7 Baptism in the Holy Spirit: The Issue of Separability and Subsequence
7
BAPTISM IN THE HOLY SPIRIT: THE ISSUE OF SEPARABILITY AND SUBSEQUENCE
Article 7 of the “Statement of Fundamental Truths” in the constitution and by-laws of the General Council of the Assemblies of God reads:
All believers are entitled to and should ardently expect and earnestly seek the promise of the Father, the baptism in the Holy Ghost and fire, according to the command of our Lord Jesus Christ. This was the normal experience of all in the early Christian Church. With it comes the enduement of power for life and service, the bestowment of the gifts and their uses in the work of the ministry (Luke 24:49; Acts 1:4, 8; I Corinthians 12:1–3). This experience is distinct from and subsequent to the experience of the new birth (Acts 8:12–17; 10:44–46; 11:14–16; 15:7–9).
The theological sentiment expressed in this statement, it should be noted, is not unique to Pentecostalism. Rather, it reflects a classical view of many pietistic groups, reaching at least as far back as early Methodism, and found subsequently in various holiness and deeper life movements, namely, that there is for all believers a “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” which is separate from and sequential to the initial experience of conversion. Indeed two of the best known defenses of this position were written by none other than the first president of Moody Bible Institute, R. A. Torrey, and one of the founders of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, A. J. Gordon.[1] The uniquely Pentecostal contribution to this theological construct was to insist on the gift of tongues as the evidential sign that such a baptism had indeed taken place, and to insist on the empowering-for-service dimension of the experience.[2]
Since Pentecostals experienced this “baptism” after their conversion, they have also regularly argued for the biblical nature of both their experience of baptism and its timing (as separate and subsequent). And since they tend to make the timing of the experience of equal significance to the experience itself,[3] those who have opposed the Pentecostal position have also generally believed themselves to have dealt a crippling blow to the Pentecostalism when they have argued exegetically against its timing (as the Pentecostals express it).[4]
The purpose of this present essay is to open the question of separability and subsequence once again, and (1) to suggest that there is in fact very little biblical support for the traditional Pentecostal position on this matter, but (2) to argue further that this is of little real consequence to the doctrine of the baptism in the Holy Spirit, either as to the validity of the experience itself or to its articulation.
I. The Pentecostal and the Baptism in the Spirit
In order to understand the doctrine of “subsequence” one must first try to understand the Pentecostals themselves—and how this doctrinal stance came to be so cherished.
Pentecostals have often been accused of exegeting their own experience and then looking to the Bible to support it.[5] In part this may be true; but it is important to know why they have done so. On the one hand, their experience itself has been so empowering, so thoroughly life-changing, both in terms of personal obedience to God and readiness and empowerment for witness, that they instinctively know that it must be of God—and therefore must be biblical.
But since, on the other hand, for them that experience was subsequent to their conversion, they turned to the New Testament for the basis both of the experience itself and its timing. Their reasons for this are clear. All the early Pentecostals carried with them to their experience the traditional Protestant view of Scripture, as inspired of the Spirit and made effective by the Spirit through Spirit-anointed preaching. Thus the Pentecostals felt a great urgency to verify their experience by the interpretation of Scripture. For them the Bible was still central; and since their own experience of the Spirit was so vital, they knew that the God of the Bible and the God of their experience had to be the one God. Hence they automatically expected to find the evidence for their experience in Scripture. Their understanding of Scripture, therefore, seemed both reasonable—and perfectly plain.
In the course of articulating this experience biblically, however, they felt a special urgency to press for all the aspects of the experience—not only the experience itself, but also especially its necessity as a work of grace subsequent to salvation. But in so doing, they exposed their flanks to some exegetical and hermeneutical weaknesses; and they ended up trying to persuade others of the rightness of their experience on grounds different from their own experience of the Spirit.
The Pentecostal experience historically came out of a deep dissatisfaction with “things as they are” in light of “things as they were” in the New Testament church, plus a deep spiritual hunger for the latter. They belonged to that tradition of piety that cried out, “O God, fill me with yourself and your power or I die.” Out of that hunger and cry, they experienced a mighty encounter with God the Holy Spirit. Then they turned around (especially in the second generation) and tried to bring others, many of whom did not share the same dissatisfaction or deep spiritual hunger, to their same experience through the more cerebral route of a biblical apologetic; they thus became, in a sense, a kind of living contradiction.
What I hope to show in the rest of this essay is that the Pentecostals are generally right on target biblically as to their experience of the Spirit. Their difficulties arose from the attempt to defend it biblically at the wrong point.
It should be noted here that the biblical support for the concepts of separability and subsequence is basically two-fold: (1) The use of biblical analogies (Jesus himself, who was born of the Spirit and was subsequently anointed of the Spirit at his baptism, and the apostles, who had Jesus breathe on them on Easter Day [interpreted as regeneration] and were subsequently baptized in the Spirit at Pentecost); and (2) the use of biblical precedent in the book of Acts (in Samaria [Acts 8], in Paul [Acts 9], and in Ephesus [Acts 19]).
Although a number of things can be said in the Pentecostal’s favor for some of this, there are several clear exegetical/hermeneutical weaknesses in the classical presentation:
1. Arguments from Biblical Analogies
Arguments from biblical analogies are especially tenuous. They may function well in preaching, but for theology they serve less well, for at least two reasons:
a. The whole question of intentionality becomes a crucial one here. It can seldom be demonstrated that our analogies are intentional in the biblical text itself, as it was inspired by the Holy Spirit. Indeed it is more likely that they are irrelevant altogether.
b. Furthermore, it will be difficult to gain universal agreement on what, in fact, in the biblical text does serve as an appropriate analogy. It seems to me that no one can easily deny the importance of the descent of the Spirit on Jesus at his baptism. But it will be equally difficult to get very many people to see the appropriateness of the relationship of that event to his birth as analogy for subsequent Christian experience. Likewise, the uniqueness of the event of Pentecost in salvation history, not to mention the exegetical difficulties of demonstrating that John 20:22 refers to a regenerational experience, makes that analogy equally tenuous—although, again, who will deny the significance of the event of Pentecost for the apostolic ministry.
Analogies, therefore, are just that—analogies. But they can scarcely be treated as the biblical stuff on which to build Christian theology.
2. The Function of Biblical Precedent
On the second matter, the function of biblical precedent for the construction of Christian theology, I have already had much to say.[6] Let me here repeat my own conclusions. Events narrated in Scripture that have clear divine approbation, and especially when there is a repeated pattern, have the highest level of viability as repeatable patterns in the ongoing church. The problem occurs when one would elevate such patterns to be mandatory patterns—necessarily repeated or otherwise one is sub-biblical in some way.
Moreover, in the case of the three narratives of Acts, there are some exegetical concerns as well, as to whether they intend what Pentecostals see in them. For example, it is extremely unlikely, despite his use of mathētai to describe them, that Luke intended us to see the people in Acts 19 as Christians in any real sense, especially since they knew nothing of the coming of the Spirit, the sine qua non of truly Christian experience, and since they received Christian baptism at this point, implying that their previous baptism was not Christian.
The narratives of the Samaritan’s and Paul’s conversions do indeed reflect the coming of the Spirit as subsequent to what appears to be the actual experience of conversion. But the problems here are several. In the Samaritan case, for example, Luke actually says the Spirit does not come on them until the laying on of the apostles’ hands. In order to square this with Paul’s statement in Romans 8, James Dunn has argued that Luke does not consider them to be genuine believers before that.[7] But that seems to run aground on the rest of linguistic evidence used to describe them prior to the laying on of hands, all of which is Lukan language for Christian conversion.[8] Indeed the resolution to this tension is most likely to be found at the linguistic level. One simply must not press Luke’s phenomenological use of Spirit language into service for theological precision. Although Luke says otherwise, we may assume the Samaritans and Paul to have become believers in the Pauline sense—that without the Spirit they are none of his. For Luke, however, the phenomenological expressions of the Spirit’s presence are what he describes as the “coming of” or “filling with” the Spirit.
Thus in the case of Samaria, the Pentecostals do seem to have a biblical precedent, both for subsequence and, almost certainly, for tongues as evidence. But is this single precedent the intended divine pattern, or is it, as most New Testament scholars think, a unique event in the early history? And in any case, why does it serve as a better precedent than Cornelius or Ephesus?
In thus arguing, as a New Testament scholar, against some cherished Pentecostal interpretations, I have in no sense abandoned what is essential to Pentecostalism. I have only tried to point out some inherent flaws in some of our historic understanding of texts. The essential matter, after all, is neither subsequence nor tongues, but the Spirit himself as a dynamic, empowering presence; and there seems to me to be little question that our way of initiation into that—through an experience of Spirit baptism—has biblical validity. Whether all must go that route seems to me to be more moot; but in any case, the Pentecostal experience itself can be defended on exegetical grounds as a thoroughly biblical phenomenon. And to that I now turn.
II. The Holy Spirit in the New Testament
I think it is fair to note that if there is one thing that differentiates the early church from its twentieth-century counterpart it is in the level of awareness and experience of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. Ask any number of people today from all sectors of Christendom to define or describe Christian conversion or Christian life, and the most noticeable feature of that definition would be its general lack of emphasis on the active, dynamic role of the Spirit.
It is precisely the opposite in the New Testament. The Spirit is no mere addendum. Indeed, he is the sine qua non, the essential ingredient, of Christian life. Nor is he a mere datum of theology; rather, he is experienced as a powerful presence in their lives. Whatever else may be said of the early church, it was first and foremost comprised of people of the Spirit.
In order for us to understand early Christians on this matter, we must appreciate the essentially eschatological nature of their existence and their understanding of the Spirit. For them, in a way that very few of us can fully appreciate, the Spirit was an eschatological reality—the clear evidence, the sure sign, that the coming age had dawned, that God had set the future inexorably in motion, to be consummated by a second coming of the Messiah. Thus for Paul the Spirit was the arrabōn, the down payment, on the future reality that was itself guaranteed by the down payment (2 Cor 1:21–22; 5:5; Eph 1:13–14). And for Luke the outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost was the eschatological fulfillment of the prophecy of Joel. So much is this so that in the Joel quotation in the Peter speech he alters the words “after these things” to “in the last days.”[9]
Such an understanding, of course, is a reflection of contemporary expectations, which were based on a twofold understanding of messianic hopes: (1) that in the coming age the Messiah would be the unique bearer of the Spirit, as expressed in the prophecies of Isaiah 11:1–2; 42:1; and 61:1–3 (thus reflecting one of the Old Testament motifs of the Spirit, that he was necessary for leadership in Israel); and (2) that a part of the new covenant that would be ratified in the coming age would be the outpouring of the Spirit on all of God’s people (e.g., Ezek 36:26–27; Joel 2:28–30, thus reflecting the other Old Testament motif that the Spirit was responsible for all genuine prophecy).
These eschatological expectations had been intensified during the intertestamental period by a theology of the “quenched Spirit,” in which the present was seen as a time in which there was no Spirit in the land—hence the failure of the succession of the prophets[10]—and in which the Spirit was thus pushed into the future as the ultimate expression of the coming age.
It is precisely within this context that we are to understand the ministry of John the Baptist. According to Luke, he was filled with the Spirit from birth (1:15), and he grew and became strong in the Spirit (1:80), thus indicating a renewal of the prophetic tradition. In his own announcement of the coming Messiah the two great prophetic themes combine: “I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. I would not have known him, except that the one who sent me to baptize with water told me ‘The Man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is he who will baptize with the Holy Spirit’” (John 1:32–33). Thus in Luke 3:16, when asked whether he himself was the promised Messiah, John emphatically denied it in terms of the Spirit which the Messiah would pour out on all people: “I baptize with water. But one more powerful than I will come. . . . He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” John thus coined the term, “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” as a metaphor taken from his own sphere of activity; and he did so in order to contrast his own ministry with that of the Messiah who would usher in the coming age, the age of the Spirit. Although the prophetic hope, of course, had in it the promise of the Spirit for all people individually, that is not the emphasis in the metaphor itself. Rather, it is John’s way of speaking of the Messiah’s most essential quality, namely, that he would usher in the messianic age as the age of the Spirit.
Thus the Spirit in the New Testament is an eschatological reality. The Spirit belongs to the future, to the Age to Come. This is the key to everything in the New Testament. What is essential to understanding the ministry of Jesus is that he announced that with his own coming the kingdom of God, the coming age of righteousness and justice, had already begun. In the synagogue at Nazareth, the messianic prophecy of Isaiah 61:1, that the Spirit would rest upon the Messiah to bring justice and the time of God’s favor, is announced to be fulfilled “in your hearing” (Luke 4:16–21). When accused of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebul, he announces, “If I by the Spirit of God cast out demons, then the kingdom (the Rule) of God has come present upon you” (Matt 12:28).
The Spirit is crucial to all of this. For Jesus himself, divine though he is, the key to his truly human life was the presence and fullness of the Spirit (Luke 4:14, 16; 5:17; Acts 2:22; 10:38). With him, the Messiah—the one uniquely anointed with the Spirit and power—had come. But it was only the dawning of the coming age, the beginning of the End, the inauguration of the Rule. Therefore, the power is there, but it is held in tension as veiled power—there for others, while he himself experienced weakness, servanthood, deprivation, and finally crucifixion. This is followed by resurrection. Surely now comes the End: “Will you now restore the kingdom to Israel?” That’s the wrong question, Jesus implies. It is for you to receive power, when the Spirit comes, so that you may be witnesses to me.
It is in the context of all this that we are to understand the outpouring on the day of Pentecost. Above all else, the coming of the Spirit meant that God’s people also had been ushered into the coming age. “This is that,” shouts Peter. “The Spirit is here; the Age to Come has begun.”
What we must understand is that the Spirit was the chief element, the primary ingredient, of this new existence. For early believers, it was not merely a matter of getting saved, forgiven, prepared for heaven. It was above all else to receive the Spirit, to walk into the coming age with power. They scarcely would have understood our Pentecostal terminology—“Spirit-filled Christian.” That would be like saying “Scandinavian Swede.” They simply did not think of Christian initiation as a two-stage process. For them, to be Christian meant to have the Spirit, to be a “Spirit person.” To be “spiritual,” therefore, did not mean to be some kind of special Christian, a Christian elitist (except perhaps at Corinth, where that was their failure). For them, to be spiritual meant to be a Christian—not over against a nominal (or carnal, etc.) Christian, but over against a non-Christian, one who does not have the Spirit.
The evidence for this is thoroughgoing in the New Testament. Everywhere in Luke–Acts it is the presence of the Spirit that marks off the people of the Age to Come. That is exactly the point of Paul’s question in Acts 19:2. There were obviously not Christians because the one essential ingredient was missing. So also in John. It is the Spirit that will mark the people who believe and who are thus destined for eternal life (John 7:37–39; etc.).
And of course in Paul it is also everywhere. In 1 Corinthians 12:13, when trying to establish how it is that all of them have become one body in Christ, he singles out two metaphors for fullness of the Spirit—all have been immersed in the same reality, Spirit, and all have been made to drink to the fill of the same reality, Spirit. In Galatians, to counter the heresy of the Judaizers, at the start of the argument proper in chapter 3, he asks the one crucial question: “I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard?” This was clearly his way of asking about their experience of becoming Christians; and in vv. 4–5 he argues the same point from their present manifold experience of the Spirit, including the ongoing presence of miracles. So also in 1 Corinthians 2:6–16, where Paul sets out to contrast the Christian from non-Christian concerning why one can penetrate to the wisdom of the cross while the other cannot. The reason is that one has the Spirit; the other does not. That is, one is a Christian; the other is not. Likewise, in Romans 8, the whole point is that there are two kinds of existence: the one, kata sarka, means to live under the old order, under law; the other, kata pneuma, describes life as it is lived in the new age (cf. 2 Cor 5:14–17). Thus the basic imperative for Paul is not “Love one another” but is found in Galatians 5:16: “Walk in the Spirit.”
Note, finally, that nowhere does the New Testament say, “Get saved, and then be filled with the Spirit.” To early believers, getting saved, which included repentance and forgiveness obviously, meant especially to be filled with the Spirit. That all believers in Christ are Spirit-filled is the presupposition of the New Testament writers. Thus the imperative is, “Keep on being full of the Holy Spirit” (Eph 5:18).
On this analysis of things, it seems to me, all New Testament scholars would be in general agreement. But there is one further factor that must be noted, and perhaps here some will part company with me. Because for most Christians in the history of the church the Spirit was believed in but scarcely experienced as a powerful presence, either in the individual life or in the community, there grew up the idea that the Spirit was a quite unobtrusive presence. For the earliest Christians, it was quite the opposite. The Spirit was always thought of as a powerful presence. Indeed the terms Spirit and power at times are nearly interchangeable.[11] For the earliest believers life in Christ meant life in the Spirit, and that meant life characterized by power, not simply by some quiet, pervasive force. The coming of the Spirit had phenomenological evidence; life was characterized by a dynamic quality, evidenced as often as not by extraordinary phenomena. The Spirit was not someone one believed in or about; he was experienced, powerfully experienced in the life of the church, as is vividly clear in Acts 1:8, “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you”; Acts 4:33, “with great power the apostles gave witness to the resurrection”; and throughout Acts. On the day of Pentecost what happened to the first Christians was something one could see and hear (Acts 2:33); it was the visible, phenomenological dimension of the Spirit that Simon wanted to buy (Acts 8); and in Cornelius’ household the coming of the Spirit visibly and phenomenologically is what convinced Peter and his companions that the Gentiles too had received the promise of life. Such a view of the Spirit was normal for them. Indeed that such is the presupposition of the early church is the only way one can make sense of 1 Thessalonians 5:19–22, 1 Corinthians 12–14, and Galatians 3:5. These are not isolated occurrences, anymore than the Lord’s Supper is an isolated occurrence in the Pauline churches. It was the abuse, or distortion, of what was normal that called for the corrective.
Thus the Spirit was not only the essential matter of the early believers’ understanding of their eschatological existence, but he was powerfully present among them. This was no false triumphalism (the Corinthian error). As with their Lord, their power was often veiled in weakness (see 1 Cor 2:1–5; 2 Cor 12:1–10), but it was manifest power nonetheless. Indeed, it was the Pentecostals’ ability to read the New Testament existence so correctly, along with their frustration over the less-than-adequate norm of anemia that they experienced in their own lives and in the church around them, that led to seeking for the New Testament experience in the first place. The question, of course, is, if that was the norm, what happened to the church in the succeeding generations? It is in pursuit of that question that an understanding of the Pentecostal experience as separate and subsequent lies.
III. Some Suggested Historical Reasons for the Rise of a Separate and Subsequent Experience
The problem that most Pentecostals have with the biblical data as they have just been presented is that the data do not seem to square with their own powerful experience in the Spirit, which was not in fact a part of their conversion, or becoming a Christian, but was rather “separate from and subsequent to” that conversion. Is their experience then not biblical? Or is it necessary to go back and reinterpret the biblical data to square it with our experience? I would argue No to both of those questions. On the one hand, the typical evangelical or reformed exegete who disallows a separate and subsequent experience simply must hide his or her head in the sand, ostrichlike, to deny the reality—the biblical reality—of what has happened to so many Christians. On the other hand, the Pentecostal must be wary of reforming the biblical data to fit his or her own experience. The solution, it seems to me, lies in two areas: (1) An examination of the components of Christian conversion as they emerge in the New Testament, and (2) an analysis of what happened to Christian experience once the church entered into a second and third generation of believers.
1. Without belaboring any of the points in detail, it seems to me that the components of Christian conversion that emerge from the New Testament data are five:
a. The actual conviction of sin, with the consequent drawing of the individual to Christ. This, all agree, is the prior work of the Holy Spirit that leads to conversion.
b. The application of the atonement in the person’s life, including the forgiveness of the past, the canceling of the debt of sin. I would tend to put repentance here as a part of the response to the prior grace of God, which is also effected by the Spirit.
c. The regenerating work of the Holy Spirit that gives new birth, that brings forth the new creation.
d. The empowerment for life, with openness to gifts and the miraculous, plus obedience to mission. This is the component that Pentecostals want to make subsequent to numbers a, b, and c, and that the Protestant tradition wants to limit simply to fruit and growth, but tends at times seemingly to omit altogether.
e. The believer’s response to all this is baptism in water, the offering of oneself back to God for life and service in his new age community, the church. This act obviously carries with it the rich symbolism of elements b and c (forgiveness and regeneration), but in itself effects neither.
Obviously, not all will agree with this assessment of things. But this is one New Testament scholar’s understanding of the varied forms in which the biblical data come to us. The crucial item in all of this for the early church was the work of the Spirit; and element d, the dynamic empowering dimension with gifts, miracles, and evangelism (along with fruit and growth), was a normal part of their expectation and experience.
2. The problem lies with what happened to element d in the subsequent history of the church. The fact that it effectively got lost can scarcely be denied. Christian life came to consist of conversion without empowering, baptism without obedience, grace without love. Indeed the whole Calvinist-Arminian debate is predicated on this reality, that people can be in the church, but evidence little or nothing of the work of the Spirit in their lives. Cheap grace, Bonhoeffer called it. That such so-called Christian life exists not only cannot be denied, but one may have ruefully to admit that it represents the vast majority of believers in the history of the church. However, surely no one will argue that such should be the norm—even if it is now quite normal. The question is, how did such an understanding of Christian life and experience come into existence?
The answer seems to be twofold: First, it needs to be noted that the New Testament documents are for the most part all written to first generation adult converts and therefore simply do not describe or address the needs of the second and third generations. What we have described above as the normal Christian experience was normal for converts, those about whom the Acts is written and to whom Paul’s letters were written. But for a second or third generation, who grow up in Christian homes, conversion is seldom so life-changing—nor, would I argue, can it or necessarily should it be so. But what happens is that the dynamic, experiential quality of the Christian life, as life in the Spirit, also seems to be the first element to go. Thus there arose a generation that “never knew about the empowering of the Holy Spirit.”
Second, and by far the more devastating, was the eventual tie of the gift of the Spirit to water baptism, a tie that one is hard-pressed to find in any of the biblical data.[12] And then when baptism is eventually transferred from adult converts to infants in Christian homes, which meant that they, too, had now received the Spirit, the phenomenological, experiential dimension to life in the Spirit was all but eliminated.
The result was the unfortunate omission of this valid, biblical dimension of Christian life from the life of most Christians in the subsequent history of the church. And it was in response to this sub-normal Christian experience that one is to understand most pietistic movements within Christendom, from Montanism at the end of the second century through the charismatic movement in the latter half of the twentieth. It is precisely out of such a background that one is to understand the Pentecostal movement with its deep dissatisfaction with life in Christ without life in the Spirit and their subsequent experience of a mighty baptism in the Spirit. If their timing was off as far as the biblical norm was concerned, their experience itself was not. What they were recapturing for the church was the empowering dimension of life in the Spirit as the normal Christian life.
That this experience was for them usually a separate experience in the Holy Spirit and subsequent to their conversion is in itself probably irrelevant. Given their place in the history of the church, how else might it have happened? Thus the Pentecostal should probably not make a virtue out of necessity. At the same time, neither should others deny the validity of such experience on biblical grounds, unless, as some do, they wish to deny the reality of such an empowering dimension of life in the Spirit altogether. But such a denial, I would argue, is actually an exegeting not of the biblical texts but of one’s own experience in this later point in church history and a making of that experience normative. I for one like the biblical norm better; at this point the Pentecostals have the New Testament clearly on their side.
1 See R. A. Torrey, The Baptism with the Holy Spirit (New York: Revell, 1897), and A. J. Gordon, The Ministry of the Spirit (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1894).
2 For the matter of tongues, see especially Article 8 in the Assemblies of God “Statement of Fundamental Truths,” cited above in chapter 6 (p. 84). See Article 7 quoted above for a statement about empowering for service. [R. Stronstad, “Trends,” 7, has suggested that in this essay, “in violation of [my] own caution about elevating incidental things to a primary position, [I] have done this on the subjects of separability and subsequence.” This, of course, is not my intent. The primary issue for classical Pentecostalism has always been the “empowering-for-service” dimension of the baptism in the Spirit. But it is also clear in the literature that distinction, and therefore subsequence (see e.g., Menzies’ critique in the Ervin Festschrift [“Methodology,” 11), is a continuing concern in Pentecostal theology. In any case, my point is a simple one; it is not to discover and to speak to the primary issue, but simply to discuss an issue that lies close to the center of classical Pentecostalism’s articulation of its experience of the Spirit.]
3 [This is overstated, and leaves me open to the charge leveled by Stronstad (preceding note). My point here is simply that it is crucial to Pentecostal theology that the enduement of power does not take place at conversion. Pentecostals were led to this emphasis both by their own experience and later in response to criticism from the outside.]
4 See, e.g., Bruner, Theology, 153–218.
5 [I have suggested as much myself; see the preceding chapter, p. 86. But as noted there, it is only “in a sense” that they do so. As pointed out in chapter 5, their experience came originally as a direct result of searching the Scriptures.]
6 See the preceding chapter; cf. Fee and Stuart, How to Read, 87–102.
7 Dunn, Baptism, 55–72.
8 Dunn himself acknowledges this; his difficulty arises in starting with Paul and trying to fit Luke into that theological mold [cf. the similar critique in R. Stronstad, The Charismatic Theology of St. Luke (Peabody Mass.: Hendrickson, 1984) 9–12]. This forces him to say that the language must mean something slightly different here. On this matter see I. H. Marshall, The Acts of the Apostles (TNTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980) 154–56.
9 Haenchen, Acts, 179, argues that the text of B (meta tauta) is original on the grounds that “in Lukan theology the last days do not begin as soon as the Spirit has been outpoured.” Here is a clear case of one’s theology (Conzelmann’s, in this case) prejudging one’s historical sense. It is this text that refutes Haenchen and Conzelmann.
10 See, e.g., Zech 13:2–3. During the intertestamental period this understanding is reflected in 1 Maccabees 9:37; 2 Baruch 85:3; and Josephus, Against Apion 1.41.
11 See especially the synonymous parallelism in Luke 1:35: The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the most high will overshadow you. Cf. the promises in Luke 24:49 and Acts 1:4–5; where the same interchange takes place. Thus in Luke 5:17, the “power” that was present with Jesus to heal is clearly the Spirit.
12 This has been demonstrated especially in the exegesis by Dunn in his Baptism in the Holy Spirit [cf. my article on “Pauline Literature,” in S. Burgess, G. McGee, eds., Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988) 675–76].