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A number of you wrote in to critique my recent newsletter "The Roots of Pentecostal Scandal: Romanticism Gone to Seed" on various grounds—including my supposed lack of salvation, my supposed hatred of Pentecostals, and my lack of solid evidence to back up the claim that the intensively "vertical" piety of Pentecostals and their holiness forebears has sometimes been indulged at the expense of "horizontal," human relationships.

Since there is no sure way that I know of to prove one's salvation, I'll move on briefly to the question of my views on Pentecostalism, before offering some more of that historical evidence many of you were looking for.

I want to be clear: I am not arguing that the vibrant, physical, emotional worship of God typical of the holiness and Pentecostal movements is intrinsically a bad thing. I do not happen to think it is. In fact, I have grown a great deal as a Christian through such worship. Holiness and Pentecostal folk really have recaptured a way of communing with God that engages human worshipers as embodied, emotional, related creatures. And this can be a very good thing.

But like any recovery of truth in the church, the holiness—and later, Pentecostal—rediscovery of direct, intensive intimacy with Christ has had its rough edges and its misguided excesses. That's the way it is with all Christian movements—we all pick up alloys and emphases from our surrounding cultures. To remind ourselves of this fact is not to categorically reject any Christian group. It is to see the church whole—in the troubling mixture of sanctity and sinfulness that marks all human attempts to live faithfully for God.

On, then, to some further historical background. Since my argument starts with Pentecostalism's parent—the Victorian holiness movement—I turn to the writings of that movement.

Initially, holiness writers were as likely as any evangelicals to extol the virtues of hearth and home as the best, holiest place for spiritual nurture and emotional fulfillment. So a writer in the Advocate of Christian Holiness, January 1873, enjoined his readers to "see to it that son and daughter never pass the home-portals without feeling that they enter into a charmed circle, that they breathe an atmosphere of purity and love."

But evidence crops up early in the movement's literature that members could be tempted by the joys of worship and the excitement of religious activism to neglect their more difficult, prosaic duties to their blood families. As I've argued, this anti-domestic trend seems to have emerged out of the romantic insistence that all one's expectations for emotional fulfillment be concentrated on Jesus.

We gain a hint of this problem in an article titled "Holiness in the Family" that appeared in the same magazine—Advocate of Christian Holiness—in the same year, 1873.

"The family," holiness Methodist pastor and evangelist Lucius C. Matlack felt constrained to remind his readers, "exists by divine appointment." It "should not be deprecated" (someone, clearly, was deprecating it!). Matlack observed that in the joyous communal environment of camp meetings and prayer meetings, the sanctified reveled in "the experience of holiness" that "removes the distance between God and the soul." There, in that sweet heaven-on-earth, "the presence of others, the melody of song, the power of united faith, combine to inspire boldness of confession, faithfulness in labor, and joy in the Holy Ghost."

So far, so good. However, "when these scenes pass away" and the worshiper returns home, "too often professors of holiness seem to be 'off guard' … greatly to their damage and greatly to the scandal of their profession." It was as if home was not the "natural element" of the charged-up holiness believer.

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