Chris, I agree that the current paradigm shifting presents an opportunity to reassess our understanding of the charismatic experience, though I suspect that many of those involved in the emerging conversation need more distance from the modern charismatic movement before we can really begin to imagine and manifest a renewed pneumatology. Anyway, some preliminary thoughts…

I don’t myself see that an emerging theology is intrinsically incompatible with a charismatic spirituality. The renewed, post-eschatological people of God has its life organized by the Spirit rather than by Mosaic law, and there is no reason to restrict in advance the ways in which the Spirit may be expressed in the people. The wariness about charismatic expression that we sometimes see in the emerging church probably has more to do with personal disillusionment than with theology.

However, I would expect an emerging theology to be more sensitive to issues of contextualization both in its interpretation of scripture and in its experience of the Spirit. A narrative theology would highlight certain historical contingencies of the experience of the Spirit and of the miraculous in the Bible. For example (these points are obviously debatable):

• How much is Jesus’ healing ministry a prophetic sign of the renewal of the covenant (a reversal of the curse of the covenant) rather than a normative expression of faith?
• What does the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost mean within the narrative of judgment and renewal in the first century. There is a strong case for saying that the giving of prophetic gifts to the whole people (and not to the few) at this time has to do specifically with the coming judgment of Israel: it is precisely a sign of imminent judgment that not just a few isolated and misunderstood prophets will prophesy disaster but a whole community will see what God is doing in Israel.
• I would also like to ask to what extent the operation of the gifts of the Spirit within a self-understanding as ‘body of Christ’ has to do specifically with the experience of Christ-like suffering in these communities during the birthpangs of the age to come.

The question that then needs to be asked is how should we expect to experience the Spirit if we understand ourselves as ‘new creation’, ‘new humanity’. What would be a natural outworking of having the living God at the heart of a people (not just of individuals)? What does the Spirit of God have to do with human society, relationality, creativity, etc.? What belongs properly to the experience of being new humanity now, and what serves to point beyond the present experience to a new heavens and a new earth in which there is no more sickness and death? Perhaps in an emerging pneumatology there would be greater emphasis on the role of the Spirit drawing out the fulness of our createdness, our humanity, in relation to God. This may mean that an emerging understanding of the experience of the Spirit will be less supernaturalist (and perhaps more critical) than traditional charismatic theologies. But I would not want to lose sight of the prophetic function (for example, through healing) of pointing beyond current experience to the final renewal.

To set the activity of the Spirit within a new creation framework obviously marks out an emerging pneumatology from the sort of thinking represented by IHOP, where the emphasis appears to be on an imminent end-times scenario in which Israel has centre-stage.