Pentecostalism

From Philosopedia

PENTECOST

See entry for Holy Ghost.

Pentecostal Churches

In the United States, the Assemblies of God organization numbers over 2,400,000. Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, which represents an estimated 1,000,000, is at 3939 Meadows Drive, Indianapolis, Indiana 46205. The United Pentecostal Church International, which numbers an estimated 700,000, is at 8855 Dunn Road, Hazelwood, Missouri.

Pentecostalism

A contemporary movement in religion, Pentecostalism is based on direct personal appeal and power rather than dependence upon polity and doctrines. The Pentecostalism which is found in the United States began with such ministers as Charles Fox Parham, who preached to his Topeka congregation in 1901 that speaking in tongues was objective evidence of baptism in the Spirit, and William Joseph Seymour, a self-educated African American who in 1906 said that if people prayed with sufficient fervor God would send “a new Pentecost,” one like the miracle described in Acts.

Pentecost, a word which derives from the Greek, is a name for the Jewish Feast of Weeks, which falls on the fiftieth day after Passover. Worldwide, it is growing rapidly, gaining an estimated twenty million members a year. The Yoido Full Gospel (Pentecostal) Church in Seoul, South Korea, has 800,000 members. The various Pentecostal groups in 1994 were estimated to total as many as 410 million.

Harvey Cox, in Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-first Century (1994), distinguishes between Pentecostalism and fundamentalism: “[They are not the same. Fundamentalists attach such unique authority to the letter of the verbally inspired Scripture that they are suspicious of the Pentecostals’ stress on the immediate experience of the Spirit of God. . . . [W]hile the beliefs of the fundamentalists, and of many other religious groups, are enshrined in formal theological systems, those of Pentecostalism are embedded in testimonies, ecstatic speech, and bodily movement. But it is a theology, a full-blown religious cosmos, an intricate system of symbols that respond to the perennial questions of human meaning and values.”

“Speaking in tongues” (glossolalia) is observed at meetings. In 1906 after Seymour and his followers began speaking in tongues, which they held is a sign of the coming of the end of the world as predicted in the Book of Revelation, San Francisco was shaken a few days later by the great earthquake. Seymour, who had been shunned by most up until this time, now found himself surrounded by flocks of blacks and whites who uncharacteristically joined together despite that era’s racial separation. “God was now assembling a new and racially inclusive people to glorify his name and to save a Jim Crow nation lost in sin,” Cox wrote. Although whites soon split off into their own congregations, Cox found that Pentecostalism is “one of the least segregated forms of Christianity” in a religion which allegedly preaches brotherhood.

Oral Roberts in the 1960s encouraged a Pentecostal revival organized by faith-healing. The formal origin of the new Pentecostalism or charismatic movement is traced to Dennis Bennett, an Episcopal minister whose methods influenced many Protestant denominations, the Roman Catholic church, and, to a lesser extent, Eastern Orthodox communions.

Another type of Pentecostalism consists of sects which adopt or tolerate beliefs and practices such as ancestor worship and polygamy. These are found mostly among non-whites in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

Pentecostalism is just one more form of a supernaturalistic religion to rationalists or freethinkers, who nevertheless are impressed by the growth of the movement among the poor, the dispossessed, the less education, and minorities.

(See entry for Tongues.)

{S. M. Burgess and G. B. McGee, eds., Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (1988); CE; Dan Wakefield, “Speaking in Tongues,” The Nation, 23 January 1995}