Types of Pentecostal Theology: Method, system,
spirit
Christopher A. Stephenson
OUP £45
(978-0-19-991679-5)
Church Times Bookshop £40.50 (Use code
CT632 )
WHEN I attended a Two Choirs Festival in a large Pentecostal
church in the high-tech Brazilian city of Campinas, conducted by a
woman and ending with the "Hallelujah Chorus", I saw Pentecostalism
coming of age aesthetically. This book, with its Greek epigraph,
massive bibliographical apparatus, and a Preface signing off on
"All Souls' Day, 2011", shows Pentecostalism coming of age
intellectually.
It shows how a popular movement, now more than a century old,
reflects on its religious experience as it fosters aspiration,
acquires education, and ceases to be socially marginal. There are
interesting stories behind the bare facts of educational
advancement: among an older generation, Myer Pearlman was a Jew
born in Scotland who emigrated to the United States before becoming
converted at the Glad Tidings Mission in San Francisco. He was
acquainted with several languages, and engaged in a pre-critical
exegesis of the Bible which assumed that it was easily accessible
to common sense through a scrutiny of the meanings of individual
words, and through gathering information from the whole corpus of
scripture before arranging it in theological categories.
Since the 1970s, Pentecostal theologians have been confident
enough to engage in ecumenical dialogue and to understand other
religions in a Pentecostal perspective concerning the workings of
the Spirit. Simon Chan, who teaches at Trinity Theological College,
Singapore, has a Cambridge doctorate supervised by Eamon Duffy;
Frank Macchia has a doctorate from Basel; and Amos Yong (born in
Malaysia) has a doctorate from Boston University.
What Stephenson offers is an assessment of Pentecostal
theologians looking into their methodological self-awareness; their
conception of the relations between scripture and tradition, and
theology and philosophy; their epistemological and hermeneutic
assumptions; and, crucially, their treatment of eschatology and
pneumatology.
His chapters address, in turn, methods emphasising the relation
of theology to spirituality, the virtues, and the "affections",
including, in Chan's case, liturgical theology; methods taking the
Kingdom of God as their starting-point (Macchia), including a
theology of baptism in the Spirit; and methods that make
pneumatology a foundation for philosophical theology (Yong), and
for understanding the God-world relation. Interestingly, Yong
discusses resurrection and disability.
In this book, Stephenson pre-sents thinkers to be engaged with
seriously, and, for himself, pro-poses a Pentecostal theology
incorporating a form of lex orandi, lex credendi
for the enrichment of Pentecostal theology and spirituality.
The Revd Dr David Martin is Emeritus Professor of Sociology
at the London School of Economics.