Jelle Creemers: Theological Dialogue with Classical Pentecostals

Jelle Creemers, Theological Dialogue with Classical Pentecostals: Challenges and Opportunities, Ecclesiological Investigations 23 (New York and London: Bloomsbury/T & T Clark, 2015), x + 320 pages.

The Roman Catholic-Pentecostal Dialogue has completed five rounds since it was launched in 1971. Each round has consisted of weeklong or so meetings for five or more years, followed in the last three rounds by multiple years of drafting and rewriting of the final reports. The first two rounds (1971-1976 and 1977-1982, with 1978 being a bye year due to the unexpected death of Pope John Paul I) engaged assorted topics of mutual interest, while the last three rounds have been more thematically focused: on the nature of the church (1985-1989), on evangelization and proselytism (1990-1997), and on becoming a Christian (1998-2006).

Creemers teaches at the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit in Leuven, Belgium, where he also completed his PhD degree that is the basis for this book. Whereas a number of other volumes have been published on one or more rounds of the Dialogue, this is the first one that covers the five completed rounds of discussion, and it is also the only to focus on the question of theological method. At one level, followers of the Pneuma Review might consider this a rather dispensable exercise. Pentecostal ministers especially are doers rather than theoreticians and considerations of method seem quite speculative and abstract. Even if readers might be interested in the topics taken up in the Dialogues, Creemers’ reflections might seem beside the point (of evangelism, for example!). Yet I encourage potential readers, especially Pentecostal clergy, to withhold judgment for three reasons. First, there have been many who have argued that Pentecostals are ecumenical even if they might deny or not even realize this, and if that is the case, engaging this volume will provide one fascinating point of entry into the what (is ecumenism) and why (Pentecostals are such) of this important set of issues related to unity that Jesus prayed for. Second, the writing opens up to a narrative of the Dialogues, and in that sense there is an unfolding of a plot full of twists and turns involving primary agents (who were present in many if not most of the rounds) and other secondary characters (those participants in two rounds or only one) that might be unanticipated for theological books. Last but not least, to think about the methodological underpinnings of these exercises provides another window into the nature of Pentecostal spirituality and realities that the movement’s practitioners and ministers will find informative, especially vis-à-vis their own efforts to comprehend themselves theologically.

So what does Creemers find? Or, first, how does he go about looking for Pentecostal theological method when such is rarely or never made explicit? There are four main chapters in the body of the book through which the quest is undertaken. First, Creemers profiles how members of the Pentecostal Dialogue teams have attempted to understand themselves as a conversionist, revivalist, and restorationist movement, and how such starting points already chart certain methodological trajectories. Second, efforts – contested, as the book portrays – to adequately represent a quite diverse worldwide Pentecostal movement in the dialogue teams are indicative of how an egalitarian set of ecclesiological sensibilities generates a fragmented movement and this also has methodological implications, not least for how the Dialogues have unfolded. Third, then, Creemers analyzes one weeklong session within each of the five rounds – the second year, because that is when the main topics are presented for that round of dialogues – and unveils how reading and exposition of papers have been followed by “hard questions” raised by both sides to the other for discussion (first intra-murally and then inter-murally) in order to clarify perspectives, identify differences, and anticipate possible convergences or ways forward. Finally, the aims, sources, and approaches of each of rounds of Dialogue are assessed, in chronological order, and then also vis-à-vis their Final Reports.

Here, enumerated in no particular order, are a few important findings relevant to Pentecostal ecumenical prospects in particular and for developments in and for Pentecostal theology more generally. First, explorations in theological method in this project are a posteriori, dependent on analysis of the actual dialogues as they occurred, and demonstrate how methodological approaches are embedded within and manifest through dialogical engagement on the one hand even as they reflect theological instincts and habits on the other hand; put another way, even if in the theological academy there is a tendency to come clean with one’s methodological orientation up front, in reality, it is probably truer to say that such segments are written as much in hindsight (of writing the book, etc.) as they are presuppositions brought into the project. Second, the methodological frame delineated in this case study (which is actually a set of cases: five rounds of cases to be more exact) was forged dialogically (with Roman Catholic interlocutors, more precisely) in and through pragmatic strategies of honestly bringing forth perceived hard questions to the conversation (which Creemers notes that in comparative context did not work well in other bilateral dialogues!); as such theological methodologies discerned post facto are inevitably contextually constrained if not determined and this is something to be borne in mind rather than to be regretted as then not allowing access to any putatively global or universal methodological key (which aspirations for reflect more habits of Enlightenment thinking than they do actual consideration of how our epistemic and procedural practices are historically informed). Third, and as an extension of the previous point, methodological character is not only contextually situated but teleologically guided, even compelled; what I am referring to is how not only mutual consideration of the sources within the Christian tradition (preferred by the Roman Catholic dialogue team) made their presence increasingly palpable as joint undertakings (emerging most fully during the fifth round), but also to how focused efforts on pastoral challenges related to mission, evangelism, proselytism, and ecclesial practice foregrounded certain resources derived from socio-historical and other modes of shedding light on the real issues while foreclosing other pathways.

Last and most importantly for reflection on the interrelationship between method and theology is that the Pentecostal team could not be forged, nor its commitments adequately represented, apart from a presumably shared spirituality and praxis, one which operated as much if not more on the practical and affective levels as at the cognitive dimension. This meant both that experience (of the Holy Spirit, specifically!) became central to these dialogues in ways remarkably distinguished from what happens at bilateral conversations more generally (which work often, sometimes exclusively, on received dogmatic documents), and that the Roman Catholic conversation partners were also invited – forced may be too strong a description – to come to grips with the role of experience in their own theological efforts. With experience being bedrock to the Pentecostal theological task, the normative role of scripture (even tradition) was, and is, not compromised but such was complicated indeed. Pentecostal theologians will come away from this volume with additional fodder for construing pentecostal spirituality, in all of its experiential and historical diversity, as central to their ongoing theological work, as has generally been the trend so far.

Pentecostal ministers who persevere through the small print of this book will also be better informed about how theological formulation must be sensitive to and at its best critically embraces the specifics of context, audience, and relational frames amidst which such articulations are forged. More importantly, they will be treated to how the dynamism and potential explosiveness of Pentecostal spirituality and experience can be not only tempered by dialogical interaction but also creatively resourced in and through such interchanges for scripturally and theologically meaningful explication. Last but not least, perhaps Pentecostal ministers can learn about how to open up dialogical venues in their local communities with not just Roman Catholic priests but also those of other ecclesial and even religious traditions, and to work toward understanding – not any watered down synthesis – that enables both common witness for the common good and Christian witness to the wondrous works of God and the impending divine reign.

Reviewed by Amos Yong

 

Publisher’s page: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/theological-dialogue-with-classical-pentecostals-9780567658838/