The weight of authority rises or falls in the measure that adherents are persuaded that a given idea is Scriptural or in the case of leaders, that they know the Bible. However, it would be inappropriate to describe Pentecostals, in the spirit of fundamentalism, as rationalists working on the back of abstractions, mining the Scripture for all the answers an adherent may seek. The pragmatic comportment of Pentecostals continues to concede that most ideas are born out of experience. Nonetheless, they would also adjoin that, if experience is going to have a lasting value, it must be verifiable in Scripture. Any ideas which remain true, do so because of their proven fidelity with Scripture.
Pentecostals endeavor to maintain a dialectical relationship between experience and Scripture.
It is the role of experience to interpret Scripture and for Scripture to inform experience. Today, with the advent of a Pentecostal academia, the tension between these two poles is increasingly lively as Pentecostals make a conscious attempt not to sacrifice either side of the equation. Testimony to this fact, within the PAOC both the 1984 decision to ordain women and the 1994 decision to allow remarriage in limited circumstances, were the result of a healthy ongoing struggle between experience and the Scriptures. A fugitive rabbinical parable recounts a time when Moses returns from the dead and attends a lecture on the meaning of the Pentateuch given at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. You have it all wrong.