128 - Charismatic Renewal and the Churches

Charismatic Renewal and the Churches
By Kilian McDonnell
New York, Seabury Press, 1976. 202 pp. $8.95.

In this book, which is to be highly recommended, Kilian McDonnell deals with the many theories of the causes and motivations behind the charismatic movement and glossolalia. Probably the majority of the researchers in this field describe glossolalia and charismatic communities in terms of pathology and subnormality. McDonnell criticizes this research. Why is it, he asks, that much of it gets away with rather flimsy empirical evidence, provided that the researcher confirms the popular belief that charismatics are highly emotional, disturbed, and suggestible people? In fact Ernest and Josephine Hilgard have shown that normal subjects are more easily hypnotized than those who border on the neurotic, so-if the allegations of hypnosis and suggestion in charismatic meetings be true-this could certainly not be used as a proof against the normality of the people attending these meetings. He further states that much of this research is done without ever checking the findings against a control group.

McDonnell also deals with the different deprivation theories. These claim that people turn charismatic because they lack money, status, prestige, or a combination of these. With the emergence of neo-pentecostalism this theory was shattered so a new theory had to be created. This time it was to be "affective deprivation," on which McDonnell comments: One wonders whether this is not a universal condition, " something which is constant in all human beings…. Since affective deprivation … is considered a factor in the rise and growth of the [charismatic] community, is one not explaining a variable (the charismatic community) by a constant (affective deprivation)? In social science a constant cannot be used to explain a variable" (p. 26).

129 - Charismatic Renewal and the Churches

Two issues that seem to me important from a theological and a medico-psychological point of view are not discussed in the book. The first question is: On the basis of what criteria do we judge a person to be psychologically and medically normal? As far as I know there are no objective standards-only statistics-for such a judgment. This is increasingly recognized by medical researchers. The lack of criteria for establishing "normality" is felt not only in the psychiatric field but also in the purely medical field.

The second question has to be formulated like this: What is the ecclesiological and charismatic function of people who are considered subnormal? Could it not be that they have important charismata to contribute to a world and a church that believes itself to be fairly healthy and is perhaps more endangered by disease than it knows? Is God not also a God of the neurotics? He uses them in their neurotic state. One should not forget that some of the greatest thinkers and writers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, some of the Old Testament prophets, and Sigmund Freud of all people, were-in the modern clinical sense-psychologically disturbed.

The book is not so detailed on the theological side as it is on the psychological. McDonnell presents the different official reports of the American and British churches on the charismatic renewal. That is in itself highly interesting reading, and it is-to my knowledge-the first time that these different reports have been discussed in chronological order and compared with each other. Oddly enough the reports by the more evangelical wings of the Christian church, those of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, and of the Southern Baptists, are the most critical. This is something that has not yet been thought through enough by Pentecostals and charismatics.

McDonnell does not hesitate in his own assessment of charisma to disagree with much that is normally said in charismatic literature. For him "a charism is a fully human activity and is not under the control of some force outside a person" (p. 6). "There is theologically no reason why a certain ability cannot be both a 'natural' ability and a gift of the Spirit" (p. 84). He even goes so far as to describe glossolalia in the psychological term of "learned behaviour." But "this does not militate against it being a gift of the Spirit" (p. 154). "It is not true that what can be described in psychological terms is therefore not a true exercise of a charism, not of the Holy Spirit. This supposition would relegate the Spirit to some Platonic ideal world as it would presuppose that the Spirit operates in a psychological void. On the contrary, only what can be described in psychological terms is a true charism, even though the religious meaning and content is not adequately accounted for in psychological terms" (p. 155).

That understanding of a fully human charism, of a gift of the Spirit within the context of the presence of the Spirit in all creation, would demand a pneumatology that is very different from the normal pentecostal and neopentecostal pneumatology. And that is exactly what

130 - Charismatic Renewal and the Churches

McDonnell implies in the last sentence of the book. "Such a theology is essentially cosmic and developmental in its preoccupations." Is it possible to say that most of the charismatic literature, couched in evangelical propositionalism, is a self-misunderstanding of the charismatic reality?

Walter J. Hollenweger
University of Birmingham
Birmingham, England