“The way to Pentecost is Calvary; the Spirit comes from the cross.”
Scottish theologian Thomas Smail centered his career around this message, and there is little wonder as to why that is: for these words were the interpretation given to him after his first public expression of the gift of tongues in the mid-1960s. [1] Recognizing that the very shape of Pentecostal theology makes it difficult to understand this dogmatic proclamation, Smail made it a goal of his to embed this notion in a Pentecostal theology which, as a result, would be better safeguarded from shallow ‘God-talk’ or glib triumphalism—two temptations sometimes yielded to by Pentecostals. For traditions in which the charismatic activity of the Holy Spirit is emphasized, a robust theology of the Spirit is required in order to do justice to both sides of the church’s journey: “the power and the love, the failure and the triumph, the weakness and the strength, the suffering and the healing, the dying and the rising again.”[2]
In part one of the following essay, we will observe Smail’s attempt to do just this in his article “The Cross and the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Renewal”: develop a theology of charismatic renewal that situates itself at the foot of the cross. By doing so, Smail makes clear that the Spirit poured out at Pentecost will necessarily be the Spirit of the crucified one, the Spirit whose power and work bear witness to the scandal of the cross—God’s power made perfect in weakness. In part two, we will take note of Smail’s theology of suffering, which he devises from the “Paschal model” charismatic renewal, and offer a critique of certain aspects of his argument.
Part I
In the article, Smail focuses in on the close proximity of Pentecost to Golgotha and how we cannot understand the Holy Sprit if we do not perceive it through the lens of the cross. But before stating his thesis, Smail carefully constructs an implicit premise of his argument: the charismatic renewal needs a working theology open to the Scripture’s correction in order to account for lived realities like suffering. First, he mentions the ubiquitous “impatience with theology” amid the renewal movement. The charismatic renewal, it might be argued, is about an “experience of God rather than thinking about God. . . . Its central contribution [is] to emphasize once again the here and now activity in his Spirit.”[3] Originally, Smail understood this impatience.[4] But while attending a gathering of Scottish pentecostal leaders, he was reminded that the movement would fall pray to serious problems if its leaders did not hold on to their “good theology.”
Second, Smail finds an analogue for understanding theology’s efficacy in maps and their function. Like a map for a traveler, a robust theology is indispensable for showing a Spirit-led church where it is going and how it is going to get there.[5] Encountering God in the Holy Spirit engages our hearts (emotions) and our minds (thoughts)—not simply the former at the expense of the latter. And anyhow, there is no such thing as a church without a theology. The issue lies with what kind of theology a church is utilizing. Smail argues that “All our theological traditions need to be recognized for what they are, interpretations of the gospel that do justice to some aspects and fail to do justice to others.”[6] Concerning the theological pedigree of the charismatic renewal, he names it as one beginning in the Protestant Reformation, altered by Pietism and the Methodist holiness movement, and most recently manifested in ‘classical’ Pentecostalism.[7] Pentecostalism should be recognized for the ways it has turned a spotlight on aspects of Christian dogma that are largely neglected by mainline denominations in the west. Having set up a backdrop against which to view Smail’s thesis, Smail declares it saying, “the basic structures of Pentecostal theology make it difficult to recognize the close and intimate relationship between the renewing and empowering work of the Spirit and the centre of the gospel in the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”[8] Because of this, Smail suggests that the charismatic renewal develop a deeper notion of the Holy Spirit’s relation to the cross. “We are indeed rejuvenated and empowered at Pentecost, but we are judged, corrected and matured at the cross.”[9]
Theologia Gloriae and the Pentecostal Model of Renewal
Smail offers two possible models of charismatic renewal, a Pentecostal Model and a Paschal Model. The distinctions between the two models’ emphases are easily discerned in the titles Smail assigns to them: the Pentecostal model emphasizes the reception of the Spirit as the goal of the Christian life, whereas the Paschal model focuses on the connection between the cross and the Spirit. The Pentecostal model is characterized by Luther’s theologia gloriae, “the theology of glory that tried to deal with God in a way that did not take the cross fully into account.”[10] This model bypasses Good Friday, as it were, making a b-line to the narrative of Acts 2, forty days after Easter. In Smail’s view, this model compartmentalizes Christ’s work on the cross into a temporally prior category and the Holy Spirit’s ‘here-and-now’ work into a newer one.[11] Smail states two key dangers with this model. The first danger is that Christians working from this theology may articulate the Spirit’s power in ways that differ from—maybe even contradict—the gospel of the cross. In such a case, those who have experienced baptism in the Holy Spirit are conceived of as Christians of a higher class. As a result, the second danger is that Christian experience ceases to be normed by the cross. “Charismatic experience can become an autonomous realm of its own,” Smail says, a realm in which the cross no longer scandalizes and calls into question our expectations and experiences.[12] If the working theology of this model articulates the conception of a spirit who promotes triumphalism (implicit or explicit) over the cross, the model’s advocates may soon find out that this spirit, in Smail’s words, “turn[s] out to be a very unholy spirit.”[13]
Theologia Crucis and the Paschal Model of Renewal
The paschal model is, for Smail, more sustainable and theologically fertile than the Pentecostal model. Unlike the theologia gloriae of the previous model, the paschal model is a cruciform theology with eyes affixed on the cross—a theologia crucis. Where the Pentecostal model rushes from Luke’s narrative to Acts 2,[14] the paschal model ‘detours’ through John’s gospel before arriving in Acts and Paul. More than Luke, the gospel of John implies a closer connection between Jesus’ passion and the coming of the Spirit. This is largely due to the unique references in John to the Holy Spirit as the paraklete, the “helper,” “comforter,” or “witness” (John 15.26).[15] Smail also mentions that the pneuma Jesus gives up in John 19.30 may not simply be his “breath”; it may be the “Spirit.”[16] But one need not agree with Smail on this interpretation of 19.30 to concede the larger point that John’s gospel more emphatically stresses the Spirit’s movement from the cross:
In [John’s] gospel the way of the cross and the way of the Spirit are one and the same. The Spirit leads us as he led Jesus, to glory fashioned in suffering, to victory won through defeat, to power exercised in weakness, to a throne that is the same shape as a cross. This Spirit will never lead us away from or past the cross of Christ; rather, he will consistently bring us back to it, because it is the one source of that strange power by which God through Christ has overcome the world.[17]
This theology is by no means unique to John’s gospel. The apostle Paul, according to Smail, evidences a cross-shaped hermeneutical through which he interprets the Holy Spirit’s work.[18] In 1 Cor 1.22, for example, Paul reproves those seeking rational expositions (like the Greeks) or miraculous signs (Jews), “signs and wonders that manifest God’s presence in sensational and dramatic ways.”[19] The Holy Spirit has gathered the community in Corinth and is present in the charismatic gifts they display (1 Cor 12-14), but Paul adamantly declares that the power of the Holy Spirit is power from the cross and released by the cross’ message (1 Cor 2.1-5).[20]
The Particular Power of the Spirit
Pentecostal and charismatic Christians are notorious for speaking about the Holy Spirit’s work in terms of “empowerment.” When a theology of the Holy Spirit is divorced from the cross, though, the quality and character of the exact power imparted by the Spirit becomes elusive. Smail fears that an undisciplined use of power language can result in the impression that God unleashes a violent, “supernatural” attack against sin and evil. “Jesus did not attack evil by standing outside it in divine immunity and smashing it with the laser beams of supernatural force, “ he says; “he did not defeat it by violent and overwhelming assault upon it.”[21]
So what is the precise character of God’s power, given to the church through the Holy Spirit? When we understand it by way of the cross, we are able to see that the power of Jesus, and thus the power of the Spirit, is none other than the self-giving love of the Father, the epitome of which is put on display at the Son’s crucifixion. “Calvary love,” as Smail calls it, is that with which God “delivers, remakes, heals, frees, and saves.”[22] Consequently, “spiritual gifts” may only be wholesome and upbuiding if they are exercised as gracious gifts of God’s love, the fullest sense of charismata (“gift”) in the New Testament. To drive home his critique of the theologia gloriae of the Pentecostal model of renewal, Smail says, “The Spirit can use a Christian community that has begun to love even a little in the way Jesus loved on the cross far more than he can use people who may have sensational experiences and dramatic gifts in plenty, but who do not know how to love in this way.”[23] The Holy Spirit does not lead disciples away from the cross but is rather forever turning their eyes back to it; for it is precisely through the cross that the paradoxical power of God—through Christ—has overcome the powers of this world[24] The power of God made known in Christ, which Christ imparts to his church through the Spirit’s mediation, is the power of God’s self-giving love. A theological model refusing to separate the Spirit from the cross and power from self-giving love provides the charismatic renewal movement—and all ecclesial traditions!—a framework willing to endure theology’s fundamental challenge: human suffering. In the following section, I turn to critique the suggested theology of suffering that Smail puts forward with the intent of elucidating areas of his theology which are less clear and expanding areas which are too narrow.
Part II – Theology of Suffering
With a working theological lens (the Paschal model) through which to understand the relation between cross and Sprit, Smail suggests that we understand suffering and pain by attending to the notion that God’s purpose is not always to remove us from suffering but to take us through suffering—that is, to endure it. This observation, as Smail notes, is easily gained when one scans the pages of the New Testament:
The New Testament makes it clear that the way of the master is the way of the disciple. . . . That means we have no guarantee of immunity either from the kind of suffering that is a direct consequence of our discipleship or from the accidents, misfortunes, illnesses and disabilities that afflict other people and are as liable to afflict us as well.[25]
Smail goes on to suggest that Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” should serve as a New Testament paradigm for learning to trust that God can work in the midst of our sufferings and afflictions. Paul experienced many “sensational spiritual experiences” that could have easily driven him to pentecostal triumphalism. But his afflictions—i.e., his ‘thorn’—repeatedly drove him to place his trust in God (2 Tim 12.9-10).[26] Therefore, renewal in the Spirit does not advance us beyond the cross but rather suggests to us that “the more we are filled with the Spirit, the more we shall share in both cross and resurrection.”[27]
As a corrective to the pentecostal tendency to stress a notion of God’s power that does not begin at the cross, Smail’s emphasis on the cross and the Spirit’s connection is necessary. In fact, I find that I agree with much of what Smail says. There are, however, a few qualifications or additions that could have substantiated his thesis. First, nowhere does Smail clarify that a theology of suffering does not include the suggestion to actively seek pain, persecution, or any other form of suffering. We might describe such behavior as masochistic. Christians do not actively pursue suffering in order to be more like Christ; Christians participate in Christ by his Holy Spirit and in so doing are shaped into agents of God’s kingdom. When this occurs, when believers begin to bear the imprint of the Son by the Holy Spirit’s empowerment, they may very well be “received” in a similar manner to how Jesus himself was received: he was rejected and suffered as a result of it. I believe Smail would agree on this point. But he fails to clarify this and so leaves himself open to a vapid reading of Christian suffering such as this.
Second, I think Smail’s argument that God, more often than not, desires to lead us through suffering rather than deliver us from it would be more cogent if he stressed that God’s desire to lead us through suffering manifests itself in the communion we receive from the Holy Spirit. Writing on Karl Barth’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit as “mediator of communion, George Hunsinger says the following:
The ‘communion of the Holy Spirit’ (2 Cor 13.14) in which believers become ‘individually members of one another’ (Rom 12:5) is established as the Holy Spirit unites them with Christ by faith; at the same time, through our definite communion with Christ, as mediated by the Holy Spirit, they are also at the same time given an indirect share in the primordial communion that obtains between the Father and the Son to all eternity.[28]
The Holy Spirit unites believers with Christ, through whom they experience the communion of the Triune life by participation. Part of this participation is that while we participate in the self-giving communion of the Holy Trinity, we are discovering and establishing communion with others.[29] In the Christian community, therefore, there can be no such thing as a solitary sufferer; for the suffering of one is the suffering of all. The Holy Spirit opens us outwardly to one another and thus we are enabled to wait with, endure with, and witness to those suffering in our midst. Regardless of the shape suffering takes, an anthropology informed by the trinitarian being-in-relation helps to elucidate the disciple’s call to take up their cross—for they do not carry it alone. In his epistle to Galatians Paul says, “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (6.2). When the resurrection community bears the burdens of one another, the act of sharing in or interceding for one who is suffering is already a sign of the Holy Spirit’s transformation and ‘empowerment’. The koinonia fellowship of the Spirit, which is the primary shape of the Church’s life together, is most evident in the community’s sacrifice, eschewing self-centeredness for the sake of the other. “Our loving,” Arthur McGill says, “at least when it has the form of service, always means our dispossession. It always involves our surrendering to another something of our own, something that secures our old identity as self-contained beings.”[30] In other words, the spirit of sacrifice in the Spirit-led community is already a sign of the Spirit leading the community towards the cross, not away from it. Indeed, this is Smail’s aim in the article. And although these suggestions are not altogether in tension with Smail, framing Christian suffering within the community’s participation in the triune life is another way of arriving at Smail’s conclusion, that the Spirit cannot be divorced from the cross. “God is not doing anything on Good Friday that’s uncharacteristic of God.”[31] Likewise, when God unites believers to Christ by the Holy Spirit, it will not be uncharacteristic of the resurrection community to endure suffering. For in their communion with the Holy Trinity and consequently with one another, they are witnessing to the power of self-giving love—a power misunderstood by the world and thus deemed threatening.
[1] Tom Smail, “The Cross and the Spirit: Towards a Theology of Renewal” from Charismatic Renewal: The Search for a Theology, eds. Tom Smail, Andrew Walker and Nigel Wright (SPCK, 1993), p. 55.
[2] Ibid., p. 70.
[3] Ibid., p. 50.
[4] In the midst of his own renewal of the Spirit, Smail shelved theology, shelved thinking about God, so that he might “meet [God] and let him begin to liberate me by his Spirit” (50).
[5] In the Preface of Reflected Glory (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005), Smail mentions his frustration with the charismatic renewal’s inability to provide a theology capable of interpreting his new encounters with the Holy Spirit. “One the one hand,” he says, “I was not content with the theological frameworks that were offered me for its interpretation, and on the other, I was as convinced as ever of the general soundness of the theological approach I had maintained since student days, and this book is the result of an attempt to bring the new experience and the well-tried theology together” (p. 9).
[6] “The Cross and the Spirit,” p. 53.
[7] Ibid., p. 53.
[8] Ibid., p. 54.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., p. 57.
[11] Ibid., pp. 56-7. Smail employs the metaphor of ‘departments’ to describe this compartmentalization. Thus the cross is relegated to the “pardon department,” where Christians begin as sinners seeking divine pardon and only return when in need of forgiveness. On the other hand, the “power department” is overseen by the Holy Spirit and is tacitly understood as the superior department.
[12] Ibid., p. 57. He continues, “Bolstered up by what has happened to us and by the testimonies of others, we can easily come to see ourselves as living in a world of supernatural power that leads us from triumph to triumph, where the weak, desolate sufferer of Calvary has been left far behind, or at any rate has ceased to dominate the scene.”
[13] Ibid., p. 58.
[14] On the Pentecostal model’s biblical basis in Luke-Acts, Smail says, “It is . . . true that Luke is less interested in the meaning of the cross than in the activities and experiences of the Spirit that manifest themselves in the first day of the Church and its mission. To that extent Pentecostals are note entirely mistaken in claiming him as their best New Testament friend” (p. 58).
[15] para◊klhtoß (paraklete) appears 4x times in John: 14.16, 26; 15.26; 16.7.
[16] Raymond E. Brown articulates the exegetical rationale behind this interpretive choice well. See The Gospel According to John (XIII-XXI), Anchor Bible, ed. William Foxwell Albright and David Noel Freedman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), p. 931.
[17] Ibid., pp. 59-60.
[18] I do not mean to imply that Johannine and Pauline theology are exactly the same; I am simply noting (with Smail) that both are working more from a theologia crucis than a theologia gloriae.
[19] Ibid., p. 60.
[20] Ibid., p. 59.
[21] Ibid., p. 61.
[22] Ibid., p. 62.
[23] Ibid., p. 64.
[24] Ibid., p. 60.
[25] Ibid., p. 65.
[26] Ibid., p. 67.
[27] Ibid., p. 68
[28] “The Mediator of Communion: Karl Barth’s Doctrine of the Holy Spirit,” The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 179
[29] Ibid., p. 187.
[30] Suffering: A Test of Theological Method (Philadelphia: The Geneva Press, 1982), p. 113.
[31] Jeremy Begbie, Lecture: “The Christological Narrative” (1 February 2012).
FOR • THE • TIME • BEING 