Constructive Pneumatological Hermeneutics in Pentecostal Christianity

offered from this and other non-majority and marginalized contexts. As

important as it is to make a call for theology to have a different starting

point, if one goes on to privilege pneumatology as Dabney has for this

work, then one is left with a very demanding prospect: Where theology is

pursued and among whom it is sought will necessarily determine what is

undertaken and concluded. Yes, this is an area of concern for theological

hermeneutics, but the consequences are simply staggering in relation to

how Christianity has taken shape, which would make it a different kind of

“fi rst theology” indeed.

NOTES

1. D. Lyle Dabney, “Otherwise Engaged in the Spirit: A First Theology for a
   Twenty-fi rst Century,” in The Future of Theology: Essays in Honor of Jürgen
   Moltmann , ed. Miroslav Volf, Thomas Kucharz, and Carmen Krieg(Grand
   Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 154–163 (157).


2. Steven G. Smith, The Concept of the Spiritual: An Essay in First Philosophy
   (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 4 as quoted in Dabney,
   “Otherwise Engaged in the Spirit,” 158.


3. Dabney, “Otherwise Engaged in the Spirit,” 158–159. In this gesture,
   Dabney is going a step beyond Barth; for Dabney, “the Word presupposes
   the Spirit” (“Otherwise Engaged in the Spirit,” 160) in that Genesis 1:3
   assumes 1:2, and similarly Genesis 2:16 works from 2:7.


4. See broadly D. Lyle Dabney, “Why Should the Last Be First? The Priority
   of Pneumatology in Recent Theological Discussion” in Advents of the
   Spirit: An Introduction to the Current Study of Pneumatology , ed. Bradford
   E.  Hinze and D.  Lyle Dabney (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press,
   2001), 240–261.


5. Dabney, “Otherwise Engaged in the Spirit,” 161 (italics original).


6. For more on this point, see Chap. 5 of Daniel Castelo, Pneumatology: A
   Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2015), 65–80.


7. Dabney, “Otherwise Engaged in the Spirit,” 160.


8. H.  Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (San Francisco:
   HarperSanFrancisco, 1951). The famous types are “Christ against
   Culture,” “the Christ of Culture,” “Christ above Culture,” “Christ and
   Culture in Paradox,” and “Christ the Transformer of Culture.”


9. This is one of the important contributions of J. Kameron Carter, Race: A
   Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).


10. See “Meditation XVII” in John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
    (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), 107–109. Not inciden-
    tally, Donne frames this meditation in an explicitly theological way.

208 D. CASTELO