Pentecostal pacifist homiletics: A hermeneutical concern

What is it about?

Early pentecostalism was mostly a pacifist movement that sees itself as a community that resolves conflicts and disputes through confrontation, forgiveness and reconciliation in a nonviolent manner. Since the 1940s, this important emphasis was lost due to the influence of the evangelicals with whom the pentecostals allied. The hypothesis of the paper is that it was due to evangelical influnce on their hermeneutics that pentecostals lost their pacifist stance. To regain the emphasis, pentecostals need to realign their hermeneutics with its early practice. A hermeneutical pacifist emphasis suitable for the inherently violent South African society is described in order to ground a pentecostal homiletics of non-resistance. Such a homiletics will fearlessly address the issue of violence against women, combining biblical texts that are exegeted, preferably by women, with a hermeneutic of suspicion to expose male interest in justifying rape and violence, and supported by women's testimonies of their sexual harassment.

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Why is it important?

South Africa can be described as a violent country, at times requiring of its citizens a violent response to survive. What is the church’s response to violence in terms of its hermeneutical task? For purposes of the discussion, the picture of violence in South Africa is limited to a few broad strokes depicting sexual violence against women. The situation is much more complicated than a few statistics would suggest. In its homiletic it is suggested that the church should address violence against women by utilising biblical narratives of such violence by way of a hermeneutics of suspicion to develop a depatriarchalising approach, implying that one finds oneself always over against the text, asking sceptical questions about the text such as, what self-deception or bad faith might be unconsciously motivating a particular conceptuality, while exposing vested interests of the author and recognising that readers are far more likely to believe statements that concur with their belief system than those that do not. All ideologies that weaken and jeopardise the position of the poor have to be identified in prophetic preaching. Abuse of power, no matter by whom, must be pointed out. Ideally, women should be exegeting biblical texts about violence against women to ensure that authors’ vested interests are exposed and male preachers should listen to their perceptive interpretation of relevant texts. Feminist biblical interpretation is reading the biblical texts through women’s eyes81 to counteract stereotyping distortions of what each gender represents

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