Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism: Blood Nephews?
Abstract
Pentecostalism and fundamentalism are viewed by many as closely related, both as expressions of a conservative Christian response to modernism and postmodernism. It is argued in the article that although the Pentecostal tradition since the 1940s linked with a part of Evangelicalism and adopted some of its practices, including their fundamentalist view of the Bible, the movement originally viewed the Bible differently. Since the 1970s Pentecostals had begun to debate their hermeneutics intensively and the original view of the Bible of early Pentecostals gained ground. Today the movement consists of some with a fundamentalist attitude while others maintain a Pentecostalist hermeneutic that views the Bible as a fixed reference point for the encounter with God, which forms the core of Pentecostal identity. Pentecostals reach beyond the levels of creed and ceremony, cognizant of a cerebral religion, into the realm of a spirituality defined in terms of the search for connection with the precognitive core impulse of human life. The contemporary Pentecostal movement functions within the tension created by two opposing views of reading and interpreting the Bible.
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