Fruit of the Vineyard

Signs, Wonders and the Kingdom of God, by Don Williams (Servant, 158 pp.; $7.95, paper); When the Spirit Comes with Power, by John White (InterVarsity Press, 247 pp.; $8.95, paper); Christianity with Power, by Charles H. Kraft (Servant, 230 pp.; $8.95, paper); The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit, by C. Peter Wagner (Servant, 133 pp.; $6.95, paper). Reviewed by Tim Stafford.

The Pentecostal and charismatic movements started among poor and uneducated people—the sort who do not write academic books to explain themselves. As the movements have spread, however, they have penetrated other social strata. They have now reached into academic society, converting some to their perspective. These four books are a good example. Fairly late in life, these writers have been transformed by their experiences in the Vineyard.

Middle-class, suburban, and evangelical, the Vineyard is both a charismatic renewal movement and a new denomination made up of mostly small, energetic, youth-oriented churches. Its relaxed, low-key style appeals to educated people. Led by John Wimber, it emphasizes lay faith healing and worshiping through the singing of choruses. The Vineyard aims to offer more than a new flavoring to evangelicalism, however; it seeks to convert. As Clark Pinnock puts it in his foreword to Charles Kraft’s book, “This book requires that we decide which camp [proor anti-Pentecostal] we belong to.”

So, in varying ways, do all four books. These academically oriented authors approach “signs and wonders” from various vantage points: psychiatry, biblical theology, church growth, and anthropology. The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit, by C. Peter Wagner, is a popular introduction to the movement; the other three restrict themselves to narrower territory. Their burden, particularly Kraft’s and Williams’s, is that evangelicals have been profoundly unbelieving and that only a fundamental shift of belief can rescue them from dead orthodoxy. Skepticism about signs and wonders (faith healing, deliverance from demons, and “words of knowledge,” particularly) is seen as functional unbelief; only a church that views such wonders as its birthright can claim to fully experience the lordship of Christ.

The King’S Power

Such assertions demand strong evidence, and the burden of proof falls on Don Williams. In Signs, Wonders and the Kingdom of God, he works through the entire Bible arguing that “signs and wonders do not merely prove revelation or accompany revelation … they are revelation.… Signs and wonders are part of the very nature of God as King.” If God truly reigns, Williams says, his power cannot be limited to a spiritual realm; it will show itself in every arena, including nature. Israel’s miraculous deliverance from Egypt and Jesus’ healings and exorcisms are not extraordinary; they are the normal way God’s kingdom demonstrates itself. When miracles don’t happen to God’s people, it is a sign of God’s judgment on their faithlessness.

Unfortunately, in just over 150 pages it is impossible to treat such sweeping contentions thoroughly. Williams makes a plausible and thought-provoking case, but it is too brief to be convincing. For example, he barely touches on why the New Testament epistles show such slight interest in miracles, or why the later Old Testament prophets were not noted for demonstrations of power. His central argument is that Jesus sent out his disciples with authority to heal, and later ordered them (in the Great Commission) to teach other disciples “all that I commanded you.” According to Williams, that must include the command to heal and cast out demons.

This book will not convince skeptics, but it does put the classic Pentecostal question—Shouldn’t we expect God to do today what he did in the Bible?—in a thoughtful and biblical framework.

Meaningless Manifestations

John White, while nearly as positive about “signs and wonders,” takes a very different view of them in his book When the Spirit Comes with Power. He confines his attention primarily to what might be called “meaningless manifestations” of spiritual power, such as violent trembling and being “slain in the Spirit.”

In a clinical style, this psychiatrist tells the stories of people who have experienced strange religious phenomena; then he compares these with what happened in past historical revivals, such as John Wesley’s and Jonathan Edwards’s. White doesn’t deny that past revivals showed different “signs and wonders” from current Pentecostalism, or even that in some cases real revival was unaccompanied by anything overtly supernatural (Moody’s, for example). He does show that during revivals unusual and unsettling things often occur.

Unlike Williams, White seems not to regard such experiences as particularly significant in themselves. Rather, he sees them as historical symptoms, like contractions leading to childbirth. Our crop of signs and wonders are signals that we may be entering a time of revival. White’s message: Be open to it.

Reclaiming The Primitive

But do signs and wonders occur frequently among those who are merely open to them? Charles Kraft in Christianity with Power thinks it is a matter of different “world views.” As an anthropologist and former missionary to Nigeria, he is well qualified to explain why some people see supernatural events all the time, while others see nothing inexplicable.

World view is an aspect of culture. It sets people’s frame of expectations and interpretation. Thus, among the Nigerians Kraft worked with, sickness might be understood as a witch’s curse; for Westerners the same sickness might be a puzzling psychological disturbance. Kraft says that most of the world still interprets experience through spiritual categories, as biblical people did; in the West, science and skepticism have given us a world view dominated by physical cause and effect.

Kraft offers a program for how one can leave behind Western skepticism and begin to operate by Jesus’ world view. Yet he confesses that he is perplexed by how much skepticism still clings to him. He says that only a very strong will has enabled him to operate by supernatural principles.

As an anthropologist Kraft tends to treat all world views as equal, and the biases of Western culture as no better (and probably worse) than, say, traditional Nigerians’. But can we really throw aside Western culture as easily as that? Science is a powerful, though limited and imperfect, way of seeking truth; and it has found truth. Surely this is to the glory of God. Surely, too, there is no going back from it.

Medicine is a good example. Kraft is hard on himself and other missionaries when he recalls his ministry in Nigeria. He believes that they did “what Paul accuses the Galatians of doing: starting in the Spirit but then turning to human power.” As missionaries they “simply reproduced Western secularized approaches to illness, accident, education, fertility, agriculture, and every other problem of life. We acted as though Western scientific methods were more effective than prayer.”

But isn’t this a false dichotomy? Is God offended when we assume that doctors are better at treating disease than faith healers, or that agronomists have better results with crop yields than do preachers? Is it faithless to believe that God has ordained modern medicine, secularized or not, as his primary means to heal people?

This view has its difficulties for people of faith, to be sure. The alternative Kraft suggests, however, seems worse.

How our commitment to science can accord with the worship of God as King of the universe is a deep and difficult issue. Part of the difficulty is that Western culture is not entirely anti-God; much of it grew directly from Christian—and particularly Protestant—convictions.

Yet clearly this shift from medieval to scientific thought has not turned out entirely well. The Pentecostal movement is in some way a response to the sickness of Western civilization, perhaps a correction, perhaps a revolution. To an age that has banished God to the margins of life, it offers the transforming power of worship, and the daily looking for God’s awesome, intervening presence. These four writers are treating subjects of the greatest importance, doing it on the basis of their own powerful personal experiences, and speaking strongly and unapologetically. That is most welcome. Let us hope they (and others) will continue to ponder these questions in greater depth.

A rocking chair or sofa and a couple of new books are enough to bring great joy. And joy is exactly what we are to pass along in the Christmas season. Here are some suggestions for filling the stockings.

Rediscovering The Old, Old Story

• The Life of Christ: Images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, compiled by Barbara Burn (Scribners, $22.50), complements passages from the King James Version with scores of masterpieces in full color. From its large collection, the Met is able to illustrate all the more familiar episodes in the Gospels. The quality of reproduction is high. The paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, stained glass, and ceramics range from the eighth century (Byzantine) to the nineteenth (Delacroix, Manet), but the majority of the works are from the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

• A former dean of the Institute for Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem, Carl G. Rasmussen, is the author of The Zondervan NIV Atlas of the Bible (Zondervan, $39.95). This comprehensive tool has a good balance between text and maps, with ample illustrations and charts in full color. About one-third of the book focuses on physical geography (region by region, with topographical blocks for each, plus sections on Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon), while the rest covers historical geography. One helpful chart compares Middle Eastern areas with parts of the United States (Israel is about the same size as New Jersey; Syria, North Dakota). It is designed to meet the needs of all but specialists or advanced students.

Read To Me

• Children can imagine their way into a Bible story through the eyes of an animal. They might go to the wedding at Cana as a cat; ride out a Galilee storm as the ship’s mouse; or be the camel straining through the needle’s eye while two mice and a small boy help. The author-illustrator team of Nick Butterworth and Mick Inkpen bring us The Cat’s Story, The Mouse’s Story, and The Little Gate (Zondervan, $4.95 each), three from a series of eight hardcover books; they are just right for little hands, ears, eyes, and hearts.

• Debby Boone has a new book for the under-five crowd, Tomorrow Is a Brand New Day, which follows her success with Bedtime Hugs for Little Ones (Harvest House, $9.95 each). Tomorrow is also illustrated in full color with childlike simplicity by her husband, Gabriel Ferrer. It surveys the possibilities for a small child in one-page poems—fly a kite, get angry, ride the bus, take a walk, watch clouds, or just sing. One three-year-old I know has field-tested Bedtime extensively and found it satisfactory.

• Green Tiger Press, known for its interest in nineteenth-century children’s book art, also publishes new stories with new art. Out this fall for the over-five crowd, and a delight, is My Secret Sunrise, story and pictures by Jasper Tomkins ($11.95, hardcover; $7.95, paper). Boy, bicycle, and cat go off with breakfast to watch the world awaken as the sun comes up. All the things you would point out to your kids are there, pulsating with life.

The Pleasures Of Imagination

• Spirituality achieves high expression in Early New England Meditative Poetry: Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, edited by Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe (Paulist, $24.95). A lengthy introduction provides background and interpretation, but these poems stand quite well alone. Bradstreet (writing from the 1640s to 1660s) mulled over births, deaths, leavings and comings, as well as biblical passages, in well-shaped phrases and balanced compositions. From the 1680s until 1725, Taylor, like Bradstreet, wrote poems for his own spiritual exercise rather than for publication. His lines are sometimes didactic, but always graceful. A series of seven “Meditations” on 1 Corinthians 3:21–23 reminds one of an intricate arabesque as he celebrates his love for Christ.

• Maura Eichner’s poems, in Hope Is a Blind Bard (Harold Shaw, $8.95), are more sparse, taut with twentieth-century urgency and startling in their imagery. Grief is an “ocean floor,” a “mystery less known / than craters of the moon / … nudging my heart / with your careless foot.” Beauty is “ice-cased shrubs / riding like breakers / to the storm door.” Snow comes “whining like a dog.” A missionary is “the knot of song / that holds the world.”

• In her novel The Other Side (Viking, $19.95), Mary Gordon traces the last hours of a 60-year marriage, centering on Vincent, the faithful husband, father, and grandfather. An extended Irish family, living in New York, writhes in pain as the death of the grandmother looms. As Gordon explores memories, her characters convincingly embody both pain and healing, hostility and love. In Vincent, a steadfast love moves like an underground stream, nourishing each member of the family. He is the still point of grace in a slowly twisting chaos.

• I found Flannery O’Connor: The Collected Works, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (Library of America, $30), to be a delight. For the O’Connor reader who has worn out a set of paperbacks, wrap this one up and put it under the tree. Not only is almost everything here (all the fiction, most of the letters and essays), but it is carefully edited by her friend and elegantly bound.

• For adding pleasure to reading, there is How to Read Slowly: Reading for Comprehension, by James W. Sire (Harold Shaw, $9.95), which helps you discern world views expressed in fiction and poetry, and The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard (Harper & Row, $15.95), in which she takes you inside the writer’s mind, “teetering at the tip of the line of words.”

Feasting And Singing

• From a Monastery Kitchen, by Brother Victor-Antoine d’Avila-Latourrette (Harper & Row, $12.95), is a revised edition with mostly new dishes. Meat free, arranged by season, the recipes guide you to hearty food that comes from the hand of God to bless his people. You will find it laced with thought-provoking quotes as the kitchen and chapel flavor each other.

• We Wish You a Merry Christmas: Songs of the Season for Young People, music arranged by Dan Fox (Arcade Publishing, $16.95), offers two-dozen classic songs and carols, accompanied by reproductions from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, making this a marvelous way to explore sounds and colors with your children.

By Larry Sibley, who teaches practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, and is the author of Matthew: People of the Kingdom (Harold Shaw).

CHRISTIANITY TODAY Readers’-choice Awards

Christianity Today is proud to announce the inauguration of its new book awards.

Below you will find books nominated by publishers in seven categories. Please vote for the one book in each category that you feel has had the most significant impact on the Christian community in the past year. In addition, please write in the title and author of the book that you feel transcends its category and should be declared the “Best Book” for 1989 (you may choose from any book on the ballot or any book published in the past year).

After you vote, please tear out the page (photocopies will not be accepted) and mail to:

Readers’-choice Book Awards

CHRISTIANITY TODAY

465 Gundersen Drive

Carol Stream, IL 60188

Your ballot must arrive before January 1, 1990. The results will be published in the April 9, 1990, issue of CT.

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