Spirit and Power by William W. Menzies & Robert P. Menzies

Author:William W. Menzies & Robert P. Menzies [Menzies, William W.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780310864158
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2011-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

2. The New Context: Defining the Crucial Issue

As noted above, Fee’s critique of the Pentecostal position centers on hermeneutical flaws, particularly the use of historical precedent as a basis for establishing normative theology. Fee skillfully demonstrates the weaknesses inherent in traditional Pentecostal arguments based on facile analogies or selected episodes from Acts. Here we hear an echo of James Dunn’s timely critique of arguments for subsequence based on a conflation of John 20:22 with Luke’s narrative in Acts.12

When originally published, Fee’s articles, painful though they may have been, served a valuable purpose: They challenged Pentecostals to come to terms with the new and pressing questions raised by their Evangelical brothers. These questions were all the more urgent in view of the rapid assimilation of the Pentecostal movement into mainstream Evangelicalism, a process that by the mid-70s was largely complete. Perhaps because of his position as an “insider,” Fee was thus able to give voice to a much needed message: No longer could Pentecostals rely on the interpretative methods of the nineteenth-century Holiness Movement and expect to speak to the contemporary Evangelical world—a world that, with increasing vigor, was shaping the ethos of Pentecostalism.

Yet the theological landscape that Fee surveyed in the mid-70s and 80s has changed considerably. Simplistic arguments from historical precedent, though once the bulwark of Pentecostal theology, have been replaced with approaches that speak the language of modern Evangelicalism. Although perhaps this is not entirely true when it comes to the question of tongues as initial evidence, it is certainly the case for the doctrine of subsequence. Roger Stronstad’s The Charismatic Theology of St. Luke illustrates this fact. Published in 1984, it marks a key shift in Pentecostal thinking. Stronstad’s central thesis is that Luke is a theologian in his own right and that his perspective on the Spirit is different from, although complementary to, that of Paul. Unlike Paul, who frequently speaks of the soteriological dimension of the Spirit’s work,13 Luke consistently portrays the Spirit as the source of power for service.

My book, The Development of Early Christian Pneumatology with Special Reference to Luke–Acts, also highlights the distinctive character of Luke’s pneumatology. The book’s thesis corroborates that of Stronstad’s, for I argued that Paul was the first Christian to attribute soteriological functions to the Spirit and that this original element of Paul’s pneumatology did not influence wider (non-Pauline) sectors of the early church until after the writing of Luke–Acts.

The crucial point on which Stronstad and I agree is that Luke never attributes soteriological functions to the Spirit and that his narrative presupposes a pneumatology that excludes this dimension (e.g., Luke 11:13; Acts 8:4–17; 19:1–7). Or, to put it positively, Luke describes the gift of the Spirit exclusively in charismatic terms as the source of power for effective witness.14 Luke’s narrative, then, reflects more than simply a different agenda or emphasis; his pneumatology is different from, although complementary to, that of Paul.

In the previous chapters we have attempted to substantiate this description of Luke’s pneumatology. In the remaining

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