Everyday Form of Theology
Between Pentecostal Apparatus and Prosaic Existence
Introduction
Our investigation of the interaction between the apparatus of the split God and West African Pentecostals will focus on an everyday form of theology in the region. This requires that we find a veritable lens that can help us peer deeply into the discourses, practices, and aesthetics of West African Pentecostalism. Such a lens should also enable us to continue to demonstrate how Pentecostalism contests, befuddles, and transforms the categories and boundaries of orthodoxy. As we stated in the introduction to this book, piety and danger are extimate in pentecostal everyday theology. The pentecostal worldview is essentially split from within. There is a part that is faithful to the received tradition of Christian faith or conservative biblical orientation, and there is always another path that threatens to exceed the bounds of the faith, to make common cause with liberal, secular forms of explanation or understanding. These two are at the heart of the pentecostal worldview and coconstitute a tension that is always at the brink of breaking loose but not quite there yet.
We also noted in the same place that in Pentecostalism piety and danger make common cause with paleonomy. Pentecostals’ everyday theology is a paleonomic gesture in the sense that it simultaneously erases and preserves the Christian tradition. Paleonomy, according to Jacques Derrida, is the “maintenance of an old name in order to launch a new concept.”1 It is the strategy of a person who wants to conquer from within a system. “A paleonomic gesture requires us to stand inside and outside a tradition at the same time, perpetuating the tradition while breaking with it, and breaking with the tradition while perpetuating it.”2
Given all this, how best do we proceed with the task of this chapter?3 I will use a novel approach, which I call microtheology. Microtheology seeks to create a space within theology and to dispel its boundaries by identifying the subtle ways, the motility of small acts, disparities, and the small errors that give birth to the practices and reflection we call the everyday form of theology. It opposes itself to the search for definite contours that mark shifting or final boundaries of theological discourse. So instead of constructing a system or framework to trace the limits of a theological framework, or engaging in archaeological operations to discover layers or fragments of meanings that accent the contingency of theology, microtheology originates in the present and speaks into the present.
Microtheology’s focus on the small, beautiful, and ugly mundane actions enables the scholar to observe how life interpreted at the deepest level percolates up as subtle acts of everyday existence. Microtheology reveals how humans’ concern with the ultimate works its ways into concrete acts. The tiny, minute acts become a window into an embodied interpretation of ultimate concern, existential questions, or theological apparatuses.
Pentecostalism is ever making minute shifts in orthodoxy. Nowhere is this more evident than in West Africa where Pentecostalism is always trying to effect a tiny displacement of the rigid lines between tradition and novelty, mainline and margin. The central locus of divine-human encounter in the worship service and the primary theological activity of West African Pentecostals is not the Eucharist or preaching but prayer. More precisely, prayers as hedged, sustained, and driven by praise and worship anchor both beliefs and practices and characterize the Christian life. Prayers are objective, relational, and dispositional. The prayer-spirituality has as its objective the attainment of human flourishing as empowered by the Holy Ghost, building and sustaining of better relationships with God and with human beings (relational), and living a life of Christlike holiness (dispositional). This chapter presents the theology of West African Pentecostalism through the lens of worship-fed prayers. The theology is discerned from the everyday beliefs, practices, and affections, and from all that is ordinary and prosaic in the existence of West African Pentecostals.
I will use the metaphors of self-presentation and self-interpretation as a framework to analyze this prayer-infused worship. Each person in everyday social interaction produces for himself meanings; he guides and controls his identities and generates pleasures for himself within the interplay of meanings and identities. Thus this chapter focuses on the ordinary believer’s creative and interpretative capacities to rework materials from the clergy before they are consumed in the face of recalcitrant reality. Everyday theology is a second-order product of the correlation method. The method of correlation that Paul Tillich made famous charges theology to be relevant to the immediate context of its recipients by responding to the questions asked or obstacles confronting the people in a given social situation.4 But this theology produced by the church, preacher, or theologian has to be reworked in daily social circumstances. Correlated theology undergoes another round of correlation in the hands of the people, at the popular cultural level in the West African pentecostal community. The people make their own theology out of the resources and insights provided by the pulpit (armchair) system.
This does not mean that resources and insights for what can be called the popular-correlation method are only provided by the pulpit-correlation method. Believers do not passively consume the “products” of the pulpit. Their very consumption makes them into producers. The pulpit products produce a people who creatively produce their own wearable theology to further fit their “bodies,” their lifestyles in the here and now, or to circulate meanings and pleasures. The original sermon, preaching, or correlated theology is “a discursive structure of potential meanings and pleasures that constitutes a major resource of popular [correlation theology].”5 This resource and others are employed by believers to produce meanings and pleasures and to resist or evade the containment or disciplinary efforts of the pulpit or social system. Their point is not to overturn or raid the existing social system or religious epistemic system but to nudge it to yield spaces for survival, the preservation of some sense of identity, and production of meaning and pleasure. Indeed, everyday theology is constructed and sustained by the interface of everyday life, the messages and teachings of the pulpit industry (church), and the social situation of the people as it currently bears on the pursuit of human flourishing.
We will limit our study of everyday theology to three areas pertaining to human flourishing: meaning, identities, and pleasure. John Fiske makes the triplex of meaning, pleasure, and identity and the relationship between them an important lens for the study of popular culture. He says, “Culture is the constant process of producing meanings of and from our social experience, and such meanings necessarily produce a social identity for the people involved … Within the production and circulation of these meanings lies pleasure.”6 Our task of constructing the theology of West African Pentecostals is to show how people live their spirituality to make meanings, construct identities, and find pleasures. The generation and regeneration of meanings, identities, and pleasures are not without constraints. They are always produced within the circumscriptions of the social system that envelopes the believers and the boundaries patrolled by the clergy or the hierarchical authorities of the church. Contrary to the celebrated semiotic democracy and brotherhood of believers in pentecostal churches, there is some panoptic power over the people. The disciplinary energy of the clergy is always quick to deploy its moral, aesthetic, suasive, and legal powers to control the meanings, pleasures, and social identities of the people.
Pleasures in Worship
In the study of everyday theology it is vital to understand how the people use the products and services of the churches “to their own interest and find pleasures in using them to make their own meanings of their social identities and social relations.”7 Scholarly works on bodies of Pentecostals, however, have exclusively focused on the disciplining of the body, exerting of control over the body to support their spiritual quest or sustenance of salvation and holiness. Pleasures of the body or participation in pentecostal worship as motivated by pleasure, pleasure that centers on spiritual power to create new meanings in believers’ lives, and the pleasure of evading the traps of Satan have not received adequate scholarly attention. There are also pleasures that certain believers derive from disciplining their bodies or internalizing the disciplinary regimes in themselves. The body and its pleasures are important in understanding the human nature and material form of the pentecostal worship service.
Birgit Meyer has shown that pentecostal worship is a fabric of material and sensory experiences, an aesthetics of persuasion. “One of the most salient features of Pentecostal/charismatic churches is their sensational appeal; they often operate via music and powerful oratory, through which born-again Christians are enabled to sense the presence of the Holy Spirit with and in their bodies.”8 Annalisa Butticci says that the Prayer City of the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries in Nigeria “was purposely created to accommodate massive crowds of prayer warriors and to shape the emotional, sensory, physical and collective experience of prayer.”9 She describes a typical public collective prayer session with these words:
Thousands of men and women fight their battle against demonic spirits and manifest miraculous touch of the Holy Spirit by throwing their bodies to the ground … shaking, trembling, rolling, and screaming at the top of their voices. The smell, sound, touch, and sight of so many people furiously praying is overpowering. … The massive movement and sound of the crowd and the multi-sensory experience of this spiritual and social catharsis are all overwhelming.10
A pentecostal worship service is a means of release as much as re-creation, devotion as much as display, piety as much as play. Praise and worship is often an intense, pleasurable social experience in West African churches. Together worship and worshipers’ bodies become a site for the production of ecstasy, jouissance, and bliss. For some believers the pleasures come from the excitement of the body and its senses; for others they are from pure contemplation of the divine or a possible encounter with the Holy Spirit. The former pleasure, though it is given space in the worship, is also surveilled so that it does not exceed its limits. Pastors and their assistants are always equipped with clothes to cover exposed upper female thighs or quickly carry out women who appear to threaten the purity of the gathering when they are “slain” in the spirit. Rules and unruliness are always watched so that the pleasures and excesses of the body (especially the female body) do not undo social control or pollute the anointing deemed to be circulating in the assembly.
During my visits to pentecostal churches in West Africa, I have observed the power and supposed dangers of pleasures of worship services. The human body—in the intense moment of worship, especially in deliverance services—breaks down into its animal nature and, existing in that state of fracture, falls to the ground and displays serpentine movements. The believer’s body eventually convulses in muscular spasms before collapsing into stillness, which signifies the end of the state of the fracture. The whole episode symbolizes orgasmic pleasure just as any demonic possession can offer. Is this a manifestation of possession by demons or an extreme case of jouissance (erotic bliss) when the body breaks free of social control or the norms it had incarnated? The correct answer does not really matter. Whichever is the case, the members of the deliverance team will quickly move to cut off such a pleasure that threatens social control and corporate anointing. The human body in its animal realism, writhing on the ground with hands pressed to the sides, represents not only loss of behavioral control, but also a disruption of semiotic, social categories. More importantly, the spectacle of the transformed, liminal, or grotesque body is a reminder of the fragility of the categorical boundaries of formal or official theology.
Use of Language: Creating New Meaning and Identity
It is not only the spectacles of bodies writhing on the ground that challenge categorical boundaries of formal theology. Common expressions of daily conversations convey theological interpretations that not only indict nonpentecostal practices, but also celebrate pentecostal sensibility. Take, for instance, the common expression used in Ghana to describe a well-received worship service: “The anointing was great.” This phrase asserts both divine visitation and emotional energies given and received during the service. And this is only one dimension of the meaning. As Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu argues, the expression is also a subtle “critique of the staid and over-formalized liturgical forms of worship found in historic mission denominations.”11 In West African Pentecostalism, language in the form of common expressions is often used to create new meanings, formulate dynamics of identity, stage a battleground between forms of aesthetics, and to differentiate between inferior and superior or past and future.
The biblical language as a system is tactically appropriated and expressed as a “display” in the public to affirm community membership and identity. The quaint terminology of the old King James Bible, for instance, constitutes a cultural capital, which can be spent to acquire respectability in everyday life or deployed to extend the power of Spirit-filled words over personal and social existential spaces. The use of the language in this way serves to affirm or resist commonly accepted meanings in ways that acknowledge the transitory nature of most daily interpersonal encounters. Biblical language “is not [always] used to convey social, common meanings inherent in it as a system, but the unique transitory meanings of its speakers.”12
There is more to language use in everyday West African pentecostal theology. The everyday use of theological or religious language is often based on associative relation rather than logical connection, involving a great deal of parallel processing. A West African Pentecostal in prayer says, “Holy Ghost sword, shear, shear, shear; I cut the bars of iron asunder.” Holy Ghost sword simultaneously means he has taken up the sword of the Holy Ghost in his hand or there is now an imaginary sword in his hand that is empowered by Jesus, and he is announcing that Jehovah Nissi is now fighting for him. Holy Ghost is not just the name of the Third Person of the Trinity; it is a cliché that articulates the dominant worldview and ideology of West African Pentecostalism. The name metaphorizes the power, invisibility, and adoration motifs of Pentecostals. The invisible Holy Spirit represents and performs the supernatural power of God as he is evoked by a spiritual warrior’s adoration.
Shear, shear, shear is the whistling sound of the sword’s blade as it slices through the defenses of the prayer warrior’s enemies. The man’s voice that makes the whistling sound is accompanied by his right hand furiously cutting the air like a blade. The punning meaning that arises as his hand becomes a physical sword as well as a spiritual sword of God—and his voice duplicating the killer-sound of the sword-hand—brings together many images, sounds, and words in an associative freedom that is both liberating and threatening in its embodiedness.
I cut the bars of iron asunder is what the whole prayer exercise accomplishes as the pentecostal warrior frees himself from the spiritual cages or imagines himself being re-created as a new, triumphal person. In this particular prayer session and its use of language, three disparate but simultaneous bodies—the man, the Holy Ghost, and that of the implied new man—are in play and giving resources to each other. Understanding this prayer is not about deciphering the logic of the sentence or structure of theological discourse. Comprehension requires reading—the ability to bring “oral, vernacular culture to bear” upon the sentence, requiring “the parallel (not sequential) processing of words and image, of puns within words, of puns between words and image.”13 This ability to assess vernacular culture of the spiritual warrior opens up the deep structure of his prayer. At once he is calling on supreme power and exuding power, imaginatively re-creating himself through performative speech to give his life a new meaning, and thus forging a new social identity. Pleasure is attached to this social identity because it is rooted in his new born-again identity and the joy of belonging to a vivifying body of Christ. The pleasures produced from this kind of spiritual exercise are of practical use, functional and relevant in the day-to-day negotiation of social experience on the micropolitical level.
Everyday theology brings to received (pulpit, official, scriptural) theology everyday oral culture that underlies, precedes, exceeds, subverts, contests, and affirms it. Everyday theology is full of contradictions: it contains the meanings of pulpit theology and those that insist that the people’s theology is theirs to use and that they do not require pastoral or academic theologians’ approval. Resistance and affirmation are always present in it and this ambiguity marks its creativity. Only those who bring an inappropriate set of criteria to judge it think this ambiguity or complexity undermines its creativity and aesthetic appeal. To avoid this, we at least need to pay attention to how pleasures are produced at the intersection of meanings and identities, and how pleasures help to generate the people’s theology.
Sweetness of Jesus’s Blood: Meanings in Pleasures
The clock strikes 4:00 a.m. on Saturday morning in Brooklyn, New York. The Nigerian Pentecostal church has just concluded its night vigil that began at 10:00 p.m. the previous day. Leftover wafers and small cups of juice rest on the Holy Communion table at the right corner of the sanctuary, in front of the altar space. An eleven-year-old boy named Emmanuel walks over to the pastor, who is clearing the table, and asks to drink from one of the cups. He has asked during past communion services, which happens only on the first Friday night of the month, but the pastor has never obliged him. This time the pastor agrees. Emmanuel drinks the red juice and exclaims, “Jesus, your blood is sweet!” He then licks his lips, rolling his tongue over them to suck in the remnants of the liquid. This is his first time of drinking the communion wine, because in this particular church children under the age of thirteen and not yet baptized by immersion are not permitted to partake in the Holy Communion.
Why did this child literally characterize the juice as the sweet blood of Jesus? He clearly knew that the juice was not the blood of Jesus; he had seen the pastor pour the red juice from the Kedem grape juice bottle during preparations for the service. He was also not schooled in the niceties of the theology of transubstantiation. Adults spoke about the juice as the blood of Jesus but simultaneously regarded it as the juice from the Kedem bottle. The adults might have thought that pastor’s utterances in consecrating the cups of juice endued them with spiritual powers, but they did not believe they were actually drinking the physical blood of Jesus. The child was different. His acceptance of the liturgical truth places him outside the meanings and power of the dominant adult belief system.
Is there really a contradiction between the child’s belief on the actual (transformed) nature of the juice and that of the adults? Not really. First, following Jacques Rancière I will argue that the boy and the adults are caught up together in a particular distribution of the sensible, in one way of framing a sensory space and determining how the transcendental presents itself to sense experience.14 In their shared sensorium, the thing-in-itself and its representation/symbol, the invisible and visible, can exchange their properties. This relation is both asserted and denied in everyday theology. Second, let us not forget that Emmanuel knew that the “blood” he drank after the service came from the Kedem juice bottle. Before he drank, the adults had partaken of the consecrated juice, felt its materiality of life and supervening spiritual power coursing through their bodies, and believed the contact to heal them physically or spiritually. The adults and Emmanuel were not concerned with blood, not blood from wine or juice, but with the “blood principle,” the materiality of sensuous encounter, bodily engagement that underlies and precedes pentecostal spirituality and the vitality of life/existence. In West African Pentecostalism, religion is tasted, touched, smelled, seen, heard, and danced. In the committed engagement with the Spirit the body becomes a religious machine. The pentecostal body is an apparatus for seeing, hearing, tasting, dancing, incorporating, and feeling the numinous. I use the term religious machine not to say that pentecostal religious experience is mechanistic, rule-governed, calculable, or linear. The term is used to gesture to the virtuosity of the pentecostal body in divine-human interactions to both produce and consume religious goods (for example, semiotic commodities and emotional energies).
Let us press further our description of material and embodied sacraments with the example of anointing oil. Olive oil is used for cooking and when it is consecrated it becomes anointing oil for rubbing on the body or head. As anointing oil it is sacramental and used for religious purposes only. But in everyday pentecostal practice in West Africa, anointing oil can also be poured into a boiling pot of food in a use that is neither religious nor sacrilegious. The believer in the kitchen frees the anointing oil from the binary opposition to use it to generate new meanings and pleasures for her. This behavior is a key part of everyday theology and social practices. Religious objects, ideas, or practices are often pried apart from their original uses and contexts and are combined in a new social and signifying context that reworks their original meaning or symbolic value. The assortment of anointing oil and food, derived from a transimmanent bricolage, could be termed cooked sacrament, a semiotic-numinous delicacy with a culinary edge.
Shopping as Spiritual Guerrilla Warfare
Just as religious objects can be pried apart from their original uses, Pentecostals “profane” the sacred aura and meaning that attend to window shopping in the “cathedrals of consumption,” opening it up into new possible uses and meanings without demonizing it. There is a new kind of shopping that has emerged in West Africa as poor Pentecostals encounter the lure and forces of modern goods that late capitalism offers. I call this buying practice born-again shopping. This is a term that describes Pentecostals who visit marketplaces and malls, engage in window shopping, sensuously consume wares, and occasionally touch them or pray at or over them without spending money.15
The approach is a guerrilla tactic that invades the physical and “psychic” spaces of the goods in the market in the hopes that God will eventually provide the money to buy them or cause them to come to the person as a gift. In born-again shopping, the commodity is constructed as the object of the pentecostal voyeuristic look, which places the believer in a position of special power over it and gives him possession of the commodity, or at least of its image. The pleasure of doing this translates the promises of wealth-and-health gospel, which is rooted in cargo-cult mentality, into everyday relevance in the period between their pronouncement and fulfillment. Born-again shopping is not only about pleasure; it is also a tactic of the poor and weak to establish themselves in a controlling position over the market-commodity system that assiduously renders them powerless and dependent. It is important to understand that the shape of everyday theology is socially determined by the weight of the world, excessive suffering, the gravity of social existence; the abrasive forces of information and meanings from the dominant, oppressive social system that assault them, which have to be reworked for personal and socially pertinent meanings; and the fluidity of daily existence, their intransigent social experiences.
Prayer as the Locus Classicus of Everyday Theology
The everyday theology that we have set forth is best exemplified by the deep structure of prayer. The everyday practices of believers live under the sign of meaning structure of prayer. Prayer gives rise to or anticipates thought that guides everyday practice. It anticipates thought because practices that give form to meaning are already an interpretation. Prayers in turn live under the logic and teleoaffectivity of everyday practices. We might say that everyday theology, for West African Pentecostals, is a sort of unity-of-prayer-and-practice. This is to say that prayers craft everyday theology and the prayers are also forms of practice.
Together everyday practices and prayer—constituent parts of everyday life—function under the sign of power, the projection of traditional and modern, spiritual and nonspiritual, forms of power into the daily, microsociological experiences of Pentecostals. The centrality of prayer and its imbrication in everyday practices derive from the sociohistorical significance of power in West Africa. As Matthews Ojo writes:
I am convinced that nothing occupies the attention of Africans as much as power, particularly its manifestation, whether in the form of material wealth, political and social statuses, traditional privileges like chieftaincy titles, colonial heritage, etc. … Power is focal to social relations for most [Africans], amid a social milieu where “power” whether in terms of ethnic linkages, financial resources, filial relations, and business connections have been able to achieve. Crucial to the life and activities of Charismatic movements is the articulation and appropriation of new forms of power in very pragmatic terms to mediate and address [their] contemporary felt needs.16
In West African pentecostal communities, power is primarily accessible through intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit and prayer. Prayer is the concrete analysis of a given social situation, scripture, and theology in order to change social circumstances and their interpretation. Prayer analyzes the specific crisis of inherited theology, its particular cultural situation, and its present predicament. Prayer does the same for personal or social predicaments. The pentecostal prayer retrieves from practical existence the forms theology must take if it is to effectively translate Christianity into the African culture. The attentive eye that the prayer warrior brings to examining how various forms of theology touch the ground in real life enables her to discern the theological ideas that constitute meaning for her. In this way prayer enables theology to both respond to the questions in a culture’s creative self-interpretation and to challenge them.
Prayer does all these within the available modes of exchange in West Africa. Pentecostal prayer in West Africa pivots around four principles or modes of exchange, enabling it to socially determine the diverse orientations of everyday theology or practices. These modes of exchange also reflect communal norms about power or the intercourse between powers of being. An analysis of oral prayers and published prayers reveals that the intercourse between humans and the Holy Spirit is structured around the four pragmatic notions of pure gift, reciprocity (gift and counter-gift), plunder and redistribution, and instrumental faith.17 In the mode of pure gift, God’s response to human needs is taken to be a gratuitous act of benevolence. When God gives in this mode, the gift is complete and there is no need for a reciprocal gift. God is expected to show God’s superiority and believers accept his gifts without making return gifts, positioning themselves as children, clients, and servants of an omnipotent chief. An example of such a divine gift is the pure pleasure that bodies experience during worship services. In the mode of reciprocity, there is gift and counter-gift. Pentecostals believe that offering, fasting, and other disciplinary efforts can be directly exchanged for divine blessings and approval. The prayer language of the man who used his hand as a sword that we described earlier embeds this logic. He hopes to exchange time and energy expended in prayers for personal transformation.
Under the mode of plunder and distribution, the divine-human intercourse is solicited and sustained in order for the Pentecostal believer to acquire the necessary power to plunder the resources of enemies or nonbelievers and redistribute them for personal gains and the work of God’s kingdom. Born-again shopping is an example of this principle of intercourse.
Finally, we have instrumental faith. Most West African Pentecostals perceive faith as the power of universal exchangeability in transactions of the spiritual realm or intercourse with the Holy Spirit. Faith is accumulated in order to acquire goods or translate “spiritual blessings that are hanging in the air” into physical goods and accomplishments. Here spiritual intercourse has taken the form of commodity exchange, and faith-as-money is the intermediary. It appears that with faith (as indexed by the name-it-and-claim-it gospel) believers can bypass the usual groveling and pleadings before a deity and move on to an exchange transaction that is presumably grounded on mutual consent between deity and human beings. At any rate, the consent of God might not even be solicited at all times, because, as the faith-drenched Pentecostals claim, “you shall decree a thing and it shall be established unto you” (Job 22:28 NIV). They believe that faith can produce wealth at will and this partly explains the rise of born-again shopping. The prayer warrior swinging his hand as an imaginary sword and shouting “shear, shear, shear” is also drawing on instrumental faith to create the new man.
In any given prayer session or round of daily experience, these principles or modes of exchange operate simultaneously and in mutual interrelationship. So when I highlight one mode as characteristic of a prayer form or daily transaction, it is only to indicate that this form is dominant, while the others are subordinated to it. In the long-going rapid-fire prayers or everyday practices of West African Pentecostals the different modes of exchange turn over quickly.
It is germane to mention that the practices that constitute an everyday form of theology do not represent a domain of practices separate from these four principles or modes of exchange. Daily practices of Pentecostals are deeply connected to the modes of exchanges or a complex combination of them such that the principles can be used to shed light on them. But this should not be construed to mean that the organizing principles of daily practices derive from them. The principles of divine-human intercourse may have originated from human-to-human exchanges or from everyday theology of African traditional religions, which subsequently transferred to a new register. Whatever their source, they are today under the power, logic, and allure of the notion of the split God.
Senses and Sensation: Aesthetics of Practice
In chapter 3, we discussed Annalisa Butticci’s work on real presence among West African Pentecostal immigrants in Italy.18 Let us recapitulate. The immigrants, acting against the background of the notion of a split God, long for and construct or constitute real presences by throwing their bodies and their objects into a clearing or gap in order to sustain, expand, and exploit it. Let me unpack what gap or clearing means in this context as it is connected with the Lacanian Real. Butticci’s skills in excavating the depths of pentecostal aesthetics of worship helped me 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). There is 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). They 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 the Pentecostals’ grasping or full understanding no matter how close they approach him. They approach him 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 would 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 saw but just 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 this 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.
The role of bodies and senses—the aesthetics/aisthesis of religion—are crucial in the study of Pentecostalism. Any teasing out of the everyday form of theology can ill afford to ignore how believers employ their bodies and senses to enable religious experiences. The study of everyday theology cannot afford to ignore how believers establish portable links with the power of the Holy Spirit, and how they receive and sustain anointing on immigration documents. Scholars will reap huge dividends when they pay attention to how the body serves as a weapon (through its capacity to touch and sanctify objects, to vocalize spiritual commands and prayers, to feel the presence of God in job interview rooms, etc.) in the struggle for survival.
Birgit Meyer argues aesthetics—sense and sensational forms—is central not only to understanding how Pentecostals and charismatic Christians sense the presence of the Holy Spirit, but also to their politics. “Understanding religion as offering a particular aesthetics, which forms religious subjects by tuning their senses and enabling modes of embodying the divine through sensational forms, bring together sensation and power. Aesthetics is not outside power structures but enmeshed with them.”19
To ignore aesthetics in any analysis of the everyday form of theology is to ignore the role of bodies (its discipline and technology of the self) as the weapons of the weak, the body as site for the manifestation of the divine, and how a pentecostal aesthetics of persuasion is mobilized through the staging of miracles and healing on the body. We have argued in the introduction and chapter 3 of this book that the pentecostal belief in the miraculous and real presence is a pointer to the split God. Part of that argument goes like this: the starting point for grasping the Pentecostal view of God as split is to focus on their inclination toward the “non-All,” non-whole, of reality. Because Pentecostals believe that there are cracks in reality, tears in the phenomenal curtain over the noumenal that allows “miracles” to eventuate or spirit-filled believers to access things-in-themselves, their actions cannot reflect a harmoniously ordered God.
The Miraculous in a World of the Split God and Split Reality
Scholarly works on African Pentecostals have invested a lot of energies and publications on grand macro narratives and events, painting the big sociological picture. It is time to develop microsociological analyses, showing how African Pentecostals flow from situation to situation as they draw from their religious and cultural capitals. These will provide insights to inform models of the everyday form of theology or the study of its organization. It is also time to understand what animates African Pentecostals’ view of how reality is ordered and how their reality responds to various forms of spiritual energies from situation to situation.
The study of the organization of everyday forms of theology of West African Pentecostals must pay adequate attention to the relentless construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of their understanding or practical notions of destiny and miracle. Underlying African Pentecostals’ interpretations of their world and ensuing day-to-day theologies of hope and survival are a joint, rejiggered conceptualization of destiny and miracle, the ordering and responding complexity of God. The spiritual energies relating to these two notions or dynamics constantly invite and capture African Pentecostals’ loyalties. They believe that these enable them to move not only beyond their inherited boundaries and capabilities, but also beyond the obstacles to human flourishing they encounter in their lifeworlds. Responses to greetings or questions that take the form of “God dey!,” “To God be the glory,” “It is God,” or “Na God” are affirmations of the joint operations of the miraculous and destiny in believers’ existence. These utterings are shortened discourses of a certain social-political imaginary, the naming of certain revolutionary futures worked by God-talk, supernatural allegiance, agents’ decisions, and social practices.
Let us first examine the issue of destiny.20 Afe Adogame, in his study of African Pentecostal immigrants in Europe, points us to the thinking that there is no accident in their world, everything happens according to God’s plan.
In fact, the stories of illegal immigration and unapproved residence permits are sometimes legitimized as sacred narratives. Pastors encourage members (undocumented immigrants) not to “look at their past histories or present predicaments, but look forward to God’s future plan for and with them,” “I do not care how you came to this country. It was not by any mistake, but by God’s perfect design. God brought you to this country for a purpose.”21
In this kind of world where all things are in God’s firm control, the responses to greetings are constant reminders of this key belief. Now a typical philosophical theologian might think that, in such a world tightly controlled by God, the expectation for the new and surprises will be minimal. But this is not the case. I-don’t-care theology is not vested in the niceties of systematic or tightly argued constructive theology. The concern is with what people do and experience—their daily functionings. Religion or communion with God is a capability that is valued for its own sake as well as for the functionings it enables. Miracles, surprises, irruptions of events, which boost functionings, are always welcome. This is the God-drenched world of the expected unexpected. God controls a world that is very unruly, punishing, and frustrating, and God’s reign is indexed by the appearance of the unexpected at any time to alleviate human sufferings, to cover shortfalls in functionings. The sudden irruption of the unexpected is the outworking of individual destiny or purpose that God has put in place. Destiny (order) works through freedom of irruptions, by disrupting the order of things/beings. In fact, the unexpected, the power of the unexpected, or contingency is almost equated with God or God’s action.
Existence and Social Analysis: The Grounding of an Everyday Form of Theology
The beauty of Adogame’s book lies in the fact that it potentially offers raw materials for crafting the everyday form of theology of West African migrants in Europe. The subliminal aspect of the book is that there are positions inherent in Adogame’s thought, but that he himself did not comprehend their implications deeply enough. The book focuses on theologies that are acted out. The transnational dimensions of immigrants’ lives are important and the author does nice work of situating them in concrete demographic, political, economic, social, and legal settings in both host and home communities. Adogame rightly notes how “[t]he lived experiences of African Christian immigrants shape their spiritual/religious lives, just as theologies are constructed from these experiences and the reservoir of indigenous religious worldviews retained by them in their ‘new homes.’ ”22
Despite this insight the author often hesitates to follow his own leads and insights, fails to deepen the reader’s sociological understanding of how “non-theologians” forge liberatory theology and religious sensibilities in the concrete crucibles of everyday life. One has to be extremely patient and skillful to read the inner grooves of the lines of his text in order to decipher that he is always making an attempt to construct what we have called the everyday form of theology that never comes through. The author is unconsciously always piecing together a theology from below, a theology of the street that responds to existential needs of people in the here and now, a theology of resistance and liberation by ordinary folks.23
African Christian Diaspora presents, in unsteady steps, a sociology that might undergird an everyday form of theology and everyday forms of resistance. It attempts to present the story of a marginalized people resisting domination, alienation, degradation of their humanity, and marshaling theologies to make sense of their conditions and their praxes. The acts of African immigrants in host societies show that they have not consented to dominance and they have not given up on theological reflection. Their theorization of their daily experiences posits a God whose ordering and responding complexity counters that of the governing structures of their host nations.
An everyday form of theology is emerging from African Christian immigrants who are mindful of their embeddedness in structures of domination, discrimination, and oppressions as these are generated by the dynamics of race, class, gender, documentation, nationality, language/accent, and empire. This theology is a work and way of being that seeks to liberate migrants from all that thwarts flourishing life. Drawing from daily experiences, scripture, and pretheoretical doctrinaire theology, African immigrants develop a set of theoretical constructs to frame their experiences, to organize and guide their work and way of being.
Adogame is a sociologist who has done an admirable job of providing the ethnographic data and sociological insights for philosophers or theologians to construct how to extract the key forms and contents of everyday theology and to ground the theoretical-theological constructs of ordinary Pentecostals in the very existential conditions that gave rise to them in the first place. There are two issues in the preceding statement: methodology of extracting an everyday form of theology (microtheology) and the philosophical grounding of theoretical constructs of ordinary folks (some philosophy of existence).
The foregoing discussions in this chapter suggest that “academic theology” will not be a good partner in the first task. Academic theology, which usually functions under the sign of logos, is not a good tool for those interested in the kind of everyday form of theology we have put forward in this chapter.24 The theology I have extracted is from the practices of participants’ lives under the sign of meaning. This is a meaning that gives rise to or anticipates thought. It anticipates thought because the practices that give form to the meaning are already an interpretation. Using the techniques of microtheology, I brought them (logos and meaning) together under the symbol of existence, the temporospatial continuum where logos and meaning both stand in and stand out. Existence transcends religion.
By this approach, I have interpreted Pentecostalism as a dimension of the adherents’ existence, and not only as an external reality that demands integrative thinking or a window into reality that makes events and happenings intelligible. In general, this is what an everyday form of theology under the symbol of existence demands. We must understand meaning in order to live in the aura of the logos, but we must function in the aura of logos in order to understand or articulate meaning. The ensuing outcome of this approach situates everyday theology of West African Pentecostalism not only in existence; it is also an interpretation of existence.
Existence is about how to produce, reproduce, sustain, and cause to flourish human lives in social communities and with and through nature that encompasses and exceeds human beings. This is a universal principle of ethics (life) that always demands concrete fulfillment and is instantiated (phenomenalized) in cultures, modes of life, and ways of being. Since we are concerned with an everyday form of theology, how did we articulate it in a work like this in the light of material existence? To this end, we need to ask: What is the content of such a theology? What does it recognize as the agonistic striving of its subjects/adherents/addressees? What does it posit as their hope? The content of this theology is the improvement of material life, by agonistically striving against or negating obstacles to the realization of this content and harboring hope for the realization of what is lacking in the actualization of the content.
The driving interest of West African pentecostal theology is not so much a negative critique of social existence, but rather about what conditions are necessary for an affirmation of social existence that could at the same time be critical of the obstacles to improvement in material life. It is a theory (method and content) about the conditions of possibility of living well that presupposes spending eternal life with Jesus Christ.
The addressees of this theology are essentially and primarily people who live in misery and under the social weight of oppression, state neglect, and necrophiliac capitalism, whose immediate interest in social emancipation finds expression in economic terms. These are people who are continually expecting the messianic arrow of time (in the form of the new, happiness, prosperity, and redemption) to cut across, to leap into, to erupt, and to disrupt their historic arrow of time, which is an eternal recycling of the same surplus suffering.
And to continue with Walter Benjamin’s metaphor, each moment of fasting, prayer, praise and worship, and scripture reading is seen as the small door through which the messianic arrow might enter, when the discontinuous time erupts into the repetitive continuous history of “suffering and smiling.” Theology and those subject to theology are working to find and stand in that messianic gap (or flashes of it) that erupts in the repetitive history of the same in order to push back the flow of excess suffering from the past and anticipated download of additional suffering from the future. The quotidian struggle of the subjects is to transform the weighty historic time into the light messianic time, or to put it differently, to hold down messianic time and transform it into historic time. This is their existential struggle. This is the reality (human victims’ material needs) that is before theology, the prior assumption of theology and religious practice, but it is in turn constituted by theology as a discourse by a community of victims.25
Earlier I stated that there are two issues in the preceding statement: methodology of extracting an everyday form of theology and the philosophical grounding of theoretical constructs of ordinary folks. Earlier I stated that the task of extracting the key forms and contents of everyday theology and grounding the theoretical-theological constructs of ordinary Pentecostals involved two things: philosophy of existence and microtheology. We have dealt with the first of the two but the second two remain, which will now bring these reflections and the whole chapter to a (provisional) conclusion.
Concluding Thoughts: Microtheology of Everyday Life
The preceding analyses derive from my microtheological approach to the interactions between the pentecostal apparatus and believers in West Africa. This is not the method of “academic theology,” with preference on knowledges stored in books. In a certain sense, academic theology is an interpretation and reinterpretation of texts of theologians, philosophers, and others. It is an exercise in textual reading, textual criticism, and the mining of meanings from texts. The texts are usually academic essays and books, and not the tactics of everyday life, popular uses of theological language, or habits and thoughts of ordinary folks. Everyday theology, as we have shown, can be an excellent source of theology for academic theologians or it can stand all by itself. My move here to accent everyday acts as sources of theology is not an attempt to reveal the subtle, subterranean movements of the divine life in quotidian human existence. It also does not express a desire to work out any notion of religious a priori in human life or social existence. For me, everyday theology is where we can take a bird’s-eye view of the kind of spirituality that is under the sway of a split God, or at least is where we show the way Pentecostals materialize their jouissance in a set of practices that are ultimately informed by the notion of a split God. It is also where we can discern the stirrings of West African Pentecostalism’s yes and no to the totality of Christianity’s interpretation of life or existence. Everyday theology is also the principal source for microtheology, a minimally explored dimension of pentecostal scholarship. Microtheology investigates what people actually do in social situations with their faith, identifies what kind of interactions actually happen that are evidently marked and colored by beliefs, and ferrets out the theological meanings of such interactions.
Pentecostal theology has made admirable strides in many areas, but it is still focused on global-level, large-scale constructive projects or macro configuration of thoughts. The key thinkers of the Pentecostal movement are only grappling with the grand theories of spirituality, doctrines, kingdom of God, pentecostal distinctive of baptism in the Holy Spirit, pneumatology, interreligious dialogue, Pentecostal principle, and the formulation of global theology, to name just a few. These efforts give short shrift to the local, face-to-face, ephemeral patterns of everyday life, small aspects of encounters, and the flux and variation of the social life of Pentecostals. Apart from a few exceptions, the major thinkers have so far ignored interactional situations and interaction rituals of the social world of Pentecostals. This need not be so. Theologians need innovative ideas, tools, and frameworks to theorize and theologize about the everyday life of ordinary Pentecostals. The tools of their regular constructive/systematic theologies are too cumbersome, blunt, and ill-suited for this new task. They need to turn to what I have named earlier as microtheology, which is more suited for the task. Microtheology will complement and expand traditional macrotheological approaches to pentecostal spirituality.
Microtheology is an interpretative analysis of everyday embodied theological interactions and agency at the individual, face-to-face level. The study is one of everyday social interactions of individuals or small groups that demonstrate the linkages between spirituality (practices and affections) and embodied theological ideas (beliefs). Theologies, beliefs, and doctrines play an important role in structuring the daily, microsociological experiences of Pentecostals, and theologians need to understand these influences. Social interactions are like sociological transformers, taking the powerful current of theology “from above and distributing it in voltages” that the micro-moments can take, mixing it with some emotional energies as resources, and turning it into spirituality.26 To put it differently, spirituality (practice) takes the strain of theology from above, breaking it down, mixing it with some emotions as motivations, and turning it into an everyday form of theologies (beliefs) as outcomes. Real, useable theologies issue from the hard-bitten consumers of theologies generated within the customary or hierarchical orders.
I need to quickly state that the approach to theology I am trying to develop in this chapter is not limited to studying how theology from above is transformed when it touches the ground. It also seeks to understand the role of microaggressions and microaffirmations—in this case microtheological aggressions and microtheological affirmations—that Pentecostals display in everyday life as they interact with people who are higher, at the same level, or lower in power. In what ways do Pentecostals engage in theological microaggressions against non-Pentecostals in interactional situations? What about the use of microaffirmations in interactional situations and for fostering moral solidarity and trust? What roles do microaggressions and microaffirmations play in social dominance or in the acceptance or rejection of status among Pentecostals in everyday life? Besides, microtheology offers historical analyses of shifts in rituals of everyday life, microstructural shifts in standards of interactions, and boundary-marking rituals and anti-rituals.
To do all this well we need expertise in thick cultural analysis and competence in micro-empirical observation of social interactions. I will illustrate this set of skills by analyzing the hand movements of the African Christian on hearing bad news. This view describes spirituality as seen from below, from the angle of the behaviors, gestures, conversations, and situations in which theology is actually acted out. I observed pentecostal women in Kalabari (Nigeria) make circular motions with their clenched right hands over their heads and then snap their fingers to intimate the rejection of bad news. When a woman hears bad, frightening news she makes the cyclical motion with her hand while saying E Tamuno oke (“my God form a hedge of protection around me”). The making of the cyclical motion with a clenched hand signifies ritual cleansing of the self. The hand is clenched to symbolize an egg that is often used in traditional rituals of purification. In the setting of African traditional religions (ATR), a priest performing the ritual of cleansing takes an egg in his palm, makes a circular motion over the body of the client from head to toe, and then throws the egg hard on the earth to break it into pieces. By this he signifies that the pollutions, curses, and evil intrusions in/over the person have been collectively transferred to the egg, neutralized, and dispersed to the four winds. The client is thus decontaminated, hence, free from danger. The pentecostal woman who does the circling motion with her right hand is representing this ritual in a shorthand way. But when she adds E Tamuno oke, she is transferring the ritual from the registers of ATR into those of Christianity.
The woman’s micro-act speaks volumes about her embodied theologies and cultural milieu. She might not go to ATR priests for consultation and she might even excoriate them as “demonic,” but her bodily motion draws from two forms of regimes of discourse. Her microtheology works on a diagonal trajectory between the ideas of ATR and Christianity. While the woman does not have the theological sophistication and language to craft a global theology, her diagonal trajectory daily opens a new alternative, an everyday form of theology that creates a third regime of discourse. She is able to navigate her situations in new ways by connecting the two religious discourses and claims and by creating a new commonality among them. Herein lies the originality of theology at the micro, everyday level. At this ground level, theology is always conjoined with practice; rejiggered doctrine is wedded with spirituality.
Theology moves about as actions, microaggressions, enculturated bodily expressions, or underlying patterns of behavior. In this kinetic rendezvous with existence, theology does not symbolize belief as in clarification of doctrines, nor does it prescribe what behavior ought to be as in dogmatic ethics; it is behavior. Everyday behavior not only rescripts theology; it also represents the agonistic but correlational relations that Pentecostals have with it. The everyday form of theology is a dynamic theory of human flourishing that is routinely enacted by individuals in their daily encounters and situations. It is a reflection that is born in and borne by their praxis. Pentecostal theologians need to begin to focus on this kind of spirituality from below, theology as actually acted out.
Another example that illustrates expertise in thick cultural analysis and competence in micro-empirical observation come from Afe Adogame’s 2013 book, The African Christian Diaspora. He gives some weight to the everyday situational dynamics in his analysis of transnational Pentecostalism, paying attention to immediate social experiences of African migrants in their interactions with fellow Pentecostals. Adogame in this book exhibits the theoretical impulses of Erving Goffman without being conscious of them. His attention to details in microsituations is revealed in this passage:
In actual fact, theologies are acted out from simple exchanges of pleasantries “How are you?” and the response it evokes among Ghanaians, such as “By God’s grace”; or Nigerian replying: “We thank God,” “God dey!,” “E go better!,” “We go survive!,” “To God be the Glory!”; or further as some Kenyan-led churches are accustomed to responding: “I am blessed and mightily favoured.” Such wide-ranging responses elicit narratives woven around day-to-day life experiences. … It is indeed a matter of conjecture how and in what ways such theologies of “everyday life” partly verbalized by African Christians can enrich “classroom” theologies common among many Western Christians.27
Goffman’s analysis of daily rituals in everyday life provides us with a powerful tool to elaborate on what Adogame calls “theologies of everyday life.” Goffman is noted for analyzing the role of everyday expressions (such as “How are you?,” “Good night,” “Hello,” and “Goodbye”) in social structures and showing that they are not meaningless. They mark and enact social relationships, beliefs, and symbolic acts in the structures of social existence. The greetings, as Adogame has recorded, indicate how Christians regard their relationships and daily life. They are considered as practices and processes acted out in the sacred presence of God. These greetings and their responses are not just meaningless expressions or acts, but are important rituals. They are rites of those who believe they live their daily lives in the presence of God and are subjects of God’s grace. The responses not only show respect for God, but they also constitute the person-to-person encounters as sacred. In the lifeworld of Nigerian or Ghanaian born-agains, reality is divided between the profane and sacred realms, which are viably permeated and integrated by the unseen world. Certain everyday rituals, like responses to greetings and blessings of food before eating, confer sacredness on what is profane. In particular, responses to greetings stand not only as palpable means of this conferment, but also as a marker of religious identity, a presentation of self in everyday public life.
There is a fine-grained liberatory aspect to these verbal rituals. If we think of social life as taking place in an ecology of struggles between God and Satan (which includes oppressive powers of society) over the life of believers,28 then in order to maximize one’s chances of survival and success, it is usually necessary to explicitly define one’s allegiance or hope in the struggle.29 “E go better!,” “We go survive!,” “To God be the Glory!,” and their equivalents are used to define, invoke, or sustain the sacred canopy over the ecology of a person’s everyday life. And they are also used to mark (nudge or hail) daily transitions to microvictories.
These responses enact daily resistance to destructive powers of evil, of the devil that ever threatens life. They are regarded as daily “prophetic utterances” to ward off the “satanic or demonic arrows” that fly in the daytime. Thus, the verbal rituals are at least doing three things: marking transitions, accentuating relationship with the divine, and enacting resistance to potential attacks on flourishing life.
Adogame, a sociologist, made his fine-tuned observations because he was interested in capturing something of the “theologies of everyday life” of the Pentecostals he was studying.30 Adogame’s commitment to the microsituational is founded on his belief that “religion is usually not thought out in the agora of theology, but lived out in the marketplace of Africa. Their theology is not in books but in their heads, thoughts, utterance and day-to-day actions and life modes. In the diaspora, there is a certain resilience of the action-orientedness of African Christianities.”31
Adogame’s analysis points to the vast potentials of the sociological and theological constructs that undergird the everyday life of migrants. In order for pentecostal theologians to properly understand, interpret, and advance “theologies of everyday life” as set forth by sociologists and anthropologists such as Adogame, they need to crosswire James Scott’s notion of subalterns’ resistance to authority and domination and Goffman’s interaction ritual analysis. Scott enjoins us to investigate the public and hidden transcripts of oppressed people in their interactions with power. Goffman shows us how incidents, interactions, the chain of encounters over time, and situation as an emergent property shape individuals.32 An everyday form of theology is a dynamic reflection on encounters and situations by individuals, a reflection that is not separate from their praxis. Pentecostal believers reflect on the common realities of everyday life theologically in ways that recognize the interplay of structures (of society and situations) and their own agency. The scholarly community needs the kind of microsociological analyses that Goffman is famous for in order to enable theoretically oriented theologians to engage with this emerging theology.
Some readers may be thinking at this point that microtheology’s focus on individual (micro) actions constitutes a path onto solipsistic theology. Microtheology as an everyday form of theology is not solipsistic. It aims to capture in its form of theology the actions that express the import of theology. Actions or acts (which by definition are social) are the concrete materials, the contents through which the import (the meaning-making interpretation of life, the meaning-giving depth or end of religion) is experienced. Microtheology is the concrete analysis of theology in order to change it. It analyzes the specific crisis of inherited theology, its particular cultural situation, and its present predicament.
Microtheology reveals both the beautiful and ugly parts of theology. Systematized, immanently consistent, theology crafted in the dusk of the day is an erudite “high” that presents the beautiful and comforting parts of a religion minus the ugly and disturbing counterparts. By concealing the unbecoming parts, systematized theology panders to civilization’s longing for order, control, protection, and boundary. Microtheology retrieves from practical existence the forms theology must take if it is to effectively translate its religion into the culture. The attentive eye that microtheology brings to examining how theology touches the ground in real life enables the theologian to discern the theological ideas that constitute meaning for a set of believers. In this way microtheology enables theology to both respond to the questions in a culture’s creative self-interpretation and to challenge it. As it does all these it is evaluating and reanimating itself in order to remain as a font of meaning-giving ideas. Thus, microtheology performs an important service for theology. Without microtheology pentecostal theological ideas might soon turn into ghosts, living on and having a life of their own when the human bodies and social flesh that originally carried them have long decayed. The cultivated, refined, and erudite theology must feed from the trough of the practical and worldly wisdom and adaptations of microtheology to fend off all spectrality.
In sum, to understand the spirit of a period of theology the “texts” we must read are not the works of intellectual sublimity of systematic theologians or even the more practical pastors, but the imaginative and evocative uses to which they are put. This is not a rejection of intellectualism, but to note that the relevant text for an interpreter of the theological spirit of any period of Pentecostalism is textflesh (as against textbooks). Textbooks are narrow compared to textflesh, which is a rhizomatic site of textbooks, reworked texts, embodied actions, and meanings. The “theological spirit” of an age emerges only after immanently consistent theology has been put to use (evaded), inserted into the fluid dynamics of daily existence. This reworking of theology between the hammer and anvil of existential microtheology is either affirmative or powerfully resistant and contradictory to received theological wisdoms and meaning.