Scripture, and (3) the need to attend more pointedly to the telos of bibli-
cal interpretation. My Pentecostal sisters and brothers may hear in these
comments less a concern for what is missing in a Pentecostal hermeneutic
and more a matter of relative emphasis.
Drawing on Thomas and Archer’s work, I have suggested the centrality
of the Christian community to Pentecostal hermeneutics of Scripture. This
signifi cance derives from convictions about the church and the Spirit—that
the church is generated by the Spirit who is presently active in preparing
the church to read Scripture, for example, and that the Spirit guides the
church in its interpretation of Scripture. These are important emphases,
though I think more could and ought to be said about the character and
identity of the church under the guidance of the Spirit. Particularly, what
is the role of the church’s faith in a Pentecostal hermeneutic?
Whatever else it does, theological interpretation of Christian Scripture
focuses on the ecclesial context of engaging with Scripture. Undoubtedly,
as Pentecostal hermeneutics urges, this includes particular bodies of
believers being shaped by and discerning the work of the Spirit today.
Does it also include the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, that
is, the instantiation of the one church locally and globally, the church set
apart by God across time, the church “ruled” by the church’s doctrine?
By doctrine, I refer not to the faith statement of any particular ecclesial
body or local community, but to those “communally authoritative teach-
ings regarded as essential to the identity of the Christian community” and
shared by the church catholic 13 ; more specifi cally, I refer to the church’s
Rule of Truth or Rule of Faith as this came to be codifi ed in the ecumeni-
cal creeds of the church—those stable, narrative-shaped sets of affi rma-
tions that together comprise the parameters of the Christian church as a
community of discourse and serve hermeneutically as the pattern by which
the church interprets and evaluates its life. Biblical texts can be read in all
sorts of ways, and appeal to God’s Spirit is a necessary but not necessarily
suffi cient form of validation of this reading over that one. Otherwise, why
would 1 John direct its readers not to believe every spirit but to test them
“to see if they are from God,” for “every spirit that confesses that Jesus
Christ has come as a human is from God” (4:1–3)? Why else would Paul
need to say to the Corinthian Christians that speaking by God’s Spirit is
incompatible with saying “Jesus is cursed!” (1 Cor 12:3)? In the same way,
the Didache constrains what an apostle, prophet, or teacher can reliably
claim as a message from the Lord by appealing to the ordinances of the
gospel—even when that apostle or prophet speaks in the Spirit (Chap. 12 ).
PENTECOSTAL HERMENEUTICS: A WESLEYAN PERSPECTIVE 167