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Pentecostal Historiography and Global Christianity: Rethinking the Question of Origins
Dale T. Irvin
The Rupture of Pentecostal Historical Origins
Historians of modern Christianity have not always known what to do with the movement that has become known as Pentecostalism. Most have been content to locate it on the fringes of modern Protestant church his- tory, defining Pentecostals as radical evangelicals and sectarians whose histories are of marginal significance. The rapid growth of Pentecostal communities around the world over the course of the past century has challenged such historical readings, to the point where in some cases it might be more appropriate to ask if the histories of traditional Protestant churches are not marginal to the Pentecostals.1 We should not be tempted to interpret Pentecostalism as being merely the latest (if not last) chapter of modern Protestant church history, however. Rather, we should take note of a perceptive insight offered almost half a century ago by Henry P. Van Dusen, president of Union Theological Seminary in New York. Van Dusen was one of the architects of the modern ecumenical movement, a pioneer in the study of world Christianity, and no mean student of modern church history. In an essay published in the journal Christianity in Crisis in 1958, he called his readers’ attention to what he termed “sectarian Protestantism,” and the challenges it was posing to “ecumenical Protestantism.” Among the sectarians, or evangelicals as he also called them, Van Dusen included Pentecostal, Holiness, Adventist, and even Brazilian Spiritualist groups. Their common ancestry was in historic Protestantism, he argued, but then he went on to warn against the tendency among ecumenical Protestants to dismiss them as insignificant, or to expect their eventual absorption back into classical Protestantism. One can not predict the future of these groups, he continued.
1
This is a question explicitly raised concerning the Brazilian context by Richard Shaull and Waldo Cesar in their recent book, Pentecostalism and the Future of the Christian Churches: Promises, Limitations, Challenges (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000). In his “Introduction” (p. 115) Shaull writes: “I originally set out to examine theologically, from a Reformed perspective, what Pentecostals in Brazil are doing to respond to the needs of the poor and participate in their struggle for life. I ended up exploring, from a Pentecostal perspective, what Reformed and other mainline churches may be called to be and to do in order to respond to the needs and struggles of the poor.”
© 2005 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden pp. 35–50
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But it is not beyond possibility that future historians, looking back in a per- spective which we cannot possess, will declare that what is taking place under our eyes today is a new Reformation, comparable to that of the six- teenth century, from which will emerge a third major type and branch of Christendom, alongside of and not incommensurable with Roman and Orthodox Catholicism and historic Protestantism, a principal permanent variant of Christianity.2
The first generation of modern Pentecostals would not necessarily have disputed Van Dusen’s assessment, other than to challenge perhaps the sug- gestion that the other two branches he referred to—the Catholic and Protestant—ought to be truly regarded as being Christian. First-genera- tion Pentecostals in fact advertised their movement as representing a definitive break with almost all that had come immediately before them in church history.3Augustus Cerillo, in a recent historiographical overview of American Pentecostalism, writes:
A fundamental problem with respect to the history of American Pentecostalism is the question of the movement’s origins during the early decades of the twentieth century. Pioneer students of Pentecostalism, including “partici- pant-observers” and a later generation of Pentecostal ministers and church leaders, generally saw little need to seek explanations for their movement’s beginnings within the historical process, nor did they search for causal con- nections between Pentecostalism’s emergence and a turn-of-the-century American context of profound socioeconomic, political, and religious trans- formations. Instead these early writers, although not entirely unaware of the role of human agency in history, largely viewed Pentecostalism’s arrival as a providentially generated, end-time religious revival fundamentally dis- continuous with 1,900 years of Christian history.4
The classical statement of Pentecostalism’s divine or spontaneous ori- gin is Carl Brumback’s 1961 history of the Assemblies of God, Suddenly… From Heaven.5 The title of the book said it all. Others were willing to
2
Henry P. Van Dusen, “The Challenge of the ‘Sects,’” Christianity and Crisis 18, no. 13 (July 21, 1958), 106, emphasis added.
3
I am following here Grant Wacker’s rough periodization of “the movement’s birth and early development” in the United States being the years 1900 to 1925. Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), ix.
4
Augustus Cerillo, “The Beginnings of American Pentecostalism: A Historiographical Overview,” in Pentecostal Currents in American Protestantism, ed. Edith L. Blumhofer, Russell P. Spittler, and Grant A. Wacker (Urbana and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 229.
5
Carl Brumback, Suddenly… From Heaven (Springfield, MO: Gospel Publishing House, 1961).
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look more closely at the mundane sources and origins behind the American movement, however. The first generation of what Cerillo called the “new Pentecostal history” tended to locate these sources and origins in the nine- teenth-century revivalism of the Holiness movement in America, and espe- cially in the Wesleyan branch of this revival.6 Donald Dayton’s Roots of Pentecostalism sharpened the focus on the holiness roots and provided what soon became a defining paradigm for many in Pentecostal Theology. The nineteenth-century Holiness movement, argued Dayton, had coalesced around a “fourfold Gospel” that confessed Jesus Christ as savior, sanctifier, healer, and coming king.7 Only the practice of speaking in tongues, and the theological identification of these tongues as the biblical evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit that is associated with sanctification, set Pentecostalism apart from the earlier Holiness movement, Dayton con- cluded. In the end the continuity was far greater than the discontinuity between the two movements.
The radically eschatological character of the Pentecostal practice and teaching regarding tongues was radically restorationist as well. First-gen- eration Pentecostals in the U.S. perceived themselves to be restoring the doctrines and practices of the first-generation apostolic church in the Bible. The book of Acts functioned as something of a church constitution for first-generation Pentecostals in the U.S. What had happened in the inter- vening centuries of Christian history between the close of the apostolic age and 1900 mattered little. “First-generation converts took pride in their lack of substantial continuity with the historic Christian tradition,” Grant Wacker notes in Heaven Below.8 This radical restorationism, which is closely related to what Wacker unfortunately calls the “primitivist” impulse,9 eventually led to many within the Pentecostal Movement to reject the long-established church practice of baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, since in the book of Acts the apostles baptized in the name of Jesus only. The theological consequences, namely, that of rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity as being in error, soon followed and a distinctive branch of “Oneness” Pentecostalism emerged. The discontinuity
6
Cerillo notes the importance of three works in particular: Klaude Kendrick, The Promise Fulfilled: A History of the Modern Pentecostal Movement (Springfield, MO: Gospel Publishing House, 1961); John T. Nichol, Pentecostalism (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); and Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1971).
7
Donald W. Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987).
8
Wacker, Heaven Below, 251.
9
See ibid., 8.
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between the Oneness Pentecostals and the other Trinitarian branches of world Christianity is even more pronounced than that between Trinitarian Pentecostals and Protestants or Catholics. The fact that Oneness Pentecostals are still considered Pentecostal, however, suggests that the radical dis- continuity represented by the “Jesus only” teaching is characteristic of the Pentecostal Movement as a whole. This is the implication of William Faupel’s book, The Everlasting Gospel: The Significance of Eschatology in the Development of Pentecostal Thought. Faupel suggests that in the “new issue” of “Jesus Only” or Oneness teaching, Pentecostalism finally achieved its full eschatological identity.10 But this is an identity that is discontinuous with virtually all that has passed as orthodox Christianity east or west since at least the Council of Nicaea in 325.
An alternative means of pursuing historical questions of continuity ver- sus discontinuity within Pentecostal Theology in North America has been to focus on tongues and other Charismatic practices. A selective reading of Charismatic experiences in the Christian past has allowed contempo- rary Pentecostals and Charismatics to construct a meaningful tradition within Christian history with which they can identify. One can find scat- tered evidence across the centuries, and usually in monastic communi- ties, for certain practices that are identified as Pentecostal or Charismatic distinctives today. These are claimed as precedents and evidence that Pentecostalism is not a totally new thing that erupted at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is not to say that anyone has been able to demonstrate significant historical connections linking the modern Pentecostal Movement with such precedents from the past. It is not historical causation but spiritual kinship that is being argued. Mostly these histories list such episodes from the Christian past in rough chronological order and accord- ing to their various theological locations in a manner reminiscent of a handbook, drawing comparative conclusions where they seem appropriate.11
10
D. William Faupel, The Everlasting Gospel: The Significance of Eschatology in the Development of Pentecostal Thought (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996).
11
Examples include Stanley M Burgess, The Holy Spirit: Ancient Christian Traditions (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994); Burgess, The Holy Spirit: Eastern Christian Traditions (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1989); Burgess,The Holy Spirit: Medieval Roman Catholic and Reformation Traditions (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997); Burgess, ed., Reaching Beyond: Chapters in the History of Perfectionism (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1986); Gary B. McGee, ed., Initial Evidence: Historical and Biblical Perspectives on the Pente- costal Doctrine of Spirit Baptism(Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991); and Eddie L. Hyatt, 2000 Years of Charismatic Christianity: A 20th Century Look at Church History from a Pentecostal/Charismatic Perspective (Chicota, TX and Tulsa: Hyatt International Ministries, 1996).
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The sense of historical discontinuity that both of these interpretive moves tend to foster reflects the early Pentecostal self-understanding as being something different. The intense apocalyptic eschatology of first- generation Pentecostals in the U.S. fostered a self-understanding within the movement of being something radically new, and of not being bound to historical precedents of Christendom. Without necessarily intending to do so, this intense eschatology thereby challenged one of the fundamen- tal principles of modern historical thinking, that historical events are to be interpreted in light of others that came before them and that can be shown to be contiguous in a manner that allows for a cause-effect rela- tionship to be established across time. Pentecostals claimed that the only contiguous cause that was at work upon their lives and their movement was the Holy Ghost. No amount of arguing for more mundane historical influences could persuade them otherwise. The result was a radical “first- time” experience that was expressed in both biblical and historical terms, sanctioning and even requiring a sense of historical rupture that became ritualized within the movement as the baptism of the Holy Spirit and its attendant signs.
Remarkably, on the other hand, this “first-time” experience did not render Pentecostals ill-fitted for living in the modern world. The oppo- site often seems, in fact, to be the case. Most first-generation Pentecostals expressed some degree of resistance toward, if not outright rejection of, certain aspects of modern medical practice. Most were adamantly opposed as well to the new forms of critical thinking taking hold in the sciences and in biblical history at the end of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Pentecostals easily accommodated themselves to the technological world of the early twentieth century, making efficient use of its commu- nication and transportation industries. What strikes me repeatedly as I read the narratives of conversion from early Pentecostalism is the man- ner in which the baptism of the Holy Spirit marked and effected in peo- ple’s lives a rupture that nevertheless allowed them to continue on the other side of the experience to function as actors and agents within the same modern historical world from which they came. This ability to live on within modernity is what Wacker has termed the early Pentecostal “pragmatism.”12
The radical character of early Pentecostalism resulted from the pri- mordial experience of a rupture or break that took place when one became baptized by the Holy Ghost. The pragmatism reinforced the rupture by
12
Wacker, Heaven Below, 8.
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sanctioning the evasion of questions of historical continuity under the banner of practicality.13 The early Pentecostal spontaneity thesis may in fact have more explanatory value in this regard than the later historiog- raphy of the movement that wished to show the continuity with that which came before. I will return to the historiographical implications of this sense of historical rupture or break. But first I want to look more closely at the “U.S. American” location in this discussion of global Pentecostal origins.
A Genealogical Approach to the Global Pentecostal Movement
One of the debates carried on within Pentecostal Theology in North America this last twenty-five years has been over the question of who should get credit for being the founding figure or “father” of the modern Pentecostal Movement. The question has had social and ideological over- tones because of the racial/cultural identity of the two individuals con- cerned. One school of thought has argued for the primacy of Charles Fox Parham, a European American evangelist who was the first to formulate the distinctive doctrine that speaking in other tongues was, according to Acts 2, the biblical evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. From Parham’s Bible school in Topeka, Kansas, in 1901 emerged the modern Pentecostal Movement, according to this school of thought. Much of what Parham taught regarding tongues (that they were always an actual for- eign language, given to individual Christians to accelerate the process of world missions, for instance) as well as what he taught in general (British Israelitism, for instance) came to be discarded by the wider Pentecostal world. Parham’s organizational structure continued to be important only to the Pentecostal Movement in the Midwestern region after 1907, when he ceased to play a major role in national Pentecostal leadership. Neverthe- less, on account of his distinctive doctrine of speaking in other tongues being the biblical evidence, and the manner in which this was put into practice beginning in 1901 under his teaching, Parham gets credit for being the “father” of modern Pentecostalism.14
13
On this point I am drawing upon the analysis of American pragmatism that is offered by Cornel West in his book The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy ofPragmatism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
14
Proponents of this view include, among others, Kendrick, The Promise Fulfilled; James R. Goff, Jr., Fields White unto Harvest: Charles F. Parham and the Missionary Origins of Pentecostalism (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988); Edith L. Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American
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An alternative school within Pentecostal Theology has argued that it is not Parham who deserves credit for being the “father” of modern Pente- costalism, but William J. Seymour, an African American Holiness preacher who came to Los Angeles from Texas in 1906 and was the primary leader of the Azusa Street Revival that began later that year. Seymour had spent time in Parham’s Bible class in Texas (forced to sit outside the door of the classroom on account of Parham’s racist attitudes, Seymour’s defend- ers continue to remind us) before heading out to California in response to a call from a small, black Holiness band that invited him to come and be their pastor. Seymour had learned from Parham that tongues were the evidence for the baptism of the Holy Spirit, a view he initially propounded in Los Angeles and that, in turn, led almost immediately to his being ousted from the church that had just called him to be their pastor. Seymour then began a front-porch preaching mission from the home of several sup- porters, and within a few weeks it had begun to attract wider attention. White people began to attend the evening meetings, which soon grew large enough to warrant a move to a building on Azusa Street. There the revival continued for three years in duration.
By all accounts Seymour was the leading figure of Azusa Street. He invited Parham to come and preach at the mission soon after the revival moved to its new location, but broke with Parham when his former teacher began to criticize the interracial mingling and exuberance he witnessed taking place. It was from Azusa Street, on the other hand, and not from Parham that the message of the modern Pentecostal revival was first broad- cast worldwide, through the medium of the Apostolic Faith paper that was published by Seymour and others in the mission, as well as through the large number of visitors who came and missionaries who were sent out across the world. By 1915 most of the white members had left and the Azusa Street mission went on as a predominantly black Pentecostal church under Seymour. Seymour himself was eclipsed from the ranks of national Pentecostal leadership after 1913. Nevertheless it is from Azusa Street that the modern Pentecostal Movement (as opposed to the modern Pentecostal doctrine of speaking in tongues) first emerged as a global phenomenon. Thus, this school of thought contends, Seymour is the “father” of the modern Pentecostal Movement.
This latter school, which locates the roots of Pentecostalism firmly in the back church tradition in North America, and specifically in the tradition
Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); and to a lesser degree, Wacker, Heaven Below.
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of spirituality that reaches back to slave religion, is one to which I sub- scribe.15 The group that met on Bonnie Brae before purchasing the build- ing on Azusa Street was originally a black Holiness church.16 The significance of this identity is crucial for both the global Pentecostal Movement and the black church in the twentieth century. Albert J. Raboteau and David W. Wills in their forthcoming documentary history of African American religion argue that Azusa Street marks the opening of what they call the “global phase” of African American religious history, for it was here that for the first time an African American church exhibited a global consciousness reaching beyond pan-Africanism.17 The argument for Azusa Street being primarily a black church phenomenon does not reduce the Pentecostal Movement to its African American origins. Rather, it invites us to pursue a more genealogical account of Pentecostal origins. A geneal- ogy, Michel Foucault reminds us, provides an account of history that engages in an analysis of the accidental details that accompany every beginning, indeed the “numberless beginnings whose faint traces and hints of color are readily seen by an historical eye.”18 It is, says Charles H. Long, a “crawling back” through one’s history, done so explicitly in order to recover the multiple histories and historical identities of those who have been subjugated or oppressed.19
Genealogical investigations expose the detailed working of power that is being exercised by claims of singular origins. They do so by uncover- ing hidden knowledges in history and tracing their dispersion through the
15
See Dale T. Irvin, “‘Drawing All Together in One Bond of Love’: The Ecumenical Vision of William J. Seymour and Azusa Street,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 6, no. 1 (Spring 1995), 46.
16
Proponents of this view include James S. Tinney, “William J. Seymour: Father of Modern-Day Pentecostalism,” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 4, no. 1 (1976): 34–44; Leonard Lovett, “Perspectives on the Black Origins of the Contemporary Pentecostal Movement,” Journal of the I. T. C. 1, no. 1 (1973): 36–48; Iain MacRobert, The Black Roots and White Racism of Early Pentecostalism in the USA (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); and David Douglas Daniels, “The Cultural Renewal of Slave Religion: Charles Price Jones and the Emergence of the Holiness Movement in Mississippi” (Ph. D. diss., Union Theological Seminary, New York, 1992).
17
Albert J. Raboteau and David W. Wills, “Rethinking American Religious History: A Progress Report on ‘Afro-American Religious History: A Documentary History Project,’” in The Council of Societies for the Study of Religion Bulletin 20, no. 3 (September 1991), 60. Further discussion of the role of Seymour in opening the global phase of African American religion, in the form of Black Pentecostalism, can be found on the project’s cur- rent web page, http://amherst.edu/~aardoc/Global_Phase.html.
18
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 145.
19
Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 9.
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social domains of practice in order to bring their full subversive force into play.20 A genealogy seeks to empower the hidden, the opaque, in the quest for freedom. It sifts though the “details and accidents” that accom- pany every beginning to find in the “vicissitudes of history… the face of the other,” says Foucault.21 On a formal level it calls for “the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a his- torical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tacti- cally today.”22 On a material level it invites us to crawl back through local histories, to account for their multiple historical origins, and not to theo- rize away the ruptures at work in history by imposing an overarching transcendental narrative (such as the one that reduces Pentecostalism to being a chapter in Protestant church history).
An example of a more genealogical investigation of Pentecostal ori- gins on Azusa Street is the paper delivered by Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., at the International Congress on World Evangelization held in Brighton, England, in July of 1991. The title of the paper is “Pentecostal Origins from a Global Perspective.”23 It opens by noting the multifaceted history of early Pentecostalism, rehearsing some of the historiographical directions that have been pursued in Pentecostal Theology, and noting the questions of Pentecostal identity that are at stake in the debates. Throughout the first part of the paper Robeck indicates an awareness of the global char- acter of Pentecostalism as a movement, but makes a strong assertion that the movement’s origins are located in North America.24 The influences of both Parham and Seymour are noted, but both are located in relation to the Azusa Street Revival. It is the local history of Azusa Street to which Robeck then turns. He situates the revival in the social context of Los Angeles in 1906, a city that had already become a global crossroads of sorts. Of inescapable importance for both the participants in the Azusa Street Revival and those who viewed the experience as outsiders was its
20
See Judith N. Shklar, “Subversive Genealogies,” in Myth, Symbol and Culture, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 129–54.
21
Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 144.
22
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 83.
23
Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., “Pentecostal Origins from a Global Perspective,” in All Together in One Place: Theological Papers from the Brighton Conference on World Evangelization, eds. Harold D. Hunter and Peter D. Hocken (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 166–80.
24
Robeck, “Pentecostal Origins from a Global Perspective,” writes: “. . . without wish- ing to be triumphalistic, the evidence gathered in all serious quests for the origins of the modern Pentecostal movement appears inevitably to point to North America” (170).
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interracial characteristics. The Azusa Street mission was not the only inter- racial church in Los Angeles in 1906, Robeck points out, but it was most likely the only one led by an African American.25 While the racial makeup of the revival at its peak was evenly divided between whites and blacks, it started as an all black fellowship and returned to being a black church.
Transportation and communication facilitated a rapid global dissemi- nation of reports of the events going on in the revival between 1906 and 1909, most notably (but not exclusively) the exercise of speaking in other tongues. People came to the revival from all over the world. Missionaries from Azusa Street were sent out almost immediately to West Asia, East Asia, and Africa. Indirectly the revival affected others who went as mis- sionaries of the new Pentecostal teaching to Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere. The pages of The Apostolic Faith reached people across the world, while reports from various parts of the world were sent back and published in the same pages. Azusa Street was a local history in which multiple global forces were converging, Robeck demonstrates. It was also a local history whose participants demonstrated what Walter Mignolo calls “global designs.”26
Robeck urges the study of the Azusa Street Revival on a more global scale in order to “rid us of our less than pristine mythologies regarding Pentecostal origins.”27 I do not disagree with the conclusions he draws in this regard, namely, that the Azusa Street mission hoped to bring an end to racism in the church, was committed to the ministry of all people, was ecumenical as well as evangelical, addressed issues of personal as well as social ethics, and may still hold the seeds to the success of global Pentecostal and Charismatic movements today. I, too, believe there is much to be gained by studying the Azusa Street Revival in order to under- stand Pentecostal identity. I do not dispute the fact that one can trace some form of historical lines of apostolic succession from virtually every Pentecostal and Charismatic church or community in the world today back to Azusa Street. What I would suggest in addition to all of this, however, is that one of the pristine mythologies that must tumble is the one that makes Azusa Street—or any other local event in Pentecostal history—the determining factor for Pentecostal histories elsewhere in the world.
25
Robeck, “Pentecostal Origins from a Global Perspective,” 174.
26
Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
27
Robeck, “Pentecostal Origins from a Global Perspective,” 180.
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On this point my genealogical concern that we localize Pentecostal history comes clearly into view. Azusa Street was a local history with global designs. To a significant degree these global designs were suc- cessfully implemented in other parts of the world. But the very logic of this particular local history, and thus of the global designs that flowed from it—what I would call the logic of Pentecostal spirituality—resulted more often than not in the immediate localizing of these global designs in the new situations to which they were being communicated. The very logic of the Pentecostal message, in other words, led to an immediate globalization of this local experience, and to the immediate localization of the movement in other global places. The result was the rapid adop- tion and adaptation of Pentecostal spirituality and practice far beyond Azusa Street, often without any reference or deference to the Azusa Street experience.28
Addressing this spirituality Everett A. Wilson writes, “It is… futile to assume that the experience of the first set of Pentecostals provides a model for the future. In Pentecostalism every generation is the first gen- eration.”29 Wilson goes on to draw the global historical implications that follow:
By almost any standard, Pentecostalism presently is not what Charles Fox Parham or any of his successors has pronounced it to be, but rather what contemporary Brazilians, Koreans and Africans demonstrate that it actually is.30
In a similar vein Ronald N. Bueno writes:
. . . I am a Pentecostal. I was born, reared and live in El Salvador. Many of the studies I have read on Pentecostalism do not accord with or reflect my experiences in El Salvador. Although that does not cause me to reject, at least initially, many of these works, it does prompt me to ask different questions of the literature in relation to my experiences. Is there a Pentecostal movement, or are there Pentecostalisms?31
I could cite examples from across the globe of this localizing Pentecostal historical phenomenon. Frank Macchia has reminded us that European
28
See Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, ix.
29
Everett A. Wilson, “They Crossed the Red Sea, Didn’t They? Critical History and Pentecostal Beginnings,” in The Globalization of Pentecostalism: A Religion Made to Travel, ed. Murray W. Dempster, Byron D. Klaus, and Douglas Petersen (Oxford: Regnum Books, 1999), 106.
30
Wilson, “They Crossed the Red Sea, Didn’t They?” 109.
31
Ronald N. Bueno, “Listening to the Margins: Re-historicizing Pentecostal Experiences and Identities,” in The Globalization of Pentecostalism, 269.
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Pentecostalism does not look back to Azusa Street but to Pietism for its historical precedents.32 Ogbu Kalu has argued that African Pentecostalism does not have its origins on Azusa Street, but rather in the indigenous forms of religiosity that have flourished across the African continent for millennia.33 The True Jesus Church dates its origins to 1917 in Beijing and to three Chinese workers who received a direct revelation from God regarding the one true faith. Members understand Beijing, not Los Angeles, to be the Jerusalem of the Latter Rain.34 Even within North America a number of churches that were organized in the years just before or after the Azusa Street Revival, and are Pentecostal in their doctrines regarding sanctification, the baptism of the Holy Ghost, and speaking in other tongues, do not look beyond their own circle of founders for their origins.35 This is not a matter of willful or unwillful ignorance. It is a matter of Pente- costalism’s distinctive spirituality giving rise to a new historiographical self-understanding, one that echoes themes of “double-consciousness” that have emerged from a variety of locations over the last century.
32
See Frank D. Macchia, Spirituality and Social Liberation: The Message of the Blumhardts in the Light of Wuerttemberg Pietism (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993); and Macchia, “Spirituality and Social Liberation: The Message of the Blumhardts in the Light of Württemberg Pietism, with Implications for Pentecostal Theology,” in Experiences of the Spirit, ed. J. B. Jongeneel (Bern: Peter Lang Verlag, 1989), 65–84.
33
Ogbu U. Kalu, “The Third Response: Pentecostalism and the Reconstruction of Christian Experience in Africa, 1970–1995,” paper delivered at the Consultation on the History of the World Christian Movement at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, May 2000; and Kalu, “The Practice of Victorious Life: Pentecostal Political Theology and Practice in Nigeria, 1970–1996,” Missions 5, no. 2 (1998): 229–55.
34
This body traces its origins to Beijing in 1917, when three Chinese workers from other churches, Paul Wei, Ling-Shen Chang, and Barnabas Chang, were led by direct rev- elation to start the True Jesus Church. Officially, however, it lists its only founder as the Lord Jesus Christ, the one true God who was manifested in the flesh. According to its teaching, Beijing is Jerusalem of the Latter Rain while Taiwan is the Antioch. The church holds the same doctrines as many other Oneness churches, including the beliefs that Jesus was the manifestation in the flesh of the one true God, water baptism must be done in the name of Jesus only, foot washing must be practiced regularly, the baptism of the Holy Spirit is necessary for entering heaven, and speaking in tongues is the evidence of this baptism. Nevertheless, it does not recognize any historical dependency or connection with other Oneness Pentecostal teaching, nor does it believe that other Oneness Pentecostals are saved, because they are not members of the one true church of Jesus Christ on earth. For more on the churches, see their web site at .
35
See the history of the Church of the Living God, the Ground and Pillar of Truth, organized under the leadership and inspiration of Mother Mary Magdalena Tate. The church’s official statements of its history make no reference to Parham, Seymour, Azusa Street, or any other founding influence other than what the Holy Spirit gave to Mother Tate.
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Pentecostal Double-Consciousness and Post-Colonial/
Postmodern Historiography
The concept of double-consciousness is borrowed here from the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, an African American theorist who was a contem- porary of Seymour. Three years before the Azusa Street Revival broke out, Du Bois published his classic work, The Souls of Black Folks. Looking at the condition of the sons and daughters of Africa held captive within the oppressive confines of the modern world, Du Bois wrote:
. . . the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of mea- suring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.36
Charles Long has shown the connection between this experience of double-consciousness and Du Bois’s account later in the book of visiting a black country church in the south. Du Bois described the experience as one of “intense excitement that possessed that mass of black folk” and “a scene of human passion such as I had never conceived before.” “A sort of suppressed terror hung in the air and seemed to seize us,—a pythian madness, a demoniac possession, that lent terrible reality to song and word,” he wrote. The “frenzy” of the revival both captivated and terrified him.37 Long argues that what Du Bois witnessed was the radical pri- mordium of religious experience, of what Rudolf Otto called the mys- terium tremendum. In this particular context, however, it was giving rise to a specific form of double-consciousness or of being “twice born.” For African Americans and other oppressed communities, Long argues, the irruption of frenzied religion within the confines of modernity serves in a particular way as being both a critique and an expression of hope. “The veil, the double consciousness, is a critical stance, and they [sic] speak of primordial experiences and histories as the locus of new resources not yet categorized and rationalized by the communities under criticism,” Long writes. He continues:
36
W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Books, 1969), 45. (Original publication was Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903).
37
Ibid., 211.
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These movements of the oppressed cannot be understood in the terms of the older movements of the world, for they presuppose the specific nature of modernity, and modernity itself is a form of critique; these movements thus constitute a critique of the critique. . . . In many respects, most of those cultures which have given rise to the religions of the oppressed were “created” for the second time by the critical categories of the West. This is the source of the double consciousness referred to by Du Bois. The source of Du Bois’s demonic dread occurs when he touches the possible source of a new cri- tique of this second creation.38
Pentecostalism draws deeply upon this African American spirituality to foster just such a critique of religion and culture bound to modernity. It does so, however, without requiring one necessarily be situated among a visible community of the oppressed. Or rather, Pentecostalism succeeds precisely because it is able to redefine the experience of oppression and demonstrate it to be the more general condition of modernity itself. Evil is a pervasive oppressing force operating within the Pentecostal cosmol- ogy. Bodily sickness and broken relationships are both signs of the oppres- sion of demons, and neither can be cured by the offerings of modern science or medicine, which are derived from the same source in “the world” that has given rise to the condition of oppression. At the same time, Pentecostals experience the Holy Ghost infusing this world with a sanctifying presence in a way that does not require them to evacuate the modern world. Pentecostalism thus provides a new critique that does not necessarily emerge from or require a “subaltern” location. Its location has been more accurately described by Frank Macchia as being “sub-modern,” which is one fully within the horizon of modernity even as it critiques the modern.39
Macchia has pointed to the manner in which the embodied practice of speaking in other tongues, the early Pentecostal distinctive, both fostered and expressed what I would call an intense double-consciousness. Tongues, says Macchia, have been Pentecostalism’s sacramental practice, a visible manifestation of a distinctive form of spiritual (or trans-rational) double- consciousness played out upon the ecstatic body in private and public devotion. Through this particular ecstatic practice, he contends, Pentecostals have engaged in the production of free speech that breaks the confines of modern rationality and challenges Western cultural-linguistic hegemony
38
Long, Significations, 166.
39
Frank D. Macchia, “The Struggle for Global Witness: Shifting Paradigms in Pentecostal Theology,” in The Globalization of Pentecostalism, 12.
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on a global scale.40 Riding on the globalizing tides of modernity, Pente- costalism has sought to break its totalizing hold.
To return once again to the question of historical origins, then, I would argue that Pentecostalism did indeed emerge as a modern movement from the Azusa Street Revival, but that in its emergence it was a movement with multiple causes and origins. Los Angeles was already a city with global cultural connections, allowing the experience at Azusa Street to be quickly communicated to distant lands and languages. The most distin- guishing feature of the 1906 revival was the ecstatic phenomenon of speak- ing in other tongues. Many of those who participated in the revival and in the early Pentecostal Movement believed they were speaking or hear- ing actual foreign languages. Pentecostal doctrine generally considers these tongues to be the initial evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit that initiates a person into the fullness of Christian life and service. Wittingly or unwittingly, the practice helped to create conditions favor- ing linguistic pluralization, semantic differentiation, and crosscultural fer- tilization in Pentecostal life. Tongues were regarded by a number of first-generation Pentecostals as being the means by which God was equip- ping the Church for rapid evangelization of the world. They appear to have succeeded at least partially in opening the door for the rapid adap- tation of Pentecostalism to new global cultural and linguistic locations. By the very spiritual praxis that it unleashed, the Azusa Street Revival challenged its own and any other particular location having universal significance.
I cannot help but read the modern global history of Pentecostalism against the background of the last five hundred years of world Christianity in which Western Christendom and its foreign missions have dominated. Implicitly and explicitly, Pentecostalism posed a fundamental challenge to the Orbis Universalis Christianumof the previous five centuries. I don’t think it is insignificant that Pentecostalism emerged at a time when Western Christendom was entering a pronounced state of crisis. Everett A. Wilson identifies it as an internal experience as well among those who first joined the ranks of the new movement. “Crisis, not persuasion, is what brought men and women to their personal Pentecost, even if that crisis was more a sense of their own spiritual need than some personal or social desperation,”
40
Frank D. Macchia, “Tongues as a Sign: Toward a Sacramental Understanding of Pentecostal Experience,” Pneuma: The Journal for the Society for Pentecostal Theology 15 (Spring 1993): 61–76; Macchia, “The Struggle for Global Witness,” 16–18.
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he writes.41 The double-consciousness of Pentecostalism invited adher- ents to live on two distinct levels of crisis simultaneously, among the frac- tured pieces of modern consciousness and modern life while criticizing the pretenses of modernity itself.
Tossed into the colonial currents of global missions, Pentecostalism had a similar effect of fracturing and reformulating world Christian self- understanding. On the one hand, Pentecostalism has proven itself to be a localizing movement that is adept at implementing globalizing designs.42 On the other, it has continuously proven to be a movement that subverts global designs of any sort, even its own, and is thus continuously re-cre- ating its own past. Usually Pentecostals do this by turning to local histo- ries, or what is simply at hand. The persistent Pentecostal practice over the past century has been to challenge the historical stability of our var- ious narratives of Christendom. In this regard Pentecostalism might then be not so much a third wave or fourth major branch of world Christianity as it is a challenge to that mode of history that seeks coherent branches and to the spirituality that needs to be joined to a great tradition.
41
Wilson, “They Crossed the Red Sea, Didn’t They?” 87.
42
See Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), ix. For a substantive political critique of Pentecostal and Charismatic “prosperity teachings” on this particular point see Steve Brouwer, Paul Gifford, and Susan D. Rose, Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism (New York and London: Routledge, 1996).
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