International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 10 Number 4 October 2008

doi:10.1111/j.1468-2400.2008.00380.x

‘Delivered By the Power of God’: Toward

a Pentecostal Understanding of Salvation
DALE COULTER*

Abstract: The quest to find a doctrinal framework that faithfully reflects

Pentecostalism continues among Pentecostal theologians. Among the variety of
proposals offered, a consensus has emerged on the centrality of the doctrine
of salvation for a Pentecostal theology. Using theological models as a
methodological approach, the claim is made that a Pentecostal theology best
functions within a model of salvation that can be expressed in terms of two
dominant metaphors: acquisition of God’s life and deliverance. Consequently, a
Pentecostal understanding of salvation concerns the ongoing deliverance from
sin in all of its permutations through the increasing acquisition of God’s triune
life.

Despite continuing disagreement over the nature and content of a genuinely global
Pentecostal theology (or whether there could be such a theology), there is no mistake
that the doctrine of salvation remains central for Pentecostals. While Pentecostal
theologians continue to offer a wide range of proposals that seek to articulate
their understanding of the Pentecostal message, one finds basic agreement on the
importance of soteriology. For example, three North American Pentecostal
theologians – Land, Macchia and Yong – all affirm the soteriological orientation
to Pentecostalism by either devoting an entire monograph to a Pentecostal
interpretation of salvation or grounding their foray into a number of doctrines on it.1

* Addresss: School of Divinity, Regent University, 1000 Regent University Drive, Virginia
Beach, Virginia 23464, USA.
1 See Steven J. Land, Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom, JPTsup 1
(Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), pp. 32–57, 182–5, who grounds his
revisioning of Pentecostal spirituality in the recovery of holiness as affective integration
through eschatological orientation; Frank D. Macchia, Baptized in the Spirit: A Global
Pentecostal Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), pp. 11–18, who wants to
broaden Spirit baptism so as to encompass both the initial conversion to God and a second
conversion to the world; Amos Yong, The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh: Pentecostalism
and the Possibility of Global Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), pp.
81–120, who sees soteriology as ‘the beginning thematic locus of any world pentecostal
© The author 2008. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2008, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA.
448 Dale Coulter

This fundamental orientation toward soteriology places Pentecostalism firmly within

pietist streams of Christianity and gives it continuity with many doctrinal traditions.
Coupled with the emphasis on soteriology has been a quest to find a doctrinal
framework that best expresses ideas native to the movement. Such a quest was
characteristic of the movement from its outset and represents its critical edge. In light
of their experiences of the Spirit, Pentecostals sought to reject, revise and extend
inherited theological models. This partially accounts for the indigenous nature of
Pentecostalism and gives rise to the current problem of finding doctrinal coherence
among global micro-Pentecostalisms. One of the reasons for incoherence is that
Pentecostals have only recently sought to continue the project of revising inherited
theological models. For much of its existence Pentecostalism has had an uneasy
relationship between its spirituality and theological explication of that spirituality.2
This is no doubt partially due to a loss of the critical edge in which Pentecostals
sought to think through the implications of their Pentecostalism for the theological
models they inherited. However, this critical dimension also offers a way forward
by continuing the project of developing alternative theological models that take
into account concerns and emphases of the movement. The quest for a doctrinal
framework may best be described as the quest to find theological models conducive
to Pentecostalism.
A theological model arises when certain metaphors become dominant (root
metaphors). As Sallie McFague notes, models ‘are dominant metaphors with
systematic, comprehensive, interpretive power’.3 On the one hand, experiences are
expressed in metaphorical speech which then allows theological reflection but, on the
other hand, theological reflection becomes a grid to interpret experience. McFague
describes a ‘symbiotic relationship’ with metaphors providing ‘food’ for concepts
and concepts ‘sight’ for metaphors.4 A model is a mixture of metaphorical and

theology’ (p. 81); and Edmund Rybarczyk, Beyond Salvation: Eastern Orthodoxy and
Classical Pentecostalism on Becoming Like Christ (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press,
2004), p. 16, where he claims that ‘theology is always soteriological’ for Orthodoxy and
Pentecostalism.
2 This problem has been catalogued by numerous persons both inside and outside the
movement. In particular, Walter Hollenweger has consistently pointed to such a
discrepancy. See W. Hollenweger, ‘Pentecostals and the Charismatic Movement’, in C.
Jones, G. Wainwright and E. Yarnold, eds., The Study of Spirituality (London: SPCK,
1986), pp. 549–54; W. Hollenger, ‘The Black Roots of Pentecostalism’, in A. Anderson
and W. Hollenweger, eds., Pentecostals After a Century: Global Perspectives on a
Movement in Transition (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 33–44.
Hollenweger has maintained that despite doctrinal plurality, one can find a common
spirituality in the Black roots of Pentecostalism.
3 See Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language
(Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1982), p. 117.
4 McFague, Metaphorical Theology, pp. 119–20. McFague draws on Paul Ricoeur’s
distinction between symbol, metaphor and concept. Symbol represents the non-linguistic
experience of reality; metaphor is the primary language that offers an initial linguistic
interpretation of the symbol; conceptualization is secondary language arising from the
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‘Delivered By the Power of God’ 449

conceptual speech that allows for a redescription of reality. Thinking in terms of

models involves a critical realist stance toward reality. While a model offers a
redescription of reality and as such can make no claim to represent the whole truth,
it can claim to offer a more complete picture of the truth in relation to its capacity to
take into account particularities, which gives rise to a model’s explanatory power.
Theological models function to clarify not only the interpretive dilemmas
arising from scripture, but the dilemmas inherent in the tradition, experience and
what human reason has said about created reality. In other words, the more a model
can account for various aspects of scripture, tradition, reason and experience, the
more successful it is and the more confident one can be about its truthful
representation. The critical task of Pentecostal theology, then, is to continue to
evaluate inherited theological models as well as search for new models through
identifying dominant metaphors that arise from or explain the global movement.
Since soteriology remains central to Pentecostal concerns, a good basis from which
to construct a Pentecostal theology will be theological models that illuminate the
doctrine of salvation. One such model has been the full gospel, but it may be that
there are broader metaphors that ground the basic content of the full gospel.
In this article, it will be argued that a Pentecostal theology best functions within
a model of salvation that can be expressed in terms of two dominant metaphors:
acquisition of God’s life and deliverance. To put it more succinctly, a Pentecostal
understanding of salvation concerns the ongoing deliverance from sin in all of its
permutations through the increasing acquisition of God’s triune life. Although one
should expect to find contextual applications of this model, the argument will concern
the model’s capability to explain global features of the movement, not simply in terms
of its descriptive capacity but also its capacity to identify other theological models that
have been adopted by some parts of Pentecostalism at the expense of its theological
integrity. As such, the article proceeds by examining the two metaphors and then seeks
to draw implications from them for the development of a Pentecostal soteriology. The
question to keep in view is not whether the article explores all of the implications of
the model, but whether the model has explanatory power with respect to a Pentecostal
soteriology. Can the acquisition of divine life and deliverance serve as dominant
metaphors that allow for an interpretation of global features of the movement while
also correcting the use of other models not conducive to the movement?

Salvation as acquisition of God’s life

While it is not an explicitly universal idea among Pentecostals, an important notion

that many Pentecostals deduced from their own experience of the tangible presence

‘semantic shock’ of the metaphor, which calls for clarification. Hence metaphors mediate
between the symbol and conceptualization by participating in the symbol and providing
the basic material for conceptualization. Models represent McFague’s explanation of
Ricoeur’s ‘second naiveté’.
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450 Dale Coulter

of the Spirit was that the acquisition of God’s triune life forms the heart of the
Christian message. This idea emerged in a number of different contexts as
Pentecostals teased out the implications of the powerful spiritual experiences that
continued to occur. To experience Christ and the Spirit was to experience the
transforming power and presence of God’s own triune life. Even among Oneness
Pentecostals like G.T. Haywood, one discovers a functional trinitarianism that serves
to describe the transmission of divine life to human life. Indeed, a central element,
possibly the central element, of a Pentecostal soteriology is the conscious acquisition
of God’s triune life through Christ in the Spirit. By exploring it briefly here, one
can begin to tap into an underdeveloped theme of Pentecostalism through certain
spokespersons of the movement.
When one reads the sermons of the prominent British evangelist Smith
Wigglesworth, one cannot help but be struck by a theological optimism borne out of
his own spirituality. A close examination of Wigglesworth’s theology suggests that
this optimism emerges from his attempt to theologize about the radical change
introduced through an encounter with the living God. As he states:
If you are definite with [Jesus], you will never go away disappointed. The divine
life will flow into you and instantaneously you will be delivered. This Jesus is
just the same today, and he says to you, ‘I will; be thou clean.’ He has an
overflowing cup for you, a fullness of life.5
For Wigglesworth, metaphors that express the dynamic influx of God’s presence
point toward the overcoming power of God’s own life.
As a stance of the believer, faith arises from and grounds the believer in the
fellowship that occurs with God. This fellowship is the result of ‘an impartation of
His very life and nature within . . . we are made partakers of His very essence and
life’.6 Wigglesworth does not shy away from the conclusion that sharing divine life
is central to his experience of God’s presence. Instead, he challenges others:
Be a communicator of divine life for others . . . The man that is filled with the
Holy Spirit lives in an act. I come with the life of the risen Christ, my mouth
enlarged, my mind operative to live and act in the power of the Holy Ghost.7
Ultimately, it is the infusion of divine life that accounts for a positive view of the
capacity of faith to overcome all obstacles and for Wigglesworth’s constant
acclamation that ‘one touch of living faith in him is all that is required, and
wholeness is your portion’.8

5 Smith Wigglesworth, ‘Himself Took Our Infirmities’, in Ever Increasing Faith, revised
edn, ed. Wayne E. Warner (Springfield, MO: Gospel Publishing House, 1971), p. 62.
6 Smith Wigglesworth, ‘Have Faith in God’, in Ever Increasing Faith, p. 13.
7 Smith Wigglesworth, ‘Realizing Your Ambition and Fulfilling Your Desire’, in Wayne
Warner and Joyce Lee, eds., The Essential Smith Wigglesworth: Selected Messages by the
Legendary Evangelist (Ann Arbor: MI: Servant Publications), p. 249.
8 Smith Wigglesworth, ‘Wilt Thou Be Made Whole?’ in Ever Increasing Faith, p. 44.
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‘Delivered By the Power of God’ 451

God communicates his presence as a personal, living power. Immanently

involved in the liberation of creation, God’s presence always remains tangible and
brings about palpable changes internally and externally. As Wigglesworth states:
‘The shout cannot come out unless it is in. There must first be the inner working of
the power of God. It is He who changes the heart and transforms the life; and before
there is any real outward evidence there must be the inflow of divine life.’9 ‘The
shout’ is the human response of faith to the experience of God’s presence as a living,
moving force that conquers demonic powers and the full array of sinful forces.
While Wigglesworth was taking his message to England and Europe, the former
Methodist, John G. Lake (1870–1935), was crisscrossing South Africa and North
America with his brand of Pentecostalism. As a result of his experience of God’s
power, Lake came to the conclusion that ‘the greatest transformation possible to the
race is that men shall realize that instead of being enemies of God and of each other,
God intends us to be gods (John 10:34)’.10 Lake saw his ministry as attempting to
develop in individuals a conscious awareness of their connection to God. At times
he describes this connection in strong language claiming that humanity shares
God’s substance. Yet, this non-technical description seems to function as a way to
communicate that humans were designed to encounter and participate in God’s
presence from the outset. He gives the illustration of a non-Christian hearing God
speaking to him as evidence of conscious contact between the human spirit and the
Holy Spirit. The purpose of human beings, then, is to transcend their condition and
to develop into the likeness and stature of Christ by which they will realize their
God-given potential.
To be sure, Lake is not simply describing an internal God-consciousness that
must be discovered and appropriated. Instead, he seems to see Christ and the Spirit
as co-agents in communicating the divine nature to humans and the concomitant
need for humans to become aware of this destiny:
The medium by which God undertakes to bless the world is through the
transmission of Himself. The Spirit of God is His own substance, the substance
of His being, the very nature and quality of the presence and nature of God.
Consequently, when we speak of the Spirit of God being transmitted to
man . . . we are talking about the transmission of the living substance and being
of God into your being and into mine . . . That is the secret of the abundant
life of which Jesus spoke. He said, ‘I have come that they might have life, and
that they might have it more abundantly’ (John 10:10). The reason we have the
more abundant life is that, receiving God into our being, all the springs of our
being are quickened by his living presence.11

9 Smith Wigglesworth, ‘Our Risen Christ’, in Ever Increasing Faith, p. 69.

10 John G. Lake, ‘The God-Men’, in Gordan Lindsey, ed., Spiritual Hunger, the God-Men,
and Other Sermons by John G. Lake (Dallas, TX: Christ for the Nations, 1976), p. 20.
11 John G. Lake, ‘The Ultimate Test of True Christianity’, in Spiritual Hunger, p. 65.
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452 Dale Coulter

The power to overcome all the forces of darkness stems from the conscious
realization and appropriation of God’s own life. Moreover, the synergism necessary
for a Christian walk increases in direct relationship to the increase in the person’s
conscious awareness of God.12 For Lake, God’s triune life transforms human
existence so that humans now come not only to participate in it but also to
communicate it to others.
As leader of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, Joseph Hillery King was
developing a similar understanding of the Pentecostal message in his sermons
and editorials. In 1936, he described the ‘old time religion’ while editor of the
Pentecostal Holiness Advocate. King reinterpreted ‘old time religion’ to mean not
the recovery of an ideal past, but the entrance of eternity into temporal existence. It
is the stabilizing effect of a God who is infinite life filling temporal existence that
makes what may seem to be ‘old’ always new. As he states:
The true God is the living God. Truth is God in reality, and that reality is absolute
energy, filling eternity, hence truth and life are terms descriptive of the same
thing. Truth flows out of God. That truth is in the Bible. It is divine realities
operating in the sphere of humanity . . . divine realities must be united to human
realities. When this is done [humanity] receives life. It is God’s life – life parallel
with everlasting ages – eternal life.13
One cannot be in the ‘truth’ without participation in God’s own life, and God’s own
life enables one to live in the ‘truth’. To know the truth is already to be converted to
divine goodness and thus participate in God’s life. God’s presence permeates the
created order to give humanity the gift of eternal life, which is nothing other than
the gift of God’s own self. In union or fellowship with the triune God, human life
transcends itself by embodying divine truth and goodness (God’s life) and comes to
its most complete expression.
True to his holiness heritage, King suggests that possessing eternal life does not
come all at once, but through a slow, steady process in which the individual becomes
increasingly aware of God’s presence and activity. Behind King’s soteriology stands
Wesley’s developmental understanding of human existence in which humans, as
contingent creatures, are constituted to grow and develop. Although King held to
sanctification as a second definite work of grace, instead of equating it with Wesley’s
notion of perfection he described it as deliverance from sin. Perfection concerned the
gradual appropriation of God’s life. King depicted it as ‘the progressive unfolding of
Christian consciousness, or the God-consciousness within, by the Spirit’s energetic

12 See John G. Lake, ‘Consciousness of God’, ‘Evolution of Christian Consciousness’ and

‘Christian Consciousness’, in John G. Lake: The Complete Collection of His Life
Teachings, compiled by Roberts Liardon (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 1999),
pp. 232–40, 303–17, 318–28.
13 J.H. King, ‘The Old Time Religion’, in B.E. Underwood, ed., Christ – God’s Love Gift:
Selected Writings of J.H. King, vol. 1 (Franklin Springs, GA: Advocate Press, 1969),
p. 109.
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‘Delivered By the Power of God’ 453

development’ in which ‘we will come to “full age” or “full union” with the divine
in the ineffable glory of Godhead’.14 As with Lake, growth in perfection was
commensurate with growth in a conscious realization of God’s own presence and
power and this growth directly relates to a synergism between God and humanity.
In his defense of the Oneness interpretation of salvation as encompassing water
baptism and Spirit baptism, G.T. Haywood seems to espouse a view similar to other
Pentecostals. While his argument that the birth of the Spirit cannot be severed from
Spirit baptism is primarily exegetical, the theological rationale undergirding it is the
transmission of eternal life. At one point in the argument Haywood attempts to
distinguish between the gift of the Spirit and the gifts that the Spirit distributes.
Utilizing trinitarian language, he states ‘the “gift” of the Holy Ghost refers to the life
which was sacrificed and given unto us. The “gift” of the Holy Spirit is the life of
Christ himself. The gift (doron) which God has given us is eternal life.’15 It is the
continuity of the transmission of the one life of God that prompts Haywood to
defend a soteriology in which water baptism and Spirit baptism remain necessary
components of the new birth. As he states, ‘The life of the Blood of Christ is
connected with baptism when it is administered in His name.’16 The one life of God,
embodied fully in Christ, flows into believers through the complete appropriation of
the Spirit.17
Haywood operates with a functional trinitarianism because the economic
manifestation of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit ‘was to reveal to mankind that
there was a true and living God who loved them with an everlasting love’.18 To move
from the economic manifestation of God to an ontological description separates
God’s life and thus denies that all of the fullness of God is in Christ. Whether
one finds this view among other Oneness Pentecostals remains open-ended, but
Haywood certainly utilizes it in order to argue his point that to possess the unity of
God’s own life requires complete possession of the Spirit.
Locating the center of a Pentecostal theology in the acquisition of, and
increasing participation in, the divine life of God is neither new to Pentecostalism nor

14 J.H. King, ‘The Three Births of the Sons of God’, in Christ – God’s Love Gift, p. 139.
15 G.T. Haywood, The Birth of the Spirit in the Days of the Apostles, as found in The Life
and Writings of Elder G.T. Haywood, ed. Paul D. Dugas (repr. Stockton, CA: Apostolic
Press, 1968), p. 18.
16 Haywood, Life and Writings, p. 24.
17 See also G.T. Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, in Life and Writings, pp. 5–9;
and The Finest of the Wheat, in Life and Writings, p. 43. In Haywood’s analysis the
flaming sword in the hands of the angel becomes symbolic of the way that death barred
the path to the tree of life. Christ restores the way to the tree of life by battling the sword
and overcoming it. In The Finest of the Wheat, Haywood also argues for continuity of
repentance, water baptism and Spirit baptism based on the one life of God. He notes that
when a person turns to God and accepts Christ, then he or she can be buried with Christ
in baptism. ‘And the latter having been done [water baptism], the converted one is to be
quickened by the life (the Holy Ghost) which is in Christ Jesus, for the Scriptures saith,
“In Him is life,” and “life more abundant” ’ (Life and Writings, p. 43).
18 Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, in Life and Writings, p. 12.
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454 Dale Coulter

to Christianity. The history of Christianity attests to the importance of this idea as an

integrating center. Eastern Christianity on the whole sees deification as the defining
doctrine around which everything else revolves. As the most thorough comparison of
Eastern Orthodoxy and Pentecostalism to date, Rybarczyk’s work provides evidence
of a clear connection centered on a theological anthropology as the ground for a
synergistic transformation of the person.19 The mystical traditions of the West, both
Protestant pietistic and Catholic, center upon the quest to unite to God through a
progressive deepening journey. Likewise Pentecostal theologians Land and Macchia
make similar affirmations. For Land, salvation is a participation in the divine life in
which love is the integrating center. He states: ‘God is a communion who creates us
for communion and moves us toward ultimate full participation in the divine life.’20
Beginning with Spirit baptism instead of sanctification, Macchia claims that the
pneumatological substance of kingdom life involves ‘the participation of the creature
by God’s grace in the divine nature’.21 As an overarching metaphor, Spirit baptism
implies an ever-deepening communion with the divine life of the triune God
imparted by Christ, the Spirit baptizer.22 Utilizing different entry points, Macchia and
Land both echo the idea that participation and acquisition of God’s life is central to
Pentecostalism.
Stemming from different streams of Pentecostalism, these Pentecostals all
develop the idea that salvation concerns the appropriation of divine life. They
interpreted their spiritual experiences of Spirit baptism and/or divine healing as the
impartation of God’s life to the individual. The infusion of divine life through Christ
in the Spirit gave rise to an optimism about the possibilities of altering a sinful system.
This is what ultimately drives a soteriology that constantly speaks of the power of God
to deliver from sin and death. For these reasons, the acquisition of divine life can serve
as an integrating theological motif within a Pentecostal soteriology.

Salvation as deliverance from sinful existence

An important motif among many forms of Pentecostalism is the appropriation of

the biblical idea of a struggle for liberation in which individuals are engaged. If the
positive dimension of salvation involves consciously participating in divine life
through Christ in the Spirit, then its negative counterpart reveals itself as the
deliverance from sin, death and the devil. Consequently, for Pentecostals, the key
term used to describe the liberating struggle is ‘deliverance’. Within the thought-

19 Rybarczyk, Beyond Salvation, pp. 324–53. I should note that I make a distinction
between Eastern Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy. The former designates all forms of
Christianity originating in the eastern Roman empire and into Persia whereas the later
refers to the autocephalous churches who have historic connections to the Patriarchate of
Constantinople.
20 Land, Pentecostal Spirituality, p. 197.
21 Macchia, Baptized in the Spirit, p. 97.
22 Macchia, Baptized in the Spirit, pp. 158–9.
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‘Delivered By the Power of God’ 455

world of scripture, the notion of warfare remains bound up with the idea of
conquering forces hostile to God and the self. Images of Yahweh as a man of war (Ex.
15:3), Christ as a conquering king, prophet or exorciser are a few of the ways in
which scripture communicates it. In addition, cultures in the global south retain a
strong belief in the prevalence of evil forces against which they must struggle as part
of daily life. Many Pentecostals repeatedly theologize from these perspectives as a
way of encapsulating a soteriological synergism conceived primarily in terms of
cooperating with God to overcome all life-denying forces.
Under the category of deliverance, Pentecostalism offers a holistic soteriology in
which the liberating power of divine life progressively frees the individual from
internal and external hostile forces.23 These forces include inordinate psychological
drives that stem from psychological disintegration through the internal power of sin,
cosmic powers, social and political powers, and cultural systems that ultimately
destroy life. However, not all Pentecostal groups keep the various dimensions of
deliverance in tension with one another. Instead, some focus on deliverance from
cosmic or spiritual forces, others focus on social and political forces, and still others
conceive of deliverance primarily in terms of body and soul. It is important to
maintain a balance between these various dimensions of deliverance as well as to see
God’s liberating activity as intimately bound up with human activity. As a synergistic
work, salvation remains connected to the participation of the individual, which is
why many Pentecostals theologize about the role of faith beyond the category of
justification. This implies a vigorous opposition to forms of theology that tend to
mechanize soteriology as though human psychological faculties are merely the
locus of the Spirit’s activity and are not actively cooperating with it.24 This second
motif helps to delineate the theological context within which the appropriation of
divine life occurs. By examining Pentecostalism in its contextual locations, one can
begin to discern the pervasive nature of the metaphor and its relationship to a
synergistic struggle for liberation.
Within a North American context, one finds the notion of deliverance being
applied holistically to the liberation of the individual, body and soul, from sinful
existence. J.H. King asserts that the atoning work of Christ involves complete
‘deliverance from death, spiritual, mental and physical, and all decay in the world
around us’.25 He then suggests that this deliverance is progressively applied to the
individual. Pardon, justification and regeneration deliver one from bondage to sin and
death by bestowing the blood of Christ, which symbolizes the entrance of

23 Many other Pentecostal theologians have pointed toward the holistic nature of its
soteriology. For example, see Yong, The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh, pp. 79–98.
24 For example, see Jonathan Edwards, ‘A Divine and Supernatural Light’, in Selected
Writings of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Harold P. Simonson (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland
Press, 1970), pp. 65–88. Edwards attempts to make just such an argument in support of
a Reformed understanding of conversion as involving divine monergism rather than
synergism.
25 J. H. King, From Passover to Pentecost, fourth edn, revised and enlarged (Franklin
Springs, GA: Advocate Press, 1976), p. 103.
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456 Dale Coulter

God’s life. As he states, ‘The blood means life imparted, and this is pardon and
regeneration.’26 Subsequent to this work, sanctification brings deliverance from
inborn sin and prepares one for Spirit baptism in which one becomes the habitation of
God and moves out as a deliverer.27 The atonement also provides for the heal-
ing of the body or deliverance from the effects of sin. Holistic salvation involves
nothing less than a deliverance from all of the effects of sin in the life of the individual.
Among Oneness theologians, deliverance remains a fundamental way to
describe salvation. At the beginning of his work on the new birth, David Bernard
defines salvation as ‘any kind of deliverance, preservation, or liberation’.28
Bernard relates deliverance to past, present and future existence. He states:
we can say we were saved, meaning that at a past point in time we received
forgiveness of sins, freedom from sin’s control, and power to live for
God . . . We are saved because we presently enjoy forgiveness of sins, power to
live for God, and freedom from the power and effects of sin . . . In another sense
of the word, however, salvation is still future. We have not yet received final and
complete deliverance from all the curse of sin.29
In dialogue with Reformed theology, Bernard interprets deliverance as being set
free from the dominion of sin.30 Freedom from sin requires a threefold action of
repentance, water baptism and Spirit baptism. Repentance embodies death to sin
because the individual initially turns away from sinful living. Water baptism confirms
the initial turning by symbolically burying past sins, which brings their remittance.
By empowering the individual to live victoriously over sin, Spirit baptism completes
the experience of new birth.31 For Bernard, then, deliverance brings together into a
comprehensive whole the Oneness soteriology of a new birth by water and Spirit
through which the individual breaks free from sin’s dominion.

26 King, From Passover to Pentecost, p. 116.

27 King repeatedly uses phrases like ‘deliverance from inborn sin’, ‘deliverance from
carnality’, and ‘deliverance from remaining sin’ to explain sanctification. While he does
see sanctification as a cleansing or purifying from original sin, it is important to note that
this purification happens through the destruction of the ‘old man’, which is a deliverance
from the power of sin. See King, From Passover to Pentecost, pp. 32, 34, 35, 46, 61, 63,
64, 89. King utilizes the symbol of fire to connect Spirit baptism to the torches lit by
Gideon and the Israelites when they went into battle. Fire symbolizes the passion that
Spirit baptism induces to engage the world and the light that shines to reveal the truth of
God. See pp. 126–7.
28 David K. Bernard, The New Birth, Studies in Pentecostal Theology, vol. 2 (Hazelwood,
MO: Word Aflame Press, 1984), p. 16.
29 Bernard, The New Birth, pp. 16–17.
30 Bernard tries to wed Oneness soteriology to Reformed soteriology, but the two sit
uneasily together in his analysis. Hence most of the book is taken up with the Oneness
idea of the ‘new birth’, but in The New Birth, chapter 13, pp. 325–35, Bernard discusses
justification, regeneration, adoption and sanctification and attempts to make each ‘fit’ into
the Oneness framework.
31 Bernard, The New Birth, pp. 65–70, 83.
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To address the issue of racism within Pentecostalism and the United States in the
early part of the twentieth century, Robert C. Lawson reformulated the doctrine of
the atonement around the idea of Christ as a kinsman redeemer.32 The phrase itself
encapsulates Lawson’s two fundamental points about the work of Christ: racial
identification and deliverance. Without the benefit of the anthropological category of
ethnicity, Lawson argued that Christ united all races in his own blood and thus
became the kinsman of all human beings.33 As the kinsman of the entire human race,
Christ seeks to redeem or deliver humans from bondage to sin, the clearest example
of which Lawson finds in racial prejudice, which he likens unto a disease that afflicts
the nations. Humans are slaves to the devil because of his power over death and the
fear this power evokes.34 Although Lawson notes that God brought forth many
deliverers, for example, Moses, none was able to bring complete deliverance. Jesus’
death alone brought genuine deliverance because it removed the fear of death and
set free those enslaved to its grip. For Lawson, one cannot separate the racial
identification of Jesus as universal kinsman from his death. Instead, both function to
bring deliverance because Jesus breaks racial prejudice by uniting all human races in
his own ancestral bloodline and frees humans from the bondage this prejudice
produces in his death. Lawson’s theology begins to articulate a concept of
deliverance from social powers like racism as well as internal psychological powers
and physical infirmities.
The contextual theology of Korean Pentecostal David (Paul) Yonggi Cho and its
emphasis on the ‘fourth dimension’ as a new realm of living centers upon a growing
God-consciousness. For Cho, the ‘fourth dimension’ is simply a metaphorical way of
describing an innate connection between humans and the spiritual world. Cho
grounds this connection upon a particular interpretation of Genesis 2 in which the
‘breath of life’ received by humans presupposes a capacity to commune with God
and the spiritual dimension of the created order.35 The human spirit represents
the point of contact between God and humans. This side of human existence
remains partly closed off because of sinfulness and partly closed off because it
is underdeveloped, which presumes the necessity of a maturation process. To
‘reactivate’ it humans must begin to cooperate with the activity of the Spirit, which
begins in regeneration.36

32 Robert Clarence Lawson, The Anthropology of Christ Our Kinsman Redeemer, ed.
William Howard Collier (1925; repr. Piqua, OH: Ohio Ministries, 2000).
33 Lawson, The Anthropology of Christ Our Kinsman Redeemer, pp. 1–33, 47. Lawson
employs the idea of miscegenation, the mixing of blood from different races, in order to
argue that Jesus’ blood was a mixture of Jewish, African and European bloodlines.
34 Lawson, The Anthropology of Christ Our Kinsman Redeemer, pp. 41–5.
35 David (Paul) Yonggi Cho, The Fourth Dimension (Plainfield, NJ: Logos International,
1979), pp. 36–66; The Fourth Dimension, vol. 2: More Secrets for a Successful Faith Life
(Plainfield, NJ: Bridge Publishing, 1983), pp. viii–x.
36 Cho, The Fourth Dimension, vol. 2, p. ix.
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458 Dale Coulter

Cho interprets fellowship with the Holy Spirit in terms of a participation in the
Spirit’s own personal nature through conscious cooperation with the Spirit.37 The
transforming work of the Spirit seems to center upon illumination of the human spirit
through dreams and visions and its empowerment through gifts. The subconscious
plays a prominent role in the bondage of humans to sin because it is weighted down
with the history of sinful existence. In his interpretation of Jacob, Cho states that ‘his
subconscious before had been full of poverty, failure, and cheating; so his struggle
was hard, and his rewards few’.38 Indeed, it is the subconscious that gives rise to
the drive toward sinful existence. The imagination, which Cho finds expressed in the
scriptural metaphor of heart, serves as the battleground.39 Cho notes that ‘we are
slaves to imaginative power. Whatever we repeatedly and concretely conceive in our
minds and hearts will finally capture us.’40 By imparting dreams and visions, the
Spirit re-establishes contact with the human spirit and thus begins to develop the faith
to overcome the individual’s past.41 In this way, the Holy Spirit interacts with the
human spirit to empower humans to cooperate so that they might live successfully.
‘Fourth dimension’ Christianity involves conscious cooperation with the Holy
Spirit’s activity in the imagination to realize one’s potential and so prosper by
overcoming the cultural values embedded in the subconscious that drive sinful
behaviors. In Cho’s theology one finds another attempt to articulate the need to be
delivered from sin as a social and cultural force.
When one turns to the African context, the notion of deliverance comes into
sharp focus. In his description of Ghanaian Pentecostalism, James Anquandah states:
‘This is essentially a liberation movement through which the Holy Spirit sets free
many people held in bondage by Satan. The healings, exorcisms, and deliverance
from sin which adorn the pages of the gospels and Acts are re-enacted in modern
Ghana.’42 As Kingsley Larbi notes, Ghanaians construe salvation in terms of
nkwagye, a compound term that means life ‘in its concrete and fullest manifestations
(nkwa) and liberation, redemption, defense, or deliverance (gye). Salvation is nothing

37 Cho, The Fourth Dimension, vol. 2, pp. 2–3, 8–9.

38 Cho, The Fourth Dimension, vol. 2, p. 53.
39 Cho, The Fourth Dimension, vol. 2, p. 51.
40 David (Paul) Yonggi Cho, When I Am Weak, Then I Am Strong, A Sermon Series, vol. 3
(Seoul, Korea: Seoul Logos, 2003), pp. 105–6.
41 See also David (Paul) Yonggi Cho, Salvation, Health & Prosperity: Our Threefold
Blessings in Christ (Altamonte Springs, FL: Creation House, 1987), pp. 19–25. Cho
describes humans as in bondage to the devil because sinful existence closes the human
spirit off to God. This is one way Cho interprets death. Once closed off to God, humans
become servants of the devil or they become ‘soulish’, by which Cho means that a person
is closed in upon himself or herself through sinful drives and desires.
42 James Anquandah, ‘Can the Church be Renewed? Experiences of an African Independent
Church’, Ecumenical Review 31 (1979), p. 255. Kingsley Larbi utilizes this quotation
at the beginning of his description of Pentecostal churches in Ghana as a way
of encapsulating their theology. See E. Kingsley Larbi, Pentecostalism: The Eddies of
Ghanaian Christianity, Studies in African Pentecostal Christianity (Accra, Ghana:
Centre for Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies, 2001), p. 97.
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less than the “liberation or preservation of abundant life” or the “saving of abundant
life.” It is the liberation and preservation of life and all that goes with it.’43 By
focusing on Ghana, one can begin to see how deliverance is a dominant metaphor for
the nature of salvation among at least one segment of African Pentecostalism.
One can find the perspective on salvation Larbi outlines clearly at work in the
folk theology of Afua Kuma, who Mercy Oduyoye identifies as possibly the first
female ‘writing theologian’ of Africa.44 In Jesus of the Deep Forest, Kuma applies
numerous Akan titles to Jesus to convey the comprehensive way in which Jesus
brings fullness of life through deliverance and protection. Jesus is the ‘savior of the
poor, who brightens up our faces’; he kills the mamba, hunts the elephant and kills
the evil spirit; he removes the viper’s teeth so that children can play safely; he has
swallowed death so that diseases can be cured; women need not wear amulets to
have children because Jesus is the great doctor.45 A close examination of her
prayers reveals that death and Satan replace the term ‘sin’ as the primary forces
against which individuals battle. All of the titles for Jesus that Kuma employs
reinforce that Jesus is ‘the one who has everlasting life and peace, for Death knows
not the way to his town’.46 Even her reference to the cross as the bridge to the
blood pool of Christ in which one washes, points toward eternal life rather than a
cleansing from internal sin. Jesus ultimately brings eternal life not only in terms of
resurrection to an everlasting existence, but also in the concrete sense of food,
shelter, family, health and healing. There is a continuity between fullness of life in
the present and fullness of life in the future in so far as one leads to the other and
both result from Jesus’ conquest of death and the devil, which is why Kuma
concludes: ‘If Satan troubles us, Jesus Christ, you who are the Lion of the
grasslands, you whose claws are sharp, will tear out his entrails, and leave them on
the ground for the flies to eat. Let us all say, Amen!’47

43 E. Kingsley Larbi, ‘The Nature of Continuity and Discontinuity of Ghanaian Pentecostal

Concept of Salvation in African Cosmology’, Asian Journal of Pentecostal Theology 5
(2002), pp. 87–106 (p. 94). See also Larbi, Pentecostalism, pp. 12–13.
44 See Mercy Amba Oduyoye, ‘Jesus Christ’, in Susan Frank Parsons, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to Feminist Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 153.
45 Afua Kuma, Jesus of the Deep Forest: The Prayers and Praises of Afua Kuma, trans. Jon
Kirby (Accra: Asempa Publishers, 1981), pp. 5, 7, 11, 14.
46 Kuma, Jesus of the Deep Forest, p. 29.
47 Kuma, Jesus of the Deep Forest, p. 46. See also Elizabeth Amoah and Mercy
Amba Oduyoye, ‘The Christ for African Women’, in Virginia Fabella and Mercy Amba
Oduyoye, eds., With Passion and Compassion: Third World Women Doing Theology
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1989), pp. 41–5. Amoah and Oduyoye use Afua Kuma’s thought
to make that point that for African women:
Death and life-denying forces are the experience . . . and so Christ, who countered
these forces and who gave back her child to the widow of Nain, is the African
woman’s Christ. This Christ is the liberator from the burden of disease and the
ostracism of a society riddled with blood-taboos and theories of inauspiciousness
arising out of women’s blood.
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460 Dale Coulter

In Ghanaian Pentecostalism, especially the so-called Neo-Pentecostal churches,

the emphasis on a ‘this-worldly’ notion of salvation that brings concrete life through
conquering hostile forces outside the individual led to what Paul Gifford calls
‘the deliverance phenomenon’.48 Gifford describes the basic framework in terms of
deliverance from evil spirits that hinder a Christian’s progress. Informing this
approach is a theology that suggests spiritual and cosmic forces block an individual
from realizing their destiny in Christ. Gifford’s observations have caused him to
question Larbi’s interpretation that Ghanaian Pentecostalism retains forgiveness of
sin and reconciliation with God as important features of Christianity.49 Larbi suggests
that the ‘material and physical aspects’ of salvation (physical, social and economic
well-being) remain secondary to sin and atonement whereas Gifford counters that
‘this-worldly’ salvation is primary. However, it may be that the conflict over the
interpretation of Ghanaian Pentecostalism is part of a larger conflict between
soteriological models. If salvation primarily concerns the removal of corporate and
individual guilt in order to bring reconciliation with God and eternal life in heaven,
then one can understand Larbi’s point that the official theology of classical
Pentecostal denominations in Ghana deals more with salvation of the soul than the
material salvation one finds in the practice of Pentecostalism.50 Afua Kuma’s
theology offers a way in which the concept of deliverance from all forces of sin that
bring death can serve as a soteriological model that brings together the official
theology with the folk theology.
Although other Pentecostals could be included in the present analysis, it is
hoped that those surveyed provide support to the contention that deliverance
functions as a dominant metaphor within a Pentecostal soteriology. By exploring it,
one can begin to see a holistic soteriology in which individuals must be delivered by
the power of God from all life-denying forces.

Implications of the model for a Pentecostal soteriology

When one unpacks the theology implicit in the understanding of salvation as

deliverance and acquisition of God’s triune life, there are several implications that
can be drawn. First, deliverance provides a comprehensive metaphor that expresses
a holistic view of salvation. Closely associated with deliverance is a metaphorical
construction of sinful existence as slavery. Slavery and deliverance go together as
two mutually explanatory metaphors. By viewing sinful existence in terms of slavery,
Pentecostals are able to reconstruct the category of total depravity in such a way as

48 Paul Gifford, Ghana’s New Christianity: Pentecostalism in a Globalizing African

Economy (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp.
83–112.
49 Gifford, Ghana’s New Christianity, p. 109. See Larbi, Pentecostalism, pp. 409–12;
‘Nature of Continuity and Discontinuity’, pp. 96–9.
50 Larbi, Pentecostalism, p. 411.
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‘Delivered By the Power of God’ 461

to affirm the complex manner in which sin impacts humanity while not placing the
entire weight for sinful existence on an internal defect. At minimum it would imply
that total depravity cannot be reduced to a thorough warping of the interior life of the
person by means of inherited evil desires. To ground sinful existence in an inherited
sinful condition not only leads to unhealthy views of the person (e.g. that one is a
worm in the hands of an angry God or that every self-destructive behavior is the
manifestation of inborn evil desires), but fails to deal adequately with the political,
social and cosmic forms of sinful existence from which one must be delivered.
This is especially the case when an Augustinian understanding of corporate guilt
accompanies a strong emphasis on inherited depravity.51 Instead, total depravity
refers to the totality of sinful existence and the way in which powers that are internal
and external enslave the individual.
Cho’s notion of the role of the subconscious in sin provides a good example of
this reinterpretation.52 What lies just below the surface of Cho’s move is the Korean
notion of han, which has been described by Andrew Sung Park as an oppression and
repression that gives rise to frustrated hope, collapsed pain in the heart, resentful
bitterness, a giving up on life and a wounded heart.53 A metaphorical way to describe
the impact of han might be the way in which sinful forces outside the individual
pollute or contaminate by replicating themselves through a process of socialization.
Before children have the capacity to cooperate with the Spirit by making moral
decisions, they have already internalized cultural values that further enslave them
to sinful behaviors. To reduce sinful behavior to an internal defect simply fails to
account for the way in which cultural values pollute individuals. As Rauschenbusch
noted at the turn of the twentieth century, part of the power of sin resides in the
‘spiritual authority of society over its members’.54 When evils become idealized and
enshrined in cultural values, they place enormous pressure on the individual to
conform to them. Consequently, total depravity cannot be construed in terms of
the way in which sin infects the totality of an individual’s interior life. While

51 This is not to claim that Augustine held to a doctrine of total depravity, which would be
more characteristic of interpretations of Augustine rather than Augustine himself. In
addition, there is a division on this point between the North Atlantic theology of the
Assemblies of God (AG) and Wesleyan Pentecostals, at least, in terms of the way
Rybarczyk presents this theology. AG theologians rejected the Reformed doctrine of
total depravity while retaining the Augustinian notion of corporate guilt. Wesleyan
Pentecostals, on the other hand, rejected the notion of corporate guilt and described
depravity in terms of inbred sin. This is one reason why North Atlantic AG theology
retains a juridical framework that Wesleyan Pentecostalism lacks. For the AG view, see
Rybarczyk, Beyond Salvation, pp. 231–9, 241–5.
52 One can also find similar ideas in G.T. Haywood. See his The Finest of the Wheat, in Life
and Writings, pp. 12–14. Haywood writes (p. 12) about evil impressions stamped on the
soul that give rise to evil deeds.
53 Andrew Sung Park, The Wounded Heart of God: The Asian Concept of Han and the
Christian Doctrine of Sin (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993), pp. 15–30.
54 Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel, repr. Library of Theological
Ethics (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997), p. 61.
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462 Dale Coulter

Pentecostals will wish to maintain the presence of an internal defect, they would see
it as one factor among many that account for slavery to sin, such as physical diseases,
political oppression and the like.
Related to the notion of slavery is a developmental model that Pentecostals
employ to describe human existence. This is especially the case among Wesleyan
Pentecostals for whom Wesley’s notion of growth in perfection requires that they
conceive of human beings as fundamentally developmental in nature. However, one
can also find this in non-Wesleyan Pentecostals as they theologize about the nature
of slavery to sin. One can become more or less enslaved to sinful forces during the
course of one’s life.55 From this perspective, total depravity simply cannot be the case
at the beginning of human development.56 Infants are not totally depraved precisely
because they have not reached the limits of slavery to sin. Total depravity amounts to
a condition that emerges toward the end of a long developmental descent into
darkness. It is best described as total bondage to sinful powers and only then is one
completely closed off to God.
Given this reinterpretation of total depravity in terms of the metaphor of slavery
to sin, one can begin to see how Pentecostals talk about holistic deliverance. God must
confront the totality of sinful existence, its comprehensive impact on the created order,
which is what happens through Christ in the Spirit. One needs to be delivered from
‘inbred’ sin or the internal defect of sin, physical disease and systems of life outside of
God created by cosmic, political and social forces that can become internalized and
contaminate the individual. Moreover, to speak of deliverance immediately locates a
Pentecostal understanding of the atoning work of Christ within the Christus victor
family of atonement models. A penal substitionary model requires a concept of
corporate guilt and a Reformed notion of total depravity to provide its theological
rationale. John Calvin asserts that the first sin must have been extremely grave because
without the seriousness of that first sin, it becomes difficult to argue for the necessity
of the penal substitutionary death of the Son, the primary point of which is to assuage
divine judgement for corporate guilt by absorbing the penalty for sin on the cross.57

55 See Rybarczyk, Beyond Salvation, pp. 229–30, who (p. 230) cites Myer Pearlman,
Knowing the Doctrines of the Bible (Springfield, MO: Gospel Publishing House, 1937),
pp. 110–11, to make the point that individuals can become ‘increasingly malevolent’.
56 Some Reformed theologians such as William Perkins have pointed toward a development
of sinfulness even while maintaining total depravity. See Perkins, A Golden Chain,
chapter 12, in The Work of William Perkins, ed. Ian Breward, The Courtenay Library of
Reformation Classics (Appleford: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), pp. 191–4. However,
the theological rationale for total depravity is that humans are entirely sealed off from
God from birth. This is part of the curse for the offense against God.
57 See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.1.4, ed. John T. McNeill, trans.
Ford Lewis Battles, Library of Christian Classics, vol. 20 (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster
Press, 1960), pp. 244–5, in which Calvin asserts that because Adam’s sin brought God’s
vengeance against the entire human race, it must have been a ‘detestable crime’ (p. 244).
The penal substitutionary model supplies the inner logic for this interpretation. However,
if one steps outside the model, the conclusion Calvin draws is no longer necessary.
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However, a Christus victor model does not require the same theological rationale
because it locates the problem of sin not in corporate guilt or an inherited totally
depraved condition, but in a slavery to hostile powers that are internal and external to
the person.
Closely related to the first implication is that a Pentecostal soteriology would
locate the rise of evil in creaturely freedom. In this sense, Pentecostalism resists a
significant stream of Western theology. While one must be careful about over-
generalizations, it seems to be the case that one result of the Augustinian/Pelagian
debate is the tendency to remove creaturely freedom from discussions of theodicy
and instead locate those discussions within the doctrine of God. The mystery of evil
from this perspective reduces to the mystery of God’s dealings with the world rather
than the world’s rejection of God. One could point to a more extreme Augustinianism
in the West in such as Gottschalk of Orbais, Gregory of Rimini, Ulrich Zwingli or
even John Calvin as evidence of a general tendency that is only overcome by select
theologians operating outside of this Augustinian stream. It is this precise theological
move that Pentecostals reject, preferring instead to locate theodicy within a
discussion of creaturely freedom (angelic and human) and the way that freedom has
created various forms of enslaved existence that only intensify over time.
The Pentecostal understanding of deliverance presupposes the existence of a
cosmic dualism in which creaturely freedom constructed an order of existence
outside of divine intention, not by divine intention.58 This dualism is not, as in
second-century Valentinianism or Marcionism, one of opposing divine or even
quasi-divine realities. Rather, it is a finite form of dualism that emerges from the
divine endowment of creaturely freedom coupled with the commitment to honor that
endowment. Such a perspective suggests a deep Pauline vein within Pentecostalism,
at least, given an apocalpytic reading of Paul. For, as J. Louis Martyn states:
Setting right what is wrong proves, then, to be a drama that involves not only
human beings and God, but also those enslaving powers. And since humans are
fundamentally slaves, the drama in which wrong is set right does not begin with
action on their part. It begins with God’s militant action against all the powers
that hold human beings in bondage.59
Moreover, a description of the created order that fails to take into account the way in
which some forms of creaturely existence are permanently removed from divine
activity and therefore continuously arrayed against it cannot adequately account for
the scriptural notion of ‘forces of darkness’. From a Pentecostal perspective, any
theodicy must begin with the mysterious way in which creatures, despite their

58 See also Kingsley Larbi, ‘Nature of Continuity and Discontinuity’, p. 99; Cheryl Bridges
Johns, ‘Healing and Deliverance: A Pentecostal Perspective’, in Jürgen Moltmann and
Karl-Josef Kuschel, Pentecostal Movements as an Ecumenical Challenge (London: SCM
Press, 1996), p. 48, who also discuss this dualism.
59 J. Louis Martyn, Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Nashville, TN: Abingdon,
1997), p. 87. Martyn describes this view as ‘apocalyptic rectification’.
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464 Dale Coulter

inherent goodness, first succumb to an alternative order and then ultimately enlist as
agents of that order.
The refusal by Pentecostals to reject hell as a genuine kind of existence to which
creaturely freedom can ultimately lead reveals the precise nature of such a permanent
removal from God. As the culmination of ‘worldly’ existence, hell embodies all that
life outside of God is. In this sense, hell and its anti-christs already encompass human
life. Hell is a reality that one fights against daily and that only God can deliver one
from. As Chilean Pentecostal Juan Sepúlveda states:
[T]he world is ‘perdition’ in the sense that life before conversion is a life that is
lost, it is an unsustainable way of living; it is to lack a ‘livable life.’ In short,
‘world of perdition’ refers to a place where life and the individual ‘are lost,’
where identity is impossible and the fall is visible; a world of loneliness, of hate,
of sadness, of fear, of shame, of envy, of neglect, of moral degredation.60
Hell, then, is a ‘reality’ brought into existences not directly by God but by creaturely
freedom, whose central features are sin, disease, death, destruction and slavery, and
its proponents seek to infect all of life with those features. It is what emerges when
God ‘hands over’ (paradidōmi) persons to judgement as Paul claims in Romans 1:24,
26, 28.61
Finally, liberation from sinful existence through the acquisition of divine life
requires a synergistic struggle against forces of darkness. To claim that one must
acquire God’s triune life implies ever-deepening levels of cooperation between God
and the believer. Since cooperation requires conscious participation in God’s activity,
several of the Pentecostals surveyed above have described the Christian life in
terms of increasing one’s conscious awareness of God’s presence. If humans are
constituted as relational beings, then there must be a psychological ground to their
participation in God’s life. As the highest part of the human person, some
Pentecostals have claimed that this ground is located in the human spirit or, one
might say, the conscious self. While the Spirit is always active in every human being,
attempting to move them to Christ, and therefore all humans are ‘graced’ from
conception, conversion points toward a conscious awareness of and cooperation with
the Spirit. Growth in grace is the equivalent of an increase in cooperation to struggle
against enslaving powers.
Macchia’s proposal, following charismatic theologians, that Spirit baptism as a
second experience in the Christian life be termed a ‘release of the Spirit’ seems
apropos.62 To release the Spirit does not imply a greater or lesser degree of filling, but

60 Juan Sepúlveda, ‘Pentecostalism as Popular Religiosity’, International Review of

Mission 78 (1989), pp. 80–88 (p. 83).
61 See Beverly Roberts Gaventa, ‘God Handed Them Over: Reading Romans 1:18–32
Apocalyptically’, Australian Biblical Review 53 (2005), pp. 42–53. Gaventa argues that
‘handing over’ is Paul’s shorthand for God actively turning humanity over to anti-god
powers, namely, sin and death. Judgement is in the handing over to other powers.
62 Macchia, Baptized in the Spirit, pp. 74, 145–53.
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‘Delivered By the Power of God’ 465

a greater degree of cooperation with the Spirit. From one perspective, Spirit fullness
could be described in terms of the Spirit’s indwelling more or less, but this kind of
talk leads to conceptual confusion over how the Spirit indwells believers as opposed
to the rest of the created order. Rather than degrees of measurement, as though the
Spirit’s presence was akin to more or less water, it may be that Spirit fullness is a
condition achieved by increasing cooperation with the Spirit. It would be grounded
in several factors: (1) the Spirit’s presence permeating every aspect of the human
person; (2) the person becoming consciously aware of the Spirit’s presence; (3)
the person having complete awareness of his or her own self (self-knowledge).
One might speak of this as the integration of human psychology. As individuals
simultaneously become consciously aware of the Spirit’s presence and their
subconscious drives, they can begin actively to cooperate with the Spirit to
reintegrate the memories that gave rise to those drives and thus be delivered from
them. Paul’s (or the writer of Ephesians’) cry ‘Awake O sleeper, rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you’ (Eph. 5:14) could be interpreted as a movement away
from a slavery that closes one off to God and the whole self and a movement toward
conscious participation with God. Spirit baptism, then, allows for another level
of conscious cooperation with the Spirit’s activity – a release of the Spirit.
While this interpretation of synergism and its relationship to deliverance cannot
be fully explored here, it is important to note that there are deep connections with
Orthodoxy.63 The Messalian controversy in the Greek East proved to be the stimulus
for a discussion of the activity of grace in the life of the Christian. Briefly, the
Messalians were a group from Mesopotamia (Syria) who advocated an intense form
of prayer (the term ‘Messalians’ means ‘those who pray’). The group held that a
demon was united to each soul, and that baptism did not expel this demon. Only
constant prayer could liberate the person from passion and desire. Coupled with this
was an emphasis on the need to be consciously aware of grace as an indicator of its
presence. Hence baptism ceased to be an important sacrament because there was no
conscious awareness of grace.64 A number of councils condemned the Messalians,
the most important of which was the Council of Ephesus (431). In response to the
Messalian position, Eastern writers began to talk about the hiddenness of grace.
Hence Diadochus of Photiki states: ‘from the instant we are baptized, grace is hidden
in the depths of the intellect, concealing its presence from the perception of the
intellect itself’.65 The baptized person must ‘acquire the Holy Spirit’ in the sense that

63 See Rybarczyk, Beyond Salvation, pp. 250, 258–61, for the connection between the
Assemblies of God understanding of progressive sanctification and synergism.
64 For brief summaries of Messalianism, see ‘Messalians’, in F.L. Cross and E.A.
Livingston, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, third edn (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 1075; T. Spidlik, The Spirituality of the Christian
East: A Systematic Handbook (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1986), p. 72; and
George Maloney, ‘Introduction’, Pseudo-Macarius: The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and the
Great Letter (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1992), pp. 8–9.
65 As cited in Spidlik, The Spirituality of the Christian East, p. 72.
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they become more conscious of the Spirit’s activity. In commenting on what the
recipient of baptismal grace must do, Ware states:
As pilgrims on the Way, then, it is our purpose to advance from the stage where
the grace of the Spirit is present and active within us in a hidden way, to the point
of conscious awareness, when we know the Spirit’s power openly, directly, with
the full perception of our heart.66
Following Mark the Ascetic, Staniloae notes that ‘at Baptism Christ comes to live at
the altar of the heart, or in the innermost part of our being, without our realizing it at
first; we just become conscious of it by our gradual change’.67
Pentecostalism shares with Orthodoxy the need for conscious cooperation with
the Spirit. Acquisition of divine life cannot be a hidden affair ultimately, but must
encompass concrete, tangible experiences of the Spirit’s presence in which the
individual becomes consciously aware of divine activity. The synergism this
awareness produces not only stems from an act of deliverance but gives rise to
ongoing deliverance in the life of the person. That is to say, the crisis that brings
deliverance simultaneously ushers in a new phase of conscious cooperation that
further propels the individual into a liberating process in which that individual is
actively engaged. There is an important sense in which deliverance and acquisition
of God’s triune life point toward a synergistic struggle to overcome that could serve
as a basis for a mutually enriching dialogue with Orthodoxy.

Conclusion

From its outset, the Pentecostal movement has been concerned with the doctrine of
salvation. Much of the theological reflection within Pentecostalism centered and
remains centered on this doctrine. For this reason, a proposal for a Pentecostal
theology should begin with soteriology and work itself out from that point. In this
article I have attempted to argue that a Pentecostal understanding of salvation
concerns the ongoing deliverance from sin in all of its permutations through the
increasing acquisition of God’s triune life. The two metaphors, deliverance and
acquisition of divine life, forge a soteriological model that both describes important
features of the global movement and offers a way to engage critically inherited
theological models that can and should be revised or discarded altogether. By teasing
out the implications of the model, one can begin to see where Pentecostalism fits
within the doctrinal tradition of Christianity, and how, as Steve Land puts it, the
movement embodies elements from all other branches of Christianity in a way that

66 K. Ware, The Orthodox Way, revised edition (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 1999), p. 100; my emphasis.
67 D. Staniloae, Orthodox Spirituality: A Practical Guide for the Faithful and a Definitive
Manual for the Scholar, trans. Archimandrite Jerome and Otilia Kloos (South Canaan,
PA: St Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2002), p. 97.
© The author 2008
Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2008
‘Delivered By the Power of God’ 467

sets it apart from each.68 The question remains as to the explanatory power of the
model. While I have attempted to argue for its explanatory power by taking into
consideration particularities of global Pentecostalism, only my fellow Pentecostal
readers can determine whether it resonates with their own understanding and
experience of Pentecostal Christianity.

68 Land, Pentecostal Spirituality, pp. 29–30.

© The author 2008
Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2008