Theology of the Spirit

Abstract

The news has spread far and wide that Los Angeles is being visited with a ‘rushing mighty wind from heaven’ … No instruments of music are used, none are needed. No choir – but bands of angels have been heard by some in the spirit and there is a heavenly singing that is inspired by the Holy Ghost. No collections are taken. No bills have been posted to advertise the meetings. No church or organization is back of it. All who are in touch with God realize as soon as they enter the meetings that the Holy Ghost is the leader. The baptism in the spirit Frank Bartleman, eye-witness of the Azusa Street revival, concurred. ‘The meetings were controlled by the Spirit’, he declared. By the early Pentecostals at Azusa Street so proclaiming that the ‘Holy Ghost is the leader’, they saw all the manifestations occurring in their meetings as the sovereign work of the Spirit and the manifestation of God’s power, the revival promised in the Scriptures to come in the ‘last days’. If there is one central and distinctive theme in Pentecostal and Charismatic theology, then it is the work of the Holy Spirit. The history sketched in this book has shown that all the various expressions of Pentecostalism have one common experience, a personal encounter with the Spirit of God enabling and empowering people for service. Pentecostals often declare that ‘signs and wonders’ accompany this encounter, certain evidence of ‘God with us’. Through their experience of the Spirit, Pentecostals and Charismatics make the immanence of God tangible. As former Anglican Bishop of Winchester John V. Taylor put it: The whole weight of New Testament evidence endorses the central affirmation of the Pentecostalists that the gift of the Holy Spirit transforms and intensifies the quality of human life, and that this is a fact of experience in the lives of Christians. The longing of thousands of Christians to recover what they feel instinctively their faith promises them is what underlies the whole movement.