From Pentecost to the Triune God

A Pentecostal Trinitarian Theology

Steven M. Studebaker

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780802865304
• eBook ISBN: 9781467436540
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In From Pentecost to the Triune God Steven Studebaker puts forth a provocative Pentecostal Trinitarian theology, arguing that the Holy Spirit completes the fellowship of the triune God and therefore shapes the identities of the Father and the Son.
The Holy Spirit, Studebaker maintains, is not simply a passive end-product of a procession from the Father and Son but, rather, a dynamic person who plays an active role in the Trinity and a constitutional, consummational role in the history of redemption.
In the course of his study, Studebaker shows the theological yield of the Pentecostal experience of the Holy Spirit and uncovers the biblical narratives of the Spirit from creation to Pentecost. A constructive and ecumenical contribution to Trinitarian theology, From Pentecost to the Triune God also engages major historical and contemporary figures such as Augustine, the Cappadocians, Weinandy, and Zizioulas, as well as representatives from the evangelical and charismatic traditions.
Finally, Studebaker applies his Pentecostal Trinitarian theology to the theology of religions and creation care, proposing that Christians embrace an inclusive posture toward people of other religious traditions and have an earth orientation that sees creation care as Christian formation.

1 A Pentecostal Approach to the Trinity

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“My experience is my creed,” declared the early Pentecostal J. H. King.¹ But what did he mean? Does this statement substantiate the popular fear that Pentecostal hermeneutics are effusive extrapolations from overheated religious experience? At first glance it appears so, but a closer inspection reveals that King is not naively writing off theology from his experience. King assumes that his Christian experience is an experience of God and that, as such, “[d]ivine experience is the basis of theology or classified knowledge of God, [and the] Christian Creed is not an arbitrary formulation, but the outgrowth of the conscious work of God in the heart.”²

For King, theology and doctrinal formulation, or “creed,” arise out of the church’s experience of Christ’s redemptive work. Since this work grounds Christian experience and theology, theology is neither bare abstract speculation nor rhapsodic religious subjectivism. Theology and doctrine specify the meaning of what the Christian community takes as the revelation and work of God in its midst. Pentecostals have intuitively sensed that their experience and theology are interrelated, but they have not always effectively identified the theological rationale for that interrelationship or drawn out its theological implications. Indeed, many Pentecostals deny that Pentecostalism can be defined in theological terms and mustrather be understood in experiential categories. According to this view, Pentecostals are about religious experience and not theology.³

I prefer a different approach to the role of religious experience in Pentecostalism. Pentecostal experience, which includes both individual and collective — but primarily the collective, or common, type of experience within the Pentecostal movement — should inform Pentecostal theology. I agree with Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, who says: “I am convinced that a proper way to assess and describe the state of Pentecostal pneumatology is to take a close look at Pentecostal spirituality and its implications for theologizing.”⁴ Pentecostals should give theological significance to what they take as the manifestation and experience of the Holy Spirit within their incipient tradition.⁵ This chapter makes a case for seeing Pentecostal experience, and especially the Pentecostal experience of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit — Spirit baptism — as a legitimate and fertile source of theology in general and Trinitarian theology in particular.

Why should the experience of Spirit baptism inform Trinitarian theology? Spirit baptism, despite its variety of interpretations, should play a key role in Trinitarian theology because it is central (1) to the practice and experience of the Pentecostal movement and (2) to the biblical narratives of the Spirit. This raises the methodological and hermeneutical issue of the role that Christian practice and experience plays in theology, particularly for practices and experiences informed by biblical categories. Accordingly, this chapter first establishes the theological rationale for letting Pentecostal practice and experience lead theology to the biblical narratives of the Spirit. Substantiating the theological, indeed the pneumatological, ground for the place of experience in the theological task sets the stage for the second part, which suggests that the experience and biblical metaphor of Spirit baptism provide a navigating point for Trinitarian theology.

The following points summarize the logic and plan of this chapter: the biblical metaphor and promise of Spirit baptism is foundational to and formative of the practice and experience of Pentecostalism; and the Pentecostal experience of the Spirit is just that, and thus the experience of Spirit baptism within the Pentecostal tradition can inform the nature of theology in general, and of Trinitarian theology in particular. In order to support these two theological principles, I begin this chapter, first, with a discussion of the interrelationships between experience-practice, tradition, Scripture, and theology; second, I outline the historical ways Pentecostals have engaged these issues; third, I present the theological hermeneutics at work in the Jerusalem Council as biblical support for a theological method that gives theological significance to the experience of the Holy Spirit; fourth, by drawing on the Pentecostal Kenneth J. Archer and the once Lutheran but now Catholic Reinhard Hütter, I propose a constructive and pneumatological rationale for allowing the experience of Spirit baptism within the Pentecostal movement to play an informative role in Trinitarian theology; finally, I present the case for taking the biblical metaphor of Spirit baptism as representative of Pentecostal experience-practice and theology.

Experience, Practices, Tradition, and Scripture

How do Christian experience, practice, tradition, and Scripture relate to one another?⁶ Should they be arranged hierarchically — Scripture, tradition, practice, and experience? Or are the distinctions less hard and more a perspective of historical time and place? Today, Nicene Trinitarian theology is unquestioned orthodoxy. But in the early churches of the first and second century no one had ever heard of it. Although the differences between these categories are real, at another level the categories are very much integrated and reciprocal.

The Nexus of Experience, Practices, Doctrine, and Tradition

A common practice in theological hermeneutics and method is to treat Christian experience and church practices as distinct.⁷ They are different in theory, but according to the cultural-linguistic approach, experience, doctrine, and church practices cannot be separated in the concrete realities of church life. Water baptism, for instance, can be discussed abstractly as a church doctrine and practice, but the actual practice of water baptism always includes the particular experience of an individual who is baptized and the church family that celebrates the event. Christian experience, then, is the particular appropriation of church practices by specific individuals of faith; church practices do not exist concretely other than in the experience of individual believers and communities of faith. On the role of experience in theology, an appropriate theological method can recognize and draw on the interrelationship between Christian experience, church practices, and doctrine. Theology does not need to be bound to a view that reifies these elements into hermetically sealed hermeneutical categories and applies a top-down hermeneutic in which practice and doctrine carry theological freight and inform experience, but not vice versa.

The place of Spirit baptism in the Pentecostal movement illustrates the interrelationship between experience, tradition, and doctrine: it is central to the Pentecostal tradition. In this respect, Spirit baptism may be similar to the practice and experience of the sinner’s prayer in the evangelical tradition. The sinner’s prayer is the conversion paradigm through which people experience being “born again” and the forgiveness of sins. Embedded in the practice of the sinner’s prayer is a theology of conversion and salvation. Moreover, here the concern is not about which came first, the experience or the theology that makes sense of the experience, but only with their reciprocal relationship.

In Pentecostalism, reciprocity likewise characterizes the experience and doctrine of Spirit baptism. The early Pentecostals formulated their doctrine of Spirit baptism as a work of grace subsequent to salvation on the basis of theological tradition and Christian experience. Borrowing from their backgrounds in the Wesleyan Holiness and Reformed revival movements, the early Pentecostals understood the doctrine of Spirit baptism as a second or third work of grace. Moreover, since they experienced Spirit baptism as believers, they naturally believed that it was an experience subsequent to salvation. Therefore, the Pentecostal doctrine of Spirit baptism is the product of the dynamic interplay of tradition and experience — along with biblical reflection. The Pentecostal doctrine of Spirit baptism in turn became the framework for Pentecostal preaching and teaching, which in turn funded the practice of inviting people to first receive Jesus as savior and then Spirit baptism for empowered ministry and life. In summary, experience, practice, and doctrine, though separable at a purely abstract level, are not so in the life of Christian communities. For this reason, when I use the term “experience,” it is shorthand for the complex interrelationships of practice, experience, and tradition that are shaped by the unique appropriation of the biblical witness within the Pentecostal movement, which characterizes corporate and individual participation in and experience of the Christian faith. Based on the interrelationships among experience, practice, and doctrine, I want to address the tendency to prioritize practices and doctrine over experience.

Experience and Tradition

Theological hermeneutics frequently elevates tradition, or “community,” over experience as a theological source. The problem is that what we consider tradition was once experience. When does personal and collective experience make the transition to tradition and become regulative for Christian faith and practice? In other words, what now serves as the normative ecclesiastical context for the individual’s understanding of Christian thought and life was, at an earlier time, the viewpoints, practices, and experiences of individuals whose theology and practices may have seemed bizarre or even heretical to their contemporaries. The doctrine and experience of Spirit baptism was both a new experience and a doctrine that was deemed aberrant by many outside early Pentecostalism, but became the distinctive doctrine for many Pentecostals. In this respect, more established traditions could have an advantage over younger ones.⁸ For example, Lutherans can appeal to a tradition of Christian thought that spans nearly five centuries. The longevity of such a tradition can seem to trump the more ephemeral experiences of an upstart one. The situation is similar to parents giving advice to children based on the accumulated wisdom of their years of experience. In many respects, their parental wisdom is correct, but at times the younger generation’s experience, since it is more reflective of contemporary life, may in fact be wiser. In other words, a twenty-something’s understanding of the culture — and hence her action in light of it — may be wiser than her parents’ understanding because it is more in tune with the contemporary world. The point is that traditional longevity can be a boon and a bane. A long-established tradition, by virtue of its age, has demonstrated its viability. Yet it also can inhibit new insights and practices because of its tendency to ossify and its inability to adapt to the dynamic circumstances of the Christian life.

One solution is to identify a certain era of the church, say the patristic one, or a confessional tradition, such as the Westminster Confession, as definitive for Christian thought and practice. Tradition in this sense plays a normative role in theology. The role of tradition has had a renaissance in non-Catholic theological contexts in the past three decades. Lutheran George Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic approach to doctrine helped to show that church doctrine, sacred texts, and practices (i.e., tradition) provide the framework and data for individual experience and theological reflection.⁹ In this sense, tradition plays a normative function because, as an objective framework, it shapes the structure for individual practice. This insight is important, but it tends to be unilateral in the way it understands the relationship between (1) the beliefs and practices of the church and theology, and (2) the beliefs and practices and Christian experience.

A better option is to recognize that, though it bears a degree of normativity, tradition is dynamic. For example, Luther critiqued and proposed an alternative to the medieval church’s view of grace in the sixteenth century, which in time produced a new normative tradition — the Lutheran and, more broadly, the Protestant one. Furthermore, Protestant theology cannot be separated from Luther’s experience and the theology he produced or from the similar experiences of many of his contemporaries with whom his theology resonated. Lindbeck discerns a unidirectional movement from Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith to his tower experience.¹⁰ It may well be true that Luther made his exegetical discoveries and theological formulation of justification by faith prior to the tower experience, but certainly his frustration (Anfechtung) with late-medieval spirituality fueled his quest for a biblical and theological new way. The problem is that the cultural-linguistic approach, when taken as an exclusive model, becomes unidirectional and forestalls the reciprocal influence between experience, church practices, and theology.

A century after the worldwide emergence of the Pentecostal movement, Pentecostals can draw on their own emerging tradition. Moreover, the emerging Pentecostal tradition cannot be neatly separated from Pentecostal experience. For this reason, the Pentecostal experience-tradition can be taken as a unit. When we refer, then, to Pentecostal experience, it is not just to the scintillating subjective experience of Pentecostals (though it does not discount it); rather, it has in mind the broader and common character of the Pentecostal experience and thus invokes the notion of tradition — the practice and experience of Spirit baptism within the Pentecostal movement. From this standpoint, Spirit baptism can be understood as a constitutive experience within Pentecostalism. Even granting the varied interpretations of Spirit baptism among Pentecostals, Spirit baptism is a biblical metaphor for an experience that many Pentecostals have in common and as such is an experience that characterizes the movement and not just certain individuals within it. “Experience” in this sense includes traditional practices and the attendant experiences they engender. Moreover, though church practices can be contemplated in the abstract, in reality they provide the structure for the concrete ways specific communities and persons of faith experience the Christian faith. Taken together, the particular practices and beliefs of a Christian community and the way they structure Christian experience form a tradition. “Experience” is roughly equivalent to “tradition.” The experience of Spirit baptism thus refers to the common experience of Spirit baptism and charismatic practices within the Pentecostal movement.

Text, Tradition, and Experience

Because of the close historical and theological affinities between Pentecostals and evangelicals, I also need to address the tendency to give precedence to the biblical text over tradition and experience. Evangelicals — and Pentecostals along with them — have been people of the Bible. This is, of course, appropriate since Scripture is in principle the clearest testimony to the revelation and redemptive work of God. However, the writers of Scripture were more comfortable drawing on past experience and tradition than contemporaneous biblical, text-driven theologies. When the Hebrew prophets, for instance, appeal to the Exodus, they are not referring primarily to a text, but to an event, to the meaning ascribed to that event, and to the attendant religious and social practices that developed from it. They looked back to the experience of their ancestors, an experience that included deliverance, journey and provision in the wilderness, and revelation of the law in order to understand God’s work and their appropriate response to God in their changing circumstances.

The tradition of the Exodus includes experiences both individual (e.g., Moses and the burning bush) and corporate (e.g., the people of Israel passing through the sea). The prophets refer to the earlier experience of their forebears and what became their religious tradition in time. Scripture, therefore, recognizes the role of experience (both of individuals and of a community of faith) that eventually becomes tradition in the process of developing religious identity. The experience of the Exodus was formative not only for the identity of the people who experienced it, but also for the subsequent generations of Israelites who recalled it in order to understand their origins and contemporary experience of God. Moreover, the Exodus experience became the basis for theology: that is, God saved us then and can do so again; God saved us, so we should be faithful.

The significance of this for Pentecostals is that formative experiences wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A Pentecostal Approach to the Trinity
• 2. The Holy Spirit and the Trinity
• 3. Eastern and Western Trinitarian Theology
• 4. Reformed Evangelical Trinitarian Theology
• 5. Charismatic Trinitarian Theology
• 6. The Spirit of Pentecost and Theology of Religions
• 7. The Spirit of Pentecost and Creation
• Epilogue
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects