The Pneuma Review » Amos Yong

Evangelicals in the Public Square

Amos Yong — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 11:14:49 +0000

J. Budziszewski, et al., Evangelicals in the Public Square: Four Formative Voices on Political Thought and Action (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 218 pages, ISBN 9780801031564.

J. Budziszewski is professor of philosophy and government at the University of Texas at Austin, and has written a number of well-recognized books on political theory, politics and virtue ethics, tolerance and liberalism, and natural law ethics, among other topics. For the project which formed the backbone to this book, a conference was sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Prouts Neck, Maine, in September of 2003, where initial drafts of the essays published here were presented. In this review, I will summarize the book’s structure and arguments, briefly explicate on the central dilemma plaguing the formation of an evangelical political theology, and comment on why these matters are of relevance also to Pentecostal and charismatic Christians today.

After a short introduction by Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the two lead essays by Budziszewski, which constitute more than half of the book, lay out the basic issues and set the tone of discussion for the volume. In the first essay, Budziszewski suggests that one major reason why evangelicals have not yet developed a robust political theology is that their commitments to grounding any theological agenda biblically do not work well with the fact that there are insufficient biblical guidelines for such a task. In fact, political theology needs a more hearty acknowledgment of the role of general revelation precisely in order to provide a theological justification for evangelical engagement in matters related to the wider public square, as well as theological guidelines for how evangelicals might concretely proceed. But, as Budziszewski then attempts to show in his second longer essay on the four formative thinkers announced in the book’s subtitle— Carl F. H. Henry, Abraham Kuyper, Francis Schaeffer, and John Howard Yoder — evangelical hesitation about embracing this particular theological idea (of general revelation) further complicates their already difficult task. In Budziszewski’s analysis, the political theology each of these evangelical thinkers suffers because they falters at key points in their projects with regard to the doctrine of general revelation: Henry is hampered by a nagging premillennial and dispensationalist defeatism in addition to an ambivalence about the (perhaps all to Catholic) idea of general revelation; Kuyper by an underdevelopment of his ideas of common grace, sphere sovereignty (of the state, society, and the church), and principled pluralism; Schaeffer by an unbalanced emphasis on apologetics which in turn neglected the pragmatic dimensions of engaging the public square, as well as by his acceptance of the presuppositionalist school of apologetics along with its suspicion regarding general revelation; and Yoder by a sectarian and countercultural orientation which is not predisposed to exploring the continuities between Christians and non-Christians, even for the purposes of public engagement. As a result, these four evangelical theologians, as formative as any for evangelical thought and action, have been unable to bequeath to their descendents the much needed resources to more fully develop the kinds of orienting ideas, practical programs, and cultural apologetics needed for a more vibrant evangelical political theology today.

The remainder of the volume includes four essays by scholars responding to Budziszewski’s readings of these evangelical theologians and a concluding after word reflecting on the conference discussion as a whole. David Weeks, a Henry scholar and political science professor at Azusa Pacific University, attempts to provide a thicker description of Henry as an evangelical theologian as well as fill out, in dialogue with Henry, some of the details which Budziszewski has identified with regard to the formulation of an evangelical political theology. Similarly, John Bolt, a Kuyper scholar and systematician at Calvin Theological Seminary, basically agrees with Budziszewski’s remarks about Kuyper, but provides a further elaboration of how the Kuyperian theological vision can be reappropriated in the service of evangelical thought and political action. Not surprisingly, William Edgar, a presuppositionalist philosopher and theologian at Westminster Theological Seminary, responds to Budziszewski both by locating the larger socio-cultural, political, and theological framework of Schaeffer’s apologetics and by explicating how the logic of presuppositionalism leads to a different set of concerns that may be complementary rather than opposed to the logic derived from a commitment to the doctrine of general revelation. Finally, Ashley Woodiwiss, a political scientist at Wheaton College, responds that even if one cannot go all the way with Yoder, yet one must respect how his Anabaptist and Mennonite perspective informed his scholarship and produced vision of the gospel focuses on the church as an alternative politics, an distinctive praxis, and a subversive mode of cultural engagement, all of which combine to perhaps even undermine the received framework of questions concerning evangelicalism as well as political theology. The book concludes with Jean Bethke Elshtain’s (Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago “A Friendly Outsider’s Reflections” (her title) on the entire exchange.

Jelle Creemers: Theological Dialogue with Classical Pentecostals

Amos Yong — Sat, 06 May 2017 21:23:58 +0000

Jelle Creemers, Theological Dialogue with Classical Pentecostals: Challenges and Opportunities, Ecclesiological Investigations 23 (New York and London: Bloomsbury/T & T Clark, 2015), x + 320 pages.

The Roman Catholic-Pentecostal Dialogue has completed five rounds since it was launched in 1971. Each round has consisted of weeklong or so meetings for five or more years, followed in the last three rounds by multiple years of drafting and rewriting of the final reports. The first two rounds (1971-1976 and 1977-1982, with 1978 being a bye year due to the unexpected death of Pope John Paul I) engaged assorted topics of mutual interest, while the last three rounds have been more thematically focused: on the nature of the church (1985-1989), on evangelization and proselytism (1990-1997), and on becoming a Christian (1998-2006).

Dialogue that works toward understanding – not any watered down synthesis.

Creemers teaches at the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit in Leuven, Belgium, where he also completed his PhD degree that is the basis for this book. Whereas a number of other volumes have been published on one or more rounds of the Dialogue, this is the first one that covers the five completed rounds of discussion, and it is also the only to focus on the question of theological method. At one level, followers of the Pneuma Review might consider this a rather dispensable exercise. Pentecostal ministers especially are doers rather than theoreticians and considerations of method seem quite speculative and abstract. Even if readers might be interested in the topics taken up in the Dialogues, Creemers’ reflections might seem beside the point (of evangelism, for example!). Yet I encourage potential readers, especially Pentecostal clergy, to withhold judgment for three reasons. First, there have been many who have argued that Pentecostals are ecumenical even if they might deny or not even realize this, and if that is the case, engaging this volume will provide one fascinating point of entry into the what (is ecumenism) and why (Pentecostals are such) of this important set of issues related to unity that Jesus prayed for. Second, the writing opens up to a narrative of the Dialogues, and in that sense there is an unfolding of a plot full of twists and turns involving primary agents (who were present in many if not most of the rounds) and other secondary characters (those participants in two rounds or only one) that might be unanticipated for theological books. Last but not least, to think about the methodological underpinnings of these exercises provides another window into the nature of Pentecostal spirituality and realities that the movement’s practitioners and ministers will find informative, especially vis-à-vis their own efforts to comprehend themselves theologically.

There have been many who have argued that Pentecostals are ecumenical, even if they might deny or not even realize it.

So what does Creemers find? Or, first, how does he go about looking for Pentecostal theological method when such is rarely or never made explicit? There are four main chapters in the body of the book through which the quest is undertaken. First, Creemers profiles how members of the Pentecostal Dialogue teams have attempted to understand themselves as a conversionist, revivalist, and restorationist movement, and how such starting points already chart certain methodological trajectories. Second, efforts – contested, as the book portrays – to adequately represent a quite diverse worldwide Pentecostal movement in the dialogue teams are indicative of how an egalitarian set of ecclesiological sensibilities generates a fragmented movement and this also has methodological implications, not least for how the Dialogues have unfolded. Third, then, Creemers analyzes one weeklong session within each of the five rounds – the second year, because that is when the main topics are presented for that round of dialogues – and unveils how reading and exposition of papers have been followed by “hard questions” raised by both sides to the other for discussion (first intra-murally and then inter-murally) in order to clarify perspectives, identify differences, and anticipate possible convergences or ways forward. Finally, the aims, sources, and approaches of each of rounds of Dialogue are assessed, in chronological order, and then also vis-à-vis their Final Reports.

Amos Yong speaking on his books published at Wipf and Stock

Amos Yong — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 19:34:10 +0000

Publisher Wipf & Stock interviews Amos Yong about his background and introduction to his books they have partnered to published. In his own words, Amos Yong explains what these books mean to him and why he thinks them significant to his own development.

Originally published in January 2017. Length: 18:33 minutes.

Holy Spirit and Mission in Canonical Perspective, by Amos Yong

Amos Yong — Tue, 03 Jan 2017 16:49:10 +0000

In the Spring of 2015, Fuller Theological Seminary published this series of articles by Amos Yong on its Patheos blog.

Holy Spirit and Mission in Canonical Perspective

The Life-Giving Spirit

Genesis 1:3 & 6:3 – Creation and Fall: The Life-Giving Spirit

If the wind or breath of God is understood also as the spirit of God, then in this ancient words, we have a trinitarian image of the primordial creation: that God fashioned the world through his word and spirit.

Joseph and the Spirit

Genesis 41:38 – Joseph and the Spirit: The Mission of God in the Torah

The divine spirit appears thrice in the book of Genesis: once in Genesis 1:2, a second time in Genesis 6:3, and a third time in a question that the Pharaoh of Egypt poses to his servants: “Can we find anyone else like this—one in whom is the spirit of God?” (Gen. 41:38).

The Wind and Breath of Yahweh

Exodus 15:8, 10 – The Wind and Breath of Yahweh: Liberation and Mission

There are at least three trajectories of missiological readings of the book of Exodus. In the next chapter we will look at that which links the Sinaitic covenant with Israel’s witness to the nations. The other two are intertwined, involving Israel’s liberation from Egypt and Israel’s mission in or to Egypt.

The Crafts of the Spirit: A Missional Vocation in the Book of Exodus

… Yahweh speaks to Moses as leader and representative of the people, and in effect commissions Israel as a holy priesthood to the nations: “if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:5-6).

Intercessory Mission: The Spirit’s Dangerous Answer to Prayer in Numbers 11:16-34

Much has been made by modern Pentecostal interpreters of the Spirit’s filling of the Seventy in Numbers 11 as an Old Testament prototype of the Day of Pentecost event in Acts 2. There are certainly many observable parallels – i.e., of Moses as Spirit-filled leader of the people of God being a type of Jesus the Spirit-anointed messiah; of the Seventy and the Twelve as representative leadership under the two (Mosaic and Pentecostal) covenants; of the prophesying of the Seventy and the glossolalia of the Twelve, among other aspects. Without denying the correspondences, our focus here will be on understanding the connections between the sendings of the Spirit of Yahweh not only on the Seventy but also “from the sea” (Num. 11:31). Any pneumatological reading of Numbers 11 will need to be expansive enough to account for both manifestations of the divine ruach.

Latino Pentecostalism, a review essay by Amos Yong

Amos Yong — Fri, 23 Sep 2016 20:27:31 +0000

Gastón Espinosa, Latino Pentecostals in America: Faith and Politics in Action (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2014), xi + 505 pages.

Daniel Ramírez, Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), xix + 283 pages.

Why should readers of The Pneuma Review look up these books under review? Although the answers to this question may seem obvious, they nevertheless need to be reiterated: because the center of Christianity has now shifted from the Euro-American West to the global South; consistent with the foregoing, because of the so-called “browning” of the North American church such that the its vitality is currently being sustained, and is projected to be increasingly carried over the next few decades, by migration from the rest of Latin America; and because, for the North American Pentecostal movement in general and the Assemblies of God denomination specifically, one third of all adherents are non-white and one-fourth – and growing percentage-wise as well as in aggregate – are Latino (see, e.g., Pew Research Center demographics from July 2015). Beyond other rationales that might motivate the present constituency, the above ought to prompt curiosity at least, if not a sense of urgency about becoming more acquainted with what Espinosa and Ramírez have to say. To be as pointed as possible: despite their “Decade of Harvest” initiative in the 1990s, the Assemblies of God would be in no less severe of a decline compared to mainline Protestant denominations if not for growth in Latinos within its ranks over the last two decades!

Gastón Espinosa is Arthur V. Stoughton Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College.

The authors and their books covered in this review are quite distinct. Ramírez is a more recently established academic who is shifting, at the time of this writing, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (their Department of American Culture and Latino/a Studies) to Claremont School of Theology (Claremont, California). This is his first book, his Duke University PhD thesis, which has been substantially revised and extended, appearing after almost a decade. Espinosa, meanwhile, began his scholarly work on the origins of Latino Pentecostalism in the first half of the twentieth century (completing his PhD on this topic in 1999 at the University of California, Santa Barbara) and has become renowned as one of the foremost specialists on Latino religions with more than a half dozen books from Oxford University Press, Harvard University Press, and other prestigious scholarly publishers. From his post at Claremont McKenna College, since 2009 as the Arthur V. Stoughton Professor of Religious Studies, Espinosa’s Latino Pentecostals in America builds on his research trajectory going back more than two decades, carrying forward to the present the more historically focused coverage of his preceding monograph, William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism: A Biography and Documentary History (Duke University Press, 2014). Both have been participants at least in some respects of the histories they are narrating and thereby provide superb and complementary guidance to anyone interested in understanding further the Latino side of North American Pentecostal history.

Why read these books under review? The center of Christianity has shifted from the Euro-American West to the global South.

Latino Pentecostals in America: Faith and Politics in Action proceeds via a case study – quite focused considering the extant over 225 Pentecostal groups – of the Latino Assemblies of God (AG) movement, even denominational tradition (as much as churches like the Assemblies of God resist the “denominational” appellation). Among its many fine qualities, scholars of Pentecostalism and aficionados of Pentecostal history especially will be engaged with Espinosa’s straightforward efforts to set the record straight, as it were, with regard to prior histories, analyses, or presentations that have either ignored or minimized and subordinated the agency of Latinos to that of white AG ministers, administrators, and ecclesial leaders. Each of the twelve chapters to the book thus clearly specifies how antecedent scholarship and ecclesial memories or narratives have marginalized or distorted what happened: from Mexican involvement at the Azusa Street revival to their role in the Texas region and at and around the Southwest borderlands areas, to Puerto Rican agency on the island and in the Eastern Spanish district from New York state down to Florida. The last two chapters also take up one-fifth of the book’s space to tell about the much more palpable – compared to their white counterparts – presence and activity of Latino AG ministers in the American political landscape particularly since the turn of the new millennium. Espinosa’s book is important here not just for countering stereotypes about apolitical Pentecostalism but also since it explicates the how of Latino leaders having had “direct access to national political leaders and American presidents” (p. 365) and the why of such prominence within the dynamics of Latino religiosity in the contemporary socio-historical context. This material will certainly be of interest to those within and those outside of North American Pentecostalism looking to understand the movement in relationship to the religious politics of the 2016 election year.

N. T. Wright: Paul and His Recent Interpreters and The Paul Debate, reviewed by Amos Yong

Amos Yong — Sun, 03 Jul 2016 21:12:39 +0000

N. T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters: Some Contemporary Debates (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), xxiii + 379 pages.

N. T. Wright, The Paul Debate: Critical Questions for Understanding the Apostle (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2015), xi + 110 pages.

I must confess that I am writing this double-review with both volumes of N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Fortress Press, 2013), sitting on my desk, partially open, and partially read. I must also come clean that I have intentionally decided to read first the two books under review in part because I am unsure when I will finish the Wright magnum opus (so far), but I have read and been positively challenged both by Wright’s Christian Origins and the Question of God series which go back to the early 1990s (to which Paul and the Faithfulness of God adds the fourth installment) and his earlier book on Paul (What Saint Paul Really Said, Eerdmans, 1997). For those who find themselves in situations somewhat like mine, I say up front: Paul and His Recent Interpreters (PRI) and The Paul Debate (PD) are very different books that interface with Paul and the Faithfulness of God (PFG) in contrasting ways, and will not in the end alleviate from those serious about the New Testament the burden of taking up and persisting through the latter books. Let me explain.

Wright tell us in the preface to PRI that as originally imagined, it intended to serve as an introduction to PFG, particularly in terms of mapping the trajectories of Pauline scholarship in the modern era. However, the material “quickly became more complex than I had imagined, to the point where it could no longer be contained within the larger book” (PRI, xvii). One response might be that tacking on the 350 plus pages of PRI to the beginning of PFG would have resulted in an expansion of book 1 to about the current size of book 2; on the other hand, the complicating factors appear to be less about size or length than with conceptuality, and perhaps setting off PRI on its own account can be appreciated only after working through the details of PFG.

What PRI does, then, is situate PFG within the broader landscape of Pauline studies, particularly around the turn of the twenty-first century. The three parts of PRI unfold three dominant conversations about Paul: 1) on the Jewishness of the apostle, particularly as negotiated and disputed after E. P. Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1997); 2) on Paul as apocalyptic thinker and theologian from Ernst Käsemann at mid-century through J. C. Beker, J. L. Martyn, and Douglas Campbell more recently; and 3) on the social world of Paul and the apostolic Christians, particularly as initiated and developed by the work of Wayne Meeks and David Horrell. While the discussions are explicated along separate tracks (in the three parts), Wright’s account clarifies the interconnections while also locating how these important issues are relevant to other developments in Pauline scholarship, whether the so-called “New Perspective,” those working in empire studies, or the philosophical-continental Paul. Along the way, we get glimpses about how Wright’s own constructive vision in PFG has been shaped in dialogue with these developments. In particular, we understand better Paul, not to mention Jesus, as Jewish and apocalyptic visionaries, but in ways that make sense given the social and historical world of first century Palestinian life under the shadow of the Greco-Roman empire and amidst Hellenistic culture.

Apocalyptic literature, a double review by Amos Yong

Amos Yong — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 22:05:03 +0000

Frederick J. Murphy, Apocalypticism in the Bible and Its World: A Comprehensive Introduction (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), xviii + 429 pages.

Bruce Chilton, Visions of the Apocalypse: Receptions of John’s Revelation in Western Imagination (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2013). vi + 169 pages.

These two books are very different – length-wise, style, and scope – but they will appeal to readers of The Pneuma Review for related reasons. Murphy’s is quite readable but more academic and in-depth (not to mention three times the length of Chilton’s book), and focuses on a genre of literature, apocalyptic, that emerged in the last third of the first millennium BCE and continued well into the next millennium. Chilton’s is in more conversational style, although no less informed by rigorous scholarship, given his previous authorship of over a dozen other scholarly volumes, and covers three times the historical period (the last two thousand years compared to six hundred) while being focused on the reception history of one biblical book. Revelation aficionados will want to read both volumes, since Murphy includes a 35+page chapter on the Apocalypse), although they will come away informed in very different ways.

Pentecostal and charismatic ministers and readers interested in the book of Revelation and in “ends times” interpretations of the Bible will easily be able to follow Chilton’s narrative of how this last scriptural book has been read over the last twenty centuries. His book’s first six chapters unfold: chiliastic (or millennial) interpretations of Revelation among the patristic fathers (particularly Papias); spiritual and ecclesiological readings following Origen’s multi-level hermeneutic and Augustine’s two-cities (of God and of the world) vision; visionary anticipations of the coming age of the Spirit inspired by the trinitarian framework of Joachim of Fiore in the medieval period; prophetic messages claiming to identify the antichrist and other enemies of the true church in the Renaissance, Reformation, and post-Reformation periods; progress narratives developed during the early modern period by scientists like Isaac Newton and Romantic poets like William Blake among others; and catastrophic scenarios envisaged by dispensationalists from John Nelson Darby to Timothy LaHaye, and everyone in between. The final and concluding chapter returns to situate the original book of Revelation in its post-apostolic context and identifies its central themes that have precipitated these divergent elucidations over 2000 years. Readers uninitiated into the history of biblical interpretation ought to come away from Visions of the Apocalypse sympathetic with the various readings given the rationales Chilton lays out in connection to the biblical book, which of course begs the question: why should we prefer any one of these approaches over any of the others. That’s where I’d say we ought to dive deeper into the broader context within which Revelation fermented, which Chilton’s book touches on only briefly given his foci, and for this task, Frederick Murphy’s tome comes to the rescue.

Apocalypticism in the Bible and Its World lives up to its subtitle: this Roman Catholic biblical scholar presents and summarizes all of the apocalyptic texts in the Bible and also from around the biblical world, providing their historical context (to the degree that can be determined) and showing the basic development of apocalyptic ideas. Thus after an initial chapter that attends to the difficulties of defining apocalypse (the genre), apocalypticism (the worldview), and related terms – note then that texts can be apocalyptic in terms of including some of the features of the worldview, but not be apocalypses in terms of the genre – readers are introduced to “proto-apocalyptic” texts from the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament (ch. 2), the biblical book of Daniel and the so-called Animal Apocalypse, which is also I Enoch 85-90 (ch. 3), and the book of Revelation (ch. 4). The next three chapters, for those who are biblically literate but rather ignorant about extra-biblical literature, are fascinating reading about other ancient Jewish apocalypses (ch. 5 on the book of Enoch in its various parts, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, the Apocalypse of Abraham, and the book of Jubilees) and apocalyptic type literature (ch. 6 on The Testament of Moses, the Psalm of Solomon, the Sibylline Oracles, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs), and on the Dead Sea Scrolls (ch. 7). Chapters 8-11 exposit apocalyptic materials in the Gospels and Acts; in relationship to attempts to reconstruct the historical Jesus (hint: Murphy agrees with those who argue that Jesus “was an eschatological, apocalyptic prophet” [p. 304]); in the Pauline literature; and in the rest of the New Testament. The final chapter is titled the “ongoing legacy of [biblical] apocalypticism,” and begins to do for the apocalypse genre what Chilton does for Revelation. More conservative biblical readers may take issue with this or that decision – historical or interpretative – that Murphy makes, but his approach is fair to the contested matters, and his tone is irenic in presenting reasons for his conclusions. Murphy’s is a posture of faith-seeking-understanding, so that historical-critical perspectives are deployed to illuminate the biblical text rather than to undermine its authority.

Amos Yong: The Coming Global Christianity: Pietistic-Pentecostal Challenges and Opportunities, Part 3

Amos Yong — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 20:07:45 +0000

Amos Yong explores the impact of Pentecostalism on Christianity. This lecture was given on February 12, 2015 as part of the annual Murray W. Downey Lectureship at Ambrose University. This is Part 3 of the series. Watch Introductions and Part 1, Part 2.

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Further reading: Read Jenny-Lyn Harrison’s summary and reflection of Amos Yong’s 2015 Downey Lectureship.

Amos Yong: The Coming Global Christianity: Pietistic-Pentecostal Challenges and Opportunities, Part 2

Amos Yong — Sun, 26 Apr 2015 19:50:04 +0000

Amos Yong explores the impact of Pentecostalism on Christianity. This lecture was given on February 12, 2015 as part of the annual Murray W. Downey Lectureship at Ambrose University. This is Part 2 of the series. Watch Introductions and Part 1 and Part 3 of this series.

Please advance the timer to 2:05 when the introduction by Bernie van de Walle begins.

[This streaming content appears with advertisements PneumaReview.com has no control over]

Further reading: Read Jenny-Lyn Harrison’s summary and reflection of Amos Yong’s 2015 Downey Lectureship.

Amos Yong: The Coming Global Christianity: Pietistic-Pentecostal Challenges and Opportunities, Introduction and Part 1

Amos Yong — Sat, 25 Apr 2015 17:34:15 +0000

Amos Yong explores the impact of Pentecostalism on Christianity. This lecture was given on February 11, 2015 as part of the annual Murray W. Downey Lectureship at Ambrose University.

Please advance the timer to 25:15 when the introductions begin.

[This streaming content appears with advertisements PneumaReview.com has no control over]

The Coming Global Christianity: Watch Part 2 and Part 3 of this series.

Further reading: Read Jenny-Lyn Harrison’s summary and reflection of Amos Yong’s 2015 Downey Lectureship.