Enthusing Ourselves to Death
by
Michael Crowe
In the beginning, there were those who sought to use God, and those who sought to be clay in His hands. The former were more numerous than the latter. Whether Cain or Balaam or Jacob or certain narcissistic souls in the Corinthian church, legions have wanted to get some level of control over the power and prerogatives of God for their own ends. One of the quickest ways to do this is to stimulate enthusiasm in others and direct it toward one's own agenda. If defense for that agenda can be found (or apparently found) in the Christian scriptures, all manner of distorted direction and authority can be contrived. In fact, if you can back up your machinations with scriptures, however wrenched from their contexts and intended meanings, and can do it in an engaging way, especially one with moral overtones, you can create an enthusiasm for your cause that is so profound, so fiery, that many people will "know" your cause is right and will invest vast resources in it.
It might be well to look at the etymology of the word "enthusiasm." The word enthousiasmou does not occur in scripture. It does occur in ancient secular writings. Democritus, for example, said he wrote from divine inspiration: "met' enthousiasmou kai hieroupneumatos." 1 En theos, the root of the Greek enthousiasmos is "to be inspired by a god" or "having a god within." 2 Pagans have long believed that one can take in or ingest something of the substance of a god, and that that god thereby possesses or deeply affects her or him. If it's the wine god Bacchus, or the sex god Eros you've taken in, you become controlled by that god, indwelt by that god for a period of time. These gods will have certain effects upon your person, and this is the origin of the term "enthusiasm."
Moderns would perhaps say that you have initiated a chemical, bodily response, whether you've taken in the chemical alcohol (Bacchus), or by sensory means taken in stimulating data that precipitates a powerful surge of reproductive system hormones (Eros).
St. Paul alludes to this Greco-Roman cultural assumption: Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit (Ephesians 5:18, NIV).
We must understand that Paul in this passage is not saying, "get more of God in you," but is using the idea metaphorically, working from something commonly understood in the culture. In the context he has built throughout the letter, we must see that he is saying, to paraphrase, "you can't take the true God into your bodies and have Him directly stimulate your physiological systems-He is spirit-but what you can do is to fill your life with relational response to Him of worship and thanks, and relational response to the Christian community of encouraging hymns and songs (Eph. 5:19) and gracious submission to one another out of reverence for Christ' (Eph. 5:21). God has in Christ done all the astonishing things for you that I've delineated in this letter, things that strike your inner person, your spirit, profoundly, and it's only right that you would respond in kind, with a fullness of internally-based reciprocation."
Confusion as to the historical-cultural context of this passage and others has led to the unbiblical doctrine that we are to be somehow filled up with Jehovah God as if He were physical fluid and that it will make us shout or babble or fall down or perhaps pledge to dissolve our businesses and become foreign missionaries. The attractive, physiologically-based pagan concept of enthusiasm, when super-imposed over the canon, does untold mischief in the lives of people who might otherwise give their lives to Christ-like pursuits. These pursuits would include the cultivation of thankful, humble, penitent, hope-filled living that would bear authentic witness to God before a polluted, weary world.
The enthusiasmous distortion has been so repeatedly and thoroughly embraced by various sects, streams, and offshoots of Christianity that it is received without discernment in many circles. In these circles, if you can create ardor in some way, you can call it the "outpouring of the Holy Spirit". In that case, through rhythmic music, manipulative oratory, affectations of spiritual gifts, and so on, the body's own chemical stimulation becomes deified. Crowd psychology, adrenalin, and generic, voyeuristic affirmations are called "anointing" or the "presence of God" or "the holy of holies."
This does not only happen in "pentecostal" sects. Many if not all revivalist movements throughout Christian history have yielded to the temptation to deify sensation. Some, to be sure, have babbled, barked, bellowed, and rolled. But extremities of fervor are often channeled through other means such as repeated, hypnotic singing and preaching and altar calls intended to induce sensation and acquiescence. In many of these activities, the pagan element is clear. Such meetings are often quasi-void of theological content, opening the door to participation in religio-socio catharsis. What does this have to do with the humility-suffused values of Jesus He taught in the Beatitudes, or with St. Paul's ethics of spirit fruit?
Throughout Christian history, legitimate spiritual gifts have been co-opted by sensual religion. When appropriate internal response to God and His word occurs, the accompanying sensations have too often become the goal or the criteria in themselves, and a new "movement" is the frequent result. John Wesley felt "strangely warmed" in a worship setting after exposure to Moravian believers. He later became a proponent and facilitator of extreme physical enthusiasms in those to whom he preached. It's significant to note that John Wesley remained a lifetime Anglican minister, rooted in the historic church, founded in scripture, and never became the hooting, hollering, wailing, flailing congregant that many to whom he preached did. In fact, according to Wesley scholar Bruce Hindmarsh, lecturing at Regent College on the theology of renewal, later-life comments by Wesley indicated that he saw that fiery, experiential responses, when succeeded by spiritual formation in individuals, were invariably replaced by quiet, gentle character. He also complained of the impossibility of moving many people out of the syndrome of attempting to go back and re-experience their emotional and thrilling conversions.
Wesley's successors in American revivalism, such as lawyer-turned-flaming evangelist Charles Finney, were less rooted, less learned in theology and in the historic church, and more inflamed with the individualistic spirit of westward-marching frontier pride. And they appear to have been far less inclined to make sure their goals and methods were aligned with those of the Galilean who had confronted or dismissed his crowds when they became animated or extreme in their responses to His ministry. We can see, then, that the departure from the historic, rooted Spirit-authored forms occured by increments, and was related to the theological depth of leaders and surrounding cultural influence.
Ronald Knox, in his landmark volume Enthusiasm, gives us the philosophical basis of revivalism:
Basically it is the revolt of Platonism against the Aristotelian mise en scene of traditional Christianity. The issue hangs on the question whether the Divine Fact is something given, or something to be inferred. Your Platonist, satisfied that he has formed his notion of God without the aid of syllogisms or analogies, will divorce reason from religion; it is a faculty concerned with the life of the senses, and nothing assures us that it (reason) can penetrate upwards; he is loth to theologize... 3
So Knox sees revivalism as a reactionary movement; therein lies an important key to understanding. History is replete with reactionism. One movement rises up, and its application in the extreme spawns a counter-movement, which in turn stimulates a reaction. This would seem to lend partial credence to Hegel's thesis-antithesis-synthesis system, but for one diabolical reality: By the time a given group achieves a workable synthesis institutionally, ten more reactionary splinter groups have gone their way. Knox aptly describes it this way:
There is, I would say, a recurrent situation in Church history...You have a clique, an elite, of Christian men and...women, who are trying to live a less worldly life than their neighbours; to be more attentive to the guidance (directly felt, they would tell you) of the Holy Spirit. More and more...you see them draw apart from their co-religionists, a hive ready to swarm. There is provocation on both sides; on the one part, cheap jokes at the expense of over-godliness, acts of stupid repression by unsympathetic authorities; on the other, contempt of the half-Christian, ominous references to old wine and new bottles, to the kernel and the husk...the break comes; condemnation or secession, what difference does it make? A fresh name has been added to the list of Christianities...the pattern is always repeating itself...almost always the enthusiastic movement is denounced as an innovation, yet claims to be preserving, or to be restoring, the primitive discipline of the Church...Almost always schism begets schism; once the instinct of discipline is lost, the movement breeds rival prophets and rival coteries...almost always the first fervours evaporate; prophecy dies out, and the charismatic is merged in the institutional...If I could have been certain of the reader's goodwill, I would have called my tendency 'ultrasumpernaturalism'. For that is the real character of the enthusiast; he expects more evident results from the grace of God than we others. He sees what effects religion can have, does sometimes have, in transforming a man's whole life and outlook; these exceptional cases (so we are content to think them) are for him the average standard of religious achievement. He will have no 'almost-Christians', no weaker brethren who plod and stumble...extenuate, accommodate, interpret, and he will part company with you." 4
So, according to Knox's historical studies, each of the revivalist streams of the last two hundred years have engendered sects, which in turn have hardened into institutions, which by further reactionisms will beget more streams, and so on, ad infinitum.
So what do we do about this constant pattern of reaction to reaction? I return now to Knox's contention that Platonism is the subjectivist reaction to the Aristotelian mise en scene. He's referring to the Greek philosophical foundation of the western church. We are now discussing the problem much closer to the root. In particular, the modern (last two hundred years) western church has been influenced by Aristotle, who went far beyond the Socratic/Platonic quest for genuine goodness. The European renaissance of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries was largely the renewal of Greek modes of understanding and learning. For the church, this meant a renewal of systematic theology such as had been initiated by St. Augustine , who applied Platonic, then Aristotelian thinking to the understanding of God. Augustine did this to combat the heresies of his time such as Donatism and Pelagianism. Augustine brought much important understanding of God to the church and the world, but the means by which he did it was the categorizing, propositional, syllogistic method of Aristotle. This is the central, salient issue for us.
When the second-millennium church began to try to justify itself to the emerging scholastic world, it returned to the methods of Aristotle. This was its ultimate downfall. Anselm, then Abelard laid the foundations of these apologetics in the eleventh century, attempting to systematize theology so that it would be perfect and unassailable. But in the twelfth century Thomas Aquinas picked up the mantle and employed Aristotle's system to defend the church, building a Christian interpretation of nature, law, ethics, and revelation. 5 The problem is that in the face of the rising ideology of rationalism over the next centuries, the church became dependent upon this new apologetics for its identity. As Professor of Spiritual Theology James Houston, lecturing in the Regent College Fall Conference in 1998, observed, "unfortunately, Aquinas held that theology always derives its affirmation from rational thought, instead of the alternative--rationally thinking about God and His revelation." Hence, the church began to see itself in terms of its polemics, its apologetics. Its raison d'etre became self-perpetuation, in much the same way that American governmental bureaucracy has become an entity whose purpose is not to serve, but to survive in and of itself.
This meant that the purpose and meaning of the church was no longer to know God and thus know one's self, but to perpetuate its institutional existence, ostensibly threatened by the rise of secular thought. Had the historic double knowledge of God and self been better articulated at this stage and distinguished from the issues of apologetics, the true and biblical purpose of the church might have been sustained at the center, but as it happened, an evolution commenced which took the matter of knowing God and oneself away from center stage. Such spiritual theology became a sentimental sidebar instead of the major story. Now systematic theology, the syllogism, the dialectics of deduction, took center stage in the slipstream of Aquinas' masterpiece, the Summa Theologica. Ultimately, philosophers discarded half of the ancient goal; no longer did it matter to know God--one only needed to know oneself, and the heady ideology of rationalism seemed to offer that possibility in marquee fashion.
This societal departure throughout Europe did not fully impact the church until the seventeenth century-until then there was enough residual personal spirituality in the church that rationalistic philosophy did not make its full inroad. Theologian Ellen Charry of Princeton Theological Seminary said it this way in a 1998 lecture: "Attention shifted in the seventeenth century from the benefits of theology to the examination of its rational claims. Theology previously had been about profiting spiritually. Now it was about coherence and intelligibility-the notion of 'truth' was now different...'wisdom' was now eliminated...theology retained for awhile its ability to bring God to people in faith, but eventually lost this."
Thus the sapiential knowledge Socrates and Plato sought was deeply subjugated to the sciential knowledge that Aristotle had systematized, and now posthumously had injected into the veins of a Europe poised for an "enlightenment" that darkened man's spirit as it illumined his technical potential.
So, as Knox makes clear, revivalism is a terrible over-reaction to this terrible historic shift away from faith and spirituality. The reactionary swing of the revivalists did as much damage as the rationalistic theology to which it was reacting. Out on its own, the renewed pagan stream of revivalism gave theological sovereignty to the individual believer, divinized the sensual, and made "felt response" more important than biblical, Christ-centered historic spirituality. Current evangelicalism carries this baggage even as it touts itself as authentically Christ-centered. Certainly the historic churches have in many quarters become spiritually emaciated from two hundred fifty years of inhalation of industrial-strength rationalism. But by rejecting wholesale the institutions fashioned by the Holy Spirit over two thousand years, American frontier religion cut itself off from its mother-the worship modes, the prayers, the creeds, the pastoral care that God had planted in her were lost. Revivalism fashioned a new religion, a quasi-pagan religion that adhered to a few central Reformation tenets, but polarized itself in subjectivism and lost its roots.
So, in conclusion, a question: does faith need to be felt? This is the question we're tempted to ask, the question that would satisfy our curiosity. But it's the wrong question. The right question is: Does faith need to be placed in the true God of the ages, who reveals Himself in Christ through the scriptures? The answer is "yes", and when one allows God to place herself or himself in the historic, liturgical (laos, people + ergon, work) stream of believing worshippers, becoming one who moves with a fully engaged mind as a child of Yahweh in partnership with the brothers and sisters of the ages and of heaven, warmth will occur. Feeling will occur. Motivation will occur. And one will develop the ability to fight the temptation to descend into pseudo-Christian sophistry. One will fight the temptation to discard quality, thorough-going thought and study as the puppet-strings of Satan. And one will do battle with any attempt to exalt revivalism, a religious self-affirmation ideology that ultimately can only verify itself by its own shallow subjectivities.
NOTES
- - New International Dictionary of Theology, ed. Colin Brown, Vol. 2, P. 233
- - Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, Portland House, New York, 1989, "enthusiasm" entry
- - Enthusiasm, A Chapter in the History of Religion, Ronald A. Knox, A Galaxy Book, 1961, P. 578
- - Ibid, P. 1
- - Dictionary of Religious Terms, Donald Kauffman, Fleming H. Revell Co., 1967
© 1999, Michael Crowe
