My Subject of Study - Kerry

So you're wondering, why are they going to Edinburgh? What is Kerry studying? I am going to attempt in this entry to give you an introduction to what I will be studying and why. I have long been concerned with the lack of familiarity with the Old Testament which is characteristic of the average Christian. This is what originally led me to consider focusing in the Hebrew Bible. I am convinced that the New Testament is only partially comprehensible unless it is studied within the context of the religious history of the Hebrews. This is because the New Testament writers saw their experience with the risen Christ as being the culmination of that very religious history. Christ is the fulfillment. The question many Christians appear to be unequipped to answer is: of what is He the fulfillment?

More specifically, the New Testament reality of the Holy Spirit is almost exclusively studied as a New Testament discipline, with hardly more than a passing glance in the direction of the Hebrew Bible wherein the Holy Spirit expectation originated. Scholars and pastors excuse this neglect with the oft repeated (but wholly false) observation that there is not really that much about the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. But on the day of Pentecost, Peter's understanding of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit was not that this was an essentially new phenomenon, but rather that is was the fulfillment of Israelite hopes as found particularly in the prophet Joel (though one can find similar thoughts in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, among other places). In other words, there was an already existing category by which this new experience of outpouring on all flesh was understood.

This category, however, has been overlooked by most of the important scholarly work in the area of pneumatology (that is, the study of the spirit) until rather recently. One of the most important works on pneumatology in the 20th century, Conversion-Initiation and the Baptism in the Holy Spirit by James Dunn (admittedly a work concerned with specifically New Testament pneumatology), does not dedicate even one of its seventeen chapters to the Old Testament background. The Pentecostal critique of Dunn's work by Howard Ervin, Baptism in the Holy Spirit, does not correct this as part of its critique (though I think the Pentecostal position is only strengthened by Old Testament pneumatology). While I understand that Ervin's intent was to respond point-for-point to Dunn's work, such an oversight reveals the lack of priority OT pneumatology has had across the board. There has been some good work done in this area more recently, especially by Daniel Block of Wheaton College in his work on Ezekiel, but there is still plenty of room for investigation.

This is why I began to look seriously at studying the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. Whether one is Pentecostal or not, I assert that understanding better what the Bible has to say on any point can only be beneficial to the Church as a whole. Now, as I began to seriously consider the Spirit's role in the OT, something began to stir in the back of my mind. I began to wonder where the idea that God even had a spirit came from? With most things in the Old Testament, the writers weren't inventing new categories so much as subverting existing categories. For example, animal sacrifice is not unique or even original to the Israelites. Everybody did it. What is original is the function of animal sacrifice in the Israelite religion. Further east, in Babylon, people thought that animal sacrifice fed the gods, so that according to one story, after a worldwide flood, when there was not anybody to offer sacrifices, the gods got really hungry. This mentality is specifically refuted in the Old Testament. Repeatedly, God indicates that He doesn't need the sacrifices. Somehow, we were the ones that needed the sacrifices. Theologically, this is described by the adjective incarnational, just as Jesus in his incarnation was a man, but through his humanity he turned our entire understanding of humanity upside-down.

So, I thought, the spirit, both of God and of man, must have some sort of ancient near-eastern corollary. Perhaps, by finding those corollaries, we may see more clearly what the spirit meant to the ancient Hebrew. Through this increased understanding, I hope, eventually, to shed some light on New Testament pneumatology, but that is many years down the road. For now, I want to understand OT pneumatology in its ancient near eastern context. This is the reason I am going to Edinburgh.