Spirit, Apocalypse and Ethics: Reading Catholic Moral Theology as a Pentecostal

Journal of Pentecostal Theology 17 (2008) 238–255

www.brill.nl/pent

Spirit, Apocalypse and Ethics: Reading Catholic Moral Theology as a Pentecostal Jonathan A. Martin* 1346 Central Ave., Charlotte, NC 28205, USA jonathanm@renovatuscommunity.com

Abstract As Pentecostals develop their own approach to theological ethics, the Catholic tradition may turn out to be their most promising dialog partner. At its core, Catholicism is a holiness movement with deep resources for ethical renewal. As Pentecostals appropriate their own quirky catholicity bequeathed by Wesley, they have much to learn from the narrative of Catholic moral theology given by Servais Pinckaers in The Sources of Christian Ethics. Negatively, Pentecostals have already developed some of the same destructive tendencies in their short history that took centuries for Catholic moral theologians to develop. Yet while the story of Catholic moral theology will at times be a cautionary tale, there is equal potential to shape Pentecostal ethics constructively, as exemplified by Pinckaers, Pope John Paul II and ultimately Herbert McCabe.

With his approach to ethics as language, McCabe’s important but still largely underappreciated Love, Law and Language is an especially provocative resource that could help Pentecostals articulate ethics as a pneumatically formed new language.

Keywords moral theology, Servais Pinckaers, Herbert McCabe, Pentecostal ethics, holiness

It is a strange thing to be a fifth generation Pentecostal on both sides of my family—the movement is still so young it seems mathematically improbable.

But that is where I find myself, not only the product of deep Pentecostal heritage but a third generation Church of God preacher. My grandfather was a pioneer Pentecostal pastor, a police officer converted dramatically in the ferocious heat of the 15th Street Church of God in Charlotte, NC. He turned in his badge and gun one day because he said he felt the call to preach, though he hadn’t yet lined up a single revival. My father felt ‘the call’ to follow in his

* Jonathan A. Martin (MA, Church of God Theological Seminary) is currently pursuing a ThM at Duke University. He is also the founder and Senior Pastor of Renovatus: A Church for People Under Renovation in Charlotte, NC, USA. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008

DOI 10.1163/174552508X377501

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footsteps. At times I have pushed against my tradition and tried to run from it, but it is in me, and I am in it. I stay within it both because I love it and, like Peter, I simply can’t imagine where else I would go.

To come from an endlessly idiosyncratic tradition that is historically young and theologically still developing and attempt to fully engage the Roman Catholic tradition, itself endlessly idiosyncratic but historically grounded and theologically rich, seemed daunting at first. But perhaps it is here that Herbert McCabe’s marvelous discussion on ethics as language would be most helpful.

In describing the Pentecostal nature of the Church and the staggering possibilities for the Spirit to forge ‘the beginning of the kingdom in the restoration of communication between men of different languages’,1 McCabe is as provocative and exciting as any Pentecostal theologian could be in sketching a truly Pentecostal view of ethics with specifically pneumatic contours. For as valuable as the Pentecostal doctrine of prayer language has been, in my tradition we often make the same mistake of our critics in reducing the Pentecostal experience to speaking in tongues. For McCabe, the prospect of Jesus the divine word ‘which comes to be language for man’2 opens the gates to far broader understandings of what it could be to live in light of the ‘pentecostalization’3 of the church. The new language is not restricted in scope as glossalalia but is a way of communication that establishes the framework for the moral life in its entirety.

Before moving to McCabe’s constructive proposals for moral theology, I will first sketch the ways that the move in Catholic ethics away from the primary source of Scripture (via Aquinas) has largely mirrored the ways that Pentecostals have lost their own source (Scripture via Wesley). The narrative framework given by Servais Pinckaers in The Source of Christian Ethics is useful to trace the development towards (and at least initially, away from) a Pentecostal view of ethics and thus demonstrate why constructive work is needed between Catholics and Pentecostals.4 Ultimately, the historical challenges of both traditions gesture towards urgent dialogue with McCabe on ethics as language, as his proposals allow room for moral theology to adapt a pneumatic, eschatological character especially conducive to Pentecostal spirituality.

1

Herbert McCabe, Love, Law and Language (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 111.

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 129.

3 A helpful phrase from J. Kameron Carter in ‘Race, Religion, and the Contradictions of Identity’, Modern Theology 21 ( Jan 2005), p. 59.

4 Servais Pinckaers, The Source of Christian Ethics ( Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995).

2

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1. From the Vatican to Cleveland, TN: A Brief Narrative History It would seem to take nothing less miraculous than a gift of tongues for Pentecostals and Catholics to think constructively about the radical moral possibilities of ethics as language, especially since one of the things Pentecostals picked up from cross-pollination with fundamentalists was anti-Catholic tendencies. But there may be more hope than a superficial assessment of the traditions might suggest. In my tradition we have often balked at Catholics for a perceived over reliance on tradition for matters of faith, practice, government and discipline in favor of the ‘authority of Word’. But for all our freewheeling rhetoric against authority and structure, Pentecostals have been more akin to Catholics than we have often been willing to admit. In matters no less significant than salvation, Pentecostals have consistently rejected forensic justification in favor of sanctification-transformation.5 Despite all of the ways we have attempted to crawl in bed with fundamentalists, we never seem to get past first base. Perhaps Pentecostals are most reminded of their quirky catholicity when they interact with the Reformed tradition. We have tried on Saul’s armor many times with broadly absurd results, but ultimately Pentecostals still appreciate salvation as affective integration (‘the faith that works through love’), a feature of the movement that will just never synthesize with classical Protestants.6 Yet we have oftentimes been no less than delighted to be known merely as the Protestants who speak in tongues, the hot sauce in ecumenical evangelical associations. It is quite the pity that a movement this young, perhaps just beginning to come into its own in terms of offering something distinct to Christian ethics, has been so willing to ignore our relatively short history for a seat at the Protestant table.

In fact, in reading Pinckaers’ lively narrative of the development (and degradation) of Catholic moral theology, I couldn’t help but feel like it all sounded eerily familiar. One could go so far to say that if painted with a broad brush (and as a Pentecostal minister, I know how to traffic in overgeneralizations!), the movement of Catholic moral theology from Aquinas’ beatific vision of happiness to ‘the freedom of indifference’ ushered in by Ockham and the subsequent moves from casuistry into proportionalism have already been echoed in our tradition. We have demonstrated the same destructive tendencies in one century that took Catholics many centuries to develop. Perhaps

5 Steven J. Land, Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom ( JPTS 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), p. 31.

6 Land, Pentecostal Spirituality, p. 33.

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such a claim seems audacious since Catholics have for so long taken moral theology seriously as a discipline, when Pentecostals are only beginning to sketch formally what form an approach to ethics might take.7 But even though Pentecostals are just beginning to seriously enter the world of moral theology on a wide scale within the academy, we are much like our Methodist ancestors in that through the medium of sermons, hymns and pamphlets, we’ve done plenty of serious (if at times episodic) reflection on ethics. And besides, moral theology is hardly the property of experts who have spent their lives studying ethics as an isolated discipline. In fact, if Pinckaers is to be believed, the experts have historically been the problem. We would do well to heed the words of John Paul II himself, who acknowledges the universality of moral theology to all concerned with the way of salvation: ‘The Church knows that the issue of morality is one which deeply touches every person; it involves all people, even those who do not know Christ and his Gospel or God himself.

She knows that it is precisely on the path of the moral life that the way of salvation is open to all’.8 At its core, Catholicism is a holiness movement and carries within it the same concerns that burn at the center of Pentecostal theology. Pentecostals are capable of offering an approach to ethics with surprisingly Thomist dimensions (albeit with a Wesleyan flair), made especially interesting by its pneumatic, apocalyptic implications. Like Catholics, our moral vision has taken quite a beating through both legalism and compromise. And perhaps for a young tradition to recover its own sources and find its way as a holiness movement again, the way back may not be that different than the path sketched by Pinckaers, Pope John Paul II and finally Herbert McCabe.

For each of these moral theologians, the starting point is a return to Scripture as the basis of Christian ethics. Thus John Paul II begins Veritatis Splendor with a stunning exegesis of Jesus’ conversation with the rich young ruler in Matthew 19 as a way for us to ‘listen once more in a lively and direct way to his moral teaching’.9 As he reflects on the young man’s question ‘Teacher, what must I do to have eternal life?’, he asserts that ‘people today need to turn to Christ once again in order to receive from him the answer to their questions about what is good and what is evil’.10 For John Paul II, this is not an abstraction or a call to a purely subjective experience of Jesus but 7 Though Pentecostals should be mindful not to allow ethics to become compartmentalized from theology and thus make the same mistakes illustrated by Pinckaers.

8 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (August 1993), para 3.

9 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, para 6.

10 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, para 8.

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a charge to revisit Jesus’ response, ‘If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments’.11 To understand Jesus, we have to pay attention to the ‘centrality of the Decalogue with regard to every other precept’.12 Ultimately, ‘Both the Old and New Testaments explicitly affirm that without love of neighbor, made concrete in keeping the commandments, genuine love for God is not possible’.13 In his elegant exposition, John Paul II sets up the framework for this encyclical to firmly denounce the speculative moral theology of the proportionalists and ground Catholic moral theology firmly again in Scripture.

According to Pinckaers’ narrative historical analysis of moral theology, proportionalism had taken moral doctrine so far away from a biblical center that Pinckaers makes the remarkable claim that ‘the chief task for today’s moral theologians is to reopen the lines of communication between Christian ethics and the Word of God’.14 This return to ‘the Word of God’ as the source of Christian ethics is not ambiguously defined. While there is certainly a call to reappropriate Scripture overall as the basis of moral theology (and both Pope John Paul II and Pinckaers move through varied texts masterfully), the explicit text that is to be revisited is the Sermon on the Mount. John Paul II calls the Sermon on the Mount ‘the magna carta of Gospel morality’,15 and notes that it ‘contains the fullest and most complete formulation of the New Law clearly linked to the Decalogue entrusted by God to Moses on Mount Sinai’.16 It is nothing less than ‘the summary of Gospel morality as it came from the lips of the Lord Himself ’, and a ‘principal source for Christian moral teaching, in both homiletics and theological reflection’.17 The work of recovering the Word of God as the primary source of Christian ethics brings with it an appeal to reclaim moral continuity with tradition.

John Paul II and Pinckaers argue consistently that their approach is faithful to the patristic fathers. And perhaps more prominently, they find their Scriptureoriented approach to Christian ethics in the work of ‘the angelic doctor’. The recovery of Thomas Aquinas’ view of a life of God as the fulfillment of human happiness is central, as God is ‘the source of man’s happiness’.18 To return to the religious foundations of moral action is to ultimately acknowledge God 11

John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, para 12.

John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, para 13.

13 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, para 14.

14 Servais Pinckaers, The Source of Christian Ethics ( Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), p. 18.

15 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, para 15.

16 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, para 15.

17 Pinckaers, The Source of Christian Ethics, p. 134.

18 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, para 9.

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‘who alone is goodness, fullness of life, the final end of human activity and perfect happiness’.19 Pinckaers dubs the Thomist approach to morality, articulated by the virtues, as ‘freedom for excellence’. Through the development of habitus and the gift of infused virtues, humans may become inclined towards God and given the deepest desires of the heart for true happiness. The foil to Aquinas for Pinckaers is William Ockham, whom he blames for the ‘demolition’ of Aquinas’ moral teaching in Catholic theology.20 Ockham’s emphasis on human choice amounts to ‘a freedom of indifference’ to choose whatever one wishes. For Aquinas, there is no such thing as freedom apart from love and virtue, whereas for Ockham the freedom to choose moral options supersedes the moral character assumed by Aquinas for a person to live into freedom.

Freedom ‘for excellence’ is also central for McCabe, though he doesn’t use the term. McCabe sees freedom as a possibility only by ‘transcending humanity in divinity’, clarifying that ‘the freedom with which he is concerned cannot be confused with the individual autonomy bestowed on us by industrial society; a society in which the field of obligation has been reduced to that of work’.21 Thus while McCabe does not discuss ‘freedom for excellence’ over against ‘freedom of indifference’ in historical terms as Pinckaers does, the distinction between ethics of obligation and true freedom is equally pronounced.

Before interacting with Pentecostals, it should be noted that Pinckaers is pessimistic that classical Protestant theology would have the resources to do constructive work to renew Christian ethics to ‘freedom for excellence’. For him, the ‘systematic refusal and, consequently, the denial of any value to human actions—even though they be conformed to the moral law—through which a person might glorify himself before God’ is part of the deep problem within moral theology.22 The negative side of the doctrine of justification by faith and faith alone is the ‘refusal to admit that human works had any value for salvation, regardless of their nature. This refusal extended to whatever might favor or foster the human notion of any work of salvation other than pure faith’.23 Thus, justice ‘remained external, “forensic” and the Christian, at best “saint and sinner”’.24 Pinckaers’ critique of protestant ethics is uncharitable but also difficult to refute. He rightly claims in classical Protestantism,

19 20 21 22 23 24

John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, para 9.

Pinckaers, The Source of Christian Ethics, p. 338.

McCabe, Law, Love and Language, p. 156.

Pinckaers, The Source of Christian Ethics, p. 283.

Pinckaers, The Source of Christian Ethics, p. 283.

Pinckaers, The Source of Christian Ethics, p. 283.

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There was no such thing as sanctifying grace, touching and transforming us in our souls, in the depths of our being, as St. Thomas thought. Nor were there any supernatural virtues, conceived as permanent qualities or dispositions, which could ennoble our faculties and enable us to perform meritorious actions.

Protestantism was suspicious of virtue in general, because it connoted a human attempt to achieve moral value.25

Pinckaers suggests that this leads Protestants to reject ‘the idea of holiness and sanctification’ because it seemed to denigrate faith and to reject mysticism as a ‘purely human work, an attempt to attain an eminent knowledge of God’.26 For as much as Pentecostals may balk at the notion of a Magisterium and for all of the so-called prophecy experts who have been allowed under our tents to caricaturize the Pope as the antichrist and the Catholic church as the cult of Mary, the neglect of holiness doctrine in classical Protestantism is one of many compelling reasons to shake loose the ill-fitting armor of fundamentalism and recover the catholicity bequeathed to Pentecostals from our Methodist lineage. If Pinckaers’ assessment of classical protestant ethics is correct (and I believe it is), then protestant moral theology is every bit as inherently anti-Pentecostal as it is anti-Catholic. For Pentecostals, sanctification as ‘perfection in love’ deeply informs every major theological move. And clearly Pentecostals embrace mysticism!

The constructive work of both Catholics and Pentecostals would lay claim to the Word of God as the ultimate source of their doctrine of sanctification and their ascetic, mystical practices. But whereas Catholics have ‘freedom for excellence’ mediated via Thomas Aquinas, Pentecostals interact more directly with John Wesley. Whereas the language of virtue is central to Catholics through Aquinas, Pentecostals may be more familiar with the language of ‘affections’. As a lifelong Pentecostal who grew up hearing sermons on sanctification, I don’t recall one of them ever referring to ‘infused virtues’. But I was taught that through sanctification God would change not just your outward disposition towards sin (which was part of the initial work of salvation) but now change your ‘want-to’. While lacking the sophistication of Aquinas, I am pretty certain they were talking about the same thing.

The Wesleyan notion of Christian perfection (as ‘being made perfect through love’) shared Aquinas’ teleogical orientation towards happiness. For Pentecostals in the Wesleyan tradition, as for Aquinas, love is ‘the end’ of the

25 26

Pinckaers, The Source of Christian Ethics, p. 283.

Pinckaers, The Source of Christian Ethics, p. 283.

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commandment that animates all tempers and passions.27 Also as with Wesley, virtue is not ‘the culmination of a human potentiality intrinsic to a human being’, but rather virtue assumes that intellect and will are ordered to something external.28 Wesley’s moral theology, like Aquinas’, grew out of an abiding pastoral concern for the formation of converts and preachers.29 Both Wesleyan-Pentecostals and Catholics resist the characteristically Niebuhrian realism so prevalent in much of protestant moral theology in favor of perfection.30 Also like Catholics, Wesleyan-Pentecostals believe that sanctification is a divine gift and not the product of human effort, though both are maligned for an alleged over-emphasis on ‘works’.

For all the nuances in Aquinas, the vast interior resources of Catholic moral theology were not mighty enough to stave off the degeneration of virtue towards legalistic casuistry.31 The beatific vision of happiness and holiness found in Aquinas was gradually replaced by the manualists, who forsook moral coherence to parse specific sins in specific contexts. Whatever desire for holiness remained present, for practical purposes Catholic moral theologians misplaced the ‘end’ and thus lost the plot.

If the rich tradition of Catholic moral theology proved insufficient to resist the allure of ‘the freedom of indifference’ and the seemingly more attainable task of managing sins, the intense mysticism and holiness rhetoric of early Pentecostals would hardly be enough to fare better. In both cases, the loss of teaching on sanctification-transformation was not due to an overt rejection of either Aquinas or Wesley. In the case of Aquinas, Catholic moral theologians didn’t shelve him—they edited him. Specifically, they ignored his treatise on happiness, which forms the heart of Aquinas’ vision of holiness.

Pentecostals were remarkably similar in how they treated the Wesleyan notion of Christian perfection. That is to say, we retained the language but almost none of the meaning. There is a great need to trace the lines of Wesleyan heritage more fully, as the later years of the movement reveal a great deal of turmoil over how to rightly claim holiness tradition. If Wesley himself is sometimes criticized for not developing his own moral theology fully enough (in the manner of Aquinas), Pentecostals fared far worse by adopting Wesleyan sanctification language, playing up the component of crisis and

27 D. Stephen Long, John Wesley’s Moral Theology: The Quest for God and Goodness (Nashville, TN: Kingswood Books, 2005), p. 127.

28 Long, John Wesley’s Moral Theology, p. 175.

29 Long, John Wesley’s Moral Theology, p. 173.

30 Long, John Wesley’s Moral Theology, p. 219.

31 One might call this an early form of quandary ethics.

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largely ignoring the parameters. As Pentecostalism increasingly took on characteristics of American fundamentalism, holiness teaching lacked the integrating center of perfecting love that gave Wesleyan holiness its depth and character. Despite the characteristically broader concerns for holiness in Wesley, teeming with hope for realization of rediscovering what it is to be human, Pentecostals ‘inherited a watered-down version of John Wesley’s teaching, focusing on instantaneous sanctification and absolute sinless-ness’, resulting in ‘inadequate, legalistic and trivialized conceptions’ of sanctification.32 It is nearly impossible not to read many Pentecostal sermons in the years after Azuza Street on holiness as a type of proportionalist casuistry. They were not legalistic because they had prohibitions to guard against the external threat of ‘worldliness’—but the prohibitions often lacked a broader, narrative context by which they could be understood as perfection in love. This is precisely the accusation leveled by Pinckaers against the proportionalists—ethics was reduced to individual acts, with no larger understanding for how these acts fit into the broader story of God, Scripture and tradition.

But as Pentecostals continue to trace Wesleyan continuity further, the holiness emphasis could become a greater resource in moving towards a pneumatic approach to ethics. Otherwise, we are stuck with almost exclusively crisis sanctification rhetoric. Sanctification was conceived in some cases exclusively as a one-time event en route to Spirit baptism where all sinful desires were annihilated. Most problematic was that the language of love became increasingly distant from this crisis experience. Holiness without the language of love too easily becomes detached from the ‘joy’ so characteristic of early Pentecostals or ‘happiness’ expressed by Aquinas. Even now it is common to hear Pentecostals give some variation of the phrase, ‘God is not interested in your happiness, but in your holiness’—which seems a poor estimation of both words. Beyond that, Pentecostals largely ignored the mechanisms that formed Wesleyan sanctification doctrine. Whereas it was understood for Wesley that growth in holiness entailed both process and crisis, Pentecostals often reduced sanctification to an instantaneous experience necessary to move from salvation to Spirit baptism. There was no longer room for process, and thus there was not as pronounced a need for Christian community through ‘bands and classes’ to steer one towards a life of holiness. The sanctification that could be experienced in the thunder and lightning of an altar service was too easily segregated from corporate discipline and confession of sin.

32 James P. Bowers, ‘Recovering Sanctification in the Church of God’, Leadership, Volume 19, no. 1, 5.

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The larger vision of a coherent, moral life in the spirit of Aquinas and Wesley also risks getting lost when the doctrine of tongues as initial evidence of Spirit baptism is detached from other evidences. The isolation of tongues can be at the expense of a fuller understanding of the holy life. In light of the spontaneous, liberating nature of the early Pentecostal experience of worship and their anti-creedal tendencies, the very language of ‘initial evidence’ seems at times unnatural, as if it were tacked on from another place. But Pentecostalism was marked by fundamentalist-modern controversy, and the language of ‘proof ’ was part and parcel of the theological era. Speaking in tongues then could at times become isolated from the framework of a life of holiness lived in the power of the Spirit, fragmented from other signs of a Spiritempowered life.33 As for the loss of grounding in the Word of God, we Pentecostals have a more tenuous relationship with the Word than might be assumed. As is well noted, Pentecostals have an extraordinarily high view of the authority of the word—which is no better illustrated than in the high premium Pentecostals place on the sermon. Early Pentecostals had little formal education, so the authoritative instruction on moral life came not from moral philosophers but preachers. In the best of Pentecostal preaching, the preacher relates to the Word like a brilliant jazz musician—an improvisational, interactive love affair between the prophet, the instrument of language and the audience. It is sensual and urgent in its passion for the Word. When it is extemporaneous, it works because of the long, disciplined study of the Word that brings true freedom in the pulpit, now enlivened by the Spirit. A man or woman speaks the Word of God as the oracle of God, and it is a cataclysmic, risky event. But for all the free-flowing beauty of Pentecostal preaching, it can also suffer from having no rails, no parameters. We are known for our disdain of formalized liturgy, which often gives us the liberty to form our sermons from outside sustained reflection on the Scripture, which is the source of the Spirit-formed imagination. If the proportionalists lost view of the end because moral theology became a kind of speculative discipline apart from rigorous reflection on Scripture, Pentecostal preachers lost sight of truly biblical ethics because we had no more accountability than the proportionalists to keep us faithful to the Word of God as the authoritative source of moral teaching.

33 A helpful corrective to this is Steven Land’s discussion of ‘initial evidence’, ‘essential evidence’ and ‘ultimate evidence’ of Spirit baptism. While strongly affirming his belief in tongues as initial evidence, Land gives the doctrine a larger framework of love and sacrifice by which it can be narratively understood. See Land, ‘The Nature and Evidence of Spiritual Fullness’ in Robert White (ed.), Endued with Power (Cleveland, TN: Pathway Press, 1995) pp. 69-78.

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In Catholic moral theology, John Paul II and Pinckaers specifically lament the loss of the Sermon on the Mount as the moral center of Christian ethics.

Both see a return to the Sermon, which ‘through the Beatitudes gives Christ’s answer to the search for happiness, deepens the precepts of the Decalogue and penetrates to the “heart,” where actions are conceived in the depths of a person and where virtues are formed’,34 as the hope for renewal in moral theology. Specifically, Pinckaers believes a return to preaching from the Sermon on the Mount is crucial in the rediscovery of truly Christian ethics.35 Pentecostal preachers have an odd history with the Sermon on the Mount.

I do not assume that my experience is representative of all Pentecostals (especially outside North America), but I must confess that I was into my late twenties before I ever heard a Pentecostal preacher use any significant portion of it as a text. This is perhaps symptomatic of a failure on the part of Pentecostals to trace the roots of our family tree. For example, if we paid more attention to Anabaptists than classical Protestants, we would not only find much more in common but would be forced to reckon with a more serious (and more conducive to our tradition) reading of the Sermon on the Mount.

There is also our peculiar coziness with dispensational theology (on the popular level), which marginalizes the Sermon on the Mount as prophecy of the future kingdom to be realized by Jews and renders it more or less useless for the moral life of the church. Early Pentecostals had no real quarrels with the dispensationalism of the Scofield Study Bible beyond its cessationist teaching on supernatural gifts.36 When Finis Jennings Dake produced the popular Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, Pentecostals had even more direct access to dispensationalism, this time with more accommodating teaching on spiritual gifts. It was one more significant step away from viable sources of ethical renewal.

As Pinckaers sketches for Catholic tradition, Pentecostals are in great need of revisiting parallel sources to find their own way towards ‘the freedom for excellence’ that marks the sanctified life. But beyond the return to ‘sources’, Pentecostal ethics could not be separated from the apocalyptic, catastrophic

34

Pinckaers, The Source of Christian Ethics, p. 165.

As Pinckaers comments, ‘We can never stop preaching the Sermon on the Mount to everyone. Theology is at the service of this kind of preaching. It is, in its own way, a commentary on the Gospel, designed to show us how to apply it to all dimensions of life. And it is here that the works of St. Augustine and St. Thomas can be our models. This is precisely why they are written’. See Pinckaers, The Source of Christian Ethics, p. 163.

36 Curiously, when I was ordained as a bishop in the Church of God recently during a campmeeting service, I was given an engraved copy of the Scofield Study Bible!

35

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structure that makes Pentecostal spirituality distinctive. What would be needed is not only a return but an eschatological move that allows the Spirit of the future to crash into the present.

2. Constructive Proposal: A Dialogue with Herbert McCabe For both Catholics and Pentecostals, moral theology ultimately conceded too much by accepting the parameters of language given by philosophy and culture. That is where McCabe’s prospect of ethics as language invigorates both traditions: he allows room for the new language of the Spirit to give ethics a distinctively pneumatic character. He explicitly uses the two texts that have been so crucial for Pentecostal theologians: the Babel narrative of Genesis 11 and the restoration of languages in Acts 2. As Pentecostals have often preached, McCabe sees the outpouring of the Holy Spirit as a reversal of the curse of the Babel tower project.37 McCabe’s moral vision could be a key resource for Pentecostals, who are still largely trying to find themselves with regards to ethics.38 In many cases, the unique contributions Pentecostals could make to moral theology have not been realized (especially in North America), because we have chosen to speak in languages that we have already learned, rather than speak in new tongues as the Spirit gives the utterance. But if Pentecostals again reinterpret themselves in light of Acts 2, the coming of the Spirit is a violent, apocalyptic, disruptive event. It strengthens the unity of the church but puzzles everyone else—the initial responses are bewilderment and accusations of drunkenness. It is easy to marvel at the notion of a time when ‘sons and daughters will prophesy, old men dream dreams and young men see visions, male and female bondslaves speak the word of God’.39 It is also easy to forget that this promise too is couched in violent, apocalyptic language—the same text that promised dreams and visions also anticipated ‘blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke, the sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before the great and glorious day of the Lord shall come’.40 Joel’s prophecy, reinterpreted in and through the Spirit, thus creates new possibilities for a ‘pneumatic way of

37

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 111.

For a recent constructive proposal, see Daniel Castello, ‘Tarrying on the Lord: Affections, Virtues and Theological Ethics in Pentecostal Perspective’, Journal of Pentecostal Theology 13 ( January 2004), pp. 31-56.

39 Acts 2.17-18.

40 Acts 2.19-20.

38

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existence’.41 The new possibilities of thinking about God, humanity and ethics are the product both of pneumatic imagination and apocalyptic vision.42 The Pentecostal movement brought these apocalyptic nuances back into play when they rediscovered Acts 2, no less joyful and no less traumatic than the ancient Hebrew narrative of King Josiah finding the law.

In McCabe’s sparse work, there is something of that sense of rediscovery, not just of past tradition, but of ‘remembering the future’.43 His ethical vision is moving not only because of the uncluttered prose and jolting clarity of ideas, but because he brings something of the apocalyptic to the moral life, both in reinterpreting God’s intervention through the law and participating in God’s future by the Spirit.

This begins before Easter and Pentecost with the revelation of Yahweh on Mt. Sinai.44 It is on Sinai that God announces himself as the liberator (‘I am Yahweh your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery’) and reveals Himself through the ten commandments. It is important to note that Sinai is also an apocalyptic event. Mt. Sinai’s significance is more than geographical. Sinai marks a moment where thunder roars and lightning flashes, beautiful because it is where God meets with Moses but terrifying for the same reason.

The power of Sinai is mysterious and darkly compelling. The people of God come just close enough to hear what God is saying through Moses, but don’t want to touch the mountain for fear He might kill them. Pentecostal preachers have often understood their task in light of Sinai. Perhaps that is what makes Pentecostal preaching so distinctive—it carries with it the weight of life or death. People generally don’t come to hear mere inspiration from Pentecostal preaching, they want something that will move and frighten them. Pentecostals not only expect their preaching to be confrontational, they are often suspect of it if it’s not! Preaching from Sinai is on one hand extremely intimate because it comes right out of Moses’ personal encounter with God, but at the same time keeps a distance because it is such a fearful encounter. ‘Don’t let Him speak to us directly, let Him talk to you and you talk to us’ is the retort of God’s people. For as intimate as Pentecostal preaching can be, there is great fear of the storm of Sinai coming too close and obliterating the people.

41 A lovely phrase taken from J. Kameron Carter, ‘Race, Religion, and the Contradictions of Identity’, p. 59.

42 Or to use Walter Brueggaman’s term, ‘a prophetic imagination’. See Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), p. 66.

43 McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 152.

44 McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 115.

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Moses at Mt. Sinai sets the pattern for prophetic preaching. Moses goes off to hear from God. He faces up to the Creator. He is given a word. The things that he sees and hears are too vivid for the human mind; his senses are overwhelmed and overcome by the experience. His ability to relate to humans is altered by his obsession with the divine. By the time he returns, the fire that He felt has almost incinerated him, and his sanity is the price. He is not just delivering the message, he is enveloped by it—he becomes the message. He comes back bearing the weight of the Word of God, words which have both destroyed and liberated him. This is the Pentecostal experience of receiving and delivering the message—it is intense and incendiary. There is a lot of wonder at Sinai. There are colors to be seen, thunder that shakes the soul, lighting that fascinates you…but would peel your skin back if it hit you directly. Preaching from Sinai erupts with fear and awe through the medium of a man or woman armed with nothing more than a Bible and a cordless microphone.

Through their own experience of the terror and wonder of Sinai, Pentecostals have resources with which to capture the revolutionary nature of the call towards freedom. McCabe sees the task of the Christian minister to be no less apocalyptic than Moses from Sinai, or the task of Peter on the Day of Pentecost. And in the best of this tradition, this would far be more descriptive of the Pentecostal understanding of the role of the minister than that of most Christian traditions: The Christian minister is meant to be neither the pillar of an established quasifeudal order, as conservative Christians are inclined to think, nor is he the democratic representative of a quasi-bourgeois society as the progressives seem to suggest; he is a revolutionary leader whose job is the subversion of the world through the preaching of the gospel. He exercises authority amongst his people not as maintaining an established structure; he is the leader of his people in a movement towards a new community. He is representative of his people not necessarily in the sense of being their elected spokesman; he may represent them in the way a revolutionary leader does, a way that is not obvious to them and only becomes clear when the revolution is achieved.45

McCabe’s prophetic understanding of Christian leadership brings hope that Pentecostal pulpits could again be a place of moral courage, as revolutionary leaders who derive their authority not from titles but from the word of the Lord (which separates the people of God from all other peoples, as the law did).

45

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 152.

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In the Pentecostal imagination, the Sinai covenant of Moses, the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus, and the day of Pentecost where the new language of the kingdom inaugurated in Jesus is realized, all become places that might be revisited ‘in the Spirit’. It is the Spirit that mysteriously transports the church backwards and forwards through time through the worship of the community, as Pentecostals intuitively recognized from the beginning.46 The wonder of Sinai, the fulfillment of law through Jesus’ own teaching and the actualization of new language at Pentecost are all part of the community’s shared experience of the Spirit.

The freedom gestured towards in the covenant of Sinai is realized in Jesus, who is not just the ultimate specimen of humanity, but ushers in the ‘coming of a new humanity, a new kind of community amongst men’.47 The coming of Jesus then is understood ‘as the coming of a new language’, playing off of the first chapter of John’s gospel, ‘the language of God which comes to be a language for man’.48 Yet McCabe sees the task of Christian ethics in revolutionary, catastrophic terms not only because the nature of new language in Jesus, but also in that the rejection of this language has catastrophic implications. In the rejection, expulsion and murder of God Himself through the cross, McCabe sees evil every bit as destructive as nuclear technology, ‘where the eccentric activity during just a few days on the part of quite a small group of men could bring history to a stop’.49 In a world where ‘we know the events of a few hours on a slope outside Washington, where the Pentagon is’ could bring the literal destruction of the world, McCabe sees the apocalyptic nature of crucifixion.50 The moral crisis of humanity is the result of radical evil that comes to a climax in ‘the killing of the uniquely good, the expulsion of God’.51 In addition to giving an astonishingly clear, Christological account of sin, McCabe’s view of sin raises the stakes again as to why Christian ethics are so vital. In his words, ‘The crucifixion of Christ transforms the problem of ethics—the problem of taking human behavior seriously—into the problem of sin and holiness’.

Against this backdrop of radical evil, McCabe understands the confusion of languages in Genesis 11 also to be a ‘profound fall story’ which ‘shows us the attempt to build the city and the tower, to create a human identity collapses

46 47 48 49 50 51

Land, Pentecostal Spirituality, p. 39.

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 129.

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 29.

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 106.

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 107.

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 132.

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in a failure of communication’.52 This failure of human communication is a failure to know how to talk to one another, and yet it is more devastating than that. It is ultimately the cause of violence against the Creator. Given McCabe’s account of sin, it is no wonder that this leads him to the exotic language of ‘revolution’ over and over again to describe the work of God in Christ to rescue the world. The fragmentation of the world that ruins human communication to one another and to God is no less than ‘deafness to the summons of God’.53 To understand something of the crisis of sin is to recognize the apocalyptic nature of holiness and thus dramatically raise the stakes of ethics.

Yet McCabe also sees the human race ‘moving towards a unity, a point of view from which its history will be intelligible’.54 For him, this movement can only take place through ‘revolutionary change; not by mere progress along the established lines, but by radical transformation of the lines themselves’.55 The summons of God to moral coherence then is more catastrophic, more radical than the murder of Jesus. It is the summons to resurrection. The power of resurrection arrives with apocalyptic force—resurrection is marked by earthquakes, thunder and lightning (reminiscent of Sinai) and graves being opened up all over Jerusalem. God’s response to radical rejection is resurrection, which brings into focus the eschatological contours of this new language, seeing Jesus as ‘the future destiny of mankind (to which we are summoned by the Father) trying to be present amongst men in our present age’.56 Pentecostal spirituality thrives on this kind of eschatological character, where the participation in God’s kingdom is entered as participation of the resurrection to come. This is why despite the often-close associations between Pentecostals and liberation theology, they have consistently rejected any view of freedom that does not retain an eschatological character. As we owe much to black spirituality, Pentecostals would do well to heed the words of James Cone: It is important to note that Black Theology, while taking history with utmost seriousness, does not limit liberation to history. When people are bound to history, they are enslaved to what the New Testament calls the law of death…if the oppressed, while living in history can nonetheless see beyond it, they can visualize an eschatological future beyond the history of their humiliation, then ‘the sign of the oppressed’, to use Marx’s phrase, can become a cry of revolution against the established order.57 52 53 54 55 56 57

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 111.

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 113.

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 113.

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 114.

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 129.

James Cone, God of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury, 1975), p. 159.

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The eschatological, apocalyptic nature of Pentecostal spirituality is what gives it shape and form to transcend the established order of identity that is given to them. Recapturing something of that essence via McCabe gives Pentecostals the ability (at least potentially) to transcend ethics as an isolated moral task in favor of a pneumatic narrative that makes sense only in light of the end.

When God’s Spirit mediates the power of resurrection to the church with the gift of new languages they had not yet spoken, this new form of communication is also apocalyptically formed. The gift of right communication is as definitive and traumatic as Joel’s prophecy of ‘blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke, the sun turned into darkness and the moon into blood’, now reimagined in the Spirit. At the first Pentecost, the promise of the Spirit comes couched in Joel’s language of promise, but also of judgment for all the ways that the world has failed to communicate and thus rejected its own sense of meaning.

It is the Spirit then that gives the utterance to speak in languages that we have not heard. It is the Spirit that not only takes us back to the terror and wonder of Sinai and the splendor of Jesus’ teaching on the mount, but also the imagination to see the present in light of the future. In fact, for McCabe ‘the business of the church is to ‘remember’ the future. Not merely to remember that there is to be a future, but mysteriously to make the future really present.58 The Spirit grants the apocalyptic imagination necessary ‘to live into the mode of communication that belongs to the future world, the mode we call charity or the presence of the Spirit’.59 Finally, the sacramental nature of Catholic theology expressed by McCabe would be an especially valuable resource for Pentecostals to live into this eschatological future in practical ways. Pentecostals have often gone the way of protestant neighbors in performing their liturgies and merely hoping that God will show up. For McCabe, a distinctive mark of Catholicism is the belief that in the resurrection Jesus, something about the cosmos itself has changed.60 Pentecostals are at their best when they understand the sacramental quality of the arrival of the Holy Spirit in the same way. The presence of the King and the signs and wonders that follow the arrival of the kingdom are not wished for, but participated in. This is expressed in specific, bodily practices of the church, such as the Eucharist. But perhaps especially poignant for this

58 59 60

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 141.

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 153.

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 142.

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discussion is that McCabe references ‘the sacrament of anointing the sick as an exploration of the meaning of the bodily care men have for each other and see its ultimate meaning in Christ’s care for our bodies culminating in the resurrection itself ’.61 This basic, subversive practice, so familiar within Pentecostal tradition, takes on new possibilities when understood sacramentally—because it too becomes a way to participate in God’s future. Through the Spirit, the act of anointing the sick with oil becomes not just a hope for immediate healing, but a way of anticipating the resurrection of the body in the parousia, connecting the practice again to the apocalyptic, eschatological character of Acts 2. In McCabe’s words, ‘The sacramental life of the church makes the presence of the risen Christ articulate to a revolutionary interpretation of the world, an interpretation of the world in terms of its future destiny’.62 The eschatological nature of McCabe’s approach to ethics is ripe for further Pentecostal dialogue and could only be deepened by his pneumatic ethical focus. To remember the future with McCabe is also a way for Pentecostals to revisit the apocalyptic tensions of our past, giving both urgency and coherence to the construction of Pentecostal ethics. The sacramental practices (especially when reinterpreted by their own practices) offers a way for the church to further apocalyptic anticipation while tangibly participating in God’s future in the present. As Pentecostals seek to find their place in theological ethics, McCabe gives resources that could keep us honest both in terms of our eschatological identity and restorationist roots.

61 62

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, pp. 152-153.

McCabe, Love, Law and Language, p. 153.