Friday, April 9, 2010

Amos Yong and Pentecostal Theology


Just got this book today - been meaning to read it for a while. Amos Yong is a Pentecostal theologian who's co-editing a series of "Pentecostal Manifestos" with James K.A. Smith. He's done some pretty impressive work in the past, especially a book called Theology and Down Syndrome.

I'm just a few chapters in, but I'm already interested in the way Amos Yong says Pentecostal theology is grounded in a exegetical perspective that privileges Luke-Acts. Yong also says that Pentecostal theology provides a corrective to the way Protestant Scholasticism downplayed the role of the Spirit in Justification and in Christology.

He doesn't give any examples of Protestant Scholasticism here, so I'm curious what he's referring to. He brings out a pretty impressive list of biblical texts that describe the role of the Spirit in Jesus's life and work. Christ offers himself on the cross "through the eternal Spirit" (Hebrews 9:14), Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness (Luke 4:1), and Acts 10:38 talks about how God "anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power." And so on (Yong gives many others).

Of course Yong says that this doesn't invalidate "Logos Christology" in any way, but it adds an extra dimension to the complexity of Christ's life and work that he says was passed over. Although all I know from Prot. Scholasticism is from Barth's "small print" sections in the Church Dogmatics, it seems like they were pretty biblical. I wonder why they would pass over these texts.

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