Constructive Pneumatological Hermeneutics in Pentecostal Christianity

(Barry) #1
for interpreting Scripture and is fundamentally informed by the sighs of

human hopes and yearnings especially for what is yet to come, then the

signs of the Spirit’s work are both discerned in the biblical account and

also in every generation’s ongoing efforts to bear faithful witness toward

the Day of the Lord.

Hence, orthodoxy (right thinking), orthopathy (right feeling), and

orthopraxy (right living) are intertwined so that a post-Pentecost-al

hermeneutics is a threefold chord of life in the Spirit practiced multi-cul-

turally, performed inter-culturally, and aspired to trans-culturally betwixt

and between the “that” of the apostolic testimony and the “this” of wit-

ness that the Apocalypse describes variously as deriving from every tribe

and language and people and nation. 39

NOTES


  1. Going back to my second book, Spirit-Word - Community: Theological
    Hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective , New Critical Thinking in
    Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies Series (Burlington, VT, and
    Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Ltd ., 2002).

  2. For example, Yong, “Reading Scripture and Nature: Pentecostal
    Hermeneutics and Their Implications for the Contemporary Evangelical
    Theology and Science Conversation,” Perspectives on Science and Christian
    Faith 63:1 (2011): 1–13; The Future of Evangelical Theology: Soundings
    from the Asian American Diaspora (Downers Grove: IVP Academic,
    2014); and (edited with Dale M. Coulter), The Spirit, the Affections, and
    the Christian Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
    2016), especially my concluding refl ections to this volume: “The Affective
    Spirit: Historiographic Revitalization in the Christian Theological
    Tradition.”

  3. In this respect, I would differ from the proposals of the so-called “Cleveland
    School” of Pentecostal studies—that seeks inspiration from the fi rst gen-
    eration of modern Pentecostal spirituality—about which I have written
    briefl y: “Salvation, Society, and the Spirit: Pentecostal Contextualization
    and Political Theology from Cleveland to Birmingham, from Springfi eld
    to Seoul,” Pax Pneuma: The Journal of Pentecostals & Charismatics for
    Peace & Justice 5:2 (2009): 22–34. I am appreciative of their proposals as
    charting important trajectories for contemporary Pentecostal scholarship,
    but see my suggestion as providing a broader—albeit surely more general-
    ized and abstract—account that would include theirs with other modern
    Pentecostal hermeneutical options.


190 A. YONG

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