What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionThe Spirit still gives powers — healing, prophecy, tongues — to ordinary believers.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and The Brethren in Christ are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
ShelfHow truth arrives
Travels across4 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderTaoism · c. 500 BCE
Newest holderShekinah Church · 1994 CE
Turns up as6 rites · 3 experiences · 3 tenets · 1 story
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 7 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 4 faiths of this family hold it
Pentecost.
Fifty days after Easter, red vestments, and the reading about fire and languages. Russian churches carpet the floor with cut grass and birch branches so the building smells like a field. The tradition dates its own beginning to this day rather than to the resurrection.
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Pentecost.
Wind, fire, and a room of Galileans suddenly intelligible in every pilgrim's home language: the church's founding miracle is translation.
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The Spirit still speaks.
Tongues, healing, prophecy — the gifts did not expire with the apostles.
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Baptism in the Spirit is for every believer.
A second encounter beyond conversion — power for ordinary people.
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Baptism and the Holy Spirit mark new birth.
The church names water and Holy Spirit baptism and teaches that spiritual gifts and fruits remain available.
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Entire sanctification — a second work of grace, and an argued one.
Taken from the Wesleyan holiness movement in the later 1800s: after conversion, a further crisis in which the Spirit cleanses the disposition to sin. Anabaptist-minded members have never been comfortable with it, and the denomination has repeatedly restated it in softer terms.
⚖ contested within
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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
Being mounted.
The lwa displaces the person's gwo bonanj and uses the body: it is dressed in its colours, given its food and drink, and it dances, diagnoses illnesses, settles disputes, scolds relatives and gives advice. The person is the chwal, the horse, and remembers nothing. This is the purpose of the ceremony rather than an unusual outcome of it.
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The horse remembers nothing.
People who are mounted report no experience whatever and learn afterwards from others what their body did and said. The community is unsentimental about this: it dresses the lwa, feeds it, asks it questions, and takes notes. It is less a mystical state than an arrangement for having the spirits available in person.
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Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
The medium.
A tangki goes into trance, the god is understood to take the body, and the medium speaks and writes in the god's voice — often while driving spikes through the cheeks or sitting on a nail-studded chair, apparently without pain. The ordained clergy consider this legitimate but low-status. In Taiwan, Singapore and Fujian it is where a great deal of the working religion actually happens.
⚖ contested within
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Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
The drums, and being mounted.
Bata drums play the rhythm that belongs to one orisha and no other, the praise names are sung, and at some point a devotee is taken — the orisha rides them, speaks through them, and they will not remember it. The community's test is behavioural: if it is Shango, it must behave as Shango behaves.
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Being ridden.
The vocabulary is explicit — the orisha mounts the devotee as a rider mounts a horse — and the person has no memory afterwards and is told what happened. The community does not accept every instance: what is watched is whether the behaviour is characteristic of that particular orisha, and a false one is spotted.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
Tongues.
Speech that outruns the speaker, in a room full of people doing the same. Pentecostals treat it as evidence of Spirit baptism; cessationists hold the gift ended with the apostles. Half a billion people are on the first side of that argument, which is a fact about the twentieth century as much as about the experience.
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The medium.
A tangki goes into trance, the god is understood to take the body, and the medium speaks and writes in the god's voice — often while driving spikes through the cheeks or sitting on a nail-studded chair, apparently without pain. The ordained clergy consider this legitimate but low-status. In Taiwan, Singapore and Fujian it is where a great deal of the working religion actually happens.
Go deeper — context →
Entire sanctification — a second work of grace, and an argued one.
Taken from the Wesleyan holiness movement in the later 1800s: after conversion, a further crisis in which the Spirit cleanses the disposition to sin. Anabaptist-minded members have never been comfortable with it, and the denomination has repeatedly restated it in softer terms.
Go deeper — context →