What is Pentecostal Writing?

As 90&9.com’s executive editor for content, I read endless articles from an Apostolic perspective. I also write more than my fair share. It was at the completion of a recent cover that I thought, “This is an important article.” That’s an intoxicating thought. It empties your head and lightens your heart and fills both with peculiar dreams of immortality and respect.

It didn’t take me long for me to realize it was the topic, not the essay, that was important. I had served only as the messenger. Oh well, it was an intoxicating thought.

It did make me wonder if there were any important Apostolic writings.

For a piece of writing to be “Important” it’s not enough to be powerful and true. It must also be ground-breaking and insightful and forward-looking and forceful enough to make readers rethink themselves; often it reframes an argument for a generation, providing the template for future interpretation.

I had a knowledgeable Pentecostal argue to me that there were no important Apostolic writings to date. He felt our oral tradition interfered with this process, but added that even our valuable doctrinal writings are defensive in nature, so couldn’t be considered Important. I found that fascinating.

Cases in Point

Three non-Apostolic examples of Important:

* T.S. Eliot recast poetry with The Wasteland.

* George Keenan’s writings provided the intellectual framework for the United States’ policy of containment towards the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War.

* In 1993, Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations posited that the world’s upcoming, post-Soviet conflicts would be over religious and cultural identities, not politics. It wasn’t an outright prediction of 9/11, but…

Speaking in New Tongues

Maybe it is finding someone brave enough to recreate the language to accommodate our experience.

The father of modern African literature, Chinua Achebe, crafted a new language for his seminal Things Fall Apart: “The story is so different from what I had read as a child; I knew I couldn’t write like Dickens or Conrad. My story would not accept that. So you had to make an English that was new. Whether it was going to work or not, I couldn't tell.”

Maybe we're at a similar starting point, awaiting direction.

What is Pentecostal Identity?

Maybe there’s no Important Apostolic writing because we don’t have a well-defined identity.

Many writing subcultures present distinct commonalities; for instance, Southern writing often features quirky characters, homespun sayings, racial tensions, and sweltering settings.

Maybe our subculture isn’t potent enough to lend itself to a particular style of writing because we are chiefly Americans (largely indistinguishable from mass culture) with potent doctrinal truths. Is doctrine, its resulting standards, and large social events all that makes us “us”? (Am I overlooking some important distinctives?)

Many would see these three distinctives as an overabundance of fodder for some smart fiction (Jane Austen anyone?) or strong cultural analysis. Somehow the Catholics have spawned superior authors (Flannery O’Conner, Graham Greene, Walker Percy) and cultural analysts (starting with their two most recent popes), so it’s not like an Apostolic outlook is a preposterous proposition.

Maybe we are believers built around doctrinal ideas, with room for numerous amorphous characteristics, but few clear definitives. If true, that’s okay. The United States is built around a set of ideas with few clear definitives and it’s doing just fine.

Still, we’ve been at this for over a century—shouldn’t we have something to show for it?