“… the prophet makes clear that [Amos’ audience] celebrate a different god, one they might call Yahweh but one who was nevertheless a deity of their own making. It was a god of blessing and goodness, with no rough edges.

“Theirs was worship disconnected from reality and the living God.”

“Prophetic Anticipation Builds: Unblemished Red Heifers for Temple Ceremony Soon Come of Age” CBN (March 17, 2023).

Messianic teacher Kevin Williams writes: “In case you follow such things, it looks like we are about a year away from a potential Red Heifer update. The article says during the spring of 2024, but based on the other things in the article, I think the fall feasts are more likely. The article is intriguing though, regarding nine pure priests, the secured location, and the notion that the next temple will be ‘a house of prayer for all nations.’”

Richard R. Hammar, “Expanding Abuse Victims’ Rights and What It Means for Churches” Church Law & Tax.

From this landing page, Attorney and CPA, Richard Hammar launches a 4-part series on what the expansion of abuse victims’ rights means for churches.

“50,000 mosques have closed in Iran – Are Iranians seeking truth outside of Islam?” AllArab.News (August 16, 2023).

Here is exciting confirmation that God is doing something in Iran. Thanks to Iran Alive Ministries for pointing out this story of how 50,000 out of Iran’s 75,000 mosques have closed.

Image: Steven Coffey

Sam Storms, “Why Are Charismatics So Weird?” Enjoying God Blog (August 21, 2023).

No thinking Pentecostal/charismatic has ever denied that some that identify with that label do bizarre things and teach strange doctrines. Retired pastor and scholar Sam Storms argues that when cessationists (those who say the miraculous ministry of the Holy Spirit has ceased) hold up these undeniably bizarre examples as if they represent all Pentecostal/charismatics they are being deceitful and not acting like Christ.

Daniel K. Williams, “Evangelicals’ Theology of the Church Must Be Born Again: The ‘Great Dechurching’ is an opportunity for our tradition to rediscover a more enduring ecclesiology” Christianity Today (August 24, 2023).

PR

Amos Yong’s The Dialogical Spirit contains a series of essays written within the past two decades that demonstrates not only thoughtful theological engagement with a variety of critical issues and a host of interlocutors, but also the spirit of dialogue at the heart of its message. That is, Yong reflects his own willingness to posture himself as a learner among many voices. Yong’s interactions are funded by a Trinitarian stance with emphasis on pneumatological intuitions, especially that of the trialectic dynamic of the Spirit. That dynamic is the resolution to binary or dualistic impulses and funds a Spirit-oriented hermeneutic while also energizing a dialogical approach to theological inquiry. According to Yong, the benefits of a pneumatological lens do not require the diminishing of Christian commitments but will, on the other hand, promote a deeper understanding of contextual underpinnings of all theologies and a more effective global Christian witness (Ebook loc. 125).

Yong’s conversation partners are positioned in light of the situational and theological challenges that their respective contributions can address. To begin with, Yong asserts that Christian theology today finds itself situated within a postfoundational, post-Christendom, postsecular, postmodern, and pluralistic world (loc. 125, 7096). Following the introduction, his text is divided into four sections. The first discusses a way forward through the demise of foundationalism, and the second features the role of pneumatological intuitions and those voicing them in this post-Christendom era. The issue of plurality is addressed in the third and fourth sections, the first dealing with science in dialogue with spirituality, highlighting specifically the gains in this direction made by Buddhist theologians and the implications for Christian theology. The fourth and last section explores relational and participative methods in interreligious dialogue.

In the first half of the text, Yong offers a turn away from Cartesian influences and toward an experiential epistemology via C.S. Peirce’s semiotic theory, the neo-pragmatism of Richard Rorty that accentuates “the interrelatedness of all things” (loc. 1352), and the foundational pneumatology of Donald J. Gelpi (loc. 1954). To address the viability of Christianity among other voices, Yong introduces the “baptist vision” of James William McClendon, Jr., a vision that resonates with what Yong refers to as “the broad theological anthropology of Wesleyanism and the pneumatological anthropology of pentecostalism” (loc. 2931). McClendon’s approach is ecumenical and eschatological while at the same time sensitive to the need to listen to the story of others (loc. 2920). In conversation with Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen and James K.A. Smith, both writing intentionally from their theological and philosophical journeys in the pentecostal and charismatic movements, Yong encourages bolder strides toward engagement with the world and other religions. In Kärkkäinen’s case, Yong suggests he cultivate even deeper contact with other religions in order to develop himself as a world theologian (loc. 3517). For Smith, Yong offers a “pneumatological assist” toward a “more cohesive Christian theology of cultural and interreligious engagement for our time” (loc. 3960). This assist highlights the Spirit already in the world in accordance with “the Spirit poured out on all flesh” and turns away from “out-narrating other mythoi” and toward an intuitiveness regarding the presence of the church in the world (loc. 3960, 3826, 3999).

Amos Yong begins this monograph by emphasizing the global diversity of Christianity. He argues that, in terms of demographics, we can no longer view it principally as a Western religion. After all, the growth of Christianity is occurring most rapidly within the Global South. Yong emphasizes that this global feature is not new; rather, Christianity began as a multi-cultural movement – consider those present at Pentecost. Too often, however, evangelical theology has failed to embrace indigenous voices. Yong suggests that this failure may result from a fear that local voices will “dissolve” the biblical narrative (46) or that it will result in an uncritical syncretism. He maintains that contextual theology need not succumb to these dangers. Asian theology, for example, can be both deeply evangelical and open to Asian sensibilities (56). So, while evangelical theology has been dominated by Western theologians, this should not be the continued trend, and for Yong, Western dominance cannot continue to be the trend. Global voices, including Asian ones, have a valuable perspective to offer. He argues “the vitality of evangelical theology going into the middle of the twenty-first century depends on its contextual inputs” (33). Evangelical theology, if it is going to thrive, must be informed by local, or contextual, dynamics.

Reviewed by David Bradnick

Publisher’s page: https://www.ivpress.com/the-future-of-evangelical-theology

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.

Amos Yong is professor of theology and mission and director of the Center for Missiological Research at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. His other books include The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh (2005), Theology and Down Syndrome (2007), and Hospitality and the Other (2015). One might ask what qualifications – if any – an able-bodied man has to write about disability. Yong answers this concern by noting his own experience being a brother of a man who suffers from trisomy-21, otherwise known as Down syndrome. As such, he has manifold practical experience in working with those who are disabled. As a man who is himself intellectually disabled, although I function at a relatively high level (I suffered a traumatic brain injury in 1995), I welcome Yong’s re-visioning and re-interpretation of the relevant biblical texts that concern the topic of disability, even though that term is anachronistically applied to the bible itself.

This is Yong’s first venture into a full-fledged book about biblical theology. The present title could be aptly seen as a biblically oriented complement to his more theologically minded title from 2005, Theology and Down Syndrome. This title is about disability, from beginning to end. However, it is also about the church. More than that, it is about what it means to “be” and “do” the church in light of the experience of disability. Building on the primal work in Theology and Down Syndrome in which Yong approached the intersection of theology and disability from an explicit theological perspective as a systematic theologian, addressing questions that spanned the theological loci of the doctrine of creation, providence, the person of Christ, and theological anthropology, this present book furthers his insights into how we as the corporate people of God might revise negative theological understandings of disability with the goal of creating a more hospitable and inclusive world for those who are afflicted with disablement. The present book differs in a number of manners, however. For example, whereas Theology and Down Syndrome was intended for theologically minded audiences, the present book is aimed at a more popular audience, with Yong foreseeing this text being the topic of group bible studies and religious education, to name just a couple of uses. Additionally, whereas Theology and Down Syndrome deployed theological modes of argumentation, the present book is primarily concerned with biblical interpretation. Third, the present book explicitly discusses the “so then” aspect of application, whereas Theology and Down Syndrome was largely theoretical. If Theology and Down Syndrome could be seen as being designed to change the way we think about disability, one might say that this present text is designed to transform the way we live with disability both practically and – especially – ecclesially.

Yong makes several affirmations that are important and relevant to readers of Pneuma Review. For example, he asserts that people with disabilities are created in the image of God, which is measured by the personhood of Christ, and not our understandings of normalcy. Additionally, he avers that people with disabilities are people first, meaning that they are not to be defined by their disability. Third, he contends that disabilities are not necessarily evil or blemishes to be avoided and eliminated, but that instead people with disabilities (I resonate with this assertion) are constituted by their disabilities, and thus to remove them from their disablement would be to remove an intrinsic part of their identity.

In sum, Yong proposes a new “portrait” for what it means to be the whole people of God that both values and is inclusive of those who are marked by disablement. He suggests a “charismatic fellowship” of the Spirit that both blesses and is blessed by people with disabilities. Pointedly, he addresses what it means to be the church if we are to go beyond the damning dichotomy that renders so many of us disabled individuals on the periphery of society. Yong views the bible as a source of redemption for the experience of disability.

Reviewed by Bradford McCall

Publisher’s page: http://www.eerdmans.com/Products/6608/the-bible-disability-and-the-church.aspx

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.

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.

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.

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 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.