Abstract
This book is about a Catholic–Classical Pentecostal dialogue as it progressed over the years 1972–2007. The adjective ‘classical’ matters given that it is properly applied to only a minority of those belonging to a group claiming to be the second largest Christian family, and given that this generates a historical debate about the true origins of that family. The analysis is by a scholar brought up in a small Belgian Evangelical Church but currently working in the Evangelical Theological Faculty at Leuven. It is a work of monumental and definitive scholarship, though it might have benefitted from more careful copy-editing to correct linguistic idiosyncrasies and eliminate rather too much repetition, however daunting the task. The plural of dogma is not dogma’s.
Jelle Creemers treats the progress of the dialogue through several phases as a test case of what is involved a dialogue between a ‘free church’ which sees itself as re-creating the conditions of the earliest Church as recorded in Acts, notably the gifts of the Spirit as the earnest of conversion, and a Church conceiving itself as guided ‘into all truth’ by the Holy Spirit to create a sacramental system signifying membership, notably baptism. Guidance was sought from the formulae of a church, which is or was in one way in between and in another way the main source of Pentecostal theology: the Methodist quadrilateral of Scripture, tradition, experience and reason. A major difficulty arises of course when dealing with a church that stresses two of these, Scripture and experience. But there are other important difficulties arising from questions like the line delimiting the kind of Pentecostal one can properly call classical, and the question of who may rightly claim to represent that kind of Pentecostal in view of internal diversity and the absence of any agreed focus of authority. That difficulty immediately raises the question of how groups without such a focus receive such conclusions as are reached by the dialogue.
Creemers’ conclusion is that the dialogue has come to be permeated by an emphasis on spirituality that marks it out from dialogues held between Catholics and those kinds of Protestant church where issues of history and historical tradition and of the meaning of the sacraments and church order might be more to the fore. Spirituality as a theme requires shared worship. It is the prior condition of progress but not its guarantor, and it underpins the question of mutual recognition. Clearly mutual recognition is not so easy given memories of the active denial of such recognition on both sides. Both sides recognize the importance of everyday practice as well as theory. All this links up with a recent emphasis in ecumenical conversations generally on common witness. An emphasis on spirituality leads to questions of conversion and the hope of the coming kingdom in a restorationist perpective. My recollection as a consultant to a Catholic–Pentecostal dialogue in New York is that this is where viewpoints collide. Beyond that, sociologists often hold that competition stimulates ardour.