Pentecostalism as a Product of the Enlightenment

Nothing has been more foundational within pentecostal scholarship than the idea that Pentecostalism is necessarily opposed to “modernism” and/or “Enlightenment thinking.” And yet an unmistakably “modernist” strain of thought lies behind several central pentecostal commitments. This article traces Pentecostalism’s debt to the English Enlightenment’s encounter with the miraculous and to John Wesley’s reception of Lockean empiricism, and traces in outline the empiricist shape of a true pentecostal epistemology. It shows that early pentecostal rhetoric used the term “modernism” strictly to denote liberalism, so that recent efforts to aim this rhetoric against modernist commitments as defined vis-à-vis postmodernism cannot legitimately claim continuity with the early Pentecostals. All things considered, Pentecostalism owes a greater debt to Enlightenment thought than do many streams of Evangelicalism.