At Westbourne Grove Church, we are currently doing a series of teachings aimed at renewing the intellectual foundations for our engagement both with the Bible and with a world going through tumultuous upheaval. An extravagant and presumptuous ambition, I know, but you’ve got to try.
For me, it is an opportunity to implement much of the narrative-historical hermeneutic that I have argued for and used on this site and in other writings. I’m not putting myself forward as a model speaker—far from it. But I’ve enjoyed doing these talks, the response has been pretty good, and perhaps they will give others hope that the church can be shifted on to more solid biblical ground as it braces for the shockwave of the age to come.
The text in each case is not a transcript but an overview of the topic.
Westbourne Grove Church, which I help to lead, is part of the Forge Sphere of churches in the south of England, which used to be part of Salt & Light, which is a network of “neocharismatic Evangelical” churches associated with the British New Church Movement.
So no surprise that the Forge summer camp at beautiful Ashburnham Place in East Sussex had some serious charismatic energy to it, boosted by rumours of a “quiet revival.”
I have difficulty keeping a lid on my scepticism at times, but the more constructive response I have is that, when we look at the phenomenon from a biblical point of view, it appears that the modern charismatic movement lacks what I would call a narrative-historical frame. It is all about the enthusiastic experience of God in the context of the church, not of God in the context of history. That is a major shortcoming.
My argument here, in the first place, is that the people of God from Abraham onwards has existed in two modes, switching between them over long periods of time: a mode of disruption, disorientation, transition, and a mode of settlement, stability, institutional consolidation.
The first period of instability was the exodus—the long, arduous journey out of Egypt and through the wilderness—when the people were dependent on the “supernatural” presence of God in the pillars of cloud and fire, who made miraculous provision for their material needs.
This was a radical mode of existence by faith—and failure—but it was not an end in itself. The exodus was the means to the end of settlement in a land in which they would flourish, sustained not by water from a rock or bread from heaven, but by agriculture, their lives governed by Torah, eventually with a king who would judge them and lead them in battle against their enemies. The ideal was the fully fledged, expansive Davidic state, with the spectacular temple of Solomon at its religious centre.
When this kingdom broke down, Israel found itself again in the wilderness, subject to aggressive, pagan, imperial powers: first, the Assyrians and Babylonians, then the Greeks and Roman; first, in exile, then in the land but under occupation in one form or another. In this period of protracted instability, both text and prophecy come to the fore, because Israel needs to understand what has happened and how YHWH will resolve a series of crises that will run all the way through to the conversion of the pagan world and the establishment of a new era of settlement and stability for the priestly people of the creator God.
The “charismatic” movement in the New Testament is driven by the prophetic expectation that the God of Israel will judge and renew his own people and then judge and rule over the nations through the Son whom he sent to Israel. The diverse manifestations of the Spirit—healings, exorcisms, and so on—trail along behind, like the shower of sparks from a firework rocket.
In modernity, the people of God has again been uprooted, disrupted, destabilised, banished to the margins. It is no longer sustained by the customs and institutions of western Christendom. So we again learning to rely on both text and the Spirit of prophecy and renewal to make sense of this new journey of exile. A narrative-historical hermeneutic is an effective way of framing the charismatic experience and accounting for the priority given to prophecy.
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