Spirits of Protestantism by Klassen Pamela E

Author:Klassen, Pamela E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2011-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

BROKEN SPIRITS

Charismatic renewal was never as profound an influence within the United Church as it was and continues to be among Anglicans. Alex Holmes lasted less than ten years in Canada before moving to the larger market of spirit-filled Protestants in the United States. Although the occasional Observer article mentioned an instance of “faith healing,” these were rare occurrences and not institutionalized to anywhere near the same extent as in Anglican “ministries of healing.” The post–World War II United Church preferred its healing in forms that were less squarely placed in Christian ritual forms—whether embracing psychology via pastoral counseling, or cautiously exploring psychic research.58 For example, in the wake of World War II, the United Church lamented both the psychological distress of Canadians and their “feverish materialism” in their 1947 Annual Report “A Time of Healing.” The report began with two epigraphs, one a biblical passage (Jeremiah 14:18–21) that served as a basis for the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt in which prominent German Protestants acknowledged their guilt for the murderous Nazi regime.59 The second quotation came from a U.S. Presbyterian publication lamenting the “racial tensions, economic maladjustment . . . moral license, and cynicism” of postwar society. Declaring that “a spiritual sickness demands a spiritual cure,” the text focused not on assertions of wholeness but instead on diagnoses of “brokenness” at both societal and individual levels, insisting that “without a social gospel, evangelism heads toward superstition, but without evangelism, the social gospel is a sowing of the sand.”60

Encompassing the disparate U.S. and German Protestant appeals to a metaphor of healing, the United Church sought a theology of “cosmic guilt” that would differentiate its particular approach from the personal guilt addressed by healing revivalists and could position the church as a Christian body with much to contribute to national and world affairs. However, in the celebratory year of Canada’s centennial in 1967, the Observer’s editor recalled to his readers that guilt was not the hallmark of a Protestant confessing church: “We have been on the guilt-complex, blame-assessing kick too long. After a while the ashes get into our nostrils and the sackcloth wears thin. It’s time for a little joy. It is time to remember that the church is a great fellowship of confessing (and forgiven) sinners, that the God we try to serve is a great God with abundant resources for us.”61 A forerunner of this optimistic theology of abundance was biblical scholar Ernest Scott, who taught for twelve years at Queen’s Theological College in Kingston, Ontario, before taking a position in 1919 at Union Theological Seminary in New York. At the end of his distinguished career as a biblical critic, Scott wrote the definitively entitled and posthumously published I Believe in the Holy Spirit, (1958), in which he argued that to allow the spirit to be relevant and necessary in a materialistic world deadened by conventionality and multiple threats to human freedom, “unity through difference” was the only path for Christians.62

Neither fully endorsing those revivals that “collect people together

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