Great.
Well, welcome back and we're off to a great start.
Thank you again, Dr.
Dayton, for getting us thinking and setting up the day.
I appreciate it very, very much.
Okay, so you have chosen the session with Bradley Truman Knoll on Experiential
verification, the Pentecostal advantage in Hermeneutics.
Ah, ah.
He is the Director of Pentecostal Studies here at Tyndale University College.
He holds credentials with the Pentecostal
assemblies of Newfoundland and Labrador, and he is a gifted presenter.
And we're pleased to present Bradley to you now.
Thank you, Van.
I'm also at the Society of Pentecostals, typically Van's designated driver,
which is a great privilege and challenge and thrill all of its own.
Wonderful privilege to be here.
Many thanks for the invitation.
Great to have you at Tyndale, which is where I get to work and minister,
and I trust today is going to be a great blessing to you.
I'm looking at experiential verification
and whether or not this is an edge for Pentecostals into hermeneutics.
Now, the very idea that one group has an
edge over another group is a little bit of a touchy subject.
But what I really want to do here is survey a number of authors on this topic
who believe strongly, actually, that in fact Pentecostals do have an edge when it
comes to hermeneutics because of their own experience.
This presentation basically comes as
chapter seven of my 2010 book on Pentecostal, Hermeneutics.
And I don't know if you can find it in the
bookstore right now, but it is on Amazon and I do make eighty six cents a copy.
So if three of you will buy one, I can have a Starbucks.
Okay, start off with some quotes.
Pentecostal approaches to biblical interpretation are playing an increasingly
important role in the contemporary hermeneutical debate.
We want to acknowledge that Pentecostal
approaches to Biblical hermeneutics are in a better position to accept the
possibility of a subjective and more experiential mention in hermeneutics.
Roger Strandstead says in other words, the
Pentecostal's charismatic experience is an experiential presupposition which enables
them to understand the charismatic life of the Apostolic Church.
As Luke reports, it better than those
contemporary Christians who lack this experience already.
Sounds like fighting words.
Clark Pinnock we cannot consider Pentecostalism to be a
kind of aberration born out of experiential excesses, but a 20th century
revival of New Testament theology and religion.
It has not only restored joy and power to
the church, but a clearer reading of the Bible as well.
So the purpose of my paper today is to
explore the reasons for the deficiency first in the discussion concerning the
function of the Holy Spirit and Hermeneutics, and to discuss why the
involvement of the Spirit is inherently necessary.
I'd like to take a look at how exactly the
Holy Spirit assists us as we interpret the Scriptures.
So that's the front end of this.
My goal is to ask whether or not Pentecostals and Charismatics, through
their experience of the Holy Spirit have an interpretive advantage.
And in doing so, I think I will offer a
distinctly pentecostal contribution to hermeneutics.
So let's talk for a moment about long standing omission, because when you begin
looking at the role of the Spirit in hermeneutics, the first thing you discover
is there is a frustrating paucity of material on it.
Nobody is talking about it.
Robert May did a survey of current hermeneutical textbooks and in it, and you
can read this for yourself, he discovers that almost nobody, even in an
introductory hermeneutic textbook, talks about the role of the Holy Spirit.
It's a topic almost totally ignored.
Everyone believes in it.
Nobody explains how it happens.
Clark Pinnock notes that somebody like
Gordon Fee, who you may know, held and holds assemblies of God credentials, can
write a book entitled Gospel and Spirit, which many of you will have read or been
familiar with and say nothing about the Holy Spirit's role and interpretation.
Fred Kluster says the illumination of the Holy Spirit is regularly mentioned in the
theological literature, yet detailed discussion of this subject is rare.
So we believe in it, but we don't talk about the how.
Let me just touch base as a way of
refresher for us and talk about why the Holy Spirit actually must be involved.
And this won't be new material to you, but
it will set up the next part of this discussion.
The nature of the Bible.
The Bible, as we know, is a spiritual book.
Paul and Timothy tells us that all
Scripture is God breathed and is profitable therefore for teaching,
reproof, correction and training and righteousness.
So the men or woman of God is maybe complete.
The idea of this book being God breathed, however, we understand that means that we
are going to need the help of the Holy Spirit to understand it.
Because of its very nature, we have God's self revelation.
Bruce Walte says the nature of the
revealer demands that the exegete has proper spiritual qualifications.
God has hidden himself in Scripture and must sovereignly show himself to us.
And note this line we cannot make God talk through the scientific method.
We cannot make God talk through the scientific method.
Luther said scripture is the sort of book which calls not only for right reading and
preaching, but also for the right interpreter.
The revelation of the Holy Spirit
we have the depravity of the reader and the common scripture we use to talk about
that comes, of course, out of one corinthians.
Two person without the Spirit doesn't
accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, but considers them foolish
and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.
Finally, we have the transformation of the individual believer.
The goal of the text, of course we know, is to transform the life of the reader.
Inspired Scripture without the Spirit will remain a dead letter and is useless.
In accomplishing this goal,
we have the passage from James one where he says, prove yourselves doers of the
Word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves.
For if anyone is a hero of the Word, not a
doer, he's like a man or a woman who looks at his natural face in the mirror, and
once he has looked and gone away, forgotten what kind of person they are.
The key passage there, of course, in James is the idea that we delude ourselves.
There can't really be a worse kind of delusion than self delusion.
Other delusions it seems like we have a better chance of catching.
But when you are self deluded, that's a hard one to get out of.
And of course, the role of the Holy Spirit is to keep us from this kind of self
delusion where we think it's okay to hear the Word but not be obedient.
And that surely is one of the most important roles of the Holy Spirit.
And finally, we have the transformation of the church.
Pinnock rightly observes that evangelicals need to reappropriate two notions of
Scripture that are often stressed in Orthodox and Catholic circles.
Number one, that the Bible is the book for the people of God,
and two, the church is the normal locale of illumination, even for Protestants.
He says Scripture originally arose from the life of the community and was meant to
be interpreted in the ongoing life of that community.
To my mind, when it comes to hermeneutics and actually when it comes to
Pentecostalism in general, which is my subject of interest,
not so much perhaps in our early days, but certainly in later days, the individualism
that is so much a part of the Enlightenment and then subsequent
rationalism has really impacted us negatively.
We hear way more about me and Jesus.
US too, and no more
than we do about the church interpreting the Scriptures together.
Probably the most focus I've ever heard on
the church interpreting the Scriptures together comes in the sense of
denominationalism whereby you have your collection of churches that keeps you from
straying too far, because somebody up at Top, the Magisterium, as it were, is
keeping you from drifting even if you wanted to.
But in terms of us allowing the Holy
Spirit to interpret Scripture through us and doing that in a group as the local
body of Christ, we don't hear so much about that.
We hear what God showed me in my devotions this morning.
And of course, we have all kinds of examples in Pentecostalism in
particular of abuse of that where somebody has heard the latest and greatest from the
Holy Ghost and then runs off and changes their life accordingly without actually
involving the body in some serious evaluation of what they've heard.
Let me talk for a few minutes now about
how exactly the Holy Spirit assists with illumination.
We all believe in the original inspiration
of Scripture, and we believe in illumination as well.
That is, he illuminates the Scriptures to us.
My experience in teaching Pentecostals is
that most of us have never stopped to say, how does that happen?
Because we're a better felt than felt kind of people.
We instinctively know he does, but we
don't stop to survey this very often or to size up how we think that happens to us.
And what I want to offer now is some
reflections from different scholars on how that happens.
French Harrington says submission of the
mind to God is a part of this, so that the critical
and analytical abilities are exercised under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
So the Holy Spirit here helps us analyze
Scripture, a critical openness to the witness of the Spirit as the text is
examined, the personal experience of faith as a part of the interpretive process, and
then, of course, a response to the transforming call of God's Word.
And this couldn't be a Pentecostal
understanding without that last part, because we believe strongly, of course,
that the text is meant to have impact upon us and we are then meant to respond.
I grew up in Pentecostalism, third
generation, and that was the preaching of Scripture.
You don't get to sit in judgment on the text.
The text always sits in judgment on you, and you'd best respond accordingly.
John Goldingay, who we just heard at SPS, says the Holy Spirit is concerned with the
intellectual work of exegesis, and that's a debated point.
Actually, as we'll see in a moment, the Holy Spirit opens our darkened minds to
receive the things of God and enables both the one who preaches and they who listen
to receive the word of God and identify what Scripture signifies for them.
Mark Cartilage has looked at the five paraclete, sayings in John 14 to 16 and
notes five things jesus always connects love and obedience,
which is surely a message the church could hear again today, noting that the Spirit
is given to enable his followers to live lives of obedience.
The Spirit will teach the disciples and
remind them of everything Jesus has taught them.
He is given to testify to the disciples concerning Jesus.
His conviction will be felt directly on the heart of every person,
and the presence of the Spirit will lead and guide believers into all truth.
Clark Pinnick has done a fair bit of work
on this, actually, and probably comes closer to a detailed
exposition of how illumination works than most others.
He said we must see interpretation more in
the sense of a corporate exercise than an individual activity.
As I've mentioned, we must recognize the dynamic nature of
our interpretive journey as we maintain an eschatological focus.
Third, God's purpose in unfolding the
Word, the truth of His Word goes beyond our intellect to Word and deed.
This is, of course, a most common Pentecostal theme.
Fourth, and this of course, would go back to our roots as well biblical
interpretation must function in the context of world mission.
Pentecostal hermeneutics really would not
recognize an interpretation of Scripture or the pursuit of the interpretation of
Scripture for the sake of the academy alone.
Or, in other words, let's interpret or let's execute for the sake of exegesis.
Pentecostal hermeneutics would recognize exegesis for the purpose of the person in
the pew, because we were all about the mission.
If you know your Pentecostal history, of course, as people of the latter reign, we
were all about God, jesus soon return and the harvest that was waiting.
And so we interpreted Scripture.
And still, I would like to think,
interpret Scripture for the purpose of action.
Fifth, the Spirit helps the church to
recognize the signs of the times and to reflect biblically and theologically on
current trends and issues within the church and in society at large.
And if that's true, the Holy Spirit these days is quite busy.
6th, our commitment to unity must be
stronger than our desire to preserve denominational walls and paradigms.
A couple of more
Robert May says our biblical hermeneutics are going to have to be reasonable,
acknowledging on one hand the work of the academy and our own rational abilities and
the dynamics of people in a supernatural relationship with God.
On the other.
This seems when I study Pentecostal hermeneutics and I talked to the people in
the pew, I talked to members of the academy.
This is really, of course, the rub.
How do you juxtapose our rational faculties
and the confidence, especially if you're here as a scholar, the confidence you have
in your own intellect with the fact that the Holy Spirit,
Pentecostals believe, is flowing through us often to do supernatural things that
your rational faculties can't always grasp.
It's probably why Pentecostalism at its
core has had such an anti intellectual strain running down through the middle of
it, because the two are really hard to bring together.
It we struggle with that.
Our interpretive method should resonate with both the past history of the church
and historical interpretation, as well as present church community.
As a member of the Godhead, the Spirit's work will always be seen as relevant, no
matter in what context the present church might find herself finally, and
admittedly, most difficult to clearly describe.
Our reading of the Scriptures should be revelatory, bringing people into encounter
with the living God through which God speaks to his people.
He concludes by saying, so where our hermeneutics are reasonable
to the Christian mind, where there is a sense of resonance with both past and
present church communities and Pentecostalism, of course, as a
restorationist movement, we've not done well at the historical piece.
You get somebody like B. F.
Lawrence in the very early days saying we have no history but Pentecost,
and I'm sure in Pentecostal assemblies of Newfoundland, there's many people right
now in our pews think that a group of the older fellows in the 1930s got together
and wrote the doctrine of the Trinity for them.
But literally in our denomination.
When you mention names even like Calvin and Luther, they don't know who you're
talking about, let alone Aquinas or Augustine.
But they know a little bit about Azuza Street and Axe.
And of course, the other 1900 years are pretty well the wasteland of church
history, where our hermeneutics are relevant to the
context of the one who reads and where God ultimately is revealed.
We suggest that there's a greater
likelihood that the Holy Spirit is at work in our hermeneutics.
So that's the background to this piece.
Now we want to talk a little bit about whether or not Pentecostals indeed have a
hermeneutical edge because of their experience.
A quote for you by Ken Archer
a hermeneutic that focuses only upon what the original inspired author meant will
not satisfy the requirements of a Pentecostal hermeneutic.
The essence of Pentecostalism asserts that the spiritual and extraordinary
experiences of the biblical characters are possible for contemporary believers.
So there is an evangelical hermeneutics,
as you know, a strong focus on authorial intent.
Fee really drove this home to us in the
early 1970s with his work on historical precedent, where he said, if you can't
prove the biblical author intended to teach something,
you can't pull a normative doctrine out of historical precedent.
So, in other words, if you can't prove Luke is intending to teach initial
evidence, you can't get it from the three, four or five stories out of Acts if it's
not repeated in the Didactic literature, the teaching literature somewhere.
Of course, that kind of turned Pentecostalism on its ear for a bit as we
considered how, in fact, we were going to prove Luke so intended to teach.
What's interesting in that, of course, is
the number of the Pentecostal scholars who took him on.
Like Bob Menzies, they never, ever
challenged authorial intent right up front.
What they did instead was accepted fees premise right at the bottom, which is that
you have to have authorial intent and then Menzies and strandstat in particular come
out with something like the charismatic theology of St.
Luke, where he accepts fees premise wholesale.
But he says, we know Luke so intended to teach because all of Luke Acts is
charismatic and focused, where Paul is more satirological.
But as I read through the various
challenges back to Phi, as they dialogue back and forth,
very few actually took Fee on on the idea that authorial intent is the bedrock for
determining normative doctrine, especially in narratives.
What Ken Archer wants to say here is that if you're only going to focus on authorial
intent, that's not going to make for a good Pentecostal hermeneutic,
because at the core of Pentecostalism, as you will all know, is restorationism.
We believe that what we read in Acts is
the blueprint for the church today, what God did.
I've heard this a thousand times in Testimonies, to the point where I felt
when I was a teenager, my ears were going to bleed if I heard it one more time.
What God did once, he can do today, and
what God did for anyone, he will do for you.
And that's basically their scriptural worldview.
That's how they see the Bible and that's how they read it as well.
Talking about experience, the debate is
over whether there's a substantially different Pentecostal hermeneutic.
And this debate is perhaps best viewed as
a discussion of how Pentecostalism seeks to contribute to and perhaps modify
existing evangelical standards of hermeneutics.
I was most interested in what Professor Dayton had to say about Pentecostalism in
some way selling their souls to become evangelicals.
And I think he's right in the sense that
we have a fairly strong inferiority complex when it comes to that.
Actually, I think on that we're a little bit schizophrenic in the sense that my
reading of Pentecostals is we're either a little bit educated and we feel really
inferior to the evangelical world, or we're not so educated and we think
Pentecostalism is the only group ever going to make it because we got it.
And so we're kind of a little bit in two places on that.
But certainly academically we have had an inferiority complex.
I believe that to be true.
I think we contribute most substantially to hermeneutics in the areas of experience
and verification, which are not things you typically read of
if you read the introductory or more advanced textbooks in hermeneutics.
But I think this is our best area of contribution.
Well, let me start off with a couple of
dissenting voices, first with Gordon Anderson, who believes that focusing upon
a hermeneutic distinctive Pentecostalism leads to an apparent elitism that cannot
well serve either Pentecostalism or the wider evangelical community.
He says a Pentecostal hermeneutic is not special insight unavailable to others.
Of course, the concept of Pentecostal
elitism has been with us since 1906 because the minute you say there's
another experience of the Spirit and it is evidenced or signed by glossalalia, you
have set yourself up over and against people who don't have that experience.
We've been talking about elitism now for
110 years, and you will know the younger generations
in particular are very sensitive to this because they're big on justice.
Justice is their overriding hermeneutical
principle, and the idea that we would have something that others don't have, and even
to say it that way is most troubling to them.
Now it shows up here in terms of anderson believes that the same thing would happen
if we believe we need a Pentecostal hermeneutic.
He differentiates between two schools of thoughts concerning how the Holy Spirit
AIDS interpretation of the Scriptures, and Robert May does this summary for us.
He says, either the Holy Spirit enables
the human mind to intellectually grasp the revelation of Scripture,
or alternatively, the human mind is quite capable of understanding the meaning of
the Scriptures without the aid of the Holy Spirit.
Rather, it's the will of the one reading
that's the subject of the Holy Spirit's action.
And that's a great distinction.
Is the Holy Spirit helping our minds to better understand the Scriptures?
Or is the Holy Spirit helping us to do what our minds have already figured out?
Does he act upon your mind or your will?
Maybe you sit there and you say, that's an unnecessary bifurcation.
He's doing both.
That could be true as well.
Anderson, however, believes that we ought
to align ourselves with the second position.
The Spirit does not act upon the mind, but rather upon the will.
Spirit's role is not to shed light upon the meaning of the text, but to move the
will of the individual to a place of receptivity to the meaning of Scriptures.
Robert Menzies is another dissenting voice on this.
He believes the move towards a more reader centered approach to the text, common to
pentecostal and postmodern line of thought, is a dangerous one.
And this debate, for those of you who don't spend your evenings immersed in
hermeneutics, this is kind of the parameters of the debate.
Is the meaning found in the text itself?
That's why authorial intent works well,
because once you figure out what Luke meant, that's what it means.
It's viewed to be safer.
Or is some of the meaning or all of the meaning discovered by you when you sit
with the Bible and you figure out what this means, is that the meaning?
How much of the meaning does the reader bring?
Or is it just in the text, anchored in the text?
Always only in the text.
And then you have to figure out what that text is.
That's the two poles from the text to the reader.
Menzies believes that the reader, the
shift in focus sum to the reader is very, very dangerous.
And he's not alone in this.
Most feel that the subjectivity you bring
in determining meaning is a dangerous trend.
They feel safer saying it's there in the written word.
Once you involve your head and your heart
and your spirit in it, now it gets scary because it's so subjective.
These approaches strike me as the logical
successors of a sterile Biblical criticism which has so emasculated the text that it
had nothing of significance to communicate.
At some point, the question had to be asked, why bother with all of this?
The solution to this dilemma was obvious.
If significance cannot be found in the
meaning of the text, then it must be imported from outside the text.
And so you see the two parameters.
If the meaning is not in the text, then you have to import the meaning, and the
one who imports the meaning is the reader, and people are nervous about that.
Now, to be sure, Menzies serves the pentecostal community well when he raises
concerns over the location of the final determinant of meaning.
Traditional evangelical and increasingly
Pentecostal hermeneutics have leaned heavily upon the historical critical
method inherent with its safety in locating meaning objectively in the text.
The transition towards a reader centered hermeneutic can be risky, as the meaning
may now be found subjectively with the reader.
Let me start with a voice of support from
William Menzies, who actually is Robert's father.
He suggests three levels of a Pentecostal hermeneutic.
First is the inductive level, the second
is the deductive level, but the third is what he calls the verification level.
While others tried Pentecostals for their dangerous practice of exegeting out of
experience, william Menzies argues that it's dangerous to develop theology and
experience from our hermeneutics from nonexperience.
See, we've been accused of this for quite some time, that we had an experience, and
then we went to the Bible looking for where it was, and the great scholars of
old said, that's not how you deal with the text.
You have to go to the text first, find out
what it says, and then your experiences line up with that.
That's the parameters of this debate.
Menji's is saying here, no, in fact, it's dangerous not to involve your experience.
He says, if a biblical truth is to be
promulgated, then it certainly ought to be verifiable and demonstrable in life.
When Peter stood on the Day of Pentecost
and proclaimed this, is that testimony about the experience and exposition of
Joel's prophecy flowed together hand in hand.
Howard Irvin also supported this, suggesting a Pneumatic hermeneutic.
And this would provide a resolution of a
the dichotomy between faith and reason that existentialism seeks to bridge,
though at the expense of the Pneumatic, the antidote to a destructive rationalism
that often accompanies a historical critical exegesis, and c irrational
accountability for mysticism by a piety grounded in faith alone.
Because Pentecostals allow the
experiential immediacy of the Holy Spirit to inform their epistemology or how we
know things, this contact with the Pneumatic enlightens their hermeneutics in
a way that may be considered beyond the traditional view of illumination.
Roger strange that as well.
When he looks at it, he says there are
five components to a Pentecostal hermeneutic.
We have the charismatic experiential presuppositions.
We have the actual Pneumatic.
Then we look at genre, we do our exegesis,
but then we should have an experiential verification.
He feels that Pentecostals have much to offer traditional hermeneutics in the
areas of pre understanding and experiential verification.
He says the charismatic experience of the Pentecostal ministering in the power of
the Holy Spirit, speaking in other tongues as the Spirit gives utterance.
Being led by the Spirit enables him to understand Luke's record of the activity
of the Holy Spirit better than the non Pentecostal.
They'll break it down for you very simply.
When I read Acts Two and the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they all speak in
tongues as the Spirit gave sutterance, I understand that because I do it.
When the Holy Spirit shows up in a dream,
and you've had one of those dreams when you read the passage, it makes sense.
I don't yet understand some of the
teleportation that goes on in Acts, but I would love to get a run at that too.
I commute back and forth to Newfoundland on a weekly basis with Air Canada and if I
could get the Holy Spirit just to start helping me out there, that would be great.
So this is the debate here.
If through your experience you've encountered what the text is
talking about, do you have a hermeneutical edge?
Pentecostal scholars, many of these are arguing.
Yes.
Paul Lewis says long before the debates
over inerrancy, Pentecostals assume the authority of the Scripture for they
experience that which the Scriptures described.
This is a really important point.
Many of you will be aware that we didn't
need a doctrine of inerrancy at the beginning because we read James and he
said if there's any sick, lay our hands on them and we did it.
And they got better and we said, oh, obviously James is right.
We didn't argue over whether or not Mark 16 is a legitimate ending to Mark because
he said signs will follow the preaching of the Word.
We preached the Word, the signs followed.
We knew the Word was right.
And not only did we knew the Word, no, the Word was right and true and authoritative.
We knew we had interpreted it correctly
so we didn't need to get bogged down in an errancy.
Because when it says something and you do it and then God follows, you got it right.
And it actually, I think, classical
Pentecostal experience in seeing the scriptures fulfilled in front of their
eyes was a much stronger motivation for the
authority of the Scriptures in their life than any creed would have been.
Whereby we defend an errancy because we defend an errancy because we're afraid.
What happens if we don't defend an errancy?
They never got caught up in that so much.
He says Pentecostal experience authenticates and provides assurance that
numerological experiences of the Bible are meant today.
And Pentecostal restorationism naturally means Pentecostals have a keen
interest in the people and the world of the text.
He says we're placed within a unique position as biblical exeges, for
Pentecostalism promotes the prophetic gifts and finds no philosophical problem
of the inspired authors foretelling events prior to their occurrences.
Therefore, the Pentecostal can enter in the discussion with a more balanced
perspective on the origins, aspects and features of biblical texts.
John Thomas Chris Thomas has done great
work on this and he's looked at Acts 15 in the Jerusalem Council.
And this of course is a great passage to use because they're confronted with a
problem and we see how they create doctrine live using their experience.
And they use, he said, the collective experience of the community.
They use the Scriptures and then the role of the Holy Spirit in mediating these
Scriptures to the context of the believers present,
contrary to the understanding of historical critical method that says
authorial intent as the deciding factor in.
Determining scriptural truth.
Chris suggests that the triadactic method used in Acts 15 might better suit
Pentecostals in their search for suitable hermeneutical principles.
The study, he says, suggests that there may indeed be a distinctive hermeneutical
approach to Scripture contained within the New Testament itself that is more in
keeping with the ethos and worldview of the Pentecostal community than are many of
the interpretive approaches currently being employed by a number of Pentecostal
interpreters regarding the role of context and community.
Thomas notes, and this is really interesting.
The methodology in Acts 15 is far removed
from the historical grammatical approach, where one moves from text to context.
On Acts 15, they move from their context to the text.
They had an experience, they were trying to wrestle it to the ground, they talked
about it as a community, and then they went to the text.
He acknowledges that this reliance on the
Holy Spirit in the interpretive process can lead to rampant subjectivism, which is
the fear, but argues that this model provides protection against this, for it
clearly regards the Scripture as authoritative, and ultimately the
experience of the Church is measured against the biblical text.
One more, I think.
John McKay says his own experience with
the baptism of the Holy Spirit effectively changed his outlook on Scripture from a
purely academic interest to one that was subjective and life changing.
Spirit baptism changed his view of
Scripture significantly and to the point that instead of embracing both rational
and spiritual insight into Scripture as both beneficial and complementary, he has
chosen the more radical approach of suggesting the latter, which is spiritual
insight, is to be preferred and is superior to the former.
He says it's not that charismatics have
ceased to think theologically, quite the contrary.
However, their theological perspective has
changed and changed so radically that they find their views no longer fit with those
of the majority of today's biblical theologians, and furthermore, that they
fail to find much satisfaction from participating in their debates.
It's my convinced opinion that the charismatics view of the Bible must be
different from everyone else's, be they fundamentalists conservatives, liberals,
radicals, or whatever the title de jure is.
Conclusion
while the excessive subjectivism often prevalent in the reader response model of
hermeneutics is not desirable within Pentecostalism,
it's my contention that neither is there frequently detached and sometimes esoteric
objectivity found within the historical critical method.
I don't like the poles, I don't like the
extremes, and I don't like being pushed into one side or the other,
and I think we do well to avoid those two extremes
if we drift too far, of course, into subjectivity so that the text only means
what you think it means, that's naturally dangerous.
But on the other hand, the concept that
the text means something there and there is one meaning and only one ever, and we
have to go digging around to find it because it's purely objective and your
presuppositions and your experiences in life have no impact on that meaning.
I think that I find that to be equally as troubling.
I believe Pentecostal Hermeneutics therefore should move towards the center
of this debate, acknowledging and relying upon the historical critical method with
its objectivity on one hand while maintaining an openness to the more
subjective verification of Pentecostal experience on the other.
Early pentecostals were pragmatists.
We did what worked.
And there's a sense to me still that I
cherished that about my Pentecostal heritage.
Scripture should work.
What it says should happen, should happen
if it says that if you ask of God and the peace of God that passes all human
understanding will guard your hearts and your minds.
I should be able to live in some peace because it promises that.
And I still approach the Bible that way,
that there is an experiential verification to my Hermeneutics even if, unlike my
forebears, I better understand what was going on when Elijah stood before Ahab in
One King 17 because I have a little bit of sense now of what the context was.
Even as we use both, we're going to have to embrace a
harmonical method that strikes a balance between the text centered approach and the
reader centered approaches that are currently in vogue.
As Pentecostal Muslim of the past served the Christian Church by renewing our
awareness of the Holy Spirit both in theology and practice.
I think Pentecostals today may contribute much to a methodology of hermeneutics that
holds to the best of the historical critical method, yet is open to the role
of experienced narratives and community in the interpretive process.
Robert May says it's the postmodern
bandwagon of rampant subjectivism that we should jump off and not the possibility of
the Christian experience of the transcendent.
Does this holy experience result in an experience centered theology?
Hardly the better way to label it.
Is this Christ centered experience certified theology?
Christ centered experience certified
theology, I think, would be a goal for all of us.
And I'll then with this question what are we afraid of?
When I've taught pneumatology and I've talked about the role of experience in
hermeneutics, I get any number of people who want to draw back to the certainty of
the historical critical method of authorial intent because it's safer,
because we use the cerebral cortex of the brain.
And when I get into the gifts of the
Spirit and the subjectivism of God flowing through us, the Church and what that's
like, they get really uncomfortable with that.
And so I always ask this question, and it
might be something you're interested in thinking about.
Name the top ten heresies that the Church
has ever encountered and figure out how many of them came from learned cerebral
men and how many of them came from the wild, charismatic types.
And what you'll discover is that in the
top ten heresies of the Church, almost all of them come from serious scholars of the
Word who were applying their critical faculties to the very certain and
objective truths of scripture and ended up with wildly different interpretations.
So I asked this question what makes your head so much safer than your experience?
And the only answer
really seems to me to come out of rationalism and the enlightenment.
We feel our head is safer because we've been taught our head is safer.
But my experience is that not only is the
heart deceitful among all things, the head sometimes can just be way out of whack.
So that's what I'd like to leave you with.
What are we afraid of?
As we embrace a supernatural experiential,
subjective, at least verification of hermeneutics.
Thank you.