Fundamental Truths declared: “The premillennial second coming of the
Lord Jesus Christ himself is the blessed hope set before all believers.”
Whereas the 2004 Statement of Faith simply states: “we believe in ... his
personal, visible, bodily return in power and glory as the blessed hope of
all believers.” The Elim tradition also dropped dispensational premillen-
nialism in favor of a similar statement in 1994. There may be a number
of reasons for this change, but it was due in large part to the popular-
ity of Evangelical amillennial theology in the UK. As a subset of British
Evangelicalism (indicated by the affi liation with the British Evangelical
Alliance network), classical Pentecostals changed their doctrine and are
now in line with the dominant position.
Ecclesial theology comes in various forms. In the Pentecostal church
I studied, it was mediated by one of the senior pastors as he conducted
membership classes, whereby he would teach British Assemblies of God
doctrine according the Statement of Faith. It was also mediated via his
preaching and teaching in worship and other contexts. The denominational
magazine was subscribed to by a number of the church members, 17 which
allowed them to hear all that the wider denominational church was doing,
but also reinforced the theological narratives in circulation. Thus, via the
pastor, the doctrinal statements, and vehicles of denominational theology,
a tradition was understood and inhabited. This wider ecclesial theology is
important because it functions normatively to regulate the ordinary theol-
ogy. Inevitably, it does this both overtly and subtly. Guardians of the eccle-
sial tradition mediate it to the faithful, which is why denominations set up
denominational seminaries, in order to tradition their people in their own
way, according to their own distinctive habitus. Often academics working
in the seminary context are answerable to church hierarchies, such that
they are constrained by the ecclesial tradition. In other words, meaning is
moderated! Clearly there is a point of tension between the power of the
tradition, and indeed the guardians of the tradition, and the freedom of
academic discourse.
(3) Academic empirical theology, I would argue, is a research-driven
theology, which may or may not be Pentecostal in the sense that it engages
with theological concerns associated with Pentecostalism. In other words,
it is not tied to any single ecclesial tradition. It is not a guardian of a spe-
cifi c tradition and so it has the freedom to go with the debate, break new
ground, or (as in my case) simply ignore people. This does not mean that
it is not regulated, but its regulation is more on academic grounds by
virtue of its reception in the wider academy beyond specifi c Pentecostal
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