Current classical Pentecostal Bible reading methods: A critical perspective

Abstract

The prevailing trend among members of the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa(AFM of SA) is to interpret the Bible in a biblicist and literalist way, which conflictswith how early Pentecostals read the Bible. Empirical research completed in 2020 sup-ports the observation. In contrast, early Pentecostals read the Bible with the expectationof meeting God. Their precritical, canonical, and text-centered interpretation focusedon the text inductively before they deductively compared it with related texts in astraightforward manner to formulate their teaching. The new generation of Pentecostalsapplied conservative Evangelical hermeneutics to focus on the world behind the text,using the historical-grammatical method to arrive objectively at the author’s intendedmeaning. It was rooted in the Scottish Common-Sense school of philosophy in a synthe-sis with the Baconian method. Their new hermeneutic was based on a theory of inspir-ation that accepted that divine revelation terminated at the end of the first century,resulting in a discrepancy that conflicts with Pentecostals’ expectation for extrabiblicalrevelations, miracles, and wonders to continue. The article aims to suggest an alternativehermeneutical approach that can constructively address the discrepancy, based on therecently developed scholarly hermeneutic that employs post-critical and postmodernapproaches such as literary, reader-response, and advocacy hermeneutics. It utilizesquantitative research and a comparative literature study to realize the aim