Charismata

The Catholic Church teaches that God grants charismatic gifts: prophecies, speaking in tongues, healings, and other sorts of miracles. The Church also allows Catholic participation in the “charismatic movement,” a modern development that encourages Christians to seek these gifts as a regular part of their spirituality. Many Catholics have experienced spiritual renewal in their own lives as a result. None of these truths suggest that we should be credulous in the face of claims of the miraculous. On the contrary, the Church teaches that we should “test everything, and hold to what is good.” (1 Thessalonians 5:21)

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My own involvement in the charismatic movement came when I was still a Protestant. I grew up with a sincere Christian faith, but without a deep, lived experienced of Christian truth. I could easily parrot platitudes about Christian life but cannot say that they moved me personally. While in college, I discovered Christians whose worship was ecstatic and whose enthusiasm was almost intoxicating. Their worship was more than the dissemination of information or the recitation of formula. It was more like the frenzied rock concerts of my teenage years, minus the dissipation prevalent at such events. I had always separated the enthusiasm characteristic of sports, music, and entertainment from the more sobering constituents of religion. To unite them in a single, continuous movement towards God was exhilarating. I became “a charismatic.”

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I am deeply grateful for what I experienced with Pentecostal and charismatic friends. I met men and women of extraordinary commitment and charity. I formed some deep relationships. Most importantly, my heart was opened in a new way (unknown to me) towards the Catholic faith. Catholic worship has always been about the lived experience of God and of transforming grace. The contemplative ideal of Catholic life aims precisely at a transrational encounter with the ineffable. My experience of the charismatic movement exposed me to possibilities in religion that I had never anticipated. It was another meaningful brick in the road to Catholicism.

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I could not, however, turn off my critical intellect, though at times I tried to. I dove deeply into the history, theology, and psychology of the movement and learned things that gave me pause. I also observed contradictions in my own experience of charismatic phenomena and of those around me. In short, I began to question many of the claims that promoters make about this spirituality.

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The modern charismatic movement finds distant roots in Calvinism, Puritanism, and Wesleyanism. The common denominator in these Protestant movements was the belief that faith and grace are sensible realities. For the Calvinist, we can infer the presence faith, grace, or the Holy Spirit from certain emotions or affective states. Puritanism developed a highly articulated schemata to track the spiritual progress of a soul through introspection of these affective states. In later Wesleyanism and in some forms of New England Calvinism, spiritual progress is punctuated by a distinct, easily recognizable crisis experience, culminating in breakthrough to a higher life.

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A key figure in the rise of modern Pentecostalism was the Protestant theologian and revivalist Asa Mahan (1799-1889). Mahan associated the Puritan and Wesleyan idea of higher life with the biblical language of “Spirit baptism.” Mahan’s books were widely read in nineteenth-century America, and it was not long before Wesleyan preachers began associating the higher life, Christian perfection, and “baptism in the Spirit” with speaking in tongues and the miraculous events that took place at Pentecost in Acts 2. The holiness preacher Charles Parham (1873-1929) taught explicitly that baptism in the Spirit must be evidenced by speaking in tongues. Modern Pentecostalism was born. The charismatic movement developed a few decades later as the practice of speaking in tongues was separated from Parham’s peculiar theology of Spirit baptism.

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Merely recounting the genealogy of Pentecostalism neither refutes nor confirms the claims of the movement. However, it helpfully illustrates what I take to be the main danger Catholics must confront. That danger is the Calvinist claim that grace and the Spirit can be reliably inferred from sensible phenomena. The Catholic Church teaches the exact opposite.

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In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we read, “Since it belongs to the supernatural order, grace escapes our experience and cannot be known except by faith.” (CCC 2005) The Catholic cannot make or accept a claim to supernatural experience simply on the basis of affective states. Contrary to the language of charismatic worship, we do not “feel the Spirit moving” simply because we get excited.

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Charismatics today do not speak in tongues in order to be understood by foreigners. (The linguistic evidence indicates that modern glossolalia – tongues is not intelligible language of any sort.) They speak in tongues because of how it makes them feel. Brain scans and first-person reports both reveal that speaking in tongues is a dissociative, calming, and cathartic experience. But precisely because it can be emotionally powerful, claims in favor of speaking in tongues and similar practices can be overblown.

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“Back in the day,” I witnessed a good deal of absurdity along with the catharsis. I witnessed broken, crippled, and sick people claiming to be healed. I watched “prophets” manipulate the emotionally wounded for profit. But for me, the worst lie occurred when I was speaking in tongues. I was hooting and hollering along with the best of them when a man turned to me and said, “Brother, you are filled with the Spirit of God!” In an instant, I knew that he was wrong. I knew the blackness of my own heart, my profound need for grace, and the woundedness that prompted me to seek cathartic release in ecstatic experience.

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It was years before these realizations moved me eventually towards the Catholic faith. In the Church, I found a far more reasonable but also more mysterious encounter with God’s grace. There was room for God to give charismatic gifts, but a more sober assessment of their value. These, says the Church, are like milk, and not solid food. In the end, what matters is love.

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