28 - New churches: Pentecostals and the Bible

Summary

This chapter explores the biblical use among new churches, a designation that is itself rather arbitrary, especially given that the preponderance of new churches is Pentecostal in nature. The bulk of new-church Christians in the world are not a part of any formal denomination, making their classification difficult. Classical Pentecostals are typically defined as those who hold that baptism in the Holy Spirit has as its initial evidence speaking in tongues. Pentecostals are stereotypically viewed as spiritual enthusiasts who blindly follow the Spirit more regularly than they follow the Bible. Pentecostalism originally was rather paramodern in that it paralleled modernism as a historical movement. Nevertheless it did not accept modernism's thorough going rationalism. The Pentecostal biblical hermeneutic was motivated negatively by the belief that turn-of-the-twentieth-century Christianity was lacking in power. The Pentecostal hermeneutic is learned mostly through the church's kerygmatic practice.