Constructive Pneumatological Hermeneutics in Pentecostal Christianity

are what hermeneutics is after. Hermeneutic here should be read as being-

in- the-world. That is, to speak of a pentecostal hermeneutic is to speak of

a way of living in the world that is oriented by speaking in tongues. When

we dwell in the pre-interpretive moment of glossolalia, we dwell in the

moment of arrival, or of unconcealment; we dwell in a world in which the

limits of what language is and of what it is capable of are not static and

pre-determined. The absence of (intelligible) words does not indicate the

absence of interpretation, or of meaning. 44 Rather, it signals the possibility

of the world as an opening and offers a way at the end of the way. When

language seems to have failed and we listen to the peal of its silence, when

we rest in that moment and are still, language speaks itself as language, and

we are set anew on a path toward the discovery of our own being. What

Heidegger explicates philosophically and poetically, pentecostals know in

their deepest being when tongues of fi re descend and rest upon them.

NOTES

1. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , trans. Albert Hofstadter
   (New York: Harper Perennial, 1971), 190.


2. James K.A.  Smith, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to
   Christian Philosophy , Pentecostal Manifestos (Grand Rapids, MI: William
   B. Eerdmans, 2010), 23.


3. My use of “being” here is related to Heidegger’s idea of Dasein. This con-
   cept of Dasein refers to the sense of an entity that can know itself and its
   essence as being there, existing in the world. However, this sense of exis-
   tence is more than the mere idea that we exist. Rather, it refers to a kind of
   progression wherein beings can self-inquire into their own being and by
   doing so reveal the essence of truth within being itself.


4. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , trans. Albert Hofstadter
   (New York: Harper Perennial, 1971), 49.


5. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , 49.


6. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , 51.


7. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , 51–52.


8. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
   Robinson, 7th ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 52.


9. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , 52.


10. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism’” (1946), trans. Frank
    A.  Capuzzi, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (New York: Cambridge
    University Press, 1998), 239.


11. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , 145.


12. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , 147.

64 J. VAZQUEZ