The Pentecostal Distinctive

This affirmation is the defining doctrine of the Pentecostal movement, which arose in the early twentieth century, and it gave the movement its name and much of its character of fervent, experiential worship. It distinguishes Pentecostalism from traditions that identify Spirit-baptism with conversion or baptism itself, and it is shared, in a modified form, by the later charismatic movement across the churches. The belief ties directly to the Pentecostal conviction that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit continue in the present. The doctrine crossed denominational lines further than Pentecostalism itself when the Catholic Charismatic Renewal began at a student retreat at Duquesne University in 1967, and Catholic charismatics adopted the language of baptism in the Holy Spirit while reinterpreting it, controversially for some Pentecostals, as an experiential release of a grace already given sacramentally at Christian baptism and confirmation rather than a wholly separate crisis experience.

Cessationist Reformed theologians, notably B. B. Warfield in Counterfeit Miracles (1918), had already argued before Pentecostalism's own rise that any doctrine of a post-conversion empowering distinct from ordinary sanctification lacked New Testament warrant, a critique classical Pentecostal theology directly rejects and that continues to divide Pentecostal and cessationist Protestants today.