The condition in Pentecostal hermeneutics is charismatic experiences that, in the first place, form a pre-understanding (Vorverständnis) that determines what they take into the text whilst interpreting the text and influences the text’s interpretation and application personally and culturally (Lewis 2000:113–114). In other words, the experience of the Spirit’s baptism (Ac 1:5) or filling (Ac 2:4) that empowered the church on the day of Pentecost to proclaim the gospel ‘to the ends of the earth’ dynamically shapes Pentecostals’ reading of Scripture. Thus, the direction in which they read Scriptures is from their experiences to the Bible and back.

In the second place, Pentecostals deliberately expect to hear from God directly whilst reading the Bible. They are open to the ‘voice of the Spirit’, expecting the Spirit to interpret Scripture and apply it to their context through insights formed in their minds (Pinnock 1993):

The insights they believe they receive from the Spirit (and that are not necessarily or always directly connected to the text) form an integral and essential element of their hermeneutics, spirituality and the eventual theological formation. They share the anticipation of an encounter with God in their reading of Scripture and expect that the encounter will transform their life. ‘The impetus for reading biblical texts in the Pentecostal community is to obtain transformative encounters with God’ (Grey 2011:154) that consists of the ability to change behaviour, regulate decisions and set parameters for a reader’s life influenced by the biblical text (Lewis 2000:116).

The Pentecostal hermeneutical spiral implies that orthodoxy, orthopathy and orthopraxy intermingle in the interpretation process (Lewis 2000:117). They view their encounter with charismatic experience as a necessary and even critical voice in biblical hermeneutics’ conversation (Grey 2011:5). That is the reason why pentecostal hermeneutics is qualified here as a ‘hermeneutics of experience’.

Such experiences provide a form to their spirituality and determine how they interpret the Bible. In the process, they reinterpret biblical events to fit into their existential reality and explain the meaning of what happens in their lives from such parallels. For this reason, Ellington (1996:38) argues that: ‘Pentecostal theology and hermeneutics are different because they arise not primarily out of rational reflection, but rather out of lived experience’.⁴

Although rational deliberations do not necessarily have emotional content, most experiences are affections-based; that is why rich emotional content characterises charismatic spirituality. It may serve as a reason why some mainline churches became interested in integrating aspects of charismatic worship practices and spirituality. It also explains the popularity and growth of Pentecostalism in the global South, including Africa (Kalu 2008:5).

One cannot argue with the observation that Pentecostal readings of the Bible lead to mixed results. For instance, they accommodate differing views of Trinitarianism, several ethical issues, women’s role in ministry, prosperity teachings, separation from the world and ascetical injunctions and prescriptions. In addition, one can discern a mainstream tradition contra diverse local cultural applications (Archer 2017:193). The reason is that Pentecostals do not have any magisterium to decide what is to be considered ‘Pentecostal’ (Chapman 1990:269). There are no publications by a pioneer or important leader/figure(s) or an overarching organisation, synod or council that they view universally as authoritative.

The next defining element of Pentecostal hermeneutics consists of the Spirit’s inspiration and revelation as a condition for understanding the Bible correctly. Pentecostals believe that the Spirit can act in ways that do not necessarily comply with the rules of more rational approaches and bring people into a more profound knowledge of God by using the Bible (May 2005:7). What does it imply that the Bible reader should rely upon the Holy Spirit in interpreting the text?

Humanly devised interpretative methods will always be marred by several limitations, illustrating the need for divine guidance and requiring a continuous reflection on the Spirit’s role in interpretive practices (Philemon 2019:31). It implies that interpretive exercise may never be predominantly a human academic enterprise. Arrington (1994:105) suggests several helpful ways in which interpreters may express their dependence on the Spirit. By submitting the mind to God, readers deliberately bring their critical and analytical abilities under the Holy Spirit’s guidance with a genuine openness to the witness of the Spirit as they examine the text. They realise that the Spirit addresses them in ways that transcend human reason. The Spirit flows in ways that no one can control or dictate, implying that one should approach the Bible, not as an object to interpret but as a living word that interprets readers (Moore 2013:11–13). For that reason, Bible-reading practices should ideally occur within the context of prayer and worship that results in charismatic experiences and relational-transformation knowledge of Christ (Nebeker 2003:49). Jones and Jones (1992:112) describe Pentecostal epistemology (the way Pentecostals acquire knowledge) by the Hebrew term yāda – ‘to know’, which they interpret as ‘knowledge which comes through experience’. Knowledge is more of the actualisation of a relationship than a mere conceptualisation of an object (Moore 2013:12). The Pentecostal community does not amass knowledge in reading the Bible for knowledge’s sake but from their desire to ‘know’ God (Grey 2011:159).

The challenge is that relying on the Spirit can lead to subjectivist interpretation practices, and therefore Pentecostals must keep the two dimensions, experiential-pneumatic (or spiritual) and exegetical elements of the interpreting process, in balance.⁵ They should realise that an overemphasis of the experiential and pneumatic at the cost of the mind’s contribution contributes to a subjectivising interpretative process; the last part of the article comes back to the challenge. They should remember that the Bible should always stand as the objective standard and submit all interpretation to it; this is non-negotiable. To speak with any authority, a pneumatic reading condition is that it can support its case biblically. Pentecostals believe that God still speaks today, and when God speaks, God has more to say than just what is written in the Bible. However, what God says will never contradict what Scripture teaches because it is the same Spirit who inspired the Bible’s authors who reveal God to contemporary believers (Archer 2013:148).

The last remark is that the interpretation is not exhausted by commentary alone; the ceaseless movement of biblical interpretation begins and ends in the challenge of a response, in the words of Ricoeur (1975:31). Hermeneutics reminds us that biblical faith is inseparable from the movement of interpretation, which elevates it into a language (Gräbe 1997:23). Pentecostals interpret faith in the same terms as the book of Acts; it consists of life-transforming encounters with God that empower believers to tell about the divine power and love that changed their lives and eventually established a faith community (Schnackenburg 1974:81–82).

The next element of a hermeneutics of experience is the expectation of a continuous divine revelation of some sort. Pentecostals expect to hear from the Spirit when they worship, pray and read the Bible, and they define their spirituality within these existential parameters. They interpret their charismatic experiences in continuity with the experiences ascribed to the early church of the first century and use it as a starting point or pre-understanding for engaging the text (Kärkkäinen 2002:38). The expectation of restoring the New Testament church’s essential practices comes from a primitivist urge to receiving an ongoing revelation. It distinguishes them from the (soft and hard) cessationism of most Protestant traditional ‘mainline’ churches.

They believe that they live in some sense within the larger narrative world of the Bible, sharing the world view of Jesus and the apostles and establishing their metanarrative in terms of the Bible’s narratives, characterised by the super/supranatural, eschatological and apocalyptic world view that foresees a catastrophic end of the existing order. The metanarrative serves as a means of shaping identity, which in its turn contributes to experience and understanding.

Pentecostals’ purpose in reading the Bible is not merely to collect information about biblical figures and historical events or to understand the text that originated in an ancient culture. As a faith community, they believe that they live in the biblical experience, demonstrated by their (perceived) experience that the same Spirit who guided God’s people and inspired the Bible still leads them in the same way. At the same time, they use language generated by reading the Bible and derived from the Bible when they testify about their encounters with God. In this way, they succeed to bring together the ancient and contemporary horizons of understanding in a unique manner; their narrative world coincides with that of biblical figures. They base their non-cessationist or continuationist approach to the Bible on their identity founded on their experiences of Spirit baptism that formed them into a prophetic-eschatological people of God as interpreted in terms of Joel 2:28–32 and Acts 2:21 (Keener 2016a:231; Martin 2013:1). ‘Being pentecostal’ implies that one is committed to a Spirit-centred, miracle-affirming, praise-oriented version of Christian faith that fits the New Testament description, in Jacobsen’s (2003:12) words. When they read the Bible, they expect to share the same experiences and relationships with God that they find in the Bible. For that reason, they read the text and interpret it as a source that addresses the questions they pose to the text (Bultmann 1984:79). They leave ample space that the Spirit, the still ‘voice of God’, will reveal insights,⁶ expecting the Spirit to apply a specific passage to a new situation (Van der Geest 1998:40). It implies that the text’s meaning can move beyond the scope of the authors’ intent. It accepts that the humans who participated in the Bible’s writing did not always fully understand what they wrote, implying that there may be a sensus plenior that the Spirit may wish to explicate for contemporary readers. New contexts may also generate new meanings in line with the biblical metanarrative (Lewis 2000:113). They read biblical narratives as ‘testimonies’, implying, according to Brueggemann (1997:118), that they do not ask, ‘What happened? but What is said? Furthermore, what does it say to me?’ One implication is a simplistic acceptance of the narrative’s claims as authentic and accurate, including historical references, resonating with pentecostal tendencies towards literalism.⁷

Continuationism implies that biblical narratives relate how people heard from God, spoke ‘God’s words’ and experienced miracles of deliverance and healing. Contemporary Pentecostals expect that God would repeat similar interventions in their lives and circumstances. The expectation includes supranatural wonders and miracles; the result is that the ‘supernatural’ element within the community forms an integral element of Pentecostalism’s essence (Archer 2013:131) because God as an active agent includes the miraculous intervention of God operating outside a rationalist worldview (Grey 2011:169). Pentecostals’ world view is more holistic than the average Westerners’, incorporating ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ alongside each other without any qualms. It is based on what Poloma (1989:8) calls an anomaly that maintains a tension between the ‘rational cognitive and affective experiential’. They operate their worship gatherings on the assumption that God can and will do what God wants, and they reject a formal liturgical structuring of worship services to provide the Spirit that opportunity (Davies 2013:253). It is crucial for them that their worship services keep the spontaneity where the Spirit may at any time intervene as the Spirit wills. They create the space that any one of the attendees may participate by testifying, singing, praying or bringing a charismatic word. In this way, they confirm the priesthood and prophethood of all believers, including all people, despite gender, age or level of (theological and other) education.

The first part discussed the defining elements of a hermeneutics of experience that emphasise the role the experiential plays in interpretation, the importance of relying on the Spirit whilst reading and the primitivist expectation of a repetition of biblical revelation. The Pentecostal hermeneutics also determines how Pentecostals theologise; again, they start from their experiences and move to the theoretical.

Pentecostals’ hermeneutics of experience holds significant implications for their theological endeavours. Although the Bible serves as the standard to define faith and practice (Nel 2017:2), they base their doctrine on their experiences with the God who utilises the Bible to reveal Godself through God’s Spirit (Ellington 1996:34). According to Grey (2011):

They define doctrine experientially in terms of the Bible or based on what they perceive as similar experiences found in the Bible, although they underplay doctrine to the benefit of ongoing encounters with God and continuous revelation. Their epistemology is open-ended. Doctrine is emphasised only within the praxis and not as creedal representation; creeds do not function in any way in their spirituality. However, they set (and should always do so) as a condition for their experience of ongoing revelation that canonical texts serve as ‘measuring sticks’ for such encounters. However, the challenge and danger remain the exploitation and abuse of the interpretation of texts in the service of ideological or personal agendas (Keener 2016b:107–108).

Pentecostals read the Bible to find something they would experience as relevant to their felt needs (Anderson 2013:222). Then the Bible becomes the word of God, as Luther and Barth emphasised, because of the Spirit’s ministry, something that does not happen automatically or mechanically when believers read the Bible but require Bible reading in the context of prayer, worship and dedication to God. Pentecostal hermeneutics sees the Bible as a witness to revelation rather than revelation itself; the actual, real inspiration of the Spirit occurs when the texts are read faithfully (as Barth 1958:512 also states). Only when reading the Bible results in a revelation applicable to the current situation does the Bible become the word of God. The Spirit’s authority comes before and determines the Bible’s authority (Land 1993:100, 106; Welker 1996:52–79). For Pentecostals, cognitive constructs alone do not determine the Bible’s authority; instead, their immediate experiences of God in and through the text do it (Lewis 2000:110).

Pentecostal hermeneutics is based upon God’s continued presence globally, working the same way today as God did in biblical times (McKay 1994:29). The expectation is that a modern-day believer can experience existentially what the earliest apostles experienced by cooperating with the same Spirit (Martin 2013:2) and accompanied by the same charismatic phenomenology that characterised the earliest church (Ervin 1981:22). In that sense, the Bible’s authority is self-evident because believers find that the text relates to their experiences that coincide with the text (Lewis 2000:111). God’s voice is, for that reason, not limited to the words of the Bible, but recognised in present-day anointed sermons, teachings, exhortations, testimonial narratives and other charismatic words, including the charismata (Albrecht 1999:229).

In discussing the most significant hermeneutics of experience, several challenges were identified, such as the affectionate leading to a subjectivist interpretation and the ideological exploitation and abuse of interpretation. Experience and its accompanying affections are necessarily individualist and subjectivist, even in communal experiences within groups, necessitating measures to prevent subjectivist and ideological misinterpretation. It is suggested that a three-tiered process can counteract the dangers of subjectivist readings that requires the Pentecostal faith community’s participation.⁸ The three-tiered questions that should be asked are: what does the text mean to me (an individual), to them (the wider church through the ages) and us (the local faith community)? These voices’ interaction provides Pentecostals with controls against the loud domination of a single voice, acknowledging the difficulty of analytically isolating God’s propositional content from God’s personal communion and offers ‘checkpoints’ against ‘me’, ‘them’ and ‘us’.⁹

As a community of believers, the church is the context for biblical interpretation, a pneumatological fellowship whose origin and sustenance is contingent upon the Holy Spirit (Philemon 2019:208), in the same way as the faith community also serves as a corrective for charismatic practices. Charismatic words aspire to represent a (new) word of revelation from God to upbuild, encourage and console fellow believers (1 Cor 14:3); the rest of the believers are responsible to judge or weigh it (1 Cor 14:29).

As stated, Pentecostal hermeneutics appreciates the text’s transformative power in the interaction between the reader’s experience and the text and provides meaning. However, stopping here and not integrating the meaning into the broader community’s understanding imply that the text is not read beyond its significance for the individual. When readers expound on ‘new truths’ or read the Old Testament through exclusively ‘christological lenses’ and find many narratives of prototypes and prophecies of Christ, it demonstrates the limitation and liability of isolated readers (Grey 2011:155). They need a critical interaction and dialogue with the Pentecostal and broader Christian community to ensure that one eliminates the dangers inherent in self-deception. Pentecostals should learn to question the text’s significance for others, including the marginalised (the ‘them’) such as people of other races, the poor, women, displaced people and people with other sexual orientations (Smit 1998:346). They should deliberately relate their understanding to the faith community’s understanding and ensure that interpretation aligns with the ecumenical community’s broader historical and current exegetical perspectives. The exercise of charismata implied in the faith community’s existence as a ‘community of the Holy Spirit’ may also provide affirmation of the correctness of their interpretation; gathering together as believers is a fundamental Pentecostal expression in which they believe the Spirit speaks and operates through the gifts (Philemon 2019:63).

In this regard, Thomas (1994:43) suggests a holistic Pentecostal hermeneutic that leaves room for the revelation of the Spirit and believers’ experiences. He refers to Acts 15, explaining that the Spirit cooperates with the faith community to interpret the requirement whether gentile or non-Jewish Christians should observe the Mosaic law as in Judaism. The believing community interprets their context in terms of the biblical text, in contrast to exegetical processes that move in the opposite direction by beginning with the text and moving to the context. The last element is the Spirit’s revelation that enlightens the faith community in the interpretive process, leading to the remark that ‘it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you …’ (Ac 15:28). Pentecostals do not claim, as Evangelicals do, that the Spirit only illuminates their minds; instead, they expect the Spirit to guide them to understand God’s will in the challenges their context poses to them.

The interpretation process then consists of the three components of Spirit, faith community and interpretation (Sparks 2008:192) that dialogue with each other when the community searches the Bible for the Spirit’s revelation to meet their context’s challenges. Firstly, it requires a dynamic conversation between the believer, the Spirit, the Bible and the faith community (Ellington 1996:28); then, ‘what the Bible says’ and ‘what God says’ become identical (Ellington 1996:38).

In conclusion, the primary technique for avoiding the potential of rampant subjectivism in interpretation requires the necessity of a continuing dialogue in Bible interpretation, reading in conversation with ‘them’ and ‘us’.