1. Introduction - That You May Have Life
Authentic teaching can never be a mere academic exercise. It is the attempt to interpret the message of salvation to a concrete community in terms that will lead it to repentance and to a deeper openness to the Spirit. When, therefore, Christian teaching loses its prophetic character, it becomes shot through with inauthenticity. It degenerates into cerebral academic exercises.
Donald Gelpi, Charism and Sacrament, p.88
A book that informs without inspiring may be indispensable to the scientist, the lawyer, and the physician; but mere information is not enough for the minister. If knowledge about things constituted learning, the encyclopedia would be all the library one needed for a fruitful ministry. The successful Christian must know God, himself, and his fellow men. Such knowledge is not gained by assembling data but by sympathetic contact, by intuition, meditation, silence, inspiration, prayer, and communion. The book that leads the soul out into the sunlight, points upward and bows out is always the best book.
The man who can teach us to teach ourselves will help us more in the long run than the man who spoon-feeds us and makes us dependent upon him. The teacher's best service is to make himself unnecessary. The book that serves as a ramp from which our minds can take o
ff is the best book for us; the book that frees us to think our own inspired thoughts is our friend.
David J. Fant, A. W. Tozer, a twentieth century prophet, 1964, p. 128.
Our purposes in teaching the Word of God should still be the same today as were Jesus' purposes. He came that we might have life in all its fullness (John 10:10) and the gospels were written to help us find that life for ourselves and obtain it. Too much of our theological writing and teaching misses this life-giving dimension completely, and some of it even achieves the converse, destroying the very faith that should bring life - through critical, rational and other totally negative approaches to studying the Scriptures. The need for a new approach is very urgent.
Classical Pentecostalism never developed a total Biblical theology of its own, but tended to adopt already existing evangelical and fundamentalist systems of interpretation. Charismatics have mostly done the same, with differing degrees of dissatisfaction since these theological systems, as well as the more liberal ones, generally fail to meet their need to learn more about the ways of the Spirit, the power of faith, revival, healing ministry, the dynamic of the word, etc. - in fact everything that relates to personal experience of God in the life of the believer. What we need, therefore, is an approach that lays bare the life-giving heart of Scripture, one that taps its dynamic source - which is, of course, the Spirit of God himself.
Israel's history, unlike secular history, is mainly a story about God's dealings with men. Its stories of individual lives also focus on the working of God's Spirit in transforming men. And in the telling the Bible delights in the very things many Christians love to hear about today: the miraculous, the prophetic, the visionary, the love and fellowship of Spirit-filled believers, and so forth - the very things that give life. Such matters must become the main focus of our theological studies too, if they are to cease being sterile and become life-giving.
