This volume presents interdisciplinary, intercultural, and interreligious approaches directed toward the articulation of a pneumatological theology in its broadest sense, especially in terms of attempting to conceive of a spirit-filled world.

Wolfhart Pannenberg’s understanding of “public,” based on his view of revelation as history, is that everything is potentially a theology. Of course, a public theology of everything is impossible; therefore, Jae Yang develops a Pannenbergian public theology by correlating Pannenberg’s theological methods (postfoundational, eschatological, and trinitarian) with the aims and methods of public theology, and second, with Pannenberg’s views on various spheres, arguing that Pannenberg’s public theology engages not just the academic world, but also the political, economic, familial, religious, and cultural ones. This book argues that Pannenberg is a public theologian because the public purpose of his theology is not to coerce or inject a Christian agenda onto the public (political theology), challenge and subvert unjust structures (liberation theology), or substitute overtly Christian religion with a publicly palatable secular and vaguely religious one (civil religion), but to cooperate and dialogue with the established order under the presumption of a “Christianity outside the church.”

Insofar as Christian theology aims to make truthful claims about the nature of reality, it is necessarily involved in the enterprise of metaphysics. Pentecostals, precisely as Christians, are thus obliged to participate. Through this study it becomes evident that pentecostals aim to participate in the metaphysical discipline in the same way they theologize - that is, informed by the norms, practices, and speech acts that constitute their spirituality. This book aims to construct a Christian metaphysics that is at once attuned to pentecostal spirituality/theology and informed by the classical tradition of Christian metaphysics. Ultimately, this work offers a constructive and critical engagement with pentecostal spirituality, and with pentecostal theology via the larger ecumenical, creedal, and dogmatic metaphysical tradition. Thus, this book is explicitly and intentionally limited to understand metaphysics in conversation with the historical Christian tradition, and to understand a pentecostal vision of it.

This book is about African Pentecostalism and its relationship to religious beliefs about a pervading spirit world. It argues that Pentecostalism keeps both a continuous and a discontinuous relationship in tension. Based on field research in a South African township, including qualitative interviews and focus group discussions, the study explores the context of African Pentecostalism as a whole and how it interacts with the concepts of ancestors, divination, and various types of spirit. Themes discussed include the reasons for the popularity of healing, exorcism, the “prosperity gospel,” the experience of the Holy Spirit, Spirit manifestations and practices resembling both traditional and biblical precedents, as well as scholarly discussions on African Pentecostalism from theological and social scientific disciplines. The book suggests that the focus on a spirit-filled world affects all kinds of events and explains the rapid growth of Pentecostalism outside the western world.

Amos Yong is the most prolific pentecostal theologian to date, and his published works are so many that it is difficult to find an amiable entry point into his thought. An Amos Yong Reader is the first introduction to Yong’s theology in his own words. It brings into one volume representative samples of the broad range of Yong’s scholarship, including theology of religions, religion and science, theology and disability, political theology, Luke-Acts, and theological method. Christopher A. Stephenson, perhaps Yong’s most insightful interpreter, provides an introductory essay that both orients readers to Yong’s extensive theological program and identifies the most important key to understanding Yong’s theology as his most neglected work, Spirit-Word-Community, a book with implications far beyond the boundaries of Pentecostalism. An Amos Yong Reader provides an overview of Yong’s thought and a starting point for more thorough study in any of the major themes in his expansive corpus.

What does it mean for the spirit world to be real? Scholars from different disciplines investigate this topic focusing on the role played by the spiritual realm in Pentecostalized Africa. The grammatical angle of their research proves to be a fruitful avenue to clarify the kind of reality or realities the spirit world has. This novel approach takes us beyond most existing research by investigating the often unaddressed assumption that we know what it means for the spirit world to be taken as real. This volume shows the importance of paying close attention to the grammar according to which people speak of spirits, Spirit, witchcraft, ancestors and other aspects of the spirit world.

What is the human soul? What does it do? How does it relate to the brain and body? What is happening in the soul when a person encounters the Holy Spirit? These are some of the questions addressed in The Spiritual Soul as it advances towards its overall goal of proposing a (re)new(ed) Pentecostal/Charismatic understanding of what constitutes a human being. In pursuing this overarching intention, Churchouse responds to the anthropology of two leading Pentecostal scholars, Amos Yong and Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen—specifically their theological models concerning what a human is constituted / essentially “made up” of—to offer an enhanced Pentecostal model in preference to their monistic view. Drawing upon the sources of biblical studies, the philosophy of mind, and upon the pneumatology that flows from Pentecostal spirituality, Churchouse advances a renewed understanding of the human soul—one illumined by the spirit and the Spirit—to engender his distinctive Pentecostal model of human constitution.