Conclusion
Eager to emphasize readers’ experience, some critics today play down the foundational importance of the ancient meaning. Those divided between emphasizing the modern and the ancient meanings include contemporary Pentecostal interpreters, with both sides claiming the heritage of the Spirit.
The ancient meaning, however, does matter, and, continuing a theme already broached in the previous chapter, that ancient, canonical meaning must be the anchor and arbiter for claims to interpret the text today. Moreover, continuing a theme in Part II, we must listen to voices from other cultures with sensitivity to their varied cultural contexts; how can we grant modern readers that respect yet deny it to the biblical authors? Concern for the ancient meaning is not a modern invention, and I argue that it is a concern shared by the Spirit who first inspired the text.
(Post)modern or Ancient Meanings?
Many argue for multiple meanings, although to at least some extent this argument may be a semantic one: most interpreters recognize some importance of both the ancient meaning and readers’ reception, even if the nomenclature by which they describe this varies. Some, however, do seem to devalue the connection between ideal reception and ancient meaning.
Postmodern Pentecostal Hermeneutics?
A current tension in Western Pentecostal scholarship exists between those who favor a historical-critical hermeneutic and emphasize historical context, on the one hand, and those who, on the other, favor a postmodern hermeneutic and play down the importance of the original historical horizon. 1
In reality, we should recognize the historical contingency of both the ancient and modern horizons. As William Oliverio rightly laments, Pentecostal interpreters, often divided today into one of two hermeneutical camps, have sometimes unhelpfully caricaturized the opposing camp. Those favoring a contextual hermeneutic “have accused those of the Evangelical-Pentecostal hermeneutic of problematically striving for an illusory goal of pure objectivity, followed by rejoinders from representatives of that hermeneutic accusing their critics of coming near (or falling into) an abyss of unconstrained relativism.” 2
A number of Pentecostal scholars have found valuable features in postmodern approaches; 3 others have objected to these. 4 While some aspects of postmodernity require critique, postmodernity does provide experientially informed voices a place at the table, and thus provides a valuable opportunity for those who can speak its language. By welcoming a range of cultures, it also welcomes many Christian voices of deep faith and spiritual experience from whom Western biblical scholars have much to learn.
Some trace the development of Pentecostal hermeneutics from precritical to modernist to postmodern approaches. Such a development is not surprising, although neither should we regard it as prescriptive: Albert Schweitzer, for example, naturally presented his own view as the climax of a long development of Jesus scholarship, yet many of Schweitzer’s positions today appear eccentric. 5 Noting that many Pentecostal scholars today articulate themselves particularly in the approaches in which they have been trained hardly suggests that these approaches characterize Pentecostal experience per se. 6
But while postmodern approaches may overlap with conventional Pentecostal approaches at points, they are not the same. Most Pentecostals who appreciate aspects of postmodernism readily distance themselves from extreme postmodernism’s moral and theological relativism. 7 New approaches appear periodically, but when we wed ourselves to them too closely our very linkage to now cutting-edge approaches will date us eventually. Bultmann wedded his gospel to Heidegger; that may have been intended as contextualization for his generation, but it is passé now.
One could approach Pentecostal hermeneutics as a sort of postmodern potluck: all meaning is restricted to the eyes of the beholder, so we simply describe all interpretations offered by various Pentecostals and treat them all as equally normative. Like some other special interest hermeneutical approaches, we might then be taking descriptions of interpretations of a group—or even our preferred element of that group—and making them prescriptive or at least acting as if the practice of these approaches automatically legitimizes them as beneficial. 8
In practice, few of us would go so far: most Pentecostals, for example, reject extreme practices associated with Pentecostal fringes such as snake handling and claims of believers becoming gods. Some Western interpreters have argued that Scripture’s meaning is determined only by the reader’s context. 9 Yet if, with respect to reader-driven approaches, we consider global Pentecostalism as a community of readers, it is helpful to note that most global Pentecostals and charismatics reject this relativistic and Scripture-relativizing approach of meaning being determined only by the readers’ context. 10
Is Any Interpretation as Good as Any Other?
We can learn from a range of cultural and even theological voices, but I believe that a true Spirit hermeneutic must go back to Scripture itself, in the form and thus the context in which God chose to inspire it. It is true that we will not always understand exactly what the original point of some texts was. But it is also true that no specific modern, “contextualized” reading is normative for all cultures. 11
Subjective experience is not self-interpreting, and abundant historic abuses (whether by gnostics, Bogomils, Münster Anabaptists, some early Quakers, or Charles Capps’s modern prosperity teaching) invite some objective criteria. The interplay between experience and Scripture involves a sort of hermeneutical circle, 12 but, as with Wesley’s incorporation of reason, tradition, and experience, Scripture must remain paramount. Thus as Pentecostal theologian Cheryl Bridges Johns urges, “The written text has an objective, historical reality which cannot properly be understood outside of the bounds of reason. Yet, it is a personal subjective word that is carried along by the Spirit.” 13 A Pentecostal biblical scholar, Lee Roy Martin, warns that focus on subjective feelings “rather than seeking God for God’s sake” is the sort of “shallow emotionalism” that earlier Pentecostals called “ ‘wild fire.’ ” 14
If some deem an extreme postmodern approach that equalizes the value of all interpretations the most “Pentecostal” reading, they do so only by baptizing a modern academic or cultural approach, not by reflecting the dominant approach of early Pentecostalism. Early Pentecostal interpretation may have hosted a degree of polyvalence restricted by evangelical theological boundaries. 15 Nevertheless, their frequent, commendable tolerance on secondary issues 16 did not entail endorsing all interpretations as correct.
Pentecostals fought and divided over issues such as sanctification in ways that today embarrass many of us (including myself). Many of them affirmed that everyone, not just their groups, should embrace speaking in tongues and a new experience of the Holy Spirit. It is difficult to doubt that, on some points at least, most early Pentecostals believed that some readings were normative, and insisted that Scripture was to be decisive. Indeed, in the 1918 Assemblies of God debate over initial evidence, biblical evidence was deemed more important and nonnegotiable than experience. 17
Joel Green, himself critical of sterile traditional approaches, rightly protests the extreme relativism of some newer approaches:
More recently, some have migrated to forms of study for which there are no “facts,” only “perspectives.” Texts are sundered from the sociohistorical contexts within which they were generated, . . . and from whatever interpretive constraints might have been suggested by the texts themselves. Because these impulses continue the modern agenda of sundering the present from the past, it is arguable whether these forms of study are only late-modern, and not yet postmodern after all. 18
What we emphasize is often shaped by what we seek to correct. Like Gordon Fee, 19 I have reacted against, and thus spent much of my hermeneutical instruction addressing, popular proof-texting, especially when it is blamed on the Holy Spirit. Those more shaped by combatting sterile academic traditions will have a different emphasis, although of course some of their emphasis also appears in Fee’s and my work. It is misappropriation of texts with counterreadings, and not resistance to application, that drives our concern with potential uses of claims about polyvalence.
For those apparently unaware how far such unbridled charismatic subjectivity can go, here are just a few of the examples I have personally encountered of justifying new doctrines on this basis, from eschatological revelations incompatible with Scripture, to Word of Faith teachings, to claims that victorious Christians will achieve immortality by faith or will become Christ or part of the Trinity. (Retaining the nomenclature “Trinity” after this last-mentioned addition might remain feasible only for the severely mathematically challenged.) Proponents usually claim textual support for such views, but fairly consistently resist literary and historical context that challenges their “inspired” interpretations.
Some ancient interpreters affirmed polyvalence, especially rabbis approaching their sacred texts. 20 The widespread ancient approach of allegory could lend itself to such claims, but some approaches tended to prevail in particular schools.
How far should informed Christian interpreters press polyvalence today? Even at the level of authorial intention, texts can sometimes have different implications for different intended readers. 21 No one disputes that texts can be read in various ways, many of which may indeed genuinely arrange evidence from the text; but not all of these interpretations are necessarily helpful or necessarily consistent with larger biblical theology or Christian faith. 22
Texts with indeterminate elements naturally lend themselves to multiple significations. “The only danger,” one writer warns, “is that we will too easily accept our understandings as truly residing in and springing from the text itself, rather than deriving from our own vision.” 23 Yet this observation suggests another, unstated danger insofar as we are concerned to hear the text rather than our own voice as authoritative. When our constructions of textual meaning diverge widely from its contextual sense, we may simply invest our own opinions with biblical authority.
The assumptions we bring to the text help determine the meaning that we supply to textual indeterminacies. 24 To the extent that we share the assumptions of the first ideal audience, our reading is likely to approximate the reading designed by the ideal author. Ideally, our assumptions are shaped by what we know of the canonical texts and how they are shaped in particular contexts to communicate.
Fee thus warns of the danger of simply mirroring our own views in the text; because Scripture must be heard as God’s Word, good exegesis means “to hear the text first on its own terms, not our own.” 25 This is a vitally important point: if Scripture is God’s Word, we must hear his voice there rather than our own. God’s Word may speak different things to different contexts, but if we hear merely a reflection of our context (and never a challenge to it) we hear not God’s voice contextualized but a syncretistic deification of our context.
Potentially Ambiguous Nomenclature
Many who affirm the importance of modern horizons do not for that reason reject that of ancient ones. For some, Pentecostal hermeneutics emphasize the Spirit’s role in multiple interpretations. 26 Insofar as we understand “meaning” or “interpretations” as applications and recontextualizations guided by the framework of the biblical text in its original context, scholars from a wide range of perspectives will agree in principle, despite differences in vocabulary.
Nevertheless, some can find the language misleading if it is not qualified. That misunderstandings are inevitable given the proliferation of divergent nomenclatures may be illustrated by actual readings of such claims.
Some of Kenneth Archer’s proposals, for example, have generated controversy. Using familiar academic language, Kenneth Archer concludes, “Meaning is not something we discover then appropriate. Meaning is something that we construct.” 27 In specifically biblical interpretation, however, our usual stated goal is to hear the message of the canonical text, so we cannot construct “meaning” (what others call application) without first discovering meaning in the text.
Speaking of readers constructing meaning in biblical texts, then, has provoked the concerns of some critics that this approach shifts the locus of authority from the designed text to its actual readers. 28 Although I would not suggest that Archer’s views are identical with my own or his critics, however, he has provided us some authorial signals of his own intention; other statements in his work suggest that he is describing the process of reading here, not prescribing dismissal of the canonical sense. What he describes as “meaning” being “produced through the on-going interdependent dialectical interaction of the text and reader” 29 I would label “understanding,” but again, these are primarily semantic differences. Social contexts determine the meaning that terms carry, and Archer is using some terminology familiar in literary studies.
In personal correspondence, Archer has explained that his critics misunderstood his point. 30 (I might suggest, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that his explanation thereby asserts the value of his own authorial intention in approaching his work.) 31 Archer affirms “the intentionality of the text to communicate with an appreciation for it being a social-cultural product that was written in a certain time and place by a person(s).” 32 He does reject historical-critical methodology as a way of discovering what the text means and thinks that discovering original intent does not deliver a straightforward understanding of what the text means; but he does appreciate social-cultural context and values both horizons. 33 “The world behind the text” informs but does not control the conversation about meaning. 34
Some of our debates, then, may be especially matters of emphasis shaped by the differing contexts that we address. Without denying that other differences do exist, the lack of a standardized nomenclature for discussing these differences complicates communication.
Wrong-headed Rejection of Ancient Context
I can have sympathy for scholars who feel the tension between historical criticism and hearing the text itself. Indeed, that is partly what Bultmann’s existential approach (see Appendix A) and, I believe more helpfully, modern literary-theological approaches are meant to surmount. I took a break from significant work on John’s Gospel for a couple years after my dissertation on John because it had become difficult for me to read it without thinking of all the secondary literature on the various passages. Years later, I can again hear the Gospel afresh on its own terms without being distracted by modern critical questions. Such questions have their place, and some even arise naturally from reading the text, but secondary literature often builds layer upon layer of speculative interpretive glosses no less coercive for interpreters than the ecclesiastical constraints and traditions about which early modern scholars complained.
By contrast, careful research that aids us in hearing these works in their ancient contexts can make the texts and their scenes come alive to us more fully. Insofar as testimony of spiritual experience is valued, I can certainly testify concerning this rewarding experience. Understanding better the first horizon does not resolve all issues but it fills many lacunae that the text did not answer because, at the time of its writing, the answers were obvious. 35
Speaking of a view as “wrong” may offend some postmodern sensibilities, but insofar as one’s goal is receiving a communication from another—what we affirm when we speak of Scripture as God’s message through concrete human agents—there are plainly unhelpful ways to do it. Some scholars do wrongly speak as if the first horizon is not important.
In some cases scholars value both horizons and simply emphasize one over the other in their writing. In many parts of the world, popular interpretation often neglects issues of background because it is rarely available to the interpreters. Nevertheless, I have found popular readers almost uniformly enthusiastic about ancient background when I have presented it and made it more available to them. 36
Yet one Pentecostal scholar, apparently using prescriptively a description of popular Pentecostal practice, 37 suggests that a fuller understanding the Bible is not particularly desirable, 38 that “encounter” is preferable to “exegesis,” that “spiritualising readers” need “little interest . . . in the surface meaning of the text” or attention “to the original intention of the author.” 39
On this view, Pentecostal hermeneutics opposes, in an adversarial manner, appreciating the text in its own right, and suggests that “Pentecostals are infinitely less interested in” what texts mean to their original audiences than in how the texts challenge us today. 40 The author goes so far as to suggest, though not with a completely straight face, that “now that progressive scholars” have mortally struck the Goliath of “grammatico-historical criticism,” Pentecostal Davids should finish the job by cutting off Goliath’s head. 41
The analogy works better as a rhetorical device than an argument, since the voices of all prophets must be tested and it remains to be seen who genuinely speaks for God on the matter. Fortunately, this author lacks the position to define for others what a Pentecostal hermeneutic should look like.
Inspiration does not make texts any less texts. Whether or not one wishes to speak of the authors’ intention, one cannot easily avoid speaking of what the text meant in its originating context. It was, after all, written in ancient Greek and Hebrew. The first-century Mediterranean world was the setting in which New Testament authors’ Greek vocabulary, syntax, and so forth made the most sense (and for which they were designed). How one defines “meaning” depends largely on one’s goal in interpretation, but its real, originating historical level in which a writer sought to communicate content in a socially shared system of signs clearly shaped the texts as we have them.
Moreover, if we cannot take into account the biblical texts’ cultural context, we are left with insoluble problems concerning slavery (e.g., Exod 21:21) and, in my opinion, some passages addressing women’s subordination (esp. 1 Tim 2:11–12), and a host of other issues in the Old Testament and some in the New. 42
As Bruce Malina rightly observes, our Scriptures were written in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean languages and settings. If they “made immediate and direct sense in that cultural form within our American social context, you might rightly suspect the New Testament writings of being twentieth-century forgeries,” which they obviously are not. 43 It is when we hear most clearly what the biblical writers communicated, often forcefully, to their own generations that we can hear most clearly what these texts speak to us in our very different contexts. 44 It is easy for us to simply dismiss the relevance of the Corinthians’ folly, for example, until we hear how logical their views sounded within their own culture—just as some of our practices sound logical to us until truly challenged by Paul’s point.
Modern contextual readings that are most faithful to that original sense as their foundation will have the greatest common ground and ability to dialogue with other contextual readings. Without a common foundation—not only in the words of the texts but in what those linguistically and culturally specific words meant in their culturally, situationally, and authorially shaped contexts—one can make any text say virtually anything. In one SBL session that I attended early in my academic career, the presenter suggested that if one does not like what the text says, one should read the spaces between the lines to produce a counterreading. (When I shared this theory with a doctoral student from another institution, he remarked wryly, “Oh, that sounds just like what we used to just call eisegesis.”)
Culture makes a difference on both ends of interpretation: understanding the ancient context and relating to the interpreter’s context. Thus, for example, Abraham’s negotiations with local Hittites for a burial plot for Sarah (Gen 23) fit what we find in Hittite business documents. 45 Had Abraham not known the culture, he might have thanked Ephron the Hittite for offering to give him the land free (23:11) instead of paying him for it (23:13–16). In that case, he would have expended all his favor with the Hittites and incurred enmity; the offer was a courtesy, not meant for the receiver to take advantage of. By contrast, in Paul’s world, to refuse a gift or try to pay for it insulted and risked incurring the enmity of the benefactor who offered it. 46 Neither in antiquity nor in cross-cultural interactions today can one determine the appropriate response simply by supplying dictionary equivalents of words as translations; one must grasp the cultural context that informs them. Otherwise one risks sometimes understanding precisely the opposite of the speaker’s point!
The disconnect readers often feel with the ancient meaning is one reason that many readers today seem baffled by the Bible and struggle to keep reading it. Believers need to hear and appropriate the text corporately and personally. One of the best ways to make this happen, however, is for some teachers of Scripture to explore relevant features of ancient culture and translate the message in their expositions. Most of us recognize the value of contextualizing the message for our hearers; what is so controversial about scholars using the same skills to reconstruct how contextualization was modeled for us in Scripture, which regularly contextualized the message for its first audiences?
My Pentecostal Testimony for Ancient Context
Since testimony is both a valued element in Christian epistemology and a conventional element of the Pentecostal heritage, 47 I shall offer mine. For what it is worth, to those for whom subjective revelation holds a place of special authority, a revelatory experience set my course toward understanding. As a young Christian, reacting against my preconversion intellectualism, I decided that I did not need to understand Scripture; I needed only to “get the revelation in my spirit.”
One day during prayer the Spirit confronted my view; when I tried to protest, God flashed about ten texts into my mind simultaneously, proving me incontrovertibly wrong. Scripture values understanding (e.g., Prov 1:6; 2:2–3; 8:1 and passim; Rom 12:2), including understanding God’s word (Deut 4:6; Ps 119:34, 73, 104, 130, 169; Matt 13:23).
Nor did I come to value historical context because of academic indoctrination. Indeed, although our education does influence each of us, my views have differed quite starkly from my esteemed and learned doctoral hermeneutics professor, Dan Via, a Bultmannian existentialist and former structuralist. Quite the contrary, my approach came by reading the Bible forty chapters a day, often through the New Testament every week, until it forced me to abandon my previous way of reading the biblical text and begin to read it according to the shape in which God actually inspired it, such as letters to concrete congregations.
To ignore that the texts invite attention to their ancient context—indeed, were written in ancient languages—is simply to show that one has not spent enough time reading them—at least, the way God inspired them, usually a book at a time. This is not to say that God does not provide insights to Scripture in other ways; it is simply to say that one way that God clearly does so is to help us understand the texts in context, and I was led to focus on this approach to make more of that context available.
I did not focus on background because my professors told me to; I gravitated toward the professors who gave me what helped me understand the background, and thus the Bible, better. I did not need so much a professor to tell me what the text said because I was reading the text enough on my own. I went into scholarship because it gave me more access to the background I now craved to help me—and help the church—understand the Bible better. I had to understand whether we should practice holy kisses, women wearing head coverings, and so forth; if I was not to dismiss these texts on subjective grounds that made modern readers’ intuition rather than Scripture the canon, I had to discover why Paul wrote such instructions in his context.
My only desire, originally, was to fulfill my calling by preaching God’s Word as accurately as I could. Might this call also summon the church to a paradigm shift on the popular level? The Bible is full of examples of God using servants to bring paradigm shifts, and unlike Jeremiah, I am at least not alone in inviting this one. God gave me a special passion for background, often spending ten hours a day mining collections of ancient texts, searching for any information that would illumine any biblical passage. After collecting roughly 70,000 index cards of information and finishing my doctorate, I resolved to put the information at the fingertips of ordinary preachers, such as I had been. No teaching position opened for me that summer, but within twenty-four hours of my prayer for a specified figure to live on that year, I was offered an unexpected advance of that very figure to write the background commentary I had proposed. The revised edition twenty years later is better, but God was at work in this process from the beginning. 48
I believe that the Spirit has often helped me in my exegesis also, often facilitating my cognitive skills (which seems usual in the exegetical process), for example, by striking my attention with all sorts of potential connections as I read the background sources and still more as I wrestle with the text. Yet this also happens by guiding me in ways traditionally considered more “charismatic.” Thus, for example, when several decades ago I was struggling with the point of the tabernacle material in Exodus, praying desperately, I felt that God directed me to study ancient Near Eastern temples to understand the symbolism. 49 On a different level, at times various ideas come together and something “clicks” in a special way. I do not want to elevate such insights as if they are perfect or immune to correction; again, “we know in part and prophesy in part” (1 Cor 13:9). I mention them simply to illustrate that I do expect and experience what I believe to be the Spirit’s guidance even at the exegetical stage.
Premodern as Well as Modern Way of Reading
Later in this chapter I address ancient precedent for exploring authorial intention. 50 Here I turn more generally to interest in ancient context. Discovering a text’s “original meaning and intention” is the goal of historical-grammatical methodology. 51 As noted further in chapter 9, some associate authorial intention with “an Enlightenment rationalistic hermeneutic” 52 or “the historical-critical method.” 53 Yet interpreters clearly already used “historical-grammatical exegesis” before the dominance of modern historical criticism. 54 Reformers such as Zwingli emphasized attention to matters such as “grammar, rhetoric and historical research in explaining the biblical text.” 55 Anyone who doubts the sophisticated nature of much ancient literary criticism need only survey Aristotle’s Poetics or other ancient critical works. 56
Some critics have complained that reading in historical context is a modern notion irrelevant to Greco-Roman texts. 57 Even a cursory survey of Greco-Roman sources will expose the fallacy of this complaint, even if many interpreters were inconsistent in their application of the principle. 58 Thus one Roman writer complains that some older Roman laws are no longer intelligible, because the “words and customs” identified in the laws have become “obsolete, and it is in the light of those words and customs that the sense of the laws is to be understood.” 59 Everyone also understood the reality of cultural differences. 60
Granted, ancients were readier than we usually are today to cite snippets more verbally than contextually relevant to their situations; 61 consulting the original was also far more difficult for them. 62 But the first hearers of the Gospels, for example, would have heard them read whole, rather than piecemeal. 63
For those with historical interest, the question is not anachronistic: contrary to some modern suppositions, ancient writers were not shy about debating intention, whether regarding the actions of someone on trial 64 or the purpose of legislators. 65 Certainly ancient authors were ready to challenge those who quoted them out of context by producing the context of their words. 66 Indeed, many current literary approaches resemble ancient antecedents, 67 though not all correspond as closely to their alleged ancient analogues as is sometimes supposed. 68 Contrary to what some modern writers have opined, historical interests are not a purely modern concern limited to an Enlightenment mentality; just as the Renaissance emphasized classical learning, the Enlightenment emphasis on historical context harks back to classical models.
Ancient writers, like modern ones, could assume a degree of shared knowledge on the part of their readers or hearers. 69 Writers regularly alluded to situations that they did not need to state explicitly, 70 because their ideal audiences shared this knowledge; being outside these ideal audiences, we sometimes find ourselves in the dark as to the precise referent of the allusion (e.g., Luke 13:1–4; 1 Cor 1:11; 2 Thess 2:5). 71 (Some ancient interpreters admitted that they faced the same problem with still earlier writers.) 72 Writers sometimes respond to interlocutors clearly enough that we understand the question (e.g., Sen. Ep. Lucil. 68.1; 74.1; 75.1; perhaps 1 Cor 7:1); at other times, however, we cannot reconstruct the question (e.g., Sen. Ep. Lucil. 72.1).
They could examine a writer’s meaning in a text based on that writer’s usage elsewhere. 73 (Jerome even noticed linguistic problems in Paul.) 74 They could also take into account an earlier writer’s historical context; thus, for example, when Dionysius of Halicarnassus practices rhetorical criticism on Thucydides, he complains that the latter employs a style not used even in his own time (Dion. Hal. Thuc. 29). 75
Ancient writers might likewise note that older texts had grown less intelligible because words and customs had changed, and urged reading those texts in light of the original wording and customs (Aul. Gel. 20.1.6, on Rome’s early laws). Critics sometimes debated whether particular words were available in a given past writer’s period. 76 None of these interests precludes recontextualization of a message; indeed, ancient writers, no less than modern ones, approached historical information also in light of their own contemporary concerns. 77
Nor is this way of reading texts exclusively ancient. Luther, for example, emphasized “the historical and grammatical principle” against the fourfold scholastic approach. 78 This historical and grammatical approach also characterized Calvin 79 and the Reformers more generally. 80 Even with respect to the historical-critical method, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin and Zwingli all broached matters that today are regarded as considerations of critical study. 81 Without the Renaissance’s renewed interest in foundational sources and Erasmus’s production of a Greek New Testament, it is questionable whether the Reformation would have happened.
Indeed, until the nineteenth century the NT and classics were often approached by scholars together. 82 Church fathers and medieval-period writers often quoted “classical authors” for explaining biblical texts. The humanist training of many Reformers highlighted this approach even further; Calvin’s first published work was on Seneca. 83 In the seventeenth century, John Lightfoot began writing a NT commentary based on insights from rabbinic texts. 84 Although Enlightenment exegetes could use these tools in a reductionist manner, interest in ancient context certainly did not begin with them.
Early Pentecostals sometimes used historical background and sometimes even biblical languages—normally when needed to resolve a difficulty; 85 they “were concerned about both the ‘historical-cultural’ and ‘grammatical’ contexts of a passage.” Nevertheless, although most clearly did not oppose using background, access to background was rarely available on a popular level. As popular preachers more than academicians, early Pentecostals normally did not and could not “use the academically tutored historical-grammatical exegetical method.” 86
Does their limited use of background mean that a more disciplined and consistent approach to background information would have done them harm? Or might they have deployed more background and knowledge of ancient languages had they had fuller access to these? Smith Wigglesworth read only the Bible, but this was not true of most Pentecostal Bible college teachers. Certainly my esteemed teacher, Stanley M. Horton, whose roots go back to the Azusa Street Revival, 87 brought his academic training into the service of the Assemblies of God (including regarding language and cultural background), and the movement depended heavily on him and other academicians who were able to work within its structures.
Debates about texts’ range of “meaning” often depend on how “meaning” is defined; certainly readers may experience texts’ implications for their own situations in a wide range of ways. Nevertheless, implications are connected with the message originally invested in the texts as we have them. Those messages include textual communicative lacunae because in their original linguistic and cultural context certain features of the setting could be assumed rather than needing to be explained. Our interest may be in wider principles, but we encounter these principles in inspired texts the particularities of which reflect their cultural, situational and authorial distinctives.
Interest in ancient meaning is neither a purely modernist nor historical-critical way of thinking. It is demanded by the shape of the texts themselves, a shape recognized by interpreters even in antiquity.