order as a "shaking".

There have been two remarkable transformations of the human way of life in the course of the world’s history. These are called two "covenants", and, so famous was the business involved, two "shakings of the earth" (Heb 12:26; Hag 2:6; Mt. 27:51). ¹⁹ The first was the transition from idols to the Law (Ex.20:3-5); the second, from the Law to the Gospel (Mt. 27:51; Heb. 9:3-15; Gal. 2:14ff.). The Gospel also tells of a third "shaking", the change from this present state of things to what lies unmoved, unshaken, beyond (Heb. 12:18). ²⁰

The so-called ‘shakings’ are axial times of transition. Gregory goes on:

*I can make a comparison here with the progress of the doctrine of God, except that the order is exactly the reverse. In the former case change arose from the omissions; here, growth towards perfection comes through the additions. In this way, the old covenant made clear proclamation of the Father, a less definite one of the Son. The new covenant made the Son manifest (1 Pet. 1:20) and gave us a glimpse of the Spirit’s Godhead. At the present time, the Spirit resides among us, giving us a clearer manifestation of himself than before. * ²¹

*And in the Spirit, we learn more of the Son and the Father. They continue to be revealed in unprecedented ways. The axial age of the Holy Spirit and the Church of such a Spirit lies beyond Scripture, insofar as it gives the first two covenants of the Father and the Son. Scripture itself points beyond itself, insofar as it reveals the Spirit, who is to become more and more manifest in the experience of the Church. The Bible is like the first four acts of an unfinished play that points to a missing fifth act, which (following the analogy) we, on the basis of the first four acts, and in accordance with them, have to perform ourselves, to the finish, faithfully, truthfully and lovingly, in other words, in the Spirit. *

Gregory’s enunciation of the three ages of the Church is not as clear as we find it today, in Rosenzweig, but we are only looking at the pre-history of the idea as it appears out of Scripture in the writings of one of the most authoritative Church Fathers. Remember, the New Testament hardly existed yet in Gregory’s day, the texts that would decisively go to make up what later came to be called the New Testament, were only then in his time being finalised. Gregory was one of the Fathers who agreed with Athanasius of Alexandria (in the previous generation) on what the authoritative list of texts that would make up the New Testament should be.

It is a new order, a new epoch, and starts from the revelation of the Godhead of the Spirit. In the next chapter Gregory explains further:

Let me add to these remarks a thought which may have occurred to others already, but which I suspect of being a product of my own mind. The Saviour had certain truths which he said could not at that time be borne by the disciples (Jn.16:12) filled though they had been with a host of teachings. These truths, for reasons I well may have mentioned, were therefore concealed. He also said that we should be taught "all things" by the Holy Spirit (Jn. 14:26 and 16:13) when he made his dwelling in us. One of these truths I take to be the Godhead of the Spirit, which becomes clear at a later stage, when the knowledge is timely and capable of being taken in, when after our Saviour’s return to heaven, it is, because of that miracle, no longer an object of disbelief. What greater truth could the Son promise or the Spirit teach than this one? ²²

We can have theology about the Father and the Son, but revelation is only in the Spirit, and revelation becomes clearer the more manifest the Spirit becomes, that is to say, the more mature we become in the Spirit. This maturity may be measured by the ability of the Church to pour out the Spirit, or to be the conduit for such outpouring on all flesh.

Revelation in the third epoch of the Church is different to the Petrine "deposit" upon which heirs of Peter sit like bankers, possessively and protectively. And revelation in the third epoch is different to the Pauline preaching and the Gospel as a verbal commission. The third age is dependent upon the deposit and the preaching, not gainsaying them, but is itself a manifestation of the Spirit by works and power; in other words, it is something else again.

From this brief, rather summary background sketch, it should be clear that Joachim’s prophetic revelation of the three ages of the Church in Calabria in the 12th century was not formed in a vacuum. It belongs to a living stream of tradition that is pre-Christian, characteristically Judaic, and was taken up by the Church. No book better covers the whole historical phenomenon in an exemplary scholarly manner than Henri de Lubac’s La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore (1981). ²³ Yves Congar has a summary article in his work I Believe in the Holy Spirit. ²⁴ Congar, who along with de Lubac is one of the great Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, writes of Joachim that while he and his followers were thought to be insignificant by the theologians of Paris in that age, ²⁵ they "certainly gave rise to human hopes and expectations and caused a stir that was to be felt for a very long time." ²⁶ This statement is well documented.

The time of Joachim was theologically one of ecclesiastical legalism and abstract theologising. Joachim’s teaching was spiritual in the sense – at least as it was received – of reminding his followers of the tension between the Church and the world. In his day the Church had made itself very comfortable in the world and the world generously accommodated the Church. Joachim warned that the status quo between Church and world – Christendom – would see the spirit of God released upon it in unprecedented ways. Congar traces Joachimist hopes as they abounded in the centuries that followed him. "He introduced into the history of the world, which was for him, of course, the history of the Church, an eschatology that was characterised by the great novelty of a rule of the inner life and of freedom. Joachim in this way opened the flood-gates to admit what could well become the torrent of human hopes." ²⁷

This hope at the foundation of the Kingdom of God is a "pentecostal" root prior to the Pauline Church of Protestant centuries. Fast-forwarding to the end of the Eighteenth century, we find the great German philosopher Hegel trying to over-ride the static theological basis of understanding forged in the Middle Ages, with a dynamic philosophical understanding, in which the ages become chronological and historical, not just typological, as they are in Gregory and Joachim.

In the history of Joachimism after Joachim, the time of Hegel is the most important, and so I shall say quick word about that to finish off. In the Middle Ages Thomas Aquinas saw logic the same way as the pre-Christian Greek philosopher Aristotle as a tool of intellect and reduced to the defined co-ordinates of the rational animal ‘man’. In the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth century, Hegel saw the intellect of man, and man’s whole self-reflection as caught up in the movement of history, more precisely, a movement of the spirit, of consciousness, and he saw that this spirit had a logic to it. This was a different kind of logic altogether. It had a tendency to deconstruct the static ‘laws’ of scholastic logic, therefore of traditional metaphysical theology, by always seeing them in terms of their time, or as we would say, with an historical perspective.

Congar sees the connection between Joachimist hopes and Hegel’s famous concept of Aufhebung. ²⁸ By means of this concept Hegel states that God is being-differently in different ages. Hegel applies Aufhebung to describe the way in which God is-differently and becomes-different. He associates the reign of the Spirit with the Reformation, which to an extent is true, because it was a releasement (Gelassenheit) ²⁹ of the spirit from the constructions and constrictions of ‘Christendom’. Holiness is always self-reforming, never a static order of Being. Hegel seems to describe God transcending himself in the Spirit in order to be-differently in man, within the temporal sphere. It is a metaphysical explanation. However the term Aufhebung stands out for us within Hegel’s narrative philosophy. Hegel normally used this term narrativally to define the movement of human thought as it became successively more self-aware and self-conscious and reflexive with time, so that ideas were preserved in being raised to a higher level. The vulgarised version of this Aufhebung is that of causal development. An example of Aufhebung might be the way that paganism, on being Christianised, is preserved (not annihilated, as under Islam), but raised to a higher level. Another example is in the New Testament, (everywhere in Paul) where the idea of the Passover lamb in Exodus is preserved in the New Testament, but finds a transcending version in Jesus our Passover lamb, dying on the Cross once for all, releasing all mankind for all time from Egypt, as it were, rather than just releasing one people at one time and place, epochal and revelatory though that was. Every time Jesus says, "You have heard it said, but I say to you…" there is an Aufhebung; something is preserved, but what is preserved is raised to a higher level. Although Aufhebung is a key Hegelian concept it is a dynamic of the biblical text and of biblical thinking. Hegel knew this, so did Rosenzweig.

The followers of Joachim clearly saw the successive ages of the Church as an exemplification of what today we think of in terms of Hegelian Aufhebung, although of course they did not have this concept. Hegel’s friend Schelling in his work Philosophy of Revelation (Philosophie der Offenbarung) takes up the notion of Aufhebung using the figures of the three apostles, Peter, Paul and John. It is from Schelling that Rosenzweig is really most likely to be borrowing, but this is not a literary borrowing; it is philosophical, I believe, because Rosenzweig foresees what Schelling also foresaw. Congar summarises Schelling’s position: "Peter is the one who gives the law; he is the principle of stability. Paul is the movement, dialectics and knowledge; he was the first Protestant by virtue of his resistance to Peter’s unlimited authority (Gal.2). The true Church is not to be found in either of these two forms as such. From the time when it was founded on Peter, it moves forward through Paul towards its end, which is to become a Church of John." ³⁰

These are momentous words for a Church that can be historically identified as Johannine. Rosenzweig says, describing pentecostal churches perfectly, without knowing it in fact: "The Johannine Church itself does not assume a visible shape of its own. It is not built; it can only grow…this Johannine Church, shapeless, necessarily unorganised, and hence always dependent on the organised Churches…"³¹ To his words just quoted Congar adds: "the true Church is therefore still to come." ³² This is precisely the message of Joachim of Fiore and his followers. Like many Catholics, even superbly educated Catholics like Congar with an overt interest in the Holy Spirit and a phenomenal theological and ecclesiastical literacy, he here seems to know nothing of pentecostal churches. Pentecostal churches – global pentecostalism as we call it - is the Johannine Church coming to birth, it is the Church in its true colours and measure in our epoch. It is the prophecy of Joachim coming true.

Conclusion

Finally, in summary, rather than conclusion, let me just reiterate the idea of the three ages of the Church and finish by stating why this is important for Pentecostal Christians.

The Petrine Church is the idea of Mother Church (hence the devotion to the Mother of God in this Church as well). In the Church of Rome salvation is literally dependent upon the centralised monarchial organisation of the Church herself, which, like a Mother figure, provides the prerequisite spiritual sustenance from its bosom - its sacramental system - from which the Christian must suckle, or lose eternal life.

The Pauline age refers to the belief–led churches of the Protestant era. Protestantism, of whatever form, defines itself by belief, by contrast to the Petrine Church which defines itself by its sacramental system and organised guardianship of that. In the Petrine Church, the hierarchy hold responsibility for the believing (traditionally at least), and the ‘laity’ (as they are called) are thus like spiritual children who believe what they can as best they can (or they just believe what they are told); the main thing is that they adhere to the sacramental system. The Pauline centuries changed all this. With the birth of Protestantism right belief became the key which defined faith, so that faith and belief became synonymous. This has influenced the Petrine Church in turn and over the centuries it has gradually and steadily upgraded its whole notion of the status of belief with respect to faith, even for the ‘ordinary’ believer, even with respect to the sacraments.

The Johannine age of the Church is the age of a Church of the Holy Spirit, a Spirit-led Church. It is necessarily diverse. It is necessarily spiritually based, rather than belief-based, or centrally organised. The Johannine Church is so diffuse and variegated that it depends upon the Petrine Church and the Pauline Church, to the extent that it has even confused itself in the past with the latter.

The idea of the three ages of the Church is important because by it pentecostal Christians may realise that their Church is as different from Protestantism as Protestantism is from Catholicism. Pentecostal Christians are epochally different from Protestants and (philosophically speaking) paradigmatically different. Understanding the three ages of the Church gives each pentecostal church a philosophical basis which is not based on Protestant belief-led self-understanding or evangelical theology, which is unable to properly accommodate spiritual theology. Understanding the three ages of the Church frees pentecostal Christians to draw from the deep wells of Catholic tradition, given that pentecostalism is spirit-led and the Catholic Church contains immense wealth in its writings on spirituality, spiritual living, life in the Holy Spirit, practising the presence of God, theology of God’s glory, ritual imagination, liturgical foundations, spiritual discernment, spiritual direction. Any and all of these may empower a pentecostal church with a new evangelism and spirit-led (rather than doctrinaire and ideological) self-understanding.

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Endnotes

• Matthew Del Nevo is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Christian Spirituality with the Broken Bay Institute and Sydney College of Divinity. With his family he is a partner in the vision at Hillsong church.

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