Verse
Petrie, Paul
source of God's word, as I am afraid Martin would have it, to that extent will the dialogue of God with God collapse in the other direction. For the sake of our life and of our authenticity,...
...Montanism failed in its efforts to reform and revitalize the church...
...Others will come," they said, "'to take her place...
...He is creating division in the name of the Lord...
...Rather, there was something quite intanPaul Petrie The Lost Child She was not no one...
...Though half of the world's mourning is for what never was...
...A grief without a shape is imageless...
...It began making the distinction, found today among some charismatics and in fact made by Martin in his book, between those "natural" or "carnal" Christians and those in the church who are the "spirituals...
...But born still-born she was bustled faceless away to save a mother's grief...
...Will the charismatic movement do likewise...
...But Martin finally collapses the human word into God's Word...
...He does not take seriously the fact that Scripture is both a human and a divine word...
...She had a given name, a drawer of knitted things, matched suits and sweaters, a crib under the window where the sun could look...
...But this is merely a reflection of the challenge which faces the whole church...
...Yes, much of the church has collapsed God's Word in Scripture into the human word through which it comes...
...The history of spirituality is replete with movements and people which felt the church needed reform...
...F INALLY, despite disclaimers by Martin, the charismatic movement is infested with fundamentalism...
...Lucky," they said, "it happened now before . . . " (And it was true...
...Fundamentalism is precisely a denial of contemporary consciousness by an escape into a naive realism...
...Commonweal: 150...
...This was a movement which began in the second century A.D...
...For the sake of our life and of our authenticity, that dialogue must continue...
...Foolish to mourn for someone who was so nearly no one, and after five long years grieve still though less and less...
...Possibility is not fact, What never came to be never was...
...Do we have the courage to be challenged so profoundly...
...I I Ill gible about the movement which left a disquiet...
...And it must be true dialogue - - one in which we, as church, are willing to change fundamentally...
...Still, it was an error not to take that tiny shriveled body in my arms, not to touch that thin, clenched face...
...Like a hidden fish it swims under the sea, surfacing at will, or like a dark moon peers through the window of any season or any mood...
...There was nothing doctrinal which finally relegated the Montanist movement to an entry in the church's catalog of heresies...
...Some were successful in facilitating this reform and some were not...
...This is what faces the charismatic movement...
...Take Montanism, for example...
...It has no grave...
...We must be so transformed and formed in Christ that there is no capitulation to modernity...
...He urges people to pull back support, financial and otherwise, from those Catholic institutions and people who, for him, have left the "true" path...
...Martin's absolutism is truly frightening, especially because there is a very wide diffusion of his teaching via print, audio-cassette, and videotape...
...A grief without a shape is endless...
...On the other hand, we must be secure enough in ourselves to be challenged by God's Word in the world...
...The Montanists were the "pneumatici," or spirit-filled and the rest of the church were the "psychici" or carnal ones...
...There was little sense among them of the possibility of being in error...
...It was an enthusiastic movement which emphasized the charisms and had an apocalyptic bent...
...Nine swelling moons, like a small Greek goddess, she ruled my moods, talking in a morse code of thumps and kicks...
...Perhaps it was the Montanists' reliance on personal access to revelation untempered by humility...
...And they did...
...There are too many echoes of the mentality which finally led Montanism astray in segments of the Catholic charismatic movement for it to escape notice...
...and flourished for some time afterward...
...It is an overbearing and inflated ego which assigns to itself the "fullness" of the Spirit and a concession of slight spirituality to the rest of the church...
Vol. 111 • March 1984 • No. 5
