Jesus Movement Difficulties
What makes the Jesus Movement difficult to study
The JM was not homogenous in nature, centred on an individual personality or founder, in a singular location. Instead, it would be more accurately described as a heterogeneous family or collection of smaller movements, polycephalous in leadership, polynucleated in multiple geographical centres, exhibiting a moderate to extreme variance in the particulars of ethos, praxis, belief and leadership, whilst being harmonised by a nearly universally shared set of Charismatic and hippie characteristics.
It is this broad, heterogeneous quality of the revival that has made it difficult for both popular and scholarly works to make a comprehensive analysis of the entire JM story. As a result, much of the popular genre of literature tends to be biographical and at times hagiographical and self serving in nature, narrating selective stories within the JM story; and academic works have chosen to isolate and analyse certain strands and subsets within the JM. To illustrate this, amongst the twelve known doctoral dissertations written on the JM, only one has attempted a comprehensive theological and historical analysis, and that, having been written in 1971, was completed at least one year before the movement peaked. Six Master’s thesis have been written on the JM with only two offering a macro-analyse. Whilst recognising the scholarly contribution that each one of these works has made, it must also be noted that not one of these offers an analysis of the JM from a Charismatic/Pentecostal perspective, a peculiar fact considering that the JM was primarily a Charismatic revival. Thus this research intends to maintain both a comprehensive and Charismatic/Pentecostal approach to its analysis and conclusions.
Richard Bustraan
