This book presents the work of leading hermeneutical theorists alongside emerging thinkers, examining the current state of hermeneutics within the Pentecostal tradition. The volume’s contributors present constructive ideas about the future of hermeneutics at the intersection of theology of the Spirit, Pentecostal Christianity, and other disciplines. This collection offers cutting-edge scholarship that engages with and pulls from a broad range of fields and points toward the future of Pneumatological hermeneutics. The volume’s interdisciplinary essays are broken up into four sections: philosophical hermeneutics, biblical-theological hermeneutics, social and cultural hermeneutics, and hermeneutics in the social and physical sciences.

In Pentecostal Hermeneutics in the Late Modern World, L. William Oliverio, Jr. offers a series of forays into the places where late modernity and Pentecostalism have met in interpreting God, the world, and human selves and communities. Oliverio provides a historical, constructive, and ecumenical approach to understanding current trajectories in Pentecostal interpretation as he engages a variety of philosophers and theologians. Together, these essays point to a way forward for Pentecostal hermeneutics in the context of the late modern world.

The face of African Christianity is becoming Pentecostal. African Pentecostalism is a diverse movement, but its collective interest in baptism in the Spirit and the result of Pentecost in daily living binds it together. Pentecostals read the Bible with the expectation that the Spirit who inspired the authors will again inspire them to hear it as God's word. They emphasize the experiential, at times at the cost of proper doctrine and practice. This book sketches an African hermeneutic that provides guidance to a diverse movement with many faces, and serves as corrective for doctrine and practice in the face of some excesses and abuses (especially in some parts of the neo-Pentecostal movement). African Pentecostalism's contribution to the hermeneutical debate is described before three points are discussed that define it: the centrality of the Holy Spirit in reading the Bible, the eschatological lens that Pentecostals use when they read the Bible, and the faith community as normative for the interpretation of the Bible.

This title was first published in 2002. How does one go about "doing Christian theology"? Yong explores this question by proposing a pneumatological-trinitarian hermeneutic. Its thesis is that interpretation and theological method is an ongoing tri-logue of Spirit-Word-Community: of interpretive subjects as imaginative, obligated and relational agents; of the horizons of the interpreter, the biblical and ecclesial traditions, and the world; and of founding, historical, and ongoing communities of faith and inquiry. Ecumenical perspectives on the topics of pneumatology (the doctrine of the Spirit), metaphysics (foundational pneumatology), epistemology (the pneumatological imagination), and trinitarian theology converge in this book to move forward the present discussion of theological method.

In Pentecostal Hermeneutics: A Reader Lee Roy Martin brings together fourteen significant publications on biblical interpretation, along with a new introduction to Pentecostal hermeneutics and an extensive up-to-date bibliography on the topic. Organized chronologically, these essays trace the development of Pentecostal hermeneutics as an academic discipline. The concerns of modern historical criticism have often stood at odds with Pentecostalism’s use of Scripture. Therefore, over the last three decades, Pentecostal scholars have attempted to identify the unique characteristics and interpretive practices of their tradition and to offer constructive proposals for a Pentecostal hermeneutic that would be critically valid and, at the same time, be consistent with the Pentecostal ethos and conducive for the continued development of the global Pentecostal movement. Contributors include: Rickie D. Moore, John Christopher Thomas, Jackie David Johns, Cheryl Bridges Johns, John W. McKay, Robert O. Baker, Scott A. Ellington, Kenneth J. Archer, Robby Waddell, Andrew Davies, Clark H. Pinnock, and Lee Roy Martin.

In Pentecostal Hermeneutics in the Late Modern World, L. William Oliverio, Jr. offers a series of forays into the places where late modernity and Pentecostalism have met in interpreting God, the world, and human selves and communities. Oliverio provides a historical, constructive, and ecumenical approach to understanding current trajectories in Pentecostal interpretation as he engages a variety of philosophers and theologians. Together, these essays point to a way forward for Pentecostal hermeneutics in the context of the late modern world.

Offers a generative and hospitable theological methodology rooted in the distinctives of pentecostal spirituality, enlivened by a Spirited imagination and opened toward critical, constructive, and conciliatory dialogue with the wider Christian tradition. This inter- and cross-disciplinary work is careful yet generous, drawing together of knowledge and wisdom from different domains-historical, philosophical, and theological-in ways recognizably pentecostal and effectively missional. The book begins with a description of the essence of pentecostal spirituality that holds true across the various pentecostalisms. Drawing largely on an innovative engagement with the insights of Rudolph Otto and an exploration of the dialectic between religious experience and theological development, this book contends for an identifiable but mysterious “something” that makes pentecostalism truly pentecostal-that is, something more than one might sum up in any set of peculiar practices, beliefs, or behaviors. The book also provides an overview of the intellectual history of English-speaking pentecostalism, specifying and assessing the movement's major philosophical underpinnings and socio-cultural motivations. Finally, funded by an explicitly pentecostal metaphysics, the book sets forth a significant and boldly original pneumatological theological methodology, shaped by discerning conversation with the works of Amos Yong, L. William Oliverio, Jr., Wolfgang Vondey, and Simo Frestadius, among others.

In Theological Hermeneutics in the Classical Pentecostal Tradition: A Typological Account, L. William Oliverio Jr. accounts for the development of Classical Pentecostal theology, as theological hermeneutics, through four types: the original Classical Pentecostal hermeneutic, the Evangelical-Pentecostal hermeneutic, the contextual-Pentecostal hermeneutic, and the ecumenical-Pentecostal hermeneutic. Oliverio gives special attention to key figures in shaping Pentecostal theology and the underlying philosophical assumptions which informed their theological interpretations of reality. The text concludes with a philosophical basis for future Pentecostal theological hermeneutics within the contours of a hermeneutical realism that affirms both the hermeneutical nature of all theology and the implicit affirmation of realism within theological accounts.

In the contemporary biblical studies climate, proposals regarding the theological interpretation of Scripture are contested, particularly but not only because they privilege, encourage, and foster ecclesial or other forms of normative commitments as part and parcel of the hermeneutical horizon through which scriptural texts are read and understood. Within this context, confessional approaches have been emerging, including some from within the nascent pentecostal theological tradition. This volume builds on the author's previous work in theological method to suggest a pentecostal perspective on theological interpretation that is rooted in the conviction that all Christian reading of sacred Scripture is post-Pentecost, meaning after the Day of Pentecost outpouring of the Spirit on all flesh in anticipation of the coming reign of God. In that respect, such a pentecostal interpretative perspective is not parochially for those within the modern day movement bearing that name but is arguably apostolic in following after the scriptural imagination of the earliest disciples of Jesus the messiah and therefore has ecumenical and missional purchase across space and time. The Hermeneutical Spirit thus provides close readings of various texts across the scriptural canon as a model for Christian theological interpretation of Scripture suitable for the twenty-first-century global context.

The Interpreting Spirit is both a consideration of the Spirit's role in the interpretation of Scripture and a celebration of renewal scholarship. It examines those who have focused on the Spirit's role in their hermeneutical considerations, recognizing common, uniting themes amidst the diversity of scholarly approach and opinion. Working on the principle that the Spirit communicates in ways that seek to unify and celebrate the other, Mather works diachronically from 1970, identifying and drawing together these common, uniting hallmarks into a collective understanding. Pivotal to Mather's argument is her emphasis that we do not just interpret Scripture, but that the Spirit through Scripture, and working in our lives in ways that lead us towards Scripture, interprets us. The Interpreting Spirit is the first comprehensive analysis of the conversation surrounding pneumatic interpretation that has been taking place, particularly among renewal scholars, since 1970. It seeks to answer the notoriously difficult question, "What does the Spirit do in the process of biblical interpretation?"