Pentecostalism, fundamentalism, and modern prophetic movements: From Topeka and Azusa to the Postwar Healing Revival, AD 1900-1960

The first six decades of the twentieth century produced several movements that permanently altered the genealogy of modern Christianity. Pentecostalism emerged from a nineteenth-century matrix of Wesleyan Holiness teaching, Higher Life and Keswick spirituality, divine-healing networks, revivalism, premillennial expectation, restorationist impulses, and transnational missions. At Topeka in 1901, Charles F. Parham's school connected baptism in the Holy Spirit with speaking in tongues as its initial evidence; at the Azusa Street revival beginning in 1906, William J. Seymour presided over a racially and socially unusual mission whose worship, testimony, print networks, and visiting missionaries accelerated Pentecostal diffusion. The movement rapidly institutionalized in multiple denominational families and soon divided over sanctification and, more decisively, the Trinitarian-Oneness controversy. In parallel, Protestant fundamentalism arose as a coalition defending historic supernatural doctrines and biblical authority against theological modernism, while dispensational premillennialism and Bible institutes reshaped conservative evangelical eschatology and pedagogy. After the Second World War, independent healing evangelists, the Voice of Healing network, and the Latter Rain movement intensified claims of healing, prophecy, restored ministries, and charismatic power. William Branham became a leading healing-revival figure and later the center of a distinct prophetic-restorationist movement whose authority claims and non-Nicene teachings require classification separately from classical Trinitarian Pentecostalism. Historically, the period generated intersecting but nonidentical Pentecostal, Oneness, fundamentalist, evangelical, healing-revival, and prophetic streams. Biblically, the chapter affirms prayer for healing, the Spirit's gifts, missionary expectancy, and fidelity to supernatural Christianity while testing universal initial-evidence claims, Oneness theology, guaranteed-healing formulas, and binding prophetic authority by the apostolic Scriptures.