As part of my continuing program of studying the revivals of 20th Century, I am currently plowing through Vinson Synan's lengthy history textbook entitled "The Century of the Holy Spirit: 100 Years of Pentecostal and Charismatic Renewal". Synan does lay out much of the gory details that histories are supposed to provide—names, places, dates, who did what where and when. And unlike Epstein or Blumhofer, Synan does not go about trying to stuff things into the usual secularistic framework. It's all very fascinating reading for me, but I wonder if publicly admitting this will land me on the Flame List of some of the folks in the continent of WSFTRB. Oh, well, I guess that can't be helped.

The Blogific Ocean

As I have said in the past, I never set out in Lunar Skeletons to create a "xtian blog". This is mainly because there are already a zillion of them. Why create yet another one? I don't see much point in it. I am simply a xtian who happens to blog, and I talk about the things that happen to interest me.

However, my cursory navigation of the Blogific Ocean does seem to lead to several cartographic observations, although I can't claim them to be my uniquely original discoveries. I notice that xtian bloggers are arranged into several large continents. First there is the Continent of The Catholic Bloggers (CotCB), which itself is composed of a number of large sub-continents, each having inhabitants who are quite different from one another. Now that vast continent has many penisulas and mountain ranges; the largest river there is the Tiber. At one end, there's the Land of We-Are-Oh-So-Progressive; and on the opposite side, there is the long, narrow Penisula of the Very Strictly Latinates; and between them is the vast Territory of the Generally Sensible Moderates. The people in these different sub-continents do maintain a certain chilly politeness with each other, but civil wars do occasionally flare up. But it's a very large continent, and I can't say I've explored all its nooks and crannies, nor all the different ethnographies.

The next large continent I've encountered is We're-Still-Fighting-The-Reformation-Battles (WSFTRB), which itself is arranged into various subcontinents. One of these is the Land of More-Calvin-Than-Calvin. The people there are very warlike; they also eat rocks, because their teeth are like iron railroad spikes. In their land, which is a very arid, barren plateau, is this enormous, richly adorned, and intricate mausoleum, containing the corpse of John Calvin, whom they all greatly revere. In fact, this mausoleum is the only edifice that was ever built in that country. Also, close by is the Land of We're-Reformed-But-We're-Hip-Too, where the people there have enormous brains, and their land is dotted with many bottomless lakes. The people of this land love to talk about endless complexities and enjoy diving into their murky lakes, seldom coming up for air. It's odd but they all seem to have graduated from Calvin College (located in Michigan), or at least have graduated from something closely equivalent. Finally, it should be noted that in centuries past the continent of WSFTRB fought a long, protracted war against CotCB, a war which the people of WSFTRB always recall with especially happy fondness. (Generally speaking, the people of CotCB are somewhat embarrassed about the whole affair, and so they seldom speak of it.)

Now, adjacent to WSFTRB is another nearby continent, but really it's more like a complicated and intricately entangled archipelago than anything else. For lack of a better name, it's called the Evangelical Archipelago. Now many of the islands in this archipelago can be very different from one another: some are marshy, some are deserts, some are flat and foggy moors, and some have large forested mountains. One island, for example, named the Isle of Emergent-Whatever, is particularly swampy and humid, but it seems to have become a favorite vacation destination for the younger PoMo crowd. Now the various tribes who inhabit these many islands of the Evangelical Archipelago have many differing customs, and they don't necessarily get along very well with their neighbors on the other islands. Ancient legends do suggest however that the inhabitants of the archipelago originally migrated from the continent of WSFTRB long ago, but the people of WSFTRB vehemently deny any such connection. Furthermore, for some reason, the folks of WSFTRB are rather icy in their relations towards their neighbors living in the nearby archipelago, whom they disdain as being mostly stupid, boorish, aesthetically-insensitive, poorly-educated, and bunglesome buffoons. And sometimes the icyness will break out into open hostilities, in which case the WSFTRBers will cross the narrow straits and launch attacks on the Evangelical Archipelago. And it can get quite bloody sometimes. What is more, those in the Land of More-Calvin-Than-Calvin, being especially ferocious and warlike, occasionally launch particularly gruesome raids on the inhabitants of the archipelago, raids resulting in horrifying rumors of cannibalism having happened.

But there is one thing I have yet to discover in all my voyages. I have never found any continent of xtian bloggers inhabited by Pentecostals. If there is such a continent on the vast Blogific Ocean, I have yet to find it. Indeed, I have used Technorati in an unsuccessful effort to locate such a place, but so far it has eluded me, and it still remains a distant Terra Incognita, a far-away Shangri-La. If such a continent does exist, its inhabitants must have kept themselves hidden somehow, perhaps so as not to alert the people of WSFTRB as to its existence; otherwise, WSFTRB might decide to launch a thermonuclear strike, completely destroying the place. But there is some slim evidence that such a continent might exist. For example, I have noticed that the inhabitants of the Evangelical Archipelago, on rare occassions, will make jokes about a certain far off tribe of people who babble in strange, unknown languages.

A few days ago, I picked up from the library a book with the weighty title "Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century" by Harvey Cox. There are hardly any books on the subject of the history of the Pentecostal movement at the public library, but I checked out what I thought was the only one they had, mistakenly thinking that this book was a history.

And how mistaken I was! Cox's book does have a little bit of history in it, but it is hardly what I would call a History. Now, despite some of it defects, Blumhofer's book was a history. And despite its faults, Epstein's biography was very readable; at least he kept his focus mostly on the person he was writing about. But what little history there is in Cox's book serves mostly as a launching pad for him to indulge in his lofty, liberal theological philosophizing—although what I'd really like to call it is a bunch of "bovine excrement", but I'll settle for just describing it as the sort of twaddle that Ivy League academe is bound to love, jammed packed with all sorts of highfaluting concepts such as "cognitive gridworks" and "perceptional barriers" and whatnot. In fact, the book is so larded up with Cox's rhetorical cruff, that by the time I reached chapter four, the onset of the Lefty-rhetoric-induced nausea I was experiencing made it increasingly difficult to continue putting up with his book, and so I am not sure that I will even bother to finish it. But what should I have expected considering that Cox is a "professor of religion at Harvard University"? Yeah, Harvard—"a haunt for every unclean spirit and every detestable bird". It's hard to believe that long ago Harvard was founded by actual xtians. Nowadays it may as well be Babylon. Therefore, I wouldn't recommend bothering with the book. About the only worthwhile thing in it are some of the bibliographical notes in the back, which do seem to mention the titles of actual histories which may be worth the trouble trying to locate on Amazon.com.

What was so pitiful about the book was watching Cox thrash about trying to understand what's going on, trying to explain things first with this concept and then with that, when all along a simple 10-year old in a Sunday School class, having a heart of faith, could have grasped things with ease. Using the words from an old hymn from long ago:

I serve a risen Savior
He's in the world today;
I know that He is living
No matter what men may say…

Yes, a 10-year old can grasp that, but for a Harvard trained professor it's completely beyond him.

One day in the late summer of 1969, two young men decided to go on an overnight campout up on Mt. San Gorgonio. Now this mountain rises about 11,000 feet into the air; it stands on the north side of the pass that goes from Redlands eastward towards Palm Springs and the Mojave desert. Opposite it on the south side of the pass is Mt. San Jacinto, which is nearly as tall. But San Gorgonio is the highest mountain in Land-Down-There, and from the east it overlooks the dreary metropolis of San Bernardino. In Land-Down-There, the air is usually so heavy with smog that even seeing the nearby foothills is difficult. So most of the time San Gorgonio lurks above the smog layer, unseen and unknown, a mystery. At its peak above the tree line, the air is thin, and near the top in various ravines there can be late into the summer patches of unmelted snow, leftover from the previous winter. On those clear days, usually when the hot Santa Ana winds blow the smog away in Land-Down-There, and assuming no wild fires are burning, San Gorgonio sits, massive, distant, and bluish, like a great titan or colossus overlooking the goings-on of the mortals below.

These two young men, Brad and Bob, having graduated from high school that summer and on their way to their freshman year in college that autumn, and feeling the first exhilaration of freedom from home, decided to hike up to the peak of San Gorgonio. Now, Brad had grown up in the bedroom town of Rialto, a short distance west from San Bernardio. From the living room window of his home, he could look east on clear days and see the San Gorgonio mountain looming there in the distance like an unexplored mystery, and he had often wondered what things were like up near its pale blue peak. Now before he headed off to college, he decided he would like to try to climb to the top. His parents gave him permission provided he had someone accompany him. Indeed, it wouldn't be wise to hike alone up into the San Gorgonio Wilderness Area, especially so since Brad was not an experienced camper.

Brad called around on the telephone some of the people he knew, and it was Bob who readily agreed to go. For many years, since he was in grade school, Brad had known Bob mainly through church and Sunday school, although they were not what could be called close friends. Later, Brad procured a map of the San Gorgonio Wilderness Area from the Forest Service. It showed that there were several trails that could be taken to reach the peak of the mountain. Picking one, Brad decided to hike up the Vivian Creek trail, on the south side of San Gorgonio, whose trailhead begins on the Mill Creek Canyon road. The Vivian Creek trail looked the shortest, but in actuality it was the steepest.

That weekend Brad put together what he thought he would need. Because late in the Summer Land-Down-There is subject to the hot and humid "Mexican Monsoon", there are often sudden thunderstorms up in the mountains. So Brad packed a plastic tarp to serve as protection from the rain. Along with the tarp, he also took some canned food and a metal canteen, along with a rather bulky sleeping bag. Not being experienced hiker, what he didn't realize at the time was that all this was so much extra weight that would make hiking up the steep trail very tiring. Nor did he realize that the ill-fitting boots he would be wearing, which once had belonged to his father, would prove to be especially draining on his strength and injurious to his feet. Bob, on the other hand, was much better equipped for the hike.

After Brad's mother dropped them off at the Vivian Creek trailhead, Bob and Brad crossed the shallow Mill Creek and began treking up the switchbacks that took them up the south side of the mountain. Although the day started out cool and even looked as if it might rain, by mid-morning the cloud cover had cleared completely, and it began to warm up very quickly, especially so on the south side of the mountain. The climb was very steep and dusty, and along the way Brad deposited the tarp under a bush to help lighten his heavy load.

It turned out to be a very hot day, but then again that was nothing out of the ordinary for Land-Down-There, where temperatures can stay in the upper nineties even into late November. The climb was very draining, and Brad's ill-fitting boots were taking their toll on his feet. By late in the afternoon, although short of their goal, they had reached to nearly the 10,000 foot level and decided that they were much too exhausted to proceed any farther. For all practical purposes they were near enough to the peak to be able to say that they had been there. They stopped near a marshy area in a ravine lying just above a small waterfall. Although the area was just below the tree line, there was still plenty of trees and shade, and a stream flowed nearby. It was a fairly pleasant camping area. Just as they arrived, someone was packing up to leave, who apparently had camped there the previous night. What that person had neglected to tell them was that this camping area, being near a small marsh, was heavily infested with mosquitoes at night. Unfortunately, the one thing Brad and Bob had neglected to bring with them was mosquito repellent. It would be sorely needed.

Very tired from the steep climb, and getting hungry, they unpacked the food and set up things to spend the night. The sky was extraordinarily clear and had a piercing deep blue color as sunset was approaching, although they couldn't see the sunset itself from where they were situated in the ravine. After eating, they began talking about their future and plans.

Somehow at one point in the conversation, Brad felt somewhat stunned to hear Bob announce that he no longered believed in the existence of God. And indeed Brad felt deeply puzzled that someone he thought was a believer all those years would suddenly say such things. For although they had not been really close friends, they were very much acquainted and had been in the same Sunday school classes together. Indeed, Bob and his family had attended their Baptist church for as long as Brad could remember.

Brad asked for what reasons. Bob then went into a long explanation, asserting more or less that the existence of evil in the world proves that the God of the Bible couldn't possibly be, because if there were such a God he wouldn't be allowing all the evil things that go on in the world to be happening. At no point did Brad himself feel particularly convinced by any of this, but he did feel some alarm for the condition of Bob's soul. And so he tried to come up with the best counter-arguments he could, hoping to pursuade Bob that he had fallen into a grievous error. Unfortunately, Brad didn't have any particular talent for apologetics or argumentation. Although an intelligent young man and exemplary student in school, he was really at the bottom still a fairly simple fellow, and not at all adept at dealing with convoluted philosophical reasonings. The discussion went on late into the evening, and it was starting to grow dark, the sky then changing into a deep blue-purple color. Getting tired of it all—he was already exhausted enough just from the climb—Brad decided not to keep up the conversation and let the subject drop, feeling somewhat frustrated. Bob had been resolute and inexpugnable about his new found atheism.

Night came on, along with the mosquitos. As the last light of the summer day faded, the stars began to shine with an increasing brightness, sparkling in the moonless night. And the darker it became, more and more and more stars began to shine, until the sky seemed to be swarming with them. It was starting to get cool in the thin air. Climbing into their sleeping bags, and covering themselves as best they could to keep the mosquitoes away, the Brad and Bob got ready to go to sleep.

Two young men lay there that night near the top of Mt. San Gorgonio. The atheist of them looked up into the sky and could only see chance and blackness, and hydrogen burning itself into helium, and all things eventually collapsing and compacting themselves into a singularity, all a meaninglessness show. For him, life and death were simply flip sides of the same meaningless thing. The distant stars shined, but to no purpose.

On the other hand, Brad lay in this sleeping bag and looked up into the night and the myriads of stars shining so brightly and gloriously. As he lay there quietly, gazing up at them, somehow he could hear a whisper in his soul, saying "It was My Hand that made all these". Brad simply knew it was true just like one simply knows a sunrise by its brightness and how it dazzles the eyes. In the light of those stars all of Bob's clever arguments disappeared.

The next morning the climb down went very quickly. When they reached the bottom, very dusty and mosquito-bitten, they were picked up by Brad's mother at the appointed rendevouz point. Brad's poor feet were terribly blistered by his boots. Going their separate ways, Brad and Bob never saw each other again after that day.

I finished Edith L. Blumhofer's historical biography about Aimee Semple McPherson. It was a very fascinating book, and I would recommend it. There is much I could say in way of criticism of the book, especially regarding what I would call Blumhofer's tendency to a secularistic "historical reductionism", a stance which at the bottom makes her approach to the subject no different from Epstein's. However, writing out everything that I could say and doing the subject any justice would take a considerable amount of effort on my part, and I simply don't have the amount of readership needed to make it worth my time doing. Reading about Aimee's ministry however did make me interested in finding out more about the history of the Pentecostal revival, and so I think I'll be looking around for more books on the subject. Finally, as far as Aimee is concerned, I think I'll just let her speak for herself. Here is a quote from her, which Blumhofer says was published in Sunset Magazine in 1927, and which pretty much summarizes things:

It is so simple, so very simple. Believing the story of Jesus, believing that the way to salvation is the only through Him…I have been compelled by my faith and belief for eighteen years to send the message of His undying love from the pulpit, in tent, tabernacle and over the radio to every ear that could be induced to listen.

Yes, along the way Aimee Semple McPherson made plenty of mistakes and had plenty of failings, but at the bottom of it all she remained true to this one simple thing. The World, on the other hand, never being able to accept the simple explanation, has always sought to explain it all away as being nothing but meaningless convolutions of Matter + Energy + Time + Chance.

I finished Epstein's biography on Aimee Semple McPherson and am already midway through Blumhofer's lengthier biography. Both books have been very fascinating for me, but the difference between them is very noticible. Epstein writes as if he were genuinely intrigued by Aimee's life. Blumhofer's writing style comes off more like that of a resolutely dispassionate historian, although she supplies far more historical background details—especially on the concurrent events in the history of the Pentecostal revival in the early 20th Century, details which Epstein left out mostly in the interest of brevity. But there are places where Epstein added some telling details that Blumhofer chose to leave out.

However, one strange thing I noticed was a glaring contradiction between Epstein and Blumhofer concerning at least one fact. Epstein gives the date of the death of Aimee's father, James Kennedy, as occuring on October 20, 1927, to which Epstein adds these words (p.127):

Aimee had not seen her father in many years. Nowhere in her writing does she mention his death. She did not attend the funeral.

Blumhofer on the other hand, as she covered the events around Aimee's campaign in Canton, Ohio, in 1921, adds the following (pp.178-179):

During the Canton Crusade, on October 20, Sister's father, James Kennedy, died in Ingersoll, old and alone. Sister was preparing for her last healing service when word arrived… Her associates kept the news from her until the service ended. She took it calmly and spoke with reporters about James Kennedy's influence on her life and his interest in her evangelistic work. He had promised to be in Canton for her last Sunday, she said. Instead, when the meetings ended on Sunday, October 23, she took the night train to Ingersoll for his funeral.

Now that is a remarkable contradiction! One or the other, either Epstein or Blumhofer, has gotten his or her facts wrong. But more than that, while Blumhofer's text gives the year as 1921, the caption beneath a photograph of Kennedy, Aimee, Harold, and Rolf McPherson, on page 179, gives the year of Kennedy's death as 1922. It's odd that somebody couldn't read the obituary correctly.

There's also another seeming contradiction. Epstein says "Aimee had not seen her father in many years". Blumhofer says "James Kennedy had occasionally made long trips to visit Aimee's meetings" (p.179), which would seem to imply that she had still been seeing her father off and on.

As I said, Epstein does supply some telling details. As one example, there was an incident during the December 1919 meeting in the Lyric Theater in Baltimore, Maryland. Blumhofer vaguely and parenthetically notes, on page 147 of her book, that at one point Aimee "forcibly silenced at least one would-be prophetess during a large service". On the other hand, Epstein in his book amplified things considerably more, as can be read on pages 171-172:

In the middle of the auditorium a woman got up. Her face was rosy with excitement. Waving her arms about her head, she pushed her way to the aisle and started toward the altar, knocking off ladies' hats with her arms…

Aimee nudged the elder next to her on the dais, and whispered,: "Go! Go quickly brother, get that woman in her seat; this is not of the Lord."

At first he refused…but moved by Aimee's urgency, he got up. While the evangelist roused the crowd to a chorus to cover the incident, he guided the flailing zealot back to her seat.

In a moment she was in the aisle again, moving from row to row and grimacing. She waved her arms, knocking off hats and eyeglasses, shrieking "Praise God" and shaking her fist in people's faces.

Aime could not leave the platform to restrain the woman—such a thing on the evangelist's part would be so shocking a trangression of Pentecostal custom, it might ruin the meeting. So she pursuaded one of the choristers to get the woman out of the auditorium and into a smaller meeting room. There Aimee later observed her:

"There the enemy showed his true colors and purpose. The woman proved to be a maniac who had been in an asylum. Her delusion seemed to cause her to believe herself a preacher. She paced the floor, crying disconnected sentences, raving and preaching to the chairs…Yet this was the kind of woman many of the saints would have allowed to promenade the platform—fearing lest they quench the Spirit."

This account, published soon after the Baltimore meeting, is Aimee's defense of an action for which she was severely criticized.

I wonder how Epstein knew that the woman's face was "rosy with excitment". Did someone happen to take notes on the color of the woman's face back then? Now both Epstein and Blumhofer, more or less, endeavor to interpret the events of the Baltimore meeting as evidence showing that McPherson was steering things towards the "mainstream".

On the other hand, one of the charismatic gifts listed in the NT is the "discernment of spirits", the ability to intuit what's really happening beneath the visible surface of things, to see whether something has its origin in the Spirit of God or whether it is coming from elsewhere. It's a valuable if not very spectacular gift. Although the question never occured to either Epstein or Blumhofer, what would have happened if Aimee had allowed a deranged fruitcake up on the stage? One can imagine. In any case, it would served only to discredit the message Aimee was preaching. Now, in the past I have also met my share of deranged fruitcakes. For example, the loony groundskeeper at my alma mater long ago who insisted that he was XP. Another was a poor soul debilitated by drug-induced schizophrenia who sat down and visited with me and Ms. Moonbones at a pizza parlor one time, and who happened to be someone she once knew back when he was still sane. Now both of these people looked very normal, that is, until you started talking with them. Would it be a good idea to allow either of them to start off an evangelistic service in front of thousands of people? No, I don't think so. Therefore, it could just as well be the case that what occurred in the Lyric Theater was Aimee's seeing past the appearances to what was really happening and thus was able to avoid a catastrophe. Unfortunately, as later events in her life would prove, she didn't always exercise such keen discernment in dealing with some of the people who would later prove so damaging to her ministry and to herself personally. Nevertheless, using this incident as an example, it was interesting to compare how Blumhofer the historian and Epstein the biographer handled it; their different approaches are pretty well illustrated by it. Epstein goes for the dramatic, but Blumhofer maintains a detached, scholarly respectablity.

Now, of course, as far as the hard-core secularists are concerned—such as those who might have enjoyed watching Carl Sagan on PBS explain why the present cosmos is "all that ever was or ever will be", who, by the way, was on the air courtesy of the tax dollars paid out by those crazy xtians—by itself the very fact that someone is a conservative, Bible-believing xtian is ipso facto proof of that person being seriously deranged, or possibly a dangerous, sociopathic lunatic—or even a clever and nefarious operative of The Vast Theocon Conspiracy. And consequently, as far as the Reality-Based Progressive Community is concerned, they can never see that there is a substantive distinction between Aimee Semple McPherson and the poor deranged woman who was in the auditorium going around knocking off people's hats and eyeglasses on that day in 1919. It seems that in this enlightened and progressive culture of ours, what is sane is insane, what is normal is perverted, and what is light is darkness.