A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The alliance of Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, which was extremely shaky from the first days of Pentecostalism until the 1940s (see pp. 960–61), may not be a permanent one. There is no special reason why a form of Christianity which emphasizes the renewal brought by the gifts of the Spirit should be allied to Evangelical Fundamentalism, which demands adherence to a particular set of intellectual or doctrinal propositions or a particular way of understanding texts from the past. There has indeed been a considerable ‘Charismatic’ movement within a very different variety of Western Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church. Pentecostalism might grow into an alliance with other forms of Christianity which have seen the Bible in more flexible and arguably more creative ways – as stories whose truth is not that of the Highway Code or a car maintenance guide.