Keep in Step with the Spirit: Finding Fullness in our Walk With God

by J.I. Packer

6. The Spirit. Though theologically uneven (and what spiritually significant movement has not been?) the charismatic renewal should commend itself to Christian people as a God-sent corrective of formalism, institutionalism, and intellectualism. It has creatively expressed the gospel by its music and worship style, its praise-permeated spontaneity, and bold ventures in community. Charismatic renewal has forced all Christendom, including those who will not take this from evangelicals as such, to ask: What then does it mean to be a Christian and to believe in the Holy Spirit? Who is Spirit-filled? Are they? Am I? With radical theology inviting the church into the barren wastes of neo-Unitarianism, it is (dare I say) just like God—the God who uses the weak to confound the mighty—to have raised up, not a new Calvin or John Owen or Abraham Kuyper, but a scratch movement, cheerfully improvising, which proclaims the divine personhood and power of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit not by great theological eloquence, originality, or accuracy, but by the power of renewed lives creating a new, simplified, unconventional, and uncomfortably challenging lifestyle. O sancta simplicitas! Yet the charismatic life stream still needs an adequately biblical theology and remains vulnerable while it lacks one.