Methodist Bishop Calls For Recovery Of Supernatural

One big surprise of the 20th century has been the dramatic growth of churches in the non-Western world. A bigger surprise, at least for a few people, is that the fastest-growing churches are strongly supernaturally oriented.

In this thought world, prophecy is an everyday reality, while faith healing, exorcism, and dream visions are all basic components of religious sensibility (Historian Philip Jenkins).

A Methodist bishop speaks of growing up in the supernaturally oriented world, then getting secularized through a Western-world education. The Bible and empirical evidence brought him back to supernaturalism, where he now finds himself out of sync with Western theology. He is not out of sync, however, with African initiated churches, Pentecostal churches in Latin America, house churches in China and India, and fast-growing churches in Asia, South America, and Africa. He comments that present-day Western systematic and pastoral theology is unable to address the demonic on personal and cosmic levels. Paul’s “principalities and power” are reduced to sociological structures. These theologies sit well with modernity, but they are powerless in the face of spiritual bondage.

These are the thoughts of a Methodist bishop but, unfortunately, not a United Methodist bishop (can anyone image an American UM bishop talking this way?). Bishop Hwa Yung is a Methodist bishop in Malaysia and he writes in the September 11 issue of Christianity Today.

The United Methodist Church is presently talking about refocusing, redirecting, and restructuring so that it can be relevant for the 21st century. All the restructuring will be for naught unless there is some recognition and recovering of a supernatural basis for the application of the gospel. Without this recovery there is no clear doctrine of the Incarnation, or of the Atonement, or of the Resurrection. And, it might be added, without the recovery of the supernatural the United Methodist doctrinal standards have no meaning. Local churches that are alive and thriving today do not have to de-mythologize the New Testament.

The mainline churches have been drifting from the Biblical understandings of the supernatural for over a century and are paying the price for it today. Borden Parker Bowne, the father of personalism in the early 1900s, addressed his sharpest barbs not at an increasingly secularized world but at ignorant and superstitious Methodists. In 1932 eight major denominations authorized a study (funded primarily by John D. Rockefeller) on missions entitled “Re-Thinking Missions.” The study concluded that science was better suited to dispel “superstition” than missions and, therefore, there was no need for missions, at least the kind of missions operating primarily at that time in which some of the missionaries were as “superstitious as the people they were trying to enlighten” (to their credit Methodist and EUB agencies did not adopt this thinking until the 1960s).

In education E. B. Chappell, editor of church materials in the M.E. Church South, summarized the changing emphases in Christian education in his book Recent Developments in Christian Education in the Methodist Episcopal Church South. The recent developments were basically that theological presuppositions were out, new scientific presuppositions were in. This book was followed in 1937 with Ethel L. Smither’s The Use of the Bible with Children, which stated, with great emphasis, that it was an “official” position of the church. Old Testament stories were inappropriate for children as, indeed, were all Bible story books since they implied a “literalist” understanding of the Bible that would need to be unlearned later. Jesus was not to be portrayed on the cross until at least junior high. Easter was not about a bodily resurrection but about a resurrection of new life seen in the beauties of nature.

In the 1950s and 1960s the seminaries offered doses of Bultmann and de-mythologizing. The Death of God Movement came along as did Harvey Cox’s Secular City which pronounced the death of metaphysics. Evangelicals at that time were denounced as fundamentalists and literalists, defending a world-view that was irrelevant and passing from the scene.

What was becoming increasingly irrelevant was a once vibrant spiritual (Methodist) movement being stripped of its (supernatural) power. Modernism morphing into liberalism morphing into progressivism was (and is) lauded in the academic and secular world. But it has no standing in places of human need where sin and principalities and powers are real forces that can be overcome only with the power of a supernatural God acting in supernatural ways. The institutional church today is to be commended for its concern for health, for justice, for efforts to reduce poverty. But it is not, along with that, offering a message that changes hearts. That message is being preached by those persons with a very different world view.

United Methodist News Service several weeks ago carried the story of the women’s revivals in Zimbabwe where at one revival 25,000 women gathered. This is just one example of the mighty working of God in our present-day. The story spoke of the casting out of demons. But of course the reporter was from Africa, not the United States. Americans are not sure how to handle reports of the casting out of demons.

Bishop Hwa Yung and other overseas bishops understand these things. That is why there is a call for the recovery of the supernatural. This, Bishop Yung says, will result in sounder Biblical theology and a more powerful missional church. Then the world will understand what Jesus meant when he said, “But if it by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” (Mt. 12:28 ESV).