Pentecost 1976

MALACHI B. MARTIN

IT is unfortunate that today the word Pentecostal has been appropriated by what many regard as a rather strange group of religious people. Pentecost used to mean simply the day each year when Christians especially honored thé Holy Spirit. Now, in the public mind, the word evokes press photographs and film clips of. congregating worshipers wheeling in self-styled ecstasy, babbling incoherently in “glossolalia,” and healing by touch and prayer. I do not mean to derogate the sincerity of Pentecostalists. But by coopting that name, they have—however unintentionally—inevitably obfuscated the identity of that gentle and unobtrusive person, Jesus.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

MALACHI B. MARTIN

IT is unfortunate that today the word Pentecostal has been appropriated by what many regard as a rather strange group of religious people. Pentecost used to mean simply the day each year when Christians especially honored thé Holy Spirit. Now, in the public mind, the word evokes press photographs and film clips of. congregating worshipers wheeling in self-styled ecstasy, babbling incoherently in “glossolalia,” and healing by touch and prayer. I do not mean to derogate the sincerity of Pentecostalists. But by coopting that name, they have—however unintentionally—inevitably obfuscated the identity of that gentle and unobtrusive person, Jesus.