Pentecost and the Framework of Redemptive History: Prolepsis, Asynchronicity and Eschatological Ethics (Part 2)

All that said, there is a sense in which Pentecost does have a special significance for NT believers.

I think it safe to say that as New Testament believers we experience life in the Spirit in a greater fullness. Old Testament figures would have the Spirit come upon them for great deeds and yet the True Presence was found with the Shekinah in the Holy of Holies. This again is another mind-bending revelatory truth in that believers possessed the Spirit, but not in its fullness, they were regenerated by the Spirit but the Spirit-Presence in space-time (for want of a better concept) was spatially located in the Temple. The typology and chronology bend, warp and are interwoven with the eternal-eschatological realities that believers participate in. A simple appeal to omnipresence does not alleviate the difficulty.

Pentecost and the Framework of Redemptive History: Prolepsis, Asynchronicity and Eschatological Ethics (Part 1)

What is the significance of Pentecost? It was the occasion in which the Holy Spirit descended on believers signifying the new age, the sealing of the promised work of Christ and the ratification of the era of the New Covenant. Christ's Ascension meant that the Holy Spirit could come as a Comforter, as the proleptic earnest of the Kingdom which would exist in its Already and Not-Yet form during the Parousia Interim, the period we know as the New Testament or Church Age. This interim is understood as the period in which the Parousia is in temporal suspension, paused and delayed from being fully completed or consummated, the period in which Divine Wrath and Judgment are deferred, that the Gentiles might be brought in.

Inbox: What does it mean to speak prophetically in our day?

I believe special authoritative revelation ceased with the end of Apostolic Age. Christ himself was the Final Prophet as it were, at least according to the clear teaching of the book of Hebrews. And that's just for a start.

His Apostles by extension were specially commissioned to 'finish' (again, as it were) His ministry and bring out the full revelatory glory of His Person and work as well as provide us the authoritative foundations for the New Covenant era. They weren't just Prophets, they were akin to the Twelve Patriarchs, but this time of the New Israel.

What about Historic Creeds?

Creeds are helpful as guides both to the past and to the issues which we must wrestle with when approaching Scripture. We cannot divorce ourselves from history and those that try to do so prove not only their ignorance but their pride.