The Challenges of the Pentecostal, Charismatic and Messianic Jewish Movements

The Tensions of the Spirit

Peter Hocken

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317039068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book explores the Pentecostal and charismatic movements, tracing their development and their variety. Hocken shows how these movements of the Holy Spirit, both outside the mainline churches and as renewal currents within the churches, can be understood as mutually challenging and as complementary. The similarities and the differences are significant. The Messianic Jewish movement possesses elements of both the new and the old. Addressing the issues of modernity and globalization, this book explores major phenomena in contemporary Christianity including the relationship between the new churches and entrepreneurial capitalism.

Chapter 1
The Pentecostal movement:
Major Issues and Challenges

Because there is now quite a wealth of scholarly literature on the Pentecostal movement,1 this chapter does not offer a description in the way that the subsequent chapters describe the charismatic movement. As we shall see, this new abundance provides a marked contrast to the other and later streams of Holy Spirit revival and renewal to be covered in the subsequent chapters, for which there is much less scholarly material available. Instead this chapter offers a reflection on how both Pentecostals and the specialists in Pentecostalism commonly see and understand the Pentecostal movement, and provides a guide to the current literature.

Pentecostal Self-Understanding

While there has been considerable development in Pentecostal attitudes over the first century of the Pentecostal movement, there has been a remarkable consistency in terms of basic self-understanding. From its beginnings in Azusa Street, Los Angeles and Zion City, Illinois in 1906, the Pentecostal movement understood itself in restorationist terms. There was a ‘more’ in the Pentecostal experience that the Pentecostals believed had been lacking in Christian practice since the earliest days of the church. As Donald Dayton and William Faupel have indicated, this restorationist conviction was expressed in the various descriptions the first Pentecostals gave to their movement: Pentecostal, Latter Rain, Apostolic Faith and Full Gospel.2 All of these labels involve a claim that what was present at the beginnings of Christian history but was soon lost is now being restored in their midst.

Pentecostal

The term ‘Pentecostal’ eventually became the most widely used designation for this new movement of the Holy Spirit. The designation ‘Pentecostal’ indicated not so much an emphasis on particular teaching and church practice, as with the Baptists, but the claim to a new experience of Pentecost. Although there was always a strong emphasis among Pentecostals on the experience of each believer, there was at the outset at Azusa Street a more corporate sense: as the Holy Spirit had come down upon the disciples in the Upper Room in Jerusalem, so had the Holy Spirit come down upon the saints gathered at Azusa Street. Thus an early edition of the Azusa Street magazine Apostolic Faith blazoned the headline, ‘Pentecost has come’. The respected Pentecostal teacher Donald Gee spoke of the whole movement simply as ‘Pentecost’.

The dominant restorationist element affirmed in the term ‘Pentecostal’ has been that of power. Pentecostals believe that the Holy Spirit is restoring to the Church the original power enjoyed by the first generation church from the day of Pentecost. The term ‘Pentecostal’ was also appropriate because the Pentecostal believers spoke in other tongues, thereby claiming a direct link between the twentieth-century experience and the first-century experience described in Acts 2. The twentieth-century restoration of the outpoured Spirit manifested in spiritual gifts – not only speaking in tongues but also prophecy and healing – and the parallel with the first chapters of the book of Acts may be the major reason why the designation ‘Pentecostal’ stuck to those known today as Pentecostals, but was not retained by those Holiness groups that had called themselves Pentecostal in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

Latter Rain

One of the favourite designations for the Pentecostal movement, especially among preachers, was the ‘Latter Rain’. The preachers took up the biblical evidence concerning the patterns of rainfall in the land of Israel, that speak in particular of the ‘early rain’ and the ‘latter rain’. The first detailed exposition of this theme is found in D. Wesley Myland’s collection of sermons, published in 1910 under the title The Latter Rain Covenant3 Myland developed his teaching from Deuteronomy 11 with support from Zechariah 10 and from James 5. The Latter Rain usage focuses on the revival-impact of the Holy Spirit and the size of the harvest. It also introduced an eschatological element, not necessarily implied by the term ‘Pentecostal’. The ‘latter rain’ falls towards the end, whereas the ‘early rain’ had fallen at the beginning. Pentecostal preaching saw the ‘latter rain’ preparing the harvest of the end-times, underpinning a frequent Pentecostal theme that the Spirit’s outpouring equips the saints for an urgent preaching of the gospel throughout the world before the soon-coming of the Lord Jesus. As a result, as Anderson notes, ‘The Pentecostalism emerging was essentially a missionary movement of unprecedented vigour.’4

The Latter Rain vision of the movement implies a rather negative assessment of the 20 centuries of Christian history. The downpours of the Holy Spirit producing the real fruit occur at the beginning and at the end. The period in between is at best one of occasional showers, but mostly one of lengthy drought.

Apostolic Faith

The designation that found its way into denominational titles more than any other was ‘Apostolic Faith’.5 This label conveyed a sense both of the Pentecostal claim to preach the faith of the first Apostles and to do so with the same power and conviction, accompanied by the same signs. For a few Pentecostals it also represented a claim to be restoring a form of church government that they believed to be ‘apostolic’. Thus, the Apostolic Church, founded in Wales in 1914, believes in the restoration of apostolic ministries and the other ministries of Eph. 4: 11. This was however a minority conviction among Pentecostals with Donald Gee among its vociferous opponents.6 We have to wait for the Latter Rain movement in Canada arising in the late 1940s and the non-denominational expressions of the charismatic movement for a reappearance of the claim to Eph. 4: 11 ministries.

Full Gospel

The term ‘Full Gospel’ particularly expresses the Pentecostal conviction that the full message of the New Testament has been restored. The claim to preach the ‘Full Gospel’ was expressed in the term ‘Foursquare Gospel’ taken up by some Pentecostal groups, notably Aimée Semple McPherson in the USA, the foundress of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel and George Jeffreys who formed the Elim Foursquare Gospel Alliance in Britain and Ireland, today the Elim Pentecostal Church.

The concept of a fourfold gospel had first been espoused in 1890 by A. B. Simpson, the founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance.7 Simpson’s Alliance in itself represented a coming together of several strands: gospel Evangelism, the Holiness movement, the divine healing movement, the missionary movement and pre-millennialism.8 For Simpson, the four components of the gospel were: (1) Jesus saves; (2) Jesus sanctifies; (3) Jesus heals; (4) Jesus will come again. The second element ‘Jesus sanctifies’ was equivalent to ‘Jesus baptizes in the Spirit’ for Simpson, who like many in the Holiness movement understood baptism in the Spirit as a decisive experience of sanctification.

With the beginning of the Pentecostal movement it was natural for the Pentecostals to make a place in this schema for the central experience in their Pentecostal identity, that of baptism in/with the Spirit. They understood this primarily in terms of an empowerment for ministry and service distinct from sanctification. The Holiness Pentecostals still believed in an identifiable experience of sanctification and so arrived at a ‘fivefold’ gospel, while the ‘finished work’ Pentecostals professed a ‘fourfold’ gospel that they called ‘foursquare’ with ‘Jesus sanctifies’ being replaced by ‘Jesus baptizes with the Spirit’. For McPherson, this remained the second side of the square, while Jeffreys placed healing second and Spirit-baptism third.

Pentecostals typically saw the restoration of the foursquare (or fivefold) gospel beginning with the Protestant Reformation. All saw Martin Luther restoring the doctrine of justification by faith, John Wesley restoring sanctification and the Pentecostal movement restoring the full gospel of Pentecost. Some inserted after Wesley the restoration of divine healing in the nineteenth century.

Revival

Pentecostals have typically understood their movement in terms of revival, speaking for example of the Azusa Street revival. Parallel to the restoration of the Full Gospel beginning with the Reformation, understanding the Pentecostal movement as revival implicitly inserted it into Evangelical Protestant history. But Pentecostal self-understanding was always that their movement represented something more, an intensification, a movement toward the climax of history, as the labels Apostolic Faith, Latter Rain and Pentecost indicate in their different ways.

The understanding of the Pentecostal movement as revival, an Evangelical category, manifests the element of Pentecostal continuity with Evangelical revivalism. So while Pentecostals saw themselves as having more than the Evangelicals, the white Pentecostals readily and generally uncritically accepted received Evangelical mentalities and absorbed much Evangelical doctrine. In its earliest phases the Pentecostal movement was suspicious of intellectual skills and uninterested in education. All that was needed was much Holy Spirit and some common sense.9 In consequence as the newly formed Pentecostal denominations drew up their Declarations of Faith they typically took over the existing formulations with which they were familiar, which were characteristically Evangelical, and then added a couple of Pentecostal distinctives (baptism in the Holy Spirit, divine healing).

The category of revival is important because it expresses the sense of a work of God that exceeds human categories of explanation. In one way Evangelicalism has always struggled with the connection between revival and sound biblical doctrine. The revival focus, which historically came first, points to a God who cannot be tied down in doctrinal formulae. The concern for sound biblical doctrine, allied to the rationalist mindsets of the Enlightenment, led eventually to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 The Pentecostal Movement: Major Issues and Challenges
• 2 The Charismatic Movement: The New Charismatic Churches and Networks
• 3 The Charismatic Movement: Charismatic Renewal in the Historic Churches
• 4 Viewing the Whole: How to Relate New Revival Streams and Historic Church Renewal
• 5 The Messianic Jewish Movement: New Current and Old Reality
• 6 The Outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the Light of the Second Coming of Christ
• Bibliography
• Index