An African Pentecostal Hermeneutics: A Distinctive Contribution to Hermeneutics

The face of African Christianity is becoming Pentecostal. African Pentecostalism is a diverse movement, but its collective interest in baptism in the Spirit and the result of Pentecost in daily living binds it together. Pentecostals read the Bible with the expectation that the Spirit who inspired the authors will again inspire them to hear it as God's word. They emphasize the experiential, at times at the cost of proper doctrine and practice. This book sketches an African hermeneutic that provides guidance to a diverse movement with many faces, and serves as corrective for doctrine and practice in the face of some excesses and abuses (especially in some parts of the neo-Pentecostal movement). African Pentecostalism's contribution to the hermeneutical debate is described before three points are discussed that define it: the centrality of the Holy Spirit in reading the Bible, the eschatological lens that Pentecostals use when they read the Bible, and the faith community as normative for the interpretation of the Bible.

""From one of the southern ends of the earth, Marius Nel provides a near exhaustive engagement with the existing literature on pentecostal hermeneutics--scholars should not miss out on the feast of extensive footnotes reaching from cover to cover!--and comes up with an almost comprehensive synthesis from a southern African perspective. What emerges is a reformulation of the classic this-is-that eschatological sensibility that bridges the scriptural text with the contemporary horizon, albeit in this case enriched with the orality and performativity characteristic of an authentically African pentecostal movement that itself stretches back, however complicatedly, to the early twentieth-century transnational and worldwide revival.""
--Amos Yong, Professor of Theology & Mission, Fuller Theological Seminary

""In this carefully researched and historically sensitive book, Marius Nel recognizes that 'deep in the soul of Pentecostalism are its African origins.' He draws together his interests in Pentecostalism and African Christianity to make a wise call for a Jesus-centered hermeneutic that is Spirit led, eschatologically alert, and community based. Readers will benefit from the wealth of information brought together here.
--William P. Atkinson, Senior Lecturer in Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies, London School of Theology

""In this book Marius Nel defines the distinctive contribution that African pentecostal hermeneutics makes to hermeneutics . . . [He] shows how orthodoxy, orthopathy, and orthopraxy are intertwined in pentecostal hermeneutics, and that interpreters of the Bible should expect that what people in biblical times experienced with God is to be repeated in the contemporary experience.""
--Fika J. van Rensburg, Professor of New Testament Studies, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, North-West University, South Africa

Marius Nel is Research Professor of Ecumene: Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism at the Unit for Reformational Theology and the Development of the South African Society of North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa. He is the author of Pacifism and Pentecostals in South Africa (2018).