4 Aill ERAL S D Fr ie y 26 a june ln 1981 ed up over

charismatic renewal
WHAT A DUST cloud Quentin de la Bedoyere raises in his tramplings through the externals of charismatic renewal! Charterhouse 12 June.
I will take "naive sincerity" and "a prop for the emotionally deprived" any day of the week as genuine gifts of the Holy Spirit. But "cant and hypocrisy?"
We are, I suppose, all open to it but, at its most insidious it may be that which proclaims By your cross and resurrection you have set us free" and goes on to embrace again our intellectual, social and cultural chains in order to deny not only our own proclaimed freedom but the expression of that freedom in others.
Quentin gets very steamed up about the "emotional charge" which he perceives to be generated at prayer meetings and deduces that, because emotion is hard to handle and can be used by either God or the Devil, it should be "rationally harnessed for the conscious purposes of the group" This is really playing God and 1 would much prefer the disease to the recommended cure. For is there any human attribute that cannot be used for good or evils: and if we deprive our worship of all emotional content (and God knows how successsful we have become at it.) can we say we are coming before God as a whole people, or are we just prepared to offer Him the bits of us already safely under our own control?
As for praying in tongues, the gift is most certainly to be found in faith and expectation but the "light trance" theory propounded by Quentin is relevant only if he accepts prayer itself as a "light trance." So far from being scathing about the gift of tongues. St Paul boasted of it in himself and wrote earnestly to the church in Corinth: "I wish you all had the gift of tongues" (I Cur 4:5). Nor do I find any Pauline injunction to women to refrain from use of the gift in prayer.
It is a great sadness that the renewing work of the Holy Spirit in our church should not only be judged by human reason but that this judgment should feed upon the least pertinent external manifestations.
If we call upon the Holy Spirit to witness to anything in charismatic renewal it should be not to the gifts, exotic or .otherwise, given to individuals but to the fruit produced in their lives and the power given to them to bring others to Christ.
The Holy Spirit is not only fire but sword and gave us fair warning in Scripture: "I know of all your ways: you arc neither hot nor cold. Because you are lukewarm ... I will spit you out of my mouth .,. Hear, you who have ears to hear, what the Spirit says to the chqrches." (Rev. 3:15-16). Peter Coldham Surrey