Intellectual Defenestration

Sentimentality run amok

Christian History & Biography has an insightful take on the latest TBN scandal. Armstrong reviews the sad history of scandals within the Pentecostal and holiness movement and argues that there is an underlying weakness within that particular model of spirituality that lends itself to major failing. This weakness came from the Victorian era movement of romanticism.

[In] the transatlantic 19th-century cultural movement called "romanticism" [r]omantic philosophers, writers, musicians, and artists?facing the rationalist Enlightenment destruction of the old traditional, communal values of Christendom?turned inward in their search for spiritual meaning. If you were of the leisured class, you found meaning by diving to the depths of your own heart with the help of art, music, and travel. What you hoped to find there was a personal connection to the Spirit of things?a Spirit many among the secular romantic elite preferred to call Nature rather than God.

Plain folks without the leisure or inclination to pursue rarified experiences through travel, symphony, the opera, and so forth turned to a more obvious source for meaning?and a more obvious (and, as it turned out, longer-lasting) translation of the term "romantic." They plumbed their hearts to "find themselves" in a spiritual connection not with some nebulous spirit of nature but with another person?specifically, a soul mate and life partner of the opposite sex.

This attempt to find meaning in an intense emotional and spiritual relationship with another person in turn made its way into Pentecostal conceptions of spirituality, which replaced one's spouse/significant other with God.

If you were a holiness believer, you understood conversion as, yes, an experience of being forgiven and made right before God. But it was also an experience that left your sinful nature?your bad emotions?intact. Like the wandering, seeking young person of a sentimental novel, you had to push on to full redemption?through an experience of pure, whole-souled romantic love. This experience was called "entire sanctification." Only through this emotional cleansing could you reach your true goal: a heart filled with perfect love for God?with no affection stinted or spared for lavishing on anyone else...

This hyper-vertical version of the Christian life?bequeathed from the holiness movement to the Pentecostal movement?assumes that God has made us so that all our emotional needs and all of the meaning of our lives comes through a direct, mystical relationship with Him. Almost accidentally, it turns out that no human relationship can hold a candle to this romantic God-tryst.

The problems with this conception, as Armstrong notes, are an isolation from the community meant to help you and an unrealistic/unbiblical expectation of one's personal walk with God:

We can't load of all of our need for emotional sustenance and spiritual meaning into a single relationship. God didn't make us that way. Whether we focus all our need for affection and support on a spouse or even on God himself, we are bound to be disappointed?and the temptation may be irresistible to turn elsewhere, to unsanctioned human relationships, to fill the void.

I tend to agree with Armstrong, although I think the disease is far broader than TBN-style Pentecostalism. Much of evangelicalism's conception of worship appears to be more based on this romanticism at times than scriptural conceptions of worship. Most of modern hymnody, for example, seems to revolve around two primary statements: "I've accepted Jesus" and "I love him so." Given such a weak understanding and experience of both conversion and growth will of course lead to problems.

Part of the solution is, as Armstrong suggests, a better understanding of and partaking in community. But a return to more Biblical language and concepts of growth in grace would be helpful as well.

September 20, 2004 09:47 AM