Post 16 ~ Trump and the Politics of Prayer 3: Charismatic-Pentecostal Warfare Prayer in the Wake of the 2020 Presidential Election

Derrick, while you have been a minister in the Wesleyan Church for a few decades and therefore in a sense intimately familiar with the North American evangelical milieu from that vantage point, it is beginning to become more widely recognized that individuals like Paula White Cain, the leader of the current White House Faith Office (launched in February 2025) who also had a role in the first Trump administration and supported his presidential campaigns for both 2020 and 2024, are better understood as neopentecostal and charismatic, however slippery even are these terms. In what ways was your evangelical background helpful for appreciating the rise of pentecostal-charismatic faith leaders like White in the circles of the Trump administration and in what ways was this surprising to you given your experience and knowledge?

Derrick: My Wesleyan background was helpful precisely because it enabled me to see both the continuity and the rupture represented by the rise of neopentecostal leaders such as Paula White-Cain. On the one hand, I recognized familiar evangelical instincts in this world: conversionist language, confidence in prayer, moral urgency, and a strong sense of public witness. On the other hand, many evangelicals viewed neopentecostal and charismatic leaders, especially those operating in independent networks outside ordinary denominational accountability, with genuine suspicion, driven in part by concerns about prosperity teaching, celebrity authority, and loosely regulated claims to spiritual power. What surprised me was not that pentecostal-charismatic figures had gained influence, since they have been growing and becoming more mainstream for some time, but that this kind of independent charismatic leadership moved so decisively from the margins to the center of evangelical politics and Republican power. In that sense, my evangelical background helped me understand why many believers were drawn to this world, while also making me more attentive to how remarkable it was that figures once regarded with suspicion by large segments of evangelicalism had become trusted brokers of religious authority in the Trump orbit.

Amos: Surely, these pentecostal-charismatic pastors and church/denominational leaders do not speak for everyone in these communities, but also represent significant buy-in from such in support of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Many of these that hail from historically white (pentecostal-charismatic) churches and denominations would be among the almost seven out of ten white evangelical voters that the demographic statisticians continue to tell us remain supportive of the current administration (at least through January of 2026). And yet, it is also the case that, as our book documents in the first chapter, these pentecostal-charismatic leaders have brought their spirituality into the public square, such that the zoom calls they organized were performed as digitically medicated, prayer meetings, and even more to the point occasions to engage in spiritual warfare battle against the principalities and powers perceived to be opposing Trump, his agenda, re-election, etc. How did your evangelical perspective prepare you, or not, for this kind of “political action” and how do you think other evangelicals may have had to adapt and adjust to such practices in the context of these prayer meetings both before and after the 2020 election?

Derrick: My evangelical background prepared me in part for this kind of political action, but only in part. I was certainly familiar with the evangelical impulse to connect prayer, moral urgency, and public life, and so it did not surprise me that many believers would understand political events through a spiritual lens or gather for prayer in moments of national crisis. What was less familiar, and at times deeply unsettling, was the degree to which these prayer meetings became spaces not simply of intercession but of active spiritual warfare on behalf of a particular candidate, political agenda, and contested vision of the nation. I think many evangelicals, especially those outside pentecostal-charismatic worlds, would have had to adapt to practices that stretched beyond their own habits of prayer, including prophetic declarations, the ritualized framing of electoral politics as cosmic conflict, and the expectation that spiritual authority could be exercised in real time against perceived demonic opposition. I am still getting used to a shofar being blown at every event. Even for those already sympathetic to MAGA, these prayer meetings invited a further adjustment by collapsing the distance between devotional practice and political mobilization, so that prayer itself became a mode of partisan action. That, to me, is one of the most important things these calls reveal: they show how religious practice can become a medium through which political struggle is not merely supported but spiritually intensified.

Amos, since you read many of prayers included in these prayer meetings and had your own independent observations from your location within pentecostal-charismatic Christianity, how did you experience these prayer meetings, and in what ways did they challenge or unsettle you as both a theologian and a Pentecostal-Christian?

Amos: I intimated in our last post, Derrick, about how in writing this book with you, I experienced a bit of what believing anthropologists have had to work through in some ways bracketing their perspectives in order to adequately describe and also account for the subjects of their ethnography. I have read a lot of anthropology of Christianity (and of pentecostalisms) over the decades, but now this comes closer to home, not least in that the kind of pentecostal praying I had grown up with, and still experienced in various ecclesial settings, was prominent in these prayer calls. Pentecostal prayer, for instance, is nothing but pathic, persistent, and potent, for instance. In other words, when pentecostal Christian prays, their prayers are impassioned. It’s not that there are no scripted prayers, but prayer is considered as that which emerges from out of faith: faith in God, in God’s power, in God’s ability to accomplish what is humanly impossible. Hence, genuine pentecostal prayer is full of passionate belief that God listens, that God will respond, and that God can bring about what we are asking for in the name of his Son.

Further, pentecostal prayer in that respect also has to be persistent: true faith and genuine belief will press on despite not receiving the requested intervention immediately; in fact, sometimes the delay in the divine response to prayer represents the invitation to persist faithfully in that prayer. There is a long tradition of tarrying prayer that pentecostal Christians learned from their holiness ancestors—including those who now form the Wesleyan Church you are affiliated with Derrick—which urges our continual calling upon God, following the parable of the widow before the unjust judge that Jesus told about in the gospels, precisely in order to galvanize this form of persisting prayer.

Last but not least, then, such prayer has to be not just patiently persisting but aggressively so. In fact, it is especially when what we are praying for is that God will confront those opposing the divine will where that aggressiveness is particularly important. In the case of these prayer calls, so-called “warfare prayer” was activated, precisely because there were spiritual opponents hindering the unfolding of the divine will on Earth, and hence, the people of God needed to rise up and persist strongly and boldly in their prayers against this spiritual adversary. In a later post (and as our book unpacks), we shall see that these believers connected the heavenly principalities and powers with earthly opponents. For the moment, however, what was so unsettling and challenging for me as a theologian to walk this road with you was that I was seeing, hearing, and feeling prayers formerly resounded within churches but now echoing through these zoom calls, pleading that God intervene on their behalf to overturn what they believed were rigged election results in the 2020 election (that impeded the return of Trump to a second term). To be frank, we were doing exactly what Ephesians 6 warns against: wrestling not against merely principalities and powers but the flesh-and-blood democrats seeking to certify the election, even the vice-president of the USA (for not overturning the electoral college results), all an extension of having demonized our political opponents consistent with the president’s rhetoric over years.

Derrick: And if you want to see more of how Amos, and I, negotiated these elements, pre-order your copy of Trump and the Politics of Prayer for a deeper look at prayer, theology, and political power in a pivotal American moment. Order Link: https://tinyurl.com/trump-politics-of-prayer

Post 29 ~ To the Ends of the Earth and Back: Malaysian Pentecostal Theological Explorations into the Third and Fourth Generation

Alma’s accompaniment this time was extra special among the one handful of trips I have been able to make back (all since 2000) since my family immigrated to the USA when I was ten. This was because, fifty years after leaving Malaysia, I was able to speak from the pulpit my father preached at 99 Jalan Gasing in Petaling Jaya (from 1969-1975), not once but twice! The first occasion was the third Sunday morning service of July when I was invited as the guest preacher for Harvest Community Church (HCC). My message was drawn from the 139th Psalm, part of the lectionary readings followed by HCC, on “Breathing (in) God’s Wind: Reading the Psalms after Pentecost,” considering how the divine breath knows each step we take, is present with us wherever we are, and knits us both in the womb and through the twists and turns of life to enable and empower our testimonies individually and collectively (a recording of the homily is archived here). In hindsight, I learned from my father, among other guests he brought through our churches growing up, about how to be a pentecostal preacher, particularly about the centrality of the Acts of the Apostles for what we believed and practices, and it was wonderful to realize here this pentecostal hermeneutic applied to one of the two Old Testament lectionary texts for this Sunday in ways that brought the “that” of a Davidic Psalm into the “this” of our contemporary personal and collective/ecclesial lives.

It was a delight to be invited by Rev. Ng Kokkee, pastor of HCC, but also a Fuller Seminary alumnus—this may explain HCC’s following the lectionary since, if you know pentecostal churches, few of these know of such much less use it!—in fact perhaps one of the first Malaysian pentecostal graduates from the fullerverse who landed in Pasadena in the mid-1980s. A few years after returning from Southern California to Malaysia, Ng was invited to serve as the sixth president of the Bible College of Malaysia (BCM), which he led for the next almost two decades. Not long after leaving his presidential position, he returned to his first love of pastoring, now with a congregation that had been, 45 years ago, one of two church-plants of my father when he pastored Glad Tidings Assembly of God (GTAG). During this last decade, then, as HCC pastor, Ng brought the congregation back to the original location of the mother church (which itself had long ago both released the church plant to be a self-governing body and then also moved from the Jalan Gasing site to build on a separate property). So the added blessing was that I not only got to preach at the same pulpit, but to the congregational body emergent from and now grafted back into the mother’s church’s original geographic and architectural site!

I returned a day later, on Monday morning, to the same spot, this time invited to provide some greetings to the 4th Annual Conference organized by the Malaysia Pentecostal Research Centre (MPRC) of the BCM. The BCM was launched in 1960 and has been meeting continuously at this location since. MPRC, however, is a fairly recent development in the two-thirds of a century-long history of the school, forged under the directorship of Dr. Eva Wong Suk Kyun, and its conference proceedings have provided the content also for the Malaysia Pentecostal Journal, also under her editorship. These exciting new endeavors have come about fairly early on in the tenure of BCM’s seventh president, Dr. Victor Lee Tat Yan, a visionary move indeed since pentecostal believers and churches are known for a lot of things, especially missions, church planting, evangelism, etc., less so research!

I was honored to lead off this year’s program that included not only Drs. Wong and Lee but also Dr. Vincent Leoh. While Kokkee Ng was making his way to Fuller in forty years ago, Leoh had also made the long trek from Kuala Lumpur to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) in Louisville, Kentucky, where he then successfully defended—long before the conservative takeover of that institution (not to mention denomination)!—a dissertation titled, “Ethics and Pentecostal Preaching: The Anastatic, Organic, and Communal Strands.” I believe Leoh was the first Malaysian pentecostal to earn a PhD, doing so in the year I began my own seminary studies! He returned to home and took up the pastorate of GTAG, then proceeded for the next three decades to shepherd the community my father served. Leoh brought his homiletical training not only to the congregation but to the broader denomination and even wider pentecostal and evangelical ecclesia in Malaysia, not only as a pastor/preacher and as one who taught at BCM, but also as the general superintendent of the Assemblies of God (all the while juggling megachurch pastoral responsibilities) for much of the first decade of the present century.

Leoh’s conference presentation, available in the fourth volume of the Malaysia Pentecostal Journal, brought forward his doctoral research on pentecostal spirit-inspired and empowered preaching into our third millennium global context. Also at this conference and then in the published journal we have Lee’s article on pentecostal hermeneutics and theological interpretation of scripture (here building off his work as a Johannine scholar including his Cambridge University-defended thesis, Reading Johannine Dramatic Irony through Ancient Dramatic Devices), and Wong’s essay on the promise and anticipated fulfillments of Pentecost for the Malaysian church (also leaping off her hot-off-the-press revised Oxford Center for Mission Studies historical-theological dissertation, Malaysian Pentecostalism from Classical to Contemporary: The Assemblies of God with Reference to Joel 2:28-32). These and the other contributions to the conference theme on “Biblical and Contextual Studies” exemplify how Malaysian pentecostal biblical scholars and theologians are currently engaging the theological academy in and through this local southeast Asian peninsula arena, living into the promise of pentecostal research while navigating its institutional, ecclesial, and funding challenges.

What a blessing it was for me to speak, if only briefly, into this conference theme, alongside with colleagues and even forefathers—Rev. Ng and Dr. Leoh as the initial graduate level explorers, I mean!—in the Malaysian pentecostal academy, at and from the pulpit my father humbly stood behind, armed educationally only with the diploma in ministry he earned as part of the first batch of BCM graduates in the early 1960s. While I feel a bit too far removed from my land of birth to be counted as a bonafide Malaysian theologian (since I have been gone for a half century!), I can embrace a Malaysian-diaspora identity, sufficiently so that with a number of others (mostly non-pentecostal scholars), I put together a few years ago From Malaysia to the Ends of the Earth: Southeast Asian and Diasporic Contributions to Biblical and Theological Studies (available open access). Even from this diaspora horizon, I am standing on the shoulders of those who went before me like Ng and Leoh, and perhaps in this respect as a second generation Malaysian (diaspora) pentecostal theologian now can also celebrate and cheer on from a distance mostly (but sometimes as in this last month up close too) my fellow up-and-coming, and more newly-arrived-on-the-scene, pentecostal sojourners who are entering the fray and taking up the issues.

My father and mother attempted to follow the leading of the divine wind even though it led them in their late thirties to the ends of the earth: starting from KL we can’t go any further than northern California before we embark on the return-trajectory! Since then, Malaysian pentecostals like Leoh and so many others have extended to the far edges of the world and back. I myself, now speaking in Malaysian-British-American-English inflected by Mexican American accents—did I already mention how wonderful it was that Alma got to experience all of this with me?—get to participate in the ferment. Two thousand years ago, the onlooking crowd gathered on the streets of Jerusalem asked the first question in-and-through-and-after Pentecost: “Are not all these who are speaking all Galileans?” (Acts 2:7, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition). I am similarly now both wondering and marveling—the Acts narrative indicates such question was accompanied by bewilderment, perplexity, and amazement, among other reactions—”Are not all these who are speaking Malaysians?!” May the witnesses of the Malaysian pentecostal church now be extended through her pentecostal academicians so that they resonate to the ends of the earth the wondrous works of God (Acts 2:11b).

Post 15- Trump and the Politics of Prayer 2: Revisiting (or Relitigating!) January 6?

Derrick, as you know, there are now a plethora of books on evangelicals and the current president, stretching back almost a decade and growing by the month. Our work focuses almost exclusively on prayer calls organized by leading members of Trump’s faith advisory team beginning with the day after the 2020 presidential election until the inauguration of Joe Biden on January 21, 2021, and we initially submitted the manuscript to publishers with “January 6” and “Insurrection” variously located in the title or subtitle. Briefly describe what these prayer calls were, how they invited our theological-engaged anthropological method for this book, and how you anticipated that such a focused exploration would bring us inside the world of the faith advisory team?

Derrick: The prayer calls were a concentrated and revealing set of ritual spaces that emerged in the aftermath of the November 2020 election and continued through the inauguration of Joe Biden on January 20, 2021. This was an intense period for the whole nation and especially Trump’s Faith Advisors. On those calls, leading members of Trump’s faith advisory team and their networks gathered to pray, interpret events, issue prophetic declarations, frame the election in spiritual terms, and mobilize participants for what they understood to be a struggle over the nation’s destiny. What made them so important for our project was not only their content but also their authenticity. These calls were assembled to meet an urgent need in the midst of a chaotic and uncertain time. They were not highly rehearsed or carefully stage-managed events. They were extemporaneous, responsive, and shaped by the pressures and developments of each particular moment. That real-time quality made them especially valuable for our work because they gave us access to a living religious world as it was unfolding rather than as it was later polished for public presentation. That is precisely where a theologically-engaged anthropological method proved necessary: anthropology helped us attend closely to ritual, language, performance, authority, and community formation, while theology helped us interpret the substance of the spiritual claims being made and the moral world those claims presupposed. I anticipated that this focused exploration would bring us inside the world of the faith advisory team because prayer was not peripheral to their politics; it was one of the primary sites where their politics was narrated, authorized, and enacted. In that sense, the prayer calls were real, and that very realness provided extraordinarily rich data for understanding how religious devotion and political struggle became mutually reinforcing parts of a single vision of national crisis and divine purpose.

Amos: So yes, even though we in effect “go a mile deep” into the transcripts of the prayer calls during the two-and-a-half months of our time period, our theologically-engaged anthropological approach deployed the data derived therein as windows into the hows and whys of the evangelical commitment to Trump. Stepping back for a moment from the book, however, might I ask at a more personal level what you remember about watching the events of January 6 unfold given your participation in the various prayer calls until then, and, perhaps also delving even deeper, as a minister also, which means theologically-informed church leader, and not just a professional anthropologist, how did you process these developments theologically then? In other words, while we will be reading a book of theologically-engaged anthropology, tell us a bit about if and how you as a minister-anthropologist reacted and responded theologically especially to the events of the January 6 insurrection.

Derrick: What I remember most clearly is that I was on an emergency call with President Trump’s advisors, including Michele Bachmann, who was at the Capitol. I remember feeling both surprised and not surprised at the same time. On the one hand, the events leading up to January 6 had been reaching a boiling point, and I could sense that escalation. In fact, the night before, I told my brother-in-law that I feared people might die because of the protest that was gathering. In that sense, the eruption of violence did not come entirely out of nowhere. Yet I was surprised in relation to Trump’s faith advisors themselves. They were not participants in the insurrection, and in many ways the violence disrupted the very outcome for which they had been praying, namely the switching of electoral votes and Vice President Pence naming Trump president. What struck me on the night of January 6 was that, even as events were spiraling so dramatically, they immediately and almost exclusively blamed Democrats and antifa. That response revealed just how powerfully their theological and political framework was shaping their interpretation of events in real time, even when the reality before them seemed to point in a far more troubling direction.

Speaking now more personally as a theologian, perhaps I can turn the question you just posed back around to you: how did you feel as you watched January 6 unfold, and how did you begin to process theologically what you were seeing in relation to prayer, Christian nationalism, and public witness?

Amos: Well thanks; reminds us all that we better be careful about what we ask for! I have dim recollections watching the events of January 6 unfold; but, to be frank, I was horrified then. A week and a day later, I was leading our monthly faculty meeting—then as double-dean of the School of Theology and the School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller Seminary—and I recall very distinctly tearing up as we took a few moments to process what had been unfolding. In particular, while I did not know much at the time beyond that there were a few Christian symbols in the gathered crowd, we all were aware that 80 percent of white evangelicals continued to support Trump, and in that respect, I felt that for all of the efforts of the many historically and predominantly white evangelical seminaries—Fuller included—over the prior generations, the pastors and church leaders we had trained seemed to have had little impact in minimizing not only our community’s support for but also enablement of what happened.

I am glad that you did not come knocking on my door earlier since I may not have responded affirmatively if you did. By 2024, when you made your initial inquiry, I had stepped back from senior administrative responsibilities and was ready to begin processing otherwise those feelings and experiences. As I considered with the data you provided, I was initially even more distraught since it appeared that at least behind the scenes, evangelical Christian supporters of the administration did their part attempting to “stop the steal,” even as what happened on January 6 showed how close they came to stealing the election in turn. Trump and the Politics of Prayer represents at least for me some of the next steps I needed to take in grappling with my own pentecostal-charismatic perspectives and commitments, not least in relation to those in our churches who continue to support the current administration and its agenda. Want more details about how I have been navigating these matters—while I adopt a more dialogical tone in the book, appropriate for a theologically-informed-anthropological endeavor, it provides exactly the springboard for a more critical, and perhaps even prophetic stance vis-a-vis the White House Faith Office being all-in on the current administration’s agenda going forward (so watch this space!)—pre-order your copy of Trump and the Politics of Prayer for a deeper look at prayer, theology, and political power in a pivotal American moment. Order Link: https://tinyurl.com/trump-politics-of-prayer

Post 28 ~ Back to the Future: Dialogues “Across the Pond” in the Ever-Saturated/Lasting Present

Our EUARE trip was made possible financially in part by Fuller Seminary (thanks to CAO Ryan Bolger) but instigated by the invitation of Brazilian pentecostal theologian Henrique Mata de Vanconcelos who invited my participation in a panel he organized on “And the Veil Was Torn: For an Orthodox-Pentecostal Ecumenical Dialogue.” Besides being intrigued by Henrique’s doctoral research to bring fourteenth century Byzantine and Orthodox theologian Gregory Palamas into conversation with nascent trends in Brazilian evangelical and pentecostal theologies of creation (his PhD thesis was completed in 2025 through the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium), I said yes (in the fall of 2025) in part since I was then working on my Jesus: Mapping Worlds book (forthcoming later this year) which included two sections on Orthodox motifs. I combined my thoughts on St Symeon the New Theologian’s (tenth century) baptism of tears, which has generated a number of preliminary studies from pentecostal scholars over the last generation, and on the now more recent Orthodox missiological notion of witness as emerging from out of “the liturgy after the [Divine] liturgy,” to present some ideas under the title, “Tears, Tongues, and Witness: The Missiological Charisms of Orthodoxy and Pentecostal Christianity in the 21st-Century.” The session was rich—involving a wonderful group of Orthodox, Catholic, and pentecostal theologians that Henrique brought together—and an opportunity for me to be pleasantly surprised with the presence of old colleagues (including an entire group of Romanian pentecostals) and to make some new connections.

One of the latter included Prof. Lluís Oviedo, OFM of the Franciscan Pontificia Università Antonianum (PUA)—named after the early thirteenth century St Anthony of Padua who emerged as one of the leaders of St Francis of Assisi’s Order of Friar Minors not long after that was founded—who then also invited Alma and I for lunch with him and the rector and other colleagues. While this was not on the schedule—and I regret for that reason we could not spend more time at the PUA and had to cut short the personal tour he was giving us—it was an opportunity for me connect theory to reality, specifically another section in my Jesus manuscript on St Francis as a window into christological affectivity. Along this affective register, Fr. Lluís led Alma and I to the PUA’s Aula San Antonio room where doctoral vivas are held, and it was an occasion for Alma to sit into the “hot seat” of the candidate, herself anticipating at some point a defense of her doctoral research, as the Lord makes a way. While the PUA only dates back to the nineteenth century, nevertheless walking through its halls gave us the feel that we were in touch with almost a millennium’s worth of the history of the Christian movement.

Of course, Alma and I couldn’t go to Rome without visiting some of the historic sites that go back almost to the founding of the city in the eight century B.C.E. There were many highlights for us, not least the visit to the famous Knights of the Order of Malta Keyhole on Aventine Hill which connected for me to a third part of my Jesus manuscript where I wrote on the medieval knights templars including those initiated in part through the efforts of Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux. But even more important and significant was our sitting in one of the chapels of St Peter’s Basilica. While we were there for not more than a few minutes, Alma in particular felt awashed by remembering in her body what it meant for her to grow up as a Roman Catholic (prior to her family joining the pentecostal church). There was a sense of how the divine presence palpable then for her had never left, even if her journey in the last half century since has been in Protestant (largely pentecostal) spaces. There was so much to be thankful for, surely how attending Catholic mass left her with reverence in the presence of the divine that has accompanied her since, and then sometimes (like at this moment) reemerges in an overwhelming fullness.

The other reason I agreed to accept Henrique’s invitation was because Alma and I were also discussing a visit toTrinity College in Bristol, England, the week before the EUARE meeting, so this allowed us to cross the pond, so to speak, and say yes in two related directions. Besides the issue of global warming—our Bristol week was perhaps the hottest it had been in quite a few years, we were told, unfortunate in a nation that is a bit behind in installing air conditioners!—Alma and I got to know the Trinity faculty and also spend time with doctoral students in their residency week. Initially I was wondering why of the thirty or so postgraduate student presentation, a number had to do with the transatlantic slave trade or the topic of reparations, but this became much more apparent when we arrived. Trinity College now sits on property that, according to a recent study by one of the Trinity faculty, had connections with the shipping and related industries going forth from Bristol that facilitated in the Middle Passage and then also participated in slave ownership not only in the Caribbean (especially Barbados but also perhaps in other West Indies locations) but also in England. As part of our visit, Trinity colleagues brought a few students and us visitors to M Shed, which not only tells some of the thousand-year history of Bristol but also devotes significant attention to its role and participation in the transatlantic slave trade.

Not only did Alma also get to listen in on, observe, and learn from the postgrad presentations in anticipation of her own doctoral sojourn, but together we got a chance to grapple with how our histories shape our present and how that might obligate us to confront the possibilities before us. The question of reparations, for instance—which Bristolians (and the British generally also) continue to grapple—is about not only how we tell our stories (i.e., how our histories unfold) nor merely about our economics, and here not to minimize this urgent issue, but theologically, they have also to do with our bearing adequate witness, not only in the missiological sense, but perhaps more importantly in the alethic and ecclesiological dimensions of what truthful identity of the people of God, body of Christ, and fellowship of the Spirit means. If the gospel is fundamentally rooted in the historicity of Jesus as the Christ, then telling the truth about him involves also recognizing and responding appropriately to the many ways in which his name has been taken in vain, no matter how complicated and complex might be the circumstances of our (collective) lives through which such vanity unfolds.

Back to the future? This retrospective account of what Alma and I have been blessed to have traversed the last few weeks in our itinerary across the pond has motivated me to name who we are precisely in and through the histories—personal, ecclesial, and social—that flow through our veins. These are precious moments since they bring to awareness that the joys and pains of our past variously constitute each and every present. As these surge into consciousness, we have fresh mandates of the divine breath to ask, “so what?” In other words, the ever-fleeting seconds of our lives are actually, when looked at in light of the above, effulgent with possibilities, in a sense fully pregnant with what is behind us but also ready for consequential developments that the divine presence erupts from such junctures of memory and anticipation. Attentiveness to these interjections, made possible through the twists-and-turns of life and our walking with others, will have unforeseen implications for how our futures unfold, whether for Alma’s studies or my own (I am not sure I will ever stop studying). In that sense, we are both grateful and humbled to get to walk these paths with other spirited sojourners.

Post 14 - Trump and the Politics of Prayer 1: Why This Book on Theologically-Engaged Anthropology Needed a Lemons and a Yong as Its Authors?

Derrick, congratulations on (with me) getting in our editorial corrections to the copyedited manuscript, and welcome to the Spirited Renewal Substack! You have been working as an anthropologist for the last almost two decades and have led in establishing the idea of theologically-engaged anthropology in the field; tell us a bit about what this is and how it provides an important perspective on the origins of our Trump and the Politics of Prayer?

Derrick: Theologically-engaged anthropology emerged for me out of a conviction that anthropology and theology each ask profound questions about what it means to be human, how communities make meaning, and how worlds are shaped by practices of belief. Anthropology brings close attention to lived experience, ritual, power, embodiment, and the textures of everyday life, while theology brings normative and interpretive resources for asking what is ultimately at stake in those practices and worlds. Rather than keeping these disciplines at a distance from one another, theologically-engaged anthropology invites a conversation in which ethnographic research is taken seriously as a mode of attending to human life, and theological reflection is taken seriously as a mode of interpretation rather than dismissed as merely confessional residue. That approach was essential to the origins of Trump and the Politics of Prayer because the world of Trump’s Faith Advisory Team cannot be understood adequately through political analysis alone. It is a world animated by prayer, prophecy, spiritual warfare, charismatic authority, and theological imagination, all of which are socially enacted and politically consequential. My anthropological work helped us enter that world with care, to listen closely to its participants, and to understand how their religious practices function within networks of power and public life. Working together, we were able to bring ethnographic attentiveness and theological analysis into the same frame, which is precisely why this collaboration made possible the kind of book we wanted to write.

Amos: So from this, it begins to make sense why you approached me to work with you on the book; now in hindsight of our two-year collaboration, how have our efforts, and the book we have produced, confirmed for or surprised you about the theologically-engaged anthropological endeavor?

Derrick: In hindsight, our two-year collaboration has both confirmed and deepened my confidence in the theologically-engaged anthropological endeavor. It has confirmed for me that ethnography is at its best when it does not merely describe religious actors from a critical distance, but listens carefully enough to grasp the moral and theological worlds they inhabit on their own terms. At the same time, working with you surprised me by showing just how much theology can sharpen, rather than narrow, anthropological interpretation. Your theological questions pressed our project beyond thick description toward discerning what kinds of spiritual claims, practices, and visions of power were actually being advanced within Trump’s Faith Advisory Team. That made the book stronger because it would not allow prayer, prophecy, or spiritual warfare to be reduced either to political strategy or to private belief alone. Instead, our work together revealed how these religious forms operate simultaneously as sincere devotional practices, as sources of moral imagination, and as instruments of public and political formation. Perhaps most importantly, the collaboration confirmed that theologically-engaged anthropology is not simply a method for studying religion, but a genuinely interdisciplinary practice of inquiry in which anthropology and theology can interrogate, refine, and even correct one another. That, to me, is one of the most important things this book demonstrates.

As we conclude my first substack, could you say a bit about your scholarship and how it shaped this project, especially the ways your work in theology, Pentecostal studies, and your engagement with the anthropology of Christianity helped frame our analysis in Trump and the Politics of Prayer?

Amos: Derrick, readers familiar with at least the broad arc of my work, if not also the details, will recall that I published In the Days of Caesar: Pentecostalism and Political Theology almost twenty years ago, so in that respect, I have had a longstanding interest in how pentecostal-charismatic Christianity has interfaced with the political. More to the point, closer readers of my work will also recall my Who Is the Holy Spirit? A Walk with the Apostles a few years later to be a reading of Luke-Acts focused on the Spirit’s work in the public square. The latter was more theologically framed, while the former, albeit a work of constructive political theology, was also anthropologically rooted.

My own perhaps so-called anthropological-turn goes back to having learned from the later dean of pentecostal studies, Walter Hollenweger (1927-2016), whose scholarship on the global pentecostal movement in the second half of the twentieth century was shaped at least in part by anthropological research. A number of my books on pentecostal theology, In the Days of Caesar included, were anthropologically grounded, meaning, sought to describe what was happening on the ground by drawing from the work of anthropologists. In fact, until more recently, it has been anthropologists who have led the way in opening up pentecostal-charismatic Christianities around the world, at least for the theological academy. It has been too early for histories to be written for many parts of the world in which pentecostal-charismatic movements have exploded more recently, but anthropologists have been hard at work to document, comprehend, and begin to help us understand these developments worldwide. In these respects, I have had an ongoing interest in the anthropology of Christianity more broadly, albeit always returning to the anthropology of pentecostalisms (not least in a review article I published about a decade ago on the anthropology of charismatic Christianities in Africa).

Before ending today, however, I want to register the ongoing worry I have had about this book, so time for public confession. You mention above how our collaboration, including my theological explications, “pressed our project beyond thick description toward discerning what kinds of spiritual claims, practices, and visions of power were actually being advanced within Trump’s Faith Advisory Team.” To the degree we were successful in this, to that same degree I have grappled with the same question anthropologists with faith commitments studying communities with those commitments have had in navigating between elaboration and analysis or even critical intervention. Let’s be honest: many members of the Faith Advisory Team are from pentecostal-charismatic churches (see also my post from two weeks ago), and it is these, and the members of these churches, who are living out their theological convictions, but doing so politically in ways that are in contradistinction from my own perspective and what I have worked for over decades to articulate. I do not want my efforts to be so convincing that they become apologies for these theologically-informed performances. In the book, readers will see how in the end we address these concerns. I believe we have been successful in our efforts to write a theologically-informed anthropological work, surely in part with your help as you have been traversing this nexus of writing anthropologically and yet as a Christian. We shall leave things here for now, picking up as we move forward on various aspects of the above, but also leaving enough unsaid to motivate readers of this Substack to pre-order their copy of Trump and the Politics of Prayer for a deeper look at prayer, theology, and political power in a pivotal American moment. Order Link: https://tinyurl.com/trump-politics-of-prayer

Post 27 ~ The Pneumatological Imagination Redux: The Many Tongues of the Spirit-Word-Communities

This is because he is trained in hermeneutics, taken in this direction in part, as he tells us both at the end of this introduction to The Pneumatological Imagination and in the acknowledgments of his published dissertation, via inheriting one of my early syllabi for teaching a course on pentecostal theology, which means that he has been, almost from the beginning, in the best position to grapple with what is arguably my most difficult but arguably also supremely central methodological book, Spirit-Word-Community: Theological hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective (SWC). SWC, my second published volume, lays out the theological method forged in the fires of thinking pentecostally about one of the most intractable problems in the modern world, which is the reality of religious pluralism. And as it was developed partly in my training under one of the foremost living systematic philosophers, the argument is dense in its multidimensional scaffolding and obscure in retrieving primarily (but not only) philosophic and triadic (also: trinitarian) resources for thinking about ontology, epistemology, interpretation. At one point early on in reviews of this work, it was mentioned that most pentecostal scholars, lacking in philosophical background, would find the arguments therein inaccessible and even impenetrable. How else then might the fundamental methodological drivers of my pneumatological imagination get a fair theological hearing, particularly among my fellow pentecostal colleagues?

Bill Oliverio to the rescue (praise the Lord!). First, toward the end of his PhD studies, he devoted significant effort to “An Interpretive Review Essay on Amos Yong’s Spirit-Word-Community: Theological Hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective,” published in the Journal of Pentecostal Theology (2009). This remains a piece remarkable for its interpretive clarity (not least even for an ABD or all-but-dissertation candidate for the PhD), and insightful in seeing SWC as a methodological key to my work (almost through its first decade and more than one handful of books by then). Subsequently his dissertation included an expanded fifteen-page packed summary of the correlationally layered argument—very few can follow these mostly non-linear threads—in SWC that is generative hermeneutically, first and foremost for the classical pentecostal tradition within which it was mapped, but then also with implications and consequences for his later work. Next, Bill contributed a chapter, “The One and the Many: Amos Yong and the Pluralism and Dissolution of Late Modernity,” to the Mittelstadt and Vondey edited The Theology of Amos Yong and the New Face of Pentecostal Scholarship: Passion for the Spirit, which urged that the theological hermeneutic and methodology of SWC sought also, among its other goals, to explicate the perennial philosophical conundrum of the one in relation to the many, even universality vis-a-vis particularity, including its theological correlates regarding the God-world relationship. Then, more recently, at the twentieth anniversary of my doctoral dissertation publication, Bill participated in a roundtable response with his “The Theological Hermeneutic of Amos Yong, in the Prime of His Theological Career,” published (with the contributions of the other panelists) in the Australasian Pentecostal Studies. Along the way, Bill has continued to encourage and facilitate ongoing hermeneutical work within the pentecostal theological and scholarly community—e.g., Constructive Pneumatological Hermeneutics in Pentecostal Christianity—while also advancing the task of interpretation in modernity. Bill’s own constructive proposals for pentecostal hermeneutics in the modern world thus engaged also one of the foremost interpreters of modernity, Charles Taylor, and thus far has seen further iteration in his Pentecostal Hermeneutics in the Late Modern World: Essays on the Condition of Our Interpretation (part III of which included reprints of these prior forays into SWC and its implications).

I hope it is now clear why I am not only grateful for but also deeply indebted to Bill. His reception of my work surely provides helpful entrés for others intimidated by the bulk of my accumulative efforts and, I daresay, has served variously as interpretive tools for the broad arc of my achievements so that others no longer have any excuse of selectively engaging my corpus. To be sure, SWC needs to be updated since when I wrote it, I was not yet as alert to the critical theoretical approaches sensitive to the intersectional power dynamics of interpretive acts, individual or collective. On the other hand, if SWC is received also in light of especially my Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity (2007) and The Future of Evangelical Theology: Soundings from the Asian American Diaspora (2014), then these minoritization and racialization factors (among others treated in these works) can be added to the thickness of interpretive communal endeavors that Bill has consistently highlighted as providing much of the engine for our hermeneutical tasks: each of us are constituted variously out of intersectionally delineable communities and hence engage in interpretive inquiry in part from these internally pluralized discursive traditions.

Bill’s intro chapter also hints at how the many–tongues thesis is central to my pneumatologically imaginative hermeneutic and method. If the latter provides the overall canopy, the former, emergent a bit later, especially in and through In the Days of Caesar: Pentecostalism and Political Theology (2009)—albeit fleshed out variously in another perhaps up to a dozen articles, essays, and book chapters published in the last fifteen years—exemplifies the pneumatological imagination in interpretive action. On the one side, many tongues, many ___ (fill in the blank) bears witness to the plurality of interpretive communities, differentiated historically, culturally, linguistically, religiously, politically, intersectionally, and otherwise; on the other side, tongues or languages are related to practices and realities, both emerging discursively as witnesses to how human communities have navigated their worlds and developing performatively as exploratory constructs forging new existential and environmental possibilities for human habitation. Put otherwise, whereas the pneumatological imagination is a (trinitarian) theological hermeneutical construct, many tongues is a specifically biblically—i.e., Day of Pentecost, hence pentecostal, but not copyrighted only by this ecclesial community since the Book of Acts and chapter 2 therein belongs to the church ecumenical and in that respect—conceptualized undercurrent.

Bill’s sojourn has itself taken him, perhaps unexpectedly in this past year or so, into the arena of chaplaincy. In our ongoing interactions vis-a-vis all things pentecostal, I am delighted to know that we will soon be hearing much more from Bill about how the pneumatological imagination is relevant also for our efforts in this space, and even more so that the many tongues of Pentecost derive from and also can inform the many accompanying and healing practices of chaplains. If in the western world, at least, the chaplain serves all persons, not only those from our ethnically and culturally pluralistic world but also those who may be variously religious, or also not religious at all, then the import of the many tongues of the pneumatological imagination, culled (as mentioned above) from out of the fires of having to think through pentecostally what it means to traverse a religiously pluralistic world, may have professional and spiritual relevance also for those called into these spaces and the many people served therein.

Bill’s explication, elaboration, and extension of these ideas will surely unfold from out of the hermeneutically sophisticated knowledge and interpretive practice that his work has exhibited now over the last decade and a half. Thanks to him (and Crip Stephenson), more than two dozen other voices in The Pneumatological Imagination have also borne witness to its relevance for their theological (and other) labors. If these are what the many tongues of the great spirit enable, then my prayer is that the divine breath will come once again—and again and again—upon Bill and also upon the other contributors to this volume in order to empower their witness, in their own disciplines, languages, and testimonies, to the world in all of the differentiated spaces that they have placed in and called to …

Post 26 ~ To Our Children and Their Children: A Transgenerational Pentecostal Family’s Sojourn

Whenever we are together, and also when I am introducing my son to others in his absence, the emphasis is on his work as a practical theologian, contrasting with my own impractical(!) background and training in systematics. As Aizaiah recounts it, it was not in his plans to emulate his father’s endeavors, and yet while directing a church-based institute with (the Assemblies of God affiliated) Northwest University in Seattle, Washington, in his early twenties, he decided he needed to get at least graduate level credentials (since he was supervising undergraduate interns) and so enrolled at Northwest’s masters in theology and even took a course with me one summer (when Northwest invited me to teach), which had three other graduate students and from out of which my The Bible, Disability, and the Church: A New Vision of the People of God was published. After he left the Northwest, he applied to and was given a PhD scholarship by Claremont School of Theology where he had the privilege of meeting, studying under, and being mentored by practical theologian Frank Rogers (to whom Aizaiah has more recently presented a festschrift). And yet as a practical theologian, Aizaiah was drawn to and worked with the oeuvre of Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher Raimon Panikkar (1918-2010), drawing from the broad scope of the writings of one who had a Spanish (Christian) mother and an Indian (South Asian Hindu) father to develop his own cosmotheandric multiracial spirituality (“cosmotheandric” being a Panikkarian neologism connecting the cosmos, the divine or theos, and the human or anthropos). Herein, the practical theological method forges a critical-mixed-race hermeneutic—of course informed also by Aizaiah’s multi-ethnicity—in order to propose a spiritual posture fit for the hybridity of our globalized times. While I have not had membership in the guilds of practical theologians, I am hard pressed to think that many have read philosophical, interdisciplinary, and interreligious thinkers like Panikkar, much less worked constructively with the breadth and depth of his expansive ideas. If Aizaiah’s chapter documents that my many footnotes are the means through which I resound the many other voices, tongues, and witnesses of those who have gone before in doing their homework (research), then it is not surprising that I have not written much on Panikkar despite his major presence in the interreligious and interfaith theological spaces that I have long navigated: the scope of his work is humongous and the secondary literature is additionally difficult to surmount.

Except in one instance where, in a section of my Hospitality and the Other: Pentecost, Christian Practices, and the Neighbor, I survey Panikkar’s work and argue there that few theologians of the religions can really comprehend his contributions unless they adopt and live into his mystical stance. And it has been Panikkar’s contemplative posture that has also shaped Aizaiah, not only as a practical theologian but also as a spiritual and even mystical theologian. Let me be clear though that Aizaiah is not merely deploying Panikkar for his own purposes but is emerging as a recognized interpreter of his thought, excavating the Panikkarian corpus and charting fresh retrievals and reappropriations. And he is already making his (practical) theological mark in part as a Panikkarian, even, with his PhD thesis winning the International Raimon Panikkar prize in 2022! In other words: this is a robustly Panikkarian-resourced theology of spirituality, and in lineage, fully interdisciplinary and also intercultural.

I will say more about these latter dimensions of Aizaiah’s work soon, but on the spirituality register, I wish to note an irony. That despite the centrality of spirituality to the pentecostal movement—so much so that most would agree that pentecostal Christianity produces neither doctrinal nor theological ideas as much as spiritual practices—my seminary and doctoral training in the 1990s left me feeling that my calling as a pentecostal theologian was to traverse the horizon away from spirituality and toward translation of experience: interpreting the glossolalic utterances of pentecostal spirituality into theologically articulated explications, for instance. I recall at Western Evangelical Seminary (WES), in the Wesleyan holiness tradition, when one of my professors asked me why I did not then gravitate to Wesley’s theology, and my response then was something along the lines that a “heart-strangely-warmed” sensibility was too fuzzy and feeling oriented then, and I was seeking more robust—-even logocentric, which I then did not realize as such—-conceptualization. Funny how things evolve, for instance not only that I dedicated the aforementioned The Bible, Disability, and the Church to my WES professors and mentors, but also that I came to see that the pathic dimension of human being and experience as perhaps even more fundamental than the cognitive domain (thus my books, Spirit of Love: A Trinitarian Theology of Grace and The Spirit, the Affections, and the Christian Tradition).

Aizaiah imbibed our pentecostal spirituality sporadically during his upbringing, when we attended pentecostal churches in some of those years, although more intermittently after he turned ten. And yet, also in relationship with my parents, pentecostal preachers (and missionaries) all their lives, he came to appreciate and encounter the fullness of the Pentecost spirit as underlying and empowering the human spiritual journey. In this vein, almost from the beginning of his doctoral studies, his practical theological method always interfaced with spirituality studies. Over the last half decade or so, partly as an extension of his dialogue with Panikkar, he has increasingly turned to the mystical tradition, finding his pentecostal spirituality fueled by the richness of the Christian and other mystical paths. Where my own engagements with other religious traditions were primarily at the cognitive realm—of comparative theological endeavors for instance—Aizaiah’s has been more practical, spiritual, and participatory, and in that sense perhaps even more courageous than my own, thus accentuating that whatever courageousness he may have observed in my own journey, he has taken to another level in his sojourn! For this practical theologian, theory and practice are intertwined, so that, for instance, his work on the Yijing, about which we will read more in due course, comes out of living with and even contemplating or praying through this ancient document and its invitation to see the yin and the yang of the world in divinely orchestrated unfolding. Glimpses of his own interreligiously forged “contemplacostal” mood—Aizaiah self identifies as a pentecostal minister in the Disciples [of Christ] tradition—can be found not only in the article he footnoted in his chapter, but also in his contribution, “Cosmotheandric Eucharist, Contemplacostal Spirituality, and the Call to Relational Solidarity,” to a book I recently co-edited that is available open access (scroll down to the middle of this page for the link).

In 2018 while riding home on his motorcycle from a successful oral defense of his comprehensive exams, he was sideswiped by an errant pickup on the busy Interstate-57 and almost killed. The journey to recovery was arduous and traumatic, and he has told that story, with some contributions from his mother and I, in Trauma and Renewal: Toward Spiritual, Communal and Holistic Transformation. Intriguingly, even before his accident, his coursework had included, under the tutelage of his doktorvater, introduction to Internal Family Systems (IFS), and his ongoing journey of recovery involved further training later leading to certification as an IFS therapist. The quest for healing IFS invited Aizaiah to open new portals of considering his relationship with his mother and I as his parents—in part since the IFS system observes how our personal parts are familialy structured—and this in turn has led Aizaiah to reconnect also with his grandparents and other ancestors. Traumatic repair in a relational and interdependent world is never only individualized, so that he has come to see the beauty and gifts of not only my journey as an transnational immigrant and his mother’s as a migrant farmworker, but also his paternal grandparents’ and their ancestors’ Chinese diaspora and transnational journeys and the five-generations of Tejano-Mexican-American indigeneity, with all of the convolutedness of dynamic and ever-shifting borders shaping Tejano lives over the last few centuries. The multi-dimensional creativity and the responsibility to heal the world Aizaiah sees in my own theological endeavors are interlaced in his own spiritual (and spirited) vocation, now stretching back to recoup, cosmotheandrically and transgenerationally, the gifts of his ancestors, for the healing of the world.

Early on in my theological work, I heard the Methodist philosophical theologian Billy Abraham (1947-2021) say in response to a panel on one of his recent published works something to the effect, “books are like children, you never know what kind of friends they will bring home!” The Pneumatological Imagination provides an amazing window into Billy’s point for my own work. Chapter 2 of this book occasions me to say that our children continue to write the books of our lives, and it is the friends they will continue to make that will bring forward whatever legacies we may hand down for the healing of the world. Alma and I now have new perspectives on and gratitude for our parents and their parents also, even as we thank the great spirit for our children and also for their children—including the four who are Aizaiah’s—who will live bravely into the new world that is unfolding.

Post 13 – What Does Washington Get Wrong about Religion? (Sub)Stacking NOTUS (News of the United States)

“Washington is driven by political power, which recently has been clearly aligned — rhetorically, performatively, symbolically and otherwise — with religious power. But Washington and its many powerful constituencies are wrong that such religious power excuses executive reach over that of the other coequal branches of government; or undergirds military might, bravado, braggadociousness and aggression; or justifies how we might variously otherize those different from us and whom we disagree with, including our political opponents. Instead, religious power arises from the voice of each and every person, whether older or younger, regardless of gender, ethnicity, culture or language, not only the more affluent and socially respectable but also the less privileged, and even especially the immigrant, the refugee, the incarcerated, the homeless, the disabled or impaired, and the many others considered marginal or of less economic value. It may be idealistic and utopian to imagine attempting to live into this kind of religious empowerment, and yet it is this kind of potency that is needed to — and, when it arrives, will assuredly indeed — turn the world right side up.”

Today, I want to address specifically the role of one of the “powerful constituencies” in Washington, that of the White House Faith Office (WHFO). I am particularly uneasy about how this Faith Office is contributing to what the current presidential administration gets wrong about religion, not least since its Senior Advisor is Paula White-Cain, long a charismatic personality and televangelist in the neopentecostal circles that are an extension of my own (older) pentecostal faith community. If for much of its century-plus-long history pentecostal Christians have operated on the margins of society, not to mention at the edges of the church also, the current iteration of the Faith Office, housed as it is in the West Wing and located within the Domestic Policy Council that is at the center of the policy-making apparatus of the federal government (see section 2 of Establishment of White House Faith Office), means that pentecostal-charismatic and related evangelical Christians currently have unparalleled political influence. My question is, to put it bluntly: what is and continues to be the cost of this attained socio-political capital and power?

One point of entry into why I am concerned our influence and power has not been appropriately channeled (beyond what is said in my NOTUS response above) is that it does not appear the WHFO is exercising the influence it has through the various “Centers of Faith” operating within at least a dozen federal departments. For instance, if we take Jesus’ teachings seriously, including his insistence on providing for the hungry and thirsty and clothing the naked (addressing the needs of the poor and vulnerable), on welcoming the stranger (the refugee, the immigrant, etc.), and on caring for the incarcerated (see, e.g., Matthew 25:35-26, 42-43)—here are some of the persons and groups that constitute the “voice of every person” derived from the Pentecost narrative and included in my NOTUS note above—then we might at least hope that some of these perspectives would have driven the WHFO’s interactions with the Department of Health and Human Services, the United States Agency for International Development, and the Department of Homeland Security, just to name a few. What makes the news coming out of these agencies is not hopeful in this regard. To be sure, it may well be that there have been some interventions and these may have led to more recent adjustments in terms of health care policies, social service and development provisions, or even immigration, enforcement, and deportation approaches and activities. At the very least, those of us who pray for our government leaders might hope that current WHFO priorities include ensuring that at least these commitments of Christian faith are more consistently registered in what these and other federal agencies say and do.

Some might react that the various Centers of Faith across the federal government apparatus are designed less to shape public policy and more to support agency employees and staff (surely an important role) and in that case, the Centers of Faith ought to focus on their own religious realm and “stay in their lane.” This invites us to turn to the direct fruit of WHFO (even if not only this office) efforts over the last year, for instance the recent April 2026 “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias within the Federal Government” report. Even if we were to give this document the benefit of the doubt in terms of its assertions (to which I might want to return in the future for more in depth critical analysis), much of what we read seems like a pretext for the current bias of the federal policies and actions targeting more ecumenical Christian causes. For example, many Christians teaching at our state universities and other institutions of higher education are feeling the sting of Department of Education policies directed against “wokeism” that for them are at least in part faith commitments regarding justice and related issues. More to the point, many citizens who are voicing their opposition to the current administration are protesting or exercising their first amendment rights precisely because of their faith convictions (e.g., Jesus’ teachings about welcoming the stranger or providing for the poor), and some of these have been arrested and much worse. Last but not least, even if anti-Christian bias needs to be addressed, so do the biases against many other religious minority groups. In the end, my thinking returns to how Washington, including the WHFO, misunderstands what it means to protect religious liberty, which is at the heart of its charter: such is not meant to bolster the standing of the religious majority (however we might be understood or counted) but for all, especially presently minority faith groups.

At an even deeper level of concern regarding the current WHFO is that it is impeded from speaking truth to political power. Of course, any administration retains the right to appoint advisory members and groups that will support implementation of its priorities, ostensibly what the people voted for. And yet what has been clearly manifest is the extension of executive power in ways that not only sideline the legislative branch but ignore the checks of the judicial branch; that result in the enrichment of the president, his family, and inner circles in clearly corrupt ways, including at the expense of taxpayers; and that has weaponized the Department of Justice (which has its own Center of Faith, it should be noted) to pursue political opponents and benefit political allies. It is well-known that from the cabinet level on down, those who oppose these presidential priorities (which are for personal gain rather than as representative of the people, we should be clear) are quickly dispatched. Perhaps this is the cost of establishing and sustaining the WHFO in its current form. Even more problematic, however, is that such silence then—not to mention also the sycophancy emanating from presidential cabinet meetings and thereby presumed to persist all the way down—is promoted by Washington as supporting the president’s actions and even words. As political insiders now, it is clear that WHFO members and their constituencies have embraced a clearly partisan agenda, and in light of the rhetoric of the present administration, it is a short step from there to the WHFO also participating in the otherization and even demonization of those on the other side of the political aisle, e.g., all non-pentecostals and non-evangelicals are presumed to be non-Christians, or all traditional or non-MAGA republicans are RINOs, or all democrats become “radical left lunatics,’ albeit now also spiritualized within a religious cosmology. As a result, the WHFO now is expected to reinforce what is fast becoming a failing presidency, incapacitated from telling the truth where that departs from given talking points. Besides all of the above issues, if the WHFO continues to acquiesce to and enable the current administration’s exercise of power in unlawful, unethical, and counter-religious ways, then we also have the undermining of faith itself: the Christian witness to the good news of Jesus will be tarnished for the next generation.

I am sure that in future Substacks I will need to address the so-called Christian nationalism that is associated with the current WHFO. For now, however, the circles of Christian power gathered around the WHFO and its networks are not representative of “the voice of each and every person, whether older or younger, regardless of gender, ethnicity, culture or language, not only the more affluent and socially respectable but also the less privileged, and even especially the immigrant, the refugee, the incarcerated, the homeless, the disabled or impaired, and the many others considered marginal or of less economic value” that have been and will continue to be empowered by the divine spirit. In fact, as already indicated, the WHFO office does not represent the biases that are widely perpetuated against those in religiously minoritized groups. To the degree that the WHFO includes many from historically white pentecostal, charismatic, and evangelical Christian movements, to that same degree it also represents less than half of the constituents in these movements since persons and communities of color now, by many estimates, constitute more than fifty percent of these churches. In that respect, the WHFO might wish to be more mindful of the historically marginalized roots of pentecostal-charismatic Christianity in the United States, work to bring any and all such more peripheral voices and perspectives into the present conversation, and then find ways to live into their West Wing opportunities with these experiences, needs, and challenges in mind. Doing so is the only way, I humbly submit, to participate in God’s redemptive work of turning the world right side up.

Post 25 ~ From Kiuruvesi/Helsinki (through Everywhere in-Between on the way) to the Ends of the Earth: On (Not) Keeping Up with My Pentecostal (Elder) Brother from Another (Finnish) Mother

Once I became familiar with his deep pentecostal credentials, raised within Finnish pentecostal church, sent by this small but dynamic pentecostal movement as a missionary to Thailand in the early 1980s, credentialed as a pentecostal minister therein (although in the last decade adding ordination with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America also), and then working on his second doctorate in pentecostal studies vis-a-vis ecumenical theology (the published version of the first one appeared the year we met), I began to follow his work closely (the number of academically trained pentecostal theologians at the end of the previous millennium could have arguably been counted on one hand: we were a rather rare breed attempting to accomplish a putatively oxymoronic task: theologize pentecostally!).

I have long ago given up trying to follow Veli-Matti’s work closely—no one can really keep up!—so in what follows, I give highlights from the thoroughly biased Yong-perspective. Once I figured out that Veli-Matti had a lot to say as a pentecostal theologian, and when I began teaching Systematic Theology IV at the Assemblies of God affiliated North Central University in Minneapolis as an adjunct professor (moonlighting from my “day job” at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul since I had a growing family) and realized we didn’t have anything to offer students from a pentecostal theological perspective, I asked him for permission to reproduce a dozen or more of his previously published essays, added an introduction, and secured publication of his Toward a Pneumatological Theology: Pentecostal and Ecumenical Perspectives on Ecclesiology, Soteriology and Theology of Mission. Then, a few years later, after Veli-Matti had published another handful of books, both introductory theological texts from his teaching the systematics sequence at Fuller Seminary (where he has been since the turn of the new millennium) and other explorations in ecumenical and theological topics, I published a review essay, “Whither Evangelical Theology? The Work of Veli-Matti Karkkainen as a Case Study of Contemporary Trajectories”---initially in the Evangelical Review of Theology and then later reprinted in my The Dialogical Spirit, chapter 5—both attempting to situate his contributions up to then within the evangelical and yet ecumenical space represented at Fuller, but yet doing so given his pentecostal commitments and the global vibrancy of the movement. Not long after that, through his ongoing work on all things pneumatological, including one textbook, one sourcebook, one introductory discussion, and another edited volume, I invited him (along with another colleague doing work in pneumatological theology), to co-edit what came to be Interdisciplinary and Religio-Cultural Discourses on a Spirit-Filled World: Loosing the Spirits. Last but not least, upon completion of his massive five-volume A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World (2013-2017)—a one-volume edition was made available two years later with the same publisher, Eerdmans—I then edited with two other colleagues The Dialogical Evangelical Theology of Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen: Exploring the Work of God in a Diverse Church and a Pluralistic World, and included within that collection another essay reviewing the pneumatological volume (the fourth) and the accompanying pneumatological threads through the entire magnum opus: “The Many Tongues of the Spirit? Interpreting Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen’s A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World” (reprinted also in my more recent The Dialogical Spirit II). Notice that the above says little about all of his other scholarly efforts, with which many readers of my Substack are familiar.

I do, however, want to say something about Veli-Matti as a faculty colleague, not least since I also had the privilege of being his dean for a few years when I had that senior administrative role at Fuller. Veli-Matti, despite his busy traveling and speaking schedule (including his regular, at least annual, return to Helsinki where he has continued all these years as Docent of Ecumenics at the University there), is not only faithful but active in faculty meetings, fulfilling his faculty responsibilities admirably. More impressively, during his tenure at Fuller he has taught over 5,200 students (and counting, beyond winter quarter 2026)—averaging about 200 students a year, in case anyone is interested, a very large number for graduate level instruction—which obligations he carries out expertly also in online environments. This is no mean task, not only in that I doubt few if any other Fuller faculty have taught as many, but also in that many prolific theologians’ strengths are not in the classroom. Finally, because of our mutual interests, including our shared pentecostal backgrounds, we have had the privilege of serving with one another supervising our doctoral students, he supporting me as a committee member regularly and vice-versa, and in these contexts, I see Veli-Matti the mentor working patiently, encouragingly, empoweringly, and expertly with the next generation of theologians. I say all of this since they present a portrait of a globally renowned theologian who is attentive to details, is gracious to those he interacts with, and who shows up fully in whatever space he enters.

And that is the way that Veli-Matti has also shown up to me. He has endorsed at least four of my books and written probing but generous reviews for at least four others (I might have missed a few here and there on either front). This same mode of showing up, with full and respectful engagement, is evident also in his chapter in The Pneumatological Imagination, “Does the Spirit Really Blow Where It WIlls? The Struggle with the Freedom of the Spirit in Global Pentecostalism(s).” Wherever Veli-Matti has interacted with my work in the past, we find both encouragements and critical questions, the latter usually in a short section at the end. I have learned over time that this is his way of registering his concerns, usually guided by his ecumenical instincts that suggest any pneumatological or Third Article theological approach ought to be, in the end, fundamentally trinitarian. And yet, while this chord is not absent in his chapter, I read this piece almost as a Kärkkäinen pneumatological manifesto, one urging embrace of and inquiry toward what he calls a plural and multi-layered pneumatological theology. Now even if the essay is carried in part by references to my contributions, only someone like Veli-Matti, who has explored the theology-and-science nexus interdisciplinarily, navigated interreligiously and comparatively with the world’s religious traditions, and traversed fully the dogmatic and ecumenical horizons of the theological tradition, can have pulled so many threads together so coherently and compellingly in such a short space. Indeed, if I were not yet one, I might have said at the end of his chapter (repurposing by paraphrasing one Agrippa of old, in Acts 26:28), “you almost persuadeth me to become a pneumatological theologian”!

No doubt Anne Kärkkäinen, who has accompanied Veli-Matti across all seven continents over the decades of their marriage, has been the better half of this pentecostal voyage. And yet, before concluding, I wish to pay tribute also to another woman, the one who not only conceived and bore—in Kiuruvesi, a town in rural eastern Finland—what turned out to be this prodigious theologian but whose prayers and admonitions since his birth have no doubt charted his journey. I say this since both of us found out a long time ago comparing notes on pentecostal missionary ventures—he as an actual pentecostal missionary and me as a pentecostal (reverse) missionary kid—that perhaps pentecostal mothers around the world, not only his in Finland but mine born in Malaysia and in northern California the last half century, are incessant testifiers. This means that when he and I call home to say hello to our mothers, we hear again and in extended ways about all that God is doing in their lives and in the world, and in turn are reminded about the love expressed in ways only pentecostal mothers can prayerfully articulate (in ways that impede our hanging up the phone): interceding, admonishing, and declaring (in Jesus’ name) that their concerns for their always-on-the-go-around-the-world sons will be allayed and their best hopes come to fruition. I am sure that Veli-Matti’s many gifts to Amos Yong are at least in part the result of prayers my mother has uttered and continues to lift up on my behalf. To whatever degree I have been a blessing to him, I would suppose they also have come about due to the prayers lifted up by his. Thank God for praying pentecostal mothers!

Post 24 ~ From Chicago through Basel to Costa Mesa, California: The (Many) Gifts of an Italian-American Pentecostal Journey

Here was a young (then!) pentecostal theologian—perhaps the first time I had ever met one in person!—fairly freshly minted with the PhD from the University of Basel in Switzerland, and a Roman Catholic theologian, discussing (ecumenically and theologically) embodiment, Karl Rahner, sacramentality, Paul Tillich, and glossolalia. My brain was exploding: I was then in the middle of my second master’s degree but it was in the history of philosophy, so my pentecostal heart was being strangely warmed (this would be an understatement, more accurately reframed pentecostally as: fired up). When I got home from the conference, my research uncovered more from this Italian American pentecostal theologian: “Sighs too Deep for Words: Towards a Theology of Glossolalia” (published in the Journal of Pentecostal Theology in 1992). I kept thinking to myself: what does this mean…this is surely not my grandmother’s, nor my mother’s, pentecostal theology!!

I started writing with Frank immediately (emails were a bit later). A few years later, after I wrote a paper for one of my PhD seminars, “Tongues of Fire in the Pentecostal Imagination: The Truth of Glossolalia in Light of R. C. Neville’s Theory of Religious Symbolism,” and submitted it for publication to the Journal of Pentecostal Theology, I was delighted beyond words to hear back it was accepted. Then, I was flabbergasted when I received the print copy of the issue (electronic journals was not yet then a thing) to observe that my article was followed by Frank Macchia’s “Discerning the Truth of Tongues Speech: A Response to Amos Yong”! You can just imagine how I felt, as (then) a second year PhD student, reading Frank’s comments. Yes there were many important questions that he raised pushing me to engage more critically with the issues I wrote about, but it was words such as these that gave me confidence as a pentecostal theologian: “After years of researching the theology of glossolalia, I am delighted only seldomly by a really fresh and challenging discussion of the issue. I can say without hesitation that Yong’s article was a delight for me to read” (p. 68); and, from the concluding paragraph: “Yong presents us with a stimulating point of departure for taking a theology of glossolalia into new and uncharted waters…. His proposals are cogent and rich. Those who deal in the future with a theology of glossolalia would do well to deal seriously with Yong’s insights. I expect that we have only begun to benefit from Yong’s challenging theological mind in Pentecostal scholarship. I anticipate hearing much more from him in the future” (p. 71). In hindsight, these were not mere academese: they were Frank’s witness (in power of the divine spirit I dare say) calling forth a future for a budding pentecostal theologian.

Not long after this exchange, Frank moved from Southeastern University in Lakeland, Florida, where he was at, to Vanguard University (VU) in Costa Mesa, California, where he has stayed and from which he has recently (a month ago as of the publication of this Substack) retired. Although he did his part in attempting to recruit me to VU in the early 2000s, I was not able to join him in Southern California until I arrived at Fuller in 2014. Until then, Frank participated in a SPS panel on my published PhD thesis that then developed via an email conversation among the panelists into perhaps one of the longest journal articles ever, almost 70 pages—with myself, Frank, Del Colle, and Dale Irvin: “Christ and Spirit: Dogma, Discernment and Dialogical Theology in a Religiously Plural World,” published by the Journal of Pentecostal Theology in 2003—-and I, in turn, recruited Frank to write his groundbreaking Justified in the Spirit: Creation, Redemption and the Triune God for the Pentecostal Manifestos series I then co-edited. In the last decade plus, my wife and I have had repeated visits to Frank and Verena’s home in Aliso Viejo, a short drive from the beautiful Laguna Beach where Alma and I try to get away to at least annually, and the Macchias have visited our home in Pasadena, playing board games, etc. (when the two of us were not theologizing or talking about each other’s continually rolling out books, with Frank publishing at least another handful during this time)!

Frank’s chapter in The Pneumatological Imagination, “The Spirit Beyond the Church: A Conversation between Amos Yong and George Lindbeck,” honors me in multiple ways. I might have thought that he, the pentecostal Karl Barth, as any theologian knows—although his PhD and first book, the year I finished seminary studies, was on the Blumhardts, we need to remind ourselves—would have provided a Barthian readings of my (sometimes) Tillichian tendencies, but he does something more probing: exploring via his Barthian inclinations my pneumatological trekking in the world of religious pluralism. Further, he brings me into conversation with one of the more important theological voices of the last generation, Lindbeck’s (1923-2018), one of the architects of the so-called postliberal theology, whose The Nature of Doctrine was assigned to the theological method seminar in my PhD program. Last but not least, Frank engages deeply with my third book, Beyond the Impasse: Toward a Pneumatological Theology of Religions, which because it was in part a compilation and then rewriting of a handful of previously published articles and then was later subjected to the most critical of reactions any of my books ever received, especially from more evangelically-oriented theologians, I have perhaps been least pleased with over the years. Whereas Amos Yong’s pneumatological imagination might move swiftly through the many tongues of the many others toward a new synthesis, Frank’s more Barthian approach stays patiently with his interlocutors—thus attending to the thickness of their formulations—which allows for a more sturdy foundation to emerge in the dialogue.

In fact, Frank exemplifies in his juxtopositioning of my Beyond the Impasse and Lindbeck’s work precisely where I felt the interreligious dialogue needed to go. Since I felt the latter’s notion of religious doctrines providing grammars for religious living was more than less true, to that same extent, then, our engaging with religious others needed to attend not just to what they said but also to how what was said was woven into, and theorized out of, what was lived. In that respect, just as Lindbeck’s doctrinally-shaped theological imagination required that ecumenical dialogue accounted for the dogmatic differences in part via attentiveness to liturgical, sacramental, and other lived-expressions of ecclesial life, so also did interreligious encounter need to situate theological, philosophical, and wisdom commitments within the broader fabrics of religious lives and practices. More to the point, precisely because Lindbeck was right in the respects he was affirming (about the church’s teaching shaping its discipleship), I had to be right in the other respects I was inquiring after (the teachings of other religionists also need to be discovered and understood afresh in and through their religious lives). That is why I could include an important section on Lindbeck’s proposal in my third book on theology of religions, Hospitality and the Other: Pentecost, Christian Practices, and the Neighbor, even as this book, I have noticed, has continued to be assigned in seminary courses to the (at least recent) present.

In all of these ways, for me, and as Frank not only has long noted but repeatedly encouraged along the way, a pneumatological theology of dialogue, encounter, and discernment is absolutely central. Otherwise, what amounts to a Lindbeckian ecclesiological exclusivism (only those participating in the true church’s sacraments are savable) will not trouble my own pentecostal community’s kerygmatic exclusivism (only those who are evangelized by the true church’s—which usually means: my church’s—missionary proclamations are savable), a stance problematic for both Frank and I. From my youngest theological days to the present, then, my curiosities and voyages into various theological spaces has been possible in part only because it has been individuals like Frank, rooted as he is in the mainstream of the theological tradition, who have critically but also constructively engaged, as he did in this essay, these meanderings. Any good uncovered in my own efforts along the way therefore should have Frank to thank.

Post 12 ~ From Despair to Hope 5: Entrepreneurializing amid Late Modern Capitalism?

If we turned specifically to the realm of entrepreneurship, it would be intriguing to observe the fortunes of our chief entrepreneur (also leading bankrupter-in-chief!) in particular that the current American president’s net worth has grown during the first year of his second term in office (2025) by anywhere from $1.5b to $3.4b, depending on how estimates related to the crypto market are handled, if and when currently opaque private deals come to clearer light, and what kinds of public disclosures are produced in due course or as mandated by legal or other measures. (If some of my readers might be concerned about these issues, the midterm vote could be mobilized to ensure our elected congressional members erect new laws and enforce them and existing ones to hold the powers that be accountable.) On the one hand, we might then all gravitate toward the crypto sector, or believe that entrepreneurizing in digital, financial, and related spaces is the way forward. On the other hand, when we think of entrepreneurship generally, we usually have small businesses in mind, not playing the stock, bond, commodity, or alternative financial or real-estate-based markets. Under the current economic conditions, some of the elements required for successful entrepreneurship—capital, competition, calling—are complicatedly intertwined.

Entrepreneurship requires capital, whether physical, financial, or labor-wise. The former two might, under more ideal conditions, be borrowed, even from lending companies like banks, but in the current milieu, the rates might be too high, or the risks too great. The latter is limited: yes, we might decide to work more than eight hours a day, or forty a week, but each additional hour impinges on the time spent on other necessary activities, including resting and sleeping, ultimately (see From Despair to Hope 3 on health).

That entrepreneurship involves competition further aggravates the labor or temporal costs. On the one hand, competition might be minimal rather than maximal, but in this case, that may be because our entrepreneurial “product” is in less rather than more market demand. But if the demand is high, that simply means that the competition to produce more of what is needed at a lower cost will intensify the pressure to increase labor hours or capital or marketing investments, with all of the challenges already noted.

This leads to the issue of what is named above as calling: why entrepreneurship to begin with? Perhaps on the driving front, this relates to personally cultivated skillsets, access to opportunities (provided by others, even inheritances, etc.), or long-held aspirations. The latter involves what we might call the purpose or the telos of whatever it is we are producing: what do we hope to achieve? Some might have noble intentions, e.g., provide goods or services that meet the needs of others, improve the quality of life, reflect the aesthetic and creative aspects of our lives, and so on. In the end, however, there are sustainability factors: can we afford these entrepreneurial activities in ways that raise or produce enough income to pay the bills—business and personal/familial—and contribute to the common (e.g., public, environmental, for instance) good? In short, in today’s global economy, the bottom line inevitably returns to: does this make enough money?

It turns out that we are assailed on every side since a biblical admonition alerts us to how “the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). The levers related to capital and labor can be activated variously, but underneath each decision may be the pressing financial driver. The preceding is simplistically delineated, although the interrelationships observed are part of what any entrepreneurial endeavor will need to account for, either going into the start-up, or along the way.

How to generate some hope amid these despairing (realistic, I would say) factors? The end of the Day of Pentecost narrative is suggestive of a few practices that invite different ways to think about the calling to entrepreneurship in the third millennium global context of late market capitalism (see also chapter 7 of my book on political theology). St. Luke unfolds these developments as part of the results of the giving of the great spirit: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people” (Acts 2:44-46). I thus venture three spiritual practices to buoy at least imaginative possibilities, if not also hopefulness, for entrepreneurialism amid our twenty-first century economic realities. First, part of our entrepreneurial goals might be to ensure distribution of wealth in ways that benefit the marginalized and vulnerable in our community. Second, and pressing further into this entrepreneurial space: perhaps enterprises supporting, undergirding, and advancing philanthropic giving and enhancing the virtue of generosity might be prioritized. Are these both too (spiritually) idealistic? Perhaps. Unless, third, we include also herein the entrepreneurial calling limned by a horizon that beckons us toward the common good (or the coming reign of God, to use theological parlance), growing by layers from our immediate to more globally defined communities of relationships. How might our entrepreneurial efforts be reoriented not so that we are unconcerned about making ends meet and paying the bills but so that these objectives serve the wider purposes of promoting the common good, accompanying and growing the generosity of ourselves and others, and redistributing our entrepreneurial and collective gains for the sake of the most needy in our midst?

Left to ourselves, as already biblically intimated, we will be engulfed by the burdens of “making it,” driven perhaps to whatever “shortcuts” we might think are helpful to succeed entrepreneurially, and in the process perhaps even become what we never started out to be: greedy. After all, initial gains or returns on our investment of capital, labor, etc., need to be reinvested to grow the enterprise, and on and on: contemporary market capitalism presumes that there will never be enough. So more is needed to make or produce even more, unendingly. These so-called laws of the free market seem to have been internalized by late moderns, ourselves included. From this perspective, it will be a dog-eat-dog world and our entrepreneurial success depends on working longer hours, investing more and more, out-performing others, and accumulating wealth. Not buying into this philosophically might eliminate our ability to achieve financial success, much less make it as entrepreneurs.

A Pentecost-spirituality, however, invites us to imagine otherwise (here see also another of my books on the economics of modern Pentecost-movements). Not that the choice is between a free market on the one side and socialism or communism on the other, since not only are none of these necessarily scripturally funded, but all are later developments that we can find earlier anticipations of in various readings of the scriptural materials. Instead of buying into these binaries, or being locked into the assumptions of contemporary late market capitalism, perhaps we might invite the great spirit to inspire other hopeful possibilities, in this case, shaped by the sharing of capital rather than accumulation, motivated by generosity rather than driven by competition, and guided toward the shalom of a just and equitable commons rather than by plutocratic privileges.

We should not expect entrepreneurs to live into this invitation unless we who are spiritually committed are also willing to change our own habits of consumption, financially support such endeavors, and perhaps even reimagine our retirement strategies and options. Only such sustained efforts will change the institutional and social context for would-be entrepreneurs. And along the way, entrepreneurs who take up this challenge will further likely need monies lent at below market interest rates, and depend on partnerships with organizations and networks devoted to such visions of the common good. May the great spirit breathe such hopeful possibilities amid the current despondency.

Post 23 ~ The Pentecostal Imagination: An Ecumenical-Catholic-Pentecostal Dialogue

It has been a wonderful journey with Wolfgang and Charis, an extension of the many blessings I received from him as faculty colleague, including, for instance, upon our initial greeting at Regent, when he published what is still the most substantive engagement with what remains perhaps my most important book for pentecostal theology, The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh: Pentecostalism and Possibility of Global Theology (2005). The close reading of this book evidenced there—seen also in his chapter in The Pneumatological Imagination, “The Pentecostal Imagination: The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh as the Key to Amos Yong’s Theology”—has marked his ongoing attentiveness to my work, not least as expressed also in his contributions to the book he edited with Martin Mittelstadt, The Theology of Amos Yong and the New Face of Pentecostal Scholarship: Passion for the Spirit, in 2013. For over two decades, by now, Wolfgang has given the most precious scholarly gift that can be bestowed upon a colleague: reading carefully and responding to the proposed ideas.

Whereas Wolfgang’s earlier essay on The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh caused me to pause to assess his argument, review my own, and then also attempt to articulate an apologetic in response, “The Pentecostal Imagination” helped me to realize some things about myself, perhaps also in relation to his own sojourn. I am inclined to think that our doctoral formation—me at (Methodist) Boston University (BU) and he at (Jesuit) Marquette University (MU)—may have something to do with the divergences between our sensibilities but yet also allow for convergence in an overall complementarity. Let me tease out this hypothesis vis-a-vis the three sections and relevant claims of Wolfgang’s “The Pentecostal Imagination.”

First, Wolfgang is very generous in this first section, on the one hand reiterating his earlier claim that my pneumatological starting point in The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh, could have been more sturdy if rooted even more deeply in a biblical trinitarianism, but on the other hand then also saying that read backward to my Spirit-Word-Community: Theological hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective and forward through my Renewing Christian Theology: Systematics for a Global Christianity and beyond, there is a deeper trinitarian structure to my work which the 2005 account was not in as good a position to acknowledge. While fully benefiting from his generosity, however, I also think that Wolfgang’s immersion in the Roman Catholic tradition, particularly but not only in his doctoral research on the pneumatological theology of Heribert Mühlen (1927-2006)—which publication, Heribert Mühlen: His Theology and Praxis–A New Profile of the Church (2004), reflected in depth engagement with nineteenth and twentieth century Roman Catholic pneumatic and trinitarian theological debates—primed him to see the potential intertwining of the pneumatological and the trinitarian in ecumenical ways that I was less predisposed to.

On the other side, my going to BU meant that I constructed my pneumatological theology not just under the philosophical mentorship of my doktorvater Robert Cummings Neville (see my Substack response to him) but also under the shadow of Hegel, particularly as represented there in the religion department by Alan M. Olson (1939-2023), who I served as a teaching assistant for while attempting to comprehend his Hegel and the Spirit: Philosophy as Pneumatology (1992) alongside other works on pneumatological first philosophy I was then grappling with. Further, when I was just starting out as a theologian upon completing my PhD, I was book review editor for Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, and commissioned Marquette theologian D. Lyle Dabney (1951-2026)—-who also mentored Wolfgang variously during his doctoral studies—-to review of Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen’s first two books (his revised PhD and habilitationshrift), which resulted in Dabney’s lengthy review essay and a Kärkkäinen response (both published in the journal in 2001; I comment more on the latter’s work in my response to his chapter in The Pneumatological Imagination in a few weeks), which left me feeling compelled to provide the kind of robust pentecostal theology of the third article the exchange suggested might be possible, one not beholden to the main lines of the (western) theological (I.e., ecumenical) tradition, albeit with various risks of attempting to chart a creative path forward. This motivation was combined then with my own growing sense that any pentecostal theological approach needed to at least attempt to account for Oneness perspectives, so the trinitarian register would need to be navigated afresh in these efforts. The result now, for the last two and a half decades, is an outworking of the wager that if we have given centuries to carving out patrological and christological theologies, the pneumatological venue needs to be given a sustained chance to develop, with all of the attendant liabilities at these early stages, in order for a truly trinitarian—even one that Oneness colleagues should be able to affirm—theological imagination to unfold in the long run (after our generation is long gone). Cutting back too quickly to the christological, patrological, or trinitarian will inhibit the promise of a pneumatological approach and Third Article theology.

Second, Wolfgang’s second section is no less magnanimous, on the one hand renewing his earlier insistence that any pentecostal theology should be ecumenically grounded, but on the other hand then also acknowledging that The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh read across the scope of my work opens up to a robust, if not conventional, ecumenical theological vision. While grateful for this appreciation, however, I also think that Wolfgang was then, and in many ways remains, in hot pursuit of what might be called a pentecostal-catholic (or catholic-pentecostal) vision, which hence required a robust ecclesiological and ecumenical hermeneutic. In that respect, his second book, on ecclesiology, and then two-volumes on Pentecostalism and Christian Unity—the first on Ecumenical Documents and Critical Perspectives (2010), and the second Continuing and Building Relationships (2013)—are not only major achievements for pentecostal theology but also undergird his ecumenical instincts and commitments, both theologically and methodologically. Such a pentecostal-catholic ecclesiological and ecumenical theology, then, needed to account for the richness of the Christian tradition, not least the two thousand years of historical theology and doctrinal formulation, and perhaps this also provides insight into Wolfgang’s archeological (first principled) sensitivies.

On the other side, my own journey through Western Evangelical Seminary (WES: now Portland Seminary) and then Portland State University (PSU) in the first half of the 1990s opened me up to what has been called the wider ecumenism: if the Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, and others I met at WES were indeed “saved,” contrary to how my exclusivistic pentecostal upbringing treated those who were not “born again” as needing to be evangelized, then what about the Buddhists and those of other faiths I met at PSU? Then, my attempts to pursue this question of the religions at BU also unfolded within a milieu in which not only interreligious but also theology and science questions were (and continue to be) pursued. My own pentecostalized sensibilities, however, then foregrounded the eschatological horizon, consistent with how I understood pentecostal spirituality to have been oriented, at least as opened up by the earliest academically trained pentecostal theologians, not least Steven Land and (holiness-pentecostal adjacent) Bill Faupel, among others. If at BU, the question of truth as philosophically engaged invited dialogue with any and all who were interested—religiously or not, scientifically and technologically, etc.—in the subject matter, then a pentecostal-eschoatological orientation begged for a teleological trilogue: with the wider ecumenism, and the public square, in anticipation of the coming divine reign.

Finally (for now), Wolfgang’s charitability extends into the third section of his chapter, on the one hand renewing his earlier observation that my more phenomenological approach could have gained from a more coherently articulated narrative account, but on the other hand, again, then granting that when reconsidered against not only Renewing Christian Theology but also its antecedent In the Days of Caesar: Pentecostalism and Political Theology, there is at least a sufficient narrative undertow to the pneumatological and pentecostal imagination. On the other side, however, there is no gainsaying the theoretical and methodological influence in my thinking of both Walter Hollenweger (1927-2016) and Harvey Cox—the former whose works were inspirational for my PhD studies, and the latter who I learned from in one of my PhD seminars (facilitated by the Boston Theological Institute’s cross-registration program which allowed BU students to attend Harvard Divinity School and vice versa, etc.), and who ended up serving on my doctoral committee—in driving my phenomenological method. In short, my BU formation oriented me toward the future, beginning with where we are at present, and thus the phenomenological, anthropological, and sociological turns, even if I always felt like I wished us pentecostal thinkers had major theologians at the fount of the movement to draw from (not Charles Fox Parham!) like Wesleyans, Reformed, Lutherans, and even Catholics did. In turn, however, Wolfgang has, as an exemplary ecumenical-pentecostal theologian, had much more than anthropological studies and phenomenological interpretations to dialogue with, and thus his Beyond Pentecostalism could re-new both the pentecostal imagination and the Christian tradition; his Pentecostal Theology: Living the Full Gospel could nourish the pentecostal liturgical imagination ecumenically and vice-versa; and his The Scandal of Pentecost can revitalize the church’s engagement with the public square pentecostally, ecclesially, and pneumatologically. And Wolfgang is just getting started, with Regent being the springboard to the University of Birmingham where he now leads perhaps the premier PhD in pentecostal studies program fostered long ago by Walter Hollenweger, mentors the next generation of pentecostal theologians, continues to research and write, and also nurtures the scholarly work of others editorially, not just with Charis, but also as the lead and co-founding editor of T & T Clark’s Systematic Pentecostal and Charismatic Theology series (a dozen books last I checked).

Wolfgang, I am appreciative of your many gifts, including your artistic talents and imagination, even as I hope also one day to not only observe but savor your culinary expertise, which will indeed be for me a foretaste of the basileia. Thanks for accompaniment on the pentecostal theological journey.

Post 22 ~ The Better Half of the Apocalypse: Re-Reading Revelation’s Feminine Symbolism Pentecostally

There was quite a bit of chutzpah, to be frank, when I said yes not long after arriving at Fuller to Amy Plantinga Pauw, one of the co-founding editors for the Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible series published by Westminster John Knox, who asked if I would agree to replace their first choice who had withdrawn. Amy had endorsed my Renewing Christian Theology which doctrinal discussions have sustained engagements with scripture, including two Revelation sections in the final, twelfth, chapter, and thought to approach me. I remember thinking then: I had only engaged in a sustained way with Luke-Acts thus far, and even there, my readings were more thematic, much less exegetical, surely a far cry from any genre of commentary, no matter how stretched. Further, Revelation was a known quagmire, its intense symbolism complicating rather than aiding hermeneutically, and even if angels might have mediated most of the visions, interpreting the resulting book involves herculean tasks that surely these same angels, now proverbially speaking, would have feared treading! But then, I said to myself: I have written many books (perhaps a dozen and a half when approached by Amy), and maybe completing such a theological commentary on the Apocalypse might be a good way to say everything else that I might want or need to say for the rest of my days, so why not? Upon publication, maybe there would be no more need for any more Amos Yong books!

And Melissa is surely at the vanguard of the current generation of pentecostal biblical scholars who have dared to wade into the Apocalypse (pun intended!). She completed her PhD on worship in the Book of Revelation in 2014, under the tutelage of John Christopher Thomas, arguably the leading pentecostal interpreter of this final book of the BIble (at least to then!), turned it around very quickly for publication—as ‘I Was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day’: A Pentecostal Engagement with Worship in the Apocalypse (2015)—and has since published one handful or more of articles, both developing the Apocalypse’s worship motif and also exploring other facets of John of Patmos’s visions. Upon appearance, her book immediately caught my attention as a significant pentecostal achievement, particularly bringing the apocalyptic worship imagery into dialogue with the worship practices so central to pentecostal spirituality, both historically and in the present, so much so that in a review essay I published in 2017 (reprinted as ch. 10 in my The Hermeneutical Spirit II), I engaged with Melissa’argument as, to then, one of the most exemplary substantive pentecostal readings of the Apocalypse. Given that her chapter in The Pneumatological Imagination was focused on Revelation’s feminist symbols, Melissa’s turn in this direction more recently had also registered with me, including that her 2022 Society for Pentecostal Studies presidential address was focused on one of these symbols, the Jezebel reference in Revelation chapter 2 (which was then published later that year in Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, as are these addresses). In short: I was wondering: to what degree would Melissa interact with my work in her chapter, and would my efforts there pass muster with this formally trained and academically experienced pentecostal hermeneut?

The excitement then turned into a sense of felt affirmation as I made my way through Melissa’s chapter, focused as it was on three other (besides the Jezebel image) feminine symbols: the Great Woman of Revelation 12, the Great Whore of chapters 17-18, and the Bride of the Lamb in the concluding section of the book. I was encouraged to see her remarking appreciatively on some of my comments, appropriately raising questions in other places, and wishing I had gone further in more forcefully rejecting any contemporary inclination to deploy biblical symbolism such as the Great Whore in the Apocalypse to justify violence against women. But overall, Melissa treated me as an ally in the pentecostal interpretive community seeking to respond more responsibly to this obscure book in relation to current concerns and realities. All the more satisfying for me—again, as a trained systematician and therefore always feeling like an interloper in the biblical arena—was that my efforts to manage the conflicting interpretations of Revelation (the secondary literature and extant commentarial tradition on the book that, as Melissa knows, is gargantuan!), not least its puzzling, dynamic, and potent feminine symbolism, appeared to have been valued by this leading not just interpreter of the Apocalypse but also, by now, senior biblical scholar of the pentecostal academy and respected pastoral theologian of the pentecostal church.

Toward the end of her chapter, Melissa insightfully mentions what I am not sure I have heretofore seen, that “the Woman Clothed with the Sun is our story of origin, the Great Whore is our present context, and the Bride of the Lamb is our present identity and glorious future” (p. 91). This means that we can live in the footsteps of either the Whore or the Bride, and therefore, in these times and days, we ought to remain vigilant, discerning, and faithful, beginning, for the purposes of Melissa’s focus here, with how we treat what makes up one half—the better half!—of the human race. I note also that if male and female are included in these feminine symbols, might not all persons, including those gendered intersex and otherwise, also have their origins in the Sun Woman, and thereby being invited to opt for the path of either the Whore or the Bride? What are the implications for our collective ecclesial journey? Beyond this, I observe that Jesus the Christ, the focus on the visionary message of John of Patmos, is also symbolized otherwise, as lion, lamb, and horse. To what degree might such creaturely symbolism—overflowing beyond sensory grasping in the Apocalypse, for instance in its four living creatures among many other beautiful, awe-inspiring, and even monstrous non-human animal symbolism—invite further creational, environmental, and ecological consciousness from us as we consider sojourning in the community of either the Whore or the Bride?

As Melissa knows, our worship of the slain Lamb happens, surely for John exiled on the island of Palmos, not just in the ecclesial congregation nor only in our devotional cloisters but in the ways in which we live faithfully in the public square, whether amid the imperial Roman rule prevalent in John’s time or in the late market capitalism of our late 2020s era of the Anthropocene. For all of these reasons, the platform that the seven spirits has given to Melissa through her achievements now as one of the pentecostal community’s most important biblical and theological voices invites her to respond ever more expansively to the many important questions confronting global pentecostal Christianities today, which then also have ecumenical, public square, and even environmental implications beyond our communities. These same seven spirits have been sent also to the four corners of the Earth and it is from here to there and back that I am eager to see how Melissa Archer’s witness will continue to resound from her Jerusalem through Judea and Samaria and beyond.

Post 11 – From Despair to Hope 4: Education to the Third and Fourth Generation?

While the sphere of education of our youth begins long before the college years, this Substack will focus on this latter arena as that is the one in which I have worked most on. My sense is that there will be neither any quick-fix to these issues on the horizon nor a one-size-fits-all-problems approach. We will have to develop a new financial model, and along the way, some of our schools will close (many in the theological sector where I am located already have, unfortunately), others will merge, and even others will transform themselves. In the meanwhile, however, it is not as if people—younger ones too—are not looking for information. The question in part is how higher educational responses will regain public trust. The related question is what potential students might be looking for to address the increasing polarization in our present milieu. How can the higher educational endeavor meet the needs in this space, specifically?

Readers of this Spirited Renewal thread of posts will not be surprised that I hearken back, again, to the New Testament Book of Acts, chapter 2, in thinking about this matter (the following summarizing what is also in part II of my book with Dale Coulter on this topic). In this narrative, the author tells us that there were people “from every people under heaven” gathered on the streets of the city of Jerusalem amid the first century Pax Romana (Acts 2:5). And as when thinking about democracy, which we discussed (two posts ago), there are now parallel implications for considering education. First, members of the crowd hear what is spoken “in the native language of each” (2:6). While many of us learn another language in secondary school—and some of us are also raised in bilingual (or more rarely, trilingual) households—I’ll put a plug in for continuing such language teaching and learning in postsecondary contexts. We might say that we have technologically mediated translators at our fingertips today. And yet, I think such is shorsighted since it is not only the communicative dimension of bi- or multi-lingualism that is at stake but the cultural, epistemic, axiologic, and critical-analytical aspects of languages that are lost if not learned.

We see this clearly in the second point: that the listeners were hearing across ethnic and cultural groupings. If the speakers (the apostolic community) were primarily local Jews (Galileans, even, from one part of the Judean region), the listeners were both from various ethnic and national communities with their own indigenous languages (e.g., “Parthians, Medes, Elamites” as Acts 2:9a says), and also from different parts of the Mediterranean world as “residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs” (2:9b-11a). In a sense, they were comprehending one another linguistically, but not communicatively, for instance, culturally or ethnically, surely not theologically (or relatedly: philosophically). Hence, the narrative concluded: “All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’” (2:12). This suggests that beyond language education, we need cultural education: understanding other ethnic and cultural systems, including their wisdom traditions, philosophical perspectives, and even religious and theological commitments. Linguistic education, in other words, opens up to epistemic, interpretive (hermeneutical), and translational capacities. Languages are portals into ways of thinking, and thus to the perspectives, values, and sensibilities shaped by distinct experiences, histories, and developments. Higher educational achievements ought, at the very least, to produce multilingual readers and speakers, cross-cultural interpreters, and intercultural translators, all of which enrich communities and facilitate understanding across worlds of difference.

But, ways of thinking and ways of living are intertwined. From one perspective, thinking emerges from out of living, effectively being a second order discursive elaboration on first order lived experience. From another perspective, however, thinking then also returns to shape living: growing in articulatory potency then reshapes one’s activity, behavior, and approach to life. In other words, we have a hermeneutical circle: thought derives from practice and returns to inform practice, in a never-ending cycle. Language is not only communicative, passing on information, but performative: guiding our actions in relation to others and to our physical environments. When we hear other languages, we hear not only other cultural values (per above) but also other culturally-nurtured ways of engaging the world. It is not without reason that at the end of the Day of Pentecost account, the question from the transnational crowd is, “what should we do?” (2:37). The point of the text is specifically behavioral and soteriological, vis-a-vis the person of Jesus the messiah at the center of this passage. The higher educational point is a parallel one: our learning should have implications for our living, and more specifically, for our thriving and flourishing in our various socio-environmental contexts, as opposed to just getting by. Of course, universities (and colleges) may not be able to guarantee such, and yet it is precisely from this perspective that I might read, with us, this early Christian narrative as inviting us to a kind of glocal citizenship, one informed by linguistic competence, intercultural skills, and practical capacities to work in our places of habitation but yet toward the planetary common good. As a directly relevant aside: the many disciples of scientific and humanistic inquiry can also be seen as discursive practices with their own technical concepts, vocabulary, and theoretical frames thus functioning like languages that both need interpretation and translation but also shape our understanding of, engagement with, and navigation through the world!

To be sure, St Luke is not writing a first-century manifesto for salvaging the ancient Jewish (or Greco-Roman, for that matter) academy. And yet the outpouring of the great spirit on that Pentecost Day invites us to imagine a spirited glocal conversation—multiversity even!—that catches up not just those eloquent in the lingua franca of that day (Greek, the language of imperial Rome) but all who are shaped by many cultural-linguistic perspectives, struggling to live together in the concrete places of their great metropolises (like Jerusalem), and learning to hear one another and work together as needed for the common good (about which we will say a bit more in our final “From Despair to Hope” post in two weeks). Similarly, then, today’s higher educational courses of study, as important as it might be to develop professional certificates and degrees to accomplish technical, service, and other related social goals, can help us to do better to diffuse our culture wars, to learn to listen to others different from us linguistically, culturally, ethnically, religiously, politically, and otherwise, to gain in fluency of interpreting and translating across these borders (that are otherwise barriers), and to grow in ability to link arms to address the challenges that we face. If we are all fearful, education calms us to respond more than less appropriately to our fears. As we are all in any case under-informed, education equips us with more (than less) knowledge to anticipate the unknowns before us. Since we are all tired of despair and hopeful for something better, surely for our children, education empowers every generation to work for the common good, down to the third and fourth generation even.

Our colleges and universities will need to teach, model, and facilitate more than what is sketched above, to be sure. And yet, arguably, if we don’t do well with the above, there may not be many students left for any of the other needed realms of study and inquiry. May the great spirit guide the efforts of those remaining engaged in these spaces.

Post21 ~ Many Tongues, Many Greco-Roman Accents: Tracking the Apostolic Spirit across the Ancient

Gentleman Craig is soft spoken, which means that when he speaks—which is usually barely above a whisper—we all strain to hear what the divine wind is breathing through him. Gentleman Craig is a truly kind, tender, and affable human person; whenever I get to be around him, Craig holds himself in ways that allows any of us who are near to relax. Gentleman Craig is unpretentious: despite his prodigious knowledge (of which of course I will have much more to say in a moment), since the Apostle Paul said, “Knowledge puffs up, but love edifies” (1 Corinthians 8:1), it must be the case that he continually invites the divine spirit of love to inhabit his soul. If I ever grow up, I want to be like Craig.

And it’s not as if there is any other way possible to grow up to be like Craig. I mean, c’mon: Scholar Craig is in a class by himself. Lord knows that no matter how many books I publish, Craig’s multi-volume Acts commentary itself includes more words than the entire Amos Yong oeuvre! Ok, that may be a slight exaggeration, but seriously: over 4600-plus pages just there, at 600 words per page (I am undercounting I am sure since half those pages are even more smaller-fonted footnotes!) equals almost three million words, all of which translates over (what the internet counts as) 45,000 ancient and modern works for the purposes of illuminating what the Holy Spirit intended to communicate to the first century apostolic community of readers then, and now also to any of us today. And I am going to comment only on this work since it’s the one I not only know best but also use regularly. I have had the privilege of consulting and citing Craig’s Acts commentary because Scholar Craig is also generous, having had the full set sent to me upon its appearance. Every time I write on the Book of Acts—which is almost every paper, article, and book I have written since this commentary appeared over a decade ago—I always go back to check on what Craig has written there, primarily to keep a theologian like me honest about what the Bible does, or does not, say!

And as most of you who are readers, referencers, and citers of Craig also know, our brother has produced commentaries—mostly very thick ttomes—on many if not most of the New Testament books. Each is informed by his remarkable knowledge of the writings across the ancient world, and helps to bring the biblical text alive. Not only that, Scholar Craig has also published volumes on many other topics, not only on the text of the New Testament vis-a-vis the historical Jesus and the reliability of the gospels, but also on contemporary important issues such as women in ministry, marriage and divorce, and race. In almost every item he has put out, including the dozens if not hundreds of essays, articles, and book chapters, he addresses all of the relevant scriptural texts, situates them in their ancient contexts, and explores what they have to say to inform our heads, shape our hearts, and guide our actions.

Closest and dearest to my heart, however, is Pentecostal Craig. Of course, Pentecostal Craig is Gentlemen Craig who is (as we have seen) also Scholar Craig. When we read Craig’s writings on pentecostal-related topics, they are treated with the same hermeneutical sophistication, methodological rigor, and theological clarity as in all of his books. But I mention specifically Pentecostal Craig since he is a person full of the divine breath, manifesting the fruits of that spirit of Jesus while edifying all of us with the charisms of teaching and writing he has been gifted with. And Pentecostal Craig is also worshipping and praying Craig, with me and other pentecostal scholars who raised hands together and then prayed for people who came forward in response to an altar call at the Asia Pentecostal Summit in Singapore at which we were both invited guests last year. We both went to Assemblies of God Bible colleges—he to Central Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, and me to Bethany Bible College in Santa Cruz, California—and thus have been deeply formed in pentecostal spirituality and somehow have persisted as scholars by inviting the divine wind to renew our minds and hearts always.

It is precisely for these reasons that at one point when I had begun, with Jamie Smith, the Pentecostal Manifestors series with Eerdmans, we immediately named Craig as someone who needed to make a contribution therein. Craig did eventually write the book we asked for, although (sadly for me), Spirit Hermeneutics: Reading Scripture in Light of Pentecost, appeared with Eerdmans (including my foreword) after the decision had been made to end the Manifestos series. This was, of course, far from Craig’s only book on pentecostal-related topics, which range from texts addressing matters of direct interest such as the by now multi-editioned Gift and Giver: The Holy Spirit for Today, and those of related relevance such as his multi-volumed Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (including an updated Miracles Today). These various works not only address issues central to global pentecostal spirituality today but also engage with the biblical materials on all related fronts deploying the vintage-Keenerian approach, steeped with perspective drawn from sources across the ancient world to help us late moderns grapple with these scriptural witnesses in navigating no less convoluted times.

And then, for his chapter in The Pneumatological Imagination, Craig does not re-trod the ground he has covered in Luke-Acts but makes time to uncover and “offer something new” (p. 93), thus coming up with “Lepra or Leprosy in Luke’s Gospel.” In part a nod to my interests in reading Luke vis-a-vis disability studies and related matters (as in my book on The Bible, Disability, and the Church), Craig seeks to comprehend lepra in the first century context, in order to more clearly view how it is similar to but also different from modern leprosy (Hansen’s disease). Packed into his twelve-page article (fifteen if you included the 65-item bibliography—the longest in the book, which Craig easily attained by, I am sure, not even making any conscious efforts—that buoys the almost 100 preceding footnotes, also a third more than the chapter with the next higher number of such!) is the renowned Keenerian exegetical approach: first the broader context of Jesus’ healing in Luke-Acts; then lepra in these books; then, in order over the next three sections: lepra across the biblical corpus, in non-Jewish Greek sources, and in Jewish Greek sources; culminating with lepra in relation to ancient Mediterranean concepts of impurity and the associated social ostracism; which allows us to then more deeply appreciate the apostolic concerns with Jesus’ healing of lepers which addresses also their social status. Whew, this is a lot to think about not only hermeneutically but also theologically.

My gratitude to Craig is not only due to his having taken the time to honor me by contributing to this The Pneumatological Imagination but also since I have so often found him to be that allied pentecostal colleague who is being faithful to the divine call to persist as a biblical scholar. And now having named Craig’s approach as so succinctly laid out in this essay, I believe I have further scholarly reasons for my gratitude to be co-laborers with Craig in pentecostal studies even if we labor in different vineyards (guilds): that his approach resonates deeply with what I call a methodological interdisciplinarity and theological multidimensionality. In other words, I see in Craig’s methodical approach to biblical texts something similar to my own interdisciplinary engagement with theological topics; whereas Craig moves intentionally across the various corpus of ancient writings in order to better situate the biblical materials in their worlds, I seek to allow the many voices to bear witness to contemporary realities in order to better comprehend the theological implications in our third millennium global context. Then, Craig’s discussion of lepra surely presses the question of how social impurities stigmatize and marginalize all kinds of biological conditions, perhaps not least also (for us late moderns) in genderizing and sexualizing ways, which was not of course what he was attempting to address.

My point is this: that Craig’s discussion shows lepra includes not only the obvious biological sphere, but there are also ethnic, spiritual, moral, and social dimensions related to its manifestation as understood across the ancient world. Such has theological consequences: that when considering the apostolic witness, we have to deal not only with the biological cures, but also the social healing, the existential suffering, and even the spiritual, cosmic, and environmental aspects of how divine redemption shows up. Divine salvation concerns the full scope of curing (of disease), wholeness (related to impairment), cleansing (of social impurities), and, in the end, healing for us and all creation (shalom). I am now of course saying a whole lot more than Craig said in his discussion of lepra, although here exercising my rights as a theologian.

In any case, I am sure Craig is not worried about being responsible for everything anyone else does with his work, not least since he is just now finishing the final volumes of his even more massive (than Acts!!) six-(only?)-volume International Critical Commentary on Mark’s Gospel. I knew when the Acts commentary came out I would need the rest of my life to even come close to fully reading it; so, although I won’t have a second lifetime to engage the Mark commentary—we know Craig writes more in one year than any of us can read over decades!—I am grateful we will have eternity to experience fully the gift through the divine spirit that is Gentleman, Scholar, and Pentecostal Craig Keener.

Post 20 ~ Many Tongues, Many Ethnoracial Receptions of St John: A Latino-Asian-American Collaboration

And there has been so much to cheer about. In the first handful of years plus after that initial encounter, Rudy went on to finish his PhD, examined by Craig Keener himself (of legendary status!), and then quickly turned around and published a revised version of his thesis that worked out the implications of a renewal or pneumatological hermeneutic for considering issues of ethnicity in the autoptic gospel: A Pneumatology of Race in the Gospel of John: An Ethnocritical Study. This volume was not yet out of the warehouse and he was working to deepen his reading of the Fourth Gospel, which then unfolded in quick order as A Latino Reading of Race, Kinship, and the Empire: John’s Prologue. Then, just last year, a third (monographic) installment of his research program materialized, this time reconsidering John’s gospel in part ecclesially but especially from the perspective of first century ethnoracial realities across the Greco-Roman world. The recent The Spirit and Race in John’s Gospel: Belonging and the People of God—along with the earlier volumes—establishes Rudy not only as one of the foremost Johannine scholars in the academy of pentecostal studies but also, at least in part as a protege of Keener, as a preeminent ethnoracial interpreter of the New Testament against its backgrounds in the biblical studies guild, well set up to write the book he is currently working on regarding ethnicity and race across the Christian scriptures.

And all of this against a shifting institutional backdrop over the last decade: from LABI through Fuller Seminary (for a brief stint) to Vanguard University (Assemblies of God affiliated) where he now also chair of their undergraduate school of theology and professional studies. In fact, mentioning these institutional realities also reminds us that our scholarly work does not take place in a vacuum. Whereas one can imagine the challenges of working on issues like race in historically white institutions, such endeavors are fraught also at sites like LABI, located as they are within pentecostal denominations that are also predominantly white. Rudy does his homework, tells the truth, and does so in part as an expression of love for his (pentecostal) church and in part in the hope of equipping the next generation of graduates with skills to read scripture in their original contexts and for the task of Christian discipleship unfolding in our complicated and contested public square today.

It was in part my own excitement at seeing Rudy’s accomplishments as a New Testament scholar not shying away from some of the most critical issues of our times—race, racialization, migration, minority communities, Latinx studies, etc.—and bringing all of that to bear on scripture more generally but also engaging his Latino pentecostal upbringing, experience, spirituality, and perspective more specifically, that I asked him to join me in editing The Hermeneutical Spirit II. In this volume, which came out earlier this year (see our dialogue on the book in a Substack post about three months ago), Rudy did an amazing job not only on details of formatting the manuscript, but also in providing a coherent throughline. Even more satisfying is that his concluding chapter is itself a tour de force, filling in a lacuna in the book (since my chapters moved from the Book of Acts through the pastoral epistles to the Apocalypse) by reconsidering St Paul, himself contributing almost a fourth of the words now gathered in the New Testament, less as a missionary (classically and historically/conventionally understood) than as an undocumented migrant(!). Herein also Rudy’s achievement anticipates his ongoing research and writing that will carry him from the gospels through the rest of the New Testament.

The preceding may provide some perspective on why Rudy’s chapter in The Pneumatological Imagination, “Race, Love, and the Johannine Spirit: A Dialogue with Amos Yong,” is deeply satisfying. In this essay, Rudy has reviewed most of what I have written about John’s Gospel—which although surely much less than on Luke-Acts where I have spent the bulk of my scriptural interpretive time, nevertheless involved some sleuthing in order to locate their embeddedness in disparate spaces across the Yong corpus—and connects my prior efforts to his own research on race and ethnicity. I am delighted that he found sufficiently helpful to engage an earlier article of mine on the moral and cosmological dualism in the Fourth Gospel, and yet my efforts to read such redemptively for a pluralistic world also was deemed theologically and hermeneutically fruitful for considerations of race and ethnicity in John then and for today. Rudy prophetically notes that in our current national context of white nationalism/supremacy with the frequently accompanying demonization of immigrants, people of color, and those of other faiths and cultures, it is important to address what on the surface are binary divisions in the scriptures, particularly when these are used to stoke fear against and then justify the othering of those not like “us.” My theological commentary on the Apocalypse also explores these matters, although from my Asian American horizon, so I am eagerly awaiting Rudy’s perhaps more Latino (pentecostal) reading of the Book of Revelation in relation to all of these issues in his forthcoming work.

Rudy does not know this yet since my book Jesus: Mapping Worlds, is in press (coming later this year so watch this space for the long-awaited Yong christology), but this volume provides readings of the Fourth Gospel in two of the chapters, including toward a constructive ecochristology. The seeds of this vision were planted in a short section on the sacramentalism in John’s Gospel elaborated in the chapter on the ordinances and sacraments in my Renewing Christian Theology: Systematics for a Global Christianity, where I explored the incarnational implications for how material and creaturely reality is taken up in the flesh of the Word of God. I mention this here since, as Rudy well knows, the Johannine ocean is not only wide but deep. Rudy has been plowing the social, ethnic, racial, and related thoroughfares of the ancient Greco-Roman world especially as these have illuminated John’s Gospel, among the other New Testament writings, and yet there remains a great need for our pentecostal communities at least—if not also the Christian churches at large—to reconsider creation as a whole as caught up in the redemptive arc of the divine spirit’s outpouring. What might we make in the Fourth Gospel, at least, of the many references to other animal creatures with which we share our terrestrial habitation, of how the landscape—not to mention seashores and aquatic regions—of the Galilean and Judean worlds are depicted, and of what the ground produces, whether “in the wild” or as domesticated by farmers, vintners (vineyard owners and workers), gardeners, etc.? And how might Asian American and Latino, among many other, ongoing receptions of St John and his apostolic colleagues today help us bridge the divides with our social and environmental worlds that we have erected, and how might tearing down these dualisms also facilitate ethnoracial relations? In these and so many other questions yet to be asked pneumatologically of John and other apostolic writers, I am thrilled that I will get to learn from spirited sojourners like Rudy for many years and decades to come.

Post 10 – From Despair to Hope 3: Whence (Medical) Healing and Healthcare?

Obviously, the New Testament does not say anything about modern medical care legislation or policies. On the other hand, the apostolic record says quite a bit about salvation and being saved, and one of the Greek terms regularly used, sozo, includes within its semantic range physical rescue, bodily healing, social restoration, spiritual regeneration, and even final deliverance. Salvation as the New Testament understands it thereby happens to include health and healing at multiple levels, from personal to social to covering even the cosmic realm. In fact, for regular readers of this Substack, even the Day of Pentecost narrative features this term, with all of its connotations, at its very center: “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved [sōthēsetai]” (Acts 2:21, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, NRSVUE).

Before delving into the spiritual and practical implications of this reference, however, I want to be sure we are all reminded that health and healing as we understand it today is no less holistic than as indicated in sozo and its implications. Our late modern understandings recognize that human healthiness requires not just prescriptions (drugs and otherwise) for existing ailments but preventive measures (long) before and new (sustained) habits and social conditions after, including but not limited to, in no particular order, regular exercise, wellness regiments, nutritious food, sufficient sleep, clean air and water, sanitary living spaces, lowered stress levels, meaningful relationships, life-giving activity, significant and purposeful vocational endeavors, spiritual vitality, etc. Because each of these are interrelated with the others, losses on any front will (eventually) negatively impact the others, no matter how advanced we might be in any specific area. And while personal choices are important, all of the above are socially, politically, and environmentally intertwined in greater and lesser ways. Our stress levels are related to all of the pressures we feel (including those induced by other persons), even as many of the quality-of-life domains are correlated with political decisions (and elections!). In these latter arenas, for instance with regard to the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the waste we have to dispose of safely, relegating to the states or privatizing such endeavors without substantial and enforceable regulation will increase pollution, even as accessibility of nourishing food and availability of time (to exercise etc.) is often taken for granted without awareness of the socio-economic conditions that make such possible. In other words, health and healing has socio-political aspects. We cannot be fully healthy or on the road to long-term flourishing without the requisite supports, whether interpersonally, socially, and politically.

I want to return now to the Day of Pentecost account, to highlight how the text points to our health and salvation in the passive tense: “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved” (italics added). Interestingly, cognates for sozo appear twice more before the end of this passage: “Be saved from this perverse generation,” and, at the end, “the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved” (Acts 2:40, 47, New King James Version). Notably, in all three cases, as should be obvious, the passive tense is used.

The first reference, perhaps the standard theological formulation, might be expected. After all, if salvation is of God and, in this case, the listeners (and readers) of this word are urged to call upon God for the gift of the divine breath, then it makes sense, both grammatically, formulaically, and posturally, to encourage all to receive such as dispensed from above. Yet, seeing the passive tense also in the other two references reinforces that salvation—or health as healing, as included in this notion—derives ultimately from beyond us. Even when we might be urged to respond, we are to do so in an attitude of reception. Thus, at the end of the Pentecost homily, when the crowd asks, “what should we do?” (Acts 2;37 NRSVUE), the apostolic response translated in the active tense—captured in the same NRSVUE translation: “Save yourselves…”—may directly answer the question, but the Greek verb formulation even here (sōthēte, in the passive) nevertheless underscores that there is a fine line between doing what we can to be saved or to be healthy or to be healed, and yet also receiving such salvation, health, and healing from beyond our individual capacities. In this respect, how the passage concludes, that the community of those who were being saved, healed, or made whole were divinely enabled, again underlines how such gifts were received by the apostolic community.

So here is the spiritual posture and practice I wish to lift up regarding healing from the preceding consideration: that such is to be welcomed, received, and embraced by us, despite all that we might and ought to pursue toward such ends. In other words, yes, let’s vote green, support environmentally sustainable policies, enact wellness initiatives in our churches, organizations, and communities; yes, let’s nurture life-giving relationships, respond and react to others in our various roles that reduce rather than elevate stress; yes, let’s reorganize our diets, recalibrate our our patterns of waking and sleeping, and renew our spiritual and mundane commitments (e.g., to recycling!), etc. But amid all of this (sometimes frenzied) activity, let’s also learn to attend to the many gifts given to us (even as we are alert to how others can benefit from more of the same): to the more or less clean air we inhale (and when it is more smoky, perhaps we might be reminded to do our part, as possible, to encourage behaviors moving the quality of our air in a cleaner direction); to the more or less clean water we drink and food we enjoy (and when we are reminded that more needs to be done to ensure wider access to such, we might consider if we can move the dial here also); to the time, leisurely or otherwise, we have to exercise (and when we realize others lack such opportunity, how might we do our part is expanding such possibilities?); to the safe and comfortable environment we have to sleep in (and when we find ourselves in a situation of accompanying others who lack these basic comforts, is there anything we can do to effect change here?); to the basic healthcare coverages we have (how might we also advocate for others who lack such?); to the good supportive friendships we experience (or how to accompany others who might need such?); to the purposeful vocations we are undertaking (and how we might expand such possibilities for others), etc. In other words, our first and foremost spiritual practice ought to be the awareness of what we have that is in a sense undeserved; appreciation for these gifts of life, health, and salvation; and a gratitude that then moves us to do our part to multiply these blessings to others.

My Substack readers will be among those who are more than less healthy since, like I have the time and space to write such, you have enough of these also to read them. In this respect, we already are being saved, are being made relatively healthy and ever more whole, hopefully. Let us not be presumptive about these very basic gifts of life. More to the point, to the degree that we have had a foretaste of these aspects heralding the full salvation to come, to the same degree we can bear witness to such and now on behalf of others, proclaiming such possibilities with our lives of receptive gratefulness and also acting in ways that would augment and increase their availability to as many others as possible. These would be what the great spirit would have us do, precisely by gifting them to us to begin with.

Post 19 ~ Many Tongues for Many Publics: A Multi-Generational Romanian-American Pentecostal Voyage

First, Ciprian rightly mentions in one paragraph the role of Corneliu Constantineanu (1967-2021)—of blessed memory to many of us in pentecostal academia—in facilitating not just our “relationship” but also my introduction to the nascent Romanian pentecostal theological academy. While Ciprian overstates there that Corneliu was one of my post-doctoral students—technically, he was a fellow the Global Research Institute at Fuller Seminary where I welcomed him in the summer of 2019—there is no underemphasizing Corneliu’s massive contributions to establishing pentecostal theology in the Romanian context. This paragraph alone moved me to to recall, very fondly, my one visit to Bucharest at Corneliu’s invitation and arrangement in June 2012, not only giving lectures and the commencement address to the Institutul Teologic Penticostal din Bucuresti where he was rector then, but also preaching in one of the leading Romanian pentecostal congregations while there. Before then and since, until he left us all too early, Corneliu worked tirelessly as a New Testament scholar but also broadly across the theological arenas, to promote theological education in Romania, advance Romanian pentecostal theological reflection, and connect these developments to wider academic and ecumenical currents across Europe and around the world, within and beyond pentecostal contexts. I know Ciprian and his colleagues miss Corneliu deeply, but many of us around the globe also wish he were still with us, encouraging us with his big heart, moving us with his courageous intellect, and accompanying us with his curious and creative spirit (following the divine wind!).

Second, then, as Ciprian also notes there, was Corneliu’s efforts to translate some of my work into Romanian. Here is where I first “encountered” Ciprian, as one who Corneliu recruited to bring my In the Days of Caesar: Pentecostalism and Political Theology into their native language. While I have in the intervening years received a copy of this translation (published in 2020), I had little idea that the efforts in public theology Corneliu sought tirelessly to promote in the Romanian context had taken off as much as it had, and, to my utter amazement (and thankfulness), how my meager contributions may have played some role in these developments. Thus Ciprian’s chapter not only informs us about how the public theology program Corneliu began at the University of Arad—where Corneliu was at the time of his passing dual director of the Research Centre for Intercultural and Interconfessional Studies, and of the master program in Public Theology, both in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences—has flourished to date, including in producing a PhD track, but also that three of the PhD dissertations in recent years have engaged with and benefitted from my work. Ciprian’s own achievements (including the revised thesis recently published) gained from, as he says, my theological approach and research method. As I think back to the days of my travel to Romania, and now have some perspective on the ferment that has grown since across the increasingly vibrant contemporary Romanian pentecostal theological academy, I trust readers can appreciate my wonderment at what has unfolded.

Last but not least, then, I cherish Ciprian’s chapter in my festschrift since, not being able to read Romanian, I am now treated to a taste of the emerging Romanian pentecostal public theological discussion, among which my translator is a significant voice. I need to be clear that as translator, Ciprian’s role is not merely reiterative (from English to Romanian for instance), but interpretive and constructive: no translation only repeats the source text, but each effort has to make decisions and these choices open up new aspects of the material content, developable in fresh directions. I can begin to discern how these openings have been capitalized on by my Romanian pentecostal colleague. For instance, he has defined public life theologically rather than relying on secular assumptions. This is in a sense consistent with my own more pneumatological framing of political theology but Ciprian is specifying why Romanian pentecostal Christians (and those also around the world) need not only a political but also a public theology and that, whereas other conjunctions might wish a synthesized definition, he is unwilling to undermine the theological dimensions of our or any public endeavor. All the while, his chapter clearly shows, such a theological orientation does not minimize the complexity and profundity of the shared public realm that we all inhibit, regardless of political or governance contexts, and in that respect, the theological and the realities of public life are in constant dialogue, thereby perpetuating challenges attending to all multi-discursive contexts but also opening up unforeseen opportunities when we honestly and openly engage with others.

Further, Ciprian’s pentecostal witness is undiminished even as an academic public theologian. I see this clearly in his insisting on constructive prophetic dissent as central to the pentecostal posture toward public life (p. 135). Of course, pentecostal believers have long insisted that, as the Lukan commission exhorts, we are emboldened to testify when filled with the spirit of Jesus. Yet, there is always the risk that the academic sojourn tames or domesticates such forthrightness. This is not the case with Ciprian, all the more noteworthy given the ecclesial-cultural present moment of Romania where pentecostal communities are relative newcomers compared, for instance, to Orthodox churches in the country and region, and where pentecostal churches occupy a marginal space in the Romanian public square transitioning from communist rule over the last three and a half decades plus. In other words, while pentecostal communities in some parts of the world have been attaining greater socioeconomic upward mobility and accumulating political capital, the Romanian pentecostal churches remain a more minoritized group (perhaps two to three percent of the overall population). In this context, prophetic speech might need to be calibrated, surely given discerningly: there is much more at stake for our Romanian brothers and sisters speaking prophetic truth to power than for others who have more sociopolitical leverage.

I do wonder, however, if a dissenting position—prophetic and otherwise—comes with the minoritized and marginalized social status. Some of this derives from how Ciprian notes also that in the Romanian pentecostal context, there is a “a keen sense of separation from the world” (p. 135). Dissent, in these situations, may be built-in, no? Yet “separation from” as I read Ciprian does not mean disengaged with. This distinction is especially pertinent in the contemporary United States, where some pentecostal and charismatic Christians are at the heart of political power. Here there should be more degrees of separation, albeit also engagement. What does it mean for the pentecostal-charismatic community to be dissenters in such circumstances and what forms might such take? It might well be that Ciprian’s prophetically dissenting positionality may be even more urgent, especially when, as he elaborates, our economics of community solidarity is more this-worldly than eschatologically committed, and when our faith expressions are too assimilated to the contemporary zeitgeist rather than empowering diverse cultural sensibilities and manifestations. In other words, we tend to become less prophetic, if I read Ciprian rightly, when our spirit-ed commitments are subordinated to economic upward mobility and when our newly-found majority-potencies then ignore or diminish the experiences of injustice suffered by other minority groups. Put otherwise: if when we might attain to majority status we then forget what it felt like to be in the minority, we are less likely to be prophetic; but if we always kept in mind where we once came from, then when we are in positions of power or have greater access to such, we will not forget to advocate for those on the margins who continue to be vulnerable to the powers-that-be.

My gratefulness comes to some concluding words full of hope for the future of not only Romanian pentecostal theology but for the global pentecostal theological conversation. Ciprian and his pentecostal colleagues in Romania and the Romanian diaspora have their own witness to bear, theologically and academically also. They will speak, prophetically and otherwise, from out of their own perspective. Our Romanian theological friends occupy a liminal space, yes in the European west but yet outside of the dominant Anglo-American orbit. Their Romanian tongues in that respect is truly heteroglossic (Acts 2:4)—other and different than the dominant English-language offerings—and in that sense, will need to be attentive to what is said, inquisitive about their efforts (“What does this mean?”), and constructively and dialogically engaged in turn with these colleagues. May the divine breath imbue these sojourners from the eastern European frontier to the ends of the earth!

Post 18 ~ The Better Half of Theology and the Second Great Commandment: Foregrounding the Spirit of Service

I appreciate Lisa’s devoting effort to explicating this notion of “Spirit-filled service.” In the theological guild, “service” is related to one of the practical arenas, perhaps to be dealt with in pastoral or ministry-related endeavors, but even then, drawing little theoretical and even theological attention. OK, it is probably right that efforts in this direction are focused on delineating practice: what to do and how to do so in theologically relevant ways. Yet, as Lisa puts it, service is neither optional nor marginal but is required and central to Christian vocation, which as she takes it—and I agree—involves and includes both our thinking (our theologizing) and our acting and behaving (our practices). In these respects, theological discourse has failed to do what is needed: seriously engage such a mandatory and obligatory issue. To her credit, and read from the trajectory of her chapter, Lisa grounds our Christian conceptions of service theologically, proceeding from a doctrine of incarnation through christology to pneumatology, and when arriving at the latter locus, draws on and brings some of the ideas in my Spirit of Love into the discussion.

Let me make explicit here what may be for many readers of this post (and of my work overall) merely implicit over the course of my theological argumentations through by now many books (at least since Hospitality and the Other twenty years ago): I came to see the import of practices by starting with the Spirit. This is actually precisely Lisa’s point about inverting the methodological order of presuming the centrality of benevolence and then working theologically through to reviewing the pneumatological threads and connectivities. My emphasis has been that the work of the Spirit bridges us/self and others, thought and action, theory and practice, human creatures and the creation. More to the point, theology itself is second order reflection emerging from out of practice, even as theological reflection can help to revise and refine practice, and it is the Spirit that drives us to seek the theological and theoretical truth from out of experience even as the former cognitional articulations can then also in turn inform and reform ongoing practice. That is the telos of Lisa’s chapter: that the Spirit-filled life includes, centrally, the practice of especially service, to God and neighbor.

Within her section on pneumatology, Lisa turns to discussion of how the Spirit empowers redemptive service by elaborating on notions of justice, righteousness, and love. Our service is part of our participation in the activity of the triune God directed to redeeming the world! Let this thought sink in…. This prompts me to anticipate whether or not I need to write a book (or three) about redemption, righteousness, and justice someday, maybe soon. My Spirit of Love is both a theology of agape and phileo on the one hand, and a theology of grace, as the book’s subtitle indicates, on the other hand. Underneath these constructs are a theological anthropology regarding affectivity: the emotions, embodiment, and loves that carry us forward as desiring and yearning creatures. The Spirit of love, as Lisa says, is the liberating force through which divine redemptive service transcends the barriers—class, race, gender, etc.—that human creatures have otherwise erected to oppress and marginalize others for “our” (whoever the “we” are in any instance) purposes.

Love can be a sort of high-flutin’ and abstract idea in theological texts, and yet Lisa’s unpacking of this notion within a pneumatology of service seeks, as I read her, to accomplish two important objectives: first, to remind (pentecostal) believers that the empowerment of the Spirit is not to promote esoteric glossolalia as any kind of “initial evidence” but rather to generate deeply moving commitments that allow us to manifest divine reality to the world: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). Second, Lisa’s essay registers the importance of love for the ongoing theological conversation, not only in pneumatology but in the allied loci. If theologians, pentecostal and otherwise, have not paid much attention to service, love also seems rather sentimentalistic, and hasn’t merited the necessary engagement. However when asked about the greatest commandment Jesus said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’.... And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:38-40). I am not sure why I have not written more than one book on a theology of love given its supremacy in Jesus’ own theological imagination (maybe its because one of my best friends, Tom Oord, is the theologian of love with many books on that topic), but in any case and surely in that respect, Lisa’s gestures toward a pneumatology of love add a major strand to the discussion.

My last set of comments are inspired by the subtitle to Lisa’s essay, which extends the call to service as a form of life, indeed, accentuating the activity of living. More precisely, Lisa’s summons is to behave in ways that enact the righteousness and justice of the coming basileia (reign of God), which means that beyond our interpersonal relationships, and even extending from our ecclesial lives, there is a broader social dimension to our embodied witness, one that involves our representing the divine being and activity—the imago Dei or image of God that we are called to re-present—in the social, economic, political, and cultural domains of the human existence. Thus, while Lisa comes from the holiness side of the pentecostal wing (the Church of God, Cleveland) with which I deeply resonate (despite my Keswickian roots in the Assemblies of God and ongoing Foursquare affiliations), we both recognize we must expand our pietistic evangelical commitments beyond privatistic or individualized expressions. Rather, our lives take on meaning in what we do, more specifically as Lisa here commends, in the ways we serve others. Theologically, as reiterated above, our confessions, articulations, and abstract speculations take on concreteness in our living, clarify meaning in our acting, and unveil significance in our behaving.

I am all for rigorous theological excavation, although the obscurity of my earlier work—not to mention the ongoing density of some of my ongoing writing—motivated me to find ways to not only communicate more accessibly but also to look for connecting my ideas, if I felt they were important, to the concerns of more than a handful of readers. This is why I think the turn to praxis is crucial, not that we have to do practical theology all of the time but so that our abstractions can continually to be re-rooted in what is most meaningful and significant: how they connect to and serve others, not just intellectually but in all of the other ways that Lisa’s chapter elevates. Lisa herself has continued to chart the way with her books and throughout her theological work, at one point, for instance, reading Tillich critically for the purposes of revitalizing our spiritual life (from her feminist pentecostal perspective, in a book I co-edited). I remain thankful the emerging pentecostal academy has spiritually sensitive, methodologically sophisticated, and pastorally wise theologians like Lisa Stephenson: may her witness and gifts bear the Spirit’s fruit to the third and fourth generation, beginning with the two thoughtful Stephenson daughters.

Post 9 – From Despair to Hope 2: W(h)ither Democracy?

Now to be precise, as a Christian, the New Testament does not proffer any kind of ideal political system. In fact, the apostolic record as preserved across those pages has sustained religious life across various political and governmental conditions over two millennia, whether imperial, monarchic, even totalitarian (and otherwise). So, while we might well argue against the idea that democracy is a divinely-intended structure for human governance, in the United States, that is what we have nurtured and which most (if not all) of us hope to sustain. But if so, what are we despairing of losing, and what are we hoping to fortify? Whatever else democracy involves, minimally, it enables citizen participation, especially in free and fair elections; it promotes civil liberties; and it undergirds individual rights (of speech, religiosity, association, etc.). If many of us might be despairing about the waning of these democratic activities, how is hope buoyed?

My own attentiveness to the oftentimes indecipherable blowings of the great spirit return me to the Book of Acts chapter 2, a passage at the heart of my own church tradition from which I have drawn regularly as a resource. In particular—and here again, without claiming that the author of this biblical text was attempting to promote “democracy” as we understand it—I find relevant St. Luke’s account of what was transpiring regarding the giving of the divine spirit, especially in calling on the ancient Hebrew prophet Joel. When the divine breath is given to all flesh, the story goes, “your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy” (Acts 2:18b-19, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition). Surely, modern democracies welcome if not promote the voices of men and women, even if that was a radical idea for the first century extending through to the recent past when we had to fight for, and still must remain vigilant in preserving, the witnesses of especially the latter. Even more profoundly, working democracies value each voice (or vote) equally, not just vis-a-vis gendered persons but also whether they be of the affluent or underclasses of the social order (the “slaves” of the ancient world). Last but not least, might not functional democracies also be characterized by our ongoing realization of prior aspirations (the youth referred to seeing earlier hopes materialize), and continual encouragement to envision new, creative, or innovative futures (especially for the elders among us that now have more space to anticipate new possibilities accumulated from hard won experience and wisdom)? In all of these ways, the apostolic promise was that the gift of the divine spirit opens up precisely such expressive forms of interaction among, as St. Luke situates the discussion, those “from every people under heaven living in Jerusalem [locate your city/nation]” (Acts 2:5).

I need to be clear about one thing: the space to dream, the path toward realizing such, the opportunity to speak and to be heard, etc., all require both more than less ideal material and political conditions. In particular, basic physical needs must be at hand, whether health, economic provisions, educational opportunities, and so forth. Not coincidentally, these are the themes for the final three cohorts of the “From Hope to Despair” initiative, about which I will say more over the next six weeks. My point here is that democracy is both crucial to these other domains of our common endeavor and also intricately reinforced by developments therein. In each case, as we shall see, the comings and goings of the great spirit may assist our own efforts to invigorate these interrelated spheres of our common life.

For now, however, the question is this: in light of the above, how might this Pentecost account also inspire spiritual practices for democratic participation, whether for those actively engaged in that work or most of the rest of us attempting to survive? Here I find clues in the details of what is narrated: that the gathered multi-ethnic crowd heard the locals (the Galileans of Judea, from whence the nascent apostolic community derived), and yet wondered, in amazement and bewilderment, how “we hear, each of us, in our own native language” (Acts 2:8b). More to the point, amid their perplexity, they acknowledged that whatever their provenance from across the Pax Romana of the Mediterranean world—whether they were “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power” (Acts 2:9-11). None of this was easily comprehensible, so they kept saying to one another, “What does this mean?” (Acts 2:12b).

Here is my point: one of the most important spiritual postures I can recommend for those who value our democratic undertaking is that we adopt an attitude of openness to hearing the voices and testimonies of others, especially others different from us. This could be, for us newly arrived in any community (because of job relocations or so many other reasons why we might move), the local accents of our new neighbors. They could also include, for those of us who might be in urban areas, those from other cultural, ethnic, and even national backgrounds. They would surely involve, whatever our context, those with vastly different, if not diametrically divergent, experiences and perspectives, like when (for instance) the (West) Asians of the biblical text above (who would have derived from what is today considered Turkey) encountered not only Arabs but also Romans (even if visitors) in the Jerusalem metropolis. Make no mistake: we are often more inclined to speak over, rather than attend to, the views of different (unlike us) others. St Luke’s telling of the outpoured great spirit results instead in the capacity to listen: “each one heard them speaking in the native language of each” (Acts 2:6b, italics added). Note that this initial description is followed by two other reiterations of hearkening (please revisit my direct quotations in this paragraph above to find them), so that in its repetition thrice, such can be taken as intended for effect: the miracle of Pentecost on this register is less the ability to speak than to listen.

Whatever else is happening nationally or across the state capitols of our country, each of us can seek to develop our listening muscles, sensibilities, and competencies. This will take work as we are more used to expressing ourselves, raising our voices if needed, and shouting over others when feeling unheard. We can begin hearing, however, in our neighborhood, extend to our schools and community parks, and go on from there organizationally to our churches, our civic associations, work-out clubs, or other spaces. Whatever our age bracket, gender, or class level, might we find ways to listen to the stories of those from other ethnoracial backgrounds, cultural communities, and demographic categories?

I am not naive in this invitation. As we are mostly drawn to connect to others like ourselves, I think we need a spiritual breakthrough in order to nurture this most basic feature of democratic life: the ability to listen to those different from us might only be possible as a spiritual gift, one in which we invite the great spirit to inspire within and among us. Left to ourselves, we not only are closed off to different others, but in their presence, will usually seek to impose our perspective, not least since we are anxious about how others might impinge on our own sense of self and expose the insecurities of our (often perceived as fragile) communities. Thus, listening of the Pentecost-sort will come not innately but, in this sense, supra-naturally: only as the comings and goings of the great spirit move us beyond ourselves into spaces navigated and traversed by those not like us.

W(h)ither democracy? Perhaps its persistence is dependent in part on our willingness to be led by the divine breath into where the witnesses and testimonies of others percolate. Our own democratic practices may rely on the extent to which we are willing to be spiritually alive, especially to allowing the voices of diverse others to permeate our environments, and to welcome those different sounds (not only in terms of speech but also vis-a-vis the contents of what might be otherwise translated) and their ability to impact our ears, inform our minds, transform our hearts, and enrich our lives. Democracy allows for this to happen; and doing what we can to enable all of this to continue happening may be part of what perpetuates democracy.