The Intimidation Factor. Charles Redfern

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СКАЧАТЬ of revivals, first with the 18th-century Great Awakening, led by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield in the American colonies and Methodist founder John Wesley in Britain. Converts wept and swooned and displayed other signs and manifestations of the Holy Spirit’s power. Church attendance plummeted in the later 18th century but sky-rocketed after an enormous camp meeting in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801. Again, there were those manifestations: Swooning and weeping, even barking and roaring. Some historians dubbed the 19th century “The Methodist Century,” which gave the era an Arminian hue. Many of its leaders helped spearhead abolitionism and moved into slums.2

      Calvinism, of course, did not die. Some followers joined the Wesleyan fun and mingled with Methodists while remaining Reformed; a more cerebral branch lauded the scholasticism of Geneva theologian Francis Turretin (1623–1687) and found a home at Princeton Theological Seminary. The Old Princeton theologians—successively Archibald Alexander (1772–1851), Charles Hodge (1797–1878), AA Hodge (1823–1886), and Benjamin B. Warfield (1851–1921)—lobbed critical shells into the revivalist camp. They frowned on altar calls, the manifestations, and all the exhilaration. To their credit, they were intellectually rigorous and personally charitable, especially the elder Hodge, but they demanded stifling tidiness.

      Thanks for the brain power, Old Princetonians, but do yourselves and everyone else a favor: loosen up; chill out; join the party. And Warfield: Could you walk beside the Pentecostals instead of disparaging them?

      Sadly, the union of high spirituality and movement for societal reform dissolved in the later 19th and early twentieth centuries. Advocates of the Social Gospel, like Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), embraced Liberal Christianity, and Evangelicalism devolved into anti-cultural and anti-intellectual Fundamentalism, with Modernist leaders like Fosdick predicting its demise.

      Fosdick did not foresee the influence of Henry, Ockenga, and Graham.

The threesome and their cohorts were not flawless. First, Henry and Ockenga extolled the Old Princetonians even while they shook hands with Pentecostals and admired Wesley (his portrait hung on Ockenga’s office wall). Pentecostal and Wesleyan churches joined the Reformed faithful in the National Association of Evangelicals, which would have prompted Warfield’s glare, but Hodge and Warfield emerged as the new ideal. Old Princeton no longer scowled on a predominantly Wesleyan-Arminian universe. An unspoken covenant brooded: Everyone’s a guest in Hodges’ manse. Second, historian George Marsden observes that most leading new evangelicals supported Republican Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft, the guru of the GOP right in the 1940’s and ‘50’s3 (it should be said: Billy Graham was a registered Democrat and pushed for civil rights and social action).4 They did not baptize the Republican Party in Jesus’ name, but perhaps their political unanimity rendered them near-sighted to the 1980 emergency. They failed to see the invasion of a gurgling partisan idol.

Third, and perhaps the most shameful, the mid-century neo-evangelicals initially stood on the wrong side in one of America’s great moral struggles. Donald Dayton writes that Christianity Today panned the civil rights movement in the early1960’s. Its editors defended “voluntary segregation,” leveled socialism charges against Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call for integration, condemned demonstrations and civil disobedience, and labeled the 1963 March on Washington a “mob spectacle.” They also scorned interracial marriage and hailed Mississippi when the state’s leaders blocked James Meredith from attending its university. The magazine changed its stance by 1965; but, very unwittingly, the genteel new evangelicals left the door open for subsequent intimidators.5

      I would see that later. For now, I was lapping it all up and tagging myself with the evangelical label. It was a liberating insignia. I breathed in the whole Gospel.

      I also met my future wife at seminary (the former Andrea LaCelle) and, in a strange twist, I contracted tongue cancer just before our wedding. I submitted to twice-a-day radiation therapy at Massachusetts General Hospital. I stood before the altar in the winter of 1987, pledged the until-death-do-us-part oath, and wondered if I’d render my beloved a widow in a year. The cancer wouldn’t return for another 27 years.

      So I was ready and eager to pastor churches under the emancipating evangelical banner. I didn’t know Billy Graham’s gentlemanly image, which emblemized the movement for decades, was reshaping into a bruised religious boxer’s. My career gave me and my family a ring-side seat at the slug fest.

      Intimidation: An Eyewitness Account

      I signed on with the American Baptists (a smaller mainline denomination housing the full range of theological convictions) and took a church in Boston’s Allston-Brighton section, about a mile and a world away from Cambridge’s Harvard Square. The church itself was a lovable archetype of shrinking white urban congregations. Veterans fondly remembered its glory days while newbies brought in contemporary urban life: abuse, crumbled marriages, drug addiction, alcoholism and teen pregnancy—all wrapped in a Boston accent accompanying the city’s up-thrusted middle finger (The Hub cultivates audacity, as seen in its drivers). Our car was stolen on August 26, 1993, the day after our only child, Caleb, was born.

      Welcome to the big bad city.

      But the people could be uproarious and they tolerated my rookie mistakes. Tempers often flared, but there was little intentional intimidation. I saw bullying on the larger scene after I discovered the refreshing teachings of John Wimber and the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, then headquartered in Anaheim, California. The Vineyard drew me into deeper intimacy with God.

Wimber had been a cessationist Quaker pastor after he shelved his musical career when he came to Christ in the early 1960’s. He quit that church in the wake of burnout, signed on with the Fuller Institute of Church Growth, heard Ladd’s teaching on the present-day in-breaking of God’s kingdom and agreed with it. He saw the prevalence of healing and other miracles in the Gospels and viewed them through that already-but-not-yet lens. By now, he was shepherding a church again. He and other leaders prayed for the sick in earnest and flopped for ten months. Healings finally came and, on a fateful 1980 Mother’s Day, about two thirds of the church fell as the guest speaker cried, “Come, Holy Spirit!”6 Ministers baptized about 700 that summer.

Anaheim emerged as a center for signs and wonders and Vineyard churches sprang up across America and throughout the world. An informal network formed a wider Vineyard penumbra, so conferences were often populated with Presbyterians, Baptists, Episcopalians, and even some Catholics. They didn’t mandate tongues, repeatedly said not all were healed, and stressed holiness, social justice, and love for the poor. There was no naming and claiming or promises of health-and-wealth. The Vineyard staked its claim in the “radical middle,” encouraging a holy life and sound exegesis.7 Rick Nathan, a Vineyard pastor in Columbus, Ohio, described his colleagues as “empowered evangelicals” rather than charismatics.

      I tried the Vineyard’s method for healing prayer: Remain calm; ask questions; don’t rush; let God be God. Shock of shocks, it worked. Several were healed. One woman gasped when jaw pain fled after she had visited a dentist with bad aim. Who would-a thunk it? Christianity’s fun. The thrill ride rolled on as I drove to Canada in 1995, witnessed the so-called Toronto Blessing, and returned with glowing reports (a Vineyard church, which later separated from the association, displayed various “manifestations” reminiscent of the great revivals; thousands flocked from over the world).

      Then I saw the slug fest.

      Many evangelicals embraced the Vineyard. Some responded with reasonable concerns, but others followed the irascible John MacArthur, pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, who pastes the heretic label on good Christians everywhere. Both he and Bible-Answer-Man Hank Hanegraaff tossed unfounded charges like confetti: Vineyard and Toronto leaders supposedly mandated healing, favored experience over the Bible, and made manifestations compulsory. Some Reformed scholars—including the respected D.A.Carson—didn’t check their facts and leaped into СКАЧАТЬ