Monthly Archives: November 2025

In my long exploration of the Charismatic takeover of Evangelicalism, here on The Hump, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that one core issue is that because Evangelicals lost many of the legitimate sources of knowing the emotions of joy, peace and love in Christ, it has appeared to them that the only way to know these things is through the direct, mystical, experience of God through the “Pentecostal experience.” This “blessing,” as we’ve seen, is not only absent from Scripture, but in effect deifies human passions or, worse, taps into some other spiritual source, if that’s what “kundalini energy” is. In the end it must disappoint.

In my last post I showed how the Charismatic “second experience” can be traced back, through John Wesley, to the Moravian conversion/justication/sanctification first experience taught by Count Zinzendorf. I also examined what seems to be a separate tying of conversion to a particular emotional experience by the English Puritans, the foundation of which (I would conjecture) was Martin Luther’s near-pathological sense of guilt. By God’s grace, his dread of damnation led to his rediscovery of salvation by faith alone, and consequent doctrine of assurance, albeit balanced with a life of continual repentance for indwelling sin.