Quote:
Originally Posted by Drake
In post #185 I described my positive though incomplete experience in Pentecostalism. Here I will provide what I consider the poor poor Christianity aspects of Pentecostslism. One is a basic teaching and the other are practices.
First, a fundamental flaw in most Pentecostal churches is the Arminian belief of conditional salvation.
“The conditional preservation of the saints, or commonly conditional security, is the Arminian belief that believers are kept safe by God in their saving relationship with Him upon the condition of a persevering faith in Christ.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cond..._of_the_saints
This plays out as an elevator salvation... one minute you are up , next you are down. It is applied something like this... you are in a meeting speaking in tongues, only real evidence that you have been baptized in the Holy Spirit, then next day you go out with buddies, have a few drinks, hit the road with one too many under your belt, run into a telephone pole, die and... you find yourself in hell. You start to become introspective about everything in your life because your eternal status is dependent on it. You start to ask, what if I die right now? That is a frequent message from the pulpit. Conversely, if you leave a meeting on good terms with the Lord and die on the way home, you end up in heaven.
Next post on practices.
Drake |
I cannot nor will I deny the positive life changing experiences I had in a Pentecostal Church. However, the environment lends itself to superstition and manufactured exhibitions. I will recount two that I consider to be firmly in the poor poor category.
First, because glossia is so important to the group as evidence of the Holy Spirit it was often manufactured... by that I mean speaking in tongues was brought by repeating “coca-cola ten times real fast”. One dear older sister used to reach out and kinda yank the lower lip of someone trying to break through as if to jump start the glossia.
Second, during revivals there was frequent supernatural manifestations. “I was praying here today and Jesus appeared standing right there at the end of this altar. And He told me,..”.
I should add that a popular interpretation of tongues started with “ If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves...l “ etc. I was pretty sure He had more to say but it was just part of that culture as it were.
These are examples but they reflect what is poor about Pentecostalism in my experience.
Drake