When religious ecstasy is the basis of the experience of faith. The immediate experience. The immediate sensation. Instant gratification. A direct connection to the messianic or its impending arrival. Glossolalia. Pentecostals believe that true religious experience is God sending down the Holy Spirit so as to be touched by their creator. Instead of meandering through what can appear to be a labyrinth of ritual and liturgy, it manifests itself, and quickly, through such phenomena as healing, dreams, prophetic visions and speaking in tongues.
There are often articulate personal testimonies of spiritual rebirth. Rebirth where problems are transformed into potentials, and where frustration, blockages and inertia are released and emancipated in exuberant joy. It is really impossible to doubt the genuineness of these testimonies, the authenticity of the accounts of healing even though the interpretation remains more ambiguous. Even a Harold Bloom, in his American Religion, wrote that he felt humbled when confronted with the intensity of prayer and devotion, urgent praise and fervent belief in the Pentecostal assembly. This conjunction of emotional energy is at the core of the Pentecostal ability to attract adherents, also given the scope for women in the role of authoritative prophets. It seems difficult, for anyone with even a mild romantic leaning, not to be enivrated to some degree by the sheer peculiarity of this religious phenomena as it unfolds in all its most extravagant stances. The question is whether the extremes of religiosity can be affirmed as a life affirming energy.
Charles Lewis: The woman is wearing white, and appears to need help. She convulses, then stands up and jerks back and forth. In an instant, she is on the floor. Around her are six people, their eyes closed and their hands hovering over her head while they pray….
---Batoni’s portraits won him his largest acclaim, but he began building his reputation with religious works such as The Ecstasy of St. Catherine of Siena (above, from 1743). By this time, Batoni already rejected the showiness of Rococo for a more controlled style aligned with the ancient Greek and Roman works recently rediscovered and studied by the first art historians, especially Johann Winckelmann, who became a friend of Batoni.---- Read More:http://artblogbybob.blogspot.com/2008/06/tour-guide.html
…Hundreds of people in this church sanctuary are doing similar things: waving their hands in the air, laughing uncontrollably, hugging, falling to the floor, speaking rapidly with their eyes closed and what appears to be speaking in tongues — which sounds like no recognizable language.
Collectively, the sound they make is a rumble. Above it all is the sound of a rock band turning hymns into Christian rock anthems and above that is the voice of Steve Long, a minister, imploring those in the crowd who need healing to raise their hands so others can reach out to them in prayer….Read More:http://life.nationalpost.com/2011/12/23/at-the-worlds-hottest-church/
---Glossolalia (from Greek glossa γλώσσα "tongue, language" and lalô λαλώ "speak, speaking") refers to ecstatic utterances, often as part of religious practices, commonly referred to as "speaking in tongues." The origin of the modern Christian concept of speaking in tongues is the miracle of Pentecost, recounted in the New Testament book of Acts, in which Jesus' apostles were said to be filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke in languages foreign to themselves, but which could be understood by members of the linguistically diverse audience. After the Protestant Reformation, speaking in tongues was sometimes witnessed in the revivals of the Great Awakening and meetings of the early Quakers. It was not until the twentieth century, however, that tongues became a widespread phenomenon, beginning with the Azusa Street Revival, which sparked the movement of contemporary Pentecostalism.--- Read More:http://parksfacts.blogspot.com/2011/02/glossolalia-speaking-in-tongues.html
The main distinction between these believers and the old Protestant sects of Europe is in the attitude towards Jesus. The Pentecosts believe they have a personal relationship with Jesus and that he, in turn, loves them as a person and is willing to offer redemption and salvation, though some like say a Jimmy Swaggart push the sin, redemption button a bit too long. Pentecosts treat Jesus as a transcendental force; living with them in the hear and now and conversing in the temporal. As Bloom said, about 90% of Americans, declare that God loves him or her on a personal and individual basis. This aspect has little to do with harsh European old testament protestanism or the Jewish concept of the covenant, or the harsher aspects of the Koran. Bloom has asserted that the notion of a Judeo-Christian heritage is a fabrication trying to weld separate traditions together, yet Pentecosts in some aspects seem to go further back to an older tradition that predates them and the substitution of Jesus for Yahweh or an interpretation of him may account for some of the intensity.
…It is both thrilling and exhausting to be in the midst of such a scene. And it may be the future of Christianity.
Among the early visitors were Margaret Poloma, a sociologist from the University of Akron in Ohio, and a specialist in the worldwide Pentecostal movement. She had heard about this fast-growing church in Toronto, and decided to take her holiday in Toronto to investigate. She said she will never forget what she saw.
“When I walked in I thought, ‘Oh my God,’ ” she recalled in a recent interview. “People who witnessed it
shell-shocked. You walked into the place and there were bodies all over the floor. They called it, ‘carpet time.’ It’s an old phenomenon, but I had not seen on that scale anywhere before. I just leaned against a pillar and stared.”…Read More:http://life.nationalpost.com/2011/12/23/at-the-worlds-hottest-church/
---In a real sense, Pentecostalism is primitive, tracing its roots back to the days following Jesus’s ascent into Heaven. According to the Book of Acts, in the New Testament, Christ’s disciples were in a room when, on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit fell and washed over everyone. From that encounter, the story goes, they went out across the world to create global Christianity. But the group in that room made such a racket that Peter had to come out and assure the Jewish crowd that they were not under the influence at such an early hour. “Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning,” Peter said.--- Read More:http://life.nationalpost.com/2011/12/23/at-the-worlds-hottest-church/ image:http://blogs.voanews.com/tedlandphairsamerica/tag/shakers/
…She saw people in spasms of religious ecstasy, speaking in tongues and falling to the floor as if they were struck down by the Holy Spirit. Some laughed while others cried, but all said they felt wonderful and wanted more. So powerful was this religious phenomenon, in terms of the number of people who were being touched and the force with which people were moved bodily, that it soon was called the Toronto Blessing.
ADDENDUM:
…Pentecostalism has taken the clutter out of Christianity and boiled it down to its essence, making it easily available to anyone who wants to believe.
---“What is problematic about many Pentecostal churches and ministries is a tendency to avoid the life of the mind — thinking about the faith rationally and seeking to make it intelligible. That is changing as more and more Pentecostals go to seminary and earn PhDs in religion and theology.”--- Read More:http://life.nationalpost.com/2011/12/23/at-the-worlds-hottest-church/ image:http://www.tillhecomes.org/let-god-do-the-talking/
“The entry is a low bar. Pentecostalism provides this immediate experience for the believer of God or the Holy Spirit that is forever mediated in the Catholic Church or the Anglican Church through ritual,” said Kevin O’Neill, a cultural anthropologist and a professor at the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, as well as part of a new interdisciplinary team studying Pentecostalism as emblematic of globalization.“There is an immediate sensation and experience that believers hang on to. It’s not a theological endeavour. That’s why tongues are so important, the music is so important and being filled with the Holy Spirit is so important.”
---The importance of this strand of Christianity is underlined by the Sarah Palin phenomenon. The electrifying effect of the Governor of Alaska on the Republican Party, on the American presidential election, and on white Evangelicals wary of John McCain, confounds assumptions about the unimportance of the name on the bottom of the ticket. What Palin picks up, for good or ill, is the sentiment of an America that sees itself as authentically womanly and manly in a way often sniffily overlooked by the "people of the plain" between Boston and Washington, who wouldn't know a moose if they saw one. Once, when I left Texas for Boston, I was asked, "Why go there? Some of those people are no better than Europeans". Nor is the issue really one of religion versus science or this-worldly concerns. If expectations of an end-time occupy one part of the Pentecostal mind, another part takes out mortgages and plans for retirement. "Pentecostals look for Eden with a satellite dish", as one commentator puts it. ---Read More:http://www.world-religion-watch.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=253&Itemid=66 image:http://www.toomanymornings.com/?p=1439
…Pentecostalism of whatever variety was pre-adapted to Africa by its fusion of white and black revivalist spirituality. Moreover, its fusion of technological modernity with a lively sense of an inspirited world and the demonic, lifted it across cultural barriers hitherto blocking the advance of mainstream mission. That is as true of India and China as it is of Africa. Whereas its Islamic rival represents the idea of a common religious universe organically related to politics and territory, Pentecostalism represents a decentralized form of voluntary organization operating on an open, competitive market. From the Western ecumenical viewpoint its infinite capacity for fission is deplorable and damaging, but that is part of its adaptability and its inherent pluralism….
…One outbreak of tongues of fire was associated with Charles Parham in Topeka, Kansas, in 1901, and another with a black holiness preacher, William Seymour, in 1906. Seymour sparked off wildly enthusiastic multiethnic and interracial manifestations, including speaking in tongues, at Azusa St, Los Angeles. The West Coast enthusiasm rapidly spread back to the South, fanned by a furore in the press. Southern holiness people either provided a conduit for Pentecostalism or disdained its unfettered worship style, for example fast-paced spirituals quite unlike the old Evangelical hymns. Just as the original Methodists in England and Pietists in Germany had disrupted their established Churches, and the holiness offshoots of Methodism had criticized staid denominational authorities for losing their original fire, so the holiness movement found itself outflanked by Pentecostalism. The rest of Randall Stephens’s book is given over to the way many white stalwarts of Pentecost transformed themselves after the Second World War from social and religious pariahs into middle-class Republicans. This familiar sequence of volcanic eruption and cooling off illustrates yet again Max Weber’s notions of bureaucratization and the routinization of charisma. Read More:http://www.world-religion-watch.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=253&Itemid=66
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