Wacker's Pentecostal Puzzle Pieces

In his book “Heaven Below” Grant Wacker outlines some aspects of the early Pentecostal movement in relationship to the culture the movement was immersed in. Specifically, Wacker draws attention to the Pentecostal reliance on primitivism and pragmatism as means of communication with God as well as means of acting on and spreading their religious convictions. These two concepts play out in a number of aspects in early Pentecostal experience, such as the phenomenon of tongues and the integrated aspects of the movement. Primitivism, specifically, defined by Wacker in the book as an immediateness of God to the individual or group’s action and the desire for this immediacy, also threaded into the early Pentecostal movement’s belief about eschatology. These aspects are not only convincingly presented by Wacker as the driving force of Pentecostalism (arguably, not just historically but even still.), but they are written about in “Heaven Below” even when they are not being directly dealt with and talked about. Not only do these concepts shape religious culture, but they also play into how early Pentecostals interacted with their cultural context, which is most strongly where the pragmatic side of his argument comes in. Wacker has me convinced that the desire for the nearness of God and the more practical, every day implications are what gave the Pentecostal movement what it needed to survive the first generation of converts and what paved the way to its’ thriving culture today.