228 - Pentecostalism and Black Power

Pentecostalism means not only "black and white Pentecostals, but also the mushrooming and increasingly important charismatic groups within the mainline churches, particularly amongst Roman Catholic intellectuals. [Recent studies] destroyed the generally accepted theory that Pentecostal spirituality was bound to the milieu of the spiritually and materially poor. At their meetings one finds not the uneducated but the intellectuals, not the naive but the critical, not frustrated puritans but normal Christians."

Pentecostalism and Black Power
By Walter J. Hollenweger

THE United States "must choose between democracy and repression, between the republic and a police state; for America cannot keep down thirty million people who are moving up, without destroying the entire nation in the process."¹ These sentences were not written by a radical leftist theologian, but by a black Pentecostal evangelist in Chicago: Arthur Brazier. In an exact and detailed report he describes one of the slum quarters of Chicago, the so-called Woodlawn. This is not an idyllic park lawn but a slum area where 60,000 black people vegetate on two square miles in indescribable conditions of hygiene. Garbage is not at all or only partly collected; rats and vermin reign; and the children learn so little in their over-crowded classes that on leaving school they only swell the army of unemployed and the drug addicts.

Brazier protests against this state of affairs. He wants to destroy the myth of the intellectual

Walter J. Hollenweger is widely regarded as one of the worlds leading authorities on Pentecostalism. Formerly on the staff of the World Council of Churches, he is now Professor of Mission in the Department of Theology at the University of Birmingham. His exhaustive study of Pentecostalism is the 10-volume Handbuch der Pfingstbewegung. A shorter survey has been published as The Pentecostals (1972).
¹ Arthur M. Brazier, Black Self-Determination. The Story of the Woodlawn Organization (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1969). On Brazier, see my Handbuch der Pfingstbewegung, No. 02a.02.139. For documents, literature, and sources on black Pentecostals, see W. J. Hollenweger, "Black Pentecostal Concept," Concept, No. 30 (Geneva, 1970) and Handbuch der Pfingstbewegung (10 vols.; available in book form and micro-film from ATLA Board of Microtexts, Divinity School, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.). See also Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1971) and my introduction to Pentecostal history and literature, The Pentecostals (Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg, 1972).

229 - Pentecostalism and Black Power

and moral supremacy of the white. America, he says, was built on the backs of the blacks. The blacks have planted cotton, but they have to walk around in rags. The blacks have built the railways, but they were not allowed to ride on them. A black doctor discovered blood plasma, but he died because nobody was ready to give him a blood transfusion.

Changing this situation cannot be effected by the violence of arms, but only by the violence of non-violence. We black people, Brazier writes, are also for law and order. But not for that law which the white wants to force upon us, a law which brands as criminals the demonstrators who publicize this appalling state, while those who are responsible for this situation are left in peace. We do not understand law to be the police practice of shooting down a suspect as a criminal and making the policeman judge, juror, and hangman in one person. Certainly, Brazier concedes, the majority of the police do not misuse their power. But there are too many who do.

How does this violence of non-violence work in practice? Brazier's program consists of a program of self-determination for the people of Woodlawn. It is called the Woodlawn Organization. It was initially subsidized by white churches, but it is organized and directed by the blacks of the slum area. Under the direction of Brazier and other black Pentecostals, the Woodlawn Organization set up control-stations where those who feel that they have been cheated in the shops can check prices, quality, and weight of the goods they have bought. Offending shop-keepers are taken to task, and in the case of repeated offenders, their names are published. House-owners, who make their money in Woodlawn by over-charging on rents but live in the villas of the suburbs, are informed of the miserable state of the houses they rent out and the plague of rats and woodworm. But that hardly helps, so then the press and television are invited to photograph the defunct toilets, the houses where the heating system has ceased to function, where the plaster is falling down, where the doors and windows are cracked and the roofs leak. This is uncomfortable for the owners but seldom alters their ways. Generally Woodlawn has to go a step further and has to organize a rent strike. The rents are paid to an account of Woodlawn Organization instead of to the bank of the owner. If the lazy house owners go to court, their behavior is exposed.

Similar programs are invented for improving the miserable schools which are under white direction. In order to put an end to looting and shooting-against which the police are almost powerless-two youth organizations ("The Rangers" and "The Disciples") have been trained and used to maintain order.

230 - Pentecostalism and Black Power

Theologically these different activities are seen within the framework of a Pauline doctrine of charisms. In addition to the charisms which are known in the history of Pentecostalism, such as speaking in tongues, prophecy, religious dancing, prayer for the sick, they practice the gift of demonstrating, organizing, and publicizing as another kind of prophecy. I have known black Pentecostal churches in which these activities were explicitly mentioned in a list of gifts of the Spirit, but not as it is usually done in many political church groups in Europe where political analysis replaces prayer and song (not to speak of dancing and speaking in tongues). The black Pentecostal approach forms a new unity between prayer and politics, social action and song.

I

Brazier summarizes his book by saying that in this battle, the church is ahead of the world. Yet Brazier is not a unique example. During a research tour of the most important black Pentecostal churches in the United States, whose adherents number in the millions,² I discovered similar programs. Dietrich Bonhoeffer has already drawn attention to these "step-children of church history."³ Their theology is oral and is handed down in the same way it was in New Testament times before it was written down. This theology, their missionary work in the West Indies, and their elementary social and political reflection are still ignored and even misunderstood by both white Pentecostals and the main-line churches as a preliminary form of full-fledged European "literary" Christianity. There are important exceptions. They are not found in the standard works on social ethics, church history, or histories of theological thought, but for example, in the thoughtful study of worship by the Roman Catholic liturgiologist Lothar Zenetti, who has dedicated his book Hot Melodies⁴ to a black Pentecostal church. Similarly, Ernst Benz, in his book on the Holy Spirit in America,⁵ described his first encounter with black Pentecostals as a "surprising discovery of something absolutely new."

An increasing awareness of the inherent values in black culture can be observed among the black Pentecostals. One of these black churches, the Church of God in Christ, claims to be the largest Pentecostal church in the United States, despite the fact that hitherto the Assembly of God has been considered the number one Pentecostal denomination in the United, States. The Church of

² There are at least 1.5 million and at the most five million, depending on whether or not one prepared to accept the statistics of the black Pentecostals.
³ D. Bonhoeffer, Bericht über den Studienaufenthalt im Union Theological Seminary zu New York," in Gesammelte Werke (Munich, Kaiser-Verlag, 1958) 1, 97.
⁴ L. Zenetti, Heisse (W)Eisen (Munich: Verlag J. Pfeiffer, 1966).
⁵ Ernst Benz, Der Heilige Geist in Amerika (Düsseldorf: Diederichs, 1970).

231 - Pentecostalism and Black Power

God in Christ claims twice the membership of the white Assembly of God. Another group, the Church of the Living God, has developed an interesting exegesis of the Bible by claiming that most of the biblical saints, including Jesus, belong to the black race. In a long discussion, they explained to me that since Jesus is descended from David and Abraham (both belonging to the black race), Jesus himself belongs to the black race. At the same time, they added, we know that he did not have an earthly father. That is why he belongs to all men and not just to the blacks. He represents the whole of humanity.

Concerning social issues, Bishop F. D. Washington, from the Church of God in Christ, deplores the church's "mental block" which is responsible for a false understanding of evangelism. It attempts to promote the church building or organization when, as he states, "whether we like to admit it or not, the church (as a building or denomination) has the poorest appeal of all to sinners. Its rating is exactly zero because most sinners do not go to church. Yet the fantastic fact remains that the person of Jesus Christ-when he is presented right-has the greatest single appeal to the human heart in this world."

It is only logical that this black Pentecostal leader was greatly attracted by the concept of evangelism as presented in the studies of the World Council of Churches. "How can one join this World Council of Churches?" he asked abruptly and unexpectedly. It is furthermore understandable that the strike of sanitation workers in Memphis under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. had its headquarters in the big Mason Temple of the Church of God in Christ. Although the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. hit black Pentecostals; in a very personal way, so far it has not destroyed their hope in the power of non-violence.

But they cannot go along with a purely 'Spiritual" evangelism. Regarding Billy Graham, the black Pentecostal evangelist George M. Perry said: "We believe in the content of the Graham message, but we can't go along with its suburban, middle-class, white orientation that has nothing to say to the poor or the black people." Perry concluded that mass evangelism practiced by Graham and other preachers never had and never will have any relevance to the black community.

II

It is clear that this new orientation of black Pentecostals is watched with uneasiness by the established white American Pentecostal churches. They know that they themselves trace back their history to a 1906 revival in a black church in Los Angeles. The Pentecostal movement began in the same milieu in which the spiritual, jazz, and blues emerged. The songs of the blacks are not, as

232 - Pentecostalism and Black Power

James H. Cone pointed out,⁶ unpolitical and otherworldly. Starting from M. M. Fisher's fundamental analysis,⁷ Cone says: "The divine liberation of the oppressed from slavery is the central theological concept in the black spirituals. These songs show that black slaves did not believe that human servitude was reconcilable with their African past and their knowledge of the Christian gospel. They did not believe that God created Africans to be the slaves of Europeans. Accordingly, they sang of a God who was involved in history-their history-making right what whites have made wrong. . . . Because black people believed that they were God's children, they affirmed their somebodiness, refusing to reconcile their servitude with divine revelation."

While black music has gained recognition as a contribution by Negroes to universal culture, the black influence on the Pentecostal movement, which today has about thirty million adherents, has been forgotten despite the fact that in their books the Pentecostals mention the one-eyed black evangelist, W. J. Seymour, as one of their pioneers. "That the one outstanding personality in bringing about the Pentecostal revival in Los Angeles was a Negro is a fact of extreme importance to Pentecostals of all races," states the young Pentecostal historian Vinson Synan. I agree with this evaluation. One of the prominent white leaders of this early period, Charles F. Parham, was a convinced follower of the Ku Klux Klan, but Synan underlines the significance of the inter-racial nature of early Pentecostal revival. "Even more significant is the fact that this interracial accord took place among the very groups that have traditionally been most at odds, the poor whites and the poor blacks," Synan argues.

White Pentecostals also received their ordination from the hands of black Pentecostal bishops, and a Pentecostal eye-witness, Frank Bartleman, proudly relates that in the Los Angeles revival which gave birth to the modem Pentecostal movement, "the 'color line' was washed away in the blood." Another Pentecostal pioneer, the Anglican clergyman Alexander A. Boddy, described the revival in Los Angeles as "something very extraordinary" because "white pastors from the South were eagerly prepared to go to Los Angeles to be with the Negroes, to have fellowship with them, and to receive the blessings of the Spirit through their prayers and intercessions. And it was still more wonderful that these white pastors went back to the South and reported to the members of their congregations that they had prayed in one Spirit and received the same blessings." This tradition is also seen today. A neo-Pentecostal Anglican

⁶ James H. Cone, "Black Spirituals: A Theological Interpretation," Theology Today, XXIX (April 1972), 54-69.
⁷ M. M. Fisher, Negro Slave Songs in the United States (New York: Citadel Press, 1953).

233 - Pentecostalism and Black Power

leader in Great Britain issued a statement against the British Conservative politician Enoch Powell and declared, "To deny a coloured person the same human rights as a white one, or treat a person differently because of the colour of his skin, is a sin against God. A prophetic ministry should seek to bring conviction of this sin to those who indulge in it."

Why then are American Pentecostals strictly separated in white and black organizations? Here and there one finds black pastors in subordinate posts in white organizations, and the black Pentecostals usually appear at the Pentecostal World Conferences. Yet " no explanation has been offered as to why the Negro churches have not become part of the organization" of the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America. This development is due on the one hand to the loud criticism against Pentecostalism voiced by the main-line churches which tried to discredit Pentecostals by pointing to their lowly beginnings in a Negro church; on the other hand, the laws of the Southern states have prohibited racially mixed meetings. Consequently, it is unfair to blame only the white Pentecostals. They simply adapted themselves to what was considered at that time to be American Protestantism.

Black Pentecostals are not satisfied with the feeble attempts of white Pentecostals in America to understand social and political commitment as a task for the individual Christian (and not for the churches as a whole) or the very tardy and generalized appeals for Christian love of one's neighbor to be extended to the social field. For the black Pentecostals the "Pentecostal problem" is the "cleavage of the races," which must be solved before the movement can "shake the world." The appeal of the Assemblies of God, "not coercion, but conversion," will fall on deaf ears as long as it continues to be uttered only to those below and not to those above.

One can understand the pastor of the Assemblies of God in Alabama who stated: "I felt that the greatest indictment against the church of the Lord Jesus in our century is our stand (or lack of one) on racial problems."

III

Clearly black Pentecostalism and Black Power are not opposites, as some might wrongly suppose. A European observer might be inclined to consider black Pentecostalism as a religious mechanism of adaptation and Black Power as a political protest movement. This is not the case, at least in this antithetical formulation. In a comparative study Luther P. Gerlach and Virginia Hine⁸ describe both as "Movements of social transformation." By Pentecostalism they do not mean only black and white Pentecostals, but also the

⁸ Luther P. Gerlach and Virginia H. Hine, People, Power, Change: Movements of Social Transformation (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970).

234 - Pentecostalism and Black Power

mushrooming and increasingly important charismatic groups within the main-line churches, particularly amongst Roman Catholic intellectuals. This destroyed the generally accepted theory that Pentecostal spirituality was bound to the milieu of the spiritually and materially poor. At their meetings one finds not the uneducated but the intellectuals, not the naive but the critical, not frustrated puritans but normal Christians. They do not merely speak in tongues and pray; they eat together and they smoke and drink. Luther P. Gerlach has observed that people with a higher education are more likely to have the Pentecostal experience of baptism in the Spirit than those with an inferior education, and, he states, speaking in tongues is less frequent among Pentecostal Mexicans than among white, middle-class Americans. The attempts to describe speaking in tongues as a pathological or half-pathological phenomenon of marginal people have also been disproved by competent psychological and sociological studies.⁹

In their comparison between Black Power and Pentecostalism the two American anthropologists, who belong neither to Black Power nor to the Pentecostal movement, come to the conclusion that Black Power cannot be seen as a contrast to the black Pentecostal movement. Both movements are religious and revolutionary, and it is difficult to draw a dividing line between the two.

IV

Pentecostalism is revolutionary because it offers alternatives to "literary" theology and defrosts the "frozen thinking" within literary forms of worship and committee-debate. It gives the same chance to all, including the "oral" people. It allows for a process of democratization of language by dismantling the privileges of abstract, rational, and propositional systems, and this is even experienced as beneficial by intellectuals. Examples of political alphabetization are not only found in the black Pentecostal churches in America, but also in the Russian, South African, Swedish, and Latin American Pentecostal movements. Our socio-political search has entirely by-passed (and here the World Council of Churches must explicitly be mentioned amongst the culprits) this political and religious awakening, sometimes mixed with a light undertone of regret for these slightly doped believers.

⁹ See especially is H the dissertation of the Pentecostal psychiatrist L. M. Viviervan Eetveldt, Glossolalia (University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, 1960); summarized in his essay "The Glossolaliac and His Personality," Beiträge zur Ekstase (Basel and New York, S. Karger, 1968), pp. 153-175; G. J. Jennings, "An Ethnological Study of Glossolalia," Journal of the American Scientific Association (March 1968) pp. 5-16, which includes a bibliography; V. H. Hine, "Pentecostal Glossolalia: Toward a Functional Interpretation," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, VII (1969), pp. 211-226, which contains a bibliography; W. J. Samarin, Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism (New York and London: Collier-Macmillan, 1972). More literature is cited in my book, The Pentecostals.

235 - Pentecostalism and Black Power

Likewise, Gerlach affirms that Black Power is a religious movement. He points to the conversion of Malcolm X to Islam, which is responsible for the religious basis of the Black Muslims. Throughout the Black Power movement the religious language is remarkable. They talk of "transfiguration into blackness," the "baptism into blackness," and see Black Power expressions as a religion, into which one is initiated by an experience of commitment, a kind of conversion which is articulated in the framework of a liturgy.

The essence of this cultural revolution involves the development of fluid organizational forms, which our linear thinking can understand only with difficulty. The revolution has several leaders and finds its adherents through normal communication in everyday life -in the lower class particularly among relatives, in the upper class amongst the circle of friends. The executives change frequently, and the different groups change their status in the whole framework of the movement from week to week. Only this diffused authority makes it possible for a minority to withstand a majority. The unity of the movement is not assured by normal headquarters but by "traveling evangelists" (in the charismatic movement as well as in the Black Power movement) and through common code words and songs. It is easy, says Gerlach, to find out if a Black Power group is led by communists. As soon as there are clear hierarchical structures and traceable executive centers, then we are dealing with a communist organization. That is why the very few communist-led Black Power groups are not revolutionary but reactionary. They do not liberate black people from white tutelage but replace one infantilizing structure with another.

Similarly, the transition from the charismatic movement to a Pentecostal church is recognizable by the emerging linear structure of dependence and direction. Such a transition from the diffuse charismatic movement to a centrally organized church (be that along presbyterian, congregational, or episcopal lines) can often be observed in the Pentecostal movement. At the same time a new protest is kindled against the manipulative "thinking from above." which either leads to the formation of a new charismatic revival (outside the organization) or calls the organization back to its initial polycephalous form.

In dealing with their attitude to opposition, Gerlach shows a further parallel. A revolutionary movement like Black Power or the Pentecostal movement can only rise against the wind of opposition. That is why Black Power emerged in many towns only with the help of police action. In the same way, many charismatic movements could only form themselves in the main-line churches with the help of the ecclesiastical hierarchy's opposition to speaking in tongues.

236 - Pentecostalism and Black Power

Such a diffused revolutionary movement, says Gerlach, can only be counteracted effectively by "overkill"-rigorous control of all the media of communication, including the mail and the telephone, and arrest and elimination of all suspicious and sympathetic fellow-travellers, including those who are wrongly thought to be in sympathy with the movement. This method was used in earlier times in the Catholic church and in the national-socialistic state and is used at the present time in Russia. Yet in the United States-and one would like to add in the Christian church-such a method is unthinkable. Therefore, Gerlach concludes, the ecclesiastical interventions against charismatic revolutionaries and state intervention against Black Power advocates are exactly what those movements need to grow and prosper. They produce exactly the opposite of their intended result.

V

Gerlach's analysis is fascinating. But does it fit all situations? It seems to me that the revolutionary quality of such movements depends on two conditions which are logically exclusive of each other. First, they must have an almost axiomatic emotional and existential basis which cannot be shaken either through argument or through further investigation; or, if one prefers, they must rest on a religious conviction. Second, they must allow questions and criticism to prevent this religious conviction from again becoming an ideological prison.

For the first thesis there are enough examples in the present day. Objectively and rationally considered, the Red Chinese were defeated by Chiang Kai-Shek when they started their long march. Similarly the escalation of the bombardment of North Vietnam should have led to the capitulation of the North Vietnamese. In both instances this was not the case. Why not? Gerlach answers that according to his conviction as an agnostic, religious commitment has the power to change realities. One could also point to the success of the Pentecostals and Jesus People in dealing with drug addicts, where state institutions have almost completely failed. From this Gerlach draws a conclusion which is extremely relevant to the whole debate on development, namely, that political and economic tinkering with the treatment of symptoms has to be replaced by the acknowledgment of these culturally revolutionary groups as catalysts of transformation.

For the second thesis, Mao Tse-Tung and the Pentecostal Movement again provide striking examples. The undifferentiated and unquestioned ideologies which prohibit tolerance and lay taboos on important questions destroy the original charismatic and revolutionary outbreak. What we then face is the well known observance of the letter of the law-whether Protestant, Catholic, or Communist-

237 - Pentecostalism and Black Power

by which people compensate for the sacrifices they have bad to make by compelling others to make the same sacrifices. Black Power and Pentecostalism have broken up institutionalized hypocrisy by taking literally what was affirmed officially but not practiced (in the church, the general priesthood of all believers; in the state, equal rights for black and white). Yet these movements become victims of institutionalized hypocrisy at the moment they create a closed ideology of this revolutionary act. It seems that utter commitment and conviction does not allow for the "luxury of tolerance." Either a man is ready to risk everything for a recognizable goal, but then he is not prepared to be diverted from this goal by arguments or by facts; or he is a critical, liberal, and tolerant man, but then lacks that utter commitment which alone acts as a catalyst of transformation.

One may well ask: Can only fanatics be evangelists? Church history seems to answer this question in the affirmative. Neither the biblical prophets, the New Testament evangelists, the Reformers, nor the theologians, evangelists, and missionaries today are both tolerant and are faithful to an utter commitment. The Pentecostals have sometimes said that the tolerance of many of today's Christians has its roots in their religious insecurity.

VI

In spite of these obvious facts I am not prepared to accept a definite conflict between utter conviction and genuine tolerance. The Pentecostals rightly say that the Holy Spirit is a "gentleman" If we have to use all our energies in order to press all critical arguments into our subconscious, then we lack the necessary energy which we need for more differentiated tasks. But combining tolerance with utter conviction demands the whole life and the whole energy of a man. In this sense, lived tolerance can be understood as making real the doctrine of justification by grace alone. If we really believe that we are sola gratia Christians, then we will always have to reckon with the possibility that we might be wrong, and still justified by God. Secondly, the one whom we want to convince will be justified by God's sola gratia, even if he is wrong.

The Black Power and Pentecostal movements confront us with acknowledging equal rights to a non-literary theology. Only in the encounter between "literary" and "oral" cultures can we find out how far our 'literary" theology (our critical analytical methods) relates to pre- and post-rationality, and what the relationship is between "the logic of the guts" and "the logic of the brain." Then we can ask: How does the dance speak to us and how does the word move us? How does the guitar talk and bow does the thesis provide a variation on a theme? Or in an image: what is the reason that it is only the many colors of the rainbow in the spectrum of

238 - Pentecostalism and Black Power

communication which can create that bright light which allows us to see reality? If God has given us a head, "heart and reins" that we might know the world, he surely will not allow us to let one of these ways of perception wither. On the contrary, we have to investigate how the head can learn from the heart-beat and the stomach from critical thinking.

These are not the questions of a specialist. In answering (or refusing to answer these questions), we decide whether the church has a future as truly universal and catholic; for the number of those Christians and theologians, who look for and practice an oral theology as an alternative or complement to a rational and logical system of terms, is greatly increasing.

That is true for the growing African churches as well as for the Latin American churches, for the blacks of America and as of late for many young white people. The ecumenical problem of the immediate future is not the relationship between Catholic and Protestant, but between "oral" and "literary" theology.