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Ways Christians See It

Is baptism in the Spirit a second experience after conversion?

Acts 2, 8, 10 and 19; 1 Corinthians 12:13

Luke tells the story of the Spirit coming on people four times in Acts, and he tells it in a different order every time. At Pentecost the Spirit comes and Peter then calls the crowd to repent and be baptized. In Samaria people believe and are baptized, and the Spirit comes later when the apostles arrive. In Caesarea the Spirit falls on a Roman officer's household while Peter is still mid-sentence, before anyone is baptized at all. In Ephesus disciples are baptized and then have hands laid on them.

Paul, writing to Corinth, says something that sounds different in kind: in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body. Not some. All.

The question is how those fit together. If Paul is describing what happens to every Christian at the start, what are the episodes in Acts where believers plainly receive something later? And if Acts is describing a normal second stage, why does Paul use the language of all?

Where everyone agrees

Everyone here holds that the Spirit is given to every Christian, that no one belongs to Christ without the Spirit, and that the Spirit's work is not an optional extra for advanced believers. Nobody in this argument thinks there are two classes of Christian in terms of standing before God. The disagreement is about whether there is a distinct, datable empowering after conversion, what to call it, and whether it has a standard sign.

A distinct second experience

Conversion brings the Spirit. Baptism in the Spirit is a further empowering for witness.

What it claims

The New Testament describes an enduement of power that is distinct from and usually subsequent to being born again. Jesus' own disciples are the pattern: they are already believers, already sent, already breathed on in John 20, and they are still told to wait in Jerusalem until they are clothed with power from on high. Waiting for something implies not yet having it. In classical Pentecostal teaching, speaking in tongues is the initial physical evidence that it has happened, though the wider charismatic renewal generally holds the experience without insisting on that sign.

Who holds it

Classical Pentecostal denominations: Assemblies of God, Church of God in Christ, Foursquare, Apostolic Faith bodies, and the Wesleyan-Holiness churches they grew out of.

The texts it stands on

  • Luke 24:49 Told to wait for power, after the resurrection and the commission.
  • Acts 1:4-8 You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you. Power for witness, not for salvation.
  • Acts 8:14-17 Samaritans had believed and been baptized; the Spirit had not yet fallen on any of them.
  • Acts 19:1-6 Paul asks disciples whether they received the Spirit when they believed, which is only a sensible question if the two can come apart.

Strongest case

It takes Acts at face value rather than harmonising it away. Luke does describe believers receiving the Spirit after believing, twice, and he does not treat those as irregularities needing explanation. The question Paul asks in Ephesus is the strongest single piece of evidence, because it presumes the possibility of a gap.

Hardest question

Paul never uses the phrase for a second stage. The one time he says baptized in the Spirit he says all of us were, and he says it to a church he is rebuking, some of whom he calls worldly. If the experience were the mark of the empowered, that is the last congregation he would grant it to universally. And the episodes in Acts are transitional by design: Samaria and Caesarea are the gospel crossing ethnic boundaries for the first time, with apostles present precisely so the crossing is witnessed and accepted.

How it answers that

Paul and Luke are not using the same vocabulary for the same thing, and requiring them to is the error. Paul's phrase describes incorporation into the body; Luke's describes an outpouring for mission, and Luke is the one narrating the experience. On the transitional reading, the reply is that Ephesus is not a boundary crossing at all, it is a group of ordinary disciples a long way into the book, and Paul's question there is put in general terms rather than as a special case.

Holding the map

Two things are worth separating before anyone argues. The first is whether a further experience of the Spirit after conversion happens, which is a question about what the New Testament describes. The second is what to call it, which is a question about vocabulary. A surprising amount of this disagreement is the second one wearing the clothes of the first, and people who would never share a label often describe remarkably similar experiences.

It is also worth noticing what nobody here argues. No one in this conversation holds that some Christians lack the Spirit, or that the Spirit is a reward for effort, or that the experience is the measure of a person's standing with God. The New Testament's own test of the Spirit's presence, given at length in the passage that sits in the middle of the longest discussion of gifts, is love.

EKLI serves Christians across traditions. On questions where churches differ we explain how each one sees it and leave the deciding to you.

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