Perhaps Pentecostal emphasis on the Spirit could combine with evangelical emphasis on the Word. With enough humility, Pentecostals and other evangelicals may and sometimes do learn much from one another. Sometimes, evangelicals fear charismatic excesses, and charismatics are impatient with evangelicals’ reticence to engage some genuinely biblical experiences. In our pride and fear, we fail to see how much we need each other as fellow gifts in Christ’s body, and that both are considering genuine elements of the biblical message. Instead of reacting against each other, or posturing about which gifts are most important, let us embrace biblically affirmed experience in biblical ways. The Bible offers repeated models of spiritual experience; it also offers guidance and a framework within which we can keep our experience on track.
We need to read the Bible dynamically as something that speaks to us about how God acts in our world – in our time and not just in the past. That is a contribution that much of the broader church still needs to grasp from global pentecostalism. We must expect the Spirit’s presence and pedagogy as we read Scripture. Ideally, the entire church must be experiential if it wishes to be biblical.
Meanwhile, the broader church, namely its membership who does not embrace the title charismatic, offers its own contributions to global pentecostalism. This includes its more academic emphasis on understanding historical information, original languages, and grammar. If we truly respect the biblical text as authoritative, understanding its original context is a necessary foundation.
We must recognize in Scripture the prevalence and promise of divine activity, and understand that a genuinely Spirit-illumined interpretation of the text is consistent with its originally Spirit-inspired design. This is a truly Spirit Hermeneutic.
This content is by Craig Keener, but edited and posted by Defenders Media.
