Pentecost or Plotinus?

The Word-Faith teachers, such as Kenneth Hagin, like to assert that their teachings have arisen from the Pentecostal movement. How does this explain the many peculiar and bizarre elements in their teachings?

I would like to suggest another source for their novel ideas. He is the neo-Platonist philosopher, Plotinus (AD 204-70).

There are some very striking similarities between the teachings of the faith movement and this long dead philosopher.

What is man?

Hagin's view of man is that although he has a body and soul, he is essentially spirit. For the Christian, he teaches that the spirit is completely divine and without sin.

Paul Henry, in his commentary on Plotinus, notices that in his scheme of thought, spirit cannot sin and is 'strictly incapable of sinning'. He goes on to note that 'where wrongdoing does not exist, there can, of course, be no place either for pardon and expiation.' Furthermore, salvation is achieved. 'For its realisation, it is enough that the individual should become conscious of what he is already in his inmost nature.' As Torbjorn Swartling states in this book on his experience in the Swedish faith movement: 'We are supposed to have unlimited abilities and powers deposited in our innermost being, which they call our spirit.'

Possession of the godhead

For Plotinus, one's innermost nature is God, since (in the words of Henry) 'to be present to the other (God) is to be at the centre of oneself', or as Stephen McKenna says: 'He may even in this life attain to the 'possession' of the Godhead in an ineffable act of identification, becoming one with God, actually God, and foretasting the blessedness of the final return after which he is for all the space of eternity to be with the Godhead, to be divine, or to be God.'

This explains what Carl-Gustaf Severin says in a passage quoted in Swartling's book: '. . . God puts a new creature into your spirit and you receive life in him. You become exactly like God! You know, this is different from going about calling yourself a poor sinner, instead of saying: 'I am an heir of God, and I am God!'

Fundamentally isolated

Many of Swartling's problems were because, 'I was trying to manage myself without help from God or from friends. Everything I needed was supposedly deposited in my own spirit and, therefore I could do it all by myself . . . I became progressively more abandoned to myself and to the teaching that was supposed to help me overcome the world by my own strength. This turned out to be something very different from the true gospel, about the grace of God, through faith in Christ.'

From a Plotinian perspective, this is unsurprising, as Henry notes: 'Man is for Plotinus, fundamentally isolated . . . he stands with the gnostics against the Christians, maintaining that the soul must rely on its own unaided efforts to reach the goal of its destiny.'

In Swartling's book, he stresses the emphasis the faith movement teachers put on out-of-body experiences. He tells of a number of preachers who had apparently been taken up and says that Jan Wallander was keen to help others have the same experience. He is quoted as saying: 'I have also gone up to heaven together with other people. Christopher Alam [Ed.: In an email to us, however, Christopher denied this strongly] and I, for instance, pulled ourselves up to heaven together, and saw and experienced different things together, exactly the same things.'

Again this is similar to Plotinus: 'Often I awaken to myself and escape from the body.'

Swartling confesses that a key factor in his decision to leave the faith movement was his being informed that a man who he believed to be an 'apostle' sent to restore biblical truth to Scandinavia refused to show any apology or sympathy towards his youth pastor after he had attempted suicide following threats from himself. This behaviour, as Swartling noted, is very unchristian but it is, however, most Plotinian. As John Ditton notes: 'People are generally responsible in one way or another, he feels, for the misfortunes that befall them . . . this takes a pretty tough line with the 'innocent victims of violence and injustice, but that is a consequence of Plotinus' contempt for the accidents of the sub-lunar world.'

This close affinity of Plotinian thought with the so-called revelations of the faith movement raises profound and disturbing questions. If the teachings of Hagin et al are biblical, does this mean that Plotinus' thought was also biblical? How would this tie in with what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1.21: 'As God in his wisdom ordained, the world failed to find God by its wisdom, and he chose by the folly of the gospel to save those who have faith'?

Whatever our response to this question, it certainly means we will have to ponder anew the old query: 'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?'

Oliver Hammond

* Comments on Plotinus are taken from Plotinus: The Enneads, Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth (1991).

* Torbjorn Swartling's book From Spiritual Powers to Liberating Grace is published by Tentmaker Publications, 121 Hartshill Road, Stoke-on-Trent ST4 7LU.

A discussion of the origins of word-faith teaching being Plotinus not the Pentecostal movement

What is man?

Possession of the godhead

Fundamentally isolated

Oliver Hammond

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