chapter 1

Charismatic Prophecy

Charismatic Christians in the mainline churches, such as the Church of Eng-

land, have followed their Pentecostal predecessors in understanding the gift of
prophecy as a gift that is used within the congregational setting for the ­building
up of the church body (Horton, 1934; Carter, 1946). There are certain character-
istics defining the gift of prophecy within this context, such as the e­ xpectation
that prophecy is generally a spontaneous event (Cousens, 1986). That is, the
message is specific to the occasion on which it is received (and including
the people to whom it is addressed) rather than being generally applicable,
­unless it is otherwise stated at the time of delivery. The message of the proph-
ecy is also generally expected to fulfil the Pauline criterion of 1 C ­ orinthians
14.3 – ­edification, encouragement and consolation (Watson, 1973:91; Mühlen,
1978:149). Charismatic Christians would also expect to receive inspiration and
specific guidance via prophetic utterances (Yocum, 1976: 42–43).
In the popular literature, there are examples of oracles of judgment,
warnings and calls to repentance (Hill, 1985); but John Gunstone, a leading
­Anglo-Catholic charismatic in the Church of England in the 1980s, believed that
­condemnatory prophecy should be restricted to those who are very e­ xperienced
in the exercise of prophetic gifts, and so he discouraged that type of proph-
ecy in general (Gunstone, 1975: 89). Nevertheless, the style of contemporary
prophecy would appear in many cases to be modelled on the Old ­Testament
canonical prophets, with oracles in the first person singular. (Atkinson, 1977: 3;
Pickup, 1975: 60). Indeed, these prophecies may be highly ritualized in terms
of their delivery with the opening phrase consisting of “Thus says the Lord,  …”
(Gelpi, 1971: 82). Most charismatic Christians would stress the need to test
prophecy, since they believe that a message contains a mixture of the human
and the divine. The classical biblical categories of “foretelling” (prediction) and
“forthtelling” (proclamation) are also used to describe the phenomenon. In the
Charismatic Renewal of the 1970s and 1980s, prophecy could be said to contain
both, although mostly the latter (Goldingay, 1972: 6). Charismatics tend to re-
act against two popular positions on this issue. First, they maintain, contrary
to many Conservative Evangelicals, that prophecy is not the same as preach-
ing, since they believe that the message comes directly from God rather than
being mediated through exposition of Scripture (Green, 1982); although some
­Charismatic Evangelicals may allow prophetic preaching to exist as a hybrid dis-
course. Second, charismatics react against the popular secular ­understanding,

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Charismatic Prophecy 9

which equates prophecy with fortunetelling or prediction (Ranaghan and

Ranaghan, 1983). This is strongly refuted, while allowing that some prophe-
cies may contain prediction; the focus in terms of function, as stated above,
is understood in terms of congregational encouragement (1 Corinthians. 14.3).
In addition to these classical categories, some Charismatics attempt to pro-
vide a typology from their own experience of prophecy. For example, Joyce
Huggett describes prophecy as operating at three levels (1986: 133). They are:
(1) “low-level prophecy”, for example “The Lord says: ‘Don’t be afraid, I am
with you’”; (2) “higher-level prophecy”, where God reveals something about
the s­ ituation in a particular church at a particular time; and (3) “highest level
prophecy”, “which causes people to bow down and worship God … because
they know ‘The Lord has spoken’”. The idea that there are levels of prophecy
would seem to be a reasonably popular idea, although the expression of it
­varies (Every, 1976: 191). These descriptions provide some context to the ideas
concerning prophecy that were prevalent at time of the study (Cartledge, 1989).
As there was very little serious academic literature available, it soon became
evident that the popular and semi-popular literature of the Charismatic Re-
newal movement would need to be supplemented with further descriptive ma-
terial, drawn from empirical data. The advantage of such a study would be that
it could provide a useful check on any description emerging from the literature
of the movement (Cartledge, 1994). Thus a small-scale qualitative study was
undertaken in order to provide data for the task of theological description. The
research was completed between June 1987 and June 1988.
However, before the presentation of empirical research, it is necessary to
consider some perspectives, which provide theoretical approaches with which
the empirical data may interact. These main frameworks come from the dis-
ciplines of sociology, psychology and theology. While they will be described
independently, they are by no means exclusive perspectives.

Sociological Assessment

Meredith McGuire’s study of American Roman Catholic charismatics pro-

vides some interesting insight into the social context of charismatic prophecy
(­McGuire, 1977). She defines prophecy in this context as “God speaking directly
to the prayer group through one of its members’ voice…”. Sociologically, it is
important to observe that the Roman Catholic Charismatic Renewal move-
ment in the usa recruits from middle-class educated church members. Also,
for Roman Catholic Christians, this type of religious expression is vastly differ-
ent to the style into which they were previously “socialized”.