An Amos Yong Reader

Twenty years after the publication of his first book, an overview of Amos Yong’s theology has now been released. An Amos Yong Reader: The Pentecostal Spirit is the first one-volume reader that introduces the theological contributions of Yong in his own words. Yong is the premier Pentecostal theologian in academia at present. His contributions span an incredible breath of disciplines, from pneumatology to disability studies. This volume presents an easily accessible entry point into his theological works, and insight into the methodological engine that drives his scholarship.

An Amos Yong Reader opens with an introduction by Christopher A. Stephenson followed by six subsequent parts. Each part is focused on a specific topic and contains seven selections from Yong’s work. This results in a total of forty-nine different selections that offers the reader a broad cross-section of Yong’s scholarship. In his introduction, Stephenson advances the claim that the Spirit-Word-Community (Wipf and Stock, 2022) is key to understanding Yong’s theology. This is the triadic theological method within which Yong develops a pneumatological metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology. The result is a triadic construct of foundational pneumatology, pneumatological imagination, and communal interpretation. Stephenson situates aspects of Yong’s methodology between the competing methodological concerns of liberalism and postliberalism, showing that a key feature of Yong’s methodology is his commitment to aspects of universality and particularity. Stephenson then shows how this methodology shapes the content of Yong’s theology, using Yong’s contributions in areas such as global Pentecostal theology and the relationship between religion and science as case studies.

Part 1 highlights Yong’s contributions to the areas of theology of religions and interreligious dialogue. Yong argues for a Pentecostal-charismatic theology of religions which can embrace the tensions between inclusivism and exclusivism, and divine presence and divine absence in other religions. This theological embrace requires discernment of the spirit(s), where one takes seriously the role of interreligious dialogue in such discernment.

Part 2 turns the reader’s attention to the area of religion and science. Yong proposes an emergentist anthropology that opens up the possibility of interdisciplinarity as a framework for the mutual engagement of religion and science. Yong sees the Pentecost narrative of Acts 2, in which many tongues declare God’s truth, as analogous to scientific and theology inquiry that is open to diverse disciplinary approaches. This leads him to pursue a distinct hermeneutics of science, a pneumato-ecological ethic, and a trinitarian theology of creation.

Part 3 focusses on theology and disability. Yong’s theological methodology and the pneumatological imagination are employed to construct a theology of disability and tease out the implications of disability studies for other areas of theology. In the former, Yong engages a broad spectrum of the humanities to shape his theological understanding of disability. In the latter, Yong considers how our contemporary understanding of the impact of Down’s syndrome on a person’s personality/identity pushes against the assumed theological position that the final resurrection will necessarily entail the erasure of all disabilities.

Part 4 addresses political theology. For Yong there is no one Pentecostal political theology, but rather many Pentecostal theologies. The Pentecost narrative in Acts 2 supports this understanding of a multivalent approach to political theology. Just as there were many tongues empowered by the Holy Spirit to testify to the redemptive work of God, likewise there are many political postures within the church that enable her to bear witness to the Kingdom of God on earth. Yong also wants to argue for “the Pentecostal prophethood of believers” (194), according to which the church, empowered by the Spirit of prophecy, reclaims here prophetic voice in the public sphere.

Part 5 attends to Yong’s theological interpretation of Luke-Acts. Yong suggests a spirit Christology as an approach to understanding the person and work of Jesus Christ through pneumatological lenses. He also suggests a spirit soteriology which attends to the gift of the Holy Spirit to the disciples of Jesus as containing insights into the nature of salvation. Yong also wishes to read the Luke-Acts narrative from various perspectives in order to see what such readings reveal about the text and what theological insights they yield. He offers readings of Luke-Acts from the perspectives of disability studies and migration studies.

Part 6 brings us to the core of Yong’s theological method, at the core of which is the Spirit-Word-Community triad. This triad is not an entirely new idea. While it casts a new light on Pentecostal theology, it bears resemblance to other models of theological hermeneutics, such as canonical hermeneutics and the Wesleyan quadrilateral. In addition to this triad, Yong’s theological method also includes his understanding of theological dialogue, where the pneumatological imagination inspires and enables a dialogical relationship between various sources of theology and between various theological traditions.

This book masterfully assembles selections from the works of Yong to show his theological methodology and the way in which that methodology plays out in a broad range of disciplines. Complied as an inductive path through Yong’s theology, the reader is invited to enter Yong’s work starting from the particular and moving to the general. Stephenson helpfully notes that those who wish to take a deductive path through the Reader can start from part 6 (on theological method) and work their way backwards to part 1.

One (minor) critique of this Reader is the absence of any discussion around Yong’s theological development over the last two decades in the introduction. Are there any nascent ideas in Yong’s first publication that developed over the last twenty years? Are there new ideas that he has gravitated towards in recent publications that are absent in his earliest works? Notwithstanding such a critique, this Reader nevertheless represents an exciting contribution to the field of Pentecostal studies. It provides, for the uninitiated, an excellent entry point into the works of the premier Pentecostal theologian and will surely serve as a helpful text for any undergraduate or graduate-level class focused on introducing students to Pentecostal theology.

Israel A. Kolade is a master of divinity student at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Israel A. Kolade

Date Of Review:

September 29, 2022