The Spirit of Hospitality: Pentecostal Perspectives toward a Performative Theology of Interreligious Encounter

Abstract

This essay discusses how the centrality of the narrative of the book of Acts in Pentecostal spirituality and piety both poses challenges to Pentecostal missionary and evangelistic approaches in a post-9/11, religiously plural world on the one hand, and yet also provides resources for developing new theological understand-ings of the religions shaped by the doctrine of the Holy Spirit (pneumatology) on the other. It is further proposed that such a pneumatological theology of religions can be complemented by a theology of hospitality derived from Luke-Acts resulting in a performative pneumatological theology of interreligious hospitality for the church catholic today. I n some respects, the encounter between the world's religions is no less heated in the twenty-first century than before. This is especially the case when ad-herents of religious traditions adopt an aggressive stance toward proselytism as do members of missionary and evangelistic movements like modern Pentecostalism. Pentecostal scholars and theologians, however, have begun to recognize the need to cultivate a wider range of postures and approaches to the interreligious encounter more appropriate to the demands of a post-9/11 era. I suggest that there are resources within the Pentecostal tradition of biblical in-terpretation which can be harnessed for the purpose of developing a performative theology of the interreligious encounter, and that such an approach can benefit not only Pentecostal praxis but also the evangelical mission of the church catholic. I will unfold this hypothesis in four steps, corresponding to the four sections of this paper. First, I discuss how our contemporary, religiously plural world poses distinctive chal-lenges to Christian movements which take the Great Commission seriously and the early Christian church's experience normatively, as do most Pentecostal churches. Sec-ond, I present developments in Pentecostal scholarship which have begun to explore the possibility of a pneumatological approach to the theology of religions grounded