Pentecostal Theology and Jonathan Edwards

Amos Yong, Steven M. Studebaker

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780567687890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie

This volume brings 'America's theologian' and one of the fastest growing forms of Christianity into dialogue. Edwards is a fruitful source for Pentecostal investigation for historical and theological reasons. Edwards and Pentecostals descend from a common historical tradition-North American Evangelicalism. From revivalism and religious/charismatic experience to pneumatology they also share common theological interests. Though sharing a common history and core theological concerns, no critical conversation between Pentecostals and Edwards and their fields of scholarship has occurred.
This is the first volume that provides Pentecostal readings of Edwards' theology that contribute to Pentecostal theology and Edwards scholarship. The contributing essays offer examination of affections and the Spirit, God and Salvation, Church and culture; and mission and witness.

Part One

Affections and the Spirit

1

“True Religion, in Great Part, Consists of Holy Affections”: A Critical Comparison of the Biblical Hermeneutics of Jonathan Edwards and Pentecostals

L. William Oliverio, Jr.

Introduction

In the midst of the formative years of his young adulthood, while pastoring in New York City, summering in East Windsor, then pastoring in Bolton, Connecticut, and into his years tutoring at Yale, Jonathan Edwards kept a book of resolutions.¹ The full list of seventy resolutions is a revealing instance of what Michael McClymond and Gerald McDermott have described as Edwards’ understanding of creaturely participation in God as these meet the dispositions, loves, and habits that govern a person—both key components of the great “symphony” found in Edwards’ life and corpus.² Among these stands Resolution 28: “Resolved, to study the Scriptures so steadily, constantly and frequently, as that I may find, and plainly perceive myself to grow in the knowledge of the same.”³ To judge from the vast proliferation of the use of the Bible in his written works, the conclusion is compelling that Edwards missed little opportunity to steadily, constantly, and frequently study the Bible.

For Edwards, biblical interpretation was no dispassionate or technical exercise. He came to the important doctrinal conclusion that “true religion, in great part, consists in holy affections,” the central thesis of his Religious Affections (1746).⁴ Yet Edwards was also a remarkable philosophical theologian who utilized innovative and complex philosophical convictions as he theologically interpreted Scripture. Standing among those who turned away from the idea that human reason could serve as the arbiter of all things during the period of the Enlightenment, Edwards came to understand the affections and the intellect as fused together because he considered that “the affections are no other, than the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will of the soul.”⁵ His biblical hermeneutics can thus not be properly described in merely technical terms, but they must account for the primacy of the spiritual in his interpretation of Scripture.⁶

Pentecostals have likewise operated with a strong affirmation of the role of the affections in an authentic Christian life. Like Edwards, pentecostal hermeneutics have stood against rationalisms and merely academic or technical hermeneutics of the Bible. They, too, though not as often recognized, have come to the biblical texts with important philosophical, ontological, and theological assumptions as they have interpreted Scripture for its spiritual content.⁷ Nevertheless, the affections or feelings have been central to all major pentecostal hermeneutical types. Steven J. Land’s thesis that pentecostal theology is found in its spirituality, and that pentecostal theology is not just about right belief or right practices but centered on right feelings, concluded that pentecostal spirituality and theology are about affections shaped by a longing for the kingdom of God.⁸ Pentecostal biblical hermeneutics have likewise placed significant emphasis on the affective and the role of the Spirit.⁹

Pentecostal hermeneutics is a broad and general category to compare to the hermeneutics found in the work of a particular person, even that of a theological and philosophical giant like Edwards. Pentecostalism is itself a category that is complicated and contested, as Pentecostalism includes the Classical Pentecostals who find their roots in the early movement, of which the Azusa Street Revival was its exemplary original manifestation, through to the vast varieties of the 500 million plus Pentecostals worldwide today, and their relation to broader charismatic and renewal movements.¹⁰ Pentecostalism is itself best understood when accounted for as simultaneously local and global, particular and general.¹¹ Further, both pentecostal hermeneutics and Edwards diverged from the hermeneutical canons of Enlightenment modernism, and so certain assumptions common in modern thought have been brought into question. The hermeneutics at Azusa Street, 1906–09, and the hermeneutics of Edwards, who pastored in Northampton from 1726 to 1750, continued and further initiated alternatives to standard forms of Enlightenment modernism and their approaches to Scripture.

This chapter, while focusing on biblical hermeneutics, operates with an approach to hermeneutics that also stands, with Edwards in particular and Pentecostals in general, in contrast to the Enlightenment’s attempts to elevate its naturalistic and foundationalist epistemic canons as the proper ones for human knowing. Along with some forms of Christian thought, much of late modern or so-called postmodern thought has concurred so that the result has been that hermeneutical understanding has superseded the foundationalist epistemologies established during the Enlightenment, for what are, at least in my estimation, some compelling reasons.¹² Most importantly, the hermeneutical approach has trumped Enlightenment epistemic conceptions because the ontological, metaphysical, anthropological, theological, epistemic, and other assumptions built into foundationalist approaches are themselves contested. Those conclusions are built into the epistemologies which serve as arbiters of further ontic affirmations. Reductive materialism, for example, cannot simply beg the question of its truth. Declaring a particular epistemology the indubitable foundation for human knowledge is either to assume the triumph of or to beg the question of all these assumptions.

As Merold Westphal has efficiently formulated it, the late modern or postmodern turn contends that, instead, “hermeneutics is epistemology.”¹³ What this hermeneutical approach means for comparing the biblical hermeneutics of Edwards and Pentecostals is that the biblical hermeneutics of both, while a critical center and source for their theologies, are interdependent in relation to their entire paradigms of understanding life and reality, and thus the funding of conceptions is multidirectional.¹⁴ In a paradigm as bountiful and as ingenious as that of Edwards, a rich biblical hermeneutic both funded and emerged from his theology and philosophy. This chapter, as with this entire volume, might only begin to put Edwards into dialogue with Pentecostalism.

Elements of Edwards’ biblical hermeneutics

McClymond and McDermott estimate that the combined exegetical elements found in Edwards’ written works, from his sermons to the primarily exegetical material found in his other works, run around 5,000 printed pages. Edwards’ dedication to scriptural knowledge and interpretation came from his theological conviction that any true knowledge of God comes from divine revelation as well as his resolution to study such.¹⁵ The mid-twentieth-century resurgence of interest in Edwards focused on his metaphysical genius and often underestimated the place of Scripture in his thought.¹⁶ Recent decades have seen a surge in interest in the biblical interpretation that played a crucial role in Edwards’ thought.¹⁷

Edwards’ biblical interpretation might be well understood, though, from today’s vantage point, as primarily theological interpretation of Scripture.¹⁸ For theological reasons, he rejected the emerging modern canons of historical-critical scholarship, themselves still young in development and far away from Edwards’ own context on the American frontier. Edwards’ biblical interpretation was deeply informed by his core theological affirmations. These core theological affirmations were deeply informed by his reading of Scripture, though it seems that the whole tended to have more noetic authority than the part in Edwards’ hermeneutical circle. Edwards’ sermons typically exposited a verse of Scripture in the Puritan style of proclaiming a doctrine abstracted from the text to be followed by application or improvement for the hearers.

Commonly seen as one of his most revealing sermons, “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” originally delivered in Northampton in August 1733, is an exposition of Jesus’ affirmation of Peter’s confession that he is the Christ, the Son of the living God in Matthew’s gospel. In the Authorized (King James) Version used by Edwards, it reads, “And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven” (Mt. 16:17).¹⁹ In the sermon, Edwards exposits the doctrine that “there is such a thing, as a spiritual and divine light, immediately imparted to the soul by God, of a different nature from any that is obtained by natural means.”²⁰ All knowledge, for Edwards, is, of course, imparted by God. Material things operate as mediate or secondary causes of knowledge. But the special divine and supernatural knowledge that he speaks of here is immediately imparted by God.²¹ That is what appears in this passage in the Gospel of Matthew, according to Edwards, as this light of a different nature has been imparted to Peter. He uses the theological distinction between common grace and special grace to explain what has happened to Peter’s understanding. If it was merely a sense of his own sinfulness and misery or the anger of God that Peter had sensed, men in their natural condition may experience that, for “common grace only assists the faculties of the soul to do that more fully, which they do by nature.”²² But here Edwards sees the Spirit of God acting upon Peter in special and regenerative grace where the Spirit “acts in the mind of a saint as an indwelling vital principle.”²³

Edwards’ sermon and interpretation of Mt. 16:17 is a theological and philosophical exposition that seems to burst forth spiritual meaning from the statement found in the text. He explains how the divine light does not spring from the human imagination but affects it, that it suggests no truths not revealed in the Word of God, and that not every lofty affection is a movement of the divine light. He teaches that the light is an apprehension of the divine excellency of what the Word of God reveals. The light removes the hindrances placed by man’s reasoning, and moves attention to a clearer view of the truth of the objects of reason and their mutual relations. The divine excellency is perceived, and it removes all doubt that...