Not All Reformation: Why Pentecostalism Is Outside Historic Protestantism (Pt. 2)

What the Pentecostal Would Say — And Where the Response Falls Short

Honest argument requires engaging the strongest version of the position you are critiquing, not the weakest. The Pentecostal tradition has produced serious theologians, careful exegetes, and devout Christians who have thought hard about these questions and who would push back on everything written in the preceding sections. Their objections deserve a fair hearing, not because they ultimately succeed, but because understanding why they fall short is part of understanding what is actually at stake.

The strongest Pentecostal response runs something like this.

On the question of origins. The Pentecostal theologian will correctly point out that tracing a tradition’s lineage does not settle its theological validity. Christianity itself did not emerge from a vacuum — it grew from Second Temple Judaism, absorbed elements of Hellenistic thought, and developed its doctrinal vocabulary through centuries of engagement with philosophical categories that its founders did not invent. The fact that Pentecostalism grew from Wesleyan and Holiness soil does not automatically disqualify it any more than the fact that Lutheranism grew from late medieval Augustinianism disqualifies it. What matters is not where a tradition came from but whether what it teaches is true. The geneticfallacy cuts both ways, and the Pentecostal is right to invoke it.

This is a fair point, and it should be conceded. The origins argument is suggestive rather than decisive. It establishes that Pentecostalism did not grow from the Reformation tradition, which is historically important. But the real theological work must be done on the doctrines themselves, not on their genealogy. Fortunately, the doctrinal case stands on its own.

On Spirit baptism. The Pentecostal exegete will go directly to Acts 2, Acts 8, Acts 10, and Acts 19, arguing that the New Testament itself describes a pattern in which believers receive the Spirit in a distinct event subsequent to — or at least separable from — initial conversion. The Samaritans in Acts 8 believed and were baptized, but the Spirit had not yet fallen on them. The disciples at Ephesus in Acts 19 had received John’s baptism but knew nothing of the Holy Spirit. The pattern, the Pentecostal argues, is right there in the text. Luke is not describing anomalies. He is describing the normal experience of the early church, and the proper response to that description is to expect the same experience today.

This argument is more sophisticated than its critics often acknowledge, and it has been developed with genuine exegetical care by Pentecostal scholars such as Roger Stronstad and Gordon Fee. But it faces a problem that careful engagement with the whole of Scripture does not resolve in Pentecostalism’s favor. The narrative passages of Acts are descriptive rather than normative — they record what happened, not necessarily what must happen in every time and place. The normative teaching on the Holy Spirit’s work in the New Testament is found primarily in the epistles, and there the picture is consistently one of a Spirit given fully and completely in regeneration. Romans 8:9 is unambiguous: anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Him. The Spirit’s indwelling is not a second stage of Christian experience. It is the definition of Christian existence. First Corinthians 12:13 is equally clear that all believers — not a spiritual elite — have been baptized by one Spirit into one body. The Pentecostal exegesis requires reading a handful of transitional narratives from the book of Acts against the plain didactic teaching of the epistles, and confessional hermeneutics, consistent with the analogy of faith articulated in the Formula of Concord, does not permit that inversion.

Gordon Fee himself — one of the most respected New Testament scholars to have written from within a Pentecostal perspective — acknowledged the exegetical difficulty honestly. He argued that Pentecostalism was right in its experience but sometimes wrong in its exegesis, which is a remarkable concession from a sympathetic insider. It is also, from a confessional Lutheran standpoint, precisely the problem in miniature: the experience has been treated as the fixed point, and the exegesis has been bent to fit it.

On sola Scriptura. The Pentecostal response here is more nuanced than it first appears. Many Pentecostal theologians genuinely affirm the supreme authority of Scripture and argue that continuing prophecy, rightly understood, does not compete with that authority but operates subordinately to it. Prophecy is tested by Scripture. Tongues are interpreted and evaluated against the written Word. The Spirit who inspires prophecy today is the same Spirit who inspired the canonical text, and He will not contradict Himself. Early Pentecostal writers from the Apostolic tradition explicitly stated their belief in both the final authority and sufficiency of Scripture, declaring the whole Bible to be “the inspired Word of God, infallible in its declarations, final in its authority, all-sufficient in its provision.” (O Key of David)

This is the most serious Pentecostal objection, and it deserves an honest response rather than a dismissal. The formal affirmation is real. Many Pentecostals mean it sincerely. The question is not whether individual Pentecostals affirm sola Scriptura in principle, but whether the movement’s actual functioning theology is consistent with what that affirmation requires.

The Confession’s language — nothing to be added, “whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men” — was chosen carefully. It is not aimed only at revelations that explicitly contradict Scripture. It is aimed at the entire category of continuing revelation, because the Confession’s authors understood that once you admit the principle of ongoing Spirit-communication as a source of authoritative divine guidance, you have fundamentally altered the epistemological structure of Christian theology, regardless of what formal subordination clauses you attach to it. The problem is not that individual prophecies will necessarily contradict individual Scripture passages. The problem is that the believer now has two sources — the written Word and the incoming prophetic word — and must adjudicate between them using criteria that are themselves derived from experience. That adjudication cannot be done without installing experience as the final arbiter, which is precisely what sola Scriptura excludes.

Pentecostals routinely treat experience as trumping Scripture as the highest authority. This is not a universal rule — there are Pentecostal theologians who resist it vigorously. But the structural pressure of the movement runs in this direction, and the history of Pentecostalism is littered with episodes in which prophetic claims that clearly contradicted Scripture were defended against criticism precisely because the experiential evidence seemed so compelling. When the felt presence of the Spirit in a revival becomes the primary evidence that the revival is genuine, the appeal to Scripture as a corrective norm has already been substantially weakened, whatever the formal confessional statements say. O Key of David

On the prosperity gospel. This is where the Pentecostal response is strongest, and it should be acknowledged as such. Mainstream Pentecostal theologians have been among the prosperity gospel’s most persistent critics. The Society for Pentecostal Studies has produced sustained academic critiques of Word of Faith theology. Gordon Fee wrote a widely circulated denunciation of what he called the disease of the health-and-wealth gospel. The Assemblies of God has officially distanced itself from prosperity teaching on multiple occasions. Classical Pentecostalism, it is argued, is not responsible for what later and more distorted forms of the movement produced.

This is partly right. The prosperity gospel represents a further deformation of a tradition that was already theologically unstable, and it would be unfair to hold every Pentecostal Christian personally responsible for Kenneth Copeland’s theology. The confessional Lutheran argument is not that Pentecostalism deliberately intended to produce the prosperity gospel, but that the structural features of Pentecostal theology — the expectation of dramatic supernatural blessing, the experiential epistemology, the loosening of sola Scriptura’s regulative grip — created the conditions in which the prosperity gospel could take root and flourish in ways that would have been far more difficult in a tradition with tighter confessional guardrails. Causes are not the same as intentions. The Pentecostal movement did not intend the prosperity gospel. But it prepared the soil.

The honest Pentecostal interlocutor, at his best, will grant much of this. He will agree that the movement has been prone to experiential excess, that accountability to Scripture has often been weaker in practice than in formal affirmation, and that the prosperity gospel has done incalculable damage to real people. He may even grant that the second-blessing doctrine creates pastoral problems he has not fully resolved. What he will not grant — what he cannot grant without ceasing to be Pentecostal — is that the basic structure of his tradition is incompatible with the Reformation’s theological inheritance.

That final disagreement is the honest one, and it is where the argument must be settled. Not on the margins, not in the most extreme expressions of the movement, but at the structural center: the doctrine of Spirit baptism, the epistemological role of experience, and the question of whether the Holy Spirit continues to deliver new authoritative revelation alongside the written Word. On all three of those questions, the Book of Concord speaks clearly. And what it says is not what Pentecostalism teaches.

The Pentecostal tradition has produced genuine Christians. It has also produced genuine theological confusion, and the two facts are not in tension. The Holy Spirit works where and when He pleases, through means that are sometimes better and sometimes worse than the ones He has ordained. But the church’s task is not to baptize every movement in which God’s grace appears to be at work. The church’s task is to hold to the confession — to preach the Gospel clearly, administer the sacraments rightly, and test every spirit by the Word that does not pass away. When a tradition departs from that Word at the structural level, the confession requires saying so, plainly and without apology, even toward those for whom genuine Christian affection is felt.

Pentecostalism departs from it. The confession requires saying so.

The Label and the Substance

Words matter in theology. They matter because the church has always understood that precision in doctrine is not pedantry — it is pastoral care. The Reformers did not fight over words because they were temperamentally difficult men who enjoyed controversy. Luther resisted at Worms, and Melanchthon labored over every sentence of the Augsburg Confession, because they understood that imprecise words about the Gospel produce imprecise preaching, and imprecise preaching leaves real people — frightened, guilty, dying people — without the only comfort that can actually hold them.

The word under examination in this article is Protestant. It is not a trivial label. It carries within it a specific theological history, a set of doctrinal commitments that were forged in genuine conflict with genuine error and paid for in some cases with genuine blood. To apply it loosely, to treat it as a synonym for any Christian tradition that is not Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, is not generous ecumenism. It is historical and theological carelessness, and it has consequences.

The consequences are not merely academic. When a believer raised in a Pentecostal church is told that his tradition stands in the line of Luther and Melanchthon, he is being given a false map of the theological territory he inhabits. He is being told that the second-blessing doctrine, the expectation of tongues as necessary evidence, the reliance on prophetic words and personal revelation, and the prosperity teaching that may surround him — that all of this is somehow continuous with what the Reformers recovered from Scripture in the sixteenth century. It is not. And the believer who does not know that it is not will have no framework for evaluating what he has been taught, no external standard against which to measure the claims made from his pulpit, no access to the confessional tradition that was built precisely to protect ordinary Christians from exactly this kind of theological confusion.

The Book of Concord was not written for theologians. Luther’s Small Catechism was written for the father of a household, for the village pastor, for the ordinary Christian who needed the Gospel in a form clear and portable enough to carry through a difficult life. Its genius is its simplicity, and its simplicity is possible because its theology is precise. The catechism can be simple because the Augsburg Confession has done the careful doctrinal work beneath it, establishing with exactness what the church confesses and why. That precision is not a luxury. It is the structure that holds the pastoral comfort in place.

Consider what the Lutheran confessor can say to the believer in crisis — the one lying in a hospital bed, or sitting across from him in a failed marriage, or standing at a graveside in January. He can say: you are justified. Not partially, not provisionally, not pending your attainment of some further spiritual experience you may not have had. Justified. Declared righteous before God, for Christ’s sake, through faith, completely and without remainder. The Holy Spirit who regenerated you has not withheld a portion of himself pending your speaking in tongues. You have been baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection. You stand on ground that does not shift.

That is a word that holds. It holds because it is not grounded in the believer’s experience — which can be doubted, misremembered, and manipulated — but in the external promise of God, attached to the proclaimed Word and the administered sacraments, entirely independent of what the believer felt or did not feel on any particular occasion. Luther called this the pro me — the Gospel as something done for me, outside me, prior to me, in no way contingent on me. It is the hardest thing in the world for fallen human beings to believe, and it is the only thing that actually works when everything else is stripped away.

Now consider what the Pentecostal framework offers that same believer. If he has spoken in tongues, he may find some assurance — though the question of whether his tongues were genuine, whether his Spirit baptism was real, whether he has maintained the fullness he once received, introduces its own anxieties. If he has not spoken in tongues, he faces a more difficult situation: the tradition around him has told him, formally or informally, that there is a further blessing he has not received, a higher room he has not entered, and his spiritual incompleteness may now present itself to him not as a theological abstraction but as a live question at precisely the moment when he most needs a word that holds without qualification.

This is not a hypothetical concern. It is a pastoral reality that Lutheran pastors encounter when people leave Pentecostal traditions and arrive in confessional congregations, often carrying wounds that took years to produce and take years to heal. The damage done by the two-tier theology of Spirit baptism, by the prosperity gospel’s implicit accusation that suffering is evidence of deficient faith, by the experiential epistemology that leaves the believer with no stable external anchor for his assurance — that damage is real, and it is done to real people. The confessional tradition’s insistence on precision in doctrine is, at its root, an insistence that these people deserve better.

None of this requires contempt for Pentecostal Christians as persons. The confessors themselves were careful to distinguish between the errors of a system and the people formed by it. The Holy Spirit is not confined by bad theology — He works where and when He pleases, and He has clearly worked in the lives of many people within Pentecostal traditions, bringing genuine faith, genuine repentance, and genuine love for Christ. That is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether the system those people have been handed accurately reflects the Gospel that Scripture contains and the confessions articulate. On that question, charity toward persons does not require charity toward error.

The Reformation was, at its core, an act of pastoral love. Luther did not post his theses because he enjoyed controversy or wished to fracture the church. He posted them because he had sat with dying people who had been told that their peace with God depended on their own spiritual performance, and he had seen what that teaching did to them. He had been that person himself — on his knees in the monastery, exhausted by the effort of trying to produce a righteousness that only God could give — and he had found, in Paul’s letter to the Romans, a word that ended the exhaustion. The righteous shall live by faith. Not by their second experience, not by the evidence of their tongues, not by their confession of prosperity, not by the intensity of their spiritual feeling. By faith. In the promise. Given freely. For Christ’s sake.

That word is what the confessions protect. That word is what the Protestant label, rightly understood, points toward. And that word is what Pentecostalism, at its structural center, obscures — not through malice, but through a set of theological commitments that place the believer’s experience, attainment, and ongoing spiritual performance back at the center of a story from which the Reformation had, at enormous cost, removed them.

The question of whether Pentecostalism is Protestant is not, in the end, a question about denominational politics or interchurch relations or who gets to use which label. It is a question about the Gospel. About whether the sinner is justified freely or in stages. About whether the Spirit has spoken finally in Scripture or continues to speak alongside it. About whether Christian assurance rests on what God has done in Christ and declared in His Word, or on what the believer has experienced in the right kind of worship service.

The confessions answer those questions clearly. They have answered them for five centuries. And the answers they give are not the answers Pentecostalism, taken on its own terms, is able to offer.

That is why the label does not fit. And why it matters that it does not.

A Personal Word

I did not come to these conclusions from the outside.

I was raised Pentecostal. I grew up in the world these articles describe — the altar calls, the tarrying for tongues, the prophetic words spoken over congregations, the expectation that a genuine encounter with the Holy Spirit would announce itself in ways that were audible, visible, and emotionally unmistakable. I knew no other Christianity. The Reformation was, to my upbringing, ancient and largely irrelevant history — something that had happened to other people, in other countries, producing traditions that were cold and formal and had somehow lost the fire that we still had. Luther and Melanchthon were names in a textbook. The Azusa Street Revival was living memory.

I am not writing to dishonor the people who raised me in that tradition. Many of them were among the most genuinely devout Christians I have known — people whose love for Christ was real, whose generosity was remarkable, and whose desire to live faithfully before God I do not question. The critique in this article is a critique of a theological system, not a verdict on the souls of the people formed by it. That distinction matters to me personally in a way it perhaps would not if I were writing purely as an outside observer.

What changed me was the Scripture.

Not a crisis, not a single dramatic moment of theological reversal — simply a long, slow, honest encounter with the biblical text that began to surface questions the tradition I had inherited could not answer to my satisfaction. Questions about what the New Testament actually teaches regarding the Holy Spirit’s work in the believer. Questions about the nature of faith — whether it is the empty hand that receives God’s gift or a spiritual force the believer wields. Questions about prophecy, about the canon, about what it means to say that Scripture is sufficient. Questions, above all, about whether the assurance of salvation can rest on something more stable than the record of my own spiritual experiences, which I had begun to suspect were a less reliable foundation than I had been told.

The more honestly I read Scripture, the more the Pentecostal framework strained under the weight of what I was finding there. And the more I encountered the Lutheran confessional tradition — the Augsburg Confession, the catechisms, the Formula of Concord — the more I recognized something I had not expected to find in documents that old: answers. Not evasions, not pious redirections toward more spiritual experience, but careful, honest, exegetically grounded answers to exactly the questions that had been troubling me.

What finally settled it was the doctrine of justification. Not as an abstract theological proposition but as a pastoral reality — the recognition that the ground beneath the Christian’s feet is not his own spiritual history but the alien righteousness of Christ, declared over him in the Gospel, sealed in his Baptism, entirely independent of what he has or has not experienced in a worship service. That word — you are justified, freely, for Christ’s sake, through faith, completely — was not a word I had heard clearly in the tradition that raised me. I had heard about grace. I had heard about faith. But I had also always heard, beneath those words, the implication that there was more to be had, more to be sought, a higher room not yet entered. The Lutheran confession removed that implication entirely, and what I found in the space it vacated was not emptiness but rest.

I became a Confessional Lutheran because I became convinced that the confessions say what Scripture says — that they are not an imposition on the biblical text but a faithful rendering of it, built by people who took the text more seriously than I had been taught to, precisely because they refused to let their experience tell the text what it had to mean.

That commitment to Scripture is why I have written this article and the previous. Not to wound former brothers and sisters in Christ, not to score points in a denominational argument that most people find tedious, but because I believe that what the confessions protect is worth protecting — and that the people still inside the tradition I left deserve to have someone say, clearly and with as much care as can be managed, that the theological map they have been handed does not accurately represent the territory.

The Gospel is simpler and more stable than Pentecostalism’s framework allows it to be. It does not require a second experience. It does not depend on the evidence of tongues. It is not confirmed by prophecy or measured in financial returns. It is announced, from outside the believer and prior to anything the believer has done or felt, in a Word that has been written down, tested across centuries, and found sufficient by people far wiser and more learned than I am.

That Word is enough. The confessions have always said so. And it took me longer than it should have to believe them.