Good Lord, Deliver Us

Man In the News, Dr John Sentamu, was already in trouble with the National Secular Society and its fellow-travellers for his matter of fact witness, on the floor of the House of Lords, to the reality of deliverance from the power of supernatural evil. Like most of the Anglicans in the world, he is a product of Anglo-Catholic or Evangelical missionary activity (in his case, it looks as if it might have been both), rather than of anything out of The Vicar of Dibley or even Rev. If the Lords Spiritual do not bear this sort of witness, then there is no point having them.

The whole Church was baptised with the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, and She manifests that baptism through a rich plurality of gifts, the charisms. The whole Church, and thus every member, is therefore both Pentecostal and Charismatic. Every gift is a charism, and each is always given for the good of the whole body, in response to Her evangelistic activity, in the context of Her sacramental life, and subject to Her gift of discernment. She exercises that gift within Her institutional life, because the institutional Church and the charismatic Church are inseparable; they are two aspects of a single reality. It is wholly unscriptural to impose any requirement that anyone exercise any particular charism in order to be considered a full, believing member of the Church.

There has never been the slightest doubt that the charisms include healing, exorcism, prophecy and words of knowledge, nor really even that they include speaking in tongues. Furthermore, healing is here understood as even those of us not raised in the Charismatic Movement understand it: it is the restoration of the human person to wholeness, which may or may not take the form of healing as understood by medical science, depending on what is known best to the Holy Spirit, Who is the Wisdom of God.

Similarly, the performance of exorcism is restricted to suitably qualified persons, and it is only ever used against the power of that objective evil which we can but thank God that we do not fully understand. Prophecy is recognised as the gift of being able to read the signs of the times and to communicate effectively what is thus read, so that it does always include the prediction of the future: foretelling is always integral to forth-telling. Words of knowledge are always relevant, always wise counsel and always independently verifiable. Speaking in tongues is never without the interpretation of tongues, and together they make it possible to understand where this would not otherwise be the case.

For example, as well as having been miraculously healed, the great Dominican Saint Vincent Ferrer was also blessed with the gift of tongues. Other than Ecclesiastical Latin and despite his English father, he had no language but Limousin, which was what they spoke in his native Valencia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Yet he was a tireless itinerant missionary, preaching to tremendous effect in Aragon, Castile, Switzerland, France, Italy, England, Ireland and Scotland.

Whereas glossolalia is a twentieth-century running together of two Biblical Greek words in order to describe a twentieth-century phenomenon which does not occur in the Bible. Is it Saint Paul's “tongues of angels”? There is nothing in Scripture to support that view. The true gift of tongues is as manifested by Saint Vincent Ferrer OP, Biblical scholar, philosopher, thus doubly informed and doubly informing theologian, and thanks to that ongoing formation a gloriously successful preacher of the Gospel, not least to the Jews, precisely as an ordained priest and a solemnly professed Religious in perfect unity with the See of Peter.

Healing, exorcism, prophecy, words of knowledge, speaking in tongues, and the other charisms serve to re-root theology in experience and to call the whole Church to watch at all times for the Second Coming. They restore the integrity of the Liturgy by freeing it from over-formality and over-conventionality. And they release the ministries of women, young people, the poor, and others who experience marginalisation and oppression. Yet there is never any question of any one gift being used to decide whether or not someone has been “baptised with the Holy Spirit”, because it is the whole Church that has been so baptised. Nor need there be any degeneration into banal and incoherent services. And nor is there any transfer of ecclesial authority to parachurch leaders, because there is no parachurch.