Pneuma最新文献

Margery Kempe is an intriguing figure in medieval England. Following a dramatic conversion experience, Kempe feels called to conform her life to that of Christ. This illiterate wife and mother of fourteen senses God’s desire for her to (pay scribes to) put her extraordinary religious encounters on paper. The Book of Margery Kempe becomes the first autobiography written in the English language. While Kempe’s Book has received scholarly interest for its record of a middle-class woman’s lived experience, it has been largely neglected from theological investigation—due, in part, to Kempe’s unseemly devotional style. Known for her copious tears and bouts of loud sobbing, Kempe did not conform to the devotio moderna of her day. The present article will introduce The Book and address the heightened emotion so particular to this author. It will, finally, point to anointed aspects of Kempe’s experience meriting a pentecostal designation.

After some basic background and outlining of key contextual elements, this article examines the commentaries of William Branham, O.L. Jaggers, Gordon Lindsay, and Frank Stranges on the rise and growing popularity of the UFO phenomenon through the 1950s and 1960s. This brief survey tracks the shift from pluralistic interpretations to the dominant demonic interpretation while highlighting the accompanying nationalistic and apocalyptic milieu. It concludes with a brief deconstruction to clear the ground for future potential research.

Even laypersons, such as systematic theologians, who are not trained in law enforcement are familiar enough with crime investigation to know that the detective works circles around a few simple questions such as: Who committed the crime? What happened? How was the crime executed? Why did the criminal do what he or she did? In the first part of my essay, as a way of introducing the nature, “method,” and distinctive features as well as the motifs behind the five-volume constructive theology, I will follow that simple template. The second major part will zoom in on the given task of this essay, namely, the theology of the first article of the creed, the doctrine of God. As the distinctive Christian conception of God is trinitarian by its very nature, that discussion in its form and content is thoroughly triune. Consequently, my main argument comes in two successive steps. First, the first-article theology—similarly to the second- and third-article theologies, respectively—is trinitarian. Second, its distinctive feature in comparison to the second- and third-article theologies is that the works of the triune God are considered and investigated from the perspective of what the Father, alongside Son and Spirit, is doing in the world.

This response proceeds in two parts. It begins by conversing with the broad-strokes sketch Frank Macchia offers in his article in this issue and his christological thoughts from his other, more extensive work. This is followed by an articulation of the author’s pentecostal Christology to offer a teleological assist to fill in some of the gaps in Macchia’s approach. The telos of Christology is to witness and testify to the forming of the character of Christ in all things (Col 1:17). This complementing response to Macchia utilizes one of the significant Jewish particularities of Jesus the Spirit baptizer, outlined in the definition of anointing that he spoke at his inaugural sermon in Nazareth. Jesus’s Jewish identity creates a framework to christologize in a way that is informed by the author’s context as an Indonesian pentecostal theologian.

The terms first, second, and third article theology are relatively new, and theologians use them equivocally. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen’s first article theology focuses on the doctrines of God, revelation, and creation in and of themselves, that is, on theological topics broadly associated with the first article of the Creed. Another way to approach first article theology is to make a theology of the Father the perspective from which to view other systematic loci. Pentecostal theologians might benefit from such a theological inquiry, if for no other reason than as an exercise in the discipline associated with rigorous systematic thinking and as training in the kind of speculative theology that they have traditionally avoided. A methodology marked by a theology of the Father in trinitarian perspective and brought to bear upon other systematic loci might be compatible with a methodology marked by the liturgical theology axiom lex orandi, lex credendi.

In pouring forth the Spirit, Christ fulfills his mission to baptize others “in the Holy Spirit.” In so doing, he also opens himself to history, to his ecclesial and cosmic identity, in a new way, but in a way that is faithful to that which has gone before. Though fundamentally defined by his own sojourn in the Spirit to Pentecost as the divine Son of his Father in flesh, victorious over sin and death, he is now, at Pentecost, to be experienced in contextually diverse ways. Pentecost is therefore the pivot point from the Christ as bearer of the Spirit who gave himself for the salvation of the world to Christ as the one who pours forth the Spirit so as to take humanity in all of its diversity up into the divine communion. In what follows I will attempt to sketch in broad strokes my thoughts on Christology.

This article proposes a pentecostal theology of the Holy Spirit. It argues that the Holy Spirit plays a central role in the narrative of redemption from creation to eschaton. Indeed, the telos of redemption is the outpouring of the Spirit of Pentecost that culminates in the eschatological promise of the new creation. This eschatological work of the Holy Spirit indicates the Spirit’s immanent identity and agency as the divine person who completes the fellowship of the triune God. It begins with detailing areas of traditional pentecostal theology that prevent the development of pentecostal pneumatology that reflects the central place of the Holy Spirit in pentecostal experience and the biblical narrative of redemption. It then builds the case for a pentecostal pneumatology on the Holy Spirit’s role in the narrative of redemption from creation to eschaton. It concludes with a pentecostal account of the Holy Spirit’s identity in the immanent Trinity. Throughout, it articulates this pentecostal pneumatology considering the classical pentecostal theology of Spirit baptism and traditional Western and Eastern trinitarian theologies.

Studebaker’s overarching thesis is that “the Holy Spirit is the telos of redemption and, therefore, the divine person that consummates the fellowship of the triune God.” This thesis reflects not only the trajectory of current pentecostal scholarship, but the very core of Eastern Orthodox pneumatology that has primed the theological imagination and sacramental life of many Eastern European Pentecostals. This present reflection highlights a few questions that invite further engagement and offers a brief contemplation on three related subthemes within the proposal, pointing to some helpful insights from the Orthodox tradition. These subthemes are the event of Pentecost as the theotic telos of creation; the Spirit and the resurrection; and the redemptive significance of Spirit baptism (focusing on the pentecostal experience of glossolalia and xenolalia).