Pentecostalism

[Music] In this lecture, we're looking at the rise of Pentecostalism as it came into its full flowering in the early 1900s and its impact on the 20th-century church.

The interesting thing about Pentecostalism is that it is both unique and very familiar to us. It's unique in the fact that it really comes out of nowhere, at least in terms of the popular understanding of the rise of the Pentecostals, as well as within Pentecostalism and the charismatic renewal movements. Their own self-identity is often very much wrapped up in the idea that they have recovered something new and that the movement itself is really there in the 20th century. So Pentecostalism is unique; it's worth pointing out there were no Pentecostals on the Mayflower, there were no Pentecostals that signed the Declaration of Independence, and there were no Pentecostals in the Civil War. Pentecostalism, then, and the charismatic movement that comes out of it, really does reside in the 20th century, and so we can affirm that it is a unique thing.

However, for all of its newness, for all of its uniqueness to the 20th-century experience, Pentecostalism still feels very familiar to anyone who is at least aware of, or who participates in, the Christian church today. And they are familiar, of course, because they're so numerous today. Pentecostals and charismatics number about 500 million Christians around the world, and that is to say nothing of those who are sympathetic to the charismatic perspective on the Christian life, though they themselves might not identify as charismatic. Of the 500 million, 279 are Pentecostal, and we'll get into the distinction between Pentecostal and charismatic here in a minute. But with those numbers, the Pentecostal and charismatic movement and those who identify as adherents to this brand of Christianity, to this brand of evangelicalism—this means a staggeringly large number of those who are Christian in the world identify in some way as being charismatic or Pentecostal.

And so what we're going to do in this lecture is talk about how Pentecostalism came about; what were the impulses and the threads that led to the Pentecostal movement? Then, what transitioned into the charismatic movement? What were the changes there? And then we're going to say a few things about the nomenclature and how we describe all these various events.

Now we need to be very clear here: describing Pentecostalism's history is a great deal easier than trying to describe Pentecostalism or the charismatic movement today. As we just mentioned, trying to sum up 500 million different people around the world with different languages and different instincts is simply impossible. There is nothing that unifies them necessarily other than their commitment to some of the essentials of—of gifts, emotionalism, speaking in tongues at times, praying for and seeking after miracles and divine healings, and a number of different things. But here's the thing: you can find all types of folks that break every mold that you're going to place on top of Pentecostalism or the charismatic faith. Frankly, just as you think you have a single definition, well, there comes along another group or another person who simply doesn't live by those standards. So what we're doing here is discussing more of the historical backdrop—how these things come about and what were the principal players and the main themes in the history of the Pentecostal and charismatic movements.

Now we should begin with some definitions. What we're going to do is we're going to talk about the three waves, or as I'm going to say potentially the fourth wave, of the charismatic or Pentecostal movements. And then what we're going to do is we're going to go through them specifically and put some feet under them and talk about the individuals and the groups that are involved with each of these waves. But we should say at the outset that we have to realize that because historians and Pentecostals themselves describe these three different waves—describe these different brackets of the movement itself—that should tell you that there is a great deal of diversity within the heritage and the history of Pentecostalism and charismatic faith. Trying to say that, well, all charismatics are this, whether or not you agree with it or not, or that Pentecostals are this—again, very, very difficult in the context of the historical record. Because what we have here are a number of different impulses, a number of different instincts, and things go in different directions. So just a word of caution: we have to be careful here. What we're doing is providing some nomenclature and some structure to a very amorphous movement, but that should not be read as ironclad, straight-jacket systems, as if any of these folks just simply will not agree. Three waves does not mean three denominations; rather, it means three unique periods of time where we see an outflowing of Pentecostal faith and then later the charismatic faith.

Now you probably realized at this point that I keep distinguishing between Pentecostal and charismatic. Well, that is actually part of the story you see, because in the first wave, what we have is the wave that we call Classic Pentecostalism. Classic Pentecostalism is right there in the early 1900s. It's a move that again gets going in fits and starts. It began predominantly with preaching on the book of Acts, the focus on Pentecost—hence the name Pentecostalism—and a desire born in part by the realities of the modern world and the Darwinian revolution. Certain Christians began to feel that something had been lost, that they needed to recover the miraculous and the powerful message that we see in the book of Acts.

Now this raises an interpretive issue, of course. In the history of the church, the church had, by and large, seen the book of Acts not as prescriptive but as descriptive; that is to say, the church looked at the book of Acts as the story of how the church itself unfolded through the ministry of the Apostles and the eyewitnesses. Now obviously they don't separate the church from the book of Acts, but you don't see a movement throughout most of church history for people to apply the book of Acts in their life, in their day, as something that is mandatory. It is a description of what was happening in the first century, not a prescription as to what should happen in every century thereafter. So the first wave is again very focused in the book of Acts; it's typically focused on revivalism, which we'll say more about in just a second; it's also very much Evangelical.

The unique feature of Pentecostalism in this first wave, though, in the early 1900s, is that these are the years of *Plessy v. Ferguson* and the Jim Crow laws, and we're going to look at those features within the story of the American Church in our next lecture on the Black church and the Civil Rights Movement. But you have to realize that Pentecostalism comes within a world that is very much racially divided, and this is important to note because Pentecostalism is radically desegregated. In fact, many of the initial attacks on Pentecostalism, particularly with Azusa Street, were voiced not so much by principal theologians or pastors, but by the news outlets and the media who beat them up because there was a Black pastor leading a mixed congregation, and this, of course, was seen as unseemly and, in some cases, against the law. So we're going to tell that story more in-depth here in a second, but we have to realize that in the first wave, it's very difficult at times to parse out the attack on Pentecostalism by some as whether it was biblically motivated or motivated by racism. The important feature of this movement again is that it mostly reaches out to poor, illiterate, or undereducated folks from a wide variety of backgrounds and ethnicities and languages, and that this first Pentecostal movement was, you might say, an extension—and this is important—an extension of the ongoing unfolding of the world after the Great Awakenings movement. And this is something that's frankly not always understood or appreciated. The fact of the matter is that the speaking of tongues or ecstatic worship—really emotional revivalism—is not something that starts in the 20th century. It did not start with Azusa Street, as we've seen over the years, over the decades, in fact, going back to the mid-1700s. There are already very emotional, pretty ecstatic utterances and expressions of a revivalistic spirit within the New World. This is only intensified in the Second Great Awakening with the ministry of the Wesleyan and the Methodists and the Baptists. Frankly, if you go back and look at the accounts of the Second Great Awakening, it's very difficult at times to tell the difference between those revivals and some of the things that you see in the first wave of Pentecostalism. So we have to stop saying that Pentecostalism merely began in the 20th century; rather, what Pentecostalism is in this first wave is an intensification of some of those revivalistic elements that had been part and parcel of the American Church experience almost from the very beginning, certainly ever since the dissenting groups came over and began to take root here in America. So one of the—we'll talk about in a second—is that Azusa Street actually looks very much like a Quaker service; it did not happen in a vacuum. So that's the first wave.

Now the first wave is very much maligned, very much attacked; it is not embraced by the mainline, more established denominations; in fact, it is very much shunned. Now, by and large, this first wave of Pentecostalism occurs in areas where those old mainline denominations really don't have a great deal of presence, so the animosity is more in print, you might say, and you can only imagine that, in particular, those back on the East Coast hearing stories of these revivals in LA and in Texas and other places, really let their minds wander as to what was going on.

The second wave of this movement happens a number of decades after, and it is in this second wave that we have what we call the charismatic renewal movement. The charismatic renewal movement is called that by historians because what we're dealing with here is not a more structured, organizational movement as we see in the first wave, and again we're going to uncover a bit of that about the first wave in a minute and look at some of those denominations. But what happens in the second wave is you begin to see predominantly white denominations, mainline denominations, begin to experience some of the same things that we saw in the Pentecostal awakenings several decades before. You begin to see it in university settings and theological traditions of all kinds. What happens here is really a bridge. Then the difference between a Pentecostal and a charismatic is really a matter of where their membership, you might say, is. One is a Pentecostal when you are a part of a Pentecostal denomination where the entire ethos and structure of your Christian life and your worship and the church that you attend is purposely Pentecostal. Now it may not have that name, but it is certainly part of a denominational structure. Those who are charismatic, though, very often are people who will attend any number of different churches, even in a number of cases Roman Catholic churches, and yet they will embody and take into their own identity some of these elements that we see in the Pentecostal movement. So we see Lutherans and Presbyterians and Methodists and Baptists all experiencing some level of this charismatic outpouring. So when we say charismatic and we talk about the second wave, what we're talking about again are the main lines, the major denominations, and we're looking at charismatic faith here more as an additive—not to be pejorative, but an additive—to what people already were. Most of these people will remain theologically and ecclesiologically—that is to say, their position on the Bible, on their faith, on theology, and on what church they attend—may remain entirely the same, but what has changed is they are beginning to embody and embrace some of these Pentecostal ideals and some of these more emotional responses that do or do not come with spiritual gifts.

Now one of the main differences that you can use to remember the difference is that because Pentecostalism, the first wave, comes out of the renewal and revival movements, the Holiness movements of the 1800s, very often when you see a Pentecostal church, particularly in the first half of the 20th century, they look very much like a Holiness church. You have, for example, prohibitions against makeup; very much looks at times like a fundamentalist, Holiness-type experience. And in that sense, it's not entirely different from what we saw again throughout the 1800s. It's an intensification of those movements for sure, but the Pentecostal movement did not drop out of thin air; rather, it is part of the unfolding of the Holiness movement. When you get to the charismatic renewal movement, though, you may or may not have people who look like they participate in a Holiness tradition. They could again look very much like a mainline person; they could be egalitarian; they could be well-educated—all these sorts of things—but they have embraced the charismatic renewal movement, or at least some of these elements, into their own identity. But because they are tied to other denominations and churches and traditions, they don't look, in the charismatic movement or the renewal movement, very much like the Holiness movements of the first wave.

Thirdly, there is what we call the Neo-charismatic movement, which arose in the 1980s and carries on down until today. This is the third wave; it's also called the wave of signs and wonders. Now it's important to note: most of us, if we are not charismatic or if we were not raised Pentecostal, our only exposure to this movement comes from this third wave. It comes from Neo-charismatic expressions that again have been around since the 1980s. Well, from a purely historical lens, that is a bit like trying to describe Luther and Lutheranism in the 16th century by attending a German Lutheran church in Lake Walloon; it just simply is not going to be the case. You have a great deal of change that has happened now throughout the 20th century; that is a pretty rapid change that happens. You go from Holiness movements—very much no makeup, very much about sanctification, repentance, and the outpouring of the gifts—to frankly some of the more excessive things that we do see in the third wave: things like TV evangelists, people that seem to have gone the opposite direction from the Holiness movements in terms of their makeup use, and those who began to tout not just the desire to live out the book of Acts, but a rather excessive, at times, appeal to the miraculous, to the ecstatic, and in particular to the frequent predictions about the coming of Christ. But here, too, even in the third wave, it still is very much an unfolding, or even you might say a further intensifying, of the revival spirit that we saw all the way back in the 1800s. It is very modern; it's very showy; it has new things that were never there before—the ability to reach around the world with your message, these types of things—but the signs and wonders movement, the third wave, changes some of the elements at the core of what it meant to be Pentecostal, and we'll describe that here in just a minute. So those are the three main waves.

Now one of the things I want to talk about just briefly is the fact that some historians have noticed what they call a fourth wave. Now, unfortunately, we're still in this wave, so it's a bit difficult to determine all of its limits and boundaries and definitions. But there has arisen within those who are Pentecostal and charismatic an increased desire for intellectual credibility, thoughtfulness, the writing of books that are more than just practical memoirs—a real substantive change that we're seeing in Pentecostal and charismatic-influenced universities, in academic settings. You're seeing a maturing, in some ways, a bringing together of head and heart within those who are charismatic and Pentecostal that had not really been part of the movements from the very beginning. Now that's not to say that they were dumb; that's not what we're saying. What we're saying is that there's an increased thoughtfulness, an increased deepening of what their tradition is, and historians have begun to talk about the fourth wave, but again not everyone agrees with this and not everyone knows what this even means, but there are changes afoot. Okay, so let's go through these three waves and tell the story of the Pentecostal and charismatic movements.

First and foremost, it's too often said, and it's said in just about every textbook possible, that the Pentecostal faith gets going in Azusa Street. Azusa Street happens, and lo and behold, we have Pentecostals springing up everywhere. Well, the fact of the matter is that's not the case. It's not the case for two reasons. One, we've already said these movements, these revivals, the ecstatic experiences had been there for at least a century. So in general, we can't talk about Azusa Street as the kind of chasm that separates this new Pentecostalism from everything else that had gone before. The other thing is that Azusa Street and those involved there had learned their faith, had learned this theology from other people. Now there are inklings here and there, even as far back as the 1700s, of folks who get very much wrapped up in ecstatic, emotional worship. There are occurrences in Wales, over in the UK. There was a man by the name of Edward Irving, for example, who lived from 1792 to 1834, who was a bit rowdy, and he talked a great deal about Holy Spirit healings and these types of things. But we don't want to create too long of a genealogy here; we have to be careful. There are folks that are in different pockets of both the UK and in America, but that doesn't mean that they're all connected. But in terms of the rise of Pentecostalism in the context of the states, there's a man by the name of Charles Parham. Charles lived from 1873 to 1929, and Charles really is the godfather of the Pentecostal faith. In his early years and his formative years, he had actually married a Quaker, and for a number of years this was his context. Now the Quakers, of course, were very much a part of the revival movements, and really their worship had a certain number of contours to it—for example, anti-authoritarianism. There is no single pastor that runs a Quaker church—that took away some of the boundaries that you might have found in another church to something like Pentecostalism. Well, Charles eventually began to ministry of his own, and he looks very much in his early ministry like any other revival preacher that had gone before him. He preaches revival; he preaches emotionalism; but he does two things that are very unique. First and foremost, Charles begins to minister to the poor and the undereducated, in particular; he ministers to poor African Americans, now freed after the Civil War. Now we have to be careful here; he does do this with a certain amount of Christian grace. However, Charles was also a firm believer in some rather, let's just say, interesting ideas about the creation of whites over against every other race. He actually believed that on the sixth day God created all the races except for the whites, and that on the eighth day, I guess he felt like there needed to be another day tacked on, but on the eighth day, Charles believed that God created white people. Well, Charles has a certain bent towards ministering to those who are poor and African Americans in particular, but he's doing so obviously from a somewhat unique reading of Genesis, and eventually this will, by the way, lead to the fallout between the Azusa Street people and Charles. But Charles begins to minister in a pluralistic, multiethnic context; he is an equal opportunist; he also ministers for a while in Texas, where he ministers to Mexican-Americans and immigrants as well as to the white poor. So the first context that Charles brings is a multiethnic, mixed congregation experience in the context of his revivals. Now again, that's not entirely unique; rather, what you see again is an intensification of that ideal that had been there from the Second Great Awakening, with the Methodists and others doing a modest amount of mixing of different races in their congregations or in the big tent revivals. The other thing that Charles does is he connects the idea of speaking in tongues from the book of Acts, from Acts 2, with the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Now let's be clear here: historically in the church, those two things have been kept separate. The church had almost always embraced the idea that the baptism of the Spirit related to our salvation, that it related to the applying of the work of Christ. And Paul does this; he talks about in our conversion, when we came to Christ, the Spirit came into us and cried "Abba, Father," in numerous places in Paul and elsewhere in the New Testament. The coming of the Spirit is part and parcel to salvation and to conversion, and so to say that you were baptized in the Spirit was, for nearly the entirety of the church's history, synonymous with being born again or being converted. What Charles does is he takes the idea of the baptism of the Spirit; he takes that jargon, and he ties it up with a speaking of tongues. So you might say that he separated the work of Christ from the work of the Spirit. Christ has saved us; he has justified us; he certainly believes in that, but all the activity of the Spirit, Charles will say, is more in the context of worship, sanctification, and in particular things like speaking in tongues, etc.

Now I labor this point because if there's any Achilles' heel over the years, it's this one for both Pentecostal and charismatic renewal movements: it is an ambiguity as to where the work of Christ for salvation ends and what the role of the Spirit is. Separating the work of the Spirit from the application of Christ's work for us, for salvation, too often makes the Holy Spirit kind of isolated off to the side, and it makes him simply part of worship itself or only the speaking in tongues. And therefore, when passages that talk about how all Christians have the Spirit, when those are read in this interpretive model, too often what ends up happening is people say, well, if you don't speak in tongues, then you're not really Christian; then you haven't really taken that further step. Again, that's an Achilles' heel; that's a pitfall. I always say all traditions have pitfalls and accesses that they can fall into, and this tends to be one that we see in Pentecostalism or the charismatic movement: it's an ambiguity about the relationship of the work of Christ to the work of the Spirit. Well, Charles Parham is again a very influential man on his own, but he's most influential because he ends up being a teacher and then a discipler for William J. Seymour. William J. Seymour was a son of a former slave; he had contracted smallpox and lost the use of an eye. In fact, one of the slanderous things that the *LA Times* writes about his later ministry is that he is that one-eyed Negro who is leading a mixed congregation—very much a racist rant against him. But Seymour had heard of the teaching of Charles, and he went to study under him for a while. It then ends up in Texas where he is preaching revival and many of the same things that are very much used to from the Holiness tradition. Now it's important to note here: Seymour has fully bought into the ideas that Charles has espoused about speaking in tongues as the sign of actual faith, as a sign of being baptized in the Spirit—for all of us talk about it at this point—and he preached on it pretty much every week. Seymour, at this point, has not yet experienced these manifestations of the Spirit's work. Still, though, he gets a bit of a famous name for this in Texas, and there is a woman who has come to Texas to visit family, Julia Hutchins, and she attends his sermon, and then she goes back to her home city of LA out in California, and she tells the story of Seymour as this wonderful preacher who ought to be invited out to do a series of sermons and a revival there in LA. Seymour then is eventually invited, and actually Charles Parham pays some of the money to send him on. And so in 1906, William Seymour heads out to LA, and he begins to preach, and the response is overwhelming, but it is also met with racist resistance. Now the Azusa Street revivals, as they'll eventually be known, is a bit of a misnomer; it actually begins in a church, but eventually the elders of that church padlock the door and they say that his preaching is a bit extreme. The movement then moves to a house, and it becomes a Bible study, but there are numerous tales of hundreds of people trying to get into this house to be part of the preaching and the revivals that are associated with Seymour. As at some point along the way, Seymour does himself experience the speaking of tongues and the baptism of the Spirit that he sought and that he had preached so fervently. In the end, they do move to a ramshackle space that had been used for a number of manufacturing ventures there in the poor part of LA, and it's that third step that is at Azusa Street. And so the Azusa Street revivals last from 1906 to 1915, and they become really a national sensation; they make all kinds of—

Headlines and there are a number of different elements to it that people found crazy. But here's the thing: most of the people who came to chronicle these events, in particular the journalists—a man from the LA Times, for example—often themselves were not part of a holist tradition. So what they were witnessing was actually, again, pretty common in terms of the revivalism of their own day. But of course, this was also intensified to a certain extent. But to those who were coming from the outside looking in, this was crazy.

But also, as we've said, there is a racist element here because Seymour, in particular, very, very conscientiously embraces white leadership, white congregants, as well as others. And the mixture of those who are attending include Asians, Latinos, African-Americans, whites, poor, rich, and everything in between; it is a real melting pot, you might say. And so what happens just as frequently is the Isua Street revivals have a double whammy, you might say. Because, for example, the LA Times journalist who comes to chronicle this both does not know what he's looking at in terms of church revivals, but he's also scandalized by what he called "The Negro leadership of this movement that has all these different races mingling." He was appalled racially.

Well, the Isua Street revivals really is one of the epicenters, one of the touchstones of that first wave coming out of this and other impulses towards revivalism in the speaking in tongues. You have formed all types of different denominations: you have the Holiness Pentecostal Church formed in 1911, the Assemblies of God formed in 1914, the Four Square Gospel Movement—which is often very much synonymous, that name, the Four Square Gospel, with Pentecostalism—well, that movement was started in 1923. The Church of God of Prophecy, again a very influential, very large Pentecostal denomination today, got going as well in the early 1900s. So the first Pentecostal movement is very much tied up with racism, the Jim Crow laws, as well as an intensification of the Revival movement and the Holiness movement.

What happens though in the second wave, as we've already said, is you see whites in the elite and the wealthy around different parts of the country begin to manifest some of the same realities that we saw in places like Isua Street. So in 1960, for example, in Van Nuys, California, there is an Episcopal Church that experiences many of the same phenomena, and this too is covered by the Times and by Newsweek and other magazines. You also see major universities and the Ivy Leagues and the campus ministries on these campuses begin to experience many of the same things. So Intervarsity at Yale University is a great example; they began to experience the speaking in tongues as well as other manifestations of what was traditionally called Pentecostalism. But there are others. In the late 1960s, there are charismatic renewals spontaneously erupting in Notre Dame, a very Catholic bastion within America. And in fact, in 1968, there was held a Catholic Pentecostal conference, which, of course, is again the blending of the formerly Pentecostal world with the Catholic faith. Today we would call this the charismatic renewal within the Catholic faith. But again, you're seeing others take this on.

By the early '70s, that same conference, the Catholic Pentecostal conference, numbers tens of thousands who attend each year. Also in 1977, there was begun the Kansas City charismatic conference, a very, very huge and inclusive coming together of all types of different folks from Pentecostal denominations and from other denominations who had experienced charismatic renewal. So much so that by the midpoint of the 1970s, the AP, the Associated Press, reports that there is an estimated 10 million Pentecostal or charismatic Christians in America.

Well, what happens? Well, in the 1980s, again, the third wave gets going, and we have to be careful here because, again, most of us are going to think that what we see on television, the more excessive televangelist experiments within the charismatic or Pentecostal world, or even some of the scandals that were associated with the '80s and '90s, that this is somehow part and parcel with all of the third wave of the signs and wonders movement. And I just want to urge caution here: you can never define a movement by its failures or its excesses. Whatever tradition you come from, you wouldn't want anyone doing that for you, so it's best not to do it for our charismatic and Pentecostal brothers and sisters. But the signs and wonders movement in the '80s and '90s is a very influential pivot because what begins to happen increasingly is something that was seen in the Pentecostal and charismatic renewal movements as a positive—as the speaking in tongues and signs and wonders as a manifestation of Revival—increasingly becomes the mark of what a true Christian is, a true church is one that has miraculous signs at all times, or at least very frequently. And there becomes a more circling of the wagons for some within the third wave—not by all, by any means—and a real, again, intensification of certain elements that were there in the Pentecostal and charismatic movements, but now become more or less the defining hallmark of what it means to truly be Christian.

You also see arise, perhaps as a result of the end of the Cold War, a great number of end times prophecies, predictions, and these types of things. And of course, this continues on to the modern world. But you have to be careful here again; millenarianism, this idea of the imminent coming of Christ, goes back to where it goes back to—William Miller in the early 1800s. It did not spring out of nowhere. So in the end, the Pentecostal and the charismatic movement is not monolithic; there's a great deal of variety in it. And more importantly, those who self-consciously identify as charismatic or Pentecostal number some 500 million. But perhaps the most important story, and perhaps the most intriguing element of this movement in the 20th century, is the way that it has become almost omnipresent in the Christian world. There is virtually no denomination that has not felt some of this come in and leaven either the pastors or the laity within their churches. And that rapid change from being marginalized and scathingly talked about because they were racially mingled to then move from that to becoming a powerful influence on a number of different denominational fronts is a story that is truly staggering. [Music] [Music] [Music]