We didn’t say that much. We just took our time saying it.
One of the slowest ways to carry on a conversation is through book writing. It can take decades to complete a simple dialogue. Such is the story of Dave Gable and me sharing over 40 years about how the Spirit shapes our ethical understanding.
In the early ‘80s, Dave presented a statement at a General Council business meeting – that is, the national leadership body for the US Assemblies of God. I’d known Dave from when we worked together in Chi Alpha, a national campus ministry, in the late ‘70s. When I found his statement while working on my doctoral research in the mid-80s, I put it in my dissertation.
In those pre-digital days, doctoral dissertations had a way of slumbering in the catacombs. They’d get stored and made available through a national outfit, but they weren’t easily accessible. So, they slept in some vault in Ann Arbor, Michigan, like the Lost Ark of Indiana Jones. As mine did.
A few people like Mel Robeck of Fuller Seminary picked up on what I’d written. He went big time with it, drawing on it to address a 1994 conference that became known as the Memphis Miracle, where white Pentecostals apologized to black Pentecostals for decades of cultural accommodation. But mostly my work gathered dust, along with that reference to Dave.
While I lived overseas, I gave it little thought. Then after returning to the US, I heard of three guys trying to track me down. Being from New Jersey, I was a bit skeptical of people looking for me. But these guys were legit.
Marty Mittlestadt, a professor at Evangel University in Missouri, wanted to publish my dissertation in his series called Pentecostals, Peacemaking, and Social Justice. He wanted my work available to a broader audience. He and researcher Jay Beaman were especially interested in my section on pacifism. Just so happened that in 2007 I moved to Portland within a mile or two of where Jay lived. I’d leaned on Jay’s research in my dissertation but had never met him.
Marty and Jay didn’t know how to reach me. But they knew Darrin Rodgers. Darrin is the kind of guy who knows how to find people. Plus, Darrin also wanted my dissertation published.
Darrin leads this amazing operation called the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, a massive archive that safely stores valuable records and makes them available to researchers. Think the Lost Ark again, but where the ark doesn’t get lost. FPHC collects historical records for the entire Pentecostal-Charismatic movement.
People kept writing Darrin and asking him about my research, so he knew there was some interest, at least among academic types. He connected me with Marty who linked me with his publisher, Wipf & Stock, a couple hours’ drive south in Eugene, Oregon. I got to editing and reformatting my dissertation, making it a publishable book. Including that reference to Dave.
When my book, Ethics in the Age of the Spirit, finally came out in 2019, Dave reached out to me and ordered two copies, one for him and one for his pastor. I think the pastor got a copy just before his house was destroyed in a fire, so I don’t know if he ever read it. But Dave did – all the way through.
Although Dave’s house did not catch on fire, his face certainly lit up. For, lo and behold, there on pages 294-95 he discovered his name and the story of that statement he’d presented at the 1983 General Council.
Meanwhile, Dave’s been doing some writing of his own, including a 4-volume memoir called LifeTakes, which I’ll review next week. Ordering each volume as it came out, I finally got to Book 4 and was reading along when, lo and behold, there starting on page 121, I discovered my name and the story of how Dave discovered his name in my book.
So, Dave and I have been carrying on this conversation for about 40 years, counting long gaps where the voices went silent in some dusty vault. And now this post is adding to the conversational thread. I know Dave reads my blog, at least some of the time. Hopefully, he’ll read this post. As I don’t know if Dave will write much more, this may be the end of our conversation. But it’s been a fun run.
***
I was sitting at the memorial service for a friend, Lowen Berman. His service was at the Multnomah Meeting House – as in Friends or Quakers, the liberal kind. Lowen was an atheistic Lithuanian Jew who’d been my first boss at the Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon (EMO). After he retired, his wife got him involved with the Meeting House’s feeding program for people living on the streets of Portland.
As EMO is primarily connected with Mainline Protestants, they asked me when I started working there if I, as a Pentecostal, could work with them. I said, “I’ve worked with Communist Party officials, I can work with anybody!” My one-liner aside, they were all great to work with.
What I heard these Mainline Protestants often say is that “the Spirit is still speaking.” Which is funny because we Pentecostals say the same thing, though I’m not sure we always mean the same thing.
One of the people I worked closely with on EMO’s board was Joe Snyder, a retired veterinarian. Joe is a gracious, joyful guy who happens to be a part of the Multnomah Meeting House. We sat next to each other at Lowen’s service. At the end, Joe turned to me and said he’d come to realize there is a kindred spirit between us Quakers and Pentecostals because we both believe the Spirit is still active.
Which is true. Pentecostals have a number of connections with Quakerism historically, something I’d discovered as I was doing my doctoral research.
Contrary to what some of my Pentecostal friends think, I do believe the Spirit often speaks through my Mainline Protestant friends. But I don’t think we as Pentecostals and they as Mainliners always hear the Spirit speaking in the same way.
***
And sometimes, we all have a hard time hearing what the Spirit is saying.
Which was Dave’s point at that 1983 General Council. For years, Dave has been concerned about how the Assemblies of God deals with ministers who have been divorced. He felt the denomination’s position back then was not Pentecostal enough. To quote from my own book, “What [Dave] had to say carried a significance far beyond the motion on the floor, though it was not taken seriously at the time.” (p. 294)
He reminded that august body that when we Pentecostal decision-makers consider the biblical text, we ought also to be asking, “What is the Spirit doing in the Church?” His scriptural reference was the New Testament church council in Jerusalem (Acts 15). The Jewish Christians knew what the scriptures had to say about separating from Gentiles. However, a lot of Gentiles were becoming believers and receiving the Spirit just as the Jewish believers had. So now the Church came to a fork in the road.
They could have stuck with their traditional interpretations of specific texts, or they could have thrown out the scriptures and started fresh. Instead, they took a third route and looked at the whole council of biblical texts through a new hermeneutic under the direction of the Spirit. (Hermeneutic, by the way, is a 50-cent word that refers to how we interpret the Bible or other literary texts.) It wasn’t that the text had changed; it was that they were now seeing it through the fresh lens of the Spirit’s leading.
Dave then did just what I was doing in my dissertation. He took his listeners at the General Council back to the early days of the modern Pentecostal movement – think, beginning of the 20th century – and how they were shedding new (interpretive) light on old biblical texts. The example he used was how Pentecostals realized God was ministering through women.
Which was exactly the point of my dissertation. Well, at least one point.
I’ll quote Dave here:
“[Howard’s] overall finding is that the AG was at its best and most consistent ethically back at the start, in the pattern formed in the Azusa Street outpouring. We fully accepted one another racially (with black, white and brown involvement), in gender (with women free to speak and lead), and in the primacy of the Kingdom of God over earthly ones (with World War I derided as the flailing final actions of corrupt earthly nations, not to be endorsed…)”
I’m not sure early Pentecostals got everything right, not even on those topics. I know they didn’t. What Dave describes is early Pentecostals at their best. But their goal of matching their ethics with their understanding of the Bible as interpreted by the Spirit was spot on. And yet, again quoting Dave, they reverted to old ways of interpreting scripture: “For cultural reasons, we gradually walked back away from all of these positions…” (emphasis added)
When Dave referenced the Jerusalem Council at that ’83 General Council, he drew directly from the early Pentecostal playbook on both hermeneutics and ethics. His topic was divorce and remarriage in the ministry, a hot topic through much of the denomination’s history. I had three hot topics – race relations, women in ministry, and attitudes toward involvement in war. But Dave and I came to the same conclusion as how to connect the dots between the Bible, the Spirit, and the Church.
In 1983, Dave’s argument did not win the day. In fact, it got him labeled something of an outlaw to keep your children away from, or at least your youth pastors. Which is exactly how early Pentecostals were treated by Fundamentalists and theological liberals alike. Keep your distance, folks! Which they did until Pentecostals started accommodating culture.
And here is the tricky part of listening to the Spirit. Sometimes we Pentecostals and Mainliners confuse the voice of culture with the voice of the Spirit. But that has always been the temptation of the people of God.
None other than the Apostle Peter himself is a case in point. There he is in Antioch embracing unclean gentiles. Until he encounters circumcised church folk and then he suddenly separates himself from gentile Christians and hangs out exclusively with Jewish Christians.
Paul gets in Peter’s face about it – literally rebukes him in public. Calls him out for nothing short of denying the gospel. You can read all about it in Galatians 2.
Now you may think our temptations lie between hanging on to tradition or accommodating culture, but both tradition and culture are, well, culture. When it comes to tradition, we hang onto specific ways of doing things, specific interpretations, because we think they are biblical, when they are merely old ways of accommodating scripture to culture, even if the culture is the church itself.
When we hear the Spirit speak in fresh ways, it isn’t because the Spirit has changed to accommodate a changing society. It is that the Spirit helps us see the whole counsel of God in scripture. Spirit and scripture as a whole don’t contradict, but the Spirit parses through our understanding of how different texts interface with each other.
Whether we are Pentecostals or theological Progressives, evangelicals or Roman Catholics, Orthodox or Fundamentalists, we all have to take both the scriptures and the Spirit seriously and allow the Spirit of God to uncover our eyes. The Spirit indeed still speaks.
I was glad I discovered Dave’s 1983 statement back then. It reminded me that there were still old-fashioned Pentecostals around. I bet you never thought you’d be labeled an old-fashioned Pentecostal, did you, Dave? Well, there’s a new one for you.
Stay tuned next week for a full review of Dave Gable’s LifeTakes series. Subscribe – for free – here and you’ll be notified when it comes out.
To order Dave’s LifeTakes books, you can find them on Amazon: Felton and the Farm, Places, People and Projects, and Matters THEOLOGICAL. To order my book, go to Ethics in the Age of the Spirit: Race, Women, War, and the Assemblies of God.