Charismatic Prophecy

chapter 1 Charismatic Prophecy

Charismatic Christians in the mainline churches, such as the Church of Eng- land, have followed their Pentecostal predecessors in understanding the gift of prophecy as a gift that is used within the congregational setting for the building up of the church body (Horton, 1934; Carter, 1946). There are certain character- istics defining the gift of prophecy within this context, such as the e xpectation that prophecy is generally a spontaneous event (Cousens, 1986). That is, the message is specific to the occasion on which it is received (and including the people to whom it is addressed) rather than being generally applicable, unless it is otherwise stated at the time of delivery. The message of the prophecy is also generally expected to fulfil the Pauline criterion of 1 Corinthians 14.3 – edification, encouragement and consolation (Watson, 1973:91; Mühlen, 1978:149). Charismatic Christians would also expect to receive inspiration and specific guidance via prophetic utterances (Yocum, 1976: 42–43). In the popular literature, there are examples of oracles of judgment, warnings and calls to repentance (Hill, 1985); but John Gunstone, a leading Anglo-Catholic charismatic in the Church of England in the 1980s, believed that condemnatory prophecy should be restricted to those who are very e xperienced in the exercise of prophetic gifts, and so he discouraged that type of prophecy in general (Gunstone, 1975: 89). Nevertheless, the style of contemporary prophecy would appear in many cases to be modelled on the Old Testament canonical prophets, with oracles in the first person singular. (Atkinson, 1977: 3; Pickup, 1975: 60). Indeed, these prophecies may be highly ritualized in terms of their delivery with the opening phrase consisting of “Thus says the Lord, …” (Gelpi, 1971: 82). Most charismatic Christians would stress the need to test prophecy, since they believe that a message contains a mixture of the human and the divine. The classical biblical categories of “foretelling” (prediction) and “forthtelling” (proclamation) are also used to describe the phenomenon. In the Charismatic Renewal of the 1970s and 1980s, prophecy could be said to contain both, although mostly the latter (Goldingay, 1972: 6). Charismatics tend to react against two popular positions on this issue. First, they maintain, contrary to many Conservative Evangelicals, that prophecy is not the same as preaching, since they believe that the message comes directly from God rather than being mediated through exposition of Scripture (Green, 1982); although some Charismatic Evangelicals may allow prophetic preaching to exist as a hybrid dis- course. Second, charismatics react against the popular secular understanding,

Charismatic Prophecy 9 which equates prophecy with fortunetelling or prediction (Ranaghan and Ranaghan, 1983). This is strongly refuted, while allowing that some prophecies may contain prediction; the focus in terms of function, as stated above, is understood in terms of congregational encouragement (1 Corinthians. 14.3). In addition to these classical categories, some Charismatics attempt to provide a typology from their own experience of prophecy. For example, Joyce Huggett describes prophecy as operating at three levels (1986: 133). They are: (1) “low-level prophecy”, for example “The Lord says: ‘Don’t be afraid, I am with you’”; (2) “higher-level prophecy”, where God reveals something about the situation in a particular church at a particular time; and (3) “highest level prophecy”, “which causes people to bow down and worship God … because they know ‘The Lord has spoken’”. The idea that there are levels of prophecy would seem to be a reasonably popular idea, although the expression of it varies (Every, 1976: 191). These descriptions provide some context to the ideas concerning prophecy that were prevalent at time of the study (Cartledge, 1989). As there was very little serious academic literature available, it soon became evident that the popular and semi-popular literature of the Charismatic Re- newal movement would need to be supplemented with further descriptive ma- terial, drawn from empirical data. The advantage of such a study would be that it could provide a useful check on any description emerging from the literature of the movement (Cartledge, 1994). Thus a small-scale qualitative study was undertaken in order to provide data for the task of theological description. The research was completed between June 1987 and June 1988. However, before the presentation of empirical research, it is necessary to consider some perspectives, which provide theoretical approaches with which the empirical data may interact. These main frameworks come from the dis- ciplines of sociology, psychology and theology. While they will be described independently, they are by no means exclusive perspectives.

Sociological Assessment

Meredith McGuire’s study of American Roman Catholic charismatics pro- vides some interesting insight into the social context of charismatic prophecy (McGuire, 1977). She defines prophecy in this context as “God speaking directly to the prayer group through one of its members’ voice…”. Sociologically, it is important to observe that the Roman Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement in the usa recruits from middle-class educated church members. Also, for Roman Catholic Christians, this type of religious expression is vastly differ- ent to the style into which they were previously “socialized”.