Fire From Heaven: The Rise Of Pentecostal Spirituality And The Reshaping Of Religion In The 21st Century [Paperback]

Harvey Cox (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 8, 2001

It was born a scant ninety-five years ago in a rundown warehouse on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. For days the religious-revival service there went on and on-and within a week the Los Angeles Times was reporting on a "weird babble" coming from the building. Believers were "speaking in tongues," the way they did at the first Pentecost recorded in the Bible?and a pentecostal movement was created that would, by the start of the twenty-first century, attract over 400 million followers worldwide. Harvey Cox has traveled the globe to visit and worship with pentecostal congregations on four continents, and he has written a dynamic, provocative history of this explosion of spirituality?a movement that represents no less than a tidal change in what religion is and what it means to people.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Pentecostal Christianity, which emphasizes the immediate experience of God through speaking in tongues, trance and ecstatic bodily motion, is not a backward-looking movement, declares Harvard theologian Cox (The Secular City), but an ecumenical force that speaks to the spiritual emptiness of our time by tapping the core of human religiousness. The author describes his visits to Pentecostal churches from Boston to Rio de Janeiro to Seoul. He delineates the movement's interracial beginnings in Los Angeles at the turn of the century, tracks its lightning spread around the globe and explores the pivotal role of women, which led, he asserts, to a conception of a nonjudgmental God with "distinctively feminine" qualities, making Pentecostalism a force challenging patriarchal cultures around the world. Cox expresses his misgivings about "unattractive political and theological currents" in the U.S. Pentecostal movement, including a fixation on demonic spirits and a "dominion theology" that supports ultraconservative public policy. An engrossing and illuminating report.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Cox (The Silencing of Leonard Boff, Meyer Stone Bks., 1988) gives an objective view of Pentecostalism. He is neither an insider nor a skeptic. In this study, he includes descriptions of his own experiences and reactions in Pentecostal churches as well as an accurate history of the movement's origins and development. He looks at its rapid growth in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America as well as in the United States. The author finds reason for both hope and misgivings in this popular religious revival and its relationship to late 20th-century society. Cox feels that both science and traditional religion have been rejected by many people as sources of ultimate meaning. He feels Pentecostals have tapped into genuine spiritual energies but warns that "the fire from heaven can burn and destroy as well as purify and inspire." This is a reasoned, dispassionate study; recommended for academic and public libraries.
C. Robert Nixon, MLS, Lafayette, Ind.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (May 8, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306810492
• ISBN-13: 978-0306810497
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #185,110 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Harvey G Cox, Jr is Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard University. His many influential books include The Secular City (1965), which became an international bestseller, and When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Decisions Today (2004). Daisaku Ikeda is President of Soka Gakkai International and the author of over 80 books on Buddhist themes.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Opens Mainstream Eyes To Movement, But Fails To See Clearly, December 23, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Washington,DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Hardcover)

Cox's Fire From Heaven does bring some sense of legitimacy to Pentecostalism among the liberal academy of theologians and religionists who still view the movement as full of backwater American blacks and whites. However, in playing up the idea that Pentecostalism may be little more than a Christian "mask" over indigenous spiritualities, I think he may have played into the hands of religious right fundamentalists who attack a charismatic christianity as heretical and into the hands of intellectual universalists who don't wish to see a distinct contribution from the Christian Pentecostal movement as a unique form of religious spirituality. Cox writes with the ease and clarity of a novelist, but the story is more fiction than fact. He could site actual examples of Pentecostalism in Africa, for instance, rather than making the eurocentric generalization that all African Christianity, or indigenous churches there, are just another form of Pentecostalism. Very little attention is given to the interpretive issues in Pentecostalism (oneness vs trinity, wesleyan sanctification vs keswick baptistic) nor is adequate attention given to the continuing distinction among class and race in the American movement. That someone from Kirkus Reviews could have actually have read the book and still view the Azusa Street Revival as a meeting of poor black domestic workers shows that the ecumenical and ethnic diversity of that early 20th century movement still have not been made crystal clear.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Worthy of being read....but not fully representative of "us", February 14, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Fire From Heaven: The Rise Of Pentecostal Spirituality And The Reshaping Of Religion In The Twenty-first Century (Paperback)

Professor Cox has, indeed, contributed to the ever-widening area of Pentecostal/charismatic studies with "FIRE FROM HEAVEN." His breadth of experience, reflected in the book, is to be admired; but it wasn't wide enough. As a life-long Pentecostal, I could identify with only a few parts of his "experience" and have wondered why the "main-line" denominations weren't included more than they actually were. Why did Cox not visit Times Square Church, or the Brooklyn Tabernacle, or any number of other biblically-sound congregations, and see what effective Pentecostal churches are all about? After reading, and re-reading the book, I felt that I was getting a treatise on the "fringe" elements of Pentecostalism, and not the "mainstream." It is worthy of being read...but not very balanced,in the light of world-wide Pentecostalism.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Professor Continues Myth that It All Began in America, October 23, 2006

By 

Winifred Flint "Librarian" (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Fire From Heaven: The Rise Of Pentecostal Spirituality And The Reshaping Of Religion In The 21st Century (Paperback)

Harvey Cox, the former head of Harvard Divinity School, does some magnificent work giving insight to pentecostalism and putting it into context with information I have not seen elsewhere. He traveled the world speaking to academics and attending services on almost every continent. He pushed his ten page list of citations to the back to make it more accessible to the non-academic and provides a fourteen page index.

He successfully explains the unique hidden power wielded by women in pentecostal churches in Latin America and the intricate historical relationship between American fundamentalists and pentecostals. He also does well describing the neo-pentecostal and how all three fit into the Religious Right's political agenda. The history he provides on the degeneration into gender bias is well researched. But his best work is exposing the American pentecostal automatic acceptance of government policies that permitted despots to "disappear" pentecostals. These pentecostals were in essence delivered up by their own sisters and brothers in America.

But there are at least two serious errors in this work such that it must be read with caution. He continues that Anglo-centric myth that pentecostalism took off in 1906 on Azusa Street in Los Angeles from which it spread to the world. And he totally misrepresents pentecostalism in Africa - particularly Zimbabwe.

In a 1996 article in Church History, Joe Creech mines one of the earliest histories of of Azusa St (Bartleman, 1925[1980] Bridge Publishing) to show that the historical and theological biases of the time are responsible for the current assumption of The Myth.{This is a correction to my original review - thanks to Nelson Banuchi, May 2008.} Had Cox followed this lead, he would have learned that Fire(s) had started in India in 1860, Korea in 1903, and another one in India in 1905 before Azusa missionaries had reached the continent. There are many instances of the Fire appearing in various locales untouched by pentecostal missionaries - such as the Ivory Coast and parts of China. Accepting the murky history of pentecostalism in favor of the Azusa myth is disappointing in a scholar with such a great reputation.

His interpretation of pentecostalism in Africa is also a disappointment.
In Zimbabwe the author witnesses several different services and common to them was the confession of sins against the earth "...These include any activities that lead to soil erosion, fouling the water supply, or chopping down trees without replacing them." This awareness in African communities certainly pre-dates the current Christian Anglo wakeup to proper stewardship of the earth. Here the author slips into the stereotypical view of African Christians as essentially primitive by connecting this ecological awareness to "the throbbing universe of African primal religion."

Cox basically views pentecostal African Christianity as syncretistic even using drumming and dancing as evidence instead of seeing it as a common indigenous practice incorporated into the church. This is in spite of mentioning in the same sentence the command from the Psalms to praise God with timbrel and lyre and then describing King David dancing at the ark. One needs to add that King David was known to even dance unclothed in public - and not to God's displeasure according to the same Psalms.

Of one of the African pentecostal church founders mentioned, John Maranke is lumped in with other leaders and is exalted as a Mandela type figure leading Zimbabwe to independence. But his church "The Maranke Vapostori", founded in 1932 is considered by common African pentecostals to be un-orthodox in both origin and current practice. This is one example of where African Pentecostals appear to have the spiritual and intellectual wherewithal to distinguish syncretism from indigenous practices - but Cox fails to acknowledge this.

This is likely caused in part by Cox's almost exclusive reliance on historiography written by the educated - a method that is now being challenged as the sole method of retrieving history. Oral historiography, deconstruction of myths and other methods are considered necessary to more accurately capture a complete history - if such a thing is possible.