3

The Beauty, Skin, and Monstrosity of Grace

Introduction

What is grace at the pentecostal street level, not at the pentecostal theological academy? Let me respond with a story. When I became born-again, that is, when I became a Pentecostal in 1993, I worshiped in a pentecostal church (Zoe Ministries) that was on Victoria Island, the lush, upper-class area of Lagos, Nigeria. This part of Lagos was also adjacent to a very poor neighborhood, Maroko. So the church was a mixture of the upper echelon and the lowest rung of Nigeria. The poor were in the majority. I experienced grace as an irruption of God among people who were perpetually vulnerable to death because of poverty and the excess weight of suffering. Yet worship among the poor was a form of play, an explosion of joy, a pure means. Grace was an excess, surplus power beyond the obligations of the law and the constricted possibilities of life in Maroko.

Before I came to study theology in a seminary, the congregation at Maroko had schooled me in the pentecostal notion of grace. I learned from the actions, practices, and words of the people who worshiped with me that God’s grace is not only about the beneficial actions of God toward God’s creation, transforming human beings into God’s subjects or into obedient subjects of the state, but also about providing an alternative vision to the existing order of things. Grace is both constructive and disruptive. Pentecostals consider the born-again experience as an event of grace, which compels them to proclaim themselves as the subjects of God who are open to divine surprises, to alternative visions. Grace initiates and sustains them in the Pentecostal principle, which is the capacity to begin, the capacity to initiate something new amid ongoing social automatism. Grace opens up what the law tends to close off. In every society there are three sets of possibilities: one that is open to all individuals, another that is available to only a few with the rest excluded, and the universe of possibilities that are yet to be fulfilled or not available to all persons and institutions. The law acts to bring the range of possibilities to a manageable proportion and then to distribute them into the three sets.

This is what “street-seminary” taught me about grace. According to the popular pentecostal mindset, grace is an event, a disruptive one. God’s grace radically challenges and unsettles our human presumptions of self-sufficiency and self-complacency and warmly embraces and settles us in salvation, service, identification with Christ, and as beings indwelled by the Holy Spirit. Grace is the appearance of something new into creation, human life, the human condition—it breaks into the order of things. Grace as the evental movement of God, the Holy Spirit, is full of novelty, possibilities, and potentials. In the pentecostal way of thinking, the “big,” “serious” purpose of grace is the freedom to play in salvation for freedom. Grace is characterized by play, having no purpose at all. It is to exuberantly embrace the Holy Spirit as the spirit of play. Under grace, Pentecostals believe they have a playful relation to the law, and this opens up a space where they can fulfill the demands of the law under the figure of love. How does grace open up a playful relation to the law? The logic of grace is the logic of play. In its nature of purposelessness, play transcends the instrumental demands and constraints of the present given world in the direction of possibilities and not-yet-defined potentialities.

Let us unpack the phrase “playful relation to the law.” To begin with, play deactivates the law and radicalizes saving grace. Under grace, the law is not abolished, but “deactivated,” rendered inoperative. Under the power of God’s grace, the law is separated from its end of condemning us to eternal damnation, and it is also delinked from its power to induce the desire for transgression in us. Remember Paul’s language in Romans 7: the law is not gone, but grace opens it to a new possible use. We learn that it is no longer for condemnation and guilt, but for common love. The law shows us how to live and live well in our common existence; it is severed from its original instrumentality or purpose. It is in this nature of losing its purpose and by moving us to realize the moral imperative of our lives—the demand to become what God wants us to be—that it becomes like play. This is what I mean by grace opening up a space for a playful relation to the law. In the language of salvation, play is the freedom of grace within the constraints of law as redefined.

When asked what does this lived experience of such a playful relation to the law feel like, Pentecostals would answer that, on a daily basis, there is a feeling of joy and freedom and expectation of surprises from the Holy Spirit. There is the realization that grace does not require a counter (reciprocal) service or work obligation. First, by rendering the law inoperative and yet empowering them to live the life-in-the-Spirit, they believe that they can fulfill the expectations of love of God, love of fellow human beings, and love of all God’s creation. They now respond to God or God’s law not out of fear of condemnation, but out of love. Second, the active reception of God’s grace means that one takes work seriously (but not as salvific) as supported by an inclination to play. Grace frees and transforms work. He who does not know how to play will find it difficult to appreciate God’s grace and work of existence, which is Being at play.

The Beauty of Grace and Work

It is my contention that the interrelation of grace and play constitutes the “essence” of work. Grace is not opposed to work. Grace is disruption of boundaries so a new beginning can be made. It is in this sense like work, expansion of possibilities or a goal-oriented act. Work, broadly understood, is the unfurling of humanity toward a wholeness in which all selves and others are inextricably linked.1 (The whole refers to both the social whole and to the whole that points to the cosmic order: God, persons, not-yet born, nature, and society.) Work is the daily means (involving body, mind, and spirit) of humanity to begin, to cut open (be-ginnan) the iterative dynamic of becoming itself that is human existence. Work fulfills our need to make a fresh beginning in the fluid dynamics of transcending our current humanity. Working is fundamentally the communication and exchange of that by which a human being is in dynamism of positing a new possible world.2 The that that is communicated is the set of possibilities (potentials) for forward movement. Work is that by which human beings “stand in” and “stand out” of actualization of potentialities, the processive openness toward the not-yet. This is also like the logic of play: the desire to transcend the instrumental demands and constraints of the present given world in the direction of possibilities and not-yet-defined potentialities. This is also the logic of grace. God gives God’s grace freely to humanity to repair, reconstruct, and re-create social existence, relationships, character, health, and so on. Grace, the giving of salvation, is linked to divine workmanship (Eph. 2:8–10).

Let us further explore the relationship among grace, work, and play. First, they all contribute to eudaimonia, the well-lived human life. Second, they are forces behind the freedom to begin anew, what Hannah Arendt calls the concept of natality. I recognize them as gesturing to the power (divine, divine-human, human) to re-create and replenish both inner life and social existence. There is a deep dance going on between grace, work, and play all the time. God’s grace (which by definition is free) is received and appropriated by the free self when it “allows for play and allows itself to play.” Work is the transformation of grace and play into new spaces for freedoms, overcoming unfreedoms. Grace imbues work with the sense that there is redemption and hope for failures or after failures. This can then transform the attitude toward work from that of instrumentality to that of pleasure, intrinsic finality. Work becomes play and can then really become the play of the creative potentials of humanity. Grace in this interplay can be construed as working-sans-works. God’s grace exemplifies play and work. Put differently, being-with is exemplified by grace, play, work, and the relations among them.

What makes play play is neither the absence of an instrumental orientation to outcome nor “purposiveness without a purpose.” Surely, it is all that, but much more. Being-with constitutes the essence of play. This is what displaces, dislocates, or dissolves every substantial essence. Play displaces or discloses the being-in-common, being-with one another. This with denuded of instrumentality is not external to play, is not an extrinsic addition to the players, and is not interior to each of the players. The play is the with, the cum that puts the players together. Play is the celebration of being-with.

Work, as I defined it in my 2008 book, The Depth and Destiny of Work, is the expansion, preservation, repair, and innovation of the being-with of existence. So at a fundamental level it shares the bare essence of play. Grace is the dynamic, the hope of rupture and event of the being-with. It is not a dimension added on to a primitive being-with even if it were to occur as “masculine kairos,” an in-breaking force. It is simply the immanent and intrinsic condition of the being-with that is coexistence, that is play, and that is the work of threading and rethreading the fabric of existence, the copresence of human beings. There is no appearing of grace to itself except as appearing to work and play or as appearing of work and play to one another. Grace is the very presence of the Spirit of God in the being-with, which in an endless way disrupts persons, groups, and institutions and disposes such to a better level of flourishing. Grace is repetitive, as it is affirmative of the being-with. It is the condition of affirmation of being-with, with one another and with God. This repetition is not the repetition of the same or of origins, but of continuity and discontinuity and re-creation of connections. This repetition is a form of plasticity. In some crude sense, grace is the power of the plasticity in being-with.

The Skin of Grace

To get a fuller understanding of the working of grace in Pentecostalism, we have to consider it under the extended framework of anointing. In everyday theology, grace is primarily used when talking about salvation (“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith … not by works” Eph. 2:8–9 NIV), to invoke God’s approval of a planned action (“by grace we shall do this or that …”), or to hide an intention or deeds under the banner of God. But grace is also used in a broad sense—and this tends to have more resonance with actual lived experiences of Pentecostals. Grace in its broadened usage incorporates anointing, the divine empowerment or enablement to accomplish something. Operating or luxuriating under the rubric of anointing, grace becomes the tangible, pragmatic effects of God’s presence in human bodies and objects (such as olive oil, handkerchiefs, chairs, floor, or voice—glossolalia). Grace is real presence. Real presence is grace in tangible things, the manifestation of the Holy Spirit in material forms. Often when Pentecostals in worship services say, “I feel the anointing in here,” they follow up with, “I feel the Spirit of God in this place.” Anointing is the materiality of grace, appearance qua appearance of the Holy Spirit.

The question now is how do we understand grace in and through its manifest presence in objects, physical stuff or through sensual and material practices? How do Pentecostals sense grace through their bodily senses? What are the mediated, sensational forms of grace in pentecostal gatherings? Simply put, how is the discourse of grace born as a discourse of anointed bodies and religious objects? In this way of approaching grace, it becomes easy to see how Pentecostals perceive and create their worlds through the movements of grace on bodies and group of bodies. Pentecostal worship services make the subtle point that it is no longer adequate to talk about grace without paying attention to aesthetics (in its full sense as sensory perception, form, beauty, and senses and sensorimotor skills) of religion. It is no longer adequate to talk about operations of grace without paying attention to how the gospel message of grace is danced, gestured, seen, tasted, smelled, drummed, heard, and embodied by ordinary folks.

Sociologist Annalisa Butticci, pursuing the study of the politics of real presence among Catholics and Pentecostals in Italy, reveals how poor African migrants deploy the empowerment that comes from “seeing” the Holy Spirit pour herself into their bodies and religious objects to produce a space for their flourishing.3 Her book, African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe, is about, among other things, different religious worlds in interlocking sacred settings that are not divorced from the mundane, everyday environment of human existence. At one level the book shows us the encounter of Catholicism and African Pentecostalism in Italy; at another level it portrays the rituals, interactions, and the drama of this encounter in very vivid constructions of aesthetic sacred spaces. Bodies and senses, arts and rhetoric, and sights and sounds define, differentiate, produce, and expand sacred and social spaces. In this work of expansion we discern grace as “approaching withdrawal and withdrawal approach”;4 it reveals and conceals itself at the same time, inspiring new visions of the self but never allowing itself to be grasped. And in this way, embodied and bodying grace is key to the aesthetics of human-divine encounter.

Butticci’s skills in excavating the depths of pentecostal aesthetics of worship help her readers to identify the underlying structural principle of sensuality of the human-divine encounter. I identified this principle using Jacques Lacan’s triad of the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real. There is an idealized self-image of what African Pentecostals want to be (imaginary). And it is based on their reception of God’s grace. There is the gracious God (the Big Other) whom they want to impress through impassioned prayers, dance, and gifts and who implores them to give the best of themselves to God and to the world (symbolic). African Pentecostals have a symbolic identification with God. The Real is the same God for whom they try the “impossible possibility,” demanding of themselves a crucifixion of the flesh in order to experience the jouissance of heaven on earth, to enjoy the expanded possibilities of life in Italy. This Real that is God resists their grasping or full understanding no matter how close the Pentecostals approach him. He is approached with the full complement of the body and its senses, but they can never “represent” him. The Real transpires or shines through their reality, forever slipping through their fingers, as Slavoj Žižek might put it. What we can discern as the Real in the divine-human encounter are “traces” left behind on the body surfaces or in the psyche. Such traces include the fragile moments of smiles, laughter, radiant faces, sweaty bodies, pleasures, feelings of elevation and empowerment, emotions, sense of new possibilities, and so on. These traces at best remind us of the leftover glory of Jehovah that shone on Moses’s face after he only saw the backside of God. Despite their strong belief in the transimmanence of the divine, the Spirit of God cannot be fully mediated, represented, or captured. The Spirit remains enigmatic and untouchable. The Real in our Lacanian-pentecostal triad can be likened to the unstable temporal presence, the imperceptible, ungraspable gap between the past and the future. And the real presences that Butticci analyzes in her book are constructed or constituted by human beings throwing their bodies and their objects into this clearing or gap in order to sustain, expand, and exploit it.

Through Butticci’s examination of the belief in and the role of anointing in producing real presences among Pentecostals, one can infer that the event of grace in migrants’ lifeworld produces subjectivity brought about by subjects faithful to its consequences. It is within the logic and dynamics of the triad that she locates pentecostal subjectivity. She portrays the subjectivity of African Pentecostals as located within a system of senses that is in dialogue with the hard, real world and the immaterial divine realm. Butticci describes pentecostal subjectivity as nitty-gritty materiality that disturbs, disrupts, and subverts power relations through artful deployment of senses and sensibilities. Her book shows us how fidelity to the event (grace-anointing) is primarily worked out and sustained on a daily basis through the interaction ritual chains of senses and the “distribution of the sensible” by the parts of no-part in Italian society who are relying on grace to see them through from one day to another.

The Monstrosity of Pentecostal Grace

We will illustrate the monstrosity of the pentecostal notion of grace with three examples or discussions: grace in lived experience, the effectivity of grace in form of worship as pure means, and grace as limit of salvation. The grace that we encounter as lived experience has two sides to it: internal and external. The internal is the recognition by a person that God has accepted her, believing that she is saved. The external part is the material practice of saving grace. We observe grace from the outside as practices of faith, belief in the saving God. From the inside, it is confidence. We work as we believe and we believe as we work. We enact in our work, in our external behavior the internal measure of grace inside of us and our internal belief expresses itself as work. Work inhabits grace. In Pentecostalism there is an added tension in this relationship between grace and work. I know very well that I am not saved by grace, but I nonetheless believe that work works.

Why must grace here be supplemented by belief in work? The commonplace thing to say is that in a type of Pentecostalism, with its focus on prosperity message, belief in work is a way to “coerce” grace or the divine to unleash material wealth. The real situation is to note that there is an immanent gap, a split within the subject’s experience of grace, a split within grace. And it appears Pentecostals feel this immanent gap more acutely. Grace is not articulated around a purpose, a quality, or a predicate of its receiver. It articulates around its own void. So the believer cannot subjectively assume it. Belief in work supplements this gap or void. So in a sense the Pentecostal follows the work, keeps the belief in work, and savors the manifestations of the power of the Holy Spirit and then grace as inner belief comes.

Why is the immanent gap within grace felt more acutely by the average Pentecostal than, for example, the Calvinist? The typical passage of a person, such as a non-Christian African, to born-again life in Pentecostalism is often violent. There is often a cutting of previous symbolic links, connections to the person’s natural environment and tradition for the light of the Holy Spirit, the power of grace, to come into one’s life. The person somewhat descends into a Hegelian “night of the world” before a new symbolic universe is constructed for her. How does the person climb back from the chaos and madness created by the radical withdrawal from her inherited symbolic texture and coordinates? She emerges through narratives. She retells her daily life activities, triumphs, and defeats (awaiting transformation into victories) as acts of faith, as works that give shape to her everyday grace. Through these narratives, testimonies, she incrementally and subjectively transforms herself into a true born-again. The truly new emerges neither when grace is imperceptibly received nor when the believer acts but when a declaration, a performative retelling of the act, is made.5

In sum the pentecostal nonetheless I believe that work works gestures to something akin to Alain Badiou’s concept of the emergence of revolutionary subject. The new only becomes an event when it restructures a person’s symbolic texture and makes her a believer in it. It is the fidelity to the contingent event that actually makes it happen, enacts its necessity. The nonetheless I believe that work works is the necessary “fall” into belief in work that opens up the passage into the Christian life proper. Note this fall is set off by an encounter with grace, and eventually grace completes a totality. But this movement toward completion is not before the encounter with the evental “I act because I believe,” a crack in the ring of grace that encompasses the life of the new believer.

Let us add another perspective to this discussion. This is the idea that the full realization of grace—without a crack in its totality—will lead to its self-destruction or self-profanation. We can only receive grace with reference to non-grace situations. But when the background itself is universal grace, then grace becomes particular. (Grace by definition becomes “grace is grace.”) This is like the universal encountering itself in its specific elements. The particular is a species inside the universal genus. This is a particularity that embodies the universality of the whole while at the same time is its negation. Grace is grace is an identity that contradicts itself. If the first “grace is” the grace that encompasses all the good things, predicates, and particulars we associate with grace, then the second one excludes all of them. It becomes its opposite, the absence of its predicates and particular contents. The returning first “grace is” does not meet itself exactly as it began its journey, but meets an empty collectivity.

The next point to note is that grace always arrives at its destination. Grace, like a letter from elsewhere, must reach its addressee, and it is only her recognition or acceptance of it that makes it a letter to her. Grace can only be asserted after the unfolding of its consequences, even if it engenders these very consequences. But once grace is addressed to itself, it falls into a vortex of drive, not dissimilar from what Schelling describes as the pre-creation rotary movement of drives in the Godhead.

As Slavoj Žižek argues, “The universal is the opposite of itself insofar as it refers to itself as a particular, insofar as it attains its being-for-itself in the form of its opposite.”6 The key point to note here is that this paradoxical particularity is always already part of grace, the totality, ensemble of elements. As a totality, a universal has an element in it that functions as an exception. The different elements (types) of grace begin to acquire their universality once we have excluded work as an embodiment (or enabler) of salvation in general. If grace is not the unique foundation of salvation or existence, then work is grace pretending to be the expression of the unique principle. Grace as a universal constitutes itself through subtraction of work that embodies it (or its functions) as such. So the scission is immanent in grace and not in work, the particular. The immanent inconsistency of grace prevents it from fully realizing itself irrespective of the presence or absence of external obstacles. So we have a perpetual postponement of the arrival of heaven on earth.

The “monstrosity” of pentecostal grace is also discernible in its worship or the idea of worship as pure mediality (medium), not as something instrumental, as the free selfless offering to God. Worship as pure means is free, which is to say it is ultimately grounded in itself, and we cannot attribute to it any purpose or a network of causal instrumentality or scheme. There is a discontinuity in the texture of purpose. This thus implies a hole in the fabric of social relations or divine-human relation, an incompleteness in the texture of the phenomenal reality of religion. Worship as pure means in Pentecostalism somewhat approximates the Kantian notion of freedom. Is this not what grace is all about? Is grace not ultimately grounded in itself and apart from the natural or social causes? We receive it not because of the causal chain of our preceding actions. It is an intervention into our phenomenal reality—the chain of our natural and social causes does not cover all of our religious reality. There is a gap in our phenomenal reality through which grace pours in, suspending or violating socionatural laws.

More importantly, the very gap (limitation, impossibility) that separates human beings from “saving” themselves, the humans’ failure to grasp their salvation, the gulf between human beings and God, simultaneously indicates grace. What is regarded as grace separating human work from salvation should be simultaneously seen as the gap immanent to human work itself or phenomenal reality. All this means that the human agents of worship, freedom, or the (supremely free) divine agent of grace cannot be “reduced to phenomenal reality. Phenomenal reality is thus incomplete, non-All.”7

Worship as pure means also enacts a certain reversal of the subject-object dichotomy. At the moment of worship as pure means, the Holy Spirit or rather grace becomes the subject. Grace not only mediates between God and human beings and between the human beings in the worship as a general equivalent of all interaction chains but it is also the active agent of the interaction. The result is that the entire movement of the worship service becomes the self-movement of grace or rather the Holy Spirit. Is this precisely not the “self-alienation” of the work that is worship? Is it not that what emerges as grace—that which structures the whole divine-human relation—is through the alienation of work? And yet we have no direct access to grace except through the error and failure of work. Is grace not something that is retroactively posited once we notice the failure of work to save us? Take the notion of predestination as an exemplar of this purposeless grace, of grace that is unrelated to human work. When a person comes to Christ, begins to sense that she, the unacceptable, is now accepted by God, then the whole eternal past (predestiny) is written by this sense or act to accept salvation. Predestination does not mean some persons are eternally sealed in advance to live in heaven, but that a temporal decision is capable of retroactively changing destiny, erasing the virtual eternal past of sins and setting them free. As Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling would put it, as if the decision had been made before even the person is conscious of it, as if it occurred outside of time. The free act becomes a necessity. The act that never took place in reality is presupposed for the believer in order to make sense of her contingent action.8 It does appear then that the decision chose its maker before she makes it. (This is the impossibility around which the divine-human relationship structures itself.) As if the person were born to embody their salvation, born to come to God through Christ. This does not mean that an actual decision merely actualizes an atemporal divine decision but retroactively (re)constitutes the past (decision) itself, so that persons “become what they are,” to use Hegel’s words.9 A Christian is “the retroactive result of his own choice,” a paradox of forced choice.10 This perhaps explains why Pentecostals are not enamored by the classical doctrine of predestination and as such put so much emphasis on evangelization, making altar calls, and asking not-yet Christians to make decision to accept Christ.

The idea of grace as self-propelling and self-enhancing means that the ultimate limit of salvation is grace itself. Apocalypse understood as unveiling, or, crudely, the end of the world, is an attempt of grace to escape its unconditional spiral. The revolutionizing and unconditional dynamic of grace—the sun shines on the good and the bad; the bad and the good are touched by grace—underlie the development of civilizations, both good and bad. Grace that is born at the same time as the impossibility of atemporal work attempts to escape its material conditions by consuming all temporal human work (in the language of Peter, the earth and work therein will be burnt up). This is what is expected at the end of the world, according to a reading of the book of Revelation. There is another way to interpret the end of the world. The free circulation of grace—God’s refusal to kill off unbelievers in Christ as some Pentecostals want, but rather allowing them to prosper and create obscene works of arts—is the “condition of impossibility” for realizing the full “positive effect” of grace itself. What such Pentecostals fail to understand is that the condition of impossibility is also the condition of possibility of grace. To remove the unbelievers as obstacles to realize the fundamentalist utopian vision of a perfect world is to simultaneously remove the dynamic of grace, the very thing that makes it what it is. It is purposeless and nonselective. The “obstacle” is not external to grace; it is inherent in it. The world as we know it ends when God answers the prayer of those who want grace to end.

Real Presence and Split Holy Spirit

The grounding of grace in the sensing of body or objects conveys a message not only about the pentecostal worldview, but also its notion of the Holy Spirit. The manifestation of God in real objects or bodies—the real presence—presupposes a two-world metaphysics. There is an interaction between the realm of phenomenal objects as appearance and the realm of noumenal things-in-themselves, the realm of the Spirit. The objective phenomenal object, which appears to observers in the real world, not only manifests or discloses its objective being, but also doubles as the appearance of non-manifest supersensible entity or noumenon. The Holy Spirit, the supersensible person comes into being from the world of real presence that mediates her. The divine as real presence “comes from the world of appearance which has mediated it; in other words, appearance is its essence. The supersensible is the sensuous and the perceived posited as it is in truth, but the truth of the sensuous and the perceived is to be appearance. The supersensible is therefore appearance qua appearance.”11

The preceding Hegelian quotation reveals that there are at least two possible interpretations of the real presence of the Holy Spirit—suggesting a split in the notion of God. One way is to interpret the Holy Spirit as the primary cause of the real presence—the supersensible, inner world causing the sensible, phenomenal manifestation. But Hegel suggests that the supersensible world, contrary to the tenets of the two-world metaphysics, “comes from the world of appearance.” The inner world, which does the appearing and is perceived as objective interiority, is nothing but a subjective interiority. A positing of an inner world beyond phenomena and treatment of physical objects as representations of an underlying world precede the understanding of real presence as appearances of noumena. So what lies behind the veil, the non-appearing underlying “what” that precipitates the real presence, is consciousness; consciousness is subjective interiority as supersensible inner world. Does the divine manifest in objects or do we perceive the objects as such, and to whom does this manifestation belong? How can we grasp the relationship between objects of real presence and the Holy Spirit? Perhaps, instead of asking what the Holy Spirit is for the objects and bodies, and how we can grasp her in this respect, we should ask the obverse question: What is (the exuberant rise of the) real presence for the Holy Spirit?

The point before us is that objective real presence, “the palpable anointing,” on a person or object does not settle the question as to whether the Holy Spirit “is a secondary effect rather than a primary cause” or is the effectivity of real presence “generated specifically through the deployment of intentional consciousness of the category of appearance” or not.12 The answer relies on our personal decision of faith. There is no clean logical way to infer one way or the other. So the politics of real presence falls into the class of truth procedure.

There are other vexing issues about real presence, such as, how do we interpret what the Holy Spirit is doing in manifesting in religious objects or bodies? The Holy Spirit in manifesting as real presence appears to herself. Another issue is how and why the Holy Spirit doubles herself by appearing as real presence, manifesting as appearance from its invisible, indivisible oneness (or trinitarian substantial self). With the manifestation of the divine in any object there emerges now a distinction, a gap introduced into the notion of the Holy Spirit: distinction between appearance and essence. This distinction can be inscribed into appearance itself as essence appears within appearance.13 Thus, the question is no longer about sifting through real presences that are false appearances or how to see authentic underlying reality, but the question is how and why the Holy Spirit appears to herself. The real presence of the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit’s self-reflection. In addition, the difference between the object of manifestation (phenomenon) and noumenon, between the Holy Spirit and real presence, is transposed back into the Holy Spirit.

This is precisely what the pentecostal inclination toward the real presence does to its notion of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is not reduced to appearance, but we are nudged to conceive the very process of appearance from the standpoint of the Holy Spirit and this changes the questions we ask about appearance and real presence. The split that separates physical objects from the noumenal spirit is fully admitted, or the split in the Holy Spirit is fully admitted, but “this very split is transposed back into [the Spirit] as [her] kenotic self-emptying.”14

Are the antagonisms, inconsistencies, and gaps due only to the underlying notion of split Holy Spirit in pentecostal thought? Could it be that the contradictions and conflicts concerning real presence or false appearances are part of the Holy Spirit? What are the conditions for the Holy Spirit appearing in objects? What are the conditions for appearance of the Holy Spirit arising in a gathering of worshipers? What are the conditions for the Holy Spirit appearing to himself?

The Economy of Real Presence and Grace

If the Pauline doctrine of grace as outlined in Romans 3:20–25, 28, disavows exchange and social obligations, then the logic of real presence inserts the “impossible gift” of grace into the economy of exchange. Whether the manifestation of divine power in objects or bodies is represented as God’s acts to awe unbelievers (1 Cor. 15:22), or as recompense for a life of holiness, or indeed as the reward of intense desire and prayers for God’s intervention, grace is reinserted into an economy of exchange, desire, and gratification. Grace as evidenced by the multiplicity of real presence in the circular economy is a machine for miracles, a machine that is in, with, and under the matrix of life and the lifeworld.

The pentecostal understanding of grace implies a view of life as miraculous. All of life and the lifeworld are potentially miracle-textured. The personal lives of believers can display outward and visible signs of an irruption of grace. If bread and wine can be characterized by the phrase finitum capax infiniti (the finite can contain the infinite), then so can the rest of creation. Pentecostals go further to posit that the infinite, eternal presence of the Holy Spirit (or the risen Christ) can extend the logic of this impossible possibility to improbable events in the lives of believers. The notion that the finite contains the infinite suggests that “supernatural” forces operating in nature are not always from outside; they are already present within nature. (As we shall demonstrate in the next chapter, this pentecostal view of divine intervention gestures to the idea of God that is both within and outside nature, which founds the sacred.)

The sign of the active presence of the “supernatural” forces in a believer’s life, which is also the sign of grace, is indexed by personal miracles. Put differently, grace takes the form of miracle; grace becomes miraculous grace and miracle becomes both its sign and its ground.15

Conclusion: Blended Impossibility and Possibility

By way of reaching conclusion and as a precursor to the discussion of the notion of the sacred in the next chapter, I need to quickly state that the pentecostal emphasis on the miraculous life is not tantamount to a rejection or downplaying of phenomenal life. As Ruth Marshall has rightly reported, there might have been in early years of Pentecostalism when personal work and dedication were suspended upon (because of) the grace of God, but now there is a well-developed discourse and practice of techniques of the self on the self, self-improvement and self-governance, work, and refashioning and control of desires, and a powerful tilt toward this-worldly life. Religious scholar Afe Adogame’s ethnography work on African migrants in Europe well illustrates this shift.16 He demonstrates that the African Christian or immigrant Christian focuses on the visible and invisible realms. What is most important to migrant believers is that these two realms are in constant communication and supernatural and human beings “travel” between them. Adogame records these words of a prospective African immigrant to Europe: “Since the visa officials have become slaves to paper documentation, we will continue to exploit their ignorance. Even if they request for signatures from God before they approve visa, we will get them. It is only a matter of time and money.”17

There is not only the notion of possibility that echoes through the informant’s statement, but also a traditional African sensibility. In it I hear the wisdom of Eneke the bird in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: “Since men have learned to shoot without missing, he [Eneke] has learned to fly without perching.”18 There are more echoes. Consider the informant’s assertion that “it is only a matter of time and money.” What do you hear or sense? I can hear the rustle of forged papers. I can also sense the sensibilities of African traditional religions filtering through it. Willingness to make sacrifices, as Yoruba Ifa’s Odu relentlessly states, is key to realizing one’s request before God. So the matter of time and money might mean time spent in prayer and fasting and money spent in offerings, tithes, and gifts to anointed preachers. Time and money, aided by a little imagination, faith, and faithfulness to the cause, will nudge the invisible God to “sign” his signatures on visible tangible papers. Imagination, faith, and faithfulness of this magnitude are a form of resistance to bureaucratic rationality and formality that reduce humans to slaves of paper documentation.

The prospective migrant’s statement draws from a theology that emphasizes possibility in the face of all impossibility, even as it highlights the commingling of the visible and invisible realms. The pentecostal everyday form of theology is a theology of possibility and the scent and accent of possibilities sustain the grit and energy of rejected, oppressed, and marginalized people. The people who espouse it are always demanding in their words and deeds: Is there a creative alternative to the current regime of obstacles, to the forces that thwart human flourishing? Their answer is always yes and soon there will be an opening, a space for miracle. They believe that they only need to deploy their imagination and show fidelity to their cause and course of enhancement of life to succeed or grasp a miracle.

Any analysis of grace in everyday theology of Pentecostals and its twists and distortions must pay attention to Pentecostals’ understanding of miracle. Their everyday form of theology is firmly anchored to a non-Humean concept of miracle. Theirs is not so much a contravention of known laws in the physical world as the work of a parallel realm, which is always tangent to the physical and capable of activating dormant possibilities or inserting new possibilities into it without overturning its physical laws. Their view of miracle is keyed to a worldview that accents the unfinishedness of all existence, which is rooted in God’s productive will. This is just one (an ontological) way of looking at matter.

Miracle is also acclaimed when an unknown (unrecognized, underappreciated) physical or statistical law operates in believers’ favor. What surprises in the sense of going against the normal run of things generates the feeling of an encounter with the numinous or miraculous. This sense of surprise is given verbal expression in the form of “Na God” (“It is God”) in West Africa, which indexes an encounter with the miraculous.19

What Pentecostals interpret as miraculous is not fully captured or translated by the word miracle. When an event or story inspires awe and wonder, it is a miracle. But the word in different contexts could be used to designate an extraordinary demonstration of human intellect, obedience, and dedication. That which is miraculous is always unexpected, against the extant order of beings or things, out of place. If what is desired is out of harmony with the ongoing run of things and it happens, it is a miracle, and when that which is not desired positively happens, it is also a miracle. Because what Pentecostals mean by miracle varies so much it is really a description of their world, how such a world is experienced, and their expectation to build new structures and norms in society’s assemblage of social relations. The word is thus well suited to investigate the relationship between lived experiences and such theological constructs (e.g., grace and the sacred) as can be revealed in an everyday form of theology. Pentecostal understanding of the sacred not only provides a good example of how to investigate the relationship between lived experiences and religious-theological constructs, but also helps us to further our investigation of the sites of blended impossibility and possibility as environs of a split God.