Ok, the title of this piece is probably clickbait. You decide. When I was preparing to come to Regent College for my theological studies, a Malaysian Pentecostal pastor warned me: “When you study in seminary, you will have so much in your mind you will have no place for the Holy Spirit.” I thought that was a strange thing to say because I didn’t think that theology and the Holy Spirit occupied the same space. But those were the days when the charismatic renewal was erupting in Malaysia and Singapore. One young charismatic told me: “You evangelicals worship the Father, the Son, and the Holy Bible, not the Holy Spirit.” He obviously hadn’t taken any classes on how to win friends and influence people. Some of us began to believe there was an anti-intellectual bent to our Pentecostal and charismatic friends.
So I arrived at Regent in 1981 and discovered a few things. One, I met teachers who obviously took the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit seriously, but who were serious, careful, scholars. I saw first-hand that one needn’t choose between charismatic fervour and careful theological reflection. They were not mutually exclusive. But I did find myself suddenly inundated with a lot of knowledge about the Christian faith — biblical studies, theology, church history, biblical languages, spiritual formation, etc. It was a shock to the system. I was operating in my mind a lot of the time. I began to be increasingly dissatisfied. Surely God cannot and should not be reduced to a whole bunch of truth statements about Him. As J. I. Packer said, “knowing about God is not the same as knowing God”. God is a person and not truths you learn for a theological exam.
This frustration led to a hunger to encounter God personally. From the encounter of the two disciples with Jesus on the Emmaus Road (Luke 24), I understood the need to know the Scriptures to know Christ accurately. But beyond that I wanted my heart to burn. The charismatics and Pentecostals seemed to hold some promise for helping me in this quest for a personal encounter with God. I went to a few trusted lecturers in this tradition to ask for prayer to help me in my journey. My friends prayed for me but, sorry, nothing dramatic happened — no tongues, no “slain in the Spirit”, etc. (These phenomena belong to another story.) But I did feel a greater sense of the presence and the power of God in my life and ministry.
So, in a sense, Regent did help me hunger more for the presence of the Lord. Because it taught me so much about God, it left a dryness in my heart that made me hunger for God Himself. I don’t blame Regent for this sense of intellectual formation that left me wanting more. The Master’s programmes they offered, e.g., the three-year Master of Divinity, meant you had to learn a lot in a short time. All the schools were then offering programmes like these. I think we are now beginning to rethink whether this is the best way to train people for ministry.
These days I see some groups in Singapore and Malaysia very passionate about returning to the Bible as the primary concern for the church. They have their approved scholars and seminaries. Ironically, many of these scholars and seminaries are from the West and I have to wonder if we still live with some degree of theological colonialism. These folks are very knowledgeable in Bible content and use their understanding of the Bible and their model of church life to judge other churches. Often this judgement comes as a desire to help you become more biblical, that is, to be more like them. If you change the names and the emphases, you will get a flavour of the charismatic movement in its early days. There is a certain advantage in being older and having lived through various renewal movements.
On the other hand, there are movements that promise personal and often dramatic encounters with the Almighty. The irony is that many of their heroes also tend to come from the West. “God is real, God is here, God wants to do a new work in the world today. Are you in?” Sing these songs. Come to these meetings. Come to be prayed for. You will be empowered and transformed. In a world that is often dark and where many of us feel helpless in the face of rapid global changes outside our control, I need to know that God is real, and is in control, and is working out His purposes in history. I need to feel it. In a lonely world, I need to know that God sees me and that He loves me. A theological textbook can’t hug me. Members of this group also want to help churches rediscover the reality of God, but in expressions that they prescribe.
As an older guy looking at all these movements, there is a sense of deja vu. Both sides have some important lessons for us. And both are reductionistic. And both can be arrogant. I sometimes wonder whether, if we somehow get our hands on a time machine and go some time into the future, some in the first group will become dissatisfied with just head knowledge about God and hunger for a personal encounter with Him. And some in the second group will hunger for more biblical grounding for their experiences.
Of course I am painting the situation in broad strokes. There are those in both movements who do aim at a healthy balance of Word and Spirit. In the end, we really don’t have to choose between Word and Spirit. Which is a relief, because we need both.
