EPS Blog

The first thing I say is that I identify myself as a pentecostal scholar. What does it mean to be a pentecostal scholar? It means not dismissing pentecostal spirituality, pentecostal life, pentecostal practices, pentecostal ways of being in the world, and since there’s sometimes a lot of craziness going on in those ways of being in the world, it makes it a very exciting job!

In other words, as a pentecostal I don’t want to bracket all of that. As a pentecostal, I theologize with all of that, which is very messy. 

Certainly the role of the Holy Spirit in pentecostal imagination and worldview is prominent. So in that respect, it may be that pentecostals are more attentive to the Holy Spirit.

But as a theologian I also want to step back and say, “let’s also take, for example, the evangelical tradition which may not foreground the work of the Holy Spirit quite that much.” Now here I am asking a theological normative question: For evangelical foregrounding of the Spirit, does it mean that the Holy Spirit isn’t at work just that much? I probably want to say something like No. For the Holy Spirit is at work whether you or I name the Spirit.

But it’s possible that one may not have or use what I call ‘pneumatological language’ to foreground the Spirit’s work. So are we theologizing about the same thing but using different languages? That may be possible. I think what is distinctive is the kind of things we are paying attention to.

My way of looking at the world as a pentecostal may probably mean that I am more comfortable saying that just because there’s a lot of craziness, it doesn’t mean that we want to throw out the baby with the bath water. It does mean that discerning the work of the Holy Spirit will be a lot more complicated and we have to make some very fine distinctions in a particular phenomenon. In other words, to say whether the Holy Spirit is working here or not here seems a little bit artificial, so we will have to cultivate what I have called ‘pneumatological sensitivity.’

Discernment has to be a very precise kind of a thing in terms of how the Spirit is present or not present here, and even when we say that the Spirit is not working here, how then is the Spirit still working redemptively in this very dark scenario?

I like that. Because I do think at the end of the day, at some fundamental level, all Christians are interested in this question – the question of drawing attention to how God is present – and they all should be.

Yes, so I’ve just re-read Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections, a well-recognized classic treatment of the subject. A careful reading of it will show that Edwards worked very hard to develop criteria, and to be nuanced, and to be very sensitive about other different ways of discerning things. He doesn’t want to be presumptive. I think this should be something that resonates with pentecostals.

I know Edwards is not a pentecostal in our sense of the term, and as a pastor he’s very concerned about these things. Colonialism is in the background coupled with a kind of bias against enthusiasm. Edwards is attentive to this.

Maybe a pentecostal bias, or “colored” perspective – to use your term – is less suspicious, which opens up a possibility, perhaps  of naming and discerning these materials. Edwards can be very helpful for us. For he still provides a kind of well-received classical way of articulating these things at a certain level of theological respectability. Pentecostals are a little bit used to the messiness of reality, but Edwards is still very helpful. He’s a good conversation partner. And we can help call attention to that. That could be a good starting point.

The tradition hands these issues down to us in a way that is both helpful and unhelpful. In one sense, we speak of “faith and reason.” But sometimes we speak of using earlier terms like “enthusiasm” and “religion within the limit of reason alone” – these are like poles on two sides of a spectrum. I think it’s helpful in some respects like when we’re talking about the left brain and the right brain. There’s day and night, there’s male and female. I do think at one level pentecostalism puts its fingers on those aspects of the human constitution such as the affective, the emotional, the subjective.

But with all of this, I want to say something like this: I want to be sensitive to the lesson we learned from modern liberalism. It’s not a mere return to Schleiermacher’s  kind of pietism, but not returning to that doesn’t mean to not attend to the affective, the pietistic, and the emotive at bodily level.

Yes. I guess being a pentecostal, because of the foregrounding of affective reason and embodiment, affectivity and emotion is not mere emotionalism, mere spiritualism. Some people may think pentecostalism is all about the spiritual, I think as a pentecostal scholar I try to call attention to my own pentecostal friends about the fact that  our spirituality is not much about otherworldliness.

We are very concerned with the material, the affective way of inhabiting this world. As a pentecostal scholar I think it’s very difficult to separate reason from faith, the emotion from the intellect, and the body from the spirit. Maybe pentecostals can help Christians think about all these things in their intertwined, interdependent, and interconstitutive manner. We have a take on it.

I try to encourage my pentecostal scholarly friends to keep helping us all to think about this and maybe perhaps our combined reflection will contribute to the broader Christian discourse, which I think will need a little bit of help in all these points. I would suggest a pentecostal approach that is holistic, paying attention to embodiment and the material dimension. That perspective is a springboard for me to think in interdisciplinary terms. All of this is helpful to think in terms of the embodied and social dimensions of our life. So for me this pneumatological imagination has already been interdisciplinary.