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"Growing up in a Pentecostal church was a marvelous, and intriguing, experience," writes Gordon D. Fee in his new book "Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God" (Hendrickson). The "experiential nature" of Pentecostalism attracted many individuals who would otherwise have been "marginalized, both in society at large and in the mainline churches," he says. "There was 'ow-ooo Ferris,' a dear brother, who when he got 'blessed' yelled 'ow-ooo' while sort of dancing in place and out into the aisle. . . . And then there was the brother who stood up to prophesy some crazy thing, and started, typically, 'Thus saith the Lord.' When his 'prophecy' was weighed and found 'wanting,' it was gently suggested that perhaps it was not the Lord who had spoken after all. He jumped to his feet again. 'Thus saith the Lord!' he shouted, 'that was too me!' "

Such people, says Fee, "added spice" to the worship environment. Spice, however, is not necessarily what churches are looking for in gathered worship. Harvard divinity professor Harvey Cox wrote in a recent article in the "Atlantic Monthly" (Nov. 1995) that evangelicals who "take their Calvin straight" become skittish at the "sometimes chaotic and unpredictable spirituality of Pentecostals" and that, conversely, some Pentecostals and charismatics bridle at being identified with "cold, rigid, and insufficiently spontaneous" forms of evangelicalism.

This theological tug-of-war has broken out most recently with the brouhaha associated with the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship. This surprising "revival" has reinvigorated the discussion of how the Holy Spirit visits us. Does he roar? Does he bark? John Wimber--no dissuader of the miraculous--says no, and he dissociated the Toronto church from the Vineyard association. On another front, last spring the Southern Baptist Florida convention recommended that membership credentials be denied to three congregations that affirmed the Toronto "laughing revival." "You cannot just believe anything or everything and be Baptist," said the Florida Baptist executive director.

Well, if the Spirit does not bark, and if you cannot believe "anything or everything" about his operations, then how does the Holy Spirit show himself?

Gordon Fee, in his 1994 work "God's Empowering Presence" (Hendrickson), answers that question on the basis of Paul's letters. And the answer is: It is the wrong question. Rather than ask how the Spirit "shows himself," the church instead should be asking how it shows itself and its witness to be Spirit driven. Fee concludes that the contemporary Western church, Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal, due to enculturation, is missing the point of the Spirit's coming, and is therefore "quenching the Spirit," marginalizing and domesticating him, and ultimately making the church's witness ineffective.

"I do not mean that the Holy Spirit is not present; he is indeed, or we are not of Christ at all," he writes. He is asserting, however, that Paul's churches "had the better of it" and that the twentieth-century church should ("dare I say 'must' ") attempt to regain lost ground when it comes to living the Christian life in the Spirit.

Decades of studying and teaching Paul, and writing commentaries about his letters, led Fee to believe that, when it comes to how Paul understood the role of the local body and how the church operates today, something is skewed. The concern boiled down to how churches understood the person and role of the Holy Spirit. The subject of the Holy Spirit, he noted, had been neglected by much of the academy, especially in Pauline studies. So he undertook an intensive study to search Paul out on these things. The result was the publication of the massive (nearly one thousand pages) God's Empowering Presence--"a veritable tour de force," says one reviewer. Another says that the book "is the sort of Pentecostal theology for which serious students of the Bible have been waiting," since Fee, he says, comes "from a Pentecostal background" and yet is "a first-class scholar."

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June 17 1996, Vol. 40, No. 7