The Charismatic Question

The Pentecostal and charismatic movements of the twentieth century made the “baptism in the Holy Spirit” a distinct and subsequent experience, and reached Orthodox parishes in North America in the 1970s. This file reports that theology accurately and from its own terms, sets out the Orthodox response in its three registers — sacramental, ascetic, and ecclesial — and concedes what an honest Orthodox account must: that the answer to enthusiasm is not formalism, and that St. Symeon the New Theologian stands as a permanent rebuke to any Orthodox who treats conscious experience of grace as presumption.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (the response draws on a ROCOR-influenced application; the criteria are universal)

The Movement

Classical Pentecostalism dates from the revivals associated with Topeka, Kansas (1901) and Azusa Street in Los Angeles (1906), and formed its own denominations. The charismatic renewal is the later transdenominational phenomenon: Dennis Bennett, an Episcopal priest in Van Nuys, California, reported speaking in tongues in 1960; the Catholic charismatic renewal began at Duquesne University in 1967 and spread rapidly, receiving cautious encouragement from Paul VI and later from John Paul II. By the early 1970s the movement had reached Orthodox parishes in North America.

Its Orthodox exponent was Fr. Eusebius Stephanou (1924–2016), a priest of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, formerly a seminary instructor at Holy Cross in Brookline, who from 1968 published the magazine The Logos and from January 1972 used it to report and promote an “Orthodox renewal” with charismatic features. He came into repeated conflict with his hierarchy — he was suspended, and later conducted an itinerant ministry outside parish assignment — and his career is the principal thread of the Orthodox chapter of the movement. The history is documented in Timothy B. Cremeens, Marginalized Voices: A History of the Charismatic Movement in the Orthodox Church in North America 1972–1993 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2018), which is the standard scholarly account and which treats the movement’s Orthodox participants sympathetically.

The Position, at Its Strongest

The charismatic position is not a caricature and should be stated as its holders state it.

The doctrine of subsequence. Baptism in the Holy Spirit is understood as a distinct work of grace subsequent to conversion (and, for those in sacramental traditions, subsequent to baptism), in which the believer is empowered for witness and service. The scriptural warrant offered is the pattern of Acts: the apostles were already disciples when the Spirit fell at Pentecost; the Samaritans were baptized and received the Spirit later through the apostles’ hands (Acts 8:14–17); the Ephesian disciples received the Spirit after Paul’s hand-laying (Acts 19:1–6). In classical Pentecostalism the initial evidence of this baptism is speaking in tongues; in the broader charismatic movement the evidence is less rigidly specified.

The restorationist reading of history. The extraordinary gifts belong to the Church as such, not to the apostolic age alone; their scarcity in later centuries is a symptom of the Church’s decline, not of God’s withdrawal, and their return is the recovery of a normal Christianity.

And a real pastoral diagnosis. The movement grew because a great many Christians in sacramental churches reported that their religion was a matter of attendance and correct forms and nothing else — that they had been told they possessed the Holy Spirit and had never had the slightest evidence of it. That diagnosis is not false, and an Orthodox reader who dismisses it has not understood why the movement had the appeal it had.

The Orthodox Response

The response runs in three registers, and all three are needed; each alone is inadequate.

Sacramental

The Spirit is given in chrismation. The Orthodox rite seals the newly baptized on brow, eyes, nostrils, mouth, ears, breast, hands, and feet with the words “The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit” — and this is the personal Pentecost of each Christian, given with baptism and not after it (see Chrismation and the Seal). The Church therefore does not teach a second bestowal, because on her account there is nothing further of that kind to bestow. Fr. Seraphim Rose put the ecclesiological point sharply: the search for a separate Spirit-baptism implies that the mysteries do not accomplish what they signify (Rose, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1975, ch. 8; see Orthodox Pneumatological Critique of the Charismatic Movement).

The proof-texts from Acts are read differently and, this collection holds, better. Acts 8 and 19 describe the completion of an initiation begun defectively — a mission received from Philip, a deacon, awaiting the apostolic seal; a group who knew only John’s baptism — and Acts 10, where the Spirit falls before baptism, breaks the pattern in the other direction and is not usable for a doctrine of subsequence at all. Three different orders in three chapters do not yield a normative two-stage sequence; the honest reading of the untidiness is set out in Pentecost and the Apostolic Preaching.

Ascetic

The Church’s criteria for judging spiritual experience apply here as everywhere: humility and compunction rather than elation, fruits rather than powers, order rather than disorder, submission to judgment rather than exemption from it (see The Criteria and the Counterfeits). Fr. Seraphim Rose’s application of these criteria — drawing on St. Ignatius Brianchaninov and St. Gregory of Sinai on prelest — is that a spirituality offering experience without purification, transferable by technique, and marked by exaltation rather than repentance, meets the tradition’s description of delusion (Rose, Religion of the Future, chs. 7–8).

Two of his specific points are worth separating, because one is stronger than the other.

The observation that the phenomenon is transferable by technique is a serious one: charismatic practice includes teaching people how to receive the gift, by relaxing, by beginning to vocalize, by imitation. A gift given “as the Spirit wills” (1 Corinthians 12:11) is not obtained by method, and the presence of a method is evidence about what is being obtained.

The observation that the phenomena occur identically across mutually contradictory theologies is also serious, and is the basis of Rose’s “ecumenism of the spirit” thesis: a unity founded on shared experience while doctrinal differences remain untouched is a unity of feeling rather than of truth, and the Spirit of truth would lead toward the truth (Rose, Religion of the Future, chs. 8–9). This is an argument and not a demonstration, and it is stated as Rose’s.

Ecclesial

The Church’s most basic answer is that the Spirit is not received in independence of the Body he constitutes. This is not a bureaucratic point. It is the assertion that gifts are given “to profit withal” (1 Corinthians 12:7), within an assembly that can judge them, under a discipline that protects both the recipient and the community. Every element of the ascetic tradition’s safeguard structure — obedience, disclosure to a spiritual father, the refusal of isolation — is an application of it.

The Exegetical Question, Not Overstated

The claim that Acts 2 describes xenolalia — speech in real, identifiable languages — is well grounded: the narrative turns on the hearers’ comprehension and lists the nations. This collection takes that reading.

The further claim, that the tongues of 1 Corinthians 12–14 are also foreign languages, is a separate proposition and is contested. St. John Chrysostom reads them as foreign languages and says that the whole matter is obscure in his own day because the phenomenon had ceased (Homilies on 1 Corinthians 29, 35; trans. NPNF I/12); a large body of modern exegesis, including Orthodox exegesis, reads 1 Corinthians 14 as describing something other than known human languages, since Paul speaks of tongues that no man understands, that address God rather than men, and that require a distinct gift of interpretation (1 Corinthians 14:2, 13–14).

[Disputed: the nature of the "tongues" of 1 Corinthians 12–14. (a) Chrysostom and much of the patristic tradition read them as foreign human languages, on the analogy of Acts 2 (*Homilies on 1 Corinthians* 29, 35). (b) A large body of modern exegesis holds that Paul describes a different phenomenon from that of Acts 2, on the grounds that the Corinthian tongues are unintelligible to hearers, are addressed to God, and require a separate charism of interpretation (1 Corinthians 14:2, 13–14, 27–28). The question is exegetical and is not settled by the Church. This collection reports both readings; the Orthodox critique of the modern movement does not depend on either, since it rests on the criteria of discernment and on the sacramental question, not on a lexical claim about Paul's Corinthians.]

What an Honest Orthodox Account Must Concede

Four things, and the file is not honest without them.

The answer to enthusiasm is not formalism. If the Orthodox response amounts to “you have already received the Spirit, so expect nothing,” it has conceded the charismatic diagnosis while refusing the remedy. The Church’s own tradition says that the Spirit given at chrismation is to be stirred up, not filed away (2 Timothy 1:6).

St. Symeon the New Theologian is the standing rebuke. He insisted, against the monastic establishment of his own day, that a Christian ought to be consciously aware of the grace he has received, and that to be content without it is a defect and not a virtue; he was accused of extravagance, opposed by the patriarchal synkellos Stephen of Nicomedia, and exiled (see Experience of Grace; Exile and Vindication). The Church canonized him. An Orthodox who uses the language of prelest to shut down every report of experienced grace is repeating the position of Symeon’s opponents.

The Church has never taught that the charisms ceased. She reports prophecy, healing, and clairvoyance in her saints in every century, including the twentieth. The Orthodox objection is not to extraordinary gifts but to seeking them, to authenticating them by themselves, and to detaching them from the sacramental and ascetic life.

And the treatment of the Orthodox charismatics was not uniformly edifying. Cremeens’ account documents pastoral responses that ranged from careful theological engagement to summary suspension, and the Orthodox participants were, in the main, people trying to recover something they believed their own tradition possessed. Reporting them as infiltrators would be false to the record.

Where This Leaves the Question

The Orthodox judgment is that the Holy Spirit is given in the mysteries, that his working is to be sought through repentance, prayer, the commandments, and communion, that his gifts are distributed as he wills and are not to be solicited, and that any claimed manifestation is judged by the confession, the fruits, and the Church. That judgment is not a denial that God acts outside the visible boundaries of the Church, which is a question the Church has not settled and which belongs elsewhere. It is a statement about where the Christian is to look, and it is the same answer St. Seraphim gave a layman in a snowy forest: acquire the Holy Spirit, and do not go looking for evidence (see The Acquisition of the Holy Spirit).

References

Cremeens, Timothy B. Marginalized Voices: A History of the Charismatic Movement in the Orthodox Church in North America 1972–1993. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2018.
Rose, Seraphim. Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1975; expanded eds. 1979, 1990. Chs. 7–10.
John Chrysostom. Homilies on 1 Corinthians 29, 35. Trans. NPNF, First Series, vol. 12.
Ignatius Brianchaninov. On the Prayer of Jesus. Trans. Father Lazarus. London: John M. Watkins, 1965.
Gregory of Sinai. “On Commandments and Doctrines.” In The Philokalia, vol. 4. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.
Stephanou, Eusebius A. The Logos (bimonthly, from 1968; from 1997 The Orthodox Evangelist). Cited as the movement’s principal Orthodox organ; see Cremeens for the documentary history.
Scripture: Acts 2:1–13; 8:14–17; 10:44–48; 19:1–6; 1 Corinthians 12:7, 11; 14:2, 13–14, 27–28; 2 Timothy 1:6.