Introduction

Michael Heiser’s The Unseen Realm represents an ambitious and learned attempt to argue that a coherent “divine council” worldview underlies and organizes the entire biblical narrative, from Genesis to Revelation, and that recovery of this worldview is the key to unlocking a host of exegetical puzzles that have long troubled readers of Scripture. The book has been warmly received in many evangelical circles, praised for its originality, its command of Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) background material, and its willingness to engage texts that more cautious interpreters have left undisturbed.

The present paper does not dispute the genuine value of Heiser’s ANE scholarship, nor does it deny that divine council imagery is present in the Old Testament and that this imagery has been underexplored in much popular biblical theology. What it disputes is the methodological and hermeneutical framework within which Heiser deploys this material—and, most fundamentally, the textual foundation upon which the entire project rests. The argument will proceed across four areas of critique, concluding with a summary assessment of the project’s overall viability as a work of biblical theology.

The Text-Critical Foundation: Deut 32:8 and the Isolation of the Qumran Reading

The entire edifice of Heiser’s argument rests, by his own account, on a single textual judgment: that Deuteronomy 32:8 originally read “sons of God” (bene elohim) rather than the Masoretic Text’s “sons of Israel.” This reading is attested in a Dead Sea Scrolls fragment (4QDeut^j) and has been preferred by a number of critical scholars on the grounds of the standard text-critical principles of lectio difficilior and the general antiquity of some Qumran textual traditions. Heiser treats this preference as effectively settled, and proceeds to erect upon it a comprehensive theology of the divine council, the allotment of the nations, and the cosmic geography of redemptive history.

The first and most fundamental problem with this procedure is one that Heiser consistently minimizes: the Qumran reading is attested in effectively one manuscript, and it left no discernible trace in the broader transmission history of either the Old Testament or the Greek and Aramaic versional traditions as received by the church and synagogue. The manuscript situation deserves to be stated plainly.

The Masoretic Text, representing the mainstream of Jewish scribal tradition across many centuries and geographic locations, reads “sons of Israel.” The Samaritan Pentateuch, an independent textual tradition, likewise reads “sons of Israel.” The Targums (the Aramaic paraphrastic translations used in synagogue worship) follow the Masoretic reading. The Peshitta, the ancient Syriac translation, follows it as well. The Septuagint reads “angels of God” (angelon theou)—which Heiser treats as corroborating his reading, but which in fact represents a distinct interpretive tradition that domesticates the phrase into angelology rather than confirming a divine council framework, and which itself seems to reflect theological interpretation of a Hebrew Vorlage rather than a variant text. Against all of this, the “sons of God” reading is present in one fragmentary manuscript from one sectarian community[1] … and a community that itself preserved manuscripts of the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. This may thus be more indicative of this community’s readings than of anything wider among Jews of the second Temple period.

This manuscript isolation is not a minor footnote. It is a datum of the first importance that cuts directly against the theological weight Heiser places on the reading. If the bene elohim text were the original reading[2], and if the divine council worldview it encodes were as foundational to Israel’s theological self-understanding as Heiser claims, one would expect at minimum some broader manuscript tradition to have preserved it. The virtual absence of the reading from the broad channels of textual transmission (Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian) demands explanation that Heiser does not provide.

The character of the Qumran community sharpens this concern considerably. The Dead Sea Scrolls community was not a neutral repository of pristine pre-Masoretic texts. It was a sectarian movement with well-documented theological distinctives: a highly developed angelology, a cosmic dualism between the sons of light and the sons of darkness, an elaborate hierarchy of spiritual beings, and an intense interest in precisely the divine council and territorial spirit traditions upon which Heiser’s framework depends. The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, the War Scroll, and 11QMelchizedek all attest to a community that was deeply invested in elaborating the kind of cosmic hierarchy that the bene elohim reading of Deuteronomy 32:8 supports. The possibility (which Heiser does not adequately entertain) is that the Qumran reading reflects a theologically motivated scribal adjustment congenial to the community’s own cosmological commitments, rather than the preservation of a more original text.

There is, finally, a theological dimension to the manuscript question that goes beyond text criticism proper. The doctrine of providence as applied to the transmission of Scripture (held in varying forms across Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions) carries the implication that the text God preserved and the communities of faith received is the text that bears canonical authority for those communities. A reading preserved in one manuscript of a sectarian movement, unattested in the broad streams of Jewish and Christian canonical transmission, cannot responsibly serve as the fulcrum of a comprehensive biblical theology without extensive argument about why providential guidance apparently suppressed the “true” reading across every other stream of textual tradition. Heiser provides no such argument. He offers a text-critical judgment and then proceeds as though a theological conclusion has been established. It has not.

The Hermeneutical Problem: Poetic, Apocalyptic, and Visionary Texts as Governing Framework

Even granting Heiser’s preferred textual reading of Deuteronomy 32:8, a second and equally serious problem emerges at the level of hermeneutical method. The texts that form the backbone of Heiser’s divine council argument are, almost without exception, drawn from the genres least suited to serve as the governing framework for systematic biblical theology: poetry (Deut 32, Ps 82; 89; 110), prophetic taunt and lament (Isa 14; Ezek 28), apocalyptic vision (Dan 10), and the elevated cosmic poetry of the wisdom tradition. Heiser’s interpretive procedure is to read these texts as straightforward cosmological claims and then to use them as the framework within which plainer narrative and didactic texts are read.

Image: Adrien Olichon

This inverts the most basic principle of classical biblical hermeneutics. From the patristic period through the Reformation and into the modern era, the consistent counsel of interpreters across traditions has been that clear, didactic, and narrative texts govern the interpretation of figurative, poetic, and apocalyptic ones—not the reverse. The rationale is straightforward: poetic and visionary texts are more susceptible to a wide range of interpretation, more embedded in specific literary conventions and rhetorical purposes, and more likely to employ figurative or hyperbolic language that is not intended as literal cosmological description. None of this is to suggest that such texts may not nor should not be allowed to say whatever they say as informing a biblical theology of anything. The question is what they are actually saying … as this cannot be assumed on any proposed straightforward reading given the nature of such texts for interpretation.

Psalm 82 illustrates the problem acutely. The Psalm depicts a scene in which God stands in a divine assembly and judges the “gods” (elohim) for their corrupt exercise of justice, pronouncing their mortality. Heiser reads this as a straightforward account of a divine council of genuinely supernatural personal beings who have been entrusted with the governance of the nations and have failed in that trust. But the genre of the text—what appears to be a judicial Psalm employing the language and imagery of the divine court—does not straightforwardly license this reading. The “gods” of Psalm 82 can plausibly be read as human rulers employing the honorific language of ancient Near Eastern kingship ideology, as the Johannine Jesus himself suggests when citing this very psalm in John 10:34-35. They can be read as a rhetorical device for the Psalmist’s polemic against injustice, using the language of divine council mythology precisely to subvert it. Heiser dismisses these alternatives too quickly and without adequate engagement with the strongest advocates of alternative readings.

Daniel 10, with its references to the “prince of Persia” and the “prince of Greece,” presents perhaps the starkest genre problem. The passage is embedded in a vision narrative—a form that the biblical tradition itself consistently marks as requiring interpretation (“wisdom”) and as not straightforwardly representing literal cosmological states of affairs. To project the imagery of Daniel’s vision into a systematic theology of territorial spirits and their governance of nations is to make a genre error of the first order. It treats as cosmological description what the text presents as visionary symbol. This is not to suggest that our attempts at genre identification rule out his reading, but he does not seem to take such into account as part of his whole approach to what he is claiming is the best reading of these texts.

The Second Temple Problem: Extra-Canonical Literature as Exegetical Authority

The third major structural flaw in Heiser’s project concerns his use of Second Temple Jewish literature. He makes extensive use of 1 Enoch (particularly the Book of the Watchers), Jubilees, the Dead Sea Scrolls (especially the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, the War Scroll, and 11QMelchizedek), and related texts as though their witness clarifies and confirms the meaning of the canonical Old Testament texts. This procedure is never adequately defended at the methodological level, and when examined carefully it proves to be hermeneutically incoherent.

There are two defensible uses of Second Temple literature in biblical interpretation. It may be used as evidence of how canonical texts were received and elaborated in a particular historical period, that is, as reception history. And it may be used as background for illuminating the conceptual world assumed by the New Testament authors, since those authors wrote within a Second Temple context. What it cannot responsibly be used for (without explicit methodological justification) is as an exegetical key that unlocks what the Old Testament texts were always and originally saying. Heiser consistently uses the literature for this third, illegitimate purpose, conflating reception history with authorial intention.

The historical diversity of Second Temple Judaism compounds this problem. Heiser frequently appeals to “Second Temple Judaism” as though it constitutes a coherent tradition that uniformly elaborates the divine council worldview. This is historically untenable. The angelology of 1 Enoch differs markedly from that of the Qumran community (despite the presence of this collection among the Qumran findings), which differs from Philo’s Hellenized tradition, which differs from the Sadducees who rejected the elaborated angel tradition altogether, which differs from the emerging rabbinic tradition’s deep ambivalence about angelological speculation. When Heiser appeals to Second Temple Judaism as confirming his reading, he is selecting the streams of that tradition that confirm his thesis and marginalizing the ones that complicate or contradict it.

The case of 1 Enoch is particularly instructive. Heiser leans heavily on the Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36) as elaborating and confirming the divine council and fallen elohim framework he finds in Genesis 6 and Deuteronomy 32. But 1 Enoch is not straightforward theological exposition of earlier Scripture. It is a sophisticated rewriting of tradition for specific apocalyptic and sectarian purposes. The Enochic literature functioned, in significant measure, as a rival to the emerging Mosaic Torah-centered Judaism of the Second Temple period, offering an alternative cosmology, an alternative calendar, and alternative priestly claims rooted in the figure of Enoch rather than Moses. To use this literature as a transparent window into what the Mosaic texts originally meant is therefore not merely chronologically problematic, it imports a theologically tendentious document with its own agenda as a neutral explanatory key.

The treatment of 11QMelchizedek illustrates the problem from a different angle. Heiser uses this Qumran pesher to connect Psalm 82, the Melchizedek tradition, and New Testament Christology within a divine council framework, arguing that Jesus’s claims are intelligible only against this background. But a pesher is, by definition, a community-specific interpretation produced for sectarian purposes. Its use of Psalm 82 tells us how the Qumran community read that Psalm in the context of their own eschatological expectations; it tells us nothing about what the Psalm originally meant, and it cannot be assumed to represent the conceptual background of the author of Hebrews or the Johannine Jesus. Heiser slides between these distinct questions with insufficient care.

Theological Difficulties: Divine Council, National Allotment, and the Limits of Sovereignty

Beyond the textual and hermeneutical problems, Heiser’s project generates a cluster of unresolved theological difficulties that his disclaimers cannot fully neutralize.

Heiser is careful throughout to insist that he is not arguing for polytheism: the elohim of the divine council are, on his account, ontologically subordinate to Yahweh, dependent beings rather than independent deities. But this disclaimer does not resolve the theological problem. If the elohim are genuinely supernatural personal beings with delegated authority over the nations, then they are morally responsible agents, and the question of their moral responsibility creates difficulties his framework never adequately addresses. If they sin in the exercise of their delegated authority (as Psalm 82 apparently implies), does their sin operate independently of human sin? Do they stand in need of redemption? Are they objects of Christ’s atoning work? Heiser gestures at some of these questions in connection with his reading of Colossians 1 and Ephesians 6, but the systematic implications remain underdeveloped, and in several places the framework edges uncomfortably close to a soft polytheism that the theological disclaimers cannot fully contain.

The “allotment of the nations” thesis presents the most acute theological difficulty. Heiser argues, on the basis of his reading of Deuteronomy 32:8-9 and Genesis 11, that Yahweh “disinherited the nations” at Babel and handed them over to the governance of subordinate divine beings: that there is a period in redemptive history when entire peoples were, in some meaningful sense, outside Yahweh’s direct providential governance, awaiting reclamation through the mission inaugurated with Abraham.

Heiser’s framework requires a far more limited and intermittent divine sovereignty than the canonical prophets seem to allow. He does not sufficiently reckon with the weight of this counterevidence, tending to treat the texts that fit his framework as primary and those that resist it as requiring explanation within it, rather than the reverse.

The Comparative Method and Its Limits

One of the genuine strengths of Heiser’s work is his command of Ancient Near Eastern textual and iconographic material—the Ugaritic texts, the mythology of El and Baal, the traditions of the bene el, the Rephaim, and the assembly of the gods. This material is genuinely illuminating as background for understanding the conceptual world in which the biblical texts were written and against which they were at least in part composed.

The Absence of Engagement with the Strongest Counter-Readings

A final concern bears mention. For a work of the theological ambition of The Unseen Realm (and Heiser’s many other books, podcasts, blogs, articles, etc), the engagement with counterarguments is surprisingly thin (though to be fair he cites himself extensively for where he deals in far greater detail on given topics). The classic monotheistic and monolatrous readings of the relevant texts are largely bypassed in favor of engagement with popular-level evangelical assumptions in order to reorder this according to his revisioned hermeneutic. Heiser tends to set up the weakest available alternative readings and demonstrate their inadequacy, rather than engaging the most sophisticated defenders of positions contrary to his own.

A more rigorous engagement would include, for example, Meredith Kline’s interpretation of divine council imagery as theophanic and juridical rather than referring to an ontological hierarchy of supernatural beings; the prolonged pointed readings countering many of Heiser’s approach in John Walton and J. Harvey Walton’s Demons and Spirits in Biblical Theology; John Goldingay’s careful and nuanced treatment of the same texts in his Old Testament Theology; and the extensive tradition of interpretation that reads Psalm 82 as addressed to human rulers employing the honorific language of ancient Near Eastern kingship. These are not easily dismissed readings, and their absence from serious engagement in The Unseen Realm represents a significant gap in the project’s scholarly apparatus. Though I must submit that in the end, he did not write this book for scholars, but for lay readers who themselves would feel overwhelmed by the technical comments (that fall short for those who know the primary and secondary literature as incomplete at best).

Conclusion

The case against the hermeneutical and textual foundations of The Unseen Realm can now be stated in summary form. The project rests, at its base, on a single contested text-critical judgment (the preference for the bene elohim reading of Deuteronomy 32:8) whose manuscript support reduces, upon examination, to one fragmentary scroll from one sectarian community whose own theological commitments were directly aligned with the reading’s implications. The broader tradition of textual transmission, Jewish and Christian, Masoretic, Samaritan, and versional, does not attest this reading. The theological weight Heiser places upon it is entirely disproportionate to the manuscript evidence that supports it.

Upon this narrow textual foundation, Heiser erects an interpretive framework drawn primarily from the genres least suited to serve as governing theological authorities for clearest theological articulation: the imagery of poetic, apocalyptic, and visionary texts, read in a maximally literal cosmological key against the controlling testimony of the narrative and didactic witness of Scripture. The hermeneutical procedure inverts the classical principle that the clear governs the obscure. One does not even have to commit to such an idea to still understand that such texts remain unclear and thus demand far more from their readers to hear well.

This framework is then confirmed and elaborated by appeal to Second Temple Jewish literature (primarily from the Enochic tradition and the Qumran community) which is treated as an exegetical authority for the meaning of canonical texts rather than as reception-historical evidence of how those texts were later read in particular sectarian contexts. The canonical text is effectively governed from both directions by extra-canonical literature with its own theological agendas.

The theological results compound these problems. The allotment of the nations thesis requires a limitation of divine sovereignty that sits in severe tension with the prophetic and apostolic witness. The divine council hierarchy raises unresolved questions about the nature, moral responsibility, and ultimate destiny of its members that Heiser’s disclaimers about ontological subordination do not seem to adequately resolve.

None of this is to deny the genuine value of Heiser’s ANE scholarship, the legitimacy of attending to divine council imagery in the Old Testament, or the interest and stimulation his readings generate. The Unseen Realm is a work that rewards serious engagement, and it has helpfully pushed readers toward texts and backgrounds that deserve more attention than they typically receive in popular biblical theology. However, it has also fed the “weird” or “strange” (something which Heiser specifically says are the texts that matter most).

But as a hermeneutical and theological project (as a claimed key to the whole of Scripture) it rests on foundations that will not bear the weight placed upon them. A single isolated Qumran manuscript supplies the preferred text; a body of sectarian Second Temple literature supplies the interpretive framework; a collection of poetic and apocalyptic texts, read against classical hermeneutical priorities, supplies the canonical evidence; and the whole is presented as recovering what the mainstream traditions of both Israel and the church somehow failed to transmit. That pattern, taken as a whole, should give any careful reader serious pause and perhaps even a turn toward the seen realm that is more clearly present in the texts.

PR

Notes

[1] By saying “community” I am not indicating by such that this was only a singular group or even that the nature of the group/s involved in the texts of the Judean Desert are to all be identified only with some narrow vision of such. Yet, in common speaking those who were responsible for the community texts seem likely to have also been those responsible for texts like 4QDeut^j and 1QEnGiants^ab, for example.

[2] The explanation is that bene el or bene elim is the proposed Vorlage that was altered to bene yisrael in the MT, but prolongated to bene elohim in 4QDeut^j.

Select Works Consulted

Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016.

Goldingay, John. Old Testament Theology. 3 vols. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2003–2009.

Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2015.

Kline, Meredith G. Images of the Spirit. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980.

Nickelsburg, George W. E. 1 Enoch: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch. 2 vols. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001–2012.

Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972.

Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Old Testament. 3rd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012.

VanderKam, Javames C. The Dead Sea Scrolls Today. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010.

Waltke, Bruce K. An Old Testament Theology: An Exegetical, Canonical, and Thematic Approach. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007.

Walton, John H., and J. Harvey Walton. Demons and Spirits in Biblical Theology: Reading the Biblical Text in Its Cultural and Literary Context. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2019.

John H. Walton, professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College (at the time of publication), teams with his son J. Harvey Walton to address the contested area in contemporary biblical interpretation regarding the nature and activity of demons and spirits in Scripture. Their central thesis challenges dominant spiritual warfare paradigms by arguing that the biblical authors were less concerned with ontological realities of the spirit world than with communicating theological truths through the cognitive environment of the ancient Near East. This approach, consistent with Walton’s broader hermeneutical project evident in works like The Lost World of Genesis One, prioritizes understanding Scripture within its original cultural and literary contexts rather than imposing modern systematic categories onto the text.

The Waltons organize their study around three primary sections: Old Testament perspectives, New Testament developments, and theological synthesis. Throughout, they maintain that biblical demonology must be understood functionally rather than ontologically—that is, Scripture’s purpose is not to provide information about the nature of demons but to communicate theological truths about God’s sovereignty and humanity’s relationship to the divine.

Turning to the New Testament, the Waltons acknowledge a more developed demonology but maintain their functional hermeneutic. They argue that Jesus’ exorcisms and confrontations with unclean spirits address the fundamental problem of human alienation from God rather than engaging in cosmic territorial warfare. Demon possession, in their reading, serves as “living metaphor” for humanity’s captivity to sin and the powers of disorder. When Jesus casts out demons, he demonstrates divine authority over chaos and previews the restoration of creation rather than engaging in strategic spiritual combat. The Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:1-20), for example, illustrates Israel’s uncleanness and alienation, with the exorcism symbolizing restoration to community and covenant relationship.

The Waltons make several valuable contributions to biblical theology. Their insistence on reading Scripture within its ancient cognitive environment prevents anachronistic interpretations that force modern categories onto ancient texts. Their functional approach helpfully refocuses attention from speculation about demonic ontology toward the theological purposes of biblical authors. Additionally, their critique of simplistic spiritual warfare models that lack clear biblical warrant serves as a necessary corrective to some excesses in popular-level demonology.

Furthermore, the book’s dismissal of territorial spirits and strategic spiritual warfare may overreach. While excesses certainly exist in much spiritual warfare literature, passages like Daniel 10:13-21, which describe “princes” associated with kingdoms, suggest some idea of a territorial dimension to spiritual conflict, even if not in the manner popular spiritual warfare models propose. The Waltons’ eagerness to avoid contemporary excess may lead to underreading the biblical data.

Demons and Spirits in Biblical Theology offers a provocative and carefully argued challenge to dominant evangelical demonology. The Waltons succeed in demonstrating that much contemporary spiritual warfare theology lacks a clear biblical foundation and that Scripture’s primary concern is theological rather than providing information about the spirit world. Their work serves as an important corrective and will benefit readers by fostering more careful biblical interpretation. Pentecostals and Charismatics would do well to read carefully this contribution to the ongoing conversation. It would serve far better than nearly everything that gets published in the popular marketplace (in articles, books, YouTube, etc.) by Pentecostals and Charismatics on the subject.

Nevertheless, the book’s strengths may be undermined by an overly reductive functional hermeneutic that seems to throw out ontological reality with its methodological bathwater. A more nuanced approach would affirm both the theological purposes of demonic narratives and the personal reality of spiritual beings, recognizing that ancient authors could simultaneously pursue rhetorical goals and describe genuine encounters. For Pentecostal and charismatic readers especially, the Waltons provide valuable cautions but may not adequately account for biblical precedent and experiential dimensions of deliverance ministry that have characterized these movements. The book makes an important contribution to the conversation but should be read as one voice in an ongoing discussion rather than as a definitive resolution to complex questions of biblical demonology.

As a further note, this book offers specific counterpoints throughout to the works of a number of influential scholars on the topic, including the late Michael Heiser. Heiser is well known for his proposed biblical theology of demons, angels, and “the gods” and what has been widely disseminated in his numerous popular publications, most notably his best-selling 2015 book The Unseen Realm (just updated and expanded posthumously in 2025).  The Waltons have taken great care to address many of the issues which Heiser has popularized (having written extensively in academic forms as well) for his theology of the gods (e.g., divine council, sons of God, etc). It is with this in mind that it would be recommended that those who have read Heiser should also read this work by the Waltons, as offering the most cogent counterpoints to date.

Reviewed by Rick Wadholm Jr

Publisher’s page: https://wipfandstock.com/9781625648259/demons-and-spirits-in-biblical-theology/

Preview this book: https://books.google.com/books?id=WvGaDwAAQBAJ

Aída Besançon Spencer’s The Exegetical Process offers a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to New Testament exegesis designed primarily for seminary students and undergraduate biblical studies programs. The work systematically addresses each stage of the exegetical task—from initial text selection and translation through historical-cultural analysis, grammatical-syntactical investigation, literary context, theological synthesis, and contemporary application. What distinguishes Spencer’s handbook from others in the field is its granular level of procedural detail, complete with assessment rubrics for each exegetical component, and an extensive collection of reference charts, tables, and resource lists designed to support students through every phase of research and writing.

The Exegetical Process enters a well-established field of exegetical handbooks, positioning itself alongside Gordon Fee’s now-classic New Testament Exegesis and other methodological guides that have served generations of students. Spencer, an experienced New Testament scholar and professor emerita at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, brings considerable pedagogical expertise to this task. The result is a highly structured, mechanically precise guide that will prove valuable for certain learning contexts while simultaneously raising questions about its broader applicability.

The volume’s most distinctive contribution lies precisely where Spencer intends it: in its relentlessly systematic, step-by-step approach. Unlike many exegetical handbooks that describe the interpretive process in more general terms, Spencer provides exhaustive detail at each stage, breaking down complex exegetical tasks into discrete, manageable components. For instructors seeking to demystify biblical exegesis for beginning students—particularly those lacking strong backgrounds in hermeneutics or biblical languages—this granular approach offers genuine advantages.

Most notably, Spencer includes detailed grading rubrics for each component of the exegetical process. This feature distinguishes The Exegetical Process from its competitors and addresses a genuine pedagogical need. Seminary and Bible college instructors often struggle to communicate assessment expectations clearly, and students frequently complain about the opacity of grading criteria for exegesis papers. Spencer’s rubrics provide concrete standards, specifying what constitutes exemplary, adequate, or deficient work at each stage. This transparency serves both fairness and learning outcomes, helping students understand not merely what to do but how well they should do it.

Additionally, Spencer enriches the volume with numerous reference charts, graphs, and tables that function as practical tools throughout the exegetical process. These include terminological glossaries, taxonomies of grammatical and syntactical categories, lists of ancient sources (including extrabiblical Jewish and Greco-Roman literature), curated bibliographies of contemporary scholarly resources organized by exegetical topic, and visual aids for discourse analysis and semantic mapping. These reference materials transform the handbook from mere procedural guide into a portable research companion. For students unfamiliar with the landscape of New Testament scholarship or uncertain about which lexicons, commentaries, or databases to consult, these lists provide invaluable orientation. The charts on rhetorical devices, figures of speech, and argumentative structures offer quick-reference tools that students can apply directly to their textual analysis. This apparatus represents a significant practical contribution that extends the book’s utility beyond its methodological instruction.

However, the volume’s strengths paradoxically generate its most significant limitations. Spencer’s approach is markedly idiosyncratic, reflecting her particular pedagogical preferences and methodological commitments in ways that may not translate well across different institutional contexts or learning environments. While the exegetical terrain she covers substantially overlaps with Fee’s New Testament Exegesis—textual criticism, translation, historical-cultural background, lexical-syntactical analysis, theological interpretation, and contemporary application—her specific procedures and emphases often diverge in ways that seem arbitrary rather than methodologically motivated.

The step-by-step format, while initially appealing, risks fostering a mechanical, almost formulaic approach to biblical interpretation. Exegesis is fundamentally an art as much as a science, requiring interpretive judgment, synthetic thinking, and the ability to recognize which questions matter most for a given text. Spencer’s highly structured methodology may inadvertently obscure this reality, training students to follow prescribed steps rather than develop interpretive discernment. The danger is producing students who can execute exegetical procedures competently but struggle to think like exegetes—to recognize when standard approaches require modification, when certain steps deserve more or less attention, or how the various analytical stages integrate into a coherent interpretive argument.

Moreover, Spencer’s idiosyncratic details sometimes seem to reflect personal preference rather than exegetical necessity. Experienced instructors who have developed their own effective approaches may find Spencer’s specific requirements constraining rather than helpful. The risk is that the volume’s utility becomes tied too closely to adopting Spencer’s entire system rather than serving as a flexible resource that instructors can adapt to their particular contexts and emphases.

Gordon Fee’s New Testament Exegesis remains, in this reviewer’s judgment, the more helpful resource for most contexts. Now in its third edition, Fee’s handbook has proven its staying power precisely because it avoids Spencer’s level of prescriptive detail. Fee provides a clear, comprehensive overview of the exegetical task while maintaining sufficient flexibility for instructors to adapt his approach to their particular pedagogical goals and institutional contexts. His discussion is more discursive, offering methodological rationale alongside practical guidance, helping students understand not merely how to do exegesis but why particular procedures matter.

Fee also demonstrates greater sensitivity to the diversity of New Testament genres, providing genre-specific guidance that recognizes how exegetical priorities shift when moving from gospel narrative to Pauline argumentation to apocalyptic literature. Spencer’s more uniform approach, while simpler to follow, may not adequately prepare students for the genre-sensitivity that mature exegesis requires.

Furthermore, Fee’s integration of exegetical method with broader hermeneutical reflection provides students with a more robust theological framework for their interpretive work. Spencer’s focus on procedure, while pedagogically valuable, offers less guidance on the theological and hermeneutical questions that ultimately shape how one approaches the biblical text.

This is not to suggest that The Exegetical Process lacks value. For specific contexts—particularly undergraduate Bible programs, introductory seminary courses, or institutions where students arrive with minimal interpretive training—Spencer’s detailed scaffolding and explicit assessment rubrics may prove extremely beneficial. The volume could serve effectively as a supplementary text alongside Fee or other handbooks, with instructors selectively utilizing Spencer’s rubrics and detailed guidance for particular exegetical components while drawing on other resources for broader methodological perspective.

Spencer has produced a conscientious, pedagogically motivated handbook that reflects deep teaching experience and genuine concern for student learning. Her commitment to assessment clarity addresses a real need in biblical studies education. However, the volume’s idiosyncratic character and methodologically prescriptive approach limit its broader utility. Instructors should carefully evaluate whether Spencer’s specific system aligns with their pedagogical goals and institutional context before adopting it wholesale.

For most seminary and graduate programs seeking a comprehensive, methodologically sound, and pedagogically flexible exegetical handbook, Gordon Fee’s New Testament Exegesis remains the superior choice. Spencer’s The Exegetical Process offers a valuable alternative for specific teaching contexts but seems unlikely to displace Fee as the standard reference in the field.

Reviewed by Rick Wadholm Jr

Publisher’s page: https://www.kregel.com/biblical-studies/the-exegetical-process/

Doug Strong and Jess Bielman offer this short volume intent on reimagining and reoffering an ancient medieval metaphor (the “workshop”) for contemporary practices of theological education that are integrative of the life of the academy and the church together. The volume proposes to take readers on a journey of recovery. Chapter 1 introduces the ancient construct of “apprenticeship” as a means of education in theology and ministry that is intentionally hands-on and oriented around a relationship of discipleship rather than simply courses taken independently with hopes that the student will gain integrative mastery on their own. Foundationally this is a call to mentorship that is facilitated via Spirit-empowered transformational experiences in community, discipline, and vocational holiness and wholeness.

Despite the noted issues with this volume, it still offers a refreshing rethinking of the moves within theological education that have tended to turn it into business and a cognitive intellectualist project rather than the personalizing and transforming Spirit empowering encounter it is meant to be for the sake of the individual, the Church, and the world. This book might function well for a group of professors, administrators, pastors, and students to read together over several weeks of discussions centered around the journey into the “workshop” re-storying proposed. As such it might just offer the “academy opportunity to make it a place of spiritual and intellectual flourishing for the sake of the church’s health” (144). May it be so.

Reviewed by Rick Wadholm Jr.

Publisher’s page: https://wipfandstock.com/9781532689093/workshop-of-the-holy-spirit/

Preview Workshop of the Holy Spirit: https://books.google.com/books?id=SyKcEAAAQBAJ

Amos Yong and Dale Coulter bring to bear a fruitful and constructive offering in The Holy Spirit and Higher Education whose primary audience are those engaged in work and service at institutions found within the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities. Not that this is their exclusive audience, but it is a helpful focal point for the intended audience. The volume is divided into two sections between the two contributors respectively where each voice may be heard (for those who recognize the writing styles) with three chapters each: historical (Coulter in chapters 2-4) and theological (Yong in chapters 5-7). Both sections offer some of the most constructive and fresh hearings in their respective areas of focus that this reviewer has engaged across the literature in both the history and theology of (Christian) higher education. The volume has helpful introductory and concluding chapters that summarize the project on both ends. Further, each chapter entails a succinct summation of the primary contributions of that chapter to the conversation.

A welcome construct utilized were terms/ideas to lead the imagination of each of the six core chapters of the volume. In the historical section by Coulter, he makes use of habitus, Bildung, and the Romanticist intuitive populism via the “triad of intuitionism, immanence, and progressivism” (in contrast to the “high culture” of liberalism and the worldview notions of Reformed approaches). In the theological section by Yong, he makes use of head, heart, hands and connects these in a pneumatologically attuned trinitarian construction for an integrative approach to Christian higher education. These ideas offer a way of remembering the movements made in each respective chapter of which the authors do hope to have some manner of “hook” to aid those who have read their works toward recall and entering into the imaginations of the writers and the world they have offered. The volume is not overly long (at 306 oversized pages), but likely many readers may find it a difficult read owing to the thickness of careful critical reflection demonstrated in the writing styles of both Coulter and Yong. In this way, familiarity with their previous work bears dividends toward understanding their particular articulations.

The rooting of this volume in the ecumenical turn of “Pentecost” (bearing the marks of Yong’s distinct contribution to the global Pentecost/al conversations) functions well as a metaphor and storying that naturally seems to lend itself to ecumenical dialogue (many thanks for the persistent work in this regard by Yong). This framing/orientation for this project avoids the political dynamics of much contemporary ecumenism and instead not only allows, but specifically calls for diversity (by and through the Spirit). This is not without difficulty in how one may in fact critique such diversities as somehow outside of such storying via Pentecost. However, this makes use of the chief storying of the Church all the while reminding Pentecostals (those identifying as such) of the ways in which this story is not their own unique possession but belongs to God’s work to set all things to rights. Coulter and Yong, thus, provide a way of constructive dialogic engagements between both Pentecostals and the rest of the Church via this storying of Pentecost as the Church’s story (and in turn, as that meant to be/become the cosmic redemptive story).

Another question is whether the “trinitarian” explanations failed to appreciate the decidedly Christologic offering in a turn to the Pneumatologic? While this perhaps opens greater ecumenical dialogue within the wider Christian traditions and among Evangelicals in particular, one may wonder if there is a loss for the internal Pentecostal dialogue between trinitarian and Oneness confessions which is so aptly engaged in the editorial epilogue of the latest issue of Pneuma by none other than Amos Yong himself.[2] It is particularly in the Christologic foci of Pentecostal confession (historic and contemporary rapprochement, e.g., the “Cleveland School” of Pentecostalism) as precisely a potential contribution to the wider Church. Though knowing that this volume is not for Pentecostals narrowly, but for institutions of the CCCU in mind particularly, means this volume is not meant directly to speak into the discussions among Pentecostals directly (though doing so throughout by way of integration of who the contributors are, their work, and the impulses of their socio-historical-religious locations).

Finally, if one sought a “how-to” approach, it is not offered in this volume (intentionally) as this is more pertaining the history, philosophy, and theology of higher education than to the practices of such. It is concerned with practices throughout, but not as a “how-to”. This is not to say no such examples are given. They are offered through the storying of part one and numerous examples of applications in part two. However, this is not a “how-to” book which would have severely limited the volume to time and place. Yet readers in higher education will likely find themselves saying “Now what?” Are there embodiments of the stories and theological ideals of Coulter and Yong that might serve as testimonial exemplars, at least in part, without simply repristinating such and allowing for the particularities of such as faithful in their respective contexts?

It is in these ways (among others) that this volume would serve well to be carefully read by individuals and (preferably in) groups across institutions of (Christian) higher education. The restorying is a key that needs to be taken up. If restorying fails to be appreciated and integrated, it will most certainly result in the failure of institutions of higher education. To be healthy, higher education must move well beyond assessments based merely upon head counts or the construction of new buildings and programs; and if the Christian story is true, education is more than an ROI calculation or a path to employability.

May this volume find a wide readership among all those concerned for the state and future of Christian higher education.

Reviewed by Rick Wadholm Jr.

Publisher’s page: https://www.baylorpress.com/9781481318143/the-holy-spirit-and-higher-education/

Notes

[1] Not least among the book, chapter, and article contributions being Yong’s Renewing the Church by the Spirit: Theological Education after Pentecost (Eerdmans, 2020). [Editor’s note: see the review by Carolyn Tennant]

[2] Amos Yong, “Afterword: Pentecostal Systematic or Constructive Theology: Many Models, Many Witnesses,” Pneuma 45.3-4 (2023): 466-475.

Gordon Donald Fee (May 23, 1934—October 25, 2022) arguably stands as one of the most widely known and influential Pentecostal scholars of the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries. His works range broadly on topics of hermeneutics, translation, textual criticism, New Testament, Pauline studies, and theology (among other topics) and have been translated into numerous languages worldwide. Sadly, I only once was able to meet him in person for an all too brief conversation, though some of my family moved to Canada in the nineties specifically to study with Fee while he taught at Regent College in Vancouver, BC.  The following are my own personal reflections on the writings of Fee that impacted my own life and calling and are neither comprehensive of his many writings nor intended as reflective of others’ experiences of his life and ministry upon themselves, but only an offering of one student of Scripture desiring to honor the legacy of another student of Scripture.

It was, in significant measure, owing to Gordon Fee maintaining ministerial credentials with the Assemblies of God, USA (AG) that I also received and maintain credentials with the same Pentecostal fellowship. He served as a constant reminder that the AG might be a broad tent among Classical Pentecostals to allow one (such as himself) to hold credentials even though Fee publicly diverged in writing on such issues as “initial physical evidence of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit” and the traditionally held Dispensationalist eschatology of the AG. It has not always been the case that Pentecostal scholars (in the AG or elsewhere) have been able to maintain such tensions. I thanked him in person for this testimony at a celebration of his life held by the Society for Pentecostal Studies at the joint meeting of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature in San Diego, CA, in November, 2014 (see below for video links to the archives on YouTube of this event).

However, Fee did not always enjoy wide embrace by AG leadership. His views (some of those, for example, published in Agora: A Magazine of Opinion within the Assemblies of God) found him removed from the faculty of Southern California College (now Vanguard University), but he was never defrocked. This removal may precisely have been the opening needed for Fee among the wider Church in relocating to Gordon-Conwell. He was regularly challenged by AG leadership yet remained staunchly committed to the life of the Spirit and its proclamation in the church and academy globally. It was this commitment which encouraged me as a young pastor and emerging Pentecostal scholar to remain within the AG despite pressures against scholarship which seem to present themselves to those committed to the life of the church as part of the academy. Fee was a stalwart and potent example that one could indeed do this.

Further, Fee contributed greatly to my sense of commitment to the study of ancient manuscripts and to not fear such historical critical inquiries—inquiries which had seemed to be something to fear in many of the contexts I had found myself growing up and in my early education. This was furthered when, in my first few years as a twenty-something year-old pastor, I read two volumes Fee co-edited with Eldon Jay Epp, New Testament Textual Criticism: Its Significance for Exegesis: Essays in Honour of Bruce Metzger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) and Studies in the Theory and Method of New Testament Textual Criticism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993). These two volumes suddenly opened to me the world of NTTC (and more broadly the work of textual criticism) that created an insatiable appetite to study more within the field. I found myself suddenly consuming the works on NTTC of Kurt and Barbara Aland, Bart Ehrman, Bruce Metzger, Daniel Wallace, and others on the OT, most particularly the many articles and publications of Emanuel Tov. I was preaching anywhere from 3-8 times a week and during my “free” moments reading every bit of these works I could find thanks to Fee’s inspiration. While I do not work professionally in TC I do teach on TC and have led many churches and classes on the topic as a way of addressing questions of faith and serious commitment to study of Scripture and faith. It has also meant that I have made several trips over the years to visit ancient biblical manuscripts in libraries and traveling museum collections as part of my love of the history of manuscripts and the preservation of Scripture.

As the young pastor tasked to preach for youth and adults many times a week I turned regularly to commentaries as learned companions to help in our congregation’s meditation of Scripture. Here I also discovered the help of Gordon Fee. The two commentaries which most impacted me were his commentaries on the Pastoral Epistles and 1 Corinthians: 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus (New International Biblical Commentary 13; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1988) and The First Epistle to the Corinthians (New International Commentary of the New Testament; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987; Revised Edition: 2014). In the first of these, I found help for wrestling with the texts of Paul to two young pastors (and I needed that). I also found help in how to reconsider the words of Paul with regard to what seemed a silencing of women (something which seemed in my thinking to be out of sync with Paul’s ministry in the book of Acts). The egalitarian approach of Fee provided scholarship for my own pastoral concerns about the female members of Christ’s body and how they are also called and empowered by the same Spirit as co-equal workers and preachers of the good news of Jesus.  In my reading of Fee’s (first edition) commentary on 1 Corinthians, two things (among many others) still remain firmly in my mind: (1) Fee’s proposal that the instructions regarding the silencing of women in 14:24-25 was perhaps an interpolation into the manuscript tradition based on some other locations for this text in the manuscript tradition (pp.705-708), and (2) that the body of the resurrection was not going to be “spirit” (as in disembodied), but Spirit-ed as transforming the body to be alive by the Spirit to the utmost.

The first of these issues was not something I found support for among other scholars and frankly questioned myself whether Fee might be overclaiming. Yet, some scholars have since found further support for precisely this sort of claim and I have come to be persuaded of Fee’s early claim (though this view still seems a minority interpretation of the data). The most notable recent potential support of Fee’s claim was an article by Philip B. Payne, “Vaticanus Distigme-obelos Symbols Marking Added Text, Including 1 Corinthians 14.34-5,” New Testament Studies 63.4 (2017): 604-625. On the second issue, the revolution in my own pastoral thinking and preaching shifted from a very spiritualizing notion of life after death to a very Spirit-ed notion of embodiment made right in Jesus at the resurrection (this happened long before I read N.T. Wright’s very helpful, Surprised by Hope). I found myself turned from ideas which owed more to Gnostic-like distinctions between “spirit” and “body” and to the Lord’s intentional redemption of all creation as very good. One thing that struck me in one of the recently published stories about Fee concerned him telling a class to not believe he had died when they hear about his death, but that he “is singing with his Lord and his king” [Editor’s note: This was also published in Regent College’s “Remembering Dr. Gordon D. Fee”]. This seemed both in line with Fee’s work on 1 Corinthians, that we live because he lives and we do not simply go to non-existence, but also disjunctive with Fee regarding the hope that has consistently been the confession of the church (and which Fee goes to great lengths to contend precisely for): we believe in … the resurrection of the dead. This is a hope not in our spirits dis-embodied living in a heavenly sphere after death, but in the resurrection of bodies that are Spirit-enlivened in every way at the return of the Lord Jesus to consummate God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven.

Gordon Fee’s name was such a household word among the Pentecostal pastors I found myself regularly engaging while pastoring and continuing graduate studies that we would regularly discuss his work with one particular highlight and turned-to-reference: God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994, 2012). It was this massive collection of exegesis of the Greek text of Paul’s writings followed by theological essays intended to articulate a Pauline theology of the Spirit that was part of the very inspiration for my own later PhD work (since published as) A Theology of the Spirit in the Former Prophets: A Pentecostal Perspective (Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2018). Fee’s attention to the nuances of the Greek text (grammar, discourse, TC, etc) and attempts at a cumulative theology of such drove me to consider how this magnum opus among his writings might be applied to other corpora of the Scriptures.

During my later graduate work, I read Fee’s newly published Pauline Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Study (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007) and found a potent articulation of early exaltation of Jesus in light of the OT revelation of Yahweh and Jesus’ unique revelation of the God of Israel (spurring my readings Larry Hurtado and James Dunn). This proto-trinitarian argument was an aid in considering the ways theology continued to develop not just into the NT, but into the earliest church who would only later give voice to a trinitarian confession and would do so as acts of worship. It served me well to seek to hear the texts of Scripture in their own contexts even as the Church was inheritors and proclaimers of that word seeking always to hear better what had once and for all been delivered. I was grateful to see that a more accessible form of this publication has become available for a wider readership in Jesus the Lord according to Paul the Apostle: A Concise Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018).

While I have found many of Fee’s publications to be great aids to myself (even if only in spurring on further studies that move well beyond his own contributions), I would be remiss to not mention a particular aspect of Fee’s work with which I have found myself opposed. One of his most well-known writings (which has also spurred on numerous spin-off publications), How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth coedited with Douglas Stuart (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, originally published in 1981; Fourth Edition, 2014) finds its mention here at the end of my reflections, not because I encountered it after all of these other writings (it was his first book I read while in college), but because of my own critique of it. It also is not because it essentially espouses what some Pentecostal scholars might consider simply another Evangelical hermeneutic (which is reductionistic of Evangelical hermeneutics as if it is monolithic). When I first read this volume, I found one of the most helpful and accessible proposals for a Biblical hermeneutic that I had read to that point (his part being specific to the NT texts). It was only later while in graduate school and pastoring that I found myself pushing against his claims in one very specific area: historical narrative. Fee argued in this book, and at greater length in his Gospel and Spirit: Issues in New Testament Hermeneutics (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1991), that historical narratives (with Acts as the aim) were insufficient as Scripture toward developing theological claims because of lack of perceived authorial intent. This was a challenge to the Classic Pentecostal reading of Luke-Acts as setting a precedence and expectation of tongues bearing public evidence of this experience Pentecostal’s labeled “Spirit Baptism”. To be fair, my own rejection of Fee’s argument was not because of the Classical Pentecostal theological claims (which in my own estimation bear too many marks of a modernist epistemological impulse as influencing such), but because the Scriptures, OT and NT, are intended toward theological confession and worship as we find ourselves taken up into these words in adoration and conformity to the Word made flesh and now exalted at the right hand of God. My own contention is that theological intent is true not only of didactic texts (like Paul’s) but of narrative texts (like Luke-Acts, or the Joshua-Judges-Samuel-Kings as my own work contends). Roger Stronstad (who also passed away this year) was one of the most outspoken critics of Fee early on regarding Fee’s proposal (and their engagements at the Society of Pentecostal Studies remain the stuff of legend). It was the works of Stronstad which (for me) articulated the beginnings of a far more theologically defensible hermeneutic of narrative texts though I have traveled in yet other directions, see Stronstad’s, The Charismatic Theology of St. Luke: Trajectories from the Old Testament to Luke-Acts (2^nd edition; Baker Academic, 2012), The Prophethood of All Believers: A Study in Luke’s Charismatic Theology (Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2010), and Spirit, Scripture and Theology: A Pentecostal Perspective (2^nd edition; APT Press, 2019).

This critique notwithstanding, I am forever in the debt of Gordon Fee. He has inspired me to love the Scriptures as faithful witnesses to God’s self-revelation in Jesus. He has inspired me to seek to lovingly and faithfully follow God’s self-revelation even when it pushes against the norms of one’s theological and ecclesiological tradition. He has inspired me to be a faithful preacher and teacher, to pass on to others what I have received and to do so with words audible and written until all know and proclaim with the Spirit that Jesus is Lord.

Video Archives of SPS Honoring of Gordon Fee at AAR-SBL 2014

Blaine Charette, Mark Fee, Russell Spittler, and Murray Dempster (Blaine Charette chaired the special session)

Sven Soderlund

Andrew Lincoln (shared by John Christopher Thomas)

Rick Watts

Marianne Meye Thompson

Ron Herms

Gordon Fee’s Response

Other Tributes to Gordon Fee

“Honoring Pentecostal Theologian Gordon Fee” by Rick Wadholm Jr

“Craig Keener on Gordon Fee, Giant of Pentecostal Scholarship”

“Michael Brown on Gordon Fee, Pioneer and Scholarly Role Model”

Andrew Wilson has written a highly readable, engaging volume seeking the integration of the streams that are regularly treated as contrastive: sacrament and Spirit. It is not that these are actually contrastive, but too many folks imagine they are distinct. Those who worship with candles, lectionaries, church calendars, and vestments versus those who worship with shouts, dancing, speaking in tongues, and altar calls. Yet Wilson contends these are not contradictory and nor should they be. While he is not proposing an explicit apologetic for these two streams to be joined, he is offering an implicit one. Even more so he is speaking to those who already may think these should be found together and offering them support toward a more biblical reflection of integration as basic to the church. The movements of this book are simple (though not simplistic): (ch. 1) Spirit and sacrament, (chs. 2-3) charis “gift” and chara “joy”, (chs. 4-5) eucharistic and charismatic. The intent is a proposed (ch. 6) “eucharismatic” (eucharistic/sacramental and Spirit-ed/charismatic) expression and experience for the life of the local church. This new term (eucharismatic) is intended to bring the two expressions into a fruitful intertwining as expressive of the fuller life of the church.

One of the many values of this volume is its positive framing of church expressions that are often put into juxtaposition as if antithetical. A similar sort of distinction was noted fifteen years ago in Sam Storm’s testimony and articulation Convergence: Spiritual Journeys of a Charismatic Calvinist (Enjoying God Ministries, 2005) that juxtaposed “Calvinist” and “Charismatic” as poles that deserve to be brought together. Wilson’s own vision is less narrow by opening up to those which are sacramental/historic/liturgical and those which are charismatic/Pentecostal/renewal (with none of these terms intended as intentionally limiting to what might be offered). Wilson contends that the church that is committed to embodied life expresses itself in dress, smells, sounds, tastes, and movements that consider the whole person as incorporated into the life of the worshiping community. The integration of all of these as gifts and joy makes of a meaningful contribution to reflecting on the life of the church as it seeks faithful expression in local (and global) contexts.

Wilson does not dictate what the eucharismatic life and church looks like as this is a work of the Spirit in the context of specific congregations seeking to live faithfully in their contexts. However, he reminds his readers that just as “the church encompasses the whole body of Christ—cerebral and emotion, high and low context, introvert and extrovert, spontaneous and controlled, Asian, African, American, European, and so on—then local churches need to worship in ways that help everyone find joy in God, through Christ, by the Spirit” (57, original emphasis). This is enabled both by the many tongues of Pentecost and the many prayers and liturgies of the church historic and global.

As a full-time pastor of 22 years and one who still serves pastors globally through teaching, mentoring, and discipleship I will be recommending this book to fellow pastors and those I disciple in the pastorate. This book would serve a local church or group of pastors seeking to reflect on these issues (whether they consider themselves more “eucharistic” or more “charismatic” or even already a bit of a blend). It has the great potential to offer language for carrying forward conversations and seeking further reflection on this field of study. This book is precisely the kind of entry level work on the subject to spur further readings and deeper reflections perhaps moving to engage other works which likewise seek to integrate such things at a more advanced and detailed level of reflection.

Reviewed by Rick Wadholm Jr

Publisher’s page: https://zondervanacademic.com/products/spirit-and-sacrament

Cletus Hull provides an exegetical engagement with Paul’s Christology and Pneumatology from the first chapters of 1 Corinthians. His proposal is that, for Paul, these cannot be separated from one another particularly with regard to the life of the church as church. For Hull’s reading of Paul, Christ crucified is the enfleshment of the Spirit poured out in power, and the Spirit in power in the midst of the church is Christ crucified. This approach to “Christ crucified” by no means excludes such things as Christ’s life, resurrection, and ascension, but reimagine these in light of the cruciform Christology of Paul.

This volume is the edited fruit of Hull’s doctoral work at Regent University and thus bears some marks of such a project by way of historical bases, narrow exegesis, and proposals for application. Hull has divided his work into two broad sections: the first concerns background and the primary exegetical work, with the second proposing the theology of Pauline pneumatology in Paul’s Christology and conclusions for practical ministry.

The readership of this volume would best be suited to advanced students of the NT, scholars, and ministers with advanced education in Greek exegesis. This volume is not easy reading (nor intended) for general readership interested in the general topic of the book. The untranslated Greek terms/phrases/verses require the reader to have sufficient acumen in reading Koine NT Greek. Despite this caveat, this volume offers a helpful introduction to the topic of Paul’s Christology and Pneumatology drawing upon the Corinthian correspondences (with particular work on the first chapters of 1 Corinthians).

Jeremiah Campbell (DMin, Talbot School of Theology) has written a very accessible volume in defense of connections between tongues as prophetic speech and the Baptism in the Holy Spirit. He offers what would be deemed a Classic Pentecostal interpretation of tongues as initial physical evidence of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit and presumes this throughout his readings of both Scriptural and historical testimonies. This volume is written to address issues which outsiders might have regarding the connection of tongues to the Baptism and to offer answers to objections regarding such.

Campbell opens with his own brief personal testimony (in good Pentecostal fashion) of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit. He then offers a five part “journey” (essentially an apologetic journey) with brief coverage of: (1) the role of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity, (2) the filling of the Spirit in the Old Testament (he prefers “Covenant”), (3) the filling of the Spirit in the New Testament, (4) the filling of the Spirit in Church history, and (5) the filling of the Spirit and Pentecostal renewal.

The first part presumes that a Trinitarian reading will give appropriate direction to all that follows. It reads a number of Biblical texts as indicating Trinitarian beliefs and confessions. While such might be well received by individuals already in agreement with Trinitarian beliefs the arguments are a-historical in context (with the specific use of “Lord” in the confessions of Paul, on which one might examine the extensive work of Gordon Fee’s Pauline Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Study).  Further, it is a curiosity that Campbell does not properly represent the use of YHWH in the English translation he makes use of (NIV1984) which indicates the name as LORD.

Jeremiah Campbell

In the second part, Campbell offers a brief argument for the connection between prophetic speech and the fullness of the Spirit. The “fullness” is presumed in the texts examined though it may simply be that he has chosen this as the leading metaphor to identify the various terms regarding Spirit endowment/experience. This connection to prophetic speech is likely one of the best offerings in this overall volume (which follows the work of Roger Stronstad’s The Prophethood of All Believers). While Campbell examines many of the texts of the OT which use the Hebrew ruah (“S/spirit”), he selectively offers only those deemed connected to prophetic speech. Thus, for example, he does not address the Spirit upon Joseph (as indicated by Pharaoh) or Bezalel and Oholiab. The former would seem to fit his overall trajectory in this chapter. While there are numerous gaps in his argument regarding the OT (which presuppose a Pentecostal interpretation apart from literary or historical interpretations), he is to be commended in continuing the work of Stronstad regarding prophetic speech in relation to tongues-speech and Spirit baptism. One caveat would be to note that Spirit experiences are not limited to prophetic speech, but include prophetic acts (such as Ezekiel’s mock Jerusalem, tongues of fire, or Paul’s belt).

The third part attempts to reconcile the oft noted differences between the Lucan theology of the Spirit in Luke-Acts and the Pauline. Many may be unsatisfied with his attempt, but it is commendable that he should address such as a hurdle to appreciating the preferential treatments of a given Biblical voice as determining how one might read other voices in the NT. Notable gaps in his reading of the NT would be Spirit endowment in the writings attributed to John which offer yet another distinct voice to the NT witness of the experience/s of the Spirit.

Rick Wadholm Jr. shares his highlights and reflections from the Society for Pentecostal Studies 2018 Annual Conference held at Pentecostal Theological Seminary, on the campus it shares with Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee.

The day before the meetings officially commenced for SPS in Cleveland, Tennessee, I took four of my students from Trinity Bible College & Graduate School in Ellendale, ND, on a historical tour of Church of God sites organized by the The Dixon Pentecostal Research Center and led by Dr. Henry Smith.
We traced the early history of the Church of God beginning with the organization of the Christian Union in 1886 at Barney Creek. A mill used to be present at the site and functioned to fund the ministry of R. G. Spurling. We then found ourselves at the site of the Shearer Schoolhouse where an early holiness revival contributed to the growth in 1896. Another site that is marked (though not at the original location even as it is near) is the log church site where worshippers experienced Spirit baptism and opponents eventually succeeded in burning the church to the ground. We also toured the Fields of the Wood Biblical Park (http://cogop.org/fow/) where the Holiness Church at Camp Creek was organized in the home of W.F. Bryant (1902) and where A.J. Tomlinson joined (1903). There we saw the world’s largest 10 Commandments and traveled the trail of markers dedicated to the doctrines and teachings of the Church of God of Prophecy. From that location we traveled to the house where the first General Assembly met (1906) and I posed for preaching (it seemed a fitting pose). To wrap up the tour we visited R.G. Spurling’s gravesite and then A.J. Tomlinson’s home in Cleveland. It was a welcome learning experience for myself and the students I brought along to discover Pentecostal stories outside of our own specific fellowship (Assemblies of God).