hermeneutically relevant. However, the point about affectivity, and about
the sighs and groans in general, is less about felt emotions than about
embodied knowing. In this respect, then, Asian American epistemologies
could foreground the ritual character of human sociality and epistemol-
ogy since awareness of and attentiveness in this ritualized environment are
nurtured by habitual and bodily practice. 35 A post-Pentecost-al herme-
neutic and theological method would, in this Asian American context, ask
about how scripture is to be received and how the Spirit is to be discerned
within the fi vefold relationality that structures human interaction with the
world. There would also be need for asking how the Spirit might then
spawn novelty within the routinized ritual and liturgical practices of the
church toward a catholic, ecumenical, and trans-cultural witness.
My argument is that a post-Pentecost-al hermeneutics not only con-
centrates on the rules of interpretation as defi ned and normed by eccle-
sial, confessional, academic, and other traditions, but is also prompted
by reasons shaped by the heart and its hopes and loves, no less than its
fears and worries. Orthodox hermeneutics is governed less by scientifi -
cally delineated rules than affectively generated passions. But that does
not mean that orthodoxy gives way to orthopathy, since we have yet to
consider orthopraxy.
The Signs of Interpretation: A Pneumatological Construal
In the end, right thinking and right feeling are intertwined with right
behaving and acting. The point about hermeneutics is reading or inter-
preting, and although much of the hermeneutical question is focused
on texts, a post-Pentecost-al approach wonders about life in the Spirit
in relationship to such texts. As such, hermeneutics involves reading and
interpreting life, and particularly the events of human acting, behaving,
and living. These life events are themselves signs for interpretation and
discernment. 36
The Day of Pentecost event itself was part of a larger story of the Spirit’s
activity, particularly in connection with the Spirit’s empowering the wit-
ness of the disciples “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the
ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8b). Put in other words, interpreting the signs
of the Spirit’s events, whether or not facilitated through human activity or
agency, always involves the wider narrative that anticipates the mission of
God and the heralding in and through many tongues and languages of the
divine reign, “the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day” (2:20b).
188 A. YONG