Читать книгу The World's Christians - Douglas Jacobsen - Страница 72

In the Pentecostal tradition, salvation focuses on the future. There is no question that salvation entails the forgiveness of past sins and the righting of past wrongs, but the attention of Pentecostal Christians is on what is yet to come, on the blessings that God has in store for those who believe. In this regard, the Pentecostal movement has more in common with the Orthodox tradition that stresses salvation as deification than it does with the Catholic and Protestant traditions that tend to describe salvation largely in terms of sin and forgiveness. This future‐oriented, growth‐in‐godliness perspective is reflected in the language of fullness that some Pentecostal Christians use to describe the experience of salvation. Salvation is not just about forgiveness, nor is it only about holiness understood as the absence of sin, and it is not something that is simply done once and then is over. Instead, salvation within the Pentecostal tradition is a matter of faith in motion, of moving ever deeper into the fullness of God and into the fullness of life that God intends for everyone.

Yet salvation in the Pentecostal tradition is not solely about the future, it is also very much about the here and now. Pentecostals believe that God has provided “healing in the atonement,” that Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection addressed not just the spiritual needs of humankind, but humanity’s physical needs as well. In the early years of the Pentecostal movement, some leaders instructed their followers to avoid all use of modern medicine because healing was supposed to come directly from God. Visiting a doctor was construed as lack of faith, and some extreme individuals even drank poison intentionally or tossed around poisonous snakes to demonstrate their belief that God would miraculously protect them. Over the years, stridency about faith healing has decreased. Most Pentecostal Christians today believe that God frequently brings healing through a combination of modern medicine and faith, but they also believe God can still miraculously heal people. One individual who strongly nudged the movement in this direction was Kathryn Kuhlman, a Pentecostal healing revivalist whose ministry was based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (see Voices of World Christianity 4.2).

The same kind of overlap between the physical and the spiritual that undergirds Pentecostalism’s belief in healing also defines the prosperity gospel, which in recent decades has become ever more prominent in global Pentecostalism. Every week, literally thousands of Spirit‐filled preachers tell their followers that God wants them to be rich. The standard message is something like this: if you want a nice house or a new car or fashionable clothing, you have the right to claim those things in Jesus’s name, and God will give them to you. The key is to step forth in faith, and the typical recommendation is to demonstrate that faith by donating a “seed offering” to the preacher’s own church. This seed offering, which is often a substantial portion of a poor person’s total assets, will show God the sincerity of one’s faith, and God will then grant the individual – some preachers say God is obligated to provide – a bounteous harvest of wealth.