of reading and believing. Pentecostals are transforming their understand-
ing of the text based on their experience. 13 This approach led the early
Pentecostals to identify their experience of speaking in tongues with the
description of the gift of glossolalia in Acts 2:1–4. As they read Acts 2,
the early Pentecostals identifi ed their experience as “this is that.” 14 Yet,
Pentecostals do not just blindly follow experience. The early Pentecostals
were seeking the gift of glossolalia because they read it in Scripture and
so were seeking that same outpouring of the Spirit. Scripture is sought
by Pentecostal readers to direct and inform their experience as much as
their experience informs their interpretation of Scripture. As Archer so
aptly describes, “Pentecostals believe that the Holy Spirit speaks today,
and when the Spirit speaks, the Holy Spirit has more to say than just
Scripture, even though the Spirit will echo and cite Scripture.” 15 So, how
did Pentecostals develop this potentially dangerous approach to reading
Scripture? They developed it by reading Scripture.
The Pentecostal community has adopted, in a literalist way, the very
methods of reading authoritative texts they perceive as being modeled
by Scripture itself. As Archer notes, “The Pentecostal community iden-
tity is forged from its reading of the biblical narrative of Acts and then
the Gospels.” 16 However, while Pentecostals have explicitly identifi ed
themselves as continuing the narrative of Luke–Acts , they are often implic-
itly continuing the interpretation methods employed in the narrative of
Luke–Acts. Faithfulness to Scripture has led the community to mimic the
reading practice described in the New Testament text. By adopting a com-
parable reading approach modeled in Scripture, such as that outlined by
Thomas, Pentecostals have learned to prioritize experience. By utilizing
this approach, albeit naively and without refl ection, the Pentecostal com-
munity has actually imbibed not only Scripture but also the internal her-
meneutic utilized within sections of Scripture. The Council of Jerusalem,
as highlighted by Thomas, is an example of this dynamic. The Pentecostal
community has read the narrative example of the process of how the early
church interpreted Scripture and has then adopted their very methods as
understood from the description in the biblical narrative. As noted above,
at the Council of Jerusalem, the early church community utilized a triad of
Spirit, experience and text. Of these three components, the priority in the
narrative was given to experience: the testimony of the Spirit. So by being
faithful readers of Scripture and adopting the methods understood to be
modeled in Scripture, Pentecostal readers prioritize their experience, spe-
cifi cally their experience of the Spirit. However, is this one example from
148 J. GREY