WCF 1.1 Although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men unexcusable;1 yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of His will, which is necessary unto salvation:2 therefore it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal Himself, and to declare that His will unto His Church;3 and afterwards, for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the Church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing;4 which maketh the Holy Scripture to be most necessary;5 those former ways of God's revealing His will unto His people being now ceased.6 (WCF 1:1 WCS)
WCF 1.6 The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.1 Nevertheless, we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the word;2 and that there are some circumstances concerning the worship of God, and government of the Church, common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by the light of nature, and Christian prudence, according to the general rules of the word, which are always to be observed.3 (WCF 1:6 WCS)
As articulated, however, Purdie's position made the mistake of confusing the revelation of Jesus Christ and the church's records of that revelation, . . . Peter Althouse
There are voluminous scholarly articles on the problems of the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement, and, as my time is limited, it will only be possible to address a few of them in this brief article. I work a full time job and do my research and writing in my free time. I spent a number of years in the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement and did my bachelor of arts degree in pre-seminary at an Assemblies of God college in Lakeland, Florida. I spent a considerable amount of time reading the academic and scholarly articles of the movement during that time period. I wanted to be able to be an academic apologist for the movement because I was fully dedicated to the Pentecostal theology and experience.
Unfortunately, that very endeavor led me in another direction which I could not have anticipated at that time. Most Pentecostal scholars want to defend the movement from an intellectual perspective because the movement from the beginning was denigrated as anti-intellectual and prone to psychological manipulation of the naive such that the leaders took financial advantage of poor adherents who desperately needed answered prayers and miracles to meet their impoverished conditions.
Those humble and early beginning of Pentecostalism around the turn of the century soon morphed into megachurches, including Angelus Temple, built in 1923 by Amy Semple McPherson. But her moral failure soon ended her career as a female evangelist and pastor.
There are many scholarly works recounting the history of the Pentecostal revival at Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles, California and how William J. Seymour, a black holiness preacher studied the theology of Charles Parham in Houston, Texas and took the message back to his church on Azusa Street in 1906. I will not go into all the details of that. However, one of the ground breaking books that I highly recommend is The Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, by Donald W. Dayton. Dayton shows clearly how the Pentecostal theology evolved from and out of the Wesleyan holiness movement, which itself was a spin off from John Wesley's original doctrine of entire sanctification. Phoebe Palmer, a Free Methodist pastor's wife, helped the evolution of the holiness movement when she advocated the view that entire sanctification could be claimed by faith rather than by years of tarrying and struggling against known sins. Of course there were other precursors to the movement earlier, including the Edward Irving movement away from orthodox Scottish Presbyterianism.
In short, the Pentecostal movement was not necessarily a new apostolic movement supernaturally enabled by the Holy Spirit, but was instead an evolution out of several different strands of Evangelical Christianity and the Second Great Awakening. There are ties to the Keswick higher life movement, which is a more Calvinistic emphasis on victory over sin advocated by Asa Mahon and others.
Today there are at least three distinctive but subjective divisions of the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement, which some claim to number at least five hundred million worldwide. The first of these is the original Pentecostal movement in 1906 at Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles. The second is associated with the Latter Rain movement in the post-WWII era of the 1940s. The so-called third wave began with an Episcopalian minister named Dennis Bennett in Van Nuys, California in the 1960s. From there the movement spread to both liberal mainline Protestant denominations and to certain conservative Evangelical denominations. (See: "The Three Waves of Spiritual Renewal of the Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement," by Emil Bartos. Review of Ecumencial Studies Sibiu. Volume 7, Issue 1. 25 June 2015. Published online.)
Perhaps the most controversial issue with Pentecostalism and the Charismatic movement is the emphasis on an exegetical method that incorporates the experimental religion of Wesleyanism via John Wesley's expansion of the Anglican trilateral of Scripture, tradition, and reason, to include as a fourth element, the spiritual experiences of Christians. The Wesleyan quadrilateral allowed for the Christian to experience not only salvation but the experience of being entirely sanctified. The early Pentecostal roots of the holiness movement included the baptism of fire in which the dross of sinful habits were burned away by the flames of the Holy Spirit and making the way for the the third work of grace, which was an empowerment for supernatural service called the baptism with the Holy Spirit; subsequently, it was then accompanied by the initial physical evidence of speaking in tongues. The Wesleyan churches like the Pentecostal Holiness Church and the Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee held to three works of grace: 1. Salvation. 2. Entire Sanctification. 3. Baptism with the Holy Spirit. The more baptistic Pentecostals, the Assemblies of God and the Foursquare Pentecostal Church, held to two definite works of grace: 1. Salvation. 2. Baptism with the Holy Spirit. This is not to say that the baptistic Pentecostals did not believe in entire sanctification or the higher life view of victory over sin. Rather the latter group conflated steps 2 and 3 of the Wesleyan churches into one final work of grace. In other words, entire sanctification and the supernatural empowerment for service were one work of grace called the baptism of the Holy Spirit. All classical Pentecostals believe in the initial physical evidence of speaking in tongues as the outward sign of Spirit baptism. For Pentecostals speaking in tongues functions much like the sacramental signs for more Protestant views of the sacrament of the Lord's supper or for water baptism in that the outward sign of Spirit baptism for Protestants is water baptism, and the outward sign for the sacrament of the Lord's supper is bread and wine. For Pentecostals the outward sign of Spirit baptism is the initial physical evidence of speaking in other tongues.
What was most problematic for me as a younger Pentecostal was the discovery that the modern Charismatic movement was even more diverse and inconsistent than even classical Pentecostalism. The original Pentecostals apparently adopted a no creed but the Bible attitude and refused to officially adopt any doctrinal statements. It was not until the New Issue of the Oneness or Apostolic Pentecostal movement that the Assemblies of God and the Wesleyan trinitarian Pentecostals began to formulate doctrinal statements to oppose the modalist Pentecostals. The other issue for me was when I discovered that not only did the modern Pentecostals accept fellowship with modalist Pentecostals but they were also permeated with the Word of Faith, health and wealth prosperity Gospel.
One of my professors at Southeastern College of the Assemblies of God in the late 1980s, Dr. Terris Neuman, introduced me to a book by Dr. D. R. McConnell called, A Different Gospel. Reading this book opened my eyes to the fact that the Pentecostal movement was by and large infected with cultic theology tied to Christian Science and New Thought, both of which are not Christian at all. My home church in Wauchula, Florida was filled with this doctrine because although the senior pastor was more of a classical Pentecostal and a graduate of Southeastern College, the associate pastor was not educated and was a full blown Word of Faith preacher. I had noticed early on that there seemed to be similarities with Christian Science since I had read many articles about Christian Science in high school and in the years before going to college. Needless to say this shook my Pentecostal beliefs to the core.
The other issue that breaks the camel's back is the issue of ecumenicalism. But that would take too long to go into since I want to focus primarily on the experiential exegetical and hermeneutical methods of Pentecostals and Charismatics. But suffice it to say that for the movement over all, despite their many theological differences, the main issue for Pentecostals and Charismatics in general is not biblical truth but the promotion of their signs and wonders movement. For them the main cardinal doctrine is continuationism, not biblical truth as a whole. For this reason they can legitimately reject orthodoxy in favor of their emphasis on charismata to the exclusion of all else. As evidence of that I can quote from Ralph Del Colle's article in the Journal of Pentecostal Theology. Del Colle was a Roman Catholic at the time he wrote the article but apparently prior to that he temporarily identified with a more "Anabaptist" and Oneness Pentecostal point of view:
I should like to be precise in my intentions for this paper. I will not broach all the several issues which divide trinitarian Pentecostals from oneness Pentecostals, for example, the baptismal formula, definition of regeneration and its association with Spirit-baptism and water baptism, holiness standards, sectarianism etc. I will deal only with their variant views on the nature of God; whether God is absolutely one or triune. Although I am of one persuasion confessionally--I am a thoroughgoing trinitarian--I will not attempt to engage in what was once called controversial theology, that is, arguing on behalf of one position against the other. The essay is doctrinally irenic and is intended to offer theological grounds for ecclesial unity between oneness and trinitarian Pentecostals as far as this issue is concerned.
One further preliminary is in order. I reflect and write as an outsider. I am not a Pentecostal but a Roman Catholic, an ecclesial communion in conversation with trinitarian Pentecostals but not with their oneness brethren. But there is some personal history here as well as some significant theological interest. I was once an independent charismatic quite involved in the enactment of an anabaptist ecclesiology and a restorationist sense of mission. During that period I was (re)baptized by immersion with a trinitarian formula. The pedigree of that act was not so much Oneness as it was Latter Rain which had adopted the formula but not always their corresponding doctrine of God. For a short period of time I contemplated a oneness view of the Godhead and then a binitarian one. For some years now I have owned my first baptism (trinitarian and infant-baptism at that!) in the Catholic Church. But that is neither here nor there. My present interest is more theological.
. . . I have taken it as part and parcel of my own theological vocation to increase awareness . . . of the triune God . . . Then what to do about oneness Pentecostals?
As might be surmised, one is left with something of a theological conundrum. How is it that approximately 25 per cent of US Pentecostals whose heritage goes back to within a decade of Azusa Street are not trinitarian in doctrine? While I am not one to assign the origin and development of doctrine solely to the explication of the religious affections (as in a simplistic version of Schleiermacher) I do consider the doxological expression of the people of God to be significant in the evaluation of doctrine; . . .Considering that Spirit-baptism in particular intensifies the believer's experience of the risen Christ and gives experimental knowledge of the Holy Spirit it would seem logical to presuppose that this common Pentecostal-charismatic witness would also unify the community in their doctrinal testimony to the truth of the gospel. However, for the theologian no such naivete is allowed.
Ralph Del Colle. "Oneness and Trinity: A Preliminary Proposal for Dialogue with Oneness Pentecostalism." Journal of Pentecostal Theology. Issue 10, 1997. Pp. 85-86.
It is ironic that in the late 1980s the Assemblies of God was hit with a theological controversy between the more classical Pentecostal views of Reverend Jimmy Swaggart and the more charismatic views of the Reverend Karl Strader of Lakeland, Florida. The controversy centered on the controversial signs and wonders movement that produced not only the Toronto Revival and the Vineyard movement, but also the Brownsville Assembly of God revival in the Florida panhandle. Swaggart not only opposed the so-called third wave of the charismatic movement, but was also an outspoken critic of Roman Catholicism as a false church.
It would seem that these upper level compromises of Pentecostal scholarship with liberal theology and the larger ecumenical movement of liberal Protestants and liberal Roman Catholics are mostly unknown to the lay members of the classical Pentecostal denominations. This is troubling on several levels; the Protestant Reformation has never been resolved for Pentecostals because they agree with the papists that there must be a continual reaffirmation of the doctrines of the Bible by means of ongoing charismatic gifts. Like the papists, the Pentecostals insist that the Scriptures are insufficient for salvation and for the Christian life. Something more is needed, namely prophetic utterances, words of knowledge, miracles, signs, wonders, and supernatural healings. Furthermore, it seems to me that the emphasis on ecstatic religious experiences has caused Pentecostalism to move in more heretical directions on at least three points: 1. Oneness Pentecostalism. 2. Liberal mainline Protestantism. 3. Ecumenical relationships with charismatic Roman Catholicism. A further problem is the classical Pentecostal compromise with the prosperity gospel message.
The main point of this blog post, however, is that the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement is more concerned about an ecumenical cooperation between proponents of an experiential theology of charismata than about doctrinal purity. Of course, there are some notable exceptions to this thesis including the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, which were influenced by the Protestant and Evangelical Anglicans of Wycliffe College in Toronto. Wycliffe was low church and opposed not only the high church Anglo-Catholic movement but also the higher critical views of theological liberalism and neo-orthodoxy. Even the Canadian Pentecostals recognized that undermining the objective nature of Scripture and the plenary verbal inspiration of Scripture held dangers for their Pentecostal theology. However, Peter Althouse sides with the compromises of neo-orthodoxy and higher criticism and criticizes the conservatives as idolaters:
While the attempt to protect the doctrine of the authority and supremacy of Scripture was laudable, Hague and Purdie adopted an extreme biblicism which verged on an idolization of Scripture. They seemed to miss the point that the Word of God was the revelation of Jesus Christ and that Scripture was the apostolic record of that revelation. Though following Hague in doctrine, Purdie's statement that Scripture did not contain the Word of God but was the very Word of God was a sentiment possibly intended to safeguard Pentecostals from the subjectivistic assumptions in higher criticism. Higher critics assumed that biblical authorship was rooted in the subjective religious experiences of the writers and excluded divine inspiration. Possibly, Purdie wanted to highlight the objective nature of Pentecostal experience. The danger was, presumably, that the subjective experiences of Pentecostals combined with the subjective assumptions in higher criticism could have led to an overemphasis on experience in Pentecostalism. As articulated, however, Purdie's position made the mistake of confusing the revelation of Jesus Christ and the church's records of that revelation, but it was a position which followed in the footsteps of his theological mentor, Dyson Hague.
Peter Althouse. "The Influence of Dr. J. E. Purdie's Reformed Anglican Theology on the Formation and Development of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada." Pneuma: The Journal for Pentecostal Studies. Volume 19, No. 1, Spring 1996.
Althouse is obviously opposed to the doctrine of plenary verbal inspiration, which the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada upheld due to their being influenced by the low church Reformed Anglican theology of Wycliffe College. Althouse sees no problem with reading the Old Testament as inspired myth as the neo-orthodox theologians do. This makes my point that the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement leads to theological liberalism and ecumenical relationships with outright heretics like the Oneness Pentecostals and liberal Roman Catholics.
Moving on to my critique of Pentecostal hermeneutics, the problem here is that from the onset of the Pentecostal movement Wesley's emphasis on Christian experience or experimental religion led to compromising the doctrine of plenary verbal inspiration and propositional revelation. For Calvinists the emphasis on sound and logical exegesis of Scripture meant preserving the church from being led astray by false signs and miracles such as those that the papists produced in the intervening 1900 years of church history.
The problem of religious experience is that everyone's experience is different. The Pentecostal movement began when Charles F. Parham started a Bible study and asked for laypersons in his Bible institute to study the Scriptures from an experiential point of view and to tell him what the baptism with the Holy Spirit was. The following is a good summary of the Pentecostal approach to biblical hermeneutics:
The reading of the Scripture is highly esteemed in Pentecostal tradition. Bible reading is interwoven with prayer. The Bible is read until it becomes part and parcel of the individuals thought system and daily expressions. It should however, be observed that the Bible is not studied as an academic work but as a devotional material. As Davies argues, Pentecostals utilize the Bible as a resource for divine encounter. They “read the Bible not to grasp it; but so that God can grasp them through it.”[12] The Bible is seen not only as the word of God but also as the full representation of the mind and plan of God. God is seen to be alive in the scriptures and thus an encounter with the scripture is regarded as an encounter with the living God himself.
The earliest form of Pentecostalism held this divine essence of the scripture to the point that they regarded the human authors of the Bible as passive instruments in the process of writing the scripture. They saw them only as instruments that recorded what God dictated. Such a view led to neglecting the context of the human authors when interpreting the Bible. However, the latter development of Pentecostal interpretation recognized human authorship as part of the process that God used to communicate his will to the people. This later development introduced an “incarnational” understanding of the Bible. The scriptures, like Christ Jesus, were seen to be fully divine and fully human and the two natures as inseparable.[13]
Michael Muoki Wambua. "Pentecostal Hermeneutics: Approach and Methodology." The Pneuma Review: Journal of Ministry Resources and Theology for Pentecostal and Charismatic Ministries & Leaders. April 14, 2014.
Like the liberals and the neo-orthodox, the Pentecostals put more emphasis on their ecstatic experiences than the Scriptures. While there are exceptions to this like the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada and some of the more conservative classical Pentecostals in the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in the United States, the clear trend overall is toward a more and more liberal point of view in regards to the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture. The earliest Pentecostals were of a more fundamentalist bent, but the obvious biases of the current leadership in Pentecostal scholarship is toward curbing logic and denouncing any commitment to Scripture as the final authority in all matters of faith and practice as bibliolatry.
Dyson Hague, best known for his contributions to The Fundamentals, held views similar to Sheraton's, though he may have been more fundamentalist in orientation. Hague stated that the study of the literary structure of the books of the Bible was laudable, "But the work of the Higher Critic has not always been pursued in a reverent spirit nor in the spirit of scientific and Christian scholarship." (18) The conclusions of the higher critics were based largely upon their own "subjective conclusions," their reliance on fanciful German theories, and their "bias against the supernatural." (19) Hague criticized the higher critics for their denial of the validity of miracles, the reality of prophecy, and the validity of revelation. (20) He also opposed the higher critics' critique of Genesis as myth, for if Genesis were myth, it had no doctrinal value; it would not be authoritative, true, or reliable; and therefore it would not be inspired by God. Hague refused to accept this position. (21) Generally, Hague held a more conservative position than Sheraton and seemed unwilling to accept any of the conclusions of higher criticism. (Ibid., Althouse. P. 7).
Of course, the more enlightened Pentecostals and Charismatics do not reject the conclusions of higher criticism because, after all, miracles are just human experiences, not necessarily literally supernatural events, right? Quite frankly, I would much rather be called a fundamentalist than to join the broad way to ecumenical heresy.
Now I would like to turn to a more Reformed methodology in regards to doing biblical exegesis and interpreting the Scriptures. The most basic way of interpreting the Scriptures is to first of all recognize that the Bible is fully inspired by God in every single word. While it is true that human writers wrote what God moved them to write, the words were not divinely dictated directly by God but each writer wrote in his own style. Yet what they wrote could legitimately be said to be the very words of God, since God so controlled their psychological thinking and thought processes that what they wrote was exactly what God intended in every single word. Since God is not irrational but logical, it follows that there are no contradictions in the Bible; all of the propositions in the Bible are logically consistent and in harmony with the whole scope of Scripture.
If everyone's experience is different, it follows that interpreting the Bible cannot be and must not be based on reader response or experiential theology. There must be an objective way to read, understand and interpret the Bible. That method of reading and understanding the Bible begins with propositional revelation. The Scriptures are a logical and propositional revelation from God so that anyone who reads the Bible can rationally understand what it says in the plain passages. Where there are difficult passages the reader can go to more plain passages of Scripture to interpret the more difficult passages.
The most obvious problem with experiential exegesis is precisely the problem that rejecting propositional revelation and orthodox doctrine in favor of a psychologized reading of Scripture leads to rejecting the Virgin Birth, the resurrection of Christ and a whole host of the fundamentals of the Christian faith.
The influence of Immanuel Kant is also seen here. He had sought the contents of science in experience, in strictly sensory experience. But outside the sphere of knowledge, he also made a place for morality and a religion based on morality. Here Schleiermacher saw an opening for faith and a religion of nonsensory experience. With this he sought to do battle with the irreligion of the enlightenment.
Let us rephrase this a little bit. Previous Christianity had been too intellectual. Religion, Schleiermacher held, is essentially emotional. For Schleiermacher, religion originates in a feeling of absolute dependence. This feeling guarantees the value of religion. By analyzing this feeling of absolute dependence, one arrives at the doctrines of theology. For example, since the dependence is absolute, we may infer the existence of God. In general, Schleiermacher thought he was able to derive a great many Christian doctrines by psychological analysis. The doctrine of the Trinity, the miracle of the virgin birth, and the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper were all, more or less, obtainable in this way. But only more or less.
A superficial view may find a great number of Christian doctrines in Schleiermacher, but a more penetrating view will find each one altered. The basic reason all these doctrines are altered is that Schleiermacher has substituted religious experience for supernatural revelation. This is his decisive break with all previous Christian history. How this affects the several doctrines is easy to understand. For one thing, every doctrine become tentative. We cannot have confidence in the truth of a doctrine because either or both of two difficulties may intervene. First, we may not have been accurate in our analysis of experience. And second, religious experience itself may change. These two difficulties do not attach to supernatural revelation. But for Schleiermacher every doctrine must be tailored to fit human experience.
To show concretely how this deviates from previous Christianity, two or three doctrines may be used as examples. The Lord’s Supper perhaps can be defended as a particularly appropriate expression of our religious experience. No one could quarrel with the idea of having some sort of fraternal meal. [sic]. If, of course, the idea of a fraternal meal is a satisfactory definition of the Lord’s Supper. But whatever the case may be with the Lord’s Supper, it is obviously difficult to derive the doctrine of the Trinity by an analysis of one’s feelings. And it may be said, the virgin birth is surely impossible so to obtain. Indeed, even knowledge of God becomes impossible.
Dr. Gordon H. Clark. The Decline of Theology in America. Audio Transcript.
Dr. Clark is perhaps one of the only consistent Calvinists and presuppositionalist apologists of the 20th century. The problem as I see it is that the charismatic movement is simply an adaptation of liberal theology applied to Pentecostal experience; even when the classical Pentecostals tried to retain their commitments to Evangelical orthodoxy, they were attacked by the more progressive neo-orthodox and papist Charismatics as "fundamentalists." The fact of the matter is that consistent cessationist Protestant Evangelicals do not reject the miracles of the Bible; instead, they are the only Evangelicals left today who believe that the miracles of the Bible are literally supernatural, not just a psychological experience in the line of Schleiermacher and other liberal theologians who kicked off the neo-orthodox movement.
If we must suspend disbelief in third world miracle claims, then I suppose every superstitious miracle story is credible. This is true from an orthodox and Protestant point of view that the miracles recorded in the Bible are literally true and literally supernatural, not just inspired myths. For Pentecostals and Charismatics the Bible is only literally true from the point of view of their own personal experiences, not as an objective reality recorded in the Bible. Furthermore, the Bible does not just contain the Word of God. The Bible is literally the Holy Spirit inspired words of God, not just a record of revelation as Althouse contends above. If the Bible is not the final authority, then the door is opened to all kinds of heretical movements within the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement, including the denial of the trinity by Oneness Pentecostals, and the Word of Faith movement, which has more in common with Christian Science than with biblical Christianity. Without the Bible there is no knowledge of God possible. None at all.
2 Timothy 3:16 (NKJV)
16 All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,
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