Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the 21st Century

by Harvey Cox

Book Overview

It was born a scant ninety-five years ago in a rundown warehouse on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. For days the religious-revival service there went on and on-and within a week the Los Angeles Times was reporting on a "weird babble" coming from the building. Believers were "speaking in tongues," the way they did at the first Pentecost recorded in the Bible?and a pentecostal movement was created that would, by the start of the twenty-first century,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0306810492
• ISBN13: 9780306810497
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 372 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Awesome! Just like New

The book is absolutely in great condition, just like new! Last owner even included personal notes about the book topic on a separate sheet of paper. Awesome product and deal

Documenting a passion to blow down walls

So with the end of slavery in the U.S.A., most black Christians set up their own churches, and later some of these churches gave birth to the massive Pentecostal movement, which deeply influenced many white churches and swept over much of the world. Cox traces this growing movement down the decades and over several continents. He deals in stories of seemingly ordinary people who caught a passion for breaking down walls between hearts. Many of these are women, such Lucy Farrow, Marie Burgess, Florence Crawford, Maria Woodworth-Etter, or Aimee Semple McPherson, who walked out of a church which could not respect her gifts, and built her independent Church of the Four Square Gospel in the 1920s, which had over 25,000 affiliated churches in 74 countries by the 1990s. The movement Cox describes is different in spirit than fundamentalism. Though it is subject to corrupt leaders or cheap commercialization, it is also full of local heroes like evangelical politician Benedita da Silva, who stresses Jesus' promise to the slum dwellers of Rio de Janeiro: "Imagine, we will do greater things than he did". (p. 166) In all, Cox gives a report which is properly respectful for the power and magnitude of popular religion, made down home in local people's hearts.

Primal spirituality surfacing under pentecostal inspiration

What is the source of the enormous appeal of pentecostalism? When William Penn founded Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, the Quakers were an ecstatic sect. Pentecostalism is the experiential brand of Christianity. It may account for one in four Christians. It proliferates in gigantic cities. It is a kind of ecumenical movement. Pentecostalism, the Azusa Street revival, arose among the disenfranchised. Religions struggle with order and chaos. The Azusa Street revival lasted for three years. William Joseph Seymour had no formal education. In Houston he saw a woman speaking in tongues. He was introduced to Charles Fox Parham. Seymour was invited to settle in Los Angeles to preach by Julia Hutchins. Los Angeles was cosmopolitan and had a high tolerance for spiritual innovators. The congregation of the Azusa Street revival was interracial. A rival group organized the Assemblies of God. The Church of God in Christ became a pentecostal denomination. A conference at Cleveland, Tenn., caused another group, Church of God, to become pentecostal. Mainline churches disliked the pentecostals and fundamentalists loathed them. In the disputes it was a case of the spirit versus the letter. The movement did not gain adherents between the wars, but rose up again following World War II. While a college student, the author attended a service at the New Order of the Latter Rain. Speaking in tongues has a theological purpose. Speaking in tongues is taken as evidence of spiritual baptism. Speaking in tongues is an example of ecstatic utterance. Aimee Semple McPherson drew on popular culture in the work of her International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, (Jesus as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King). Pentecostals believe in direct revelation through vision. Testimonies are a kind of folklore. Women are the principal carriers of pentecostalism. The author is taken with the parallel development of jazz, he plays the saxophone, and pentecostalism. Both depend upon heartfelt enthusiasm. In South America the pentecostals tell people they need to change and can change. Some followers are political activists. Pentecostalism counteracts the anomie produced by rapid urbanization. It supplies coherence and a new set of rules for living. The faith forbids drunkenness, carousing, infidelity. Despotism in the leadership of some of the groups in South America should be of concern. On the other hand, some groups practice democracy. Pentecostalism is paradoxical. Attendance at the traditional churches in Europe is low, but pilgrimages to sites associated with apparitions and other mysteries have increased. Sicily has a large number of pentecostals. Pentecostalism in Korea incorporates many elements of shamanism. Many of the independent African churches are pentecostal. Indigenous churches insist the gifts of the spirit are still available.

Will You please correct my former review?

I have sent my review on "Fire from Heaven"by Harvey Cox, which you have put on the column.I am very thankful for this.But I am sorry there are some misspellings in my review. Will you kindly replace the former review by the following one which I have corrected?I highly value this book mainly for three reasons. First this is the first and only significant research on the Pentecostal spirituality so far published. Based on his own "field work" method, the author both encourages and warns concerning the future of the spiritual movement. Secondly he is keenly aware that the movement has potential power to overcome racial discrimination (at least in its origin). Thirdly as myself one of the tongue-speaking people in Japan, I agree with the author who envisages this spiritual movement will eventually develop into various types of Christianity and will enrich the general trend of world religions.

Opens Mainstream Eyes To Movement, But Fails To See Clearly

Cox's Fire From Heaven does bring some sense of legitimacy to Pentecostalism among the liberal academy of theologians and religionists who still view the movement as full of backwater American blacks and whites. However, in playing up the idea that Pentecostalism may be little more than a Christian "mask" over indigenous spiritualities, I think he may have played into the hands of religious right fundamentalists who attack a charismatic christianity as heretical and into the hands of intellectual universalists who don't wish to see a distinct contribution from the Christian Pentecostal movement as a unique form of religious spirituality. Cox writes with the ease and clarity of a novelist, but the story is more fiction than fact. He could site actual examples of Pentecostalism in Africa, for instance, rather than making the eurocentric generalization that all African Christianity, or indigenous churches there, are just another form of Pentecostalism. Very little attention is given to the interpretive issues in Pentecostalism (oneness vs trinity, wesleyan sanctification vs keswick baptistic) nor is adequate attention given to the continuing distinction among class and race in the American movement. That someone from Kirkus Reviews could have actually have read the book and still view the Azusa Street Revival as a meeting of poor black domestic workers shows that the ecumenical and ethnic diversity of that early 20th century movement still have not been made crystal clear.