William K.
Kay, Professor of Theology, Glynd r University, Wales
In trying
to predict a future research agenda on Pentecostalism here are four suggestions:
1. Pentecostalism under the academic
spotlight: Academic activity situated in tertiary institutes will continue
to grow exponentially. Research programmes of all kinds will persist and
accessible international peer-reviewed publication will allow countries with
weaker infrastructures to begin to catch up with the best. This is already
occurring, as an examination of the citation indices shows. Medical, chemical
and other research papers are now routinely posted online and available to
researchers all over the world. Universities are competing globally with each
other in this race for scientific pre-eminence so that the best universities
are able to headhunt cutting-edge grant-capturing researchers from anywhere in
the world.
Given that
the hard sciences are internationalising even more rapidly than was once the
case, and in the knowledge that India now produces more IT graduates than the
United States, it is clear that some of the balance of academic power will
shift to Asia. Nevertheless, in addition to the creation of new knowledge
brought about by the application of existing theories and methods, there will
also be new knowledge brought about by the synthesis of established
disciplines. We already have bio-chemistry, psycho-history, philosophical
theology, and so on and, as the field of knowledge expands, interdisciplinary
work will also multiply with new pairings allowing mutated disciplines to expand
or gobble each other up in this continual struggle.
Among the matters
open to investigation is Pentecostalism. It has already attracted the attention
of anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists. There are also
physiological experiments relating to healing or speaking in tongues.
Inter-religious as well as inter-disciplinary studies comparing religious
states of mind have been published. Pentecostalism will then find itself, even
more than it currently is, under the microscope and being poked and prodded by
theories spawned by a range of academics. Moreover, as Africa slowly rises, we
can expect economists and political scientists to theorise about the role of
religion in post-colonial nations.
So what is
the implication here? My view is that the danger of all this is that
Pentecostal voices will be ignored or muted by steam rolling academic
disciplines. I first realised this when I saw the Protestant Reformation being
described in Marxist terms as a proletarian revolt against feudal or
proto-capitalistic overlords. The theology of ‘justification by faith’ was
completely ignored. The danger to Pentecostalism is that it becomes simply the
‘stuff’ of academic study as Pentecostal life is reduced to ‘cultural flow’ or
‘fundamentalist ideology’ or ‘economic activity’. So, while, on the one hand, I
welcome wide-ranging academic engagement with Pentecostalism, on the other hand,
I wish to ensure that what is being described is Pentecostalism as it understands itself and not as it
is understood by theorists whose worldview excludes spiritual reality.
I can give
a parallel example of this. A couple of years ago I was contacted by the BBC to
speak about Pentecostalism on a radio program for women. An African academic
had published an article stating that Pentecostalism was damaging to the lives
of women in Africa. I pointed out to the researcher that there was much
evidence to suggest that the opposite was the case, and Pentecostalism often
helped women receive education and empowered them by giving them responsibility
in churches. Once I said this, I was told by such information would not be welcome
on the programme. In other words ‘academic findings’ were being used in a
quasi-political way to support a secularist worldview. Pentecostal self-understanding was being
silenced at the behest of an alien agenda.
In short,
Pentecostals will need to understand the philosophy informing research methods
and the history and characteristics of more than one academic discipline.
2. Pentecostalism in a post-Newtonian,
post-Darwinian world:
Pentecostalism in the last hundred years has followed in a trajectory that has already
produced Pentecostal institutions for education, care of the elderly, drug
rehabilitation and broadcasting. Pentecostals are likely to continue to build
institutions to propagate their views, and this is especially so as those who
support the new atheism will generate their own institutions. We already know
the Dawkins followers have a 10 step plan to secularise America and, given his
theory of ‘memes’ or cultural reproductive nodes, we can be sure that the ideas
of the new atheism will be circulating popular culture for the next 20 or 30
years even after they have been rebutted or relativised by sharp academic dispute.
This leads
me to suggest that Pentecostals will see the importance of generating their own
theology and theory of education. This is already occurring with the emergence
of Pentecostal universities in Korea and the United States. As Pentecostals
begin to engage more fully with education, they will have to take a view on the
gamut of academic subjects. Amos Yong and others are leading the way here to
work out how Pentecostals might engage with physical and human sciences, and others
have asked about the role of the Holy Spirit is in relation to, for instance,
historical change. We will need a credible theology of divine agency as well as
a theology of human development. Are we to understand human beings as
developing by means of internal maturation that proceeds through interaction
between social context and cognitive functions driven by changes within the
cerebellum? And if we are, how we to fit in the doctrine of human sinfulness
and imperfection? How are we to understand revelation by the Holy Spirit in a
world that is sometimes seen as closed and mechanistic and at other times seen
as open and contingent? How does the
biological organism of the human body find or make knowledge with the character
of objectivity?
All this
will be linked with continuing battles over the theory of evolution, especially
as this theory is buttressed by genetic studies that appear to strengthen
existing evidence in the fossil record. If by comparing the genes of a
chimpanzee and a human being one can come to a conclusion that is in harmony
with the fossil record, the quest to discover how it is that DNA itself came
into existence will demand increasing resources. We’ve already seen billions of
euros put towards the discovery of the primitive Higgs-Boson particle so we can
be sure that there will be attempts to replicate aspects of the Big Bang and
that, if these are in any way successful, there will be further dismissals of
those who believe God is the initiator of the whole unfolding cosmos.
In short,
Pentecostals will need to understand how to make their institutions robust and how
God works in the world.
3. Asia and its influence: While spending time in Hong Kong,
I met many Chinese scholars. China itself is keen to assert its cultural
continuity over 5,000 years. There is an ethno-centric pride here but, among Chinese
Christians, there is a willingness to accommodate to the wealth of Chinese
culture. Two illustrations can illustrate this: I met one Chinese scholar who
was attempting to reconcile Chinese funeral practices with Protestant teaching
about what happens after death. While Protestant teaching was retained, there
was a willingness to blur the traditional lines over the absence of the dead
person. To the Chinese, the dead person, in some senses, remains present and,
in traditional animism, ancestors are worshipped and provided with money for
their journey in the afterlife. But Protestantism cut all this off and we will
see revisionist attempts by liberal Protestant scholars to bend traditional
Protestant teaching into a pattern that conforms more easily with ancient
culture.
Or, to take
another example, there is a long tradition of Chinese hermeneutics dealing with
Confucian texts. The hermeneutical principles underlying the comparison of
texts - looking at variants and contexts and attempting to find a viable
meaning - is not dissimilar to the same process that has occurred in
Protestantism since the time of the Reformation, and in the church as a whole
at least since Origen. So we may expect attempts to adjust biblical
hermeneutics by reference to the tools of Chinese culture. Some of this may not
be sceptical and destructive but it will have an impact on Western Christianity
and is bound to throw up new interpretations. For instance, once one
understands sin to be a collective as well as an individual reality, it is
easier to see suffering in the same perspective. Concepts of collective sin and
collective redemption may be forged into new theologies that will impact standard
doctrinal statements, and perhaps challenge traditional forensic accounts of
the atonement.
In short, Pentecostals
will need to adjust to Chinese and Asian culture while retaining what they
believe to be a-cultural or timeless in their faith.
4. Pentecostalism and politics: What is striking to the observer of
global Pentecostalism is how varied are Pentecostal attitudes to political
engagement. There are Pentecostals on the left and right of the political
spectrum but only in Latin America or the Philippines do Pentecostals appear to
gravitate towards direct political action. This may be because the power of
broadcasting in such places can give Pentecostals an opportunity to speak
directly into public debate. In Europe, Pentecostals appear to be completely
excluded from political life and the best they can do is to join moral
campaigns organised by evangelicals.
If Pentecostalism
continues to grow in size, its megachurches may give attention to political
issues. This is most likely to occur if secularisation becomes so powerful that
Christian voices are entirely suppressed or derided in the mainstream media. If
this happens, the example of Latin American and Hispanic Pentecostals will be
invaluable to Pentecostals in other parts of the world. On which moral subjects
can Pentecostals agree? Can political manifestoes be constructed around a
common theme that unites middle class and working class voters? Limited
experience from the UK suggested that Pentecostals and charismatics have great
difficulty in finding common ground. In
general, socio-economic groups vote according to self-interest with the result
that working-class Pentecostals vote left and upper-class Pentecostals vote
right; only policies favouring marriage and basic values unite them.
In short,
research into Pentecostal political attitudes is underdeveloped.
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