Conclusion
Reading from the Vantage of Pentecost
Although building on what came before, Pentecost ushered in something new. The experience of Pentecost in Acts 2 echoes many earlier biblical themes and particularly echoes Jesus’s experience of the Spirit in Luke’s Gospel. 1 Nevertheless, it simultaneously signifies something new: the last-days outpouring of God’s Spirit prophetically empowering all God’s people for ministry. No longer was prophetic empowerment restricted to only some prophets in Israel; now it was for all God’s people, and for a mission to all peoples. The Spirit would be poured out on all flesh, so that all Jesus’s followers, Jew and Gentile, would be empowered to share in that mission (1:8; 2:17–18, 38–39). 2
How does the experience of Pentecost affect our reading of Scripture? The Spirit’s coming necessarily adds an experiential dimension to our reading. 3 In this case, the central thrust of the Pentecost narrative is empowerment for mission, so reading from this standpoint invites us to read Scripture missionally: sensitive to the work that God has for us to do, not just work that believers might want God to do for them. Reading from the vantage point of Pentecost is also reading with the humble who depend on God’s Spirit. Finally, a reading from the perspective of Pentecost is both an eschatological reading and a continuationist (noncessationist) reading, because Pentecost offers a “last days” vantage point on Scripture.
Inspired by the Spirit (Acts 2:4), Peter speaks God’s message to his hearers, including from Scripture (2:17–21, 25–28, 34–35). In his Spirit-led explanation of these passages, Peter appeals to his hearers’ knowledge of Jesus’s signs (2:22), the apostles’ experience with the risen Lord (2:32) and his hearers’ experience of witnessing the effects of the Spirit’s current activity (2:15–16, 33). Application of Scripture remains prominent in succeeding Spirit-led preaching in Acts, especially to those familiar with Scripture (3:22; 4:11, 24–26; 7:2–53; 13:15–41, 47; 15:16–18; 20:26; 23:5; 26:17–18, 22–23, 26–27; 28:26–27) but implicitly even among those who could not recognize it (10:24, 43; 14:15; 17:24–26; 24:14–15).
More generally, the Spirit’s coming adds an experiential dimension to our reading. This dimension need not supplant all insights of earlier scribal approaches (cf. Matt 13:52) but instead supplements them with the transformed heart needed to live by biblical principles (Ezek 36:27). Preunderstanding shapes how we come to texts, 4 so the transformed heart should also transform how we approach Scripture (with eagerness, faith and obedience) and what we hear there.
Disciplined critical methods give us a framework for interpreting Scripture in many respects, but the most important element of hearing Scripture can elude even the best of critical scholarship. Obviously I believe that cultural background is essential; I have devoted most of my academic career to making more of that available. But an even deeper background comes in understanding the personality of the leading characters and the voice of the authors. If I personally know an author or lead character, I can hear them speaking in much the way in which they would have said it. I can usually grasp their basic intention even if some cultural or linguistic allusions elude me. This experience may not always affect our critical conclusions, but it will surely affect our reception of the text.
If we really hear God’s heart in Scripture, we will read Scripture differently. 5 A rascal will read Paul’s claims to be the least, because of Paul’s past persecution of Christians, as clever, mock humility (1 Cor 15:9; Eph 3:8; 1 Tim 1:15); conversely, someone who has deeply experienced grace will identify with the gratitude such a claim expresses (cf. 2 Sam 16:10–12; Luke 7:44–47; 18:10–14). Those of us who experienced anger from authority figures early in our lives may recoil at expressions of God’s anger in Scripture; but the larger narratives that encase these expressions usually make clear how slow to anger God is, despite how people provoked him and resisted faith.
For example, in the Gospels, Jesus heals the suffering and welcomes the marginalized. He models the perfect relationship with the Father, and laments over those who cannot understand the Father’s heart. Religious people might judge others from a situation of superiority, and Jesus’s denunciations of them were because these religious people were alienating from God’s way those who esteemed themselves more lightly (cf. Matt 23:4, 13). Jesus came to lay down his life to save people, and loving service is the way of those who truly understand the Father’s heart. Jesus explained that he was not seeking his own honor, but just seeking to honor his Father (though his Father also loved him and sought his honor). “You’ve never come to know him,” he lamented, “but I do know him. If I were to say that I don’t know him, I would be lying just as you are. But I know him, and do what he says” (John 8:55).
One could hear Jesus as obliquely boasting (the appropriate way to boast in ancient urban contexts). But because I have experienced deep intimacy with the Father, I can hear Jesus here boasting not in himself but in the magnificence of a relationship with the Father that honors the Father’s kindness. I can imagine how someone who has not experienced this joy could misconstrue my own words here. There are, however, some attitudes that we will never understand or identify with unless we have experienced them or known and trusted those who have.
Getting to know God’s heart in Scripture where it is clearest helps us hear his voice elsewhere as well. We can recognize, for instance, that some words of judgment are spoken with pain (for a clear example, see Hos 11:5–8; cf. Judg 10:16), though of course even in such texts God communicates this pain in cultural and linguistic forms intelligible to his audience (cf. Hos 2:2–3). 6 Jesus said that his own know him, just as he knows the Father and the Father knows him (John 10:14–15). Perhaps this claim of us intimately knowing him describes the ideal or a divinely initiated potential, but the point is that believers must have a relationship with the Father.
The Johannine Christians’ most elite critics were probably more academically skilled than they, and probably boasted a superior knowledge of the Torah; 7 but John assures his audience that they know the Torah even more fully than their critics, for John’s audience knows the Word made flesh (1:1–18). They experience God through the Spirit that their critics did not even claim to possess. 8 The Spirit would continue to reveal Jesus to the world through them (16:7–11), and would continue to reveal even the secret matters of Jesus to all who love and follow Jesus (16:12–15; cf. the parallel with 15:15). 9 Believers have an experience of God, and this shapes the way we read Scripture. For us, no less than for Moses, the veil has been removed (2 Cor 3:14–18). 10 Critical knowledge, which has its place, may come from critical study, but this intimate knowledge of God comes through the activity of God’s Spirit in us, transforming us into Christ’s image (2 Cor 3:17–18). 11
Thus one biblical scholar who after his training dramatically experienced the Spirit laments feeling torn: “The academic task requires that one stand, as it were, off-stage, like a critic or reviewer, so that one can observe the drama with the more objective eye of scholarship, whereas the Holy Spirit draws one on stage with the actors.” 12 While acknowledging his great debt to academic study, he describes the tension as refecting the difference between being “witnesses” and “analysts.” 13 The tension is less for those of us who studied under professors who embodied both values, but I concede that it is one with which I myself struggled for a number of years.
I am not by any means claiming that a critical reading cannot aid our understanding. A narrative critic may analyze God as a character in the text, and if the critic is not suspending belief but embraces God’s voice in the text, the critic experiences some of what the Spirit says in the text. But there is an added dimension when the critic (or non-critic) reads the text and embraces it in faith, or when one who already knows God hears directly in the text the voice of the God with whom one is already in intimate relationship. Sometimes, of course, this embrace leads to dissonance, as when one who knows God in Christ reads the conquest narratives in Joshua. How can a follower of the Prince of Peace stomach such violence? Such dissonance also benefits us, however, in forcing us to place the God of the book of Joshua in a wider theological context (including that of the law of Moses presupposed there) and to also be sensitive to clues within the book of Joshua 14 that point to that fuller picture of God. We wrestle with a text in light of what we know of God’s heart until we understand better its point.
For another example, Jesus did not oppose divorce arbitrarily, to impose unnecessary hardship, but because the divorcing husband’s action was “against” his wife (Mark 10:11). Betrayal is wrong, and Jesus refused to accommodate men’s hardness of heart at their wives’ expense (10:5; or vice versa, cf. 10:12). 15 Yet if we so understand Jesus’s heart, we will also find tragic the common practice of later Christians to require celibacy of the innocent party. It further harms the partner that Jesus compassionately sought to protect.
Reading in light of God’s heart may begin with the sense of God’s personal involvement in one’s life and reading. Eventually, as we grow in God’s heart and caring about what he cares about, we will also grow to care for other people and especially his people. Because we are finite in our knowledge, no less than were biblical prophets (e.g., Matt 11:3//Luke 7:20; 1 Cor 13:9), we may not always make the best applications. But ideally the omniscient Spirit can guide us in showing us at least what we need to see for what he is calling us to do.
Jesus’s promise of the Spirit for Pentecost was a promise of empowerment for mission (Luke 24:48–49; Acts 1:8). Jesus ascends and bestows the Spirit in a manner that evokes the model of Elijah and his successor who received a double portion of his spirit, namely, Elisha (Acts 1:8–11). If the Spirit empowers us especially for mission, it should not surprise us if a Spirit-led reading of Scripture should highlight the theme of mission. 16 Following Jesus’s lead, then, Peter’s biblical explanation of the outpoured Spirit is prophetic empowerment (2:17–18).
Luke reveals how pivotal this empowerment is by underlining its necessity in both his Gospel’s conclusion and his sequel’s introduction. 17 This is how the servant aspect of Jesus’s ministry becomes that of his followers. Luke’s primary emphasis regarding the Spirit involves mission, and most scholars acknowledge empowerment for mission as the Spirit’s most prominent activity in Acts. 18
Biblical narratives offered widely available models for Luke’s connection between the gift of the Spirit and Jesus’s ascension. Although Moses also imparted the Spirit to Joshua, so that he was filled with the Spirit of wisdom (Deut 34:9; cf. Acts 2:4; 6:3, 10), the transfer of Elijah’s spiritual power and ministry to Elisha is even more relevant (2 Kgs 2:9, 15; cf. Sir 48:12). 19 This is because it also belongs to the Old Testament’s only explicit ascension scene (explicitly connected to the transfer; 2 Kgs 2:10, 13; cf. Sir 48:9, 12). Such biblical models indicate that Jesus is delegating his prophetic empowerment to his followers. 20
The opening of Peter’s Pentecostal sermon highlights this feature. Indeed, what all Luke’s programmatic texts (Luke 4:18–19; 24:45–49; Acts 1:8; 2:16–17; cf. Luke 3:4–6) share in common is God’s Spirit empowering God’s agents for their mission. The empowerment of the Spirit leads to mission and, to the extent that the seminal preaching about the experience offers a model for us, a missional reading of that empowerment. 21
Reading from within Spirit-filled Experience
Peter explained the Pentecost experience in light of Scripture and Scripture in light of the Pentecost experience. “[I]s it not vain to speak of love to one who has not known love,” one scholar inquires, “or of the joys of learning to those who reject it?” 22 Shared experience allows for a deeper understanding of the experience being communicated. Among other contexts to be considered in interpretation, such as historical and literary contexts, spiritual context also matters: authors of Scripture addressed audiences in particular historical situations, but sometimes also living communities of faith that shared the spiritual realities presupposed by the authors. 23
Charismatic and prophetic experiences within the Bible take a variety of forms, so mere experience of prophecy or miracles does not mean that one’s experience is ontologically identical to any given biblical experience. It does, however, provide a sympathy for the experience and a window into such experiences generally in a way with which those without such experiences will not so readily identify. 24 That is, if we have experienced the Spirit in any way at all, we will be more apt to give at least a knowing nod to such experiences in Scripture than would someone for whom all such descriptions are puzzling enigmas of a past era or some sort of literary fiction.
Sharing biblical experiences, such as particular spiritual gifts (or for that matter spiritual fruit), affects how we conceptualize those experiences in Scripture. Note, for example, the way that some movies based on Acts depict speaking in tongues; someone who has experienced the gift might depict it differently. Certainly someone who knows the kind Lord Jesus personally would not recognize much of him in the unblinking, morose Jesus of Nazareth film, despite the film’s positive features.
Similarly, a long-term charismatic may identify with the ambiguities of prophetic experience depicted in 2 Kgs 2:3–5, 16–17 and Acts 21:4, 11–14, even though such ambiguities puzzle many other readers. 25 Likewise, interest in matters of the Spirit may help us to ask questions about and identify with experiences attested in Scripture but often ignored by interpreters. When Samuel was a boy visions were rare (1 Sam 3:1), but after his leadership prophets proliferated in Israel, even with multiple persons prophesying together, sometimes on the ground (10:5, 10; 19:20, 24). We may not all be groundbreaking prophetic leaders like Samuel but we can all learn from the spiritual experience depicted here and can pray for renewal. 26 The details of the experience are not filled in; the narrator probably assumes that his audience is familiar with the behavior of Israelite prophets. If we lack that familiarity, we may nevertheless understand better the prophets’ dynamic experience of sometimes overwhelming inspiration through our own experience of the Spirit.
I resort to my own example here because some writers on the subject today suppose that by citing Pentecostal tradition they have resolved what a Pentecostal hermeneutic should look like. Because I have ministered regularly in the gift of prophecy in certain periods of my life, I have not only an empathy for biblical prophets but also a sense of what prophetic inspiration sometimes feels like (although I can readily assure concerned cessationists that I have never written anything canonical). I also find such an experience in Scripture impossible to dismiss and easy to resonate with. 27 From one period in my life, I can identify with the intense alienation of Jeremiah from a society that rejected his message; from another, I can weep with God’s broken heart in the book of Hosea.
Whereas Dilthey found in common humanity a general means to connect author and reader, and those with traditional Middle Eastern or Mediterranean backgrounds 28 might find more specific common cultural connections with biblical texts, common spiritual experience also provides a valuable connection on a special level. 29 A more liberal or radical scholar who then experiences the activity of the Spirit will find it more difficult to dismiss reports in Scripture of supernatural activity; 30 someone from an anticharismatic background will after an experience of the Spirit find more sympathy for charismatic experience. Likewise, someone who experiences prophetic inspiration will find less plausible the archaic view of inspiration by mechanical dictation. 31
As someone who has moved in the gift of prophecy, I recognize that prophecy must be evaluated. I also recognize that a prophecy that I give to someone can mean something more precise and profound in their context than I could have imagined. 32 At the same time, my personal context normally imposes some limitations on the range of possible meanings—prophecies normally come in the speaker’s language and potential range of vocabulary, for example.
If someone prophesies, “The Lord says, ‘I will raise up a sword against the nations,’ ” a hearer might be right to infer from this a further warning against living for the values of this world. By contrast, someone who used this prophecy to assure themselves of imminent financial wealth by linking this with some other proof-texts, such as the wealth of the sinner being laid up for the righteous (Prov 13:22), would most likely be departing from the spirit of the message. If even prophecies do not mean just anything, I am not inclined to think that ancient inspired texts in more determinate genres mean just anything either, especially those in which the authors’ own use of sources and reasoning processes (as in, e.g., history or Paul’s biblical argumentation, respectively) were more fully engaged.
When Peter, filled with the Spirit (Acts 4:8), confronts Jerusalem’s elite in Acts 4:8–12, the latter observe that Peter and John lack elite education (4:13). They recognize that these fishermen speak boldly because they have been with Jesus (4:13). Yet Peter and John return and pray for continued boldness for believers (4:24, 29), which God granted by filling them all with the Spirit (4:31). Jesus calls (Luke 5:2, 10; 6:13) and empowers (Acts 2:4) not the proud but the lowly who depend on him. That was at least part of why the Spirit was given not to the elite but to the humble who obeyed God (5:32).
Scripture often indicates that God is near the broken but far from the proud (Ps 138:6; Prov 3:34; Matt 23:12; Luke 14:11; 18:14; Jas 4:6; 1 Pet 5:5). We should expect this claim to have hermeneutical implications. 33 Why should God reveal himself differently among those who read (or hear) the Bible than when he reveals himself more generally? Exegetes are sometimes proud of our knowledge; knowledge does, as Paul noted, tend to lead us to overestimate our status (1 Cor 8:1). Many of the early Pentecostals came from circles that were poor and socially marginalized; 34 many of us today would consider the dictates of some of these marginal holiness-oriented believers (even as early as Wesley and certainly William Law and most Puritans) too radical at times, 35 yet they were determined to obey what they believed God was teaching, no matter what the social cost. Granted, those who excel in what such circles value can develop a pride of their own, but in general, these were much humbler circles than those that dominated the most prestigious theological institutions at the time.
Most of the places experiencing the most profound spiritual revival today are also circles among the poor and the marginalized. 36 Whitefield’s and the Wesleys’ revivals began in the fields; compare also nineteenth-century American frontier revivals such as at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, 37 or upstate New York. 38 Various revivals toward the beginning of the twentieth century fit this pattern; for example, the Welsh revival of 1904–1905 flourished initially among mine workers and other marginal elements of Welsh society; 39 revival came to Pandita Ramabai’s orphanage in India in 1905; 40 a humble, one-eyed African-American Holiness preacher from the Jim Crow South led the Azusa Street Revival that began in 1906; “the Great Revival” of 1907 in Korea came at a time of national hardship and disappointment. 41 God has also poured out his Spirit among rural farmers in China in the 1980s, orphans in contemporary Mozambique, and others. 42
Even some of the more notable exceptions are not foreign to the general pattern. Thus the noonday prayer revival that often featured businessmen in 1857–58 followed a market crash in 1857. 43 The revival among Nigerian students in Scripture Union starting in 1967 followed in the wake of a tragic civil war that particularly devastated the largely Christian Southeast. 44 The Jesus Revival in the United States flourished among disaffected youth, and many student revivals, such as those at Asbury College, came among students dissatisfied with their current state and hungry for more of God. “How wonderful it will be for those who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness, for they’ll be fed” (Matt 5:6).
This is what liberation theology should lead us to expect, 45 and it is certainly what biblical theology leads us to expect. “How wonderful for the poor” (so Luke) and/or “How wonderful for the poor in spirit” (so Matthew), “for it’s to them that heaven’s kingdom belongs” (Matt 5:3; cf. Luke 6:20). “How wonderful for the humble,” that is, for those who aren’t puffed up with their own importance but are sensitive to others, “for they are the ones who will inherit the world to come” (Matt 5:5). Likewise, it is wonderful for the broken who will be comforted (5:4) and for those persecuted on account of righteousness and Jesus’s name (5:10–12).
Jesus did not come into this world in a palace in Jerusalem, though that is presumably where Magi first looked for him (Matt 2:1–2). Luke, in fact, probably contrasts Jesus at his birth with the respected emperor Augustus, whose inconvenient decree establishes part of the geographic premise of Luke’s birth narrative (Luke 2:1). Augustus claimed a universal empire, held together by force and propaganda; by contrast, Jesus was the true and benevolent ruler of humanity. 46
Augustus, emperor of the Mediterranean world
Jesus, the true, Davidic king destined to rule creation
Augustus was in a palace
Jesus was in an animal feeding trough (2:7)
Earthly choirs praised Augustus
Heavenly choirs praise Jesus at his birth (2:13)
Augustus boasted that he had established the Pax Romana
Jesus is associated with “peace on earth” (2:14)
Augustus was hailed as a “savior” and “lord”
“Today . . . there has been born for you a savior, Christ the Lord” (2:11)
Augustus was attended by the powerful
Jesus’s birth was attended by shepherds, a socially marginal group, and the hosts of heaven (2:8, 13)
Augustus held the highest status in the Mediterranean world
Jesus was born to a young Galilean couple in what could appear a scandalous situation (2:5)
Two chapters later, Luke summarizes Jesus’s mission in part as good news to the poor (Luke 4:18). When Jesus summarizes his signs that indicate the messianic era, Jesus lists various miracles and then concludes—or perhaps even climaxes—with preaching good news to the poor (Matt 11:5//Luke 7:22). The poor are objects of Jesus’s first beatitude (Luke 6:20; cf. Matt 5:3). Although Luke apparently dedicates his volume to a person of status (Luke 1:3), among the few wealthy people who make it through the eye of a needle (cf. 6:24; 8:14; 12:21; 16:22–23; esp. 18:25) in his Gospel are those who sacrifice for the poor (19:8; cf. 14:12–14) or who risk their very lives to honor Jesus (23:52). 47
Likewise, Jesus chose fishermen (Luke 5:10) and a tax collector (5:27) as his disciples. That these are the only professions specifically named among Jesus’s disciples may suggest that the other disciples had even less prestigious occupations; the vast majority of Galileans were probably peasants, so fishermen and tax collectors made a better living than most. By contrast, apparently none of Jesus’s chief disciples were scribes; none belonged to the more prestigious sect of the Pharisees, and certainly none belonged to the Sadducean chief priestly elite in Jerusalem. 48 With few and private exceptions, it was not the intellectual elite of Jesus’s day, but the lowly, who followed him. “I praise you, Father,” Jesus prayed, “for you hid these matters from the wise and intellectual and revealed them to little children” (Matt 11:25//Luke 10:21). Only those who welcome the kingdom like a child will enter it (Mark 10:15).
On a spiritual level and beyond the methodological level, Augustine and Anselm speak of faith seeking understanding; 49 likewise Luther and Calvin elevated faith above reason. 50 For Luther, one not immersed in Scripture and engaged in the service of the church could understand it no more than one could understand Virgil’s Bucolics or Georgics without being a herder or farmer. 51 Barth deemed faith necessary for true understanding. 52 Our information and intellects are finite, so the greater wisdom is to trust first the omniscient one. Intellectuals may not like it, since this is not the epistemic approach that we have cultivated and for which we have diligently labored, but Jesus declared that is the way God arranged matters. We are justified by trust, not by merit or personal advantage, including intellect.
Far be it from me to suggest that knowledge hinders our study of Scripture; Proverbs urges us to seek knowledge diligently (Prov 8:17; 15:14; 18:15). (I revisit this subject later when briefly responding to those who suppose otherwise.) 53 But Proverbs also warns us against considering ourselves wise (3:7; 12:15; 26:5, 12, 16), and that true wisdom and knowledge begin with fearing God (Prov 1:7; 9:10; 15:33; cf. Ps 111:10). It is a fool who counts his way right in his own eyes and is therefore unwilling to learn from others (Prov 12:15; cf. 26:12, 16). Isaiah, too, condemns those who are wise in their own eyes (Isa 5:21).
The humble read Scripture not simply to reinforce their knowledge, but with desperation and/or faith to hear God there. They read with dependence on God, trusting the Holy Spirit to lead them. Methods and information help us, but there is no mechanical substitute for expecting to meet God in the study of Scripture. 54 That was a way of reading among early Pentecostals and remains prevalent in the Pentecostalism of the Majority World today (see further discussion in Part II ). Early Pentecostals insisted on “a proper attitude of reception” toward the text; this would yield more fresh insights, they believed, than simply organizing biblical information systematically, which anyone without spiritual insight could also do. 55 The expectation of meeting God in the text, of course, was never limited to Pentecostals. 56 Wesley, for example, urged continual meditation on Scripture in order to “attain the best knowledge,” namely, knowing God. 57
Scholarship has gifts to bring to traditional Pentecostal spirituality; yet traditional Pentecostal spirituality also has gifts to bring to scholars as readers who are also human beings. These observations remain relevant even for some emerging scholarship in the Majority World, since the published, educated minority within the Majority World who often have Western-related education and a hearing in the West may differ from grassroots Christian voices. 58 That is, you do not need to abandon your precious experience of God simply in order to satisfy Western elites often insulated from wider realities. These observations serve as an even greater warning to us tenured Western professors who may teach and write in insulated cultural bubbles. “Whoever does not receive God’s reign like a child will surely not enter it” (Mark 10:15).
Peter recognizes that Jesus’s followers now live in a special, biblically promised time, the “last days” when God will pour out his Spirit and save those who call on Jesus Christ (Acts 2:17–21). Peter’s understanding remains incomplete at this point (10:28–29), but already God is teaching a new messianic, and therefore eschatological, framework for conceptualizing Scripture (cf. Luke 24:27, 44–49; Acts 3:18, 24; 10:43).
Early Pentecostals believed that they were in the last days. Reading the context of Joel’s promised last-days outpouring in Joel 2:28–29, often they envisioned their own time as a “latter rain” corresponding to the “former rain” (2:23) on the day of Pentecost. 59 Unfortunately, this allegorical reading of Israel’s climate conditions likely misses Joel’s point. The heart of early Pentecostals’ intuition about the last days, though, was surely right. They were biblically right to see themselves as part of an end-time church. 60 This eschatological perspective has often characterized the church in times of renewal. 61
God did not pour out the Spirit on Pentecost, pour the Spirit back for most of history and then pour the Spirit out again in their own day. Nor did God start the last days, allow some days after those last days that were not really last days, and now will conclude with some more last days. Surely the Spirit did not cease his activity after the book of Acts concluded. The early Pentecostal restorationist approach simply adopted contemporary cessationism and modified it by making the cessation temporary. Whatever history looked like from early Pentecostals’ vantage point or that of Reformers or restorationists before them, Scripture does not prescribe an intervening period of spiritual inactivity, even if spiritual activity is certainly necessary to achieve some events predicted before the end (Matt 24:14; Rom 11:12, 25–26). 62 Throughout Scripture, there was an ebb and flow of spiritual activity, of apostasy and what we call revival, of periods of abandonment and repentance.
The biblical approach was neither (with many cessationists) to envision a present interim era unlike the biblical period, nor (with many early Pentecostals) to envision a new revival that ended such an interim. Rather, the last-days Spirit poured out at Pentecost was God’s empowerment for the church’s mission in the world, hence should have been appropriated at all times. That much of history looked different speaks to the church’s failures (today often included), not to any deficiency of the Spirit’s availability. On the experiential level, however, this amounts to what Pentecostalism claimed to experience: God’s Spirit-empowered people are eschatological.
From the standpoint of the New Testament, Jesus’s people should always recognize ourselves as living in what scholars have dubbed the “already/not yet.” Jesus not only announced the coming kingdom; his signs were a foretaste of the fulness of that kingdom (Matt 12:28//Luke 11:20). When John the Baptist heard that Jesus was healing the sick but not baptizing in fire, he questioned Jesus’s identity (Matt 11:3//Luke 7:19). But Jesus responded by framing the healings in language that evoked the promised restoration (Matt 11:5//Luke 7:22; Isa 35:5; 61:1); his signs were a foretaste of the promised new world, when healing and deliverance would be complete. The majestic kingdom was already present like an obscure mustard seed, recognizable only to those who had the eyes of faith (Mark 4:31–32).
Similarly, Paul declares that Christ has delivered us from this present evil age (Gal 1:4), to which he urges us not to be conformed (Rom 12:2). Instead of being conformed to this age, we should think with minds made new—that is, conformed to the standards of the promised coming age. 63 This approach reveals Paul’s understanding about the eschatological era impinging on the present, and naturally demands that we read Scripture from this eschatological perspective as well (cf. Paul’s pneumatic qualification of biblical denials that mortals can understand God, in 1 Cor 2:9–10 and 2:16). 64 Paul read Scripture as relevant for God’s people living at the ends of the ages (1 Cor 10:11). The Spirit is the first fruits of the promised future harvest (Rom 8:23), the down payment on our future inheritance in the world to come (2 Cor 1:22; 5:5; Eph 1:13–14). Thus the incomparable riches of the promised future, currently depicted in words only through the imagery of apocalyptic similitudes, is already experienced as a foretaste through the Spirit (1 Cor 2:9–10). As another early Christian put it, we have “tasted the powers of the coming world” (Heb 6:5).
If, as most commentators believe, the child snatched up to rule the nations in Rev 12:5 is Jesus, the believers suffering for his name in the rest of that chapter are living in an eschatological time. At least in passages like this one, the eschatological tribulation expected by many Jewish people probably represents instead the entire present era, a period of birth pangs preceding the new world (cf. also Rom 8:22). 65
In explaining the outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, Peter depicts his own era as experiencing the “last days.” Peter’s “last days” alters the text of Joel, substituting “In the last days” for Joel’s “afterward,” but this change simply highlights the implications of the context that he does not go on to cite. 67 “In the last days” (and related expressions such as “last times”) was a biblical phrase that applied especially to the period of Israel’s promised restoration, which Jewish hopes now fixed in the eschatological time (Isa 2:2; Hos 3:5; Mic 4:1; Dan 2:28). 68
This title for the eschatological period of restoration also applied to a period of great suffering just before that restoration (Jer 23:20; 30:24; Ezek 38:16; Dan 10:14), 69 a period that Jewish tradition expected to produce apostasy among the insincere. 70 Christian texts likewise mention an eschatological period of suffering and apostasy (cf. Mark 13:9–13; Rom 8:22; 1 John 2:18), often designating it as the present, final period before the end (1 Tim 4:1; 71 2 Tim 3:1; 2 Pet 3:3). As a time of final suffering, the last days prefigured the final “day of the Lord” (Acts 2:20); as a time of Israel’s restoration, they were identical with it or followed it. Thus the phrase roughly means “the eschatological time.”
Early Christians consistently viewed this eschatological time as the period in which they were living (1 Tim 4:1; 2 Tim 3:1; Heb 1:2; Jas 5:3; 1 Pet 1:20; 2 Pet 3:3; Ign. Eph. 11.1). 72 There is no reason to suppose that Luke intends the phrase (Acts 2:17) any differently, especially since the title would be meaningless if it were to be followed by other periods not characterized as “last,” “final” or “eschatological.”
Luke thus surely means his programmatic use of Joel as theologically prescriptive and not merely historically descriptive; that is, he believes that the church of his day continues, or should continue, to experience the outpouring of the Spirit and concomitant prophesying. “In the last days . . . I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and daughters will prophesy; and your young people will see visions; and your elders will dream dreams. Indeed, I will pour out my Spirit on my male and female servants alike, and they will prophesy” (Acts 2:17–18). Lest anyone miss the point, Peter adds to the text of Joel a further, clarifying line, “and they will prophesy.” Prophetic empowerment of God’s people characterizes the eschatological era in which Jesus’s followers live.
Luke must view the promise as valid for all believers in his day, given his appeal to a text referring to “all flesh” (i.e., all kinds of people, Acts 2:17) and his emphasis that the gift was for their descendants, even those far away (2:39). The idea that such empowerment or its prophetic expressions had ceased in his day, or was scheduled to cease before the Lord’s return, is one that, given Luke’s language, surely could not have occurred to Luke. For Luke, such activity characterizes the eschatological era in which the church lives; Luke would hardly emphasize that this era was inaugurated on Pentecost and then expect us to infer, without clear evidence, that the era would be phased out before its consummation at Christ’s return. 73 God would hardly pour out his Spirit, then pour it back again! 74 Indeed, such a contradiction would have played into the hands of those who questioned whether the eschatological Messiah had genuinely come, and would undermine Luke’s apologetic and theology of fulfillment.
Further, Luke presents the interim messianic era of Christ’s reign at the Father’s right hand (2:34–35) as in continuity with God’s activity in Scripture. If this eschatological era continues “biblical” experience, then it is relevant that, despite ebbs and flows, Luke believes that prophetism was always active in biblical history (Acts 3:18, 21, 24). Those who received the message would, indeed, be “children of the prophets” as well as of Abraham (cf. 3:25). 75 Not surprisingly, Christian prophecy did continue in later centuries, 76 and later opponents of Christianity continued to attack it. 77
Pentecost and Its Subsequent Revivals
If God poured out the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, then much of what we envision as “revival” is simply part of the normal Christian life. It is not the sole possession of one part of the body of Christ, as if other parts may dismiss it as a sectarian or divisive issue; it is part of God’s gift, and it is unholy and a sin against God to despise it (cf. 1 Thess 5:20). At the same time, it is not something that belongs to a label, as if calling ourselves “Pentecostal” or “charismatic” means that we have it, reducing it to a merely sectarian possession. It does not come with labels or with a theology that merely affirms it. It comes from obedient faith in God’s gift to his church.
The early Christians saw themselves as living both in the last days and in the continuation of the biblical era, expecting God to act in their own day. As one Dominican observer noted, what was particularly distinctive about the early-twentieth-century Pentecostal movement was not so much tongues as that they belonged to “the life of the church of the apostles, the ‘church of Pentecost’ ”; they understood the renewal of prophecy, healing and the like “as signs that they were bringing in the ‘last times.’ ” 78 That is, their continuity with the apostolic church was also a foretaste and herald of the coming kingdom.
Although early Pentecostals, like other restorationist movements of their era, did overemphasize much of their own distinctive role in the history of the church, they rightly understood the biblical perspective that our experience of the Spirit is eschatological. Whether restorationists rightly understood the larger scheme of history, they were often right that they were restoring emphases or experiences that their contemporaries had forgotten. And, theological restorationism aside, early Pentecostals did ultimately play a historic role in restoring to the wider church the recognition that spiritual gifts should continue (although in so doing they were part of a wider movement of radical evangelical predecessors, such as A. B. Simpson’s Missionary Alliance).
As various scholars have shown, early Pentecostals saw the restoration of the gifts as a sign of Christ’s imminent return, and this eschatological hope helped drive the growth of Pentecostalism. 79 Although many early Pentecostals accepted the classical dispensationalist eschatology popular at the time, their perspective also continued the expectant eschatology of the holiness movement, which viewed the present era of the church as the era of the Spirit. 80 Moreover, in contrast to the classical dispensationalist relegation of certain events to the past and/or future, these believers appropriated more of the principles of Scripture for the present. 81 Classical dispensationalism’s increasing dominance in the fundamentalist environment surrounding early Pentecostals to a great extent overwhelmed the more distinctive and relevant elements in early Pentecostal eschatology, 82 but biblical scholarship (not least George Eldon Ladd’s emphasis on the already/not yet of the kingdom) has led to a widespread resurgence in what was much closer to the original spiritual impetus of the Pentecostal revival.
God sometimes acts in different ways in different times; Christians today often speak of those special periods as periods of revival or awakening. In some settings and times, miracles seem to happen regularly, and in other times more rarely; we need to recognize the element of God’s sovereignty. At the same time, he welcomes us to pray for his activity (cf. Acts 4:29–30) and promises to hear us (Luke 11:13). Living in the reality of God’s word and the presence of his Spirit is something that can characterize our lives all the time, and make us increasingly ready for whatever other ways God may pour out the Spirit in our time and place. Faith may be expressed in expectancy, and this faith may itself express the sense that God is moving, a sense based on God’s own activity in our hearts. As noted further below (pp. 174–76), biblical faith is not “make-believe,” or wishing hard; 83 it is a spiritual sense that has eyes to see and ears to hear, recognizing that God is trustworthy and, in light of some biblical passages, recognizing that God is acting or recognizing what God is doing. Faith is the sound and appropriate response to God’s reliability.
Noncessationist, or Continuationist, Reading
When we apply texts, we look for continuity between the message of the text and circumstances today. This process is not limited to, but is much simpler for, those whose theology allows a greater degree of continuity. Without biblical support, hard cessationists (the sort of cessationists primarily criticized in this book) posit radical discontinuity at some significant points. 84
When I was a young Christian I attended some Bible studies taught by a strong traditional dispensationalist (not the current, “progressive dispensationalist” kind). Some of these extreme dispensationalists did not believe that even baptism or the Lord’s Supper was for this dispensation, accepting only what was taught in Paul’s prison epistles. I found that approach extreme and disagreed with them regarding spiritual gifts. Nevertheless, I appreciated their love for the parts of the Bible that they did apply, and for several months I accepted the basic premise of radical discontinuity between the testaments until my continued study of Scripture made it unworkable.
Reading Paul, I soon realized that he grounds his arguments for salvation by faith in Christ in the Old Testament, himself accepting its relevance. If he was wrong, the most I could salvage of my young faith was Jesus plus the Old Testament, and I would need to practice the law. As I worked through Deuteronomy, however, I discovered that it was full of grace. God had always saved people by grace through faith; the change or discontinuity had to do not with grace but with newer revelations and revelatory events in salvation history, the ultimate one, of course, being God becoming flesh and dying and rising for us. But reading the Bible for continuity wherever possible helped me to welcome its message for my own life today. 85
Some hard cessationists have argued that although no clear text announces that the gifts would pass away after the close of the canon, neither do any texts argue the opposite. This is truly a curious way of arguing, since one would expect such a dramatic shift away from both Old and New Testament prophetic models to be announced explicitly in Scripture. Instead Paul seems to assume that prophecy and tongues remain until we see Jesus face to face, partial knowledge being valuable until it is supplanted by perfect knowledge as we are known (1 Cor 13:8–12).
This cessationist argument also appears a curious tactic when we consider the selective nature of the reasoning. Would someone argue that the unity of Christ’s multigifted body would pass away with the completion of the canon unless there is explicit evidence to the contrary (cf. Eph 4:11–13)? Or more analogously, would someone argue that once the canon is complete we no longer need the gift of teaching? Why some gifts and not others? (Teaching seems to run more risk of competing with the canon than tongues would.) Some people argue that we should not use instrumental music if it is not mentioned in the New Testament; others might respond that they might well then exclude cars and electric lights. 86
But the hard cessationist makes a still stranger claim: he or she excludes something that is in the Bible (such as prophecy throughout biblical history and the biblical command to pursue it in 1 Cor 14:1, 39), without any evidence that it was supposed to stop. The basis for this is not Scripture but a theological inference about Scripture. Ironically, this is a postbiblical doctrine—the very thing that hard cessationists claim most to fear from allowing postbiblical prophecies!
In contrast to such an approach, it seems more biblically faithful to read the biblical narrative as a model for understanding how God works in our world, and to live in the light of that narrative. Such a reading takes faith, inviting an entirely new worldview or approach to reality around us. It introduces the expectation of a God who works actively in the world around us. We thus both trust his providence in our lives, and expect his Spirit to guide us and to perform unusual works where he finds them appropriate to further his purposes.
Such a reading invites us to experience God’s activity in the way that early Christians did, provided we are willing to engage in the same wholehearted commitment mission that they did. This was true in the radical evangelism of early US Methodism. From Francis Asbury’s arrival in the US until his death, Methodists grew a thousand times over. 87 Near the end of his life, Asbury warned that the Reformation removed only some of the corruption that had quenched the spirit of the first-century church. The 1784 church conference in which he became the church’s leader formed “an apostolic form of Church government.” 88 Some, he warned, questioned whether the church of today could, “as in former apostolical days, have such doctrines, such discipline, such convictions, such conversions, such witnesses of sanctification, and such holy men. But I say that we can; I say we must; yea, I say we have . . .” 89
Absorbing biblical perspectives is necessary for a healthy Christian life. Immersing ourselves only in world news can breed despair; some eschatological approaches breed fear. Immersion in Scripture, however, allows us to identify with God’s people before us (e.g., 1 Cor 10:1–12); we have been through such crises before. Even biblical predictions of final suffering usually give way to final biblical hope beyond it. Immersing ourselves in Scripture reinforces our confidence that the ultimate future lies in the hands of the sovereign Lord, who is worthy of our trust.
As cultural background once shared by biblical authors and their first audiences may help readers to fill gaps in the text, so too shared spiritual experience may help us relate to experiences in the text, e.g., understanding what it feels like (at least in some cases) to experience the Spirit’s guidance, visions, or prophecy. At times an inner restlessness guards me against approaching a passage as I intended, forcing me to prayerfully and exegetically wrestle with the text until both my intellect and my spirit are satisfied. Living by faith in God’s present activity affects our reception of Scripture.
Reading from the vantage point of Pentecost includes knowing God’s heart, reading missionally, reading from within Spirit-filled experience, reading with the humble, reading eschatologically, and reading with ourselves as part of the theological world that Scripture narrates.