The Baptism of the Spirit and Speaking in Tongues
As taught in the Oneness Pentecostal tradition
How Oneness Pentecostals read Spirit baptism and tongues in Acts and 1 Corinthians
Oneness Pentecostalism, also called the Apostolic or "Jesus Name" movement, reads the New Testament's accounts of the Holy Spirit through a distinctive lens. Within this tradition the baptism of the Holy Spirit is not treated as a secondary refinement of an already-complete conversion, but as the climactic and necessary moment in which a person is "born of the Spirit." Speaking in other tongues, in turn, is understood not as one optional gift among many but as the consistent, audible sign by which the New Testament marks that a person has actually received the Spirit. This lesson describes how Oneness Pentecostals construct that position, the passages they lean on most heavily, the way they exegete those passages, the historical and confessional voices that shaped the movement, and the points at which this reading diverges sharply from mainstream and historic Christian teaching.
By the end of this lesson
- Explain how Oneness Pentecostals identify the baptism of the Holy Spirit with being born of the Spirit in John 3:5 and treat it as essential to the new birth rather than a secondary empowerment.
- Describe the Oneness doctrine of initial evidence, in which speaking in other tongues is held to be the normative confirmation that a person has received the Spirit.
- Trace the Acts 2:38 pattern of repentance, Jesus-name water baptism, and Spirit infilling as Oneness teaching presents it, and contrast it with the mainstream evangelical view that the Spirit is received by faith at conversion.
- Show how the Acts narratives (chapters 2, 10, and 19) and 1 Corinthians 14 are organized by Oneness exegetes into a cumulative case, distinguishing where tongues are explicit from where they are inferred.
- Identify the real historical and confessional sources of the movement, including G. T. Haywood, the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, the UPCI Fundamental Doctrine, and David K. Bernard.
- State precisely where Oneness pneumatology and its underlying modalistic doctrine of God diverge from the Nicene and Trinitarian confession of historic and mainstream Christianity.
Scripture
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