Praying in the Spirit: Focus of the Charismatic Experience: Tongues, the Holy Spirit, or Christ?
Are these accusations justified? Have Pentecostals and charismatics put Christ in a subordinate, or secondary position? This is an important issue. But if it can be demonstrated that Pentecostal-charismatic experience and theology are Christ-centered, I trust that this complaint will be resolved and no longer stand between the non-charismatic and his Christian inheritance.
“Any work that exalts the Holy Ghost or the ‘gifts’ above Jesus will finally land up in fanaticism,” wrote Pentecostal pioneer Frank Bartleman in 1906. “Whatever causes us to exalt and love Jesus is well and safe. The reverse will ruin all. The Holy Ghost is a great light, but focused on Jesus always, for His revealing” (p. 86). This has been the belief of mainstream Pentecostal-charismatic theology from its birth to the present. The Spirit will always draw attention to Jesus. Christ will always be exalted by the Spirit’s work. When people are glorified, when programs are glorified, when movements are glorified, we can be sure that it is not the work of the Spirit of Christ (W. Horton, p. 173). Pentecostal-charismatic theology demands that Jesus be glorified. If there is one book that puts to rest the charge of Spirit-centeredness, it is charismatic Thomas Smail’s book Reflected Glory. In the following passage, Smail concludes that it is in fact the Spirit who transforms us into the very likeness of Jesus (2 Corinthians 3:18):
A Spirit who could derogate from the glory of Christ crucified in order to promote a more dazzling glory of his own, who passes by the sufferings of Christ in order to offer us a share in a painless and costless triumph, is certainly not the Holy Spirit of the New Testament. He glorifies, not himself, but Christ, and therefore his mission is to reveal the full glory of Calvary, and to bring us into possession of all the blessings that by his death Christ has won for us. Here also the work of the Spirit is to take the things of Christ and show them to us, so that, in the way appropriate to us, we may reflect his glory and be shaped into his likeness.
(p.105)
Category: Spirit, Summer 1999