The World's Christians. Douglas Jacobsen. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Douglas Jacobsen
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Религия: прочее
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781119626121
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4.1 Number of Pentecostal Christians living in each region of the world with percentage of all Pentecostals worldwide.

      © John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

      Pentecostal spirituality centers on experience: feeling God’s presence within one’s own body. The testimonies of millions of Pentecostal Christians say the same thing: When the Spirit of God comes into their lives they feel overwhelmed by a strange and wonderful power. The early Pentecostal leader William Durham put it this way:

      Because feelings play such a large role in Pentecostalism, some Pentecostal theologians have argued that “orthopathy” (right feeling) needs to be taken into account when trying to distinguish Pentecostalism from the other three Christian mega‐traditions, since those typically focus only on orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxy (right behavior). While Pentecostals emphasize emotions, they are not simply emotivists. They are also believers who recognize the importance of Christian doctrine and ethics. That said, most Pentecostal theologians would insist that the world is a much stranger and more wonderful place than words or rationality can ever fully comprehend.

      Pentecostalism’s focus on the Spirit, on empirically experiencing God beyond or outside the realm of words, is very different from Protestantism’s emphasis on the Word, on theologically understanding God’s message to humankind. Rather than being a matter of the mind, Pentecostalism is about being enveloped in the love of God. It is about being healed emotionally and physically by God’s presence. It is about being “slain in the Spirit” (knocked unconscious by God’s power). It is about “letting go and letting God,” shutting off one’s thinking and relaxing into the flow of God’s Spirit within and around one’s body. Self‐control is a Protestant virtue, but it is precisely the willingness to sometimes lose control that allows Pentecostal Christians to experience God in the ways they do.

      Today, speaking in tongues is optional in many Pentecostal circles. A singular emphasis on the gift of tongues has given way to a wider appreciation of all the gifts of the Holy Spirit, including both the miraculous (such as claims to heal the sick, predict the future, or even raise the dead) and the relatively ordinary (such as the ability to teach or lead or encourage others). A similar moderation of opinion has taken place about the baptism with the Holy Spirit. While many Pentecostals still consider this experience to be unique and necessary – it is the thing that makes one a Pentecostal Christian – many members of the broader Pentecostal movement now assume that a person can arrive at the Spirit‐filled life via a number of different pathways, not all of them linked to a specific experience identified as the baptism with the Spirit.

      Pentecostal Christians live with the miraculous, and they assume that God’s wonder‐working power should be part of the ordinary Christian life. Individuals in all the Christian traditions (and most of the world’s religions) believe that miracles sometimes take place, but Pentecostal Christians assume that miracles occur all the time. They believe that God is constantly watching over humankind and that God is ready and willing to intervene even in the smallest details of life. So Pentecostal believers pray and expect God to respond, whether they are requesting a good parking spot, praying for a child to be healed from terminal cancer, asking for a hurricane to be directed away from a city, or seeking reconciliation when a friendship has been broken. Nothing is too small or too big to bring to God in prayer.

      image William J. Seymour (1870–1922) was the leader of the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, one of the key events that gave rise to the Pentecostal movement. Born in Louisiana to Catholic parents, he slowly made his way through the “holiness” or “sanctified” wing of the black Baptist church to Pentecostalism. Called to be the pastor of a small Holiness Church in Los Angeles, Seymour began preaching Pentecostalism, and the congregation’s leaders locked him out of the church. Seymour persisted, however, holding services at a friend’s home and later in a rented warehouse on Azusa Street. Soon people were flocking to Los Angeles from all over the world, seeking the Holy Spirit’s baptism. In the following passage taken from the Azusa Street Mission’s newspaper The Apostolic Faith,