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While on my spiritual odyssey, I encountered seemingly contradictory perceptions of Pentecostal Truth. Church leaders and authors used diverse and paradoxical language in describing the baptism in the Holy Spirit. The altar workers who exhausted themselves trying to “pray me through to the baptism” contradicted each other. “Hold on,” said one. “Let go,” urged another.
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Such untidiness in language is troubling to those who toil to explain what it means to be a Pentecostal—especially to the fourth generation. In the experience of the baptism in the Holy Spirit, does one “get the Holy Ghost” or does the Spirit get more of the individual? That is, does the person receive more of God or does she surrender more of herself to God? Is the baptism of the Holy Spirit the final stop on the celestial skyway or is it the pad from which spiritual adventures launch? Does the baptism in the Holy Spirit fill one with a passion for evangelism and missions or does the passion drive one to seek the empowering experience? Does the awareness of personal sinfulness before a holy God impel one to seek the cleansing and enablement found in the baptism in the Holy Spirit or does the deepening relationship motivate one to pursue holiness?.
The perceived ambiguity of Pentecostal theology may be caused by the “tools” of Pentecostal theology—oral tradition, tracts, magazines, and sermon booklets. For Pentecostals, theology is not “identified solely or even primarily with systematic treatises, monographs and scholarly apparatus in centers of academia.” [1]
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Theologizing is not merely a “speculative enterprise; it is urgent, last-days work.”[2] Preachers in passenger seats wrote Pentecostal theology as they carried an urgent message to a lost and dying world at the end of the ages. Surely, it is time to clarify Pentecostal theology.
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A clear theology begins with a carefully articulated hermeneutic. Pentecostals have usually depended on their Evangelical friends to provide the guidelines for hermeneutics. From them, Pentecostals learned to exegete biblical texts using the laws of grammar and the facts of history (grammatico-historical method). Within this framework, it was understood that the clearer passages of Scripture were to be used to illuminate the more esoteric ones.
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This principle served Bible scholars well until some began to insist that didactic portions of Scripture must interpret narrative portions. William and Robert Menzies suggest that this later stance may have come as an over reaction to more extreme expressions of redaction criticism. Carried too far, the principle easily becomes an excuse to interpret particular passages of Scripture by superimposing one’s preconceived theological “grid.” It can sideline the Gospels and Acts and yield the playing field to the Pauline epistles. Pentecostals and some Evangelicals have not been happy with the extremely restrictive and biased eisegetical approach to hermeneutics into which some have drifted. However, with a renewed emphasis on the discipline of biblical theology, the value of historical and narrative portions of Scripture is again being recognized. Walter C. Kaiser has suggested a new description for the refreshed approach to hermeneutics—the grammatical-contextual-historical-syntatical-theological-cultural method.
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In today’s climate, Pentecostals like Anthony Palma are recognizing the need to articulate hermeneutical principles and presuppositions before attempting to discuss Pentecostal distinctives.
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Young Pentecostals have been asking for a statement of the assumptions and rules for Bible study.
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They want to know that Pentecostal distinctives are based on careful exegesis and not simply someone’s experiences.
[1] Steven J. Land, Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press Ltd., 1997), 41.
[2] Ibid., 36.
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