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Evangelicals, Charismatics, and Reformation Roleplay, Pt 1

Evangelicals, Charismatics, and Reformation Roleplay, Pt 1

Last updated on: January 24, 2025 at 12:11 pm by Jacob Randolph

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Evangelicals, Charismatics, and Reformation Roleplay, Pt 1 2025-01-24T12:11:02-04:00 Jacob Randolph

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Evangelicalism and ecstatic Spirit-filled movements have long had an uneasy relationship. The inclusion of Pentecostal denominations into the newly-formed National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 meant that, on paper, Pentecostals were card-carrying members of conservative orthodoxy. Yet, the relationship between Pentecostals and midcentury evangelical power-brokers was often chilly. Pentecostals represented a threat to Neo-evangelicals’ self-perception as rationalistic, objective, and socially respectable. For their part, some Pentecostals saw the move into evangelical spaces as weighing into a cultural fight that wasn’t theirs and diluting the distinctiveness of the Pentecostal tradition.

If the relationship between evangelicalism and charismaticism was uneasy, this was mostly because evangelicalism had an uneasy relationship with itself. As Molly Worthen in 2014 and Isaac Sharp in 2023 argued, a lack of any central adjudicatory authority in evangelicalism, paired with a cult of personality and a range of self-appointed leaders, meant that theological and social boundaries were in a state of constant drawing, redrawing, and patrolling. To quote Sharp’s The Other Evangelicals, the job of leaders was to open the doors to invite large swaths of conservative Protestants into the circle and then to flesh out “a fuller definition of evangelical identity by sorting out the border cases from the central examples, differentiating between the ideally evangelical and the questionably evangelical, distinguishing between the conservative-enough-to-count and the too-liberal-to-consider, and separating the sheep from the goats.”

I think we see this process occurring in the wake of the charismatic renewals of the 20th century. Yet even in this process, the standards for this sorting were contested. As Calvinist evangelicals began to think twice about their early acceptance of Pentecostals, many Pentecostals and charismatics argued forcefully for their full inclusion in the evangelical sphere. A few non-charismatic evangelicals generously extended the hand of fellowship; others did so cautiously. Others still demonized charismatic Christians as fanatical at best, heretical at worst.

According to neo-evangelicals and their progeny, there were two wolves inside evangelicalism: the so-called “doctrine party,” that held fast to sola scriptura and carried the mantle of the church fathers, the reformers, and the Puritans, and the “experience party,” composed of Christians that looked for fresh revelation from God and were tossed about by the waves of subjective experience. Over time, church history was conscripted into this battle for evangelical identity. When Reformed evangelicals aimed their keyboards, it was often at evangelicals they perceived as “less-than,” who served as proxies for the great heterodoxies and heresies of Church tradition. Neo-evangelicals’ great matter was the question of biblical inerrancy. But since inerrancy did not settle the question of how to interpret an inerrant Bible, Calvinist evangelicals looked to a truncated and selective past to argue what constituted a pure evangelical. The magisterial Reformers took pride of place as the beacons of reason and regularity, scripture and doctrinal rigor. Reformed evangelicals saw themselves as standing in a line with Luther, Calvin, Latimer, and others who defended the faith against heresies old and new. And if they were Luther, it became all too easy to see Luther’s enemies as their own, the “heavenly prophets” of Zwickau and Wittenberg as proto-pentecostals or, if you like, to see charismatic Christians as Thomas Müntzer in modern guise.

Neo-Evangelicals, Biblical Inerrancy, and the Reformation

Beginning the 1940s, an interdenominational network of theologians and church leaders began a PR campaign to claim this concept of evangelicalism—a big-tent silent majority of conservative, Bible-believing Protestants—as the natural—even inevitable—continuation of Protestant confessional orthodoxy. To do this, they walked the tightrope of claiming Reformation heritage by a focus on the Bible while jettisoning denominational particulars on questions of the sacraments or church polity. Thus, Carl F.H. Henry, Harold Ockenga, and others were willing extend evangelical credentials to the Assemblies of God and other Pentecostals in the early ‘40s by inviting them into the National Association of Evangelicals.

But the fresh wave of charismatic renewal that began in the 1960s created serious theological problems for neo-evangelicals. Beginning in the late 50s and spreading widely in the 60s, various non-Pentecostal groups began reporting experiences of baptism in the Holy Spirit, an unleashing of spiritual power that included healings, speaking in tongues, prophecy, and divine words of knowledge and wisdom. Amid growing charismatic revivals in mainline and Roman Catholic churches, the preponderance of which threatened the neo-evangelical claim to spiritual exclusivity, Henry and others began to openly critique the charismatic movement as contrary to the Reformation principles of evangelicalism. In the pages of Christianity Today and in books published by evangelical presses, neo-evangelicals argued the charismatic push was an assault on reason, a failure to prioritize rational Christianity over ecstatic spirituality. To safeguard rational Christianity from spiritual excess was, for Henry and others, to uphold the very soul of the Reformation.

Walter Chantry, Signs of the Apostles (1973)

The claims for the modern miraculous read as a challenge to the sufficiency of scripture, a major evangelical thrust. “Charismatic enthusiasts are undermining confidence in the sufficiency of scripture,” Walter Chantry wrote in his Signs of the Apostles (1973). Pentecostal practice is a de facto denial of the sufficiency of scripture,” since they were “seeking an additional word from God, a further source of truth. For them the Bible is not enough.” “The ‘charismatic movement’,” he concluded, “does not carry on the Reformation but rather strikes a damaging blow to its very roots.”

For the most part, neo-evangelicals’ associations of the charismatic movement with Reformation heretics operated on the level of innuendo. Calling forth broad categories of “Enthusiastic sects” and “extremists” may have read as generalizations to most laypeople. However, these kinds of expressions gestured back to well-known conflicts in the Protestant Reformation. The shadows behind many of evangelical accusations against charismatics were Martin Luther’s old enemies: the Zwickau Prophets, Thomas Müntzer, the Anabaptists and Andreas Karlstadt. The theologies, goals, and rationales of these various figures and groups all varied, but in Luther’s mind, they shared a common trait: they abandoned the written Word of God in the Bible for the internal witness of the Spirit. They relativized Luther’s arguments from scripture as slavery to the “dead letter” against the living Spirit of prophecy. They were all fanatics, enthusiasts, Schwärmer, bees buzzing around busily doing little but wreaking havoc. As the battle over evangelical identity raged in the 80s and 90s and into the new millennium, Luther and his Schwärmer would be trotted out as foils to distinguish the true evangelicals from the false.

The Third Wave of Müntzerites

Third-wave charismaticism, or the neo-charismatic movement, saw the creation of new evangelical neocharismatic denominations, like the Vineyard Movement, but it also saw a marked rise in charismata within more storied evangelical institutions. In the late 1970s, Fuller professor Peter Wagner had teamed up with Vineyard founder John Wimber to teach a seminary course entitled, “Signs, Wonders and Church Growth.” According to Vinson Synan, the course attracted over 100 students. A hybrid of lecture and “clinical” work, it was not uncommon for students to engage in glossolalia, prophecy and prayer for healing. By Synan’s estimations, one-third of the student populations at both Fuller and Gordon-Conwell seminaries, both founded as neoevangelical training schools in the midcentury, were charismatic in belief and practice. For some Calvinist evangelicals, the explosion of these Spirit-empowered so-called evangelicals was a bridge a too far.

Controversial PCA pastor and Trinity Foundation founder John Robbins wrote in 1989 that the charismatic movement’s preoccupation with inward experience was both a manifestation of the German prophets like Müntzer and the Zwickau prophets, and it was a return to the errors of medieval Rome. “We have now come to the time when the issues of the sixteenth century have to be fought out again. This time the conflict will be more severe, and it will be final. Roll up the old denominational boundary lines. There is going to be a re-grouping of the religious world. On the one side there will be a grand union of Roman Catholics, pseudo-Protestants, and Pentecostals in what appears to be a movement for the conversion of the whole world. On the other side there will be a movement to restore the everlasting Gospel in its pristine purity and power. The Gospel will triumph. Though Antichrist may be victorious for a moment, his doom is sure. One little word shall fell him.”

John MacArthur, Charismatic Chaos (1992)

Independent Baptist preacher John MacArthur also saw links between Roman and charismatic error. Although not denominationally aligned, MacArthur had gained influence in the broader evangelical sphere through his radio program, Grace to You, which combined expository preaching, Calvinist soteriology, and fundamentalist biblicism and social ethics. In 1992, MacArthur published Charismatic Chaos with Zondervan Press, a direct rejoinder to Wimber, Wagner, and other evangelical charismatic leaders. MacArthur’s claims were simple. There were two approaches to Christianity: the historical, objective approach that began with scripture, and the personal, subjective approach that began with experience. “Objective, historic theology is Reformation theology. It is historical evangelicalism. It is historical orthodoxy. We begin with Scripture,” MacArthur wrote. On the other side stood both Roman Catholicism and historic Pentecostalism. Oh, and liberalism and neo-orthodoxy. What all these had in common against historical orthodoxy is they were driven by intuition and feeling. Against these, “historical evangelicalism” was embodied by Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms. For MacArthur, Luther was the standard-bearer for reason and the sufficiency of scripture against all forms of mysticism, gnosticism, and experientialism.

Shortly after MacArthur’s Charismatic Chaos hit bookshelves, new, controversial revivals linked to the third-wave further excited the ire of Calvinist evangelicals. Testimonies of Holy Spirit power, healings, the appearance of supernatural gold fillings in teeth, freedom from addiction, holy laughter, and euphoria swept across the nation from the Toronto Blessing in 1994, associated with the Vineyard Movement, and the Brownsville Revival of 1995, associated with the Assemblies of God. For Calvinistic evangelical leaders who sought social respectability and associated evangelical truth with rationalism, “false revivalism” marked an embarrassing regression from the pure truths of the Reformation, a return to the biblical illiteracy and spiritual blindness of the so-called dark ages.

Mere months after the outbreak of the Toronto Blessing, in the spring ’94 edition of Reformation and Revival journal, Lutheran pastor and Gordon-Conwell graduate Rick Ritchie penned his warning against the charismatic movement. His hook was a telling indictment of Wimber and the quote-unquote ‘power evangelicals’: “If Thomas Muntzer were alive today,” Ritchie wrote, “his church would have a dove on its front wall. Or, more likely, no ornament; he would be too busy running ‘signs and wonders’ conferences to worry about a building.” He continued: “the charge that today’s Reformation churches are dead because of their lack of emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit is as old as the Reformation itself. And so is one Reformation answer—Luther’s: “Muntzer, I wouldn’t believe you if you swallowed the Holy Ghost, feathers and all!” Ritchie’s garbling of Luther’s words notwithstanding, he was making a clear distinction—evangelicals who embraced scripture were standing on the side of Luther. And they were the ones who truly understood and experienced the Holy Spirit in the words of scripture. “It is only when we recognize that the Word is the Spirit’s chosen instrument that we will see that captivity of the Word is openness to the spirit,” wrote Ritchie. “On a day-to-day basis, if we wish to have God advise us personally about our money worries, comfort us when we feel arthritic, or affirm the inner child within, we are likely to be disappointed. God does speak of many things in His Word, many things that may be pertinent in the above instances. The Holy Spirit can illuminate Scripture making it understandable when it has not been before. His timing in illumination will often be remarkably providential. If this is not enough for us-if we want more—Reformation truth will be a disappointment.” If you wanted to mimic the experience of neocharismatic power rather than be content with Reformation truth, he cheekily wrote, you could simply stick your finger into a light socket.

By 1994, Carl Henry was ready to put away the prospect of a Pentecostal or charismatic evangelical space. The skepticism of a midcentury Henry had calcified into a full-on disapproval. In his Gods of the Age or God of the Ages, Henry repeated his two-party distinction of “Reformation-oriented evangelicals” and “experiential” groups. He wrote that “The tendency to use the term ‘evangelical’ as inclusive not only of Arminian and Reformed Christians, but of charismatic believers as well, and more broadly still of whoever claims a ‘born again’ experience, has diluted its cognitive force.” Lest anyone misunderstand, he doubled down: “I do not use the term ‘evangelical,’ as some now do, for non-Reformed Protestants. The historic Reformed faith champions evangelical orthodoxy, with much focus on the early ecumenical creeds and historic confessions. By the term evangelicals, I mean Protestants of broadly Reformed commitment, whether identified with Reformed denominations or not. The theological orientation and doctrinal sensitivity of the Reformed churches lend them a special serviceability in confronting the confessional weaknesses and ambiguities of many Protestant communities. The primarily experiential orientation of many professedly evangelical churches is a conspicuous weakness.”

Another frequent contributor to Reformation and Revival, Westminster Theological Seminary professor Michael Horton, wrote in 1996 that by jumping into bed with experience over scripture alone, evangelicals were betraying their Reformation heritage. Sola scriptura was a scandal to both Rome and radicals, who undermined the doctrine “by appeals to extra biblical revelation and by creating a host of individualistic sects led by charismatic prophets. In our day, too,” Horton wrote, “the Word and Spirit are often set against each other in what is often sadly called ‘revival.’” By the mid-90s, neocharismatic revivalism and the pentecostalization of Arminian evangelicalism were a foregone conclusion. Evangelical boundary lines were firmly set, or so it seemed. In the mid-90s, Horton critiqued neocharismatics from the comfortable perch of Presbyterian evangelicalism. But less than a decade later, he and his Westminster colleagues would face the uneasy task of challenging new charismatics who also claimed the mantle of Reformed theology.

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