What Unites Us?

Charismatic Theology and Intimacy with God

JACOB TAYLOR

Eucharisma 1, (Spring 2024), 59-65.

It is a warm May morning and in a little community centre in the heart of the city, about thirty adults and children have gathered together. Their chairs are laid out in a small semi-circle, huddled around a little projector, table, and chair. Someone stands up and shares something with the group that God has been teaching them this week. Having been edified by their sister, the group rise and begin to sing. As they wind through the song and it seems to draw to a close, someone shouts out a thanksgiving prayer, followed by the chorus of another song. And so, they sing together, pray together, and share with one another how God has been working. A capella, led by the Holy Spirit, the group worship God together. Eventually communion is distributed amongst them, sharing one single loaf bought from Sainsbury’s that morning, all drinking out of the same cup. It is intimate as if shared among a tight-knit family. At the end, the group disperses to their homes for lunch, full of the joy that comes from intimacy with God and fellowship with one another.

A few months later, in another city, in a different country, another group gathers, this time in a cinema. The largest room in the cinema is packed full, as people flock to take their cushioned cinema seats. It’s hot outside but inside the air conditioning is working miracles. Although the overhead lights are dimmed, the auditorium is lit up by the intricate lighting rigging and on the immense cinema screens creative visuals displaying the lyrics of the song that the contemporary worship band on the stage are leading the congregation in singing. After the sermon, preaching the gospel and applying it to the modern, city context that the congregation finds itself in, communion is also distributed in little cups, with little pieces of bread. As one broad family, the congregation partake of the elements, before the band lead the congregation again in sung worship to give glory to God through music and praise. In the end they disperse, each to separate corners of the city, full of the joy that comes from intimacy with God.

Both of these are experiences I have had in a little charismatic church in my university city and in an inner-city Pentecostal church in Germany where I was for part of my year abroad. Both churches were thoroughly “Spirit-filled”. Both fervently pursued God. Both wholeheartedly desired fellowship. Yet they were very different from one another.

Up and down the United Kingdom, there are thousands of Christians who identify with the labels “Pentecostal” or “charismatic”. There are even numerous Pentecostal and charismatic denominations like Elim, Vineyard, and Newfrontiers, as well as countless smaller networks and independent congregations. Is there really enough common ground for these groups to unite around? What unites the churches of hundreds in large halls with the house church of a handful?

Together we are one people pursuing intimacy with God. 

Looking through Scripture, Church history, and continuationist theologies, I hope to demonstrate that intimacy is not only at the heart of Christian theology and history but also that our movements are best placed to lead us into intimacy with the Father, with the Son, and with the Holy Spirit.

Intimacy with God in Scripture

Intimacy with the divine has always been a core difference between Christianity and other faiths. Whereas others are beset with a legalistic list of rules and regulations like Islam, Christians are invited to come into close relationship with love Himself. Where faiths like Buddhism stress the need for individual enlightenment attained through thorough meditation, Christians are invited into a relationship with the one Being, who knows their innermost thoughts and feelings – and who nonetheless loves them so intensely that He would die for them.

Scripture tells us we are invited into intimacy with God. We are brought into an intimate relationship through being part of His Bride and as members of His Body.

Throughout Scripture, marriage is a picture of the relationship God has with His people. Both the Edenic marriage at the beginning of Genesis and the wedding of the Lamb in Revelation drive home this point:

Let us rejoice and exult

    and give him the glory,

for the marriage of the Lamb has come,

    and his Bride has made herself ready; 

Revelation 19.7

But Paul explains this further in Ephesians 5. As the people of God, Paul applies the marriage theme to the Church. As the bride, the Church is to submit to her husband, our Lord. Through this submission, the bride is sanctified, renewed by baptism and reformed by the preaching of the Word, “so that [Christ] might present the church to himself in splendour, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5.27). And, as husbands become one flesh with their brides, Christ becomes one with His Bride. As husbands and wives enjoy intimacy, so does Christ enjoy intimacy with His Church as His bride. As the whole corporate bride experiences greater intimacy, so too do the individual parts of that body. Therefore, as individuals we enjoy increasing intimacy with Christ as a result of our participation in the bridehood of the Church. As we become one flesh with Christ, the Church both already is and is becoming His Body, of which He is the Head. 

It is in this intimate union with Christ that the Church finds herself. As Paul describes in Ephesians 1.22-23, “And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.” The fullness of Christ, the fullness of God is amongst His people, through His Holy Spirit. There is no part of the body that is deficient in its portion of Christ. The profundity of this is awe-inspiring. Even the newest convert is a member of the fullness of all of Christ. The oldest, most stalwart sojourner has never ceased to be a partaker of the fullness of all of Christ. 

This is the absurd beauty of the Gospel: intimate union with the fullness of God. God is not distant or detached. He is intimate and loving. God is not far-off or uncaring. He is close and caring. Through union with Christ, the truest intimacy with the divine is possible, to which no other faith can lay claim. Indeed, no other faith is bold enough to make that claim. But in the Scriptures we see the Early Church embracing this intimacy and union fully and staking their unity on it. As Paul writes to the Corinthian church, “For in one Spirit we were all baptised into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 12.13) 

Unity among the brethren, regardless of our backgrounds, is only possible through our ultimate union with Christ. 

Intimacy with God Through History

Within modern Evangelicalism there can be a deep aversion to the intimacy inherent to the Gospel; few are the days on which a Twitter account is not decrying some alleged effeminacy in Contemporary Christianity. But as we look through Church history, we see a different story. 

The whole life of a good Christian is an holy desire. Now what you long for, you do not yet see: howbeit by longing, you are made capable, so that when that has come which you may see, you shall be filled.

St. Augustine¹

St Augustine recognised that a key quality of a Christian was their desire for Christ. For Augustine, our desire for Christ prepares us for His Second Coming, when we will know Him fully, the veil torn away, the dissipated shadows revealing the beatific vision, the beautiful vision of our perfect Saviour. Augustine suggests that desire and intimacy in this life prepare us for the perfect reality of this upon His return, just as one would stretch a wineskin or sack in order to fit more inside of it. Augustine goes on to state: “so God, by deferring our hope, stretches our desire; by the desiring, stretches the mind; by stretching, makes it more capacious.”² Waiting for Christ’s Second Coming is a preparatory grace from God, that as our desire increases, our capacity increases, so we are able to receive Christ. Perhaps here is sanctification hinted at, that as we are sanctified and conformed to the image of Christ, so are we prepared to receive him. 

But he also hints at a cycle of increased desire leading to increased capacity for receiving Christ, leading to increased longing. This cycle is the life of the Christian, that as we long for intimacy with Christ and as we grow in intimacy with Christ, our capacity for intimacy both now and in the New Heaven and New Earth grows, leading us to desire intimacy with Christ in this life all the greater still. 

In his prayers St Anselm longed for intimacy with his Saviour, desiring to know his Saviour deeper and with ever greater love.

Teach me to seek you,

And as I seek you, show yourself to me,

For I cannot seek you unless you show me how,

And I will never find you 

Unless you show yourself to me.

Let me seek you by desiring you,

And desire you by seeking you,

Let me find you by loving you,

And love you in finding you. 

St. Anselm³St. Anselm

This is one of the major themes of Anselm’s prayers, that as he sought Christ, he begged Christ to show himself to him. But more than this, for Anselm the act of seeking Christ would awaken even greater love and desire for him, that in this perpetual cycle of seeking, loving, desiring, and finding his Saviour, Anselm would lose himself in his Saviour. 

Elsewhere he prays: “I thirst for you, I hunger for you, I desire you, I sigh for you, I covet you.” ⁴Every one of Anselm’s senses are straining towards Christ, reaching out with every fibre of his body, his mind, and his soul, to grasp his Saviour, to taste his Saviour, to be in intimate relationship with his Saviour. Anselm understood that union with Christ was both completely intimate and intimately complete. There was no part of Anselm that would be spared from the union with Christ and no part of Anselm that did not wish for union with Christ with its utmost being. Anselm was completely given over to intimately loving his Saviour. 

What is the chief end of man?

Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

Westminster Shorter Catechism⁵

The Puritans are often caricatured as dour, sour-faced intellectuals, who hated Christmas and any other way ordinary people have fun. While they did sometimes seem to go overboard with their restrictions on the Christian life, if we read them we will find some of the sweetest spiritual marrow as well as some of the most exuberant, God-glorifying passages, we could read. The Puritans wrote just as fondly about their first love as previous generations had. Through his Body of Divinity, which exposits the Westminster Shorter Catechism, Thomas Watson becomes consumed with passion for his Saviour:

Now Christ has pulled off his veil, and showed his smiling face; now he has led a believer into the banqueting-house and given him of the spiced wine of his love to drink; he has put in his finger at the hole of the door; he has touched the heart, and made it leap for joy. Oh how sweet is it thus to enjoy God! The godly have, in ordinances, had such divine raptures of joy, and soul transfigurations that they have been carried above the world, and have despised all things here below.

Thomas Watson⁶

For the Puritans, intimacy with Christ was to be found in two places: the Word of God and the ordinances. As Paul says in Romans 10.15, “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the Word of God”, and so as Christians listen to the right preaching of the Word of God, they are filled with faith, both in the first instance but also as a continuing means of grace. Preaching lights the fire of faith; it reveals to us our first and truest love. The Word of God is a wellspring of intimacy as we know God more and discover Him and His attributes through the pages of our Bibles.

But the emphasis for Watson, at least in this passage, seems to be on the “ordinances,” the waters of baptism and the elements of bread and wine found in Communion. It is in those ordinances we are elevated into heavenly realms, as John Calvin also noted,⁷ and the communicants are carried above the world into the embrace of Christ. Now is perhaps not the best place to write deeply on sacramentology, but I would encourage you to read writers like Andrew Wilson and Jonathan Black,⁸ as well as others (some baptists have also begun a resourcement on this too)⁹ who exhort us to have a higher view of the Lord’s Supper than we may have previously had.

Jonathan Edwards was arguably one of the last Puritans. He lived through the time of revival commonly called the “First Great Awakening”, in which God’s Spirit moved through North America and Great Britain, bringing many people to faith. Through this time, it was necessary to test the fruit of the revival. Writing on the revival, Edwards wrote about how Christians can discern the marks of the Spirit of God, one of which was a deeper and deepening love of God. 

The spirit that excites these motives, and makes the attributes of God as revealed in the gospel, and manifested in Christ delightful objects of contemplation; and makes the soul to long after God and Christ – after their presence and communion, acquaintance with them, and conformity to them – and to live so as to please and honour them… there is the evidence of the influence of a true and divine spirit. 

Jonathan Edwards¹⁰

Edwards suggests to us that evidence of the Spirit of God is an increase in love for God; so that Christians long for the presence, communion, acquaintance, and conformity with and to God. Therefore, we should assume that the Christian experience should be one of increasing love for God, increasing communion with God, and increasing conformity to God. These themselves, as the Spirit grows in us, become wellsprings for even greater intimacy with God.

Christianity is the faith of increasing intimacy with God, which itself fuels greater love and desire for intimacy with God. It has always been a faith fuelled by this love and desire, as shown throughout history; in fact, faith and the indwelling of the Spirit are evidenced by this!

Charismatic and Pentecostal Theology Best Positions Us for Intimacy

Pentecostals and charismatics have always emphasised the centrality of worship and prayer in all of this. By actively pursuing the Holy Spirit and receiving His gifts, we can experience greater intimacy with our gift-giving Father. 

We have always argued that the gifts of the Holy Spirit were given to the Church in order to build her up. Prophecy, tongues, and healing all build up the Church by edifying and encouraging her. As the Body of Christ is built up, the Bride of Christ is prepared for her bridegroom. This has always been the primary purpose of all the spiritual gifts.¹¹ When believers are edified, the Church is edified but when the Church is built up, so are individual believers. Therefore, as we use the gifts to build up the Church, individuals are also deepened in their intimacy with God through the use of those gifts. If someone speaks a prophetic utterance or word of knowledge, my love for God is deepened if it applies to me, because I am reproved or encouraged in my specific situation. Even if it does not apply to me, I can marvel at the power of God to speak into the specific circumstances of my brothers and sisters. These gifts mean I can have greater trust in Him.

The gift of tongues deepens our intimacy with God as the believer prays to God through a personal, spiritual language. While others may not derive meaning from that which is spoken in tongues, tongues are always inherently meaningful.¹² Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 14.14-15 about praying in tongues, commenting that his spirit prays but his mind is unfruitful. So even the speaker of the tongues themselves might not know in their mind what is being spoken but their spirit, their innermost part, speaks, falls further in love and is fed. In praying in tongues, the spirit is edified and in speaking in tongues, we recognise the great mystery of our faith, of the unseen nature of the new covenant.¹³ Therefore, tongues deepen our intimacy with Christ because our Spirit is edified, learning to trust and increasingly love the great God with whom we are speaking. 

Divine healing is not a mark solely of the charismatic and Pentecostal movements, but it is certainly a key focus of our movements. Here we have great demonstrations of the power of God over the natural world, in His ability to miraculously overcome cancers, broken bones, and illnesses. Not only is it a great comfort to those who have been healed, but it further gives glory to God for his magnificent power over all Creation. Our intimacy and dependency on Him deepens as we marvel at His love and power. 

God speaks through words of knowledge, in which someone speaks a revelatory insight or instruction into someone’s life, which has come from God. This is one of the ways that God continues to speak into the life of His people. Through words of knowledge, people are encouraged, convicted, and edified as God speaks directly into their lives. They are a sweet foretaste of heaven, of the deep knowing of and being known by our Father.

An Exhortation

The pursuit of intimacy with God unites Pentecostals and charismatics. This pursuit should be the bedrock of unity upon which Eucharisma seeks to build. As we go forwards we should not seek to replace our worship and praise with our books, words, and writing and in our writing we should seek truly deep intimacy with our Father. We should never stop praising. Even as we seek to write and think deeply about theology, we must never stop worshipping the Lord. In fact, our writing and our thinking must necessarily pour out of our praise. Therefore, we must drink deeply not only in our gatherings on the Lord’s Day but also throughout the week, as we worship amongst our small groups and families. In our acts of praise, we will find greater intimacy with Christ and our writing and thinking saturated in the love of Christ.

Imagine another scene. A handful of students gather in a front room. Fresh cups of tea and squash have been made and people have caught up with one another. As one person leads on the guitar, their voices begin to rise in exaltation of their King. Some lift up holy hands, others lift up prayers of thanksgiving and praise. As the Holy Spirit leads them, they share words of encouragement with each other. We came from different churches. I was from the church with the little semicircle of chairs, others from the charismatic Anglican Church at the foot of the university hill, and others were from another independent charismatic church on the other side of the city. Yet we all came with the singular purpose to intimately pursue God.  

This has always been an emphasis of the charismatic and Pentecostal movements. Through worship, we grow in intimacy and in growing through intimacy we grow in unity in the body. Across denominations, across doctrinal specificities, the Spirit brings unity through our intimacy with the Father. This is a picture of the New Heavens and New Earth.

1. Saint Augustine, Homily 4 in the Homilies on the First Letter of John, 6. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Saint Anselm, Prayer to Christ in Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm with the Proslogion, Translated by Sr Benedicta Ward, (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 243. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 94. ↩︎
5. Question 1 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. ↩︎
6. Watson, Thomas,  A Body of Divinity, (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1958), 15. ↩︎
7. Calvin, John, “Mutual Consent in Regard to the Sacraments; between the Ministers of the Church of Zurich and John Calvin, Minister of the Church of Geneva”, in Calvin, John, Tracts: Containing Treatises on the Sacraments, Catechism of the Church of Geneva, Forms of Prayer, and Confessions of Faith, Volume Second, Henry Beveridge trans (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1849 [1554]), 240. ↩︎
8. Especially Wilson, Andrew, Spirit and Sacrament: An Invitation to Eucharismatic Worship, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019), and Black, The Lord’s Supper: Our Promised Place of Intimacy and Transformation with Jesus, (Minneapolis: Chosen, 2023). ↩︎
9. E.g. Haykin, Michael, Amidst Us Our Beloved Stands: Recovering Sacrament in the Baptist Tradition, (Bellingham: Lexham, 2022) and Barcellos, Richard, The Lord’s Supper As a Means of Grace, (Fearn: Christian Focus, 2013). ↩︎
10. Edwards, Jonathan, The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, in Jonathan Edwards on Revival, (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1995), 116-117. ↩︎
11. Storms, Sam,  Understanding Spiritual Gifts: A Comprehensive Guide, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Reflective, 2020), 26. ↩︎
12. Ibid., 214. ↩︎
13. Grudem, Wayne, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994), 1073. ↩︎