Pentecost and Pentecostalism

Pentecost is a feast of joy in the Lord’s renewal of His people’s spirits and His whole creation through the giving of the Torah. As the 16th Century Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel notes, “Man’s connection to Torah represents the fruit of the soul God placed within, and its ability to produce spiritual bounty … Without Torah, he remains in that state; but once he receives Torah, he realizes his potential as adama to bring forth bountiful produce.” The feast of Shavuot observed among the Israelites observed the connection between humanity and the creation, and how Torah—the wisdom of God that was the way to life—rescued the world from the futility of mere toil.

As it was commanded in Exodus, Shavuot was a feast of early-harvest that was paired with a feast of late-harvest late in the year: “And you shall observe the Feast of Weeks, of the firstfruits of wheat harvest, and the Feast of Ingathering at the year’s end.” Shavuot required the offering of two loaves of bread made from the wheat harvested just before summertime, and became one of the three pilgrim feasts that required the Israelites to journey to Jerusalem to make that offering. As they gathered, the people were to celebrate the firstfruits of the Lord’s renewal of the creation, in anticipation of the harvests of wine and oil that were to follow: “Also on the day of the firstfruits, when you bring a new grain offering to the Lord at your Feast of Weeks, you shall have a holy convocation. You shall do no customary work.”

As Israel and Judah began to face judgment for their rejection of Torah and enter into their respective captivities, the prophets began to speak of the Lord’s redemption of the people and their renewal in their Land through the language of Shavuot. As Isaiah writes: You have multiplied the nation and increased its joy; They rejoice before You according to the joy of harvest, as men rejoice when they divide the spoil. For You have broken the yoke of his burden [...].” The joy of harvest as a sign of renewal, however, was forsaken by the people, as Jeremiah writes, “They do not say in their heart, ‘Let us now fear the Lord our God, Who gives rain, both the former and the latter, in its season. He reserves for us the appointed weeks of the harvest.’” This forsaking of the joy in the Law of the Lord and the life it gave to all things resulted in a time of dearth, of the Promised Land being made fallow for a generation. And yet the Lord promised renewal to it through Joel: “And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. And also on My menservants and on My maidservants I will pour out My Spirit in those days.”

The coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, fifty days after the Resurrection of Christ, is the fulfillment of that promise of renewal. This is why St. Peter cites the passage from Joel at the outset of his great sermon to those gathered in Jerusalem. The Torah had been made flesh in the God-man, Jesus Christ, and through His Paschal victory the Spirit had come to give new life by ingrafting the Torah in the hearts of the disciples as the firstfruits of what was to become a renewal of the whole creation. As St. Paul writes to the Romans: “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body.” The mission of the Church is to undertake the fruitful labor that the Spirit makes possible until the great in-gathering at the end of the age, when the harvest is closed and the Lord of the harvest sifts the good fruit from the bad and gathers the good to Himself. As the Lord spoke in His parable: “So it will be at the end of this age. The Son of Man will send out His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and those who practice lawlessness, and will cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”

Renewal is a gift the Spirit is always giving to the Church. As the Israelites sojourned in the wilderness and experienced the waxing and waning of their zeal to walk in the way of the Lord, to attain to the Promised Land, so it is with the pilgrim-disciples of Christ. We are given in the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost the promise of the In-Gathering of the Spirit at the end of the age, which is all the reason we need to live in hope and patience. As individual disciples can experience a wavering in that hope, so the Church in different seasons and in different places can experience a falling back from the call of that hope. When that happens, we are in need of renewal, which the Spirit is always willing to give afresh when we seek it with humility. That renewal will always return us to the call of Christ to become disciples again, to return to the fullness of life in His Body, and to respond to the demands of love for God and neighbor. The renewal of the Spirit always coincides with the redemption of Christ. Word and Spirit are always in unity; the Son and the Spirit are always on the same team.

It is possible, though, for the Spirit’s renewal to be sought in isolation, to be viewed as an unbounded spiritual energy that is detached from the incarnational entity of Christ’s Body, the Church. The history of the Church, from even the earliest times, reveals this tendency. As we read in St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians (especially I Corinthians 12-14), the Spirit’s gifts of renewal exist for the creation and flourishing of the whole Church, not for the transforming of individual Christians into charismatic gurus. Already, as he notes in chapter twelve, there are so-called prophets who claim to speak in the Spirit, but who speak lies about Christ. Later, St. John finds occasion in his Epistles to correct a misappropriation of the Spirit’s role in the Church, emphasizing that the Spirit will never say anything that diverts from the mission of Jesus as Lord and Christ (I John 4). The Scriptural call to ‘test the spirits’ reveals that there are deceptive parodies of the genuine life the Spirit gives, which attempt to draw disciples away from life again into captivity to death.

As the Church’s life unfolded over the centuries, there were ample opportunities to ‘test the spirits’ as so-called renewal movements proved, over time, to be departures from the Faith of Jesus Christ. One of the earliest was the Montanist movement. Under the direction of Montanus, a former pagan priest who showed an early gift of prophecy, he soon declared the established churches of Phrygia in the 2nd Century to be too soft, and so urged Christians to leave them to join a hyper-ascetical movement under his own prophetic giftings, which he deemed as superior to the Scriptures and the apostolic tradition. Another troubling example of this tendency to co-opt the Spirit’s gifts was during the time of the Reformation when a faction of Lutheran disciples under the leadership of Thomas Müntzer began to discern that the Spirit was leading them into a violent political revolution against their rulers, leading to the ill-fated Peasants’ War in which many were killed and the Lutheran movement’s credibility suffered.

At the same time that there were rampant misappropriations of the Church’s spiritual life, however, one can observe ample evidence of the Spirit’s renewal of the Church in other places. The 13th Century saw the life of St. Francis of Assisi, whose charismatic gifts flourished under his obedience to the Church, which exerted a healthy tension in places where the Church had grown lax or inert. Similarly, the 14th Century saw the life of Bl. Julian of Norwich, whose mystical experiences only intensified her experience of the historical, sacramental life of the English Church, edifying clergy and laity alike as she made herself literally occupy the architecture of her parish. Even among the Reformers, whose skepticism toward the historical Church was an open fact, there were grounded examples of the Spirit’s renewal. We can look to the Moravians of the 17th Century, for example, who sought to renew the Lutheran movement through a call to devotion and holiness precisely where there had once been calls to take up swords contrary to Jesus’ explicit commands.

We can also observe how charismatic renewal movements (those based on the charisms or ‘gifts’ of the Spirit) can coincide and link up with evangelical movements. Specifically, the Wesleyan renewal movement gives us examples of both historical charismatic tendencies. In Methodism, after John Wesley, we can observe a spiritual continuity with the Moravian pietist movement of the previous century, a kind of holiness movement in England. In the revivalism of Charles Wesley, we can observe what became a moderate leaning toward the Montanist attitude of forming communities outside of established churches as a prophetic witness to them, and sometimes against them. In the second and third generations that followed in the revivalist strand, one can observe the full resuscitation of Montanism that thrived on the outskirts of town, on colonial frontiers, and eventually in urban centers. Wherever there was impatience with seasons of aridity, perplexity, or laxity in the established church, one could find in its orbit a kind of charismatic Montanism. At best this would attempt to vivify the churches; at worst it would call members away to join the real Christianity that was taking place on the margins.

By the end of the 19th Century, the new Montanism was detectable in the end-times preaching of figures like John Nelson Darby (one of our Anglican brethren), who produced increasingly colorful apocalyptic sermons about the nearness of what he termed ‘the rapture,’ a secret and spiritual return of Christ that would vindicate the real Christians who were scattered among the dying institutional churches. On a different front, by the end of that same century, holiness movements began to spring up, and specifically around social issues like temperance. The spiritual energy of charismatic Christians proved to be a potent driver of social justice initiatives, all the while also proving to be the locus of insular, moralistic communities seeking purity from the world.

Historically, it is hard to pinpoint the precise origins of what we now call “pentecostalism.” As historian William Kay notes, pentecostal communities did not seem all that interested in documenting their own origins or activities, perhaps as a function of their spontaneous and anti-institutional impulses. What does emerge more clearly are the tendencies that characterized communities attempting to revive the moral and spiritual purity of the Church at the time of Pentecost. Church historians call this ‘the foursquare’ Gospel comprising four theological emphases through four focal roles of Jesus Christ: 1) Christ as Savior, 2) Christ as Baptizer in the Holy Spirit, 3) Christ as Healer, and 4) Christ as Soon-Coming King. Arising from these focal points in the Gospel, Pentecostals define the authenticity of spirituality through an experience of conversion (about which there is a powerful testimony of transformation), through the manifestation of charismatic gifts as a sign of baptism in the Holy Spirit (especially the gift of speaking in tongues), through the exercise of miraculous healing ministries, and through a constant sense of the imminent end of the world, ushering believers into spiritual purity with God.

As was the case with evangelical fundamentalism, the Pentecostal movement found a ready home in Southern California in the 20th Century. Specifically, the Azusa Street Revival began in 1906 under the leadership of William J. Seymour, himself a student of Charles Fox Parham, who had popularized the theological idea that baptism in the Holy Spirit was causally connected with speaking in tongues. From 1906 to 1912, the meetings held on Azusa Street drew up to 1,500 people per day, who reported instances of speaking in known languages previously unknown by the speaker, of the phenomena of glosolalia, or the speaking in an unknown, purportedly angelic language, and of healings from sicknesses. The Azusa Street Revival became the pattern for numerous charismatic communities in the subsequent century. The largest group that formed was the Assemblies of God, directly after the Revival subsided. My own exposure to it came in the early 2000s in the form of the Vineyard Movement, which still spoke glowingly of Azusa Street as the ‘pentecost’ that inspired their ministry.

Pentecostalism is a tendency that strives toward spiritual renewal, but at a pace or intensity that tends to sacrifice the grounding influences of tradition, and even Scripture. If the problem of traditionalism is that it uses tradition as a rigid impediment to self-sacrificial change in the face of new circumstances, the challenge of Pentecostalism can be its tendency to retreat into a vague sense of the spiritual in order to evade church authority, church discipline, and commitment to the slow and often obscure work of ministry over generations. It entertains the possibility of re-birthing the Church on more ideal terms than previously; revivalism, after all, presumes that a thing is dead and in need of being born again. Pentecostalism tends toward being ahistorical in this way; it does not see itself as participating in the same fabric of the Church throughout the ages, imagining for itself an unmediated spiritual connection directly with God.

Pentecost is part of the DNA of the Church. It is why we celebrate it as a feast every year. The power of Pentecost is mediated to us through the Church that has come before us. As I explored in my post on Confirmation, Pentecost is mediated through the sacrament of the laying on of the bishop’s hands, by which we receive the vocation and giftings of the Holy Spirit for the work of ministry and the building up of the Body of Christ. As a feast, though, Pentecost is ensconced in the logic of the sacred year and its sense of time based in salvation. As an outpouring of the Spirit, Pentecost is a giving of life that has the incarnational quality of Christ’s own life. The Spirit is always reliably to be found in the sacraments, ministries, and gifts of the visible Church.

As Anglicans, we believe in the Spirit’s living presence among us, but also in the orderliness of the Spirit who sanctifies and perfects us, but never through disorderly or chaotic means. The Spirit, at times, surprises the Church with prophets and manifestations of His presence that elicit something that has grown dormant in our communities. Sometimes, we get to participate in it. If we do, it is always to the end of turning us back to the life of the Church, not to the fragmentation of the Church. The Spirit is working out the Lord Jesus’ high priestly prayer “that they may be one, as you, O Father, and I are one.”

Helpful Resource:

Pentecostalism, A Very Short Introduction. By William Kay.