Tradition · 1901

Pentecostal

A Protestant movement that stresses a baptism in the Holy Spirit after conversion, usually marked by speaking in tongues, along with healing and other spiritual gifts.

History

Roots

Pentecostalism grew out of the nineteenth-century Holiness movement, and the Holiness movement grew out of Methodist teaching. John Wesley had taught that after conversion a believer could receive “entire sanctification,” a second work of grace that purified the heart from sin (A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, 1766, CCEL). American Holiness preachers made that second blessing a sharp, datable experience and increasingly described it in the language of Pentecost: a “baptism of the Holy Ghost” that brought power for service (Holiness movement, secondary). Alongside it ran a growing belief in divine healing and an expectation, fed by premillennial preaching, that the world was near its end and that God would pour out his Spirit before the return of Christ (Joel 2:28–29).

What was missing was a sign that showed when the baptism had happened. Charles Fox Parham, a Holiness preacher in Kansas, supplied one. At his Bethel Bible School in Topeka his students concluded from the book of Acts that speaking in tongues was the evidence of Spirit baptism, and on 1 January 1901 a student, Agnes Ozman, spoke in tongues after Parham prayed for her (Charles Fox Parham, secondary). Parham believed these were real foreign languages given so missionaries could preach without study. Missionaries who tested that abroad found it did not work, and later Pentecostals mostly dropped the idea.

Causes

The movement became a world movement through William J. Seymour, a Black Holiness preacher who had heard Parham teach in Houston, reportedly from outside the classroom door because of segregation (William J. Seymour, secondary). Invited to Los Angeles in 1906, Seymour led meetings that moved to a former church building on Azusa Street. The Azusa Street Revival ran almost daily for about three years. Visitors reported tongues, healings and long, unplanned services, and they noticed something else: Black, white, Latino and Asian worshippers praying together under a Black pastor, in a city and decade of hard segregation (Azusa Street Revival, secondary). Seymour’s newspaper, The Apostolic Faith (1906–1908), carried testimonies to thousands of readers, and visitors carried the experience home to Chicago, Memphis, Canada, Scandinavia, India and Africa.

Parham himself visited in late 1906 and denounced what he saw, objecting both to the emotional worship and to the racial mixing. He was a committed segregationist who later expressed sympathy for the Ku Klux Klan, and his influence collapsed after his arrest in Texas in 1907, though the charge was dropped. The movement’s two founders thus parted over the very thing visitors found most striking.

The early movement split quickly over doctrine. In 1910 William Durham of Chicago preached “The Finished Work of Calvary,” arguing that sanctification is complete in Christ at conversion and grows over a lifetime, so there is no separate second blessing between conversion and Spirit baptism (Finished Work Pentecostalism, secondary). This divided Holiness Pentecostals, who kept three stages (conversion, sanctification, Spirit baptism), from Finished Work Pentecostals, who kept two. In 1913 a camp meeting at Arroyo Seco, California, produced the “New Issue”: a teaching that baptism should be in the name of Jesus alone, which grew into a denial of the Trinity in favor of one God revealed as Father, Son and Spirit (Oneness Pentecostalism, secondary).

Denominations took shape around these lines. The Church of God in Christ under Charles Harrison Mason, a largely Black body, and the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) kept the Holiness pattern. The Assemblies of God, organized at Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1914 by mostly white ministers, took the Finished Work view, and in 1916 adopted a Trinitarian Statement of Fundamental Truths, after which a large share of its ministers left for Oneness groups. The United Pentecostal Church International, formed in 1945, became the largest Oneness body.

Influence

The racial unity of Azusa did not last. Within a decade most American Pentecostal denominations had separated along racial lines, and the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America, founded in 1948, was an all-white body. It dissolved itself in 1994 at a meeting in Memphis, where white leaders repented of racism and a new interracial Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches of North America was formed (Memphis Miracle, secondary).

Pentecostal experience then spread far beyond Pentecostal churches. From around 1960 the Charismatic renewal brought tongues and healing into mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic parishes without requiring people to leave them, and in the 1980s the “Third Wave” associated with John Wimber brought spiritual gifts into evangelical churches that did not accept the Pentecostal doctrine of a second baptism (Power Evangelism, 1986, Archive.org). The Word of Faith teaching of Kenneth Hagin and others grew partly on Pentecostal soil and became the main source of the Prosperity Gospel.

The largest change was geographic. Pentecostalism became one of the fastest-growing forms of Christianity in the twentieth century, mostly in the global South. A 2006 Pew survey of ten countries found Pentecostals and charismatics (“renewalists”) made up a majority of the population in Guatemala and large shares in Brazil, Kenya and the Philippines (Pew, Spirit and Power). Harvey Cox, who had once predicted the decline of religion, argued in Fire from Heaven (1995, Archive.org) that Pentecostalism was reshaping religion worldwide.

Key ideas and contributors

Baptism in the Holy Spirit. The central Pentecostal claim is that the Spirit, who indwells every believer at conversion, can also come upon a believer in a further experience that gives power for witness and service. The pattern is drawn from Acts, where believers who already followed Jesus receive the Spirit later: at Pentecost (Acts 2:1–4), in Samaria (Acts 8:14–17) and at Ephesus (Acts 19:1–6). Pentecostals call this doctrine “subsequence.”

Tongues as initial evidence. Classical Pentecostal bodies teach that speaking in tongues is the first physical sign of Spirit baptism. The Church of God (Cleveland) affirms “speaking with other tongues as the Spirit gives utterance” as “the initial evidence of the baptism in the Holy Ghost” (Declaration of Faith), and the Assemblies of God makes the same claim in its Statement of Fundamental Truths. The argument rests on the fact that in the Acts accounts where a sign is named, it is tongues (Acts 10:44–46). Pentecostals distinguish this sign, which they expect for every Spirit-baptized believer, from the ongoing gift of tongues that Paul says not all have.

The gifts continue. Against Cessationism, Pentecostals hold that all the Spiritual Gifts listed in the New Testament, including prophecy, healing and miracles, are for the church in every age. This is the position the vault calls Continuationism, which Pentecostals share with charismatics and Third Wave evangelicals while adding the doctrine of subsequence.

Healing in the atonement. Most Pentecostal bodies teach that Christ’s death provides for bodily healing as well as forgiveness. The Church of God states that “divine healing is provided for all in the atonement” (Declaration of Faith), reading Isaiah 53:4–5 through Matthew 8:16–17 and practising prayer and anointing for the sick (James 5:14–15). In Pew’s survey, majorities of Pentecostals in every country studied said they had experienced or witnessed divine healing.

The full gospel and the last days. Early Pentecostals summarized their message as the “full gospel”: Jesus as Savior, Sanctifier (in the Holiness version), Baptizer in the Spirit, Healer and coming King. They read the outpouring of tongues as the “latter rain” of Joel’s prophecy, a sign of the end, and most held a premillennial view of Last Things. That urgency drove an unusually fast missionary expansion.

Experience and ministry from below. Pentecostalism gave ministry to people with little formal training, and from the start it gave a platform to women as evangelists, missionaries and pastors; Aimee Semple McPherson founded the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel in the 1920s. Walter Hollenweger’s The Pentecostals (English 1972, Archive.org) argued that its oral, participatory worship, more than its doctrines, explains its spread among the poor.

Historians who shaped the account given here include Vinson Synan (The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States, 1971, Archive.org) and Allan Anderson, whose An Introduction to Pentecostalism (2004, Archive.org) stressed that the movement had several centers of origin outside America, including revivals in Wales, India and Korea, and was never only an export from Azusa Street.

Key controversies

Cessationism. The oldest objection is that the miraculous gifts ended with the apostles. B. B. Warfield’s Counterfeit Miracles (1918, Archive.org) argued that miracles authenticated the apostles and their message and stopped when that work was done, and it remained the standard Reformed case against Pentecostal claims. John MacArthur renewed the attack in Charismatic Chaos (1992, Archive.org) and Strange Fire (2013, Archive.org), charging that the movement as a whole elevates experience over Scripture and that its prophecies and healings do not match the New Testament gifts. Continuationist evangelicals replied, among them Jack Deere, a former Dallas Seminary professor who changed his mind (Surprised by the Power of the Spirit, 1993, Archive.org). Many cessationists also cite 1 Corinthians 13:8–10, while continuationists answer that “the perfect” there means the return of Christ.

Subsequence. Many evangelicals who accept spiritual gifts still reject a second baptism. James D. G. Dunn’s Baptism in the Holy Spirit (1970, Archive.org) argued that in the New Testament Spirit baptism is part of becoming a Christian, so that conversion, water baptism and receiving the Spirit belong to one event. The Samaria and Ephesus stories, on this reading, are special cases tied to the gospel crossing new boundaries. Gordon Fee, himself an Assemblies of God scholar, argued that narrative passages in Acts cannot by themselves establish a normative doctrine (Gospel and Spirit, 1991, Archive.org), which undercut the usual Pentecostal argument from Acts even as he defended the gifts. Pentecostal scholars such as Roger Stronstad (The Charismatic Theology of St. Luke, 1984, Archive.org) and Robert Menzies (The Development of Early Christian Pneumatology with Special Reference to Luke-Acts, 1991, Archive.org) answered that Luke has his own theology of the Spirit as empowerment for mission, distinct from Paul’s.

Initial evidence. Even inside the movement, the tongues-as-evidence rule is disputed. Critics point to 1 Corinthians 12:30 (“Do all speak with tongues?”) and note that Acts does not record tongues in every account of receiving the Spirit. Many charismatics and many Pentecostals outside North America treat tongues as a common sign but not a required one, and a 2006 Pew survey of ten countries found that in six of them more than four in ten pentecostals said they never speak or pray in tongues (Pew Research Center, Spirit and Power).

The Trinity. The Oneness split remains the deepest doctrinal division. The United Pentecostal Church teaches that “Jesus Christ is God manifested in flesh,” that baptism must be “in the name of Jesus Christ,” and that tongues are “the initial sign” of receiving the Spirit (UPCI, Our Beliefs), and many Oneness churches treat both as necessary for full salvation. Trinitarian Pentecostals, along with the wider church, regard Oneness theology as a form of the ancient modalist error rejected in the debates over God and Trinity and point to the threefold name in Matthew 28:19; Oneness writers answer with Acts 2:38.

Prosperity and healing claims. Critics inside and outside the movement argue that healing in the atonement easily becomes a promise that faithful believers will always be healthy and wealthy. Pew found majorities of Pentecostals in nine of ten countries agreeing that God grants material prosperity to believers with enough faith. Classical Pentecostal bodies have distanced themselves from the Word of Faith teaching, but the line between the two is blurred in practice, especially in Africa and Latin America. The vault’s notes on the Prosperity Gospel and Wealth and Blessing cover this dispute.

Race and the meaning of Azusa. Historians still argue over who founded the movement. Older white denominational histories gave Parham the credit for the doctrine; later scholarship has stressed Seymour, the interracial character of Azusa, and the Black church roots of Pentecostal worship. The speed with which the movement resegregated, and the decades before the 1994 Memphis meeting, are read by many as the movement’s most serious failure of its own founding vision.

What remains unresolved

Pentecostals agree that the Spirit’s power is available now, in experience, for ordinary believers. They do not agree on how that experience relates to conversion, whether tongues must accompany it, or even, in the Oneness case, on the doctrine of God. Their critics divide too: cessationists reject the gifts, while evangelicals like Dunn accept the gifts but reject the doctrine of a second baptism. As the movement’s center has moved to the global South, its future shape is likely to be decided less by North American denominational statements than by churches in Nigeria, Brazil, Korea and China, many of which belong to no classical Pentecostal body at all.