Global Pentecostal Renaissance? Reflections on Pentecostalism, Culture, and Higher Education, by Jeff Hittenberger
What are Pentecostal attitudes toward learning?
In order to assess Pentecostal attitudes toward learning, one must reflect on how learning is related to education and to culture. If one imagines culture in the broadest sense, it can be described (following Andy Crouch in Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling) as “What we make of the world.”4 This includes both how people interpret the world and tell stories of its meaning, as well as the products people create in the world, products like language, family systems, technological inventions, forms of art and music, and even pots and pans.
Pentecostalism was born in the era of the modernist-fundamentalist conflict. This meant that the education that early Pentecostals were skeptical of was often hostile toward the supernatural—hostile to what Pentecostals were experiencing of God’s real and transformative presence in their lives.
Learning is, in one sense, inevitable. We come into the world completely ill-equipped to navigate its demands, and must learn from our earliest moments in order to survive. Different societies structure learning experiences for children in various ways, informal, non-formal, and formal, whether in the home, in community associations, or in formal school settings. In the past two hundred years, formal schooling has become quasi-universal in much of the world, as has literacy. A nation’s level of development is often measured by the percentage of its children who receive formal schooling and become literate, and by what levels of proficiency they achieve with regard to the objectives of that formal schooling system.
To ask about Pentecostals’ attitudes toward learning, then, is to pose a complex question. Few people, if any, are opposed to learning, as such. Groups of people, and groups of religious people, differ, though, in how much they value formal education. One would be wrong to say that the Amish, for example, oppose learning. It would be accurate to say, however, that the Amish are suspicious of formal school systems, especially those run by the state, and consequently the Amish typically believe formal schooling through the eighth grade is sufficient. Amish theological views of the broader external culture, that it is generally hostile toward their faith and tends to lead their children astray, makes their skepticism about formal schooling understandable.
How then shall we assess Pentecostals attitudes toward learning (and, by extension, toward formal education and culture in general)? A full assessment of this kind is beyond the scope of this essay, but consider the following experience as possibly descriptive of what many young Pentecostals have encountered.
Following my graduation from Evangel College (an Assemblies of God [AG] institution now known as Evangel University), I received a Rotary Foundation Graduate Scholarship for International Understanding to study for a year at l’Universite Mohamed V in Rabat, Morocco. From an academic point of view, I felt well-prepared to begin my studies of international relations and beginning Arabic. I hoped to build friendships with my Moroccan Muslim classmates and perhaps have opportunities to share with them my faith in Christ.
I was not prepared, however, to be on the receiving end of their evangelistic efforts. In stark contrast to American stereotypes of the Arab world, the Moroccans I met were kind and hospitable. They invited me to their homes and shared their couscous and tagine cuisine. They wanted to know about life in America and were happy to show me the souks, the beaches, and the historical sites of their North African home. Regularly, they shared with me their deep feelings of faith and wondered if I believed in God.
My religious and cultural assumptions were challenged by this experience in a deeper way than they might have been had I encountered overt hostility to my Christian faith. As a 22-year-old who had grown up in a missionary household, I had to ask myself whether my beliefs about God and about the exclusive claims of Christianity were really true and to what degree they were simply products of my subculture. My Moroccan friends wondered how Christians could be so shocked by Islamist violence when we ourselves had perpetrated violence against Muslims and others during the Crusades and the Inquisition. As Christians, we had not spoken out against European imperialism, but had in fact been complicit in the conquest, allowing the cross to accompany the flag during wars throughout the world. And what about the centuries of slavery, which many Christians had justified by reference to Scripture?
Their questions sent me on a new quest to understand my own beliefs and to try to sort out what was genuinely of Christ and what was bound up in uncritical cultural loyalities. During that year, I read books like Edward Said’s Orientalism, which challenged Western scholarly characterizations of “the East.” I read La Rose de l’Imam (The Rose of the Imam), written by Marius Garau, a Catholic priest who made it his mission to build bridges to Muslim neighbors.
It was a year of intense reflection, prayer, and uncertainty. At times, it felt like the pillars of my faith were crumbling. And yet I felt God was with me. My Pentecostal college had given me the intellectual and spiritual tools to dig deep, and had taught me that “All truth is God’s truth, wherever it is found.” So I did not shrink from exploration, or retreat to safe and unexamined assumptions. My Pentecostal faculty members at Evangel had embodied an integration of faith, learning, and life that I wanted to live out. They had encouraged me to believe that my mind was the ally of my spirit in the quest to be faithful to God. So I read. I thought. I prayed.
As I shared this quest with friends through letters (this was long before email), the reactions varied greatly. Two general orientations toward my situation are captured by two particular responses I received.
One missionary friend wrote: “Continue to inquire, to question yourself, to search again and always (and you will never finish doing so). But it is in this way that you will become yourself, that is infinitely more than simply the product of your milieu…Be faithful to God.” I would identify this as a generally positive orientation toward inquiry, toward learning, toward the formal education I was pursuing, even in a non-Christian setting, and toward the benefits that may arise when one’s cultural assumptions are challenged.
Another missionary friend had a different perspective. With genuine affection and concern, she wrote: “Don’t think so much. Have faith.” I understood what she was getting at. Her comments drew on Proverbs 3:5-6: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge Him and He will direct your paths.” She was pointing out that our ability to understand the complexities of this world are limited, exceedingly so. Faith involves a conversation with God in which we often come to the end of our understanding and learn to walk with Him in the darkness. If we insist on having absolute answers to all our questions, we can end up fabricating answers that exclude God and these answers can be less credible than the ones we started with. While there was legitimate caution in her counsel, her letter brought back comments that I sometimes heard in Pentecostal churches as a child. “Your thoughts will lead you astray. If you try to figure things out, you’ll lose your faith. Your mind will deceive you. Don’t ask so many questions.” This orientation might be described as a generally skeptical view of inquiry, which is often associated with skepticism about formal education and wariness about the influence of culture and cultures on our faith.
Category: Living the Faith, Pneuma Review, Spring 2013
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