Summary Of Grant Wacker's Heaven

Grant Wacker’s Heaven Below offers a comprehensive, genuine and fact-laden account of early Pentecostal culture in America that spawned new denominations and transformed the religious landscape. Wacker grew up a Pentecostal attending church one or twice a week in a family filled with ministers and missionaries. When he entered a secular college, his religious beliefs were challenged and he now identifies himself as an Evangelical Christian finding his congenial abode in a United Methodist Church. As evident in his preface, “the most honest way to explain my relation to the Pentecostal tradition is to say that I am a pilgrim with one leg still stuck in the tent. I hope that being 50 percent outsider nad 50 percent insider is an asset that enables me to combine the cool eye of the critic with the warm heart of the believer.” …show more content…
Primitivism refers to to Pentecostals’ “determination to refer to first things, original things, fundamental things” of their religious experience , and a “yearning to be guided solely by God’s Spirit in every aspect of their lives.” Yet, they also applied pragmatism to their daily lives as they “proved remarkably willing to work within the social and cultural expectations of the age.” Some of the Pentecostal practices helped them relate to the divine, yet helped them navigate through the cultural complexities of the modern era at the turn of the century. The tension between the primitive and pragmatic accommodations to contemporary realties is seen through women’s roles, relations between the white and black Pentecostals, Christians’ duty in wartime, and “taboos that originated in primitivist yearnings for transcendent