In Defense of Idiots

A Plea for More Spirit-ual Brains

I first got the idea to start this Substack because I was canceled on Twitter. I made the naïve mistake of retweeting a Christian celebrity in an attempt to nuance a point she was making. My remark was interpreted as critique, not enrichment, so she and her followers bombarded me. For days, hundreds of strangers piled on, accusing me of being a caricature of white conservative maleness. It was a harrowing experience, and I still feel a pang of anxiety thinking about it. I was eventually able to come to an understanding with the celebrity, but her followers wouldn’t stop. I turned off the comments only for them to take screenshots of my tweets to keep it going.

I don’t think the toxicity of Twitter can be reduced to the tweet character limit, but I definitely think it plays a significant role. I decided that if I was going to keep posting anything on the internet, I needed a platform that would allow me more space for nuance before the comments started rolling in.

Fortunately, I haven’t been canceled or seen anyone else getting cancelled on this platform (fingers crossed).

I was recently reminded of my reasons for starting Pastoral Theology because I had the opportunity to sit down with other like-minded church leaders to think through how to better prepare the next generation of pentecostal pastors for vocational ministry. If getting canceled was a regrettable catalyst, then—positively—I started writing here because I wanted to give witness to pentecostalism with a brain.

The first pentecostals were idiot fishermen. At least that’s what the leaders in Jerusalem called Peter and John. We ultimately get the word “idiot” from the Greek word idiōtēs, meaning “unlearned.” And that’s the word used in Acts 4:13. The idea is that Peter and John don’t have the formal education to be their own lawyers, to be theologians, to explain hundreds of years of Scriptures, or the physics of resurrection—yet here they are, doing all of it.

Peter and John definitely had brains, and they used them in the power of the Holy Spirit. Peter was an accomplished preacher: imagine the boldness it took to stand in front of that confused crowd on the day of Pentecost. He connected the prophet Joel with Isaiah and davidic Psalms, all to explain the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and to defend Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. And he executes it with remarkable concision and clarity.

What I’m trying to say is that Peter and John were smart idiots: savvy in the Scriptures, mindful of Sadduccaic polity, and had the wisdom of the streets. They knew how to hang with the corner beggars, the poor, the lowest caste of the Roman Empire.

Peter and John were smart idiot pentecostals. The book of Acts doesn’t tell us what prompted Peter to say to the crippled beggar at the beautiful gate to rise in the name of Jesus. Was it a voice in his head? Was it a burning in his heart? Whatever happened, it seems to me that Peter blurted it out before he thought about it. His intellect, which might have counseled him to hedge his command, didn’t get in the way of spontaneous resurrection power. As Acts shows over and over, signs and wonders were the prayer and expectation of the earliest Christians.

Arthur Savary

I say all of this because there’s been an historic prejudice in pentecostalism that in order to be a conduit of the Spirit, one must abandon the intellect. The assumption is not without grounds. 19th century Princeton theologian B.B Warfield was convinced the works of the Spirit we see in the book of Acts aren’t for today. He was an intellectual, and it seems his brain might have gotten in the way of the Spirit’s signs and wonders.

The problem I see is that Warfield’s prejudice now runs in the opposite direction. Many of my fellow pentecostals seem to think that the brain will always get in the way of the Spirit. They worry that the intellectual life will always cause signs to dry up and wonders to evaporate. I just don’t think that’s the case.

For my part, I want to be an idiot. But I want, like Peter and John, to be a smart, savvy idiot, with Roberts Rules and bylaws in one hand, a beefy systematic theology in the other, the Scriptures rolling off my tongue, and a heart of love that blurts out resurrection to the suffering.

Pentecostalism with a brain: that’s what I want for the next generation of ordained ministers. Really, I’m convinced that’s the only way the Pentecostal movement avoids being itself cancelled—not by strangers on Twitter, but by our own inability to defend ourselves in the religious courts.