“What is it again that you're doing?”
Is the question I’m ever eschewing;
But it’s time to face fears
Cos in two-point-four yearsI’ve got one hundred thousand words due in…
When asked what I’m up to these days, I typically reply with a confus(ed/ing) flurry of apologies and caveats. [1] So I thought I’d have a go at actually answering the question, for those of my friends who are polite enough to still be interested.
Yes, so, I’m doing a(nother) PhD. [2] A sort of “activist” one, motivated by popular and (to me) troubling influences within my immediate and wider Christian circles. Three years full time, at Aberdeen University via Bristol Baptist College. I love being a part of the college and usually spend around 3 days a week there, using the library and exploiting the friendliness and wisdom of staff and fellow students. I have an excellent supervisor here in Bristol and an also-excellent co-supervisor with whom I interact remotely. The Baptist college is partnered with a nearby Anglican one (Trinity) and there’s a good-sized cohort of research students across the two, covering all sorts of fascinating topics. My day-to-day looks like reading, writing, thinking about things, and (in term time) going to seminars and reading groups, and sitting in on useful classes to fill some of the many gaps in my knowledge. The vibrancy of the conversations I get to be a part of, and the strength of my passion for the subject matter, often outweigh my natural timidity to the point where I am having to learn to rein in a new-found talkativeness.
I’m gonna try to explain my actual research project now. Deep breath.
There’s an American Christian leader called Bill Johnson who is very popular and influential around the world, including in my own (independent charismatic evangelical) church, and others like it across the city where I live. He leads a church called Bethel, based in Redding, California, that is most especially famous for its “signs and wonders” ministry and its worship music, and that produces a lot of widely disseminated multimedia resources. It has its own music label and an online subscription TV channel, and Johnson and his colleagues (many of whom are related to him) publish a steady stream of popular-style Christian books. Johnson and other Bethel folk have visited Bristol as guest speakers at a number of events, and until recently Bristol was home to a “Release Training Academy” that taught the “Bethel School of Supernatural Ministries” curriculum.
Now, I’m not “out to get” Johnson, or his fans. But there’s many aspects of charismatic evangelical Christian culture that, over the years, have increasingly troubled me. In the days before essay deadlines and dissertations I used to write about them on here. Triumphalism, power-mongering and dominionist aspirations; reputation management, victim blaming and suppression of negative truth-speaking; approaches to social action that feel uncomfortably like gentrification and benevolent imperialism; commodification, branding, entrancement with celebrity; pyramidal faith schemes with prosperity and comfort as the promised pay-off; fixation on numerical growth and reliance on worldly success criteria and strategies; narrow gender expectations and a doubling down on LGBTQIA+ exclusion. You get the picture. And, well, as I examined these features of the Christian tradition I’ve long been a part of, Bethel and Bill Johnson stood out as being strikingly representative and substantially responsible. Not uniquely so, in the complex, internet-intensified mix of Christian resources and thought-leaders, but enough to warrant closer attention. And that closer attention only uncovered more cause for unease – not least Johnson’s outspoken support for Donald Trump and his and Bethel’s part in attempts to deny and reverse the 2020 election result. [3]
So, as I started to admit to myself how deeply I felt the (by standard metrics reckless) pull towards theology research, Johnson and Bethel emerged among the most pressing concerns in the context(s) where I’m most equipped and positioned to contribute. Meanwhile, I noticed that a lot of the existing responses to them and to the wider neocharismatic movement they’re a part of [4] are made on the basis of claims about what is and isn’t “biblical” – often appealing to supposedly “plain readings” of Scripture that are themselves thoroughly shaped by tradition and by personal and communal experience. Thing is, you see, the Bible is big and complexly polyphonic. It can and has been interpreted in many different ways by people seeking to live faithfully to its message – and, no doubt, by cynical opportunists content to exploit the authorising influence of the Bible over people trying to live faithfully. Adjudicating between competing claims is, I believe, necessarily messy. An ongoing, provisional, inclusively communal, Holy Spirit-dependent activity in the life of the church(es).
My project, then, aims to give a complex account of Bill Johnson’s own (strikingly voluminous and enthusiastic) interactions with the Bible – what he says about it, how he interprets it, and the “discursive function” it plays as a source of sacred-making authority throughout his writings. [5] I’m keen to do this in a way that stays alert to potential harms but avoids too-quickly closing down Johnson’s challenges to tradition such that we also remain closed to the leading of the Holy Spirit (however understood) and to corrective disruption from traditionally-marginalised or excluded voices.
What do I hope to achieve from it all? I hope to draw critical attention to aspects of my own community’s unchecked entanglements, and encourage us and others like us to become more discerning in relation to the teachings that we embrace and the programs we pursue. I hope to get a better handle on what’s at stake when we gather around Scripture, and a clearer (and lived out) idea of how to do that wisely and humbly and receptively. I hope to make the most of being a part of a research community, bringing my little bit to important conversations and learning from others around me. And, yes, by the end I hope to have somehow written 100,000 defensible words, starting with a chapter (due scarily soon) on Johnson’s self-reported approach to Scripture that has sent me inadvertently careering into the realm of metaphysics, send help…
[1] "It’s not that I want another academic title, you understand, and I know it’s not the most strategic career move, and I do realise how privileged I am to be able to take such an extended self-removal from the labour market, and who knows what I’ll possibly find to do afterwards..." If I manage to communicate the fact that I’m doing a PhD in theology and the person I’m talking to is polite or foolish enough to ask what it’s about I feel bound to explain that I see it as a form of activist research (it’s not just self-indulgence, you see), but that’s not to say it’s coming from a place of hostility (I really care about church) nor arrogance (I just want to play my small part in needed conversations). Half an hour later my hapless interlocutor has a pretty clear idea of what I’m not doing (not biblical studies per se, nor systematics, nor practical theology…)
[2] It’s rather different to my first PhD which was in a STEM subject as part of a large research team, and was stipended – so it felt not so different to having paid employment. This one’s more personal – personal risk, personal investment in the subject matter, personal responsibility to get things done…
[3] See also Bethel et al.’s defiance of public health measures during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. My first published paper in my new field examines the use of a popular Bethel worship song in a series of “protest concerts” organised by one-time Bethel worship leader Sean Feucht.
[4] The oft-called “New Apostolic Reformation” (NAR) characteristically lacks formal membership; a book by Christerson and Flory suggests the description “Independent Network Charismatic” Christianity to keep in scope informally-connected groups that (like Bethel) choose not to self-describe as NAR.
[5] I have yet to refine my approach, but my two big methodological influences are Richard Hays' The Moral Vision of the New Testament, which provides (among other things) a useful framework for unpacking a given interpreter's practices beyond "exegetical accuracy," and Valerie Hobbs' An Introduction to Religious Language, which gives tools for examining how authorising appeals to Scripture function within a religious discourse strategy.
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