Ethical Implications of a Split God
In these final pages, I would like to engage very briefly with the “theological” excess, the religious “too muchness” that informs the everyday lives of Pentecostals as a result of the notion of a split God. I want to bring to our attention an excess, a surplus charge that flows into daily social life from the split God.1 These concluding pages will present four instances of the excess that comes from within the life of the pentecostal subject and the surplus charge that comes from the outside, from the wider social and cultural contexts. In more precise terms, this unconcluding postscript will offer a short meditation on the theological excess, the particular significance of the notion of a split God and show how it defines Pentecostal ethics in wider, existential terms. What makes this meditation interesting is that it works to show how cultural or political pluralism emerges out of the core of the notion of a split God. The paradox is that it is really this notion of a split God that the cultured despisers of religion regard as marking Pentecostalism as exclusivist and fundamentalist that is most deeply invested in pluralism and nudges its adherents toward a radical love of others in the midst of life.
The four examples illustrate or exemplify what it means to be in the midst of everyday social life with this notion: to interact with a religious Other, to be subjected to the possibilities and impossibilities of daily existence, the multifarious ways in which the pentecostal subject is summoned to respond to the inoperativity, the lack of “essence” of the human animal. The force of the notion of a split God drives the interaction with the religious Other not only because it permeates the very fabric of everyday life, but it also shapes the ethical substance of pentecostal communities. The notion of a split God gestures to a theology of radical alterity, whether or not Pentecostals are fully conscious of it. There is always, as we have demonstrated throughout this book, the gap, the incursion, the Other, or some kind of obstacle embedded or introjected in the life of the subject, being, or order of being. What are the existential valences, the theological aspects of this gesture in everyday life?
The Pentecostals’ inclination toward the split image of God, ontologically incomplete reality, and split self shows that alterity is immanent to the construction of pentecostal identity. Despite all the efforts to “domesticate” God, there is still an uncanny strangeness to him. God eludes their grasp; the imperative of “Speak-up” glossolalia means they are not fully determined by their context; the dwelling of the Holy Spirit in them means that every Pentecostal is in herself dislocated, and the much-sought-after anointing or Spirit baptism cannot be fully captured, represented, or symbolized. The split image suggests that the Godhead is not only “structured precisely around an openness” to alterity; uncanniness, uncanny strangeness, is also internal to the believer’s consciousness of him.2 What is familiar is ultimately grounded on strangeness: God moves in mysterious ways, the unfinishedness of reality means that it is also a stranger to itself, and the believer is indeed a stranger to herself. There is no easy way to interpret these various forms of strangeness and thus there is a deadlock, which the proliferation of interpretations struggles to cover up.
All the preceding illustrations are important in understanding some of the cultural conflicts between Pentecostals and other (religious and nonreligious) groups. They are crucial to answering the question: Who is my neighbor? Pentecostals often attribute intergroup conflicts to external differences between them and others. There may be some truth in this, but it is also possible that such conflicts might well indicate the uncanniness internal to Pentecostals’ construction of identity. More precisely, as psychoanalytic philosopher Eric Santner’s thought suggests, the differences between Pentecostalism and its Other may signify “the possibility of shared opening to the agitation and turbulence immanent to any construction of identity, the Unheimlichkeit or uncanniness internal to any space and every space we call home.”3
The point is that the enigma of the Other that Pentecostals think is an obstacle to integration with the Other is also an enigma within/of Pentecostalism.4 What eludes the Pentecostals’ grasp about the Other eludes not only their own grasp about themselves, but also the Other’s grasp about itself. This is the point Santner is making, and Slavoj Žižek also makes this point about any effort one culture makes to understand another culture.
The limit that prevents our full access to the Other is ontological, not merely epistemological. … this means that the Other (say, another culture I am trying to understand) is already “in itself” not fully determined by its context but “open,” “floating.” … We effectively “understand” a foreign culture when we are able to identify with its point of failure: when we are able to discern not its hidden positive meaning, but rather its blind spot, the deadlock the proliferation of meanings endeavors to cover up.5
Thus the way to understand another culture, according to Žižek, is through its enigma, what about itself that eludes its grasp.
In other words, when we endeavor to understand the Other (another culture), we should not focus on its specificity (on the peculiarity of “their customs,” etc.); we should rather endeavor to encircle that which eludes their grasp, the point at which the Other is in itself dislocated, not bound by its “specific context.” … I understand the Other when I become aware of how the very problem that was bothering me (the nature of the Other’s secret) is already bothering the Other itself. The dimension of the Universal emerges when the two lacks—mine and that of the Other—overlap.6
There is a dimension of the force of the notion of a split God that permeates practices of everyday life that could possibly complement the kind of intercultural understanding both Santner and Žižek are advocating here. There is an internal alienness within Pentecostalism as there is alterity, uncanniness, strangeness in the Other, and all sides are trying to grasp it even as it keeps slipping through their fingers. There is, therefore, a possible point of contact to develop mutual understanding. Pentecostals in the singularity of their own out-of-jointness occasioned by the split God can open up to the internal alienness of the Other.7 This can enable them to shift their antagonistic relationship with the Other from the register of external differences between cultures to shared opening to internal alienness. From Santner’s point of view, this kind of shift in logic marks the point at which they truly enter the midst of life; that is, when they “truly inhabit the proximity to [their neighbor], assume responsibility for the claims his or her singular and uncanny presence makes on [them] not only in extreme circumstances but every day.”8 There is a cultural pluralism implied in the split-God notion from Santner’s perspective.
Let us now turn to the second example. This study has shown that Pentecostalism demystifies the sacred. And this is discernible in the way it locates God both within and outside the sacred. Pentecostals place God in (en) it and nominate the same as its anchor and guarantee. The sacred is conceived as an opening to a “beyond” (which is not necessarily always transcendent), a space that creates, harbors, or provokes new possibilities. We noted in chapter 4 that Pentecostalism’s two-pronged position on the sacred (godly and special mundane events or “potentiality” and “virtuality”) is always mediated by the playful character of the pentecostal spirit. Pentecostalism “profanes” the sacred without abolishing the sphere of the sacred. It deactivates the aura that attends to the rites and stories (myths) of the sacred sphere. Yet it is this profanation and belief in God who is beyond the sacred as its anchor that, at the same time, places Pentecostals not only in the midst of the sacred, but also in the midst of life. How can a people who are so invested in the beyond, the noumenal, be so embedded in the everyday, phenomenal life? In the past when much of pentecostal everyday life was driven by eschatological hope, apparently, this paradox was not well noticed.
I will turn to Franz Rosenzweig’s theology, under the pressure of Santner’s interpretation, to explain this paradox.9 The key here is Rosenzweig’s theory of the state and of revelation. His interpretations of the state and divine revelation show that the state as a mode of temporalization and revelation is an intervention into “sovereign temporalization.” Revelation opens the eyes of believers to see in and beyond the state’s ceaseless effort to control life, found and augment its institutions that “overcome” the damages caused by the inevitable passage of time. In the words of Santner, the divine revelation that Rosenzweig is theorizing “is nothing but our opening to this ‘beyond’ that our life in the midst of institutions never ceases to produce. Rosenzweig’s paradox, if I might call it that, is that our opening to this ‘beyond’ is the very thing that places us in the midst of life.”10
The major move I make to transform Rosenzweig’s conceptualization of the connection between state and revelation into a pentecostal framework is to transpose the state into the sacred, that is, to re-cognize Rosenzweig’s theory of the state as a viable theory of the sacred. Once this recognition is made and accepted then the rest of the transformation of frames works itself out, so to speak. Let me begin by restating Rosenzweig’s theory of the state and point out its uncanny resemblance to the theory of the sacred. He posits sovereignty or state as a “solution” to the problem of the passage of time. For God’s people eternity has already come in the midst of time, but the state repeatedly “strives to give nations eternity within the confines of time.”11 As he puts it,
The world’s people as such are without orbits; their life cascades downhill in a broad stream. If the state is to provide them with eternity, this stream must be halted and damned up to form a lake. The state must seek to turn into an orbit that pure sequence of time to which the people as such are committed. It must transform the constant alternation of their life into preservation and renewal and thus introduce an orbit capable, in itself, of being eternal.12
This view of the state as a mode of temporalization is remarkably close to a theoretical perspective on the sacred. In chapter 4, we saw that what is sacred in any society is believed to always have a purchase on eternity; that is, it is believed to transcend the passage of time. The sacred always claims for itself the capacity to transcend the ravages and passage of time. Following sociologist Richard Fenn and philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, we argued that the conception of the sacred in most societies has been “reduced” to the effective practices and procedures directed by a society to enable the cosmos and nomos to maintain themselves against the threat of chaos by strengthening and renewing the ethos. One of the primary roles of religious imagination and the habits of other organs overseeing the forbidden aspirations of people is to explain, control, and predict the pattern of appropriate responses to the passages, damages, and surprises of time. The sacred (in such societies) is how a society oversees life with regard to continuity between the past and the present and the future. The key goal of the practices and procedures of the sacred-as-religion or sacred-as-state is to control the passage of time over life and society’s institutions by subordinating the “virtualizing power of time” to a superior power or set of powers. The aim of the controlling intent is to ensure that novelties, radical (or unauthorized) ruptures, do not emerge to defeat all continuity between the past and the present and the future.
Just as Rosenzweig critiques this view of the state/sovereignty/sacred as unstable and one that hinders the emergence of new possibilities, Pentecostals, as we have demonstrated in chapter 4, also have an alternative to this view to the sacred.13 For them the sacred is the site of possible and impossible possibilities, surprises, novelties, and contingencies. The state in its mode of temporalization, of attempting to stem the passage of time, Rosenzweig argues, “introduces standstills, stations, epochs into the ceaseless sweep of this life.”14 What revelation does, according to Rosenzweig, is to give believers the resources to intervene in this state’s capture of life and time, to destabilize this hegemonic power of the state (sacred) that claims the power or foundation to authorize or legitimate the new. Revelation (which is for him also love’s “divine” imperative) opens the eyes of the believers to “what remains/insists in and beyond the drama of authorization/legitimation.”15
There is always an opening in the core of the temporal machine of the state, in the hegemonic control of the possibilities by the sacred; that is, there is always a remainder or surplus in any system, “totality,” order of being, socio-symbolic network, that exceeds control. This locus of excess, the opening, allows for new possibilities to emerge. This is “a site where the possibility of unplugging from the dominance of the sovereign [sacred] can open. Indeed, that opening is what Rosenzweig understands by revelation.”16
Ultimately, for Rosenzweig it is our capacity to look “beyond” the state’s capture of life that puts us in the midst of life. The Pentecostals’ orientation to look beyond the regnant understanding of the sacred, to profane the sacred, is the very attitude that places them not only in the midst of life, but also in the sacred, a space that creates possibilities for new or excluded possibilities. Reading Santner compels me to expand the pentecostal conception of sacred to include not only the inner logic of Rosenzweig’s understanding of revelation, but the out-of-jointness that our analysis of the split God suggests is at the core of pentecostal identity and that of its Other. The sacred thus includes
the space of human possibilities organized around the claims made upon me by the Other insofar as he or she is singularly out-of-joint with respect to the social intelligibility produced by [the symbolic order]. The Other who invades my life with his or her passionate claims on my attention, desire, and care is, in other words, an Other filled with too much pressure, a surplus of excitations that have, to some extent, always already been organized as impossible.17
Once again under the pressure of Santner’s and Rosenzweig’s thoughts we have identified one more hint about how the notion of a split God could possibly influence everyday ethical life or enable Pentecostals to enter into the midst of life, to inhabit the proximity of their neighbor or the Other.
Our third example concerns worship as pure means (WPM). We argued in chapters 1 and 6 that WPM is a “work” of inoperativity and that this inoperativity is at the heart of being and praxis of God. WPM as pure mediality (re-)presents worship as exposition of human beings as argōs-being. Is it not conceivable that the Pentecostals’ orientation to (drive to, obsession with) WPM is an unrecognized way they are grappling with the purposelessness that is at the core of human beings, the surplus of being, or the real within the human being, even as they are grabbed or claimed by the instrumental logic or mesmerizing story of global capitalism? Before we proceed any further let me explain what I mean by argōs-being because it holds a key to comprehending the argument I will be making here. Aristotle wonders if nature left man without a function, work (ergon) that is proper to human beings or if they are essentially workless (inoperoso), functionless (argōs).
For just as the goodness and performance of a flute player, a sculptor, or any kind of expert, and generally of anyone who fulfills some function or performs some action, are thought to reside in his proper function [ergon], so the goodness and performance of man would seem to reside in whatever is his proper function. Is it then possible that while a carpenter and a shoemaker have their own proper function and spheres of action, man as man has none, but left by nature a good-for-nothing without a function [argōs]?18
Aristotle quickly retreated from this thought and supplied the answer: “Activity of the soul [is] in accordance with virtue.” This is the essence of human beings, at least and insofar as she is in the polis and it is the end she pursues. Today, we are no longer quick to identify what is the proper timeless function of human beings. And we even regard community as inoperative as it is only the experience of compearance (as Jean-Luc Nancy has taught us). Community or the notion of the community, according to him, is not based on some essence, idea, or project. As he argues in his The Inoperative Community, the community is not about communion, an essence, but about being-together, being ex-posed to one another.19 So, and rightly, Giorgio Agamben argues that human action cannot be regarded as a means that makes sense only with respect to an end.20 Thus, it is not totally out of place for Pentecostals to understand worship not with regard to a particular end, but as a sphere that corresponds to the argōs-standing of human beings.
This has implications for how we think about ethics in everyday life. To flesh this out, we need to connect with Rosenzweig’s concept of the metaethical self. The self is different from personality, which is an assemblage of common human predicates; it is the generic dimension of a human being. The individual can be subsumed under the concept of the universal, which Rosenzweig represents with the equation B=A, the taking up of the distinctive (B, das Besondere) into the general (A, das Allgemeine).21 “Personality is always defined as an individual in its relation to other individuals and to a Universal. There are no derivative predications about self, only the one, original B=B.22 The self is the something singular, particular, irreplaceable, not generic, and nonsubstitutable about a human. This pure gap in any series of human identifications or classification is what Santner calls the self or metaethical self.
The self, that is, signifies the part that is not part (of a whole), a nonrelational excess that is out of joint with respect to the generality of any classification or identification. … [It] is not some other, more substantial self behind the personality, not, that is, some sort of true self that, say, assumes a distance to the social roles of personality; it is, rather, a gap in the series of identifications that constitute it.23
Like worship as pure means, that is, worship at the zero-point of “pathological content,” the metaethical self is also empty of predicative determinations. Again, like WPM, the metaethical self is emptied of teleology; it resists entrance into any teleological subsumption.24
One day the self assaults man like an armed man and takes possession of all the wealth in his property. … Until that day, man is a piece of the world even before his own consciousness. … The self breaks in and at one blow robs him of all the goods and chattel which he presumed to possess. He becomes quite poor, has only himself, knows only himself, is known to no one, for no one exists but he. The self is solitary man in the hardest sense of the word: the personality is “the political animal.”25
This solitary self resists being made part of any larger or higher purpose by the symbolic order. The metaethical self cherishes purposeless activity. “The self is, in a fundamental sense, good for nothing, a rupture in the very logic of teleological evaluation.”26 To put it in the words of Žižek from another context, the self, the defiant character of a person (B=B) that Rosenzweig theorizes represents “that which, in me, resists the blissful submergence in the Good is … not my inert biological nature but the very kernel of my spiritual selfhood, the awareness that, beyond all particular physical and psychical features, I am ‘me,’ a unique person, an absolutely singular point of spiritual self-reference.”27 This does not mean that the self does not or cannot appreciate teleology. The point being made is that the metaethical self resists teleological integration into structured wholes, which is always executed on the basis of the predicates that inform or undergird personality. The self, or this character of human beings, the capability of purposelessness (inoperativity) is what in Rosenzweig’s view truly distinguishes humans from all other creatures.
The thought and language of Rosenzweig and Santner can help us to clarify the ethical dimension of worship as pure means in the light of the uncanny strangeness that inhabits any identity or human being—the enigma. This is the metaethical self, the tautological kernel of B=B. This suggests that any deliberate endeavor to communicate, to inhabit the proximity to the Other, must involve a willingness to approach the neighbor, the Other, in the precise sense of what Freud calls the Thing (Ding). There is an unfathomable X (abyss) to the Other, “the neighbor-Thing,” a radical otherness, an impenetrable core, mysterious and elusive. The Other (the real of the Other, its uncanny strangeness) cannot be integrated into the pentecostal universe or symbolic order. What is important to realize is that in the encounter with the Other Pentecostals must reject
the ethical domestication of the neighbor—for example, what Emmanuel Levinas did with his notion of the neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of the ethical responsibility emanates. What Levinas obfuscates is the monstrosity of the neighbor, monstrosity on account of which Lacan applies to the neighbor the term Thing (das ding), used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction: the neighbor is the (Evil) Thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face.28
Let me find other language to restate this ethical demand. To this end, let us turn to Jesus Christ’s supplementation of the commandment on adultery in the Hebrew Bible and to Richard Wagner’s alternative supplementation of the same commandment in order to set the background for my own supplementation of another commandment. Jesus said in Matthew 5:27 (NIV):
You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Wagner says:
The commandment saith: Thou shalt not commit adultery! But I say unto you: Ye shall not marry without love. A marriage without love is broken as soon as entered into, and who so hath wooed without love, already hath broken the wedding. If ye follow my commandment, how can you ever break it, since it bids you to do what your heart and soul desire?—But where ye marry without love, ye bind yourselves at variance with God’s love, and in your wedding ye sin against God; and this sin avengeth itself by your striving next against the law of man, in that ye break the marriage-vow.29
About loving the Other, Jesus says in Matthew 5:43–45 (NIV):
You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
And I humbly supplement it in this way:
The commandment says: “Love your neighbor! But I say unto you: You shall not love your neighbor without loving the uncanny strangeness, the impenetrable, mysterious core in him or her. If you love your neighbor without loving his or her unfathomable monstrosity, you are already guilty of hatred and you are angry with him or her and you shall be in danger of judgment.
At the heart of the three ethical implications of the notion of the split God that we have managed to uncover under the pressure of Rosenzweig’s philosophy and theology is the metaethical self in the midst of life (living with the neighbor). This metaethical self appears to materialize one split among a series of splits in the components that constitute the divine-human relation. First, the metaethical self indicates that the human being is dislocated in herself; there is a crack in her that lies between her personality and her metaethical self, the split in any series of human predicates that ground personality, the gap between B=A and B=B. One of the key insights of Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption is that the life of the Jew is penetrated by radical alterity, out-of-jointness, and is characterized by internal alienness. The Torah demands, according to Rosenzweig, that Jews be open to other human beings and be always conscious of the implication of differences, the uncanny strangeness of the Other in the midst of life. This is the responsibility that comes with the enigma/singularity of election. The life of the Jewish nationality is not fully captured by the generic predicates of other historical peoples, but by a gap or excess in the series of predicates that normally distinguish historical peoples. In fact, the Jewish collective self (or metahistorical destiny) appears to be like the metaethical selfhood, B=B.30 The final form of split that I want to point out is the one Rosenzweig identifies in God. His interpretation of the Shekhina presents God as split.
The Shekhina, God’s descent upon man and his sojourn among men, is pictured [thought of] as a dichotomy [separation, cut] taking place in God himself. God himself separates himself from himself, he gives himself away to his people, he shares in their sufferings, sets forth with in agony of exile, joins their wanderings.31
Given all this, is it not conceivable that behind the notion of a split God or the inflection of thought that led to it are the ideas of the pentecostal variant of metaethical selfhood, historical destiny (which is not a displacement or replacement of the metahistorical destiny of the Jews), and belief that God is still willing and does suffer with human beings? In Pentecostalism the Holy Spirit may be functioning in some respect as, or has somewhat subsumed, the idealization or conceptualization of the Shekhina. As Jürgen Moltmann puts it, “The idea of the Shekinah points towards the kenosis of the Spirit, God renounces his impassibility and becomes able to suffer because he is willing to love.”32
There are readers who will not accept the pentecostal notion of a split God and its link to God’s renunciation of his impassibility and to Pentecostals’ thirst for the (near) palpable God’s presence (real presence, some Shekhina presence) because for these readers it would be tantamount to accepting as “true” many other things they despise about Pentecostalism. What can I say? In the words of the priest at the end of a long conversation with Josef K. in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, let me say to them, “It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it [notion of a split God] as necessary.”33
At last, we have come to our fourth and final illustrative example. I demonstrated in chapter 1 how tongues-speech not only ends up in symbolic castration (the entrance of the speaker into the symbolic network of society, which displaces, constrains, tames, or neutralizes the impossible-Real in/that is glossolalia), but also demands the tearing down of historical-cultural predicates in relating to God. The former I called interpreted glossolalia and the latter form I called noninterpreted glossolalia (the empty “Speak up”). Here we want to only focus on the symbolic castration as a form of seduction, as an incorporation into the symbolic network that creates internal ethical conflicts or internal alienness in the pentecostal subject. In another version of Laplanche and Santner’s conception of seduction, I want to suggest that the incorporation of glossolalia into the domain of language normativity, into socio-symbolic affirmation, is a form of seduction.34
The translation or incorporation is immediately a sort of summoning forth (ex-citation) from the past and throwness into the world (1 John 2:16) and overproximity to desire of the divine Other.35 When glossolalia is translated and you say the Spirit tells you this, what does the Spirit want? God has spoken once; twice the faithful, disciplined believer must hear. The congregation or the person needs to respond to the ex-citation, “calling out” of the interpreted language, an enigma of the divine Other’s desire. So the person who feels concerned sets out to translate this enigmatic desire or message. This round of translation, which arrives at some sort of determinate demands, often allows for meaningful negotiation with the enigmatic message. The negotiation puts the person both inside and outside the symbolic network.
The point I want to make is that the distinction between glossolalia (hot from the mouth of the speaker) and interpreted glossolalia is not simply horizontal, a difference between inscription/subjection into the symbolic network or not. There is also a “vertical” distinction between the two ways the same believer can be interpellated. On one level of the divine desire, the individual recognizes herself as a part within God’s totality in the name of which she has been called forth. While on the level of the symbolic network, she is encouraged to “contract” from the interpellation of God’s totality, to have affective attachment to the symbolic network as a kind of obscene supplement to the divine interpellation.36 The “call” of the “Big Other” of society that gave “voice” or intelligibility to the glossolalia sets up a struggle between the B=A (God’s totality) and B=B, which resists the impact of the divine voice.37
All this suggests that the incorporation of glossolalia into the socio-symbolic relations may also encourage transgressive enjoyment of what that wider world has to offer, or, at least, a “transgressive enjoyment structured in fantasy.”38 The incorporation may, on a general note, be a (secret) symbolic “getting off” point on the enigmatic traumatic demands of a Spirit-filled life. We might say, then, “getting into” a Spirit-filled life includes a dimension of “getting off,” a (promise of) normative reentrance to society. This is the tension or split in everyday life: subjection and seduction.39 Every Pentecostal is in herself dislocated. Alterity or uncanny strangeness, as we noted earlier, is immanent to the construction of pentecostal identity. There is always a surplus charge that comes from within the life of the pentecostal subject and from his or her wider social and cultural contexts. This is the theological excess, religious too-muchness that informs everyday life of Pentecostals as a result of the notion of a split God. This excess may be a source of the microtheological aggressions and microtheological affirmations Pentecostals display in everyday life as they interact with others in wider contexts. Microtheological analysis can, as we saw in chapter 7, help not only to investigate how to deflect microaggressions, but also help us to decipher how to use microaffirmations in interactional situations to foster moral solidarity and trust.