The Hump of the Camel

Today is Pentecost Sunday. It commemorates the fact that after the first pouring out of the Holy Spirit in Jerusalem fifty days after the Resurrection, each and every year Peter led the Jerusalem church in prayer, so they were all filled with the Holy Spirit again, and again spoke miraculously to the gathered diaspora pilgrims in their own languages, after which Peter preached his annual sermon, and thousands were always saved. That’s why Charismatic Jewish Christians repeat the miracle in Jerusalem even now for foreign tourists, at Pentecost…

What? Charismatics don’t do that annual miracle? And you say that even Peter and the Jerusalem church didn’t, so that in Acts 11 the baptism of the Gentiles in the Spirit was compared to “the beginning” rather than to an ongoing pattern of experience? You mean that the Pentecost phenomenon was a one-off event for a special purpose? How come Alpha never told me that??

The complex web of people I examined in my last post seems to show that the leaders of extreme Charismatic and Pentecostal movements share a similar profile as well as a personal network- indeed, a profile that also matches the ancient historical originators of heterodox cults like the Montanists or the Valentinians. This may be summarised by saying they are con-men who appear to have become so detached from truth that they partially believe their own hype – deceiving and deceived, as Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:13.

There’s an interesting discussion between journalist Roman Balmakov and Christian commentator Eric Metaxas here. They discuss Metaxas’s call to metaphorical arms to the American Church to rescue their nation from the rapidly escalating decline, on the basis that the Church is the only institution that has a coherent enough ideology not to have been completely captured by the various totalitarian tendencies with which we have all, apart from the most obtuse, become familiar since 2020.

When I put up my three part offering on Pentecostal/Charismatic theology in March, I had no idea it would lead to such a long series (twelve posts prior to this one). That’s how relevant issues multiply when you start researching something.

In the last couple of posts (and more generally in my recent focus on Pentecostal theology) I’ve made mention both of revivalism, as the perennial hope of many Evangelicals, especially on the Charismatic wing; and apostasy, specifically in connection with prominent worship leaders, but I might equally have included church leaders and ordinary people.

At my last church, one of my fellow elders liked to introduce hymns with the back-story of those who had written them. You may be familiar with some of them.

I occasionally wonder how isolated communities of ancient (and sometimes rather esoteric) Christian denominations have survived under the servitude of Islam since the incursion of the Arabs many centuries ago. Supernatural perseverance aside, what factors prevent such populations simply capitulating to the dominant religion, with all the cultural advantages, and fading away over the generations? What makes a twentieth generation Egyptian pig farmer, denied education because he is a Coptic Christian, carry on?