Books

Dispensing With Scofield

Surprised by the Power of the Spirit, by Jack Deere (Zondervan, 292 pp., $17.99, hardcover). Reviewed by Edith L. Blumhofer, project director for the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College and the author of Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture (University of Illinois Press).

Jack Deere’s Surprised by the Power of the Spirit brings into sharp contrast two of the men who have wielded wide influence in twentieth-century popular Protestantism: C. I. Scofield, a fundamentalist scholar whose notes to the Bible introduced thousands to dispensational theology, and John Wimber, the father of what some call the “third wave” of Pentecostalism. For Jack Deere and others like him, the influence of both men has not only been profound but, more important, has been experienced as conflictual.

When Scofield published the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909, he embarked on more than a lucrative venture: he effectively set an agenda that millions of Bible-believing Protestants have since followed. By shaping the way people read and comprehended Scripture, Scofield exerted immeasurable (and, according to Deere, manipulative) influence on the course of twentieth-century popular Protestantism.

Today conservatives who propose alternative views of Scripture begin by confronting Scofield’s premises about dispensations, the secret rapture of the church, and the relationship between the church and Israel. While increasing numbers of evangelical academics reject his basic assumptions, millions of the faithful still find in his explanations a reliable guide through the confusing terrain of the last days.

In recent years, perhaps none of Scofield’s teachings has been challenged more vigorously at the popular level than his view that New Testament spiritual gifts and “signs and wonders” ceased at the end of the apostolic era. According to Scofield, spiritual gifts, such as tongues and prophecy, originally authenticated the apostles’ ministries; with the formation of the New Testament canon, the gifts ceased to operate. Hence, the Scofield Bible excludes the defining experience of Pentecostalism and the charismatic renewal from authentic contemporary Christian experience.

The persistence and expansion of Pentecostal currents in the American church over this century, then, are points of tension for pragmatic fundamentalists whose world-view is molded by Scofield’s categories. Are the growing numbers of Christians who believe in spiritual gifts for the church today guilty of egregious error?

Deere, a former professor of Old Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary—a long-time bastion of Scofieldian dispensationalism—believes that spiritual gifts belong in today’s church and that Scofield and his followers have, in effect, denied large segments of the American church its rightful heritage of spiritual experience. He argues that in Scripture God never withdrew these gifts. He roots his argument in his own dramatic experiences and bolsters it with references to the writings of Jonathan Edwards and the experiences of Christians during the Great Awakening.

In pursuit of gifts

Deere does not simply reason and experience his way out of a Scofieldian world-view, however; he also embraces an alternative. For Deere, this alternative is epitomized in John Wimber and especially Paul Cain, who was acclaimed a prophet by Wimber, though both Deere and Cain have subsequently left Wimber’s Vineyard Christian Fellowship (CT, Jan. 14, 1991, p. 18).

Like Wimber, Deere differs from classical Pentecostalism and from much of the charismatic renewal by rejecting the assumption that a second crisis experience—a baptism with the Holy Spirit—should ordinarily mark the believer’s life. Deere opts for a view of contemporary apostolic ministry rooted in a particular reading of Ephesians 4:11 and for the aggressive pursuit of spiritual gifts.

For Deere, the point is not simply openness to the Spirit’s moving but, rather, an intentional quest for the spiritual gifts and signs and wonders that make concrete the Spirit’s presence. Like Wimber, Deere uses terms long familiar to Pentecostals. The meanings he assigns, however, sometimes differ significantly from those Pentecostals have historically used.

For example, the purposeful pursuit of particular spiritual gifts veers sharply from the classical Pentecostal notion that God operates the gifts God chooses through the people God selects.

Surprised by the Power of the Spirit prompts a number of observations. First, it reveals striking insularity within the fluid, media-saturated world of popular Protestantism. Vast networks that encompass hundreds of thousands of American Christians simply do not overlap. Incredibly, Deere was established as a seminary professor and pastor before he personally encountered the charismatic movement.

Second, the book confirms that “the people” generally tend to be far more receptive to religious experience than their leaders anticipate. The nameless millions who give fiber and texture to popular Protestantism seem open to dimensions of religious experience that are not necessarily consistent with their denominational traditions or their historical identities. This spiritual hunger (or gullibility, depending on one’s point of view) helps account for the burgeoning fascination with forms of spiritual encounter traditionally associated with Pentecostalism.

Third, the book suggests that the boundaries, stereotypes, and categories we typically use to describe the American religious scene are inadequate to account for what is happening. Healing and spiritual gifts are not the particular province of Pentecostals or even of charismatics. People everywhere seem eager to experience what the New Testament describes. Those who proclaim the contemporary availability of religious experience tap a reservoir of yearning and an affinity for revivalistic piety that run deep in Protestant souls.

The test of experience

Deere insists that what he endorses is not properly confined to any segment of Christianity but, rather, represents the heritage of all who strive to model the Christian faith in any age. He reaches that conclusion despite the fact that his assertions often have no clear biblical precedent.

For example, he claims to have seen fingers grow and legs lengthened and to have heard personal, directive prophecies that have no clear parallels in the New Testament.

Certainly Deere’s view of the role of the prophet and the “apostolic dimensions” of ministry (especially as manifested by Paul Cain) prompts significant questions about his reading of the New Testament: In laying aside Scofield’s grid, has Deere replaced it with another that is equally or more manipulative in its use of God’s Word?

Deere suggests that when experience and argument converge, people open themselves to a life of infinite surprises in engagement with the Holy Spirit. And his personal experiences punctuate each chapter. Indeed, there is almost a sense in which the book affirms that the power of the Spirit is real primarily because Deere experienced and saw it. He comes perilously close to using experience as a form of expanded translation of the biblical text.

Ultimately, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit is another contribution to a growing body of literature that unites the power of personal testimony with a hermeneutic that offers dispensational fundamentalists a fresh way of approaching the biblical text. But although Deere offers a welcomed alternative to the Scofieldian reading of Scripture, he unfortunately leaves the reader with the impression that it is the religious experience itself that validates what he argues.

Personalizing Public Policy

Never Forget, by Kay Coles James with Jacquelline Fuller (Zondervan, 182 pp.; $15.99, hardcover). Reviewed by Steve Rabey, religion editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph.

“The riveting story of one woman’s journey from public housing to the corridors of power”—so reads the book jacket for the life story of Kay James, the self-confessed evangelical, Black, pro-life Republican. Unlike most books, this one lives up to its promotion.

Formerly the assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under George Bush, James is now vice president for policy at the D.C.-based Family Research Council, a conservative Christian think tank and lobby. While James’s life appears to be a series of graceful movements among America’s power elites, she has not forgotten the arduous experience of growing up in America’s Black underclass.

The daughter of a drunk and emotionally abusive father and a firm but loving mother, James spent her early years in Creighton Court, a public-housing project in Richmond, Virginia, where cockroaches roamed the cinder-block walls and concrete floors.

Nor has she forgotten the lessons learned at her mother’s knee: lessons on the virtues of hard work, honesty, and godliness. “A lot of struggling single parents and courageous grandparents know what I mean when I say that the circumstances a child grows up in are far less important than the character of the person who raises them,” she writes. It is a philosophy that served her well, eventually leading her to work as a spokesperson for the National Right to Life Committee, where she caught the eye of the Bush administration.

As its title suggests, Never Forget stresses the importance of remembering one’s heritage—in James’s case, her African-American heritage. Her personal remembrances intersect with some of the historic benchmarks in America’s troubled racial history. One year after the 1954 Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation in public schools, James was one of 26 Black students chosen to integrate Richmond’s all-White Chandler Junior High School. It was here that she had her first conversation with a White person and where she experienced myriad racial injustices and taunts.

The specter of racism haunted her even in the church. She gave her life to Jesus during a Billy Graham telecast during her senior year of high school, but she never felt accepted into the inner circle of her White Christian women friends. This brought a theological dimension to her suffering, causing her “to question how a blue-eyed, blond Jesus could love dark, nappy me. Would there be a section in heaven, in the back near the edges separating heaven from hell, a separate section for us blacks?”

But Never Forget is more than an exploration of racial issues; it is the story of a Christian whose intelligence and determination have lifted her to positions of influence. James’s wealth of personal experience, her compassion for the less fortunate (as well as for her ideological foes), and her balanced approach to pressing public-policy issues make her one of the church’s most valuable spokespersons.

What Europe Taught Wesley

The Protestant Evangelical Awakening,by W. R. Ward (Cambridge, 370 pp.; $59.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Mark A. Noll, McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College in Illinois.

W. R. Ward, who recently retired from his post in the history department at the University of Durham in England, has long been recognized as one of the most insightful historians of British evangelicalism. His most recent book both enhances that reputation and broadens our historical understanding of the roots of modern evangelicalism.

Ward’s theme is the Protestant revival of the early to mid-eighteenth century, which in America is often called the “First Great Awakening” and in Britain “the Evangelical Awakening.” The great contribution of Ward’s book is to show how profoundly European were the developments that influenced every phase of what is often considered a British or American event.

The book provides detailed information on evangelical stirrings in several parts of the German-speaking world (Silesia, Prussia;

Salzburg, Austria), in Hungary, in what is now the Czech and Slovak republics, and all the way east to Siberia.

And then it shows how emphases from these European stirrings—especially resistance to the growing pretensions of modern national governments, recovery of the neglected Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of believers, and reassertion of faith as a life of piety—worked their way steadily into the preaching of English-speaking revivalists like John Wesley and George Whitefield. Ward’s service in breaking the story of evangelicalism out of the timeworn concentration on English-language sources has the benefit of pointing us today to the vibrant evangelical movements that, over the course of the twentieth century, have encircled the globe.

Can We Get Along?

Great Divides: Understanding the Controversies That Come Between Christians,by Ronald H. Nash (NavPress, 240 pp.; $10, paper). Reviewed by Mark Horne, coauthor with George Grant of Legislating Immorality: The Homosexual Movement Comes Out of the Closet (Moody).

The latest work to proceed from the prolific word processor of philosopher Ronald Nash analyzes ten factious issues among Christians. Once again Nash demonstrates his adeptness at addressing both the highly theoretical and the handily practical. More than a catalog of the divisive issues, Great Divides addresses a much more important single issue: the communion of the saints. Nash writes that “one of my goals is to show that these ten issues have the potential to undermine the unity of the body of Christ.” This disunity, all too easily taken for granted, is the antithesis of Jesus’ prayer to the Father for the church that “they may be one, just as we are one” (John 17:22).

Nash examines the friction over abortion, the debate over women leaders in the church, the rise of radical feminism, disagreements over divorce and remarriage, the increasingly shrill brouhaha over Christians and psychology, the health-and-wealth perfidy, the questions regarding Christians and politics, the security risks of Christian Reconstructionism, the commotion over Lordship salvation, and the hysteria surrounding the end times.

The ultimate value of this work is that it encourages Christians to interact with fellow believers who hold differing ideas and practices in the hope of coming to a common understanding. Nash believes some of these “great divides” should not separate Christians at all. Others call for continual effort toward reunion. And, tragically, a few require separation from false teaching.

Among the most thoughtful chapters are those covering Christian Reconstructionism and the clashing views over last-day events. Indeed, a more fair-minded critique of theonomy by a dissenter cannot be imagined. Likewise, the cogent questions Nash gently asks of pretribulationists—from an amillennial approach—are bound to stimulate some critical thinking.

One addition that could have helped all of the chapters would be an emphasis on ecclesiology and liturgy. In dealing with divorce and remarriage, for instance, how do we deal with instructions regarding unbelievers without discussing the importance of excommunication? Likewise, it is hard to decipher the Bible’s teaching on women in worship without first dealing with what worship actually is.

Still, Nash’s keen writing on matters of substance is a breath of fresh air and a useful resource for anyone who desires to replace polemics with intelligent dialogue within the church.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.