B00CDB4E8I EBOK by Steven M. Studebaker

Author:Steven M. Studebaker [Studebaker, Steven M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Pneumatological Hermeneutics and Transcending Christocentrism

Habets argues that the early Christians used a retroactive hermeneutic to interpret Jesus’ life and ministry and that the Holy Spirit played an important role in this hermeneutical process and interpretation. His hermeneutic is a sensible understanding of the way the early Christians developed their accounts of Jesus Christ; but I think that Habets again falls into a form of Christocentrism — though his retroactive hermeneutic contains the resources with which to recover the pneumatological gains that are otherwise lost in that implicit Christocentrism.

The retroactive hermeneutic affirms that the post-Easter believers came into an experience of the risen Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, in turn, enabled them to understand their experience of Christ in light of their remembrance of his life and teaching. The retroactive process whereby the Spirit illuminates the meaning of Christ for the church is an ongoing one. In other words, the retroactive hermeneutic affirms a symbiotic relationship between Christian experience and the understanding of Jesus’ teachings. The early Christians interpreted their experiences in light of his life and teachings, and the canon of Christian Scripture is the documentation of these interpretations. The retroactive hermeneutic, therefore, affirms the theological fecundity of Christian experience and its dialogical role with the life and teachings of Jesus, which were the early Christians’ remembrances of Jesus’ life, ministry, and teachings. For contemporary Christians, they are the accounts of his life and ministry in Christian Scripture (pp. 103-7).

The problem is that Habets’s retroactive hermeneutic subordinates pneumatology to Christology. The Spirit becomes an instrument for a christological function: the gospel is about Christ, not the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, the Spirit illuminates the “Christ event” and enables the church to be Christlike (pp. 105-6). It reduces the gospel to a christological narrative with pneumatological Cliff’s notes. Though I am Pentecostal, I am not making special pleading for more theological attention to be given to the Spirit in order to legitimate Pentecostal experience. Rather, the issue is that this attenuation of the Spirit is out of step with the Spirit’s role and identity that emerges in the biblical accounts of Christ, which, according to Habets, are the post-Easter interpretation of Jesus’ life and ministry in terms of the post-Easter Christians’ experience of Christ in and through the Holy Spirit.

The question is: Does the record of the early church’s experience fit with a theology that subordinates the Spirit to Christ? If the retroactive hermeneutic is true, that Christian experience and the Word (for the post-Easter Christians in the form of remembrances of Christ and for contemporary Christians in the form of Scripture) correspond, then Habets’s Spirit Christology fully pursues neither the pneumatological implications of that experience nor the biblical theology of the Spirit. In the book of Acts, the initiating event of the church is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The early Christians interpreted the pinnacle of Jesus’ work in pneumatological terms. They did not see the Spirit merely playing an explanatory role relative to Jesus.

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