Thinking in the Spirit

This book is about the boisterous beginnings of the American Pentecostal movement and the ideas that defined that movement during these formative years. It follows a group of men who rethought the Christian faith in light of their new experience of God. Thinking in the Spirit aims to provide scholars and general readers who know little or nothing about Pentecostalism with an introduction to the ideas of the movement's most articulate early spokespersons, and to provide Pentecostals with a non-judgmental historical source to help them in their theological reflections. Douglas Jacobsen focuses on the individuals who formed the original brain trust of this now gigantic religious movement. In a twenty-five year burst of creative energy at the beginning of the twentieth century, these leaders articulated almost all the basic theological ideas that continue to define the Pentecostal message in the United States and around the world. The ideas studied here have frequently been borrowed and appropriated in ways that were not necessarily foreseen or fully intended by the theologians who first proposed them. Like free floating gems of wisdom they have been picked up and eclectically integrated into the thinking of Pentecostal communities around the world. Jacobsen examines those migrating ideas in their original forms of expression, when Pentecostal theology was still fresh, raw, and undomesticated. He traces the ways in which a group of creative theologians felt compelled to improvise language, bending the meanings of old words and inventing new phrases, to help their listeners better understand the illusive, yet powerful and redemptive ways God's Spirit is present in the world.