Four purpose statements of Perichorus:
1. A call for true Pentecostal revival.
2. Visioning a new kind of Pentecostal church for the postmodern world.
3. Conceptualising Pentecostal ethos through postmodern paradigms.
4. Encountering Jesus as the Baptiser in the Spirit.
Conceptualising Pentecostal ethos through postmodern paradigms.
Third, I am also envisioning, a Pentecostal ethos emerging within postmodern wineskins. Every epoch of human history, and every human worldview, exists under the judgement of God. Yet the Holy Spirit also speaks redemptively through each wineskin and worldview. So while every epoch paradigm exhibits the corruption of humankind, each also expresses vestiges of God’s creative Spirit at work through the providential outworking of His purpose in human history.
For good reason, we have valued the trans-rational experience of God’s Spirit coming upon us. Yet partly due to our right valuing towards spiritual experience, we have generally lacked awareness of our own modern paradigms. We have failed to perceive that 20th century Pentecost fell within the wineskins of modernity. Through our naive human failings, we have lacked awareness that we have picked up and internalised within our presumed “Christian” belief-system, values, practices and behaviour, so much philosophical baggage that reflects not the biblical story-world but the story-world of philosophical modernity in its worst of forms.
The result is that we and our churches become more shaped by modern management models, pop psychology, and consumerised entertainment impulses- rather than biblical theology, servant-leadership and spiritual worship. Pragmatic relevance too often, displaces spiritual reality, and has displaced a true Pentecostal ethos and reality.
We have traditionally viewed with suspicion the act of engaging the very term philosophy, because we have comically dichotomised spiritual experience from moral and intellectual reasoning. Most of us are not aware how deeply wedded modern Evangelicalism has become to the modern philosophy of human arrogance. We have generally lacked awareness to our own modern paradigms. So we have mistaken the wineskin for the wine!
But today the soil is sifting and has already sifted. We now live between the twilight of one era, and the dawning of another. Regarding the Christian Church, particularly the modern Evangelical Church, the postmodern voice is often times today something of a pagan “Cyrus,” whom as “God’s Anointed,” He has raised up to call us out of faith in ourselves and back to faith in Christ alone. Thus, through the cataclysmic events demarking the displacement of every Christian church entrapped within idolatrous trappings of modernity, a New Reformation. It will be a Reformation very much parallel to and possibly as significant to the 16th century Reformation.
The modern wineskins caused us to imagine the Triune God in mathematical calculations. Yet we are now hearing from the ancients, that what they came to discover in God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, was as the “dance of God!” Trinity means that God is dynamically and relationally alive, as if the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are eternally moving in a joyful, circular rhythm. They saw the Trinity as the perichoresis (peri- “around,” + “chorus”).
The dance of God. Yet the Triune God has opened the circle, making space for you and I. God’s Triune life, is the message: He invites us into the rhythm of His eternal dance. That is why the prophet spoke: “He will exult over you with loud singing, as on a day of festival!”
Seeking after and entering into God’s dream, song, and dance- and inviting others to this heavenly party, is what Pentecost is all about. God is passionate. His passion comes upon us, as His comes upon us. God poured out His passion upon His prophets. Today, He is still pouring out Pentecost.
I believe that as an oral culture, Classic Pentecostal spirituality will find its most natural release not through 20th century modernity, but through a number of cultural paradigms that are defining the emerging postmodern world. This will be a Pentecost, bursting through new wineskins; a Pentecostal ethos bursting through wineskins of postmodern metaphors and paradigms.
For the postmodern turn towards understanding reality through the power of symbol, metaphor, dialogue and oral-driven story telling, offers us our true moment in history, for it is here we realise that Pentecostal spirituality can interface with the postmodern world in ways unprecedented during the 20th century. Indeed, we must do if the broad ethos of Classical Pentecostal spirituality is to survive as a renewal movement and witness of Christ to the postmodern 21st century world.
Furthermore, our movement into the postmodern 21st century world will require our evolving into a living tradition that is faithful to our perennial calling and revolutionary ethos as a prophetic and apocalyptic witness to the coming Kingdom. Yet we must do this in a manner that is fully ecumenically engaged as a communal gifting within and towards the entire Catholic Christian tradition.
We must in all humility, stand convinced that the revolutionary ethos which we enter into through the Pentecostal baptism in the Holy Spirit, is an ethos and spirituality which God has entrusted to us as a movement through the Pentecostal outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
Through its deconstruction of the modern meta-narrative and myth of scientific certitude through human ingenuity, postmodernity is positively reminding us within the Body of Christ, that every church tradition is gifted as an interpretive community. Yet God has poured out His gift into earthen vessels; flawed vessels flawed through the utter realities of human weakness.
So like other spiritual traditions existing now and in the past within the Christian tradition, we who are representative of Classic Pentecostal spirituality, must perceive ourselves as weak earthen vessels. Yet we are earthen vessels filled with a distinctive charism (gifting), that we may contribute our gifting back to the God as the Spirit’s manifold presence throughout the entire Catholic Christian faith.
As Pentecostals, we must therefore recover our original ecumenical vision and spirit. This means that even as we seek to maintain our core distinctives, and even as we posture ourselves as a gift to the greater Christian tradition, we also remain ecumenically engaged with the entire Christian Church that we may also receive gifts and the enduring wisdom and depth already entrusted within the greater Protestant, Roman Catholic, and even Eastern Orthodox traditions.
We do this knowing that the Spirit has entrusted gifts to their traditions. And also, that our roots lie within their existence as our spiritual fathers. The spirit which thus enjoins us to offer our gifts to the whole Church, thus also enjoins us to nurture an openness to hear and receive other gifts found within other traditions, which to some extent may find at least a small niche within our own Pentecostal spirituality.
Monte Lee Rice (© copyright September 2008)
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