Pentecostal Imagination and the Retrieval of Identity

Book excerpt: How does identity survive the passage of time? How can we be sure that our church community in the present is a faithful representation of the originating community in the past? This book explores how Pentecostalism—the world’s fastest-growing expression of Christianity, since its inception at the beginning of the twentieth century—can identify as the same community that birthed the church in the first century. A community that spans two millennia of church history presents numerous challenges, which raise crucial questions. In the case of Pentecostalism, these questions concern the criteria we might employ in order to recognize various instances of that community: both in the present, and throughout the past. The Pentecostal emphasis on the Holy Spirit as the founding force behind the early church suggests some exciting possibilities. By bringing together Pentecostal theology and hermeneutical philosophy, this volume develops a model which attempts to discern the Pentecostal Spirit from within history. Rather than arriving at a historical survey of various theologies of the Spirit, this book instead advances a historiography which is itself inherently Spirit-oriented: a pneumatology of history.