Harvey Cox, Fire From Heaven: the Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995)
Cox has sought in this book to decipher pentecostalism’s inner meaning and discern the source of its enormous appeal in order to understand its large upsurge of popularity. He notes that the first Pentecost was full of promise, and that reflection upon it today is also fruitful, because thinking about the future differently directly influences the present (4). Cox was interested to find that Pentecostalism is mainly an urban phenomenon worldwide, and not a “hillbilly religion”, contrary to popular thought (15). He also learned that it is errant to equate Pentecostals with fundamentalists, as Pentecostals embed their beliefs in testimonies, ecstatic speech, and bodily movement versus formal theological systems (15). He contends that for the early Pentecostals, a baptism (or the) in the Spirit everything about their lives, and they saw the world in a completely new light (70). The onset what was to become the Church of God, Cleveland, occurred during a conference at which AJ Tomlinson attended, led by GB Cashwell. Tomlinson fell at the feet of Cashwell, and received the Pentecostal blessing, and spoke in ten different languages. In some ways, e.g. their emphasis on personal experience, the early Pentecostals were closer to Protestant liberals theologically than to the fundamentalists (75).
However, whereas liberals talked about experience(s), Pentecostals actually had them. Pentecostalism has succeeded because it has spoken to the spiritual emptiness of our age (81). They have enabled people to recover three dimensions of spirituality: primal speech, primal piety, and primal hope, with speech referring to tongues, piety referring to trances, visions, healings, dreams, and dance, and with hope referring to its eschatological vision – one that includes an already but not yet dimension (82, 111). Tongues have persisted, Cox believes, because they represent the core of all Pentecostal conviction: that the Spirit needs no mediators, but is available to everyone immediately and intensely (87). Millennial zest may have dampened for the ~13% of Pentecostals who live in affluence, but the remaining ~87% still looks for a soon-coming New Jerusalem (119). Women have played an extraordinarily important role in the carrying of Pentecostalism around the globe, as has the centrality of music in its worship (121). Despite Paul’s strictures in 1 Corinthians, when Cox visited pentecostal churches around the globe, women almost always were the principal bearers of the Pentecostal gospel to the four corners of the earth (125). Due to tendency of leaders toward highhanded overlordship, the hopes of many people that Pentecostalism would become the seed-bed for democracy in Latin America is faltering (183).
Cox contends that for any religion to grow in today’s world, it must possess two capabilities: 1) it must be able to include and transform elements of pre-existing religions in that culture, and 2) it must equip people to live in rapidly changing societies. In Africa, for example, wizardry has come to have a larger meaning, one that encompasses offenses against the “Earthkeeping Spirit”, which is an interpretation of the Christian Holy Spirit, like soil erosion, deforestation, etc. (245). African independent churches, though not Pentecostal by name, are ‘phenomenologically pentecostal’ in their style and origins (246). In Africa, the concept of ‘healing’ has been expanded to mean remedies for unemployment, family disputes, racism, and marital discord, etc. (254), a conceptioning that Africa could offer profitably to the remainder of the world.
As scientific modernity and conventional religion lose their appeal, two contenders are stepping forward: fundamentalism and experientialism – the latter of which Pentecostalism is exemplar (300). Pentecostals, however, need to be more specific about what they experience, so as not to devolve into a cult of vacuous experience, because as Gadamer affirmed, experience is the most obscure experience we have (313–14). Cox thinks that religious belief must pass the experimental verification test, a test that affirms experience is about something. Cox is heartened by the rethinking of Pentecostal theology by some modern adherents into a view that envisions not a fiery end, but a transformation into the promised kingdom, and one which a date or timetable cannot be applied unto (318). Cox considers Pentecostalism, by its very nature, to be ecumenical, as it is a synthesis of a number of other sources, and not all of them are Christian (16). In another sense, however, they were not at all ecumenists, at least not in today’s sense, because they considered the other churches to be entirely corrupt, and themselves only as faithful to the true gospel(74).