Worship, the Trinity, and the charismatic movement

The Trinity has been largely neglected in Pentecostalism, as in the entire Western Church right throughout the centuries. So demonstrates Robert Letham in The Holy Trinity. Most striking and significant for me personally in Letham's excellent and much needed book is his chapter, The Trinity, Worship and Prayer. He outlines the importance of understanding the Trinity for our right response to God in true Christian worship and prayer. Apart from the fact that there would be no true Christian experience without a knowledge of the Trinity, Letham quickly and convincingly shows that authentically Christian worship and prayer is distinctively trinitarian:

"Our communion with God "consists in his communication of himself unto us, with our returnal unto him... flowing from that union which in Jesus Christ we have with him. [1] (p. 414) ... 

Here is the reverse movement to that seen as the ground of the church's worship--by the Holy Spirit through Christ to the Father. This encompasses our entire response to, and relationship with, God--from worship through the whole field of Christian experience...

Putting it another way, from the side of God, the worship of the church is the communion of the Holy Trinity with us his people. We are inclined to view worship as what we do, but if we follow our argument, it is first and foremost something the triune God does, our actions initiated and encompassed by his (p. 416) ...

The worship of the church is thus not only grounded in the mediation of Christ, but takes place in union with him and through his mediatorial work and continued intercession (p. 417) ...

Since Christian worship is determined by initiated by shaped by, and directed to the Holy Trinity, we worship the three with one undivided act of adoration (p. 418).

The Holy Trinity also has this to say specifically on the Pentecostal focus on the Holy Spirit, under the heading, Worship, Perichoresis, and the Charismatic Movement:

"Richard Garrin, in a recent article, points to a tendency in the charismatic movement to separate the Holy Spirit from Christ. He counters by pointing to the close connection that Paul draws between Christ and the Spirit [2]. This argument is undergirded by the patristic teaching on perichoresis, the mutual indwelling of the three persons, all occupying the same divine space. The Father is in the Son, the Son is in the Father, the Holy Spirit is in the Son and the Father, the Father is in the Holy Spirit, and the Son is in the Holy Spirit. Thus, to worship one person at the expense of the others is to divide the undivided Trinity. Worship of any one of the three at once entails worship of all three and worship of the indivisible Trinity. An undue emphasis on one person, whether it be the focus on Jesus in pietism or the concentration on the Holy Spirit in charismatic circles, is a distortion. Owen, in his discussion, is careful to guard against this danger." (p. 421)

Dividing the undivided Trinity; it might not seem like such a serious distortion, until we're convinced about the fiercely and uniquely Trinitarian emphasis and focus of New Testament Christianity in the Scriptures. The authors of the NT of course got this from Jesus, who it seems did not cease to explain and insist upon the importance of understanding his relationship to the Father, and in turn his relationship with the Spirit. 

Letham begins his section on the Trinity and Worship by calling us stop neglecting in the Western Church the uniquely Christian doctrine of God as the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit:

"God-centred worship (can worship be anything else?) must, by definition, give center stage to what is distinctive of Christianity, the high-water mark of God's self-revelation in the Bible. Yet... In the West, the Trinity has in practice been relegated to such an extent that most Christians are little more than practical modalists. As Laats comments, "Instead of being in the centre of christian worship and thinking it has been marginalised"...

[And he goes on to give this great example...] 

J. I. Packer's best-seller Knowing God (1973) has only seven pages out of 254 on the Trinity. He recognizes that for most Christians it is an esoteric mystery to which lip service may be paid once a year on Trinity Sunday. However, after this chapter is over, he carries on as if nothing has happened...

A right understanding of God as a Trinity changes the way understand the Baptism in the Spirit (See here for an article outlining what the New Testament teaches about Baptism with the Spirit in context).

We need to stop neglecting the New Testament's unique and insistent focus on God as the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and how our knowledge of that Union is to shape our whole response to him. Pentecostals need a greater focus on the persons of the Trinity; that is, Pentecostalism needs to be more Christ-ian!



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Letham, Robert. The Holy Trinity - In Scripture, History, Theology, and Worship. P&R Publishing Company: New Jersey, 2004.

[1] Owen, Of Communion with God, in Works, ed. Goold, 2:8-9.
[2] Richard B. Gaffin Jr., "Challenges of the Charismatic Movement to the Reformed Tradition," Ordained Servant 7 (1998): 48-57.

Tony Payne in the story of the charismatic movement

Not the American darts player, but the Australian author, Publishing Director at Matthias Media and editor of The Briefing, Tony Payne is well known for his clear, evangelical and extremely well-thought-out theological communication that is both insightful and practical on modern issues for Christians in our contemporary culture.

But increasingly he is also known for his story of beginnings and transition through the charismatic movement. In 2010 in an article published by The Briefing, A continuing story: 19th-century Methodists, charismatics and me, he describes his Christian beginnings and how he was first drawn by the 'charismatic' to seek the experience of miraculous, supernatural and dynamic Christian living:

"I had a powerful intuition that I was part of something radical and real—a movement that was recovering the power and reality of New Testament Christianity by restoring to it the spiritual gifts, experiential richness and miraculous flavour that had somehow become lost or forgotten."

Now years later, Payne reflects upon these early years and notices the similarity between his journey and the original factors that led to the rise of Pentecostalism. At the beginning of the nineteenth-century, the spread of Methodism to America inspired the Holiness Movement, after first originating in the eighteenth-century from John Wesley's new experiential spirituality which promoted the power of freedom from sin and the personal change that Christians could experience through the work of the Holy Spirit. Wesley's new emphasis inspired the English movement that would eventually grow, spread wings and develop into the American Holiness movement. And by the second half of the nineteenth-century, it would be teaching a second post-conversion experience of Spirit baptism and the availability of 'faith healing'. 

As the 'spiritual ancestors' of the charismatic movement, the Holiness preachers first inspired the birth of the Pentecostal movement at the turn of the twentieth century, which grew into a worldwide movement in only three years when in 1906 a reoccurrence of tongues-speaking gained world-wide attention. This revival of tongues was perceived within the movement as an End-time restoration of the gift of languages (tongues) for multi-cultural evangelism, along with the other sign gifts such as miracles and healing, and as an essential evidence to identify those elite Christians who had been uniquely empowered by the Spirit for this task of final harvest of the unconverted world. 

But in searching out and reflecting upon his own past, Payne notices the similarity in what fueled his own early quest and those factors which were driving nineteenth-century Methodism:

"It was a basic spiritual impatience. 19th-century American Methodism saw itself caught between two glorious realities. Behind them were the glories of the New Testament, with the power of Christ in his person and work, his miracles of healing, and the tantalizing references to charismata in 1 Corinthians 12-14. In front of them were the glories of the age to come, where there would be no sin, no disease, no death and no decay—a new world where Christians would finally be made perfect like their Lord, and where they would enjoy uninterrupted, face-to-face fellowship with God.

But they saw themselves stuck between these two, like a traveller who has left one brilliant city and is journeying towards an even more dazzling one, but who finds the road between them difficult and tiring, and the scenery unexciting. Their answer was to assert that the journey should not be so difficult—that there should be a shorter way. They wanted to say that miraculous powers of the New Testament age should be fully present in our lives, and that victory over sin and disease would not simply occur in the next age, but should also be our experience now."

Payne sees in the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements a chronic spiritual 'impatience' (what theologians might describe as over-realised eschatology) -- an impulse to under-emphasise the distinct delay that has been imposed by Christ's ascension between this age, the 'last days', and the next age to come where after Christ's second coming there certainly will be divine health, perfect sinlessness, victory, peace and complete prosperity. 

"My problem was that I didn't want to wait with patience. I wanted the power and the gifts and the glory, and I wanted it now. I wanted to share in the miracles and victory of Christ, not his suffering.

I was a continuationist who had fixed on the wrong point of continuity—because it is not the miraculous powers and wonders of Christ and the apostles that continue in our lives, but the afflictions and sufferings they endured for doing his Father's will. Our imitation of Christ, Paul and the apostolic churches is in laying down our lives in sacrifice for the sake of others and their salvation (1 Cor 10:33-11:1).

As I should have known, and have now discovered, this is the more excellent way."

In this article Tony Payne is not only personally reflective and critical, he is well researched and considered. Referencing among other things Donald Dayton's Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, he shows that he has properly read and understood the historical development of the charismatic movement and the importance of this for understanding and accurately evaluating the Pentecostal emphasis against the backdrop of our common Biblical data.

But in identifying what had driven his quest for the miraculous along with the early charismatics, Payne is also honest in his assessment of how serious this departure really is in terms of the New Testament's teaching. He sees it as a failure to follow Christ's pattern of cross-shaped living, who like him must suffer before entering his glory. While we wait for Christ to bring the New Creation, our walk is actually shaped and characterised by waiting. We must patiently endure, patiently suffer, patiently struggle; all the time while we yearn for what we cannot yet have: the glory, complete freedom and victory and full possession of our final inheritance -- a redeemed universe encompassing body, mind, spirit, and world.

Read more...

View full article here.

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Tony Payne, The Briefing, Issue  #379, April 2010, A continuing story: 19th-century Methodists, charismatics and me.

The History of 'Charisma'

From Ancient Greece to the modern Charismatic Movement, from the Apostle Paul to twenty-first century politics and Pentecostalism -- Two excellent books are available at our own State Library on the history of charisma: John Potts' A history of charisma and Philip Rieff's Charisma. Rieff's book came first: Apparently quite an original work and three decades in the making, Charisma has the telling subtitle, "the gift of grace, and how it has been taken away from us." Rieff traces the evolution of charisma as a theological concept to it's transformation into a political force within modern culture.


Pott's book followed only two years later, and seems to be a completely parallel work. He specifically tracks the history of the word 'charisma' from the first century right through to the twenty-first century. The Apostle Paul first borrowed the word from Greco-Roman culture to coin a brand new term 'charismata' in his effort to re-frame first Christian thought about their various abilities, particularly those of the Corinthians. But the word has had various meanings assigned to it since then, leaving behind its original use in Christian theology, evolving into its brand new manifestation within current politics and culture. However interestingly, Pott shows that its current use by modern Charismatics, who claimed the term as their own, shows significant disparity with Paul's own thought and emphasis. Nonetheless elements of it's original meaning do continue within the contemporary secular understanding, but just fragments.


I found Pott's work particularly easy to read and quite exciting. He is insightful both for understanding the place and influence of charisma within our culture, but also for his helpful analysis of Pentecostalism and the development of the Charismatic Movement. This read is great for unravelling the distinction between modern developments in belief about spirituality and spiritual gifts, and the original New Testament teaching and emphasis of the Apostle Paul.


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Potts, John. A history of charisma. Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 
Rieff, Philip. Charisma: the gift of grace, and how it has been taken away from us, 1st ed, New York : Pantheon Books, 2007.