The Spirit and Application
Scripture Speaking Personally—and Historically
Some interpreters stress the ancient context, thus focusing on the biblical Word as it was originally shaped, whereas others stress the reception of modern readers, focusing on the need for the Spirit’s guidance. Although the latter might be more distinctive to a pneumatic hermeneutic, both are necessarily at the core of a Spirit hermeneutic that acknowledges the Spirit’s inspiration of the biblical authors. We need both Word and Spirit.
Here I summarize some principles that the book has addressed and note some applications that flow from these principles, and why a true Spirit hermeneutic is ultimately a Christian hermeneutic.
As we observed in Part I, if we follow the model of Spirit hermeneutics offered in the New Testament as well as by the voices of many subsequent movements of the Spirit, we will read Scripture experientially, eschatologically, and missionally. We will also read Scripture with greater understanding and sympathy when we share the kind of spiritual experience that Scripture describes, and when we read with the sort of humble and broken people whom Scripture often addressed and encouraged. We may read Scripture as the eschatological people of God who resonate with and embrace the message of the text for our lives.
As we observed in Part II, the global church can help us, since we can learn from those parts of the church that are appropriating for their lives various emphases that the rest of us sometimes overlook or fail to apply. Both the Pentecost narrative and the geography of the preponderance of movements of the Spirit today invite us to welcome the gifts and voice of the global church. Part III emphasized the importance of a disciplined reading that understands what biblical texts meant in their ancient contexts and thus a reading that can better empathize with those to whom these texts were first directed.
Part IV explored the contribution of the Spirit to a distinctively Christian, and thus distinctively Spirit-directed, epistemology. This is necessarily an epistemology of Word and Spirit, often functioning together in a hermeneutical circle that helps correct our misinterpretations. Such an epistemology provides a necessary foundation for any Spirit hermeneutic, which grows from a faithful relationship with God and trusting submission to what God says.
Once our epistemology invites a Spirit hermeneutic, what does such an approach look like? Part V explores how the Spirit-inspired interpreters within the canon offer models for Spirit hermeneutics. These models include, for example, Jesus’s use of a hermeneutic of mercy more than sacrifice and Paul’s reading of the law from the standpoint of faith in God’s fulfilled promise in Christ. Such a reading will be christocentric, but, against some, it will also have implications for personal application in the sorts of situations analogous in some respects to those addressed in Scripture.
Yet not all purported Spirit readings equally reflect the mind of the Spirit. Some in fact can be fairly amiss. Part VI thus asked whose “charismatic interpretation” we will follow. It thus reinforced the importance of testing readings by their consistency with the Spirit’s already-established message in Scripture.
Pentecostal Hermeneutics as a Christian Hermeneutic
The Pentecostal emphasis on the Spirit in interpretation has a long history before Pentecostals; it is thus historically a wider Christian hermeneutic. At the same time, all Christians need to be reminded of the Spirit’s work in enabling us to hear and embrace God’s message; by highlighting this emphasis for all believers Pentecostals and charismatics continue to offer a valuable contribution to the wider church. The noncessationist approach that Pentecostals began to proliferate particularly conspicuously a century ago invites all Christians into the biblical world, summoning us to expectancy and trust in God’s present, often surprising working in his church and in our lives.
What has been most distinctive about classical Pentecostal hermeneutics has been its explicit invitation to read Scripture from the standpoint of believing and experiencing that we live in the era of spiritual gifts long neglected by the church. Today, Pentecostalism has proved so successful in its primary emphasis that this emphasis is no longer so distinctive; the global church is increasingly charismatic, and cessationism in the traditional sense 1 is on the wane.
This does not of course mean that classical Pentecostals cannot continue to have a distinctive voice in hermeneutics. Much of the church acknowledges spiritual gifts in principle yet allows them little role in practice. Here Pentecostals and charismatics can continue to play a distinctive role in renewing the rest of the church—so long as Pentecostals and charismatics give God’s gifts and other experiences of the Spirit more than lipservice themselves. Being continuationist in principle does not guarantee our active embrace of the Spirit—no matter what our label. That is something we must live in daily dependence on the Holy Spirit.
Yet a movement may never be wholly defined only by elements most unique to it in any case. There are many elements of a Spirit hermeneutic that remain indispensable even if widely shared among Christ’s body. These include respectful embrace of the message that the Spirit inspired biblical writers to communicate in their original setting. They also include eagerly embracing the text’s implications for our lives today, recognizing that the Spirit also desires to guide us during our exegesis of biblical texts, not least in highlighting areas where the message applies to us today, and in inspiring our obedience to the message.
Ultimately a pentecostal hermeneutic—a hermeneutic from the vantage point of Pentecost—is simply a Christian hermeneutic—a hermeneutic of hearing in the text the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ. And ultimately a Christian hermeneutic is no less than a Spirit hermeneutic—an approach that humbly recognizes that it is God’s voice, rather than our own, that we must hear in his Word. If not all Christians—including not all Pentecostals—currently do experience God’s living voice in Scripture, we can recognize that Scripture now invites us to even greater treasures of knowledge and revelation about God.
We can and should draw appropriate analogies, and the Holy Spirit can make more direct analogies for us, drawing our attention to promises to people in Scripture analogous to those that he also makes to God’s people generally, or through which he makes analogies to our own lives individually. Some Christians who are too cautious about allowing the Spirit to speak to us forget that all Christians experience the leading of the Spirit in some ways, even if just the Spirit’s witness that we are God’s children (Rom 8:15–16; Gal 4:6; 1 John 3:24) or that God loves us (Rom 5:5). Being “led by the Spirit” is a fundamental characteristic of Christians (Rom 8:14; Gal 5:18). 2
If we believe that God speaks, the idea that God would sometimes speak to us with analogies, by reminding us of his working in Scripture, seems a fairly tame suggestion. Scripture helps shape our hearing of God’s voice. People often abuse hearing God’s voice, just as people often abuse Scripture; “we know in part and we prophesy in part” (1 Cor 13:9). The existence of counterfeits or worn currency does not require us to abandon money, and witnessing shabby structures does not invite us to throw away our tools and quit building.
At the same time, the Holy Spirit’s personal application to us does not change the original point from which such analogies may be best drawn. The original message is the foundation for all interpreters in all cultures. Personal applications are by definition not universal; they are not transferable to all people in all settings. A reading that is exclusively personal risks finding only what we want or personally need at the moment and risks missing “the full will of God” (Acts 20:27).
Moreover, we are best qualified to cite the authority of Scripture behind even our personal applications when they are most analogous to the original point. If I draw from the crowds early in Jesus’s ministry the principle that fulfilling God’s mission will always make me popular, I miss the point no less than Peter when he denied that Jesus would have to go to the cross. Impressed with Jesus’s miracles, Galilean crowds followed Jesus, but in Jerusalem the crowds cried out for his crucifixion. If we miss the point of the text, it no longer offers an objective anchor for our subjective application and experience by the Spirit. Some err on the side of subjectivity without an anchor and others on the side of objectivity without an experience; the ideal is for both to work in tandem.
An early Pentecostal voice invites us to bring Word and Spirit together—a collaboration that I would envision as the best of evangelical exegesis of the text combined with the best of charismatic power to embrace and carry out its message. Smith Wigglesworth, one of the most prominent early Pentecostal healing evangelists, felt disappointed toward the end of his life that the Pentecostal revival had not directly ushered in the end of the age, as the earliest Pentecostals had hoped. He did not, however, relinquish hope for the future. He believed that in addition to the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit that brought a restoration of the gifts, there would someday come another revival emphasizing God’s Word. “When these two moves of the Spirit combine,” he prophesied, “we shall see the greatest move the Church of Jesus Christ has ever seen.” 3 May it be so, Lord.