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Regarding the Trinity/Christology. If Jesus is NOT God and we worship Him as such, should we not be pitied in the end? To me, this issue is as central to being called Christian as anything else. I won’t budge on that. Sorry.

The belief in the coming of a Messiah never required the belief that he would be divine. One can put Jesus on the same level as God in terms of authority and direct to him kingly worship while at the same time not believing him to be divine (at least in the Trinitarian sense). In my mind, the Jehovah’s Witness whose heart is in the right place is as Christian as the Trinitarian, while maybe not as doctrinally correct.

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As far as the theology behind charismaticism, I believe it is solid (at least for the most part). There are people who go to the extreme in all things, but that is no reason to reject the thing altogether.

I believe the gifts of the Spirit are still relevant for Christians today, but need to be placed, first of all, within Jesus’ and the early church’s historical and eschatological context.

However, I believe miracles by their very nature are somewhat rare (or else there would not be so much sorrow and untimely death in the world), and that we are in a different position than the apostles. Moreover, most charismatic Christians attribute every little thing to either God when positive or the devil when negative, so that the magnificence of true miracles is watered down in significance.

The charismatic emphasis on healing poses an ethical problem for me as well. If one makes it seem as if God is spoiling his children and will heal or bless every faithful person, he leaves little room for the capacity for poverty and sickness to act as refinement and build up faith. If we make it sound like God wants to instantly pull us out of every bad situation, how will we ever learn from those situations?

More importantly, I have a problem with the charismatic interpretation of speaking in tongues. I believe this gift was given to the early church to enhance its ability to spread the gospel to people of foreign nations; it was a sign to unbelievers. More importantly, it was a symbol of restoration, a reversal of the confusion caused at Babel, and an embodiment of God creating a new humanity made up of Jews and Gentiles. Paul, moreover, lays out guidelines for how this gift is to be utilized. The significance of the gift of tongues and how it is to be utilized is almost completely ignored by charismatic Christians who believe speaking nonsensical gibberish is a gift from God.

By extension, I have a problem with reducing the worship of God to a personal experience that requires some sort of supernatural manifestation. I have heard reports of some Christians who are looking for diamonds in their churches because they believe God is manifesting his glory into physical form; the obvious result is greed. Some charismatic churches are hard to differentiate from voodoo gatherings. Of course, it differs from church to church, but the radicals have more or less the same theological (or experiential or eisegetical) basis as the moderates.

Maybe it is wrong for these things to bother me this much. Maybe I am subconsciously setting up a straw man and attempting to set it on fire rather than dealing with what actually goes on. I’m not sure.

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seems to say to me that it really does come down to theology for you.

Maybe, but what I’m more worried about is how theology affects practice. For example, I have no problem with saying the gifts of the Spirit are relevant for the church today; I just do not like the idea of putting that to the forefront of church practice so that all people care about is a personal experience hardly differentiable from non-institutional spirituality or paganism rather than a collective calling rooted in the narratives of Scripture.

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Better yet…start your own church in your community.

How would you suggest I do that? Haha.