Beeson Podcast, Episode 361 Dale Coulter October 10, 2017 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. You are going to enjoy this podcast, it's an interview with my friend, Dr. Dale M. Coulter who teaches historical theology at Regent University School of Divinity. He's one of the leading Pentecostal theologians in our country today, the current president of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, the author of numerous books, including Holiness: the Beauty of Perfection. He's just a wonderful friend and a person I've gotten to know through the work of Evangelicals and Catholics Together. And I thought, we ought to have a discussion on the Beeson podcast about Pentecostalism, one of the great ascendant forces, I think we could say, in the world Christian movement today. And who better to talk about that than Dr. Dale Coulter. So, Dale, welcome to the Beeson podcast. Dale Coulter: Thank you Timothy. It's really good to be here with you and to be part of the Beeson community for the next few minutes. Timothy George: Now, I know you visited Beeson Divinity School some time ago with some students that you brought by on a study tour and there you saw in our dome the great figure, William J. Seymour, who reminds us that there were very important Pentecostal Christians that we ought to know about. So, for listeners who may have heard of Pentecostalism or maybe have known Pentecostal Christians, how could you not, tell us, what is Pentecostalism? Dale Coulter: Well, the best way of answering that question is just to situate Pentecostalism historically and this may help some of your listeners. So Pentecostalism really is a movement that emerged out of the Holiness Movement from the late 1800s. There were two sides, two wings to the Holiness Movement. One is, of course, the Reformed Baptist wing. D.L. Moody would be a good example of someone in that wing and that Congregationalist, Baptist, northern Baptist and Presbyterians, others occupied that. Then the other was the Wesleyan wing and you had the National Camp Meetings for the Promotion of Holiness. Phoebe Palmer would be a good example of a person in that wing. Or another person is W.D. Godbey from Kentucky. So, Pentecostalism emerged in 1906 really as an extension of that particular movement. So you had some denominations, like my own, Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee, that began as holiness denominations and then became Pentecostal after the Azusa Street Revival broke out in 1906. Timothy George: And Azusa Street is what we associate with William J. Seymour. Dale Coulter: That is correct. William Seymour was really the architect of Azusa Street and the theological architect, I think, of early Pentecostalism. Sometimes people will associate it with Charles Parham, who was another person, but I really do think William Seymour is the founder of the movement in the United States. Timothy George: Now, why is it called Pentecostal? We think about the Day of Pentecost, Acts 2, the gifts of the Spirit that were poured out on the Church. It is sometimes called the birthday of the church. What's the connection between that and contemporary Pentecostalism? Dale Coulter: Well, Pentecostals certainly take the name from Acts 2, obviously, and the Day of Pentecost and Spirit baptism. That's one of the distinctives I would say to Pentecostalism is their particular understanding of Spirit baptism as another work of the Spirit, would be a way of describing it. One way of thinking about this is Pentecostals think about different works of grace in the life of the Christian. When I was growing up you would hear someone stand up in church and testify, “I'm saved, sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost.” What they meant by that testimony is that there are distinct works of the Spirit, works of grace. There's regeneration, I'm saved. There's the sanctifying work, sanctifying grace, I'm sanctified. And then there's this charismatic grace is what I would call it and that's Spirit baptism. Early Pentecostals associated that with the outpouring of the Spirit in the book of Acts and speaking in tongues in relationship to that. So, the name comes from that particular way of understanding Acts. But truth be told, Holiness people were already talking about sanctification and Spirit baptism before Pentecostals came along. So they actually inherit that vocabulary. If you read someone like Reuben Torrey of Moody Bible he will talk about a work, Spirit baptism, distinct from regeneration and that's because he was part of the Holiness movement. Now, he did not become Pentecostal and didn't like Pentecostals terribly. But he certainly associated this ongoing sanctifying grace, this sanctifying work of the Spirit, this deeper life with Spirit baptism and Pentecostals just sort of modified that ever so slightly as not being associated with the sanctifying grace, but being associated with charismatic grace. Timothy George: I remember reading R.A. Torrey's The Baptism of the Holy Spirit, when I was a young Christian and it made a great impact on me. I didn't know enough at that time to know whether he was a Pentecostal or not, but I got the impression he really had an experience with the Holy Spirit that was transformative. Dale Coulter: That's right and he comes from, he was a Congregationalist, of course as you know and comes from that Reformed Baptist Congregationalist wing along with D.L. Moody, who also held that there was a deepening work. You could call them Keswick because they're associated with the Keswick movement in England. But the whole point is that there's a deeper immersion into the spiritual life and Spirit baptism is the vehicle by which one engages in that, or one enters that deeper immersion. So that was a shared, sort of, idea in the Holiness movement and, as I said, Pentecostals adopted and modified that ever so slightly. Timothy George: Say a little bit about race and racism, if you will, in the world Pentecostal movement today. I bring that up because, of course, one of Seymour's major emphases was that the color line has been washed away in the blood of Jesus and- Dale Coulter: Right. Timothy George: -he intentionally sought to overcome some of those deep divisions around the beginning of the 20th Century, divisions that, of course, are still with us today very much. What does the Pentecostal experience say to that? Dale Coulter: Well, Pentecostalism has a very complicated history around race. Certainly at the beginning in Azusa Street what you had, and it's really not entirely unique to Pentecostals and, again, this is closely connected to the Holiness movement. In a camp meeting, in a tent, there's no slave balcony. So, we all get there together in the sawdust and experience and encounter God and the love, Wesley's idea of perfect love. Seymour, being deeply Wesleyan adopted that and he saw that Spirit baptism facilitated this transformative experience. In fact, Wesleyan, Holiness, and Pentecostals wrote a lot about the Song of Songs, surprisingly enough, because in the words of Charles Harrison Mason, the founder of the Church of God in Christ, a very important African American Pentecostal denomination, when he spoke in tongues he described it as the “wedlock with Christ.” He intentionally used bridal imagery from the Song of Songs. So the idea is that as I'm caught up into this experience I receive the love of God and then that love ought to manifest in my love for my brothers and sisters in Christ. You had that in those meetings in Azusa Street initially. But racism reared its head pretty quickly, not least because Charles Parham, the white sort of impetus of early Pentecostalism, some would call him a founder, I wouldn't but certainly an important player, he had racist tendencies. So, he comes in and he thought this was not of God and rejected what was happening in Azusa Street. So, you see that sort of complicated racial history replicating itself in Pentecostalism and you have the Church of God in Christ, an African American body that forms. You have the Assemblies of God, which largely becomes white. There's the Latino presence in early Pentecostalism but some of it goes AG, but sometimes it goes into what you could call Oneness Pentecostalism. So, Pentecostals did not, I would say, fully live up to what happened racially in those early meetings where you did have an interracial mixing going on. Back in the, I want to say 90s, you had what was called the Memphis Miracle, where in Memphis, Tennessee white Pentecostal leaders washed the feet of African American Pentecostal leaders as an attempt to reclaim Azusa Street, come back together again and reclaim that whole integrating work of the Spirit. So, it's complicated. Ideally, that's what an experience with the Spirit is supposed to do for you. Timothy George: Yes. Dale Coulter: But in the aftermath, it doesn't always work. Sometimes old prejudices creep back in. Timothy George: That's certainly not unique to Pentecostalism. Baptists, Methodists, we could all tell these stories a little differently because our histories are different. But on this point, there is a call to repentance that we all need to hear and to heed. Let me shift focus just a minute and ask you about healing. Now I remember growing up listening to people like A.A. Allen. Dale Coulter: Right. Timothy George: And Oral Roberts, who were great faith healers. They had these great camp meetings, they were tent revivals really, and practice healing. Of course, that's still very much a part of the Pentecostal world, but what is healing as Pentecostals understand it in particular? Dale Coulter: That's a very good question and it's not unique to Pentecostalism. I keep saying that but really, I'm a historian so I want us to understand how Pentecostalism really grew up out of historical movements before. One of them was the Divine Healing Movement, which actually originated in Europe on the Continent, a woman named Dorothea Trudel who had a healing home in Switzerland, prayers for healing, that sort of thing. What was happening in the Continent came into London and intersected with a number of Holiness people. So, A.J. Gordon, he became a real advocate of Divine Healing, wrote a book on healing. Timothy George: And for whom Gordon-Conwell is named in part. Dale Coulter: Yes, and Gordon College as well. Again, Northern Baptists, part of the Reformed Baptists Congregationalist wing of the Holiness Movement. A.B. Simpson, the founder of the Christian Missionary Alliance, became a strong advocate of Divine Healing. The idea that healing is provided in the atoning work of Christ- Timothy George: By his stripes we are healed. Dale Coulter: By his stripes we are healed. Not just taken to refer to the healing of the soul by the forgiveness of sins, but the healing of the body. That comes out of the Divine Healing Movement, which emerges between 1850 and 1900. Pentecostals adopt that and certainly apply it. Prayers for healing are regularly part of the Pentecostal ethos, and are seen to be part of the understanding of salvation. Pentecostals think of salvation in a holistic way that when God saves, he saves us body and soul and that divine healing of the body anticipates the resurrection. Not that--and this is where it can get complicated because among healing evangelists you can get into “name it, claim it” and that sort of thing where it can be seen as a sign that you don't have enough faith if you're praying in prayer and you're not being healed and that sort of thing. That's not the case with all forms of Pentecostalism, but that certainly is one what I would consider error that manifested itself. But the basic idea is that God wants to save all of us and salvation is not reducible to the cross, it's the cross and the resurrection and the ascension and it is the transformation of the full person. So, divine healing anticipates that final and full transformation. So we have to always pray for it. If I were to put this into the Pentecostal understanding of grace, I would say this: Pentecostals basically think that, and this is, I think, a very medieval way of thinking, grace comes to us in multiple ways and we can put adjectives on it to describe it. There's regenerating grace, which transforms the soul initially. There's sanctifying grace, through which holiness is formed. There's charismatic grace for mission and gifts. There's healing grace. So, there's all these ways in which the grace of God comes. In the medieval context, sacraments would be vehicles of all those different ways of thinking about grace. Pentecostals are not sacramental entirely yet, but they are moving in that direction with these different ways in which the grace of God manifests itself in our lives. Timothy George: I wish you'd say a little bit more about that because this growing sacramentalism is something that I would say also characterizes an important stream of the Baptist movement as well and other Reformed movements as well, a reaction almost against a kind of bare, symbolic, bare, nude symbol understanding that sometimes may be wrongly or rightly has been attributed to Zwingli in the Reformation. Dale Coulter: Right. Timothy George: So, where is this coming from and how is it taking root in the life of Pentecostal churches? Dale Coulter: So, Pentecostals inherited a memorial view, many of them came out of Baptist churches. Charles Harrison Mason, founder of the Church of God in Christ was part of the National Baptist Church when it was founded in 1896 and then he had a Holiness experience and came out of that. Richard Spurling, which is one of the founders of the Church of God, was part of the Landmark Baptist movement, which is one of those movements that actually contributed to the Southern Baptist Convention, as you know better than I do. Timothy George: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Dale Coulter: The memorial view really comes into early Pentecostalism there and, of course, some Pentecostals were Quakers which would even be farther removed. But, Pentecostals have what you could call an enchanted view of the world, which is to say that there's a theology of divine immanence. The Holy Spirit is the immanent part of the Trinity at work within the structures of the world and creation itself mediates God in all kinds of ways. Burning bush in Scripture is just the tip of a deeper iceberg and all of creation can mediate the presence of God so we find God mediated in all ways. That idea of mediation connected to an enchanted view of the world really sets the theological framework for sacraments. I'll just go back to the medievals to explain this. In the Middle Ages, there was a close connection between a sacramental understanding of the world, where the world is charged with the grandeur of God, to borrow a line from a well-known poet, to sacramentals, which is to say that a church, the dedication of a church, the church can be a sacramental, to sacrament. All of these are ways in which things get mediated. John Wesley himself thought that when we engage in works of mercy, helping our neighbor, they become places of encounter, they're sacramental. They're not sacraments. Pentecostals really have inherited that and sort of operate that way. What they have not fully done is move totally to sacrament yet. But just like what happened in my church this past Sunday, we were taking the Lord's Supper and our pastor said, "This is a healing meal. If you need bodily healing right now as we participate in the Supper, pray for healing. It'll come to you through this." The idea is that the bread and the wine or the nonalcoholic wine, I should say, mediate the presence of Christ through the Holy Spirit. So it's very much approaching what I would consider a Reformed understanding of the sacrament. Not full physical presence as a Lutheran or Catholic, but very much a Reformed understanding, which I would think is probably where Baptists probably are moving. Timothy George: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Let me shift again and ask you about the role of women in Pentecostalism. One of the distinctive features I remember growing up among Pentecostal churches was the fact that women preachers were not that uncommon. What's the situation today and why is that the case? Dale Coulter: Yes. My great aunt Emma was a preacher of the gospel, licensed and preached, went around with her husband. It was a husband and wife team. I grew up with that, inherited that. The role of women within Pentecostalism is really something they inherited from the Methodist movement and it really is a manifestation of the desire of evangelicals that are revivalist in orientation to maximize lay participation. Wesley, in particular, wanted to maximize lay participation. So you had the rise of the lay minister, someone who was authorized to preach and teach maybe, but not to perform the sacraments that sort of thing, these exhorters, as it were. That originates with Wesley, it comes into Methodism and out of that you get someone like Phoebe Palmer writing a book called, The Promise of the Father, in the 1850s in which she says, "well, given Pentecost the promise of the Father that the Spirit would be poured out on sons and daughters and they will all prophecy, women should preach and teach." And Phoebe Palmer, of course, was a preacher and a teacher. That comes into Pentecostalism, that idea that women are called to preach and teach and proclaim the Gospel. You get someone like Aimee Simple McPherson who is the founder of the Foursquare Gospel Church, which is one of the main Pentecostal denominations in the United States. She's not the only woman who founded a denomination. So Pentecostals sort of inherited this Methodist/Wesleyan view that women ought to be preaching and teaching and that naturally moved into sacraments because with a low view of sacraments, the primary task of the minister is to preach. So, this is how women can become pastors, because this is the primary goal. Today it's a complicated scene. You have groups like the Assemblies of God where women can be fully ordained at all levels, pastor, all of that. Foursquare Gospel Church, of course, that is the case as well. My own denomination, the Church of God, women can achieve the second level of licensure, which entitles them to pastor, to perform the sacraments, but they can't hit the final level, which means they technically can't become bishops, administrative bishops. It's a position that Church of England used to have, where you could have women priests but not women-- Timothy George: Until quite recently. Dale Coulter: Until quite recently, that's right. So, that's where my own denomination, the Church of God in Christ, women cannot be ordained at all. So Pentecostals are kind of all over the map on that question, but by and large, most of the movement agrees that women can be evangelists, can preach, can teach, can proclaim, can pastor, that sort of thing. Even in my own denomination, that is the case. Timothy George: We're almost out of time but I wanted to ask you to comment a little bit about the amazing spread of Pentecostalism, not only in North America but really all around the world in various forms. It seems to me that it's a vibrant kind of dynamic form of the Christian message and one that particularly we in North America maybe are not as aware of as we ought to be. Say a little bit about African, Latin American Pentecostalism, Asian Pentecostalism. It is a world-wide phenomenon. Dale Coulter: Yes it is, growing considerably. When they count the numbers they'll use terms like Renewalist now as opposed to just Pentecostal, because those numbers would include Charismatic Catholics, things like that. When you see the big numbers, 600 million, something like that globally, you have to recognize that it would include Charismatic Catholics and others in that mix. But still, if you just think of those Pentecostals associated with Pentecostal World Fellowship, we're talking about very large numbers of Christians. So, historians have debated how all this happens, but there are some key things to keep in mind. One is the rise of the Global Protestant Healing Movement and the British Empire is what allowed that to happen. It was really through the networks that the British Empire supplied that you had, not just simply Pentecostals but Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, all of them use those links going to India, these places where the British Empire was established. So Pentecostals utilized that and most of that was what I would call nonconformist Christianity. By nonconformist I mean it wasn't established Christianity, like the Church of England was establishment or like Lutheran in Germany. No, it was Baptists, it was Methodists in the United States is nonconformist. So Pentecostals utilized that, that's one. Number two, at the turn of the 20th Century there were multiple revivals that were breaking out in different parts of the world. So Azusa Street is just one of several. There was a revival in Pyongyang. There was a revival in Chile. There was a revival in India associated with Pandita Ramabai in the Mukti Mission there. So, these revivals broke out and in connection to Spirit baptism. What connected them all was the networks that this Global Protestant Missionary Movement had already established because these people didn't start off Pentecostal, they became that after these revivals broke out. So, these different revival centers suddenly connected to the networks allowing people to move along these networks. The third element to this is the understanding of Spirit baptism, that the Spirit is the missionary force of the church and Spirit baptism, this charismatic outpouring of grace is for mission. So Pentecostals start immediately missionizing, going out and just everywhere, using those missionary networks and they're doing it from more than one location. So it's not just people from Azusa Street in Los Angeles traveling, it's people from Chile traveling and people in India traveling and all through using these missionary networks. So, that's how Pentecostalism quickly morphs into a global force because it's got multiple centers of revival out of which it's moving and from there it sort of grows and begins to take off, sometimes in the midst of great persecution, but still it really grows and takes off. I would say by the time you hit the 70s that growth starts to become exponential. Timothy George: Yeah, one more question. Wish I had another hour and a half, but one more. You and I have known each other in the movement known as Evangelicals and Catholics Together. You've made a wonderful contribution to our discussions. I was in Rome several years ago and the newspaper bore a headline, “Pope Francis preaches at a Pentecostal church.” And apparently one Sunday he got up and hadn't told a lot of people about this and his driver took him down to a city named Cacerta where he actually was received by the pastor whom he had known earlier and made some comments and was wonderfully received. This was a little bit of a scandal that, you know, the Holy Father would preach in a Pentecostal church. But it kind of represents his own spirit I think in some ways, but also maybe this bridge that Pentecostalism is in some ways with the Catholic and the wider Protestant church. What do you think about that? Dale Coulter: Yes, and I think to help your listeners, it might be good to remember that there is a kind of on the ground ecumenism in Protestantism, especially Revivalist Protestantism. The idea that the regenerating power of the Spirit is what changes all of us and we acknowledge the Spirit in each of us and then we are brothers and sisters. It's because of that spiritual experience that we connect to one another and find Christ in one another. That's always been the case among Revivalist Protestants, which is why you can have people sharing pulpits and things of that nature, especially in a camp meeting where you're not really going into a church so you're not worrying about sharing your church. You get out in a camp meeting and you have different people preaching, that sort of thing. This really is an extension of that idea. The difference is that for Pentecostals, when Catholics started speaking in tongues and having this experience, that spiritual experience where Pentecostals because a way of saying, “hey, there's communion, the Spirit is at work there” in the same way that in low church Protestantism the regenerating experience of the Spirit connected everyone, a John Whitfield, John Wesley and a Jonathan Edwards. So this Spirit baptism connected Pentecostals to Catholics. That's really what's behind this sort of ecumenical coming together. It's the idea that if I see the Spirit in work in you and you're speaking in tongues and the spiritual gifts are flowing in your life, then I have to acknowledge that we are brothers and sisters and that the same Spirit is at work in you that is at work in me. So that really happened as the Charismatic movement unfolds where you have people like Dennis Bennett in Episcopalian circles claiming to have Spirit baptism and in the 60s that enters the Catholic Charismatic movement. So what you see between Pope Francis and other Pentecostal pastors is the fruit of that, I would say, and that's really the basis. It's a common experience of the Spirit coming together. Timothy George: Wonderful. My guest today on the Beeson Podcast has been Dr. Dale Coulter. He teaches historical theology at Regent University School of Divinity, leading Pentecostal theologian in our country today and a great friend of mine and thank you for this conversation, Dale. Dale Coulter: Thank you, Timothy. I really enjoyed it. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an inter-denominational evangelical divinity school, training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson Podcast.