Foundations of the Christian Life. Chapter 25. The Holy Spirit 5. What about the Pentecostal Experience?

Foundations of the Christian Life.
Chapter 25. The Holy Spirit #5. What about the Pentecostal Experience?


I feel I have clearly demonstrated from Scripture a doctrinal position that every Christian is "Baptised in the Spirit". This is in agreement with Conservative Evangelical teaching but clearly is contrary to the classic Pentecostal teaching.

It would be easy, at this stage, to say that Pentecostals (and by implication Charismatics in general) are wrong in their interpretation of scripture so their experience is also wrong and to write them off as a pack of deceived heretics.

This, of course, is an illogical stance. The fact that Pentecostal doctrine on the Baptism in the Spirit is constructed wrongly proves only one thing: that their doctrine is constructed wrongly. It does not prove anything at all about their experience. If they were able to come up with a doctrinal construction that accounted for their experience that was scriptural then they would be in the clear and those who react to their experience would be on the back foot, so to speak.

It is my purpose in the next few chapters to present such a doctrinal construction which, I believe, reconciles the Conservative Evangelical position with the Pentecostal experience.

The bottom line doctrinally about the Baptism in the Spirit is simple and it can be put in the form of three statements:
* We already have every spiritual blessing in Christ (Ephesians 1:3).
* The Baptism in the Spirit is a spiritual blessing.
* Therefore we already have it in Christ.
Against this, it seems to me, it is impossible to argue.

But the Conservative Evangelical position does not stop there. If we stop a discussion before we table all the facts we are not being fair to the opposition. So what else do Conservatives say that may be of value in this discussion? (Notice I am not at this point interested in Charismatic or Pentecostal input, I will be again later, but at this point I want to lead the discussion along accepted Conservative Evangelical doctrinal lines.)

The point of tension we are at is one created by the conflict of doctrine with experience. So what is the Conservative Evangelical position on the relationship of doctrine to experience?

THE RELATIONSHIP OF DOCTRINE TO EXPERIENCE:

Having established a doctrinal position is that all that can be said? The Bible does not give us a doctrinal religion to tease our brains, rather God is interested in sharing a life with us. He is interested in experience.

Hence we need to find some link between doctrine and experience.

The following four propositions concerning the relation of doctrine to experience are held by all evangelical scholars (as far as I can tell):

Proposition 1:
In Jewish understanding (and hence Bible understanding) there is no doctrine that does not have a practical life application, i.e. an experiential quotient.

There are two ideas of what true knowledge is:
a. Knowledge is intellectual, rational – the Greek idea. The Greeks believed that there could be objective truth arrived at by logical reasoning. Personal experience was not important – in fact experience was held to be a “lower order of truth”. To the Jew this approach is “vain philosophy”.
b. Knowledge is the understanding of life – the Jewish idea. Thus all knowledge has life experience implications. There is, in Jewish thought, no doctrine that is not experiential. Thus there are no theoretical passages in the Bible - they are all descriptions of experiences or attempts to explain the experiences.

Paul clearly reflects this Jewish idea of knowledge in
1 Timothy 1:9-11.
“We also know that law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious; for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for adulterers and perverts, for slave traders and liars and perjurers- and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine that conforms to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.”

As does James, “faith without works is dead.”

This is the typical Jewish idea of what doctrine is – it is lifestyle, experience.

Proposition 2:
For the NT writers, experience was prior to doctrine. The writings of the NT, particularly the letters, were written to try to explain to the new converts their experience of salvation and what it meant.
This implies three things:
* The letters are not doctrinal statements of theory plucked out of the air but are firmly based on experience and are an attempt to explain that experience.
* There must have been an experience they had experienced that needed explaining. This may sound obvious, but it is a fact that escapes many people.
* Because the letters are written AFTER the experience and the experience was already common and known they do not describe the experience itself, except by inference. The letters are concerned with the meaning of the experience, not the experience itself. So it is largely a waste of time to look at the letters and ask the question: “What does the experience look like?” It is the wrong place to look for the answer.

It is fundamentally wrong, then, to argue for a doctrine that is not experiential. The doctrine itself started with an experience and is the result of reflection and revelation on the experience. When we state doctrine we need to do so with the end in mind that this is to be experienced in some way.

Proposition 3:
Though we “have every spiritual blessing in Christ (Ephesians 1:3)”, this is only true in a legal sense.
“In Christ”, that is through our position as member of his body, “we have every spiritual blessing”. Christ has all the blessings and because we are in him we also have them. “He who takes the Son takes everything.”

But Evangelical teaching has always held that, in our personal experience, they are not “Ours’” yet. Some of the possessions are reserved for heaven. Those possessions that are for this age and lifetime are given to us in promise form and we are to “possess our possessions”, i.e. come into the experiential reality of them. Spiritual growth is the progressive experiential entering into those things that we have already been given at new birth. There is no subsequent set of blessings waiting for us as we get “more mature.”

Thus, though we may doctrinally be able to prove that we have some blessing “in Christ” that does not mean that we have fully, or even partially, experienced what God has promised. So the evangelical position has always been that the promises of God are ours’ “in Christ” in a legal sense, but are not ours’ experientially until we make them ours’. And Evangelicalism has also held that we are to “possess our possessions”.

This is the Principle of Legally/Positionally verses Experientially, and I covered this in depth in Chapter 4.

Proposition 4:
The judge of our experiential realisation of what has been promised is the Bible. Scripture judges our experience (or lack of it) and not the other way around. The description of what the experience of the blessings of God looks like has to be derived from scripture and not from our opinion based on our lack of experience.
This means we interpret our experience according to the Bible, not the Bible according to our experience. The Bible remains the judge of our experience and our interpretation of our experience.

This has been the major problem in the Pentecostal doctrinal presentation of the Baptism in the Spirit. There is a clear element of interpreting the Bible according to experience, which is the wrong way around. Modern Pentecostal experience was that they became Christians and then at a later time had this “Pentecostal experience”. Thus it was clear to them that this experience was a “second blessing” subsequent to conversion. But this is a deduction from their experience not from scripture. It led to a wrong theoretical (doctrinal) conclusion – but it doesn’t prove the experience itself was wrong. Mind you, we have to acknowledge that Pentecostal theology has always held that, in NT times, people did experience the baptism in the Spirit at conversion and they also claim this should be the norm today. Pentecostal thinkers are therefore struggling with this conflict between doctrine (the ideal) and reality (the experience as we know it now).

Clearly there is a very difficult, but fine, line in the balance of doctrine and experience.
* The Bible doctrine was based on experience and
* Now we must judge our experience by the doctrine.
It sounds a bit contradictory, but that is how it is.

Taking these 4 points about the relationship of doctrine to experience let’s apply them to the Pentecostal Experience.

1. Jewish understanding of “truth” implies there is an experience of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit that corresponds to the doctrine.
2. It is this experience that forms the scriptural basis of the doctrine.
3. Though we can prove doctrinally that every Christian, “in Christ”, has the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, that does not mean that every Christian has experienced fully what the Bible means by that phrase. This does not in any way deny that we “have” the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, it only asks the question, “In what way do we have it?”
4. The judge of whether or not we have fully experienced what the Baptism in the Holy Spirit means cannot be our personal opinion but must be the word of God. Only by careful exegesis of the scriptural passages dealing with the experience of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit can we describe what the Bible says is this experience. Once we have described it from scripture it is a simple matter to hold that description up against our personal experience and ask if it is true of us.

The point of what I have been trying to demonstrate in this section on the Holy Spirit is this: If we take the Bible seriously we will have to come to this position:
1. We have the gift of the Holy Spirit, both the Indwelling and the Baptism of the Spirit, from conversion. This is a covenant gift of God’s grace because we are in Christ. They are spiritual blessings which we have in Christ. “He who takes the Son takes everything.” Pentecostals would have to admit their traditional doctrinal approach is wrong at this point.
2. Like all gifts of God’s grace we receive them in promise form. Legally they are ours’, but we do not fully experience them at conversion. All evangelical thinkers acknowledge this is true of the indwelling Spirit – no one fully experiences what that gift involves at conversion. There seems to me to be no possible objection against arguing that the same is true for the Baptism in the Spirit – no one fully experiences what that gift involves at conversion. This leaves open the possibility of later experiences of the Spirit that can justifiably be called “Experiences of the Baptism in the Spirit.”
3. Every doctrine has an experiential reality that matches it. This is just as true of the Baptism in the Spirit as it is of the Indwelling and Filling of the Spirit. God’s desire is for us to live in the experience, not just understand the doctrine.
4. Spiritual growth is the process of entering into the experience of what we already have legally because of our position in Christ.
5. If there is an experience that matches the doctrine of the baptism in the Spirit (and there is) then we should seek to enter into it.
6. If there is such an experience then it must be described in the Bible. It is not left up to our own imagination to dream up what it would be like.

This would appear to me to be a sound evangelical doctrinal position.

Two Things:

(1) An Objection: The Baptism in the Spirit is a positional thing and not an experience (John Stott).

Answer: For the Jewish mind there is no doctrine which has no experience. Hence: There is no positional truth that does not have a corresponding experience to go with it. Evangelical theology assumes that our doctrine does have experience that matches it on every other gift God gives us, so why pick on the Baptism in the Spirit as an exception to the rule?

Stott does not argue that the indwelling of the Spirit is not experiential so why should he argue that the Baptism in the Spirit is not experiential? It seems a little inconsistent to me. I understand, but I don’t know for sure, that Stott later changed his stance on the Baptism in the Spirit and argued for an experience of it.

(2) A Question: Is it a Second Blessing?

Answer: Strictly speaking it is not. To use the term "second blessing" implies the getting of something new from God which we didn't have before. In actual fact this is not true, we are simply ENTERING INTO THE EXPERIENCE OF SOMETHING WE ALREADY HAVE that we have not previously fully appropriated.

At this point then I have affirmed Conservative Evangelical doctrine on the Baptism of the Spirit but have also, using Evangelical doctrine, opened a door to experiencing that doctrine. At this point any objection to an experience of the Baptism in the Spirit should evaporate.

The upshot of this is that we have to ask: "If there is a doctrine of the Baptism in the Spirit, then what sort of experience does that doctrine explain? What does the experience look like?”

After all, if we are to receive a gift we should know what it looks like so that we know when we have received it. This is another simple fact that escapes many people: If there is no criteria as to what the gift of the Spirit looks like then we would never know for sure if we have got it or not.

Question:
Is it right to call this experience of the Spirit “the Baptism in the Spirit”?

Answer:
What else could we call it? If it is the experience of the gift of the Baptism in the Spirit then why not call it such? At this point the Pentecostals have to be given a big tick – the Pentecostal experience – at least in part – is an experience of the Baptism in the Spirit. But here I have to restate my reservations about using this title. The Pentecostal experience is not just an experience of the Baptism in the Spirit; it also includes an experience of being Filled with the Spirit – and more, as we shall see.

So the Pentecostal revival of the early 1900s was clearly a restoration of truth that the Church had lost and God was at work restoring a truth and the experience of it. The fact that the Pentecostals didn’t explain it too well didn’t mean God wasn’t at work, just that human failure didn’t allow Him to bring a clear revelation.

WHAT DOES THE EXPERIENCE OF THE SPIRIT LOOK LIKE?

Now here is where, to be consistent, I have to again side with the Evangelicals. If we are going to define our doctrine from scripture, and I believe we must, then to be consistent we have to let scripture define our experience of that doctrine also. This is the Conservative Evangelical position on experience. To do otherwise would be inconsistent.

However what I have found at this point - having said we must let scripture define our experience - is that the average Conservative Evangelical suddenly backtracks. There is a tendency for them to become very Liberal – in fact they can become heretics.

The reason for this backtracking is that the question has to be asked, “Where is the Experience described in scripture?”

It is at this point that I allow the Pentecostals back into the discussion. They have an opinion here that is of value. Pentecostals argue that the experience is described in Acts, particularly Acts 2:1-4.

And for the Conservative Evangelical this will never do.

Why? Well, you see, having agreed that:
* We all have the Spirit in two relationship, in and upon,
* And having agreed that this gift of the Spirit is “in Christ” and contains “every spiritual blessing”
* And having agreed that there is an experience that corresponds to doctrine
* And having agreed that spiritual growth is simply the entering into the experience of what God has already given us in Christ.
* And having agreed that scripture should define the experience
- then to allow Acts back into the discussion here to demonstrate what the experience looks like would be to acknowledge the Pentecostal experience as being scriptural - right - and for everyone!

And that creates massive headaches. “What about all those who haven’t had the experience like it is described in Acts? Are they missing out on something?”

Now my answer to this would be, “Yes, they are.” But that is not politically correct.
So the average Conservative Evangelical will go to great lengths to argue against the Pentecostal position here. So far that they, in fact, become heretics in practice even though they do not in theory. How does this happen?

Firstly they will argue variations on this:
“You can’t use Acts as a basis for doctrine. You can’t make their experience back there in Acts normative for us today.”

When one asks, “Why not?” the answer boils down to this, “Because it doesn’t suit us to let you do so here.”

Two answers can be given to this objection:
1. Paul says, “All scripture is profitable for …doctrine. (2 Timothy 3:16,17)”
To not allow Acts as a guide for teaching on what the experience of the Spirit looks like would be the same as not allowing Acts to remain in scripture.
What the objector is doing in a practical sense – though they would never say this is true – is removing Acts from the scriptures. They are denying it scriptural status at this point because it doesn’t suit their position to do otherwise.
This practice of trying to omit books from the Bible you didn’t like occurred in the Early Church and was deemed by the Church to be a heresy. It is called Marcionism, after the man who tried to do it. It was condemned at a Church Council in the 4th Century.
Now the objector here would be horrified to think he was a heretic - but in all practical senses at this point he is being one. By trying to exclude Acts from the discussion at this point he is being a heretic.

2. The fact is, all evangelical teachers and preachers use Acts for doctrine. They all preach from Acts sometime in their ministry – even if it is only on the day of Pentecost! And in doing so they make doctrine out of Acts and, to some degree, make the disciples experience then normative for us today. To deny the Pentecostal the right to do the same would be nothing less than hypocrisy.

Another objection grows out of this: “You can’t make the Acts experiences normative for everybody unless you can prove it from the Epistles as well.”

Again I would ask, “Why?
And the answer is usually some variation on this, “Because I say so!”
To this I say, “Are you sure?”

Let me ask a few questions:
* How many times does God have to say something before we accept it as truth? Is once enough? Or does God have to say something 2 or 3 or more times? How many is enough? Remember God is truth and he never lies. Would once be enough?
* If God says it once plainly in Acts and then gives several confirming instances in Acts who are we to insist that he says it again in the Epistles? It is sheer intellectual arrogance to demand that he do so. It is to usurp the rights of God to say it when and where and how he likes. It is to make a claim to know better than God, to be God, i.e. self idolatry.
* Actually the epistles do give sufficient support – if one is prepared to accept it. The problem is that the objectors will not accept any proof as “enough”. There is a simple lack of submission to the word of God in the objection. It is all a matter of authority, as we discussed in Chapter 3.

But we need to understand the difference in PURPOSE of the Acts from the Epistles to see the falsity of this demand.

Acts was written to record the events that happened in history so, of course, it describes what happened. It is where we would expect to find a description of what the experience looked like.

The epistles, on the other hand, were written to explain what their experience of salvation meant in terms of ongoing life. In other words the Epistles are assuming that the readers have already had this experience of salvation and the gift of the Spirit. So of course there is no need to describe the experience again. The emphasis is on “What does it mean?” The “it” itself is assumed.

However every now and then the writers of the epistles make a comment about the salvation experience that gives us some insight into what it looked like. When they do that their comments are consistent with the idea of a dynamic experience of receiving the Holy Spirit as we find in Acts. There is no conflict.

Some interpreters raise another objection to using the Acts experience as a model, or norm for us. They make the claim: “You can only argue it is a norm for us if the same elements appear in all the Acts instances of the gift of the Spirit.”

The purpose of this objection is to eliminate such things as an experience of the Baptism in the Spirit, of the manifestation of tongues from the debate.

But is this a fair objection? The Bible is not a science textbook with everything detailed every time it is referred to. It is, in Acts, a record of eyewitness observation. The protocols of systematic theology don’t apply.

But let’s assume the objection has some validity for a moment and put the whole thing in a broader context. The gift of the Spirit in Acts, as we have already established, is part of the whole complex of the salvation experience. This complex includes the following: repentance, faith, baptism and the gift of the Spirit. Do all of these elements appear in every story in Acts where someone got saved? The answer is a resounding “No!” Just one illustration is enough to show this to be true: The Ethiopian Eunuch (Acts 8:26-39). In this story there is no mention of repentance.
Some questions:
* Are we to assume he did not repent because it is not mentioned?
* Are we to assume that because repentance is not mentioned here that repentance is not necessary for salvation?
* Is not, then, the fact that aspects of the gift of the Spirit are not mentioned in some conversion stories in Acts not proof at all that those aspects did not happen, or that the people did not receive the Spirit in a dynamic way?

The non-mention of one aspect in any of the Acts accounts does not mean it is not present. The Acts accounts were written with the intent to show that their experience was “the same as we had at the beginning" (Acts 15:8). This assumes that it was, in fact, "the same".The Bible does not have to go into amazing detail and specify every point every time it refers to a doctrine or experience. The demand by some that it do so is immature. When we recognise the point of the stories then we can ignore minor differences in detail (We do this quite happily in reading the gospels when they often contradict each other in the usage of events from Christ's life).

There is another side to this to this debate – a counter question:
Acts describes the experiences of the Early Church in receiving the Spirit. If we are not prepared to accept this as a model for us then what model will we accept? How can we tell if we have received the Spirit like the Early Church did if we are not going to judge our experience by the experiences recorded for us in scripture of how they received the Spirit?

We would be forced to come up with our own ideas of what “receiving the Spirit” would be like. To make up our own ideas is to create an idol of our own experience, or lack of it. It makes us and our experience and understanding the standard of spirituality and truth and not God’s revelation. It makes us into God. It is self-idolatry.

Better, in my view, to accept that the Acts experiences are intended to be a pattern or model for us.

Can we use Acts – the description of the Early Church’s experience – to establish doctrine?

In the light of what we have just said we must hold that Acts can be used, even if with caution. Some guidelines would help:

1. “All scripture (including Acts) is given by God and is profitable for doctrine and for reproof” -correction of experience (2 Timothy 3:16).
2. If the Acts experiences are properly interpreted in the light of their unique historical situation and allowances made for this we can use them.
3. If we can show that the Acts experiences are consistently the same then they should be authoritative enough to establish a pattern which we should follow.
4. If we can show the Acts experiences are similar, or identical, to what the epistles are explaining.


Another Objection:
“We all experience the Spirit in different ways so we cannot categorise spiritual experience or put expectations on people.”

Despite the fact that this idea (“we all experience the Spirit in different ways”) is not propounded in Scripture it is often expressed – and in fact there are scriptural reasons why it may not, in fact, be true.

The key reason why it is suspect hinges around an important distinction, namely, there are two “sets of experiences” that the Holy Spirit gives us. It is this distinction that is not being realised in the objection. As a result the predicates that apply to one set of Holy Spirit experiences are applied to another set of Holy Spirit experiences where they don't hold true – and the result is confusion. Let me explain.

The two sets of Holy Spirit experiences are:
1. Gifts of the Spirit – i.e. the Charismata. These are gifts of service and we are told (1 Corinthians 12) that the Holy Spirit distributes them according to his own will. The implication is that different people have different gifts of the Spirit, and thus our experience of the Spirit in this way is different. There are examples in scripture where some people move in these gifts who are not even “believers” by our sort of reckoning. In a sense God can use anyone he likes to do his work and thus gift them accordingly. Cyrus (In Isaiah 40-49) would be a clear case in point.
2. Covenant works of the Spirit. These are works of the Spirit that become ours because we accept the covenant of Christ (the New Covenant). These include things like:
a. New Birth. John 3.
b. Guidance.
c. Indwelling of the Spirit.
d. Seal of the Spirit. Eph 1:13,14.
e. Baptism in the Spirit 1 Cor 12:13.
f. Filling of the Spirit. Eph 5.
g. Prophetic ability (Joel 2:28,29).

These covenant works of the Spirit are nowhere said to be “Different for everyone” in fact the opposite is true – the very “sameness” of these experiences in our lives is one of the ways we can “test the spirits” to see if it is God or not. God is not capricious – he works according to law, pattern, principle, model, example – call it what you like. So the sort of experience I have of the Spirit should conform to the sort of experience others have – but more importantly it should conform to the experience of those recorded in the Bible for our “model”. If we do not take the Bible stories as “models” then we have no models and are doomed to inventing our own standards of truth for judging spiritual experience. And that is a dangerous position.

Quite simply, the objection doesn’t really hold up to examination.

Why is it that we do not experience this at conversion like the Early Church did?

We all know that after the third century the Church went into a period of spiritual decline and the supernatural manifestations almost disappeared.

During that time of spiritual dryness the Church separated conversion from baptism. Baptism included the “laying on of hands” for the gift of the Spirit so the idea that the Spirit would be received powerfully at conversion was dropped. The powerful dynamic of the gift of the Spirit was suppressed – in fact it soon became the official doctrine that only the priest had the Spirit and the common people were not capable of knowing God in that way.

We also know that since the Reformation God has been restoring truth to the Church through different moves of the Spirit. He has not finished yet. As Luther said, “There is yet much more light and truth to spring forth from God’s word.”

This is important because the obvious implication when we come to talk about spiritual experience is that if truth fell to the ground in the Dark Ages and as a consequence true spiritual experience was lost, then in the process of restoring truth God will also restore true spiritual experience. We should not therefore assume our experience I.e. the experience of believers before God restores the truth) to be the Biblical norm or even God’s intention. We all acknowledge that we are spiritually poor in our experience and we want “more” whatever that means.

If this idea of a progressive restoration of truth and experience is correct (and I think it is) then we have to ask real questions about the Pentecostal and Charismatic Experience:
* Was this God restoring to the church an aspect of truth and experience he wants for us all, or
* Was it only for a few? Or
* Was it not God at all?

My contention here is that we have to decide:
* Was the birth of the Pentecostal movement an act of God or was it not?
* Is the Pentecostal experience a work of the Holy Spirit or a deception?

If it was not God then we have to conclude a large number of the Church worldwide are deceived because the Pentecostal experience has become widespread. But do they show fruits of deception? I think not. Rather they show fruits of the Spirit.

But if it was God (and I think it was) then certain things follow:
1. It includes the experience of the Baptism in the Spirit (Assuming a good evangelical position that we all have it “positionally/in Christ” at conversion but may not have fully experienced it) then it follows that it is an experience for all and not just for a few. This is because it is a covenant experience and not a “gift/charismata of the Holy Spirit”. Thus we should stop excusing our possible lack of experience on the basis that “we all have different experiences”. To argue for different experiences here is to confuse the two categories of Spiritual experiences.
2. We should go back to Scripture and ask the question, “What does this covenant gift look like as an experience?” After all we have no other reliable testimony to tell us what it should look like and to go to any other source is to make up an invention of our own minds, which is idolatry. The key place where the experience of the gift of the Spirit is described is Acts 2 and the subsequent passages where that is extended to other racial or religious groups (Acts 8, 10, 19). The epistles are primarily doctrinal on this point but occasional statements support the Acts picture.
3. We should ask the question honestly. “Does my experience match up to the experience described in the Bible or am I living in a “less than what God wants” state?” We should not argue that our experience is the measure of spiritual truth or experience – to do so is to indulge in self-idolatry; thinking we know better than God.

God restored through Luther the truth of salvation by faith alone. He restored the truth of Believer’s baptism through the Anabaptists and later the Baptists. He has restored other truths through other groups. And he has restored to the church the truth of a dynamic experience of the Holy Spirit through the Pentecostal movement.

When we see the Pentecostal movement as part of the whole process of God’s restoration of truth in the church it makes sense. Restoration didn’t finish with the Lutherans, or the Presbyterians, or the Methodists or the Brethren. Nor did it finish with the Pentecostals – God is still restoring truth to the church.

Ideally we should go back to NT principles and do things the right way – don’t get people to make professions of salvation unless they are getting baptised and then lay hands on them to receive the Spirit – just like in the Bible. If we did that we would see the dynamic of the Spirit at conversion.

But when we see this process of fall and restoration in the history of the Church it is easy to see why more traditional churches are locked into a way of seeing the Spirit’s work as being pretty well a nothing experience – that is exactly what Satan set out to achieve in the Dark Ages – and he did.

But now God has restored truth – let us walk in it.

Clearly God was doing a "new" thing in 1905 when he restored the experience of the Baptism in the Spirit to the Church. However we need not assume that the exact doctrinal formulations they came up with at that time are correct.

History shows that in nearly every restoration of truth God has brought to the Church the initial understanding was very poor, often wrongly stated, and always reacted against. It generally takes about two generations for the church AS A WHOLE to receive what was being said by God, and to formulate clear doctrine about it. This is the case with the Baptism in the Spirit also. More recent formulations by Theologians have shown that the Pentecostal experience of the Baptism is now generally accepted, but the doctrinal formulation of it is somewhat different.

Another thing to note in the process of restoration of truth, is that the group that initially receives the restoration is often the last group to adjust doctrinally to the final position. Pentecostals show signs of being among the last to adjust their doctrine. By and large their position experientially has been agreed to, but not their explanation of it.

So any consistent Conservative Evangelical should be asking now:
1. What does this experience look like?
2. How do I experience it?

This will be the subject of the next chapter.

THE ERRORS OFTEN MADE IN THIS DEBATE:

On the Conservative Evangelical side:
1. The claim that the Baptism in the Spirit is a purely legal, positional thing and not an experience when clearly in Acts it was a dynamic experience.
2. The attempt to deny the use of Acts to establish doctrine.
3. Failure to ask and answer the question from scripture: Is the baptism in the Spirit an experience and if so what does it look like?

On the Pentecostal Side:
1. That the Baptism and Filling of the Spirit are the same thing and are to be identified with the Pentecostal Experience.
2. This identification leads people to assume one can be permanently filled with the Spirit - one can't.
3. That, unless one has had this experience, one is not baptised in the Spirit in any sense.

HOMEWORK:
Again I wont assign any because this is a long chapter and contains some difficult argument. Do your best to understand it. I’ve done my best to make it as simple as possible and to answer the common objections.

TRANSFORMER VERSES:
Keep using the verses from last week. Really reach out to God to see his power released in you. Keep looking for opportunities to witness or pray for people.