Reading Craig Keener

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PNEUMA 39 (2017) 126–145

Reading Craig Keener

OnSpirit Hermeneutics: Reading Scripture in Light of Pentecost

L. William Oliverio, Jr.*

The School of Urban Missions, Oakland, California

droliverio@sum.edu

Abstract

In this essay, I contend that Craig Keener’sSpirit Hermeneuticsis a major contribution to charismatic-pentecostal biblical hermeneutics and is likely to become a classical text on the subject. Keener develops an ecumenical rather than sectarian pentecostal hermeneutic that addresses both the contextuality of the original texts and that of con- temporary interpreters, valuing multiple legitimate interpretations while also holding to the author and Spirit’s design of the text as grounding interpretive meaning. Further, Keener’s hermeneutic provides the biblical hermeneutic for an emerging pentecostal theological paradigm that can be developed through further attention to the relation- ship between Keener’s biblical hermeneutics and theological hermeneutics, cultural hermeneutics, present horizons of interpretation, and the religious and fleshly forces arrayed against the Spirit hermeneutics for which he advocates.

Keywords

Spirit Hermeneutics – biblical hermeneutics – theological hermeneutics – cultural hermeneutics – Craig S. Keener – paradigms – authors

Craig Keener’s Spirit Hermeneutics: Reading Scripture in the Light of Pentecost1 is now the most significant and comprehensive text to have been written on

* I would like to thank Aaron Green and Rachel Oliverio for their dialogue concerning Spirit

Hermeneuticsas I developed this essay.

1 Craig S. Keener,Spirit Hermeneutics: Reading Scripture in Light of Pentecost(Grand Rapids,mi:

Eerdmans, 2016); further references to this work will be made parenthetically by page number

within the text of this article.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-03901012

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pentecostal hermeneutics. The 2016 monograph (xxviii + 522 pp.; $48) pub- lished by Eerdmans with a foreword by Amos Yong is a landmark in the com- munal development of hermeneutics for global Pentecostalism, broadly con- strued, as the volume plays out the more general and ecumenical implications of a disciplined pneumatic hermeneutic—a hermeneutic that has its cultural and practical roots in pentecostal interpretive habits as they meet believing modern historical studies of Scripture. Spirit Hermeneutics is set to become to charismatic-pentecostal biblical hermeneutics what Anthony Thiselton’s The Two Horizons has been to Christian hermeneutics in general in the English- speaking world, and what Kevin Vanhoozer’s Is There a Meaning in This Text? has been to American evangelical hermeneutics.2

A charismatic Baptist who has worshipped and ministered at predomi- nantly African-American churches throughout his adult life—ordained in the National Baptist Convention—Keener received his first biblical-theological training at what was the Assemblies of God’s flagship ministerial training insti- tution, Central Bible College, and he earned his m.a. and M.Div. from the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary, both in Springfield, Missouri and both now encompassed into Evangel University there. After he completed his Ph.D. from Duke University (1991), he taught at Hood Theological Seminary (Salisbury,nc) and then at Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University (near Philadelphia, pa) before becoming the f.m. and Ada Thompson Profes- sor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary (Wilmore, ky) in 2011. He is known to broader audiences through his work that brings his scholarship to use in study of the Bible as well as through his personal website (craigkeener .com) and his popular writings published on internet sites.

Keener has provided some of the most significant contributions from the charismatic-pentecostal scholarly community in his scholarship on the New Testament and related subjects. He has authored over two dozen full-length scholarly works. These include Keener’s often dense and carefully noted com- mentaries, work on the historical Jesus and miracles, as well as more pastorally and spiritually oriented books on the roles of women in the church and the black church, plus a popular autobiographical work on his relationship with his then future wife Médine as she was caught in a life-and-death struggle during

2 AnthonyThiselton,TheTwoHorizons:NewTestamentHermeneuticsandPhilosophicalDescrip-

tion with Special Reference to Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein (Carlisle, uk

and Grand Rapids, mi: Paternoster and Eerdmans, 1980); and Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a

Meaning in This Text?: The Bible, The Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand

Rapids,mi: Zondervan, 1998).

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war in her native Congo. Spirit Hermeneutics lays out a practiced hermeneuti- cal paradigm with which those who know his works will already be familiar. Rather than a proposal for a hermeneutical program, this theoretical work on hermeneutics is the result of long hermeneutical practice and experience.

The typical pair of human hands has enough fingers to count those who might be qualified to address the breadth of subjects with the depth of Spirit Hermeneutics, at least if the scope is limited to those in the charismatic-pen- tecostal tradition. Keener is uniquely gifted to do so with his renowned detail. His documentation throughout, in the form of endnotes here (304–388), is the work of an erudite lover of biblical and ancient cultural studies. This erudition is met by scholarly competency and cogent reasoning in his philosophical and theological hermeneutics, a combination that results in a work that addresses biblical, theological, and philosophical hermeneutics with sufficient adequacy, even as its focus remains the interpretation of Scripture.

Spirit Hermeneutics thus includes geological layers of Keener’s developed understanding and research, on top of which his hermeneutical approach sur- faces as a developed pentecostal hermeneutical paradigm that is now the fore- most constructive effort in the field.With due respect to the manifold contribu- tions made to contemporary pentecostal hermeneutics and several particularly influential ones,3I can only concur with AmosYong’s consideration in the Fore- word that this is “by far the most comprehensively articulated” book on the matter (xviii). Even so, Keener’s boldness in his scholarly and spiritual convic-

3 I would list as the other major works Kenneth J. Archer’s A Pentecostal Hermeneutic for the

Twenty-First Century: Spirit, Scripture and Community (Cleveland, tn: Center for Pentecostal

Theology, 2009); and Amos Yong’sSpirit-Word-Community: Theological Hermeneutics in Trini-

tarian Perspective (Eugene, or: Wipf and Stock, 2002); among other leading works, some

might consider my Theological Hermeneutics in the Classical Pentecostal Tradition: A Typo-

logical Account, Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies 12 (Leiden: Brill, 2012). Three

recent edited collections on hermeneutics among Charismatic-Pentecostals provide some

recent contributions on the topic: Kenneth J. Archer and L. William Oliverio, Jr., eds., Con-

structive Pneumatological Hermeneutics in Pentecostal Christianity,charisSeries (New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Lee Roy Martin, ed., Pentecostal Hermeneutics: A Reader (Leiden:

Brill, 2013); and Kevin L. Spawn and Archie Wright, eds., Spirit and Scripture: Exploring a

Pneumatic Hermeneutic(New York: Bloomsbury, 2012). There are dozens of monographs from

pentecostalscholarsthataddresshermeneuticsinasustainedmannerinworksthatprimarily

address other topics, especially in the area of biblical studies, along with hundreds of articles

and book chapters. Keener’s bibliography at the end of Spirit Hermeneutics (389–456) notes

most of them. A few additional works not found in his nearly comprehensive one can be

found in my bibliography in Theological Hermeneutics in the Classical Pentecostal Tradition,

363–376.

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tions throughout is met by humility in recognition of his own limits, exempli- fied by the modal strength by which he oftentimes prefaces the strength of his statements.4

Yet, Keener’s boldness and breadth of understanding are essential aspects of his success. Hermeneutics as an encompassing and basic place of beginning for human inquiry, as a supersession of epistemology and the latter’s dom- inance over human thought as the “first philosophy” of modernity, requires the theorist to have broad understanding concerning philosophical, linguis- tic, anthropological, and ontological issues.5 Such understanding goes beyond the focal point of the study here in charismatic-pentecostal biblical interpreta- tion, though a well-developed hermeneutic requires it. This breadth can per- haps best be seen in the numerous secondary comments in the endnotes, or in Appendixes a and b, where his compulsion for thoroughness provides his readers with succinct if developed responses to twentieth-century conti- nental hermeneutics (Appendix a) and a sensitive response to postcolonial hermeneutics (Appendix b). The extensive bibliography (389–456) is likewise demonstrative, and his use of those sources goes far beyond awareness of pub- lished works in the field as he moves toward the limits of the human ability to stay abreast of work in related disciplines. And while he makes hermeneu- tics the encompassing discipline for inquiry, he still recognizes the formative importance of epistemology for hermeneutics, developing an “epistemology of Word and Spirit” that is both informed by and focused on understanding Scrip- ture in its epistemic-anthropological implications in Partiv(153–204). He does so because “the theological sphere requires an epistemic approach appropriate to it. The infinite God is known only where he reveals himself, and theological epistemology must thus begin with those places of revelation” (153).

4 For example, this can be seen in his conclusions concerning the contemporization of the

hermeneutics of Jesus (italics mine to note his modal humility): “… I still surmise that if Jesus

were doing the same sort of ministry today, he would not start by cultivating favor with our

denominational leaders or scholars; certainly not with political or academic establishments

either. I believe that he would start with children in the projects, with teenagers on the

most impoverished Native American reservations, or the world’s shantytowns.He mightlook

more like a street outreach worker in Teen Challenge than a political activist. He would

start from the bottom up” (216). Throughout, a general air of humility towards Keener’s own

interpretation meets the strengths of his claims.

5 On hermeneutics as a supersession of epistemology, Charles Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemol-

ogy” inPhilosophicalArguments(Cambridge,ma: Harvard University Press, 1995); and Merold

Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Ford-

ham University Press, 2001).

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Keener writes Spirit Hermeneutics as one whose life has been deeply im- mersed in Scripture, both as a scholar and in Christian devotion. It may not even be bold to consider Keener’s commentaries and other works on the New Testament, Jesus, Paul, and other themes related to the Christian Scriptures— now including Spirit Hermeneutics as an articulation of his hermeneutical paradigm—not only as leading works in biblical scholarship today but even as classic works for future generations. Here, my goal is to provide an initial inter- pretation and evaluation of Spirit Hermeneuticsas it begins its influence on its audiences, though my own interpretation here has had to choose between so many important themes that I would likely concede criticisms from those who may find that I have missed an important idea in Spirit Hermeneutics in this essay.

Pentecostal Hermeneutics andSpirit Hermeneutics

Most changes in societies and cultures happen gradually, and thus even major trends can go unnoticed when they do not fit into regnant or championed nar- ratives. While the regnant script on the future of religion in the West has often told us that the religious future is, at least in the main, a diminishing one, and that this future will be more secular, insufficient notice has been paid to the manifold growth of global Pentecostalism and its implications.6That this script is regnant does not, however, mitigate the reality that global Pentecostalism has grown to 500–600 million adherents worldwide and now ranks as the second largest global Christian tradition.That is, Pentecostalism is at least co-second to global Protestantism, after the Roman Catholic tradition, and is in the process of surpassing global Protestantism.7This is the new and present reality, even as this shift and its implications are being digested—or, more often, ignored—by

6 For some helpful surveys here, Allan H. Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global

Charismatic Christianity, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Don-

ald E. Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori,Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social

Engagement(Berkeley,ca: University of California Press, 2007); and Wolfgang Vondey,Pente-

costalism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). For an up-to-date sociolog-

ical assessment, Michael Wilkinson, “Pentecostals and the World: Theoretical and Method-

ological Issues for Studying Global Pentecostalism,”Pneuma38, no. 4 (2016): 373–393. 7 For a recent history that accounts for this, Douglas Jacobsen, Global Gospel: An Introduction

to Christianity on Five Continents (Grand Rapids, mi: Baker, 2015); pentecostal demographic

developments are also well accounted for by the continuing work of the World Christian

Encyclopedia and The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

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an academy struggling to account for it, one still dominated by philosophical assumptions built into it by certain modes of Enlightenment philosophy. Pen- tecostalism has, for instance, as a practical religious reality, countered the three modes of secularity spelled out by Charles Taylor in his A Secular Age: secular- ization in the public place of religion, actual religious belief and the practice of religion, and the underlying cultural structures and plausibility conditions of religious belief.8Pentecostalism is thus more often treated as anomaly than as the religious future, even if that conclusion may be well criticized as one built more upon philosophical assumptions than on present realities. So when Craig Keener writes Spirit Hermeneutics as a constructive effort at pentecostal hermeneutics, he is not merely representing an odd species of American Evan- gelicalism, he is representing and building upon a now leading global Christian movement that is an outgrowth of an already century-old hermeneutical tradi- tion that itself has undergone development in various types and approaches.9

Yet, Pentecostalism itself was originally an ecumenically oriented revival movement, and global Pentecostalism has brought its experiential hermeneu- tic to the contemporary global church as a major contribution to ecumenism.10 Further, Keener develops Spirit Hermeneutics as an ecumenical hermeneutic

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Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, ma: Belknap, 2007), esp. 15–20. There is much that could be detailed and discussed concerning contemporary Pentecostalism and secu- larism, with future work to come out of Charles Taylor’s 2017 address to the Annual Meet- ing of the Society for Pentecostal Theology. The work of contemporary sociologists and his- torians, as well as theologians, who have had Pentecostalism as an important subject, such as Allan H. Anderson, Silje Kwame Bjørndal, Douglas Jacobsen,William K. Kay, David Mar- tin, Michael McClymond, Wolfgang Vondey, Michael Wilkinson, and Amos Yong, among others, provides foundations for broader interpretation of these developments. Here, I claim that Pentecostalism has provided a counternarrative to the mainstream stories of western secularization concerning all three of these modes of secularism.

MyTheological Hermeneutics in the Classical Pentecostal Tradition: A Typological Account accounted for four major types of hermeneutics among Classical Pentecostals, primarily though not exclusively among North American Classical Pentecostals: the original classi- cal type, early and contemporary versions of the evangelical-pentecostal hybrid type, the contextual-pentecostal type, and the ecumenical-pentecostal type. These types are orien- tations that continue to form new hybridizations and developing paradigms in contem- porary pentecostal hermeneutics. Further work is needed to account for broader global pentecostal hermeneutical types, though many have contributed toward works that could develop these broader accounts.

Cecil M. Robeck, Jr. has considered the original revival at Azusa Street as an ecumenical revival in The Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Move- ment(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006). Wolfgang Vondey has considered Pentecostalism, in part, “an ecumenical melting pot” (Pentecostalism, 49) throughout his works.

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in which the charismatic influence of charismatic-pentecostal Christianity has leavened much of contemporary Christianity and its hermeneutics today.Thus, a reading of Keener that considers Spirit Hermeneutics a partisan or commu- nal hermeneutic would misinterpret not only his ecumenical orientation but also his prioritization of Scripture as the authority for charismatic-pentecostal interpretation of Scripture above the interpretive traditions of charismatic- pentecostal communities.11 Keener contends that charismatic-pentecostal communities have been born out of the desire for having experiences that align with what is taught and modeled in the New Testament texts, even if, in his estimation, Pentecostals have not always had accurate historical grids—that is, good historical information and good historical-theological accounts—for interpreting these texts in their historical contexts (21–38).

Few have been more careful students of Scripture and the attendant histor- ical and cultural background.12 Yet, Keener does not consider ancient context and present experience in an oppositional manner. He instead champions an experiential-believing pneumatic hermeneutics of Scripture driven by the con- tinuity between the historical situations of biblical revelation and the present work of God. Here it is worth allowing his own words to testify:

As followers of the risen Messiah, we are people of the era of the Messiah and the Spirit, inaugurated at Pentecost, a prophetic, eschatological peo- ple. Referring to events that began at Pentecost, Acts announces the era of the Spirit that God had earlier promised: “In the last days … I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and daughters will prophesy.” A “Spirit hermeneutic” seems an apt title for that interpretive location. Moreover, it is one shared by the first Pentecostals and most global Pentecostals and charismatics, including myself. This means that we are interested in bib- lical texts not simply for what they teach us about ancient history or ideas (intriguing as that is to me), but because we expect to share the kind of spiritual experience and relationship with God that we discover in Scrip- ture.

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Keener specifically addresses the role of community in interpretation in chap. 18, “Global Pentecostal Community as a Safety Net?” ofSpirit Hermeneutics, 277–285.This comes after he has argued in the previous chapter that genuinely pentecostal, as differentiated from naïve “pentecostal,” readings (Keener’s scare quotes) are “biblically sensitive.” Keener is coeditor (with John H. Walton) of the niv Cultural Background Study Bible (Grand Rapids,mi: Zondervan, 2016), and editor of theInterVarsity Press Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove,il: InterVarsity Press, 2014).

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Keener’s pneumatic hermeneutics is an experiential-spiritual hermeneutic fused together with great attention to the historical and literary. Of course, certain spiritual-theological-ontological affirmations can be seen as underlying what he brings to the texts, but he contends, and works to demonstrate, that these are themselves formed by an experiential reading of Scripture, a “reading by the Spirit and with the heart” (219). While “[g]rammar is valuable because it helps us to hear and obey the message,” it is not sufficient for our hermeneutic, as linguistic and conceptual understanding “is not the same as embracing the heart of God that the text is designed to communicate” (257).

Hermeneutical Theory inSpirit Hermeneutics, and Pentecost as the Reversal of Babel

In Spirit Hermeneutics, Keener is a master builder of a hermeneutic. He does so with many materials that are ready to hand, already present in the living hermeneutics of the global pentecostal and charismatic community and her scholars (see the “Index on Authors,” 458–475), yet Spirit Hermeneutics is nev- ertheless his own construction, a landmark work in charismatic-pentecostal hermeneutics at that.

Spirit Hermeneutics cultivates an approach to scriptural interpretation that accounts for both the always traditioned and enculturated second nature in- volved in all human interpretation—the hermeneutical turn—andthe histor- ical actualities given to interpreters in texts, which give us their own parameters for what is legitimate and illegitimate interpretive possibilities—the ontic, the real. In this way, Keener’s hermeneutics attends to what I have argued is the crit- ical both-and in hermeneutical theory for the future of pentecostal hermeneu- tics, in a hermeneutical realism that recognizes both of these sets of concerns in a way that does not deny, neglect, mute, or suffocate the other, as some cur- rent hermeneutical approaches do.13 What further distinguishes Keener from many other hermeneutic theorists, including those who address biblical and theological hermeneutics, is how much he turns to Scripture itself in develop- ing his scriptural hermeneutics. He has an entire chapter on the hermeneutics of Jesus (chapter 14, “How Jesus Invites Us to Hear the Bible,” 207–218), a rich

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I have addressed this pair of concerns in “Towards a Hermeneutical Realism in Pentecostal Theological Hermeneutics,” chap. 7 of Theological Hermeneutics in the Classical Pente- costal Tradition, 315–362; and “Introduction: Pentecostal Hermeneutics and the Herme- neutical Tradition,” in Archer and Oliverio, eds.,Constructive Pneumatological Hermeneu- tics in Pentecostal Christianity, 1–14.

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if relatively brief study. Keener’s hermeneutical circle—or spiral, if that is a more adequate metaphor, as suggested by Grant Osborne—heavily sources from Scripture itself.14Scripture forms Keener’s hermeneutic even as his inter- pretation of Scripture is itself formed by what he has already taken to be the case about the biblical texts and the way he ought to go about interpreting them.

In developing this hermeneutic, Keener has gotten over the modern aversion to recognizing the role that experience and situation, culture and generation, play in interpretation; thus he eschews the idea that there is anything like a sin- gle proper or neutral standpoint for interpreting texts, one that often latches onto the concept of objectivity. Such a position often follows a logical non sequitur where realism—that is, the affirmation that our language concerning reality actually speaks of reality as it isto some degree of adequacy or another— entails a kind of ideal vantage point or propositional articulation that speaks “the truth” (the definite article giving the definitive articulation) on the mat- ter. Keener is operating on a different conceptual plane inSpirit Hermeneutics. He affirms the text, its realities, and the parameters it gives for interpretation, while nonetheless he also affirms the humanness—the enculturation and fini- tude and volition, the unrecognized assumptions and that which primes our assumptions moving beyond self-awareness—involved in all understanding. For Keener, “People read texts with interests and agendas” so that the ques- tions we pose to and about the texts lead to what we find in and about them. Human finitude is not an obstacle to interpretation but its inevitable condition: “Personal experience inevitably shapes how texts or communications affect us” (30).

Keener does not simply press this point because of late modern or postmod- ern concerns. Though he is undoubtedly influenced by cultural-philosophical assumptions, his primary reasons for stressing this point have to do with Scrip- ture itself and the fruitfulness found in the experiential readings of God’s peo- ple today. In so doing, he develops his hermeneutic crossculturally, finding that greater insight comes from listening to the interpretations of Scripture from the many tongues of the global church today. Much of the contemporary global church’s biblical interpretation is experiential reading, yet Keener finds that Scripture itself invites experiential reading. Similar to how Lee Roy Martin has emphasized the affective hearing of Scripture in pentecostal scholarly circles, Keener holds that readings that seek to be affected by Scripture are usually

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Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Inter- pretation, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove,il: InterVarsity Press, 2006).

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closer to the origination and original situation of a biblical text and its audi- ence than are modern technical, critical readings—even though Martin and Keener are both specialists in the skills involved in those technical and critical approaches.15

Contextualization and being formed by experiences are ubiquitous aspects of all human understanding, and Keener’s emphasis on the cultural back- grounds of the original contexts is not used to deemphasize contemporary culture but to bring about awareness of contemporary as well as ancient or original contexts. Contexts are just that, they are what the text and the inter- preter(s) bring with them to the conveying and understanding of meaning. They are always already there, whether recognized or not. Keener’s emphasis on culture comes as an affirmation of Scripture as revelation:

Those of us who embrace Scripture as divine revelation must recognize that God communicated cross-culturally. All communication has a cul- tural context; no one communicates or hears in a cultural vacuum. Insofar as we wish to hear the Bible as communication, then, we need to take into account its cultural context.

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Scripture is divine revelation—originating in particular contexts and in human language and in culturally laden communication, and always interpreted in the same. There is no escaping this. The basic problem posed by Lessing’s broad and ugly ditch between the truths of history and eternal truths is denied. Particularity as a possible condition for divine revelation is not only affirmed but taken to be the necessary condition for a Christian—a pentecostal— understanding of revelation.

Keener, here and elsewhere (for example, regarding miracles), moves past some of the seeming dilemmas of modern thought concerning spiritual things. With less philosophical and theological articulation, though none the lesser in practice, Keener operates with the affirmation developed by James K.A. Smith in The Fall of Interpretation that genuinely Christian hermeneutics do not buy into those modern Enlightenment or other epistemologies which seek to overcome the finitude and situatedness of humanity to attain some ideal state of knowledge and the often attendant quest for some meta-articulation of truth

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A summary of his affective approach as it meets technical biblical scholarship can be found in Lee Roy Martin, “Longing for God: Psalm 63 and Pentecostal Spirituality,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology22 (2013): 54–76.

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that can somehow move beyond cultures and traditions; yet neither Smith nor Keener lapses into a hermeneutics led by suspicion or despair.16 Rather, Keener is more in line with the “many tongues” principle for which Amos Yong advocates throughout his works, where a Christian plurality of voices and interpretations in the global church better speak the truth and meaning found in and revealed to us through Scripture. Even further for Keener, and this is in line with his previous work in The Historical Jesus of the Gospels and Miracles, the cultural and linguistic plurality of the church birthed at Pentecost that witnesses the truth of God stands as a reversal of the empires of Babel, includingthereductionistic-empiricalacademicempireanditshegemonyover what can be counted as real and true in Scripture. Instead, Keener finds a thicker, revelatory and empowering Bible:

If we read from the vantage point of Pentecost, we recognize that God speaks all languages and reaches out to all cultures. Different cultures may hear different aspects of the Spirit’s voice more readily. A reading from the vantage point of Pentecost, then, invites us to trust the Spirit’s work in the global church enough that we dialogue with one another, listen to one another, and share with one another. The Spirit speaks through different gifts in the local church, and we all provide a safety net of discernment for one another’s blind spots (1Cor. 14:29).

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This is so even as Keener strongly grounds meaning in the original text and the communicative work of the authors—though he is comfortable with a broader semantic range of the meaning of “meaning” while prioritizing the origination of the text and gravitating all other senses of meaning in their relation to it. He does not see authority over meaning as coming from the global Christian com- munity that gives the text its meaning but from the Lord who communicates to us. Together we hear and see and interpret this communication, which comes in and through the text itself.

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James K.A. Smith, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, mi: Baker Academic, 2012; 1st ed., 2000). Merold Westphal’s Whose Community? Which Interpretation?: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church(Grand Rapids,mi: Baker, 2009) addresses these issues from a largely Gadamerian approach.

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Meaning(s), Contexts, Authors, and Texts and Readers—and “Keener’s Hammer”

To summarize, Keener holds that the textual and revelatory meaning of biblical texts adheres to contexts, that is, the original contexts. The contexts of his- torical and contemporary interpreters are then productive of interpretations whose meanings are accountable to the original texts themselves, which are properly understood only in relation to these original contexts. Contrasting with the more modern than biblical approach often adhered to by some strands of contemporary Christian hermeneutics, a multicultural hermeneutics that has Pentecost as its exemplary moment better understands the original text— both in its original meaning and present meaningfulness—than could a single vantage point:

Welcoming a multicultural range of perspectives to the table checks biases far better than welcoming only a single perspective, but the ideal is that, once at the table, dialogue can help all of us to hear more clearly not simply ourselves or even (more helpfully) one another but the biblical text and how it speaks to our various situations.

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Keener holds the interpreter accountable to the text’s origination, linking the text to its origination while eschewing the concept that a singular contempo- rary articulation of its meaning functions as the properly correct one for all. This does not however, relativize its original meaning.

Key to Keener’s approach is the affirmation that biblical texts all commu- nicate to us today through ancient voices, so that we can hear the texts as Scriptureonly inas muchas wehold totheir originality.It isthus thehermeneu- tic responsibility of the interpreter to regard the text in its originality, and the originality of any text cannot be had without context and historicity. At the heart of Keener’s theological-hermeneutical approach is the central conviction that “[i]t is when we hear most clearly what the biblical writers communicated, often forcefully, to their own generations that we can hear most clearly what these texts speak to us in our very different contexts” (126). This then implies that “[m]odern contextual readings that are most faithful to that original sense as their foundation will have the greatest common ground ability to dialogue with other contextual readings” (126–127). That is, “Culture makes a difference on both ends of interpretation: understanding the ancient context and relating to the interpreter’s context” (127). This means that “appropriate application is generally indigenous, and is as varied as the contexts to which the principles

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are meant to be applied. One cannot produceuniversalapplication except in a generalized and usually obvious form” (247).

Though Keener especially engages the matter of authorial intention through the oft discussed work of E.D. Hirsch, Jr. and the debate around the discovery of authorial intention as textual meaning, among philosophical hermeneutic theorists Keener’s hermeneutic might come closer to that of the philosopher Jürgen Habermas’s consideration of texts as communicative actions, and even closer to his fellow Christian theologian Kevin Vanhoozer’s revision of Hirsch and resourcing of Habermas. Habermas andVanhoozer, and Keener here, avoid the Romantic hermeneutic consideration of authorial intention as psychologi- cal knowledge of the author in consonance with the interpreter’s own psychol- ogy. The notions of intention as known only through communicative action follows a more chastened approach that avoids a psychological mysticism of sorts—though Keener, of course, has no problem with attending to realities that go beyond what normally goes by the empirical.17

Yet, the pneumatic-experiential is not license to ignore history. Keener the historian considers authorial intention as “not fully recoverable,” but “this lim- itation does not prevent us from examining the text’s design and inferring from such strategies relevant aspects of the text’s implied author’s interests. The approximation is imperfect but usually sufficient for communication to work” (140).18 While Keener implies openness to the Hirschian distinction between “meaning” as reserved for original textual meaning and “significance” or “application” as reserved for subsequent use of the original meaning, he is less concerned with oft-debated “semantics.” Rather, the originality of the text gravitates meaning; yet—and there is a special sense for which this is true in Scripture—it does not entirely limit meaning. Keener clarifies his understand- ing:

Of course, we cannot perfectly reconstruct the original meaning. We have access neither to everything authors thought nor to the full original con- texts that they assumed their ideal audiences shared, the information needed to fill lacunae in secondary communication. But whatever else

17

18

Key works here for each would be Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Commu- nicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen; and Vanhoozer,Is There a Meaning in This Text?

A common related objection to “meaning” as the discovery of authorial intention is whether authors really even “intend” in any strict rational sense, that is, whether authors even know their own motives with clarity. The inspiration of Scripture raises further complexities for this issue.

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a biblical text might mean, it usually means at least what it meant to the inspired author, who understood his own language, idioms, and cultural allusions better than we do. Offering historical reconstructions as respon- sibly as possible (given the limits of the evidence and our own horizons) is a reasonable objective that need not be discounted simply because it cannot be perfectly achieved.

emphasis Keener’s, 141

Still, the turn to communicative action seeks to enter the hermeneutical circle through priority given to the communicative actions of the author rather than the presumed psychological consonance with the same. Then there are the situations in which texts are layered in composition by the work of multiple persons, in edits and editions.

Of course, there is some presumed consonance about meaning and under- standing, or no communication could ever take place. That is part of the importance of Schleiermacher’s psychological emphasis, while the critique of Schleiermacher and Romantic hermeneutics has been that this all goes too far, and that the focus on texts as communicative action chastens interpreters from overinterpreting the psychology of others in a presumptuous projectionism. In the matter of interpretation of Scripture, there are of course additional issues, especially the matter of divine authorship.Those who focus on communicative actions of authors, however, look to the givenness of the texts to speak correc- tively to the interpreter’s understanding. The texts correct the interpreter as to the implied intent involved in the composition, for Keener here its “design.” So, if the interpreter’s goal is to understand what is communicated, the interpreter must give precedence to the communication itself. Of course, there is much to say, then, about literary devices in communication, from jokes and sarcasm to communication under duress as well as varieties of genres and literary forms. These, however, only further illustrate how important context is, and for Keener all good interpretation attends to context.

Keener’s estimation of the reality of the original text maybe the critical point at which he breaks with the great hermeneutic theorist Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose famous statement that “writing is self-alienation” in his great master- work Truth and Method detached the relationship between authorship and the otherness of texts.19While Gadamer accounted for the becoming of being (following Heidegger’s Dasein, or “being there”) as necessitating that we only

19

Hans-Georg Gadamer,Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. JoelWeinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004).

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experience a text through its history of effect, and that only through our own “historically effected consciousness” (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein) in a “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung), Keener operates with a dif- ferent albeit tacit view of history and its relationship to texts, here biblical texts, and their meaning. In an approach to history that affirms memory of the past as guiding our understanding for the future, like the memory of God’s salvific action in the Exodus informing subsequent Israelite history, the bibli- cal texts have a past that is not merely the becoming of their being into the present. There seems to be a greater ontic existence to the past for Keener than in Gadamerian hermeneutics—the past is there, communicated in and through presently experienced texts and able to be differentiated from its his- tory of effect. The Aristotelian definition of truth is put in a past tense so that “to say of what was not, that it was, or of what was, that it was not, is false; while to say of what was that it was, or what was not that it was not, is true.” Keener operateswith a theory of correspondencebetweentruth and the past— hermeneutically, and with attention to context and semantic range, of course, but nevertheless. Still, these past events of revelation come to us in and through the biblical texts as part of the work of the Spirit in calling humanity to salva- tion and God’s eschatological purposes. We are joined to the original texts by the Spirit who spoke in and through them then and is doing so now.

Keener holds a high regard for intention or, as Partiiiof Spirit Hermeneutics uses in the title, the “designed sense,” in this chastened sense of understanding intention. Against detachment of the text from its original history, however, Keener contends, on the grounds of a theological conclusion, that “the incar- nation would show us that history and historical particularity matter” (99). Yet, whose design?

Throughout, the implication seems to be that it is the dual design of human biblical authors and the revelatory Spirit, that the human authors have their intentions with the biblical texts, and that the Spirit brings these and a surplus of divine intention to bear upon them as well.The extended implications of this approach are manifold for particular cases in Scripture, and Keener provides plenty of examples throughout. The importance of seeking the design of a text has practical implications for the goals of biblical hermeneutics. Keener’s hammer illustration exemplifies this. A hammer, Keener points out, can be employed

… as a weapon, a doorstop, or a prop, but the specific design of the handle, face, and claws fit its designed function in pounding in and removing nails. The goals for which texts were designed point us toward the uses for which they will usually be most relevant. We cannot infallibly recover

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an author’s thought processes; we can, however, seek to recognize the “implied author’s” design in the text.

100

Further, Keener considers that canonical texts are “measuring sticks” and not texts to be exploited for ideological agendas. The main reason so much effort has been spent on Scripture is that Christians hold it to be God’s chosen medium for divine disclosure to us. Therefore, Keener is also concerned to deny a variety of readings of Scripture that seek to use Scripture in ways that run contrary to its implied design rather than resourcing its messages anew— from political-ideological readings to “preachers … more committed to evok- ing particular audience responses than to hearing God’s message in the text” (102). Keener is an advocate for a legitimate pluralism of readings and perspec- tives over and againstbothsingular articulations that claim full sufficiencyand irresponsible readings that seek to (ab)use the authority of the biblical texts instead of honoring it. Part vi, the final part, of Spirit Hermeneutics plays this out in more detail as it addresses some popular and theoretical examples in the contemporary charismatic-pentecostal world, and it includes some take- aways for those more interested in the practical-theological implications of his hermeneutic.

Developing Keener’s Hermeneutical Paradigm

Where might charismatic-pentecostal hermeneutics go from here? How might others in the tradition pick up on Keener’s paradigm and further it? What are other related issues to address, beyond the many that Keener has in Spirit Hermeneutics?Here,Iwouldliketosuggestafewareasforhermeneuticaldevel- opment around this magnificent and carefully constructed tome. To employ a metaphor of this hermeneutical work as a monumental building—how might we also develop or revitalize the pentecostal hermeneutical neighborhood sur- rounding it?

First,Keeneradvocatesreadingexperientially,thoughhefocuseson theorig- inal contextualized biblical texts, where his own work has functioned as a gift to the scholarly community and the church. For Keener, historical understand- ing of both the original context and ourselves now is essential. Even as Keener develops an “epistemology of Word and Spirit” (153–204) that develops his anti- Enlightenment hermeneutical ontological realism, he heavily employs western scholarly historiographical methods and the traditional western correspon- dence theory of truth. He works with a version of western historiography that

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rejects the dismissal of the supernatural, yet he not only retains but exempli- fies excellence in history as a discipline, including the affirmation of honesty about evidence that emerges in contrast to the historian’s own prejudices. Yet, Keener argues that this kind of concern for understanding historicity, context, and a text’s origination is not essentially modern. Rather, these are concerns found among the ancients, including much of Greco-Roman literature, rab- binic Judaism, and patristic and medieval Christianity. The Reformers, deeply influenced by humanism’sadfontes, esteemed the primacy of the historical and grammatical sense above the medieval “four senses” (119–132). Still, Keener’s historical approach has been shaped by modern western historiography, for he is a western scholar and a contemporary biblical historian par excellence, even as his approach to history represents an enlarging and opening of this paradigm in a way that incorporates a Christian ontology and “majority world insights” to craft a historiographical approach that affirms the realities testified to in Scrip- ture, thereby completing his hermeneutical circle-spiral (88–98).

This paradigm might seem comprehensive enough. But what of those in the Body of Christ whose gifts are to relate scriptural meaning that goes further, focusing on the effects of the text’s meaning in the present in more philo- sophical or existential or theological readings? What of, for example, Barth’s Römerbrief as a hermeneutic in comparison and as a companion to Keener’s commentaryonRomans?Wouldthisthenleaddownaslipperysloperightback to ideological and naïve or manipulative interpretations of Scripture?

I see Keener’s work as at least implying a rejoinder here. That is, the very grain of Scripture, incarnationally embedded in historical context, is produc- tive of and corrective to theological understanding. His hermeneutic affirms that Scripture is giving out spiritual-theological, perhaps even certain philo- sophical-existential understanding, in a historical-ontic realism provided by the text’s inspired nature. In this sense, it might be said that Scripture oper- ates as a communicative grace, as a relational gift of God. For instance, when Keener addresses Bultmann’s approach to Scripture as in many ways deeply flawed, he sees Bultmann’s existential hearing from God in Scripture as never- theless a positive, as a way of hearing from the text primarily rather than getting stuck in technical or secondary questions, even historical ones (125). There are many ways forward here for a Keenerian charismatic-pentecostal hermeneut (better, I would say, than looking to anything from Bultmann), whether the Barthian approach that hears the Word of God in encounter with Scripture, the philosophical hermeneutics of George Steiner’s “real presences,” a pente- costal personalism that draws from Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” in encounter with the Absolute Thou, or Lee Roy Martin’s “hearing” of the text. There are ways to develop a theology of encounter that becomes constructive or systematic

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theology or even a Christian philosophy that is held within the orbit of the grav- itational pull of the historical biblical text found in Keener’s hermeneutics.

Second, others will want to revisit the attention to the second horizon, that of the present interpreters, for further development.This is where the focus and work of some, like Ken Archer, has gone, on interpretive communities. Keener addresses them in his final, brief chapter (277–285). Yet, the formation of this horizon is a matter of great attention for contemporary hermeneutics. Consid- eration of the contemporary interpreters and their purview of interpretation has often dominated the contemporary conversation, and Keener’s work may be seen as corrective to just that. On the other hand, studies of how particular biblical interpretations are happening as matters of present culture, language, human nature, and so on are important to our self-understanding, as Keener himself advocates.While Archer has focused on how narratives shape meaning for modern pentecostal communities, Mark Cartledge has studied pentecostal hermeneutics in practice through empirical studies. Others have examined philosophical or cultural assumptions of present interpreters. Just because the narratives and cultural histories that inform the second horizon are not Keener’s focus does not mean that the pentecostal hermeneutical neighbor- hood does not need responsible reconstructions of our present horizons. What we take to be the original horizon is itself informed by the horizons of our contemporary situations, shaped by multiple sources, hopefully including the biblical text and its history of interpretation.

Third, it is important to identify that the above and other issues blend the prescriptive and the descriptive together. This blending of prescriptive and descriptive is inevitable in our biblical hermeneutics, often occurring moment by moment as interpreters work with Scripture. Yet, all of this also demonstrates the need for philosophical clarity, as, for example, in Pol Van- develde’s distinction between the act and event of interpretation.20 I applied this key philosophical distinction in Theological Hermeneutics in the Classi- cal Pentecostal Tradition as helpful for analyzing contemporary theological hermeneutics. Vandevelde contends that hermeneutic camps tend to talk past one another because some tend to focus on hermeneutics asactsfor which we are responsible, such as in Hirsch, while others focus on hermeneutics asevents that we describe, as in Gadamer.The former operates with a primarily prescrip- tive orientation and the latter primarily descriptive. The task of hermeneutical theory is to account for both. The need for making such a distinction is critical

20

Pol Vandevelde, The Task of the Interpreter: Text, Meaning, and Negotiation (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2005).

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to hermeneutical self-understanding, and failing to understand it leads to con- fusion even if we understand the distinction implicitly, as commonly occurs. This is analogous to, say, an athlete or musician who can adjust a technique because s/he is aware of the process. It is not that a Keenerian hermeneutic always needs to stop and identify its descriptive or prescriptive posture; it is to say that it is occasionally very helpful.

Fourth, the relationship between Keener’s Christian approach to knowledge and history, on the one hand, and modernism on the other is an important underlying matter for his hermeneutic. As I have indicated earlier in this essay, Keener, along with other Christians, including charismatic-pentecostal Chris- tians, finds the typical epistemic approach in the academic world reduction- istic, often wrongly closed to examining what should be open questions about spiritualrealities.Perhapsthisislessthecasetodaythanitwasagenerationago. A multitude of discussions of modern and postmodern or late modern episte- mologies and cultures have addressed this issue.

Here, however, I find Keener’s postmaterialism notable. His hermeneutic includes an open epistemology, in the sense that it is open to “majority world insights” about spiritual realities over and against western Enlightenment materialisms. Yet, I find that his postmaterialism and his partial postmod- ernism have some further implications, one of which I find particularly impor- tant: Keener breaks with the modernist package against the modern principle of novelty as inherently good, by reverting not to any kind of traditional author- itarianism or conservatism but to faith in the God of Pentecost. Or, employing the notion of the great historian and philosopher of modernism Peter Gay, Keener breaks with the modern affinity for “heresy.” Keener is a heretic to the modern affirmation of “heresy”—“absolute artistic autonomy, all guidance emerging solely from within … [the] assertion of personal sovereignty”21— breaking from the atheistic and autonomous stance of his youth toward an attitude of faithfulness to the text and the Lord and the many tongues of God’s pentecostal people.

This may lead to a fifth hermeneutical issue for the pentecostal neighbor- hood. A theology of culture, or better, a theological hermeneutics of culture is a necessary complement to Keener’s biblical hermeneutics, even if he has an implicit theological hermeneutics of culture working in Spirit Hermeneu- tics. And perhaps this is a broader and more general point that would be true of almost any text that develops a scriptural hermeneutic: it ought to have a

21

Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (New York: Norton, 2008), 4.

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hermeneutics of culture as a companion to it. This is not to call Keener to write another book. It is to say that charismatic-pentecostal hermeneutics needs to develop cultural theological hermeneutics as companions to Spirit Hermeneu- tics. The need for this kind of development is exactly what Duane Loynes illus- trated in his essay “Pentecostal Hermeneutics and Race in the Early Twentieth Century,” when he identified how the lack of a theological hermeneutic of cul- ture failed to accompany the developing biblical and spiritual hermeneutics of the early movement and could be considered an important factor in why early pentecostal racial reconciliation failed after some initial success.22

Sixth, against poor popular hermeneutics in the charismatic-pentecostal world, Keener’s work here may serve as an extended hermeneutical catechism for many. Spirit Hermeneutics offers the kind of hermeneutical wisdom and breadth that is helpful for educated Christians in ministry. It makes for a rich seminary text. Still, like many skyscrapers, other useful buildings are needed in the neighborhood, and texts—say, a Keenerian hermeneutical primer for undergraduates or the layperson—might provide needed hermeneutical goods and services. Following Keener’s basic hermeneutical parameters and insights would do so much good on the popular level for the way Charismatic-Pente- costals understand Scripture and life.

Seventh, and finally, Spirit hermeneutics is essentially a hermeneutic of the Spirit and power, of faith and hope and love in the triune God. As such, the practice of this kind of hermeneutics moves in opposition to the “works of the flesh” and the exertion of power on behalf of self-seeking ideologies and destructive movements in the world. Spirit hermeneutics occur on behalf of the good and creative agencies that are aligned with the Spirit of God’s purposes for the world.That this is the stance of a Christian hermeneutic might be taken for granted. In practice, that a Spirit hermeneutics is about love of God and love of neighbor is, in its moral essence, its key activity, and this is the area for which this hermeneutic will likely face the most opposition as those who follow Keener’s hermeneutic program seek to implement it. It is built upon a strong foundation.

22

Duane T. Loynes, Sr., “Pentecostal Hermeneutics and Race in the Early Twentieth Century: Towards a Pentecostal Hermeneutics of Culture,” in Archer and Oliverio, eds.,Constructive Pneumatological Hermeneutics in Pentecostal Christianity, 229–248.

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