Constructive Pneumatological Hermeneutics in Pentecostal Christianity

Kenneth J. Archer, L. William Oliverio, Jr., Kenneth J. Archer, L. William Oliverio, Jr.

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137585615
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Cristianesimo

This book presents the work of leading hermeneutical theorists alongside emerging thinkers, examining the current state of hermeneutics within the Pentecostal tradition. The volume's contributors present constructive ideas about the future of hermeneutics at the intersection of theology of the Spirit, Pentecostal Christianity, and other disciplines. This collection offers cutting-edge scholarship that engages with and pulls from a broad range of fields and points toward the future of Pneumatological hermeneutics. The volume's interdisciplinary essays are broken up into four sections: philosophical hermeneutics, biblical-theological hermeneutics, social and cultural hermeneutics, and hermeneutics in the social and physical sciences.

© The Author(s) 2016

Kenneth J. Archer and L. William Oliverio, Jr. (eds.)Constructive Pneumatological Hermeneutics in Pentecostal ChristianityChristianity and Renewal - Interdisciplinary Studies10.1057/978-1-137-58561-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Pentecostal Hermeneutics and the Hermeneutical Tradition

L. William OliverioJr.¹

(1)

Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA

End Abstract

Drawing from a number of tributaries, especially nineteenth-century Romanticism, the twentieth century saw the emergence of the hermeneutical tradition in philosophy which moved beyond the Enlightenment’s quest for neutral viewpoints and criteria with its situating of epistemology as “first philosophy.” ¹ For the hermeneutical tradition, the contingent factors of human existence in communities, and the languages that human communities use to express their understandings concerning all human noetic domains, have meant that all human understanding is irreducibly finite, social, linguistic, and contingent, and thus tradition is inevitable rather than an old city to be bulldozed in order to begin (again and again) from a supposed neutrality or nowhere.

That is, the hermeneutical tradition has worked with the strong affirmation that all human interpretation is rooted in traditions and communal understanding which are limited and human, and it has held that this claim is, essentially, a tautology. From the nineteenth-century Romantics to the “linguistic turn” in the twentieth century through the later Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger to Hans-Georg Gadamer to the poststructuralists and Jacques Derrida and the postmoderns, and in philosophy of science through Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn as well as Imre Lakatos, the hermeneutical tradition in philosophy has couched all human understanding as human, finite, and communal. There are certainly large differences in the hermeneutical tradition, yet there is enough continuity to speak of it as a major philosophical approach to the manner in which human interpretation occurs. It is in fact a tradition because it includes such continuity and difference. ²

Hermeneutics has also had a long history in Christian theology and practices, as the interpretation of Scripture has continually been a major issue for Christian thought and living. From the New Testament’s hermeneutics of the Old to Patristic allegorical approaches and Augustine’s semiotics to the Medieval “four senses,” and then from modern historical–critical exegesis to postcolonial approaches to the contemporary theological interpretation of Scripture movement, biblical hermeneutics has been a central discipline for Christian theologians and practitioners. ³ Late modern consciousness and the hermeneutical tradition have broadened the understanding of what inevitably happens in interpretation and the necessary sources that come into play in biblical interpretation. That is, contemporary biblical hermeneutics has recognized the interdependence between theological hermeneutics, general hermeneutics, and biblical hermeneutics, so as that the failure to recognize their interdependence will result in a less than adequate Christian hermeneutics. ⁴

Further, contemporary Christian theologians, like James K.A. Smith, have been pressing the case that a more genuinely Christian theological anthropology and resulting approach to human knowledge will affirm the basic conclusions which the hermeneutical tradition has come to concerning the limitations it places on the finitude and situatedness of human understanding. ⁵ Speaking of the “literary turn in contemporary philosophy,” Kevin Vanhoozer, with attention to its implications for Christian biblical and theological hermeneutics, characterizes this transition where:

Hermeneutics has become the concern of philosophers, who wish to know not what such and such a text means, but what it means to understand…Implicit in the question of meaning are questions about the nature of reality, the possibility of knowledge, and the criteria of morality…We now look at hermeneutics not only as a discipline in its own right but especially as an aspect of all intellectual endeavors. The rise of hermeneutics parallels the fall of epistemology… It was not always so. ⁶

Hermeneutics is no longer just a matter of philology or technique, but understanding and its conditions. And epistemology no longer rules the day, and in many realms has been surpassed by the hermeneutical paradigm.

Classical Pentecostalism began with hermeneutical developments which reframed regnant interpretations of Scripture and developed the interpretive quest for deeper fillings of the Holy Spirit which sprang from holiness and revivalist movements. ⁷ I have accounted for the Classical Pentecostal tradition as having begun with the development of an original hermeneutic that, working with new theological constructions that were constructive of this new tradition, focused on the dialogical interaction between understanding Scripture and interpreting human experiences. ⁸ Yet as Pentecostalism further emerged in the twentieth century, the movement-become-tradition engaged Evangelical and Fundamentalist hermeneutics, which predominated at the time, and Pentecostals created a hybrid hermeneutic. This Evangelical–Pentecostal hermeneutic worked with an Evangelical approach to theology that had most often turned to a scholastic rationalism to defend the legitimacy of Evangelical theological interpretations in the face of modernisms and liberalisms, though the Evangelical rationalism was an odd and unwittingly modern form to merge with Pentecostal content and experience. In this hybrid form, Pentecostals retained their doctrines but turned to a much different interpretive ethos than in their original hermeneutic, and their theory even conflicted with what was commonly practiced in Pentecostal preaching and piety. ⁹ Later twentieth-century and now contemporary forms of this Evangelical–Pentecostal hermeneutic often sought to reconcile this tension by developing a strong pneumatic element in Pentecostal hermeneutics in order to authentically account for the Pentecostal ethos and tendencies. ¹⁰ Other versions of this hybrid hermeneutic, commonly taught at Pentecostal denominational institutions of higher education, drew more strongly on author-centered hermeneutic theory in the vein of its leading hermeneutic theorist, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., and significant emphasis was placed on biblical interpretation in the form of historical–critical approaches that are often characterized as “believing criticism.” ¹¹

Two contemporary counterapproaches responded to Evangelical–Pentecostal hermeneutics as insufficiently accounting for, respectively, the hermeneutical insights of the hermeneutical tradition and the wider agenda of Christian theology. A contextual–Pentecostal hermeneutic arose that began to turn the insights of the hermeneutical tradition to the concerns of Pentecostal hermeneutics. Though at first this resulted in largely unfruitful debates, ¹² more fruitful constructive hermeneutical work quickly emerged. ¹³ Such a contextual–hermeneutic considers all interpretation contextual so that “contextual” interpretation is not a code-word for non-European or non-American interpretation, but, rather, that every and any interpretation is always and already traditioned and contextual. A second response has been in the form of a broader, ecumenically constructive Pentecostal theological hermeneutic, an ecumenical–Pentecostal hermeneutic that has engaged in theological interpretive work by drawing on multiple sources from the wider Christian tradition and has integrated multiple biblical theologies in constructing Pentecostal theology. ¹⁴

Constructing Pneumatological Pentecostal Hermeneutics

This volume is a constructive effort that is demonstrative that a new and broader stage for Pentecostal hermeneutics is underway in which new constituents are providing more diverse approaches—in terms of disciplines, contexts, and approaches—which are nevertheless pneumatologically oriented and hold to Pentecostal identities. Most of the chapters in this volume stand in continuity with the emergence of the contextual–Pentecostal hermeneutic, though several stand in some level of dissent to it, and others still might be well understood as primarily in continuity with the ecumenical–Pentecostal hermeneutic. Nevertheless, this volume represents a broadening that is primarily twofold.

The first area of broadening is in the multitudinous constitution of the global charismatic–Pentecostal or renewal tradition. Over the course of the past century, Pentecostalism has become a major religious tradition within the wider Christian tradition to be accounted for along with Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions. ¹⁵ While Classical Pentecostals make up a sizable portion of this tradition, a majority of charismatic–Pentecostal or renewal Christians are part of the larger and more fluid set of movements which constitute the majority in this emerging tradition. ¹⁶ While our collection still operates with an acknowledgment of the terms of the hermeneutical discussion set by Classical Pentecostalism and its theological agenda, it also lowers the boundaries of the distinctions among Pentecostals to move into the wider world of the larger charismatic–Pentecostal or renewal tradition. It is also demonstrative of the manner in which contemporary Pentecostalism, while still closely related to contemporary Evangelicalism and its Protestant heritage, is no longer reliant upon Evangelical and even Protestant Christianity as it was through much of the twentieth century. The greater Pentecostal tradition now stands on its own resources. To pick up on D. Lyle Dabney’s admonition that Pentecostals set aside Saul’s armor and take up David’s sling by “starting with the Spirit,” perhaps this volume may include a number of those slings. ¹⁷

The second area of broadening for Pentecostal hermeneutics which this volume represents is the widened scope of inquiry that involves interdisciplinary endeavors into newer frontiers for charismatic–Pentecostal thought. As the CHARIS Series itself represents, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary efforts in charismatic–Pentecostal and renewal studies have been underway for some time now, even as it is reasonable to say that the jury is still out on what has been accomplished thus far through CHARIS and other like work. ¹⁸ Thus, this project is made up of a series of forays into new areas opened up by interdisciplinary engagement, whether that interdisciplinarity functions as just an initial effort to utilize multiple disciplines side by side in a manner that allows for two or more disciplines to illuminate a subject matter, or if they are able to go further toward more integrative approaches that move easily between approaches usually seen as domains of certain disciplines in order to provide new understanding of their subject.

Hermeneutics is suited for this task as an umbrella for interdisciplinary work as it is well understood as a broad and interdisciplinary domain that integrates many of the matters traditionally covered by philosophy, which is an important reason why philosophical approaches open this collection. As the field of hermeneutics is about human understanding, particular hermeneutics function as full orbed paradigms of understanding, with deep faith commitments about reality operating in the core of each paradigm which include multitudinous layers of the ways in which humans and human communities know, feel, and altogether experience their worlds, deep into what the eminent philosopher Charles Taylor has called the “unthought,” our deepest tacit assumptions through which we operate. Deep affirmations form hermeneutical paradigms, including anthropological, epistemological, ontological, empirical, and linguistic assumptions. ¹⁹ Further, hermeneutical development happens because of the dynamic nature of humanity, human understanding, and language. Taylor explains this dynamic becoming well, especially as it pertains to the affective aspects of human experience, which have often been emphasized in Pentecostal studies:

If language serves to express/realize a new kind of awareness; then it may not only make possible a new awareness of things, an ability to describe them; but also new ways of feeling, of responding to things. If in expressing our thoughts about things, we can come to have new thoughts; then in expressing our feelings, we can come to have transformed feelings. ²⁰

Like all other language, Pentecostal understanding is becoming, and that is evidenced by the collection here in this volume. There is new awareness and description for Pentecostal hermeneutics. But not only that, there are new ways of feeling and being as Pentecostals; new expression of thoughts and new thoughts, with transformed understanding and feelings. ²¹ And scholars from within the charismatic–Pentecostal or renewal tradition have now developed a generation that is making forays beyond the domains of just biblical and theological hermeneutics. Though, because of the complexities inherent to addressing hermeneutical issues, the chapters found in this volume can only offer an account of, or a program for, or an evaluation of some layer of the complex paradigms that are the hermeneutics which constitute such a broad tradition.

An Overview of the Volume

As the hermeneutical tradition has especially addressed issues which have traditionally been within the domain of the discipline of philosophy, ²² philosophy takes a certain primacy, and thus our chapters begin with primarily philosophical approaches to charismatic–Pentecostal or renewal hermeneutics. We begin with a sympathetic friend of Pentecostals, the philosopher Merold Westphal, who has made significant contributions to the development of the hermeneutical tradition, especially regarding its relationship t...