Peter Clenott

Pentecostalism is a movement that, in a little over a century, has encircled the globe and, either directly or indirectly, has impacted and influenced every quarter of Christendom. At its heart the movement bears witness to a contemporary experience of divine-human encounter in line with the prophetic claims of the Old Testament and the Pentecost testimony of the New—indeed an encounter with the power/the presence/the Spirit of God that is radically transformative enough, at both personal and corporate levels, to evoke a new way of seeing the world and, with it, a new way of reading the Word. In the post-modern situation that has forced all of us to a greater awareness of the contextual particularities of how we see and read things, with all of the limitation and the illumination that this can entail, it is time for offering a survey of Scripture, and the Old Testament in particular, that speaks both from and to the manifold global context of Pentecostal faith and practice. Here the authors are deft guides, affirming the integration of academic scholarship and charismatic spirituality. They present thoughtful readers with an overview of the Old Testament that is explicitly engaged with the faith and practice of the Pentecostal movement and the recent scholarship that has been generated by this contemporary, global, Christian movement, especially as it bears upon biblical interpretation. They invite readers to approach scripture reading with the expectation of being encountered and addressed by a Living Voice, flipping the primary goal of biblical study from ‘us interpreting Scripture’ to ‘Scripture reading and interpreting us.’ In addition to treating each Old Testament book individually, this textbook offers a brief chapter-length introduction to each of the four major book collections, as standardized in the Protestant Bible’s arrangement of Old Testament Scriptures: 1) Pentateuch; 2) Historical Books; 3) Poetical Books; and 4) Prophets.