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At a time when Pentecostals are stereotyped as insular and anti-intellectual, Amos Yong may seem like a fresh wind.

He's not the only Pentecostal with a Ph.D. (from Boston University) or two master's degrees. Other Pentecostals, too, publish and speak at a high level of scholarship to a wide spectrum of academics. Yet few Pentecostals have established themselves as such prolific and productive scholars by age 40, and fewer yet have explored such a range of subjects. Yong's work tackles science, ethics, world religions, language, nature, and a host of other contemporary issues. He also endeavors to work beyond the academy, making a point to engage in formal dialogues with Buddhists and other non-Christian groups.

What ties most of Yong's scholarship together is the common thread of pneumatology (the doctrine of the Holy Spirit), which he believes Christian theology has too long neglected. Even Pentecostalism has not produced a sufficiently developed vision of the person and work of the Holy Spirit. Yong's passion is to expand interest in and understanding of the wider activity of the Spirit in the world beyond its traditional scope.

Yong, who last year left Bethel College in Minnesota to help establish the Ph.D. program in renewal studies at Regent University School of Divinity in Virginia, distinguishes classical, primarily Western "Pentecostalism" from the "pentecostalism" that is the largest and fastest-growing branch of Christianity in the world. He is a product of both.

Yong's Chinese parents, Assemblies of God pastors in Malaysia, moved to California when he was 10 to pastor a Chinese church. Yong dutifully attended Bethany, the ag college in Santa Cruz, where courses in theology inspired him. During his graduate studies, however, the young pastor (he has maintained his AG credentials) and budding theologian began to realize that there are genuine followers of Jesus outside his own "full gospel" movement.

"My studies at a Wesleyan Holiness seminary [Western Evangelical Seminary] raised the intra-Christian ecumenical question for me with great force, challenging me to confront the very sectarian and exclusive form of Christian self-understanding which characterized the Chinese American Pentecostal churches of my upbringing, " he later wrote. "Further graduate studies expanded the ecumenical question: If it was possible that those whom I considered before as outside the pale of Christianity (e.g., Catholics, Orthodox, even Lutherans) did indeed have a saving relationship with God, what about others also categorized as pagan, heathen, or non-Christian?"

This has remained Yong's pressing question: Is it possible that the Holy Spirit is active not only among Christians of all denominations but also among believers of non-Christian world religions?

The question arises in each of Yong's most important publications: Spirit-Word-Community (Ashgate, 2002), Beyond the Impasse (Baker Academic, 2003), and The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh (Baker Academic, 2005). His central thesis is that, because the Spirit of God is universally active in creation and new creation, "the religions of the world, like everything else that exists, are providentially sustained by the Spirit of God for divine purposes." Where most Pentecostals see the devil's work, Yong sees the Spirit's. Concretely, that means Christians should be open to learning from and being enriched by the Spirit's work in world religions. Dialogue must take place alongside evangelism, he argues, so that all the religions—including Christianity—can learn from each other what the Spirit is doing.

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March 2006, Vol. 50, No. 3