Eyewitness Remembers the Century of the Holy Spirit, An by Vinson Synan

Author:Vinson Synan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-31T23:00:00+00:00

8

The Third Wave

By 1980, two powerful waves of renewal were well established in the church world: the Pentecostal revival, which began in 1901, and the charismatic renewal, with beginnings in 1960. Although many important differences distinguished the two movements, both accepted the idea that a separate subsequent experience—called baptism in the Holy Spirit—occurred in believers’ lives after their conversion. In addition, both movements emphasized speaking in tongues as an important accompaniment to this experience.

The most significant difference that existed between the two movements was that Pentecostals held tenaciously to the teaching that speaking in tongues was the necessary “initial evidence” of post-conversion baptism in the Holy Spirit, while the new charismatics in mainline churches saw tongues as one of the charismata, which might or might not come at the time of the Pentecostal experience. To charismatics, all of the other gifts of the Spirit were also signs of the infilling with the Holy Spirit.

Interestingly, the first wave of charismatic leaders stood very close to their Pentecostal brothers and sisters in their view of tongues. Dennis Bennett, while not using the term “evidence,” said that tongues were “part of the package”—just as tongues are parts of a pair of shoes that can’t be purchased separate from the shoes. This meant that without tongues, an individual couldn’t claim to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. Rodman Williams, the Presbyterian charismatic theologian, wrote in his classic Renewal Theology that speaking in tongues was the “primary evidence” of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. George Montague and Kilian McDonnell, in their classic book Christian Initiation and the Baptism in the Holy Spirit: Evidence from the First Eight Centuries, pointed to speaking in tongues as holding a “privileged” place in the New Testament witness to the baptism in the Holy Spirit. The same could be said of many of the first wave of charismatic leaders; most would agree that while speaking in tongues was not always the necessary evidence, it was still sought as the expected consequence of the Pentecostal experience.

In time, most charismatic theologians used the term “actualization,” meaning that the Holy Spirit and His gifts were received at baptism but released later. Like a timed-release medical pill that bursts into action some time after being swallowed, what charismatics called the “baptism in the Holy Spirit” was tied to initiation, although it was permissible to speak of the experience as a discrete, freestanding experience. Some critics, such as Presbyterian theologian Henry Lederly, spoke critically of actualization language as a “time bomb” theory, but most charismatics in both Protestant and Catholic traditions were comfortable with the term “actualization” or “release” rather than “evidence.” Both Pentecostals and charismatics continued to accept the idea of a subsequent experience called “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” with the expectation that speaking in tongues would come at the time of the experience or shortly afterward.

As newer independent charismatic denominations formed over time, they were forced to choose between the older Pentecostal model or the newer charismatic model. The most prominent

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