The study of Pentecostalism is in the ascendancy. Scholars have used the lens of social theory to study global Pentecostalism. Theologians have taken to postmodern approaches to construct pentecostal theologies and others have called for postmodern engagements with Pentecostalism. And yet there is no book that specifically attempts to bring critical theory to examine or investigate the determinate practices and theologies of global Pentecostalism. This book fills that gap in scholarship. It fills the gap by bringing critical social theory to bear not on academic (systematic, constructive) pentecostal theologies, but on the everyday forms of theologies, lived pentecostal practices. Reading pentecostal practices in the light of critical theory will be meaningless unless pentecostal practices are also used, in turn, to interrogate critical theory and mainstream academic theologies. This is what we do in the context of the idea and practice (performance) of split God in Pentecostalism. The book adopts a transdisciplinary methodology to bring pentecostal studies, critical theory, theology, and social ethics together to investigate an everyday form of religion, to reflect on microtheologies occurring at everyday practices, and to make sense of global pentecostal identity. Within this methodological strategy, it privileges pentecostal sources at the grassroots.
Though I developed my ideas by interacting with a host of critical theorists (especially Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Giorgio Agamben), I always begin by citing pentecostal sources (data, worship, expectation of miracles, prayer, quest for prosperity and health, beliefs, behaviors, hopes, and ideas from everyday forms of practice) and then use critical theory (a tradition in continental philosophy) to rethink them. Without eschewing academic discourse, everyday forms of religious practice are here considered as adequate sources for philosophical, theological, and social ethical reflection. This preferential option for the practices of “ordinary” Pentecostals is what I call microtheology or microtheologies. Critical theory (especially when equipped with a social scientific/psychoanalytic/Marxist lens) of all the threads within continental philosophy, in my judgment, is most suitable for this kind of work because it easily lends itself to deep appreciation and interrogation of practices and discourses of global Pentecostalism.
The aim of this book is to reveal the operative notion of God in the everyday forms of Pentecostalism and to examine how it conditions Pentecostals’ social-ethical behavior in different spheres of their lives. We will not be concerned with God in the abstract, but precisely with how a particular tradition understands and deploys the concept of God in concrete practices. There is no textbook or philosophical God to be found apart from the God that believers know and perform or is discernible from their daily practices. When examined through the lens of critical theory, the God that is discernible from pentecostal practices is a split God. The pentecostal God appears to distance himself from himself. For God to emerge as divine subject to Pentecostals, a certain move from “Substance to Subject must occur within God himself,” as in the emergence of human subjectivity from substantial personality in Hegelian philosophy.1 The God who is summoned in prayers and deliverance services, pressed to perform endless miracles, and solicited in daily lives is alienated, separated, split from his substantial content, from his divine attributes, properties. Then by the sheer power of faith, persistent prayers, and name-it-and-claim-it techniques, these attributes as carriers of God’s power and presence are summoned as partial organs to work independently of God himself. God or God’s universal substance is objectivized or particularized. God is split from God! For religious studies this is an important finding, and for theological studies it opens the door to compare classical doctrine of God in mainline denominations or theological tomes with the “God” that Pentecostals think they know or encounter in their daily lives.
In its functioning in the everyday forms of Pentecostalism, the split-God model teams up with three other forms of split: split reality (ontological incompleteness), split selves (split subjectivity), and split worldview (dualism/“en-spirited matter”2). First, there is a belief in ontological incompleteness, which is a condition of being or existence. The second form relates to the subjectivity of the pentecostal believer as split; the pentecostal self caught between the care of the soul (the spiritual world they want to inherit) and the care of external material things, the desires and nomos of this world. Finally, the pentecostal worldview is split between the noumenal (invisible) and the phenomenal (visible), but the noumenal could also be considered as an intensification of phenomenal perception. Each of these distinct notions of split (they are actually dimensions of one notion) constitute a rhizomatic network in the everyday form of Pentecostalism. The network not only accounts philosophically for each of the others, but also provides each of them a broader basis of their fitness within the practices we are analyzing. Part of the work of this introduction is to make the pentecostal everyday notion of a split God clear and coherent. Also, in every chapter of the book, further explanations are provided of the notion of split as applied in the context of the discussions in the chapter, so the reader can easily keep in view which dimension of the notion of split is in focus and how it is interacting with others.
The Notion of a Split God
For a hundred years now it appears there is always an ongoing debate on the living condition or the existential status of God. A debate that structures how we perceive reality. There was a time in history when everybody believed that God is alive and exists. Then Friedrich Nietzsche and some theologians came along and told us that God is dead. Not long after Nietzsche declared his medical verdict, the Pentecostals arrived almost from out of the blue with fury, enthusiasm, and dedication to proclaim that God is alive, he exists, but he is split. Their practices also suggest that they (implicitly and explicitly) believe in an ontological incompleteness in reality, being. And now we have the maverick Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek ardently arguing that God is dead and split; his violent splitting occurred when Jesus Christ (God-become-man) cried on the cross: “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?” According to Žižek, the cry not only revealed God’s impotence, but also brought God to realize his own impotence: “The gap that separates the suffering, desperate man … from God is transposed into God Himself, as His own radical splitting or, rather, self-abandonment.”3 Žižek’s main point of interest in his argument is that the “death of God” compels human beings to face reality as an internally inconsistent and incomplete whole.
My book examines in depth the various ideas, concepts, beliefs, and actions Pentecostals take to demonstrate their investment in the notion of a split of God and cracks in reality. Pentecostal practices of discernment, relating to the work of grace, and technology of subjectivation, understanding of the working of the sacred, pure worship, and the modulation of an everyday form of theology cannot be adequately grasped within the framework of reality as a consistent, harmoniously ordered whole. Reality (and by extension their notion of God) is full of cracks, and those who want to understand it must think in terms of dialectics of gaps.
The scholars and those death-of-God theologians who have made a volte-face to acknowledge the resurrection of God amid the public resurgence of religion are overlooking a problem. The problem is that the dead-and-revived God that academics now celebrate or ponder in their ivory towers is not the same God that “died.” The God the Pentecostals have resurrected, so to speak, is not the transcendental, holistic, philosophers’, systematic theology God, but a split God. The God walking the streets and eating fish with Pentecostals at various campgrounds, passing through walls into storefront churches, and stooping to enter chicken coops as cathedrals is cracked, incomplete. Pentecostals have introduced a gap/cut into the traditional notion of God; certain attributes and dimensions of God are mobilized in practices or prayers as if they are self-standing instead of being an organic whole. This gap is eventually inscribed into God. Pentecostalism first tears apart God and then brings the manifold parts together into a contingent synthesis for their pragmatic, utilitarian purposes. If Nietzsche’s mad man in the market shouted, “We have killed him,” and theologians in the 1960s bellowed in hallowed academic halls, “God is dead,” Pentecostal believers or thaumaturgists are today shouting in the public square, “God is split.”
Here, to use Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy, by split I mean the opening up of the inherited, orthodox notion of God—its aims and modalities—into new possible uses. The activity of splitting deactivates the traditional notion of God and radicalizes it, disposing it toward a new use without abolishing the old use that “persists in it and exhibits it.”4 In the practice of splitting, Pentecostals not only separate—without abandoning orthodoxy—the inherited notion of God from its orthodox grounding, but also “parts” and “attributes” of God are separated from Godself and are exhibited in their separation from Godself, becoming spectacles. It is precisely through the mode of “consuming” the spectacles that the gap that separates suffering, desperate humans from God is transposed into God as a split within Godself or God’s own splitting and the deactivation of the traditional notion of God is effected. In all this there is a heedlessness toward clear differences between orthodoxy and nonorthodoxy.
The Pentecostal God is a running skein of threads and parts, flung and scattered among several practices like divided messiah’s garments at Calvary. Thus a simplistic traditional reading of the biblical God into the pentecostal vision of God as actualized in practice will wind up not making sense of their everyday theo-talk. Pentecostals confess with their mouths: “God, God, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” but their actions reflect a God or reality that is incomplete, a not-All. The Pentecostal God is not the God of the philosophers and theologians that died, he is not the Orthodox (Bible-only defined) God, but a particular way of structuring the relation between orthodoxy and lawful (Christianly) transgression of orthodoxy. Far from being the solution to the problem of death-of-God theology, the Pentecostal God is rather the name of an impasse, a useful problem. “It is precisely as an enigma that the [Pentecostal split God] can today help us to grasp certain unthought dimensions of our [religious] situations. As Chesterton says in his Orthodoxy, ‘man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand.’ ”5
The essence of a split God is not thought-induced. It did not originate from careful theological ruminations, but in Pentecostals’ social practices. This does not mean that it is merely a practical tool. It is an objective form through which Pentecostals grasp their world. The abstraction of a split God from the harmonious God is not metaphorical in meaning. It is literal and ultimately foundational for pentecostal religious consciousness. The religious notion of God resulting from the abstraction is characterized by a complete absence of holism, a differentiation purely by separability (partial, limited, non-All) and by applicability to every kind of intercourse that occurs in the divine-human relation.6
This means that the God Pentecostals “see” is never whole, not because they lack the mental capacity to comprehend a comprehensive and systematic (notion of) God, but because they are always in the picture that bears witness to their God-world relations. Their position is not that of an external observer who can grasp the whole of God, divine-human relations, or objective reality. Their notion of a split God is a “reflexive twist by means of which [they] are included in the picture [of God] constituted by [them]. It is in this reflexive short circuit, this necessary redoubling of [themselves] as standing both outside and inside”; that is, their picture of God that bears witness to their notion of a split God. God is split and never “whole,” or reality is split and non-All because it “contains a stain, a blind spot which mediates [their] inclusion in it.”7
Only a few practical persons (“fundamentalists”) can claim to have a comprehensive (All) notion of reality or God. The God we claim to know (“see”) is always split. Adrian Johnson makes this point well when he says, “What appears as external reflection (i.e., the gaze of the subject on the substance) is not confined to an epistemological field separated off from the reflected-upon reality of being. Rather than being external, this reflection is inscribed in the reality of being upon which it reflects as an internal inflection, an immanent folding-back of substance on itself; the gaze of the subject upon the substance is substance-as-not-all gazing upon itself.”8
It is in this sense of a split God (juxtaposition of holism—All—and separability (partial, non-All) that we venture to say that all religious views of God are “commodified.” Karl Marx taught us that at the heart of commodity fetishism or abstraction is the separation of quality (use value) from quantity. The natural intercourse of commodities in the market pivots around their exchange value (quantity, monetarily quantifiable value), and use value is what belongs to them as objects. In the market commodities stand face-to-face, talk and exchange glances as objects characterized by total abstraction from use value. The God we encounter in various religions or forms of Christianity has been abstracted from wholeness, God-intrinsicness. The God of a religion reflects only “quantity” (institutionally/doctrinally quantifiable value such as the sacrifice to end all sacrifice or murder of innocent victims, the lamb for our sins, a good harvest, or bringing rain during a drought, and so on). “Quantity” is a performance we can measure against other gods, technology, or political powers and their value-as-performance, value-as-responsiveness—and as an intrinsic quality. Just as in the market the merchant is not interested in the use value of commodities but in their exchange values, we are not also interested in the use “value” (the in-itself quality, which we cannot know) of God, but in God’s performance. Both the performance value and the split God that results from it are born of “fetishistic inversion.” Enjoy your truth!
Pentecostals, perhaps, overenjoy this truth. In their way of seeing, the gap, cut, split between subject and substance, subject and object, human and God is reinscribed into being, substance, into God. God is split. The external limitation (the limited conceptualization of God amid the divine-human relation) turns into God’s self-limitation. Or rather, more precisely, the split God that emerged out of multiple processes of practices is retroactively inscribed into God.
In the philosophical sense, we might argue the gap/split that Pentecostals see in God is perhaps the place where God is exposed to human beings and human beings are exposed to God. The gap represents gestures to divine existence between two sites: immanence and transcendence; the wound of transcendent immanence. The gap represents a border unto experience of divine-human relation, the spot where divine aloofness confronts human suffering and vulnerability. This border experience is inscribed unto the transimmanent Holy Spirit as a form of space, so to speak.
The gap is the exteriority of God, the spacing of experience of contact with human beings, of the outside, the outside-of-self, to use Jean-Luc Nancy’s language.9 God is posed in exteriority. The gap gestures to “an outside in the very intimacy of an inside.”10 It is important to further clarify what is meant by gap as space. The space is not a place, but the sharing of the edges of Being and beings, their spacing. It is a locus or nexus of mutual interactions: a condition of possibility for the existence of interactions. Conceptually speaking, where is this space or locus to be located? There are three possibilities: a space outside of God, a space within God in some sense, or the space as identical to divine-human relation. The first is not acceptable because it means that Godness is grounded in an external source. Nor can the space be identical to God, since it is itself the result of interactions between God and human beings, an other. Thus, I suggest that it is within (as being-with, “an outside in the very intimacy of an inside”) God, more precisely within divine-human relation, where God and humans are not just juxtaposed but are actually exposed to one another. The space is the basis of interactions, inseparable from divine-human relation, to be sure, but nevertheless distinguishable from it. So when we say the gap is inscribed into God, it does not mean it is a laceration in the being of God. God (God’s body) remains in his (its) most intimate trinitarian folds exposed to the outside. Like an open mouth, Godness or God’s body “exposes to the ‘outside’ an ‘inside’ that, without this exposition, [divine-human relation] would not exist.”11
The pentecostal notion of a split God, as we shall demonstrate in the chapters ahead, is not merely an epistemological exercise. It both “ontologizes” and “deontologizes” the critical construct of God that has come to reign in the modern church and the implicit notion of God that is behind God-is-dead theology. It is important to pay attention to the tensions of ontologization and deontologization in the pentecostal construct of split God as we can glean from the practices of Pentecostals, not from their academic theological tomes. The notion of God in the modernist church and among the death-of-God theologians pivots around an epistemological scheme. The God that died in academe or melts away in the pews was inaccessible, not knowable, and this non-knowability as part of reality was never questioned. God was an external inaccessible entity, and the gap that separates human beings from God was mainly an epistemological obstacle as the noumenal realm was left as inaccessible and all that was needed was to ignore it. While still believing in their capacity to penetrate the noumenal realm, conservative Pentecostals did what the liberal Christians could not do; they transformed the epistemological obstacle to positive ontological condition: the gap between us and God has now become a positive feature of God. Our incomplete knowledge of God or reality becomes a positive feature of God or reality, which is itself incomplete.12 In this respect the pentecostal notion of God emanating from an everyday form of theology is both ontologizing and deontologizing. By not supposing that the gap is merely epistemological as in presupposing reality as a whole and thus “introducing a gap into the very texture of reality” and God, their notion of a split God deontologizes the modernist or death-of-God-theology notion of God. But by still believing in “a fully constituted noumenal realm existing out there,” they at the same time ontologize the modernist or death-of-God-theology notion of God.13 In other words, the pentecostal notion of God not only negates the theme of God’s death, but also redescribes the God that supposedly died. God is not dead; he is split. Pentecostals’ everyday form of theology is both subtractive and multiplicative. On one hand while they took away some of the metaphysical ballast of modernist theology by collapsing the distinction between appearance and true reality of traditional ontology with the notion of split reality and God, on the other they invested more in the domain of noumenal things-in-themselves that is anchored by the split God.14 Pentecostal everyday theology is full of contradictions, and we cannot grasp it unless we work carefully through tensions to reconcile opposites. The contradictions and their dialectics conceal the creative impulse of the Pentecostal movement.
The task of pentecostal philosophy for pentecostal scholars is in unearthing this creative impulse, articulating the ideas of the new, the Pentecostal principle inherent to the movement and betrayed by their actualizations in practice. The way forward is to repeat these ideas so as to redeem their failure. By repetition I do not mean the reproduction of the old, but the emergence of the new through a reworking of the virtuality inherent to old ideas and revisiting paths not taken as we attempt to do in this book. As Žižek argues, far from being opposed,
[t]he emergence of the New, the proper Deleuzian paradox is that something truly New can ONLY emerge through repetition. What repetition repeats is not the way the past “effectively was,” but the virtuality inherent to the past and betrayed by its past actualization. In this precise sense, the emergence of the New changes the past itself, that is, it retroactively changes (not the actual past—we are not in science fiction—but) the balance between actuality and virtuality in the past. Recall the old example provided by Walter Benjamin: the October Revolution repeated the French Revolution, redeeming its failure, unearthing and repeating the same impulse. Already for Kierkegaard, repetition is “inverted memory,” a movement forward, the production of the New, and not the reproduction of the Old. “There is nothing new under the sun” is the strongest contrast to the movement of repetition. So, it is not only that repetition is (one of the modes of) emergence of the New—the New can ONLY emerge through repetition.15
So how do we repeat an idea from everyday theology of Pentecostalism in critical religious studies such as this book? It is by staying close to the structure and dynamics immanent in the position of the idea. We need to “trace the trajectories that are ‘extimate’ (i.e., intimately and internally external, endogenously exogenous) with respect to” everyday Pentecostalism insofar as they are consequent extensions of everyday theology in pentecostal everyday theology more than pentecostal everyday theology itself.16
Let us, for example, consider one of the issues as it relates to the subjectivity of God. For Pentecostals, the emergence of God’s subjectivity is dependent on the belief that the Holy Spirit is persuaded to give the very substance of his being (his creative power) as an exchangeable value on the altar (market) of prayers and offering. There is no subjectivity of God without the kenotic emptying of God’s substantial-positive being to mortal, sinful, fragile creatures, to human beings. We are dealing with a split between God Almighty—the sovereign, omnipotent ruler of heaven and earth—and God the benevolent giver, who is persuadable. If God the giver is to emerge at the level of God the Almighty, he must pour out his creative powers on demand. (“Name-it-and-claim-it theology” is only one example.) This is to say that God in pentecostal practice must already be persuaded by the logic of exchange or submitted to the norms of reciprocity.17
The place to understand the powerfulness of God is not the form of power but in its very content. From the pentecostal understanding of God’s subjectivity, it appears God not only maintains a vague distance to his sovereignty, but enacts its disavowal in relating to human beings, saying as it were, “I use my sovereignty, but I am not performatively bound by sovereignty.” God appears not to believe in his sovereignty—he is split from his omnipotence. There are Christians who do not believe in the sovereignty of God; however, only in the virulent form of wealth-and-health Pentecostalism does God not believe in his sovereignty. The “unplugged” character of God’s sovereignty makes the contents of the Spirit’s creative power available to everyone who can ask. The “unplugged” stance permits “faith-filled” Christians to “indulge in some extra-legal pleasures.” The Almighty God is split at the altar of Pentecostals and he is put back together as an all-purpose giver. This is the ultimate logic of the pentecostal “name-and-claim-it” practice.18
The pentecostal construction of God’s subjectivity is the obverse of its notion of pure substanceless subjectivity at the individual believer’s level. As John the Baptist said of Jesus Christ, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30 NIV), so the Pentecostal believer decreases in her substance (so to speak) as she grows in faith, becomes a subject of God. For the believer, her subjectivity is dependent on being reduced to the “almost nothing” of an abject beggar. Is the Pentecostal believer the true subject/substance then? No. The Pentecostal’s self-effacing, almost self-erasure is only a pathway into intercourse or exchange with a God emptying his creative goods on her. This is why Paul’s willingness to become disposable excrement (Phil. 3:8) so he will attain the resurrection from the dead (Phil. 3:8, often read out of context) appeals to many a Pentecostal. Dung—making the self a dung—incorporates one into the economy of divine exchange.
In this way the formulations of God’s subjectivity and the believer’s subjectivity enable Pentecostals to enjoy “pagan pleasures” (believing that God incites his subjects to enjoy). Their access to jouissance depends on their ability to separate God’s sovereignty and God’s creative power, to violate the simplicity of God. Pentecostals give a positive accent to God’s omnipotence and sovereignty but actually act or desire to transgress it. Pentecostalism valorizes the “unplugged” stance of God toward his sovereignty, but it is combined with the love of “pagan pleasures.” This is the “perverse core” (in the Lacanian sense) of Pentecostalism, and the work of many defenders of Pentecostalism is to find a nonperverse way to explain this innermost kernel of the movement’s understanding of divine-human relation.
What do all these tensions about the idea of God in pentecostal everyday theology suggest? Do the tensions (contradictions?) put Pentecostals outside the ballpark of rational theology? Or do they raise new questions that beg for answers or responses? They suggest at least three things. First, the transcendental, God does not completely structure the practices and performances of the different worlds of different groups of Christianity. Second, the tensions raise the thought that there is no consistent totality that Christianity can name as God. Third, it may well mean that the tensions (the elusiveness of characterization) of pentecostal interpretation of God belong to God himself. It is necessary to think, practice, and perform God but yet impossible to decide what God is in a logocentric style. And it is impossible to decide on the basis of the Bible (an experience) that the dimensions or aspects of God accented by Pentecostals are not of God. The question remains undecidable and yet calls for the necessity of a decision on how to think and practice God. This originary decision, the place of impossible possibility of a decision, is part of any faith in God or any particular Christian denomination’s orientation to (belief in) God. Pentecostalism like any other denomination or movement is a truth procedure; “that is to say: it is something relying on something undecidable … which necessitates a decision that then produces consequences brought about by a faith subject.”19
The decision we so make constitutes not only a theory of God, but it is also constitutive of our epistemology and ontology (insofar as, Hegel demonstrates, it is impossible to have an epistemology without an ontology).20 As we have shown in the foregoing pages, the tension-ridden experience and practices are ultimately based on an inconsistent realm of non-All, which is the Real of reality. Pentecostalism is a Christianity of the non-All. It shows that there is no consistent (meta) doctrinal standpoint from which the relation between the idea (or ideas) of God and practical (phenomenal) inconsistency could be explained. Not only is the idea of God incomplete, inconsistent, but also the practices, phenomena, of any denomination (including Pentecostalism) are inconsistent. And the relation between idea and practice is also inconsistent. Pentecostalism is a performing symptom, a display of these consistencies, of a non-All reality. The inconsistency reminds us that there is no complete chain of causality that runs between idea and phenomena. If the chain of causality is complete, harboring no gap, the new will not happen. The new occurs only when there are gaps in the chain of causality. For the new to occur, the force of becoming, actualization, cannot be totally tied to the confines of the idea. In any case, there are even gaps at the level of the idea, so the chain of complete causality cannot even take place with the most faithful practice. The paradox of Pentecostalism is that it maintains fidelity to the founding religious belief in the complete chain of causality by not obeying it. In the nitty-gritty of daily material life, Pentecostals express solidarity with the complete potency of the chain while gaining access to jouissance by violating it.
The paradoxes, tensions, or the incessant dancing of Pentecostals at the boundary of “heresy” are bound to give those who are not very familiar with Pentecostalism the impression that it is almost theologically promiscuous, expressing “the threatening image of a community with uncontrolled boundaries.”21 They weave in and out of Christian tradition or orthodoxy in their expectation of the new and surprises of the Holy Spirit.
Pentecostal 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.”22 It is a strategy of the 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.”23 In this gesture is the piety and danger that I mentioned earlier. But at the same time, the perspective of piety and danger enables us to investigate the pentecostal notion of God, which eludes theorization, as a paleonomy. In this way, I hope to present the current study as critical theoretical engagements with the practical and as practical engagements with the Žižekian critical religious theory, slipping and sliding between religious critical theoretical critique of pentecostal religious thinking and production of new thinking about pentecostal religion.
So this book is a work of tracing out the paleonomy, piety and danger, and tensions in pentecostal everyday thought. Paul Tillich in his The Protestant Era says, “Those who want to know the power of reality in the depth of their historical existence must be in actual contact with the unrepeatable tensions of the present.”24 In the following chapters I raise a series of tensions, which should be of interest to social scientists, pentecostal theologians, and religious studies scholars.
The Structure of the Book
The point of departure of this study is the observation that God is split; that pentecostal practices suggest that there is a primordial crack both in God and reality itself. In the preceding pages we have addressed systematically the theoretical questions regarding this observation emanating from the biblical, pragmatic, and psychological contexts of Pentecostalism. The theoretical-analytical responses are further developed and substantiated through case studies and modes of conceptualization of pentecostal practices in the chapters ahead. Each of the case studies offers a different perspective on how the implicit or explicit belief in a split God threads through empirical pentecostal practices. There are six case studies—constituting six chapters (2–7) of the book—and they represent six modes or conceptualizations of practices: discernment, grace, sacred, subjectivity, worship, and the everyday form of theology. The case studies analyze different patterns of performing a presentation of the (notion of) a split God. It is true that the six chapters illustrate how the notion of a split God is embedded in everyday pentecostal practices, but nevertheless the case studies transcend the mere theoretical-analytical construct of the split God. I have tried as much as possible to respect the richness and complexity of the six practices, even as they illuminate different contexts of action of the one split God in the social reality of lived Pentecostal practice. The ultimate test of the relevance of any of the case studies is the ability to throw new light upon Pentecostals’ collective self-understanding of themselves and their God. The case studies cannot prove our theoretical-analytical construct of the split God. While the practices amply illustrate the notion of the split God, we cannot say one is the cause of the other because of the inherent reflexivity of pentecostal practice. On one hand, the Pentecostals may be seen as the effect of applying the notion of a split God to their everyday existence; on the other hand, the notion may itself be the condition of possibility of the practices. Pentecostals, like any other religious believers, are simultaneously the subjects and objects of doctrines or notions.
Let me now offer a rationale for choosing these six particular case studies. They each serve to illustrate instances of various types of the split of God or reality. Chapter 2 on discernment shows that Pentecostals desire to pierce the phenomenal veil over reality and this presupposes a cracked reality. What gives them the impression that they can see through to “things-in-themselves”? They believe the ability comes from a heady abundance of the grace of God—or anointing—in their lives. We examine grace (in chapter 3) as an empowerment that “opens up” already existing gaps in reality that they exploit for their own flourishing and for performing of salvation or presentation of miracles. Based on the belief in cracked, split reality and unmediated access to the powers of the noumenal realm, chapter 4 (on the sacred) crafts a pentecostal theory of sacrality. The theory of sacrality revolves around Pentecostals’ understanding of miracles, which is very complex as miracles are deemed to arise both from phenomenal and noumenal realms and raises the question whether God is the sacred or the sacred is split between an Other-God and an immanent dimension. Chapter 5 throws light upon pentecostal subjectivity, which is fidelity to the crack opened up by divine grace in the believer’s life, liberating the self from forms of power that inhibits human flourishing and economic prosperity by exploiting the powers of the sacred. Next, we consider worship. Worship is not only the pentecostal perennial festival of grace, but it is also the energizing and defining core of the pentecostal lifeworld. It is the site in the daily encounter with God where all the other practices integrate and cohere as a crazy quilt of pulsating divine-human relation. Chapter 6 presents the pristine pentecostal idea of worship as pure mediality, where the pulsating mass of divine-human relations floats above calculations and the instrumentality of the nitty-gritty materiality of everyday life. Chapter 7 (“Everyday Form of Theology: Between Pentecostal Apparatus and Prosaic Existence”) shows how everyday Pentecostals consume and produce their own theology. It shows how folks appropriate the sermons and prescriptions for disciplining their bodies that come out of the pulpits to creatively produce their own wearable theology to further fit their “bodies,” their lifestyles in the here and now, or to circulate meanings and pleasures. We see how folks collect a bricolage of resources to produce meanings and pleasures and to resist or evade the containment or disciplinary efforts of the pulpit or social system. The chapter ends with a brief methodological discussion on how to reconstruct the everyday theology of believers in their lifeworlds dealing with and reinventing the notion of a split God. Finally, the concluding essay reveals the “theological excess,” religious “too-muchness,” that informs the everyday life of Pentecostals. This discussion is not really a conclusion; it is rather an unconcluding postscript.
Now the careful reader would have already noticed that we skipped introducing chapter 1. This chapter is not a case study; it is rather a foundational theoretical analysis of the day of Pentecost (Acts 2). It shows that the notion of the split God is rooted in the inaugural, “originary” event of Pentecost, the very ur-moment of the Christian church. The stories of the practices, rituals, beliefs that we relate in chapters 2–7 are the tracing, rearticulations, and reticulation of the primordial split in the life of Pentecostals.
This book tells the story of how Pentecostals at the grassroots perceive God, rather than as doctrine or a systematic theological figure finely decorated and proportioned by scholars. It puts the Christian God in a radically new perspective, which appears to be resisting learned notions of God that seem bookish, cold, or contrived. For all the recent scholarly attention given to the study of Pentecostalism, surprisingly little effort has been devoted to the movement’s bottom-up notion of God. What is the portrait of God deep in the grain of the extraordinary, creative practices and popular imaginations of Pentecostals and what do they reveal about their perceptions and working of God? I tease out here a portrait of God as discernible from varied practices and daily engagement with the sacred, practices of discernment, appropriation of divine grace, and subject-formation. Each practice has “plowed all the Bible and cut it [in] holes,” and each has its God at the end of its trace, molded by the nitty-gritty materiality of everyday needs, fears, and hopes.25
What kind of God will a person encounter if she goes into a pentecostal church and, instead of asking “tell me who God is,” observes how God is talked about, approached, courted, performed, and enacted as a real presence? What will emerge is not an impressionist painting of God, but an expressionist one. God comes out neither as a photograph of Godself in the Bible nor as the idealized image of God in systematic theological tomes. The type that emerges attempts to convey to an observer Pentecostals’ deepest levels of engagement with and profound participation in the transimmanent Holy Spirit and reality. This expressionist portrait, as we have already demonstrated, distorts the reality or traditional notions of God in order to accent other features that resonate more with them in their intensive participation in the divine being.
This expressionist picture of God is the fertile ground for everyday Pentecostals’ “theological” understanding of discernment, grace, the sacred realm, subjectivity, and worship, which often does not fail to leave an impression of the power and reality of the Holy Spirit even on the most skeptical observers.26 This book offers a glimpse of this picture of God, painted by people who are fervently committed to Jesus Christ and are grasped by the Holy Spirit.
Its chapters are, therefore, arranged to enable the reader to see the portrait’s major brush strokes and their interconnections. The six case-study chapters of the book are finely related in two pairs (chapters 2 and 5, and 3 and 6); two single chapters act as either a node/“ground” or as the “roof” of ideas expressed in the other chapters. Chapters 2 and 5 represent two ways of looking at the pentecostal subject. In chapter 2 (“Spiritual Discernment: Bathroom Mirror as Metaphor”), we see him or her discerning (judging and making distinctions in life situations and then reaching decisions based on evaluation) on issues based on the belief of split (non-All) reality. Here we see how the notion of a split God produces subjects in the combined sense of being subjected to and being subject of a particular belief. In chapter 5 (“The Impossible Possibility, Capitalism, and the Pentecostal Subject”), we examine the subject turning the split in reality, an impossible possibility into a make-believe economic space for relating and conniving with late capitalism. In the pentecostal articulation, it is the belief in split reality that provides the dialectical link between subjectivization and “abundant life” in capitalism.
Chapter 3 (“The Beauty, Skin, and Monstrosity of Grace”) dwells on grace, the pentecostal logic of sense as grace that dances on and off bodies of believers, and the monstrosity of grace. The Absolute or God that Pentecostals say they can access through the crack in reality is fragile, as flashes or bursts of energies in the matrix of bodies. In the hands of Pentecostals, grace works like dark energy. Unlike other kinds of matter that pushes away, dark energy pulls together. The difference is that most other kinds of matter are under pressure, whereas dark energy is under tension. But when the tension increases enough, dark energy does the opposite; instead of pulling the universe together, it leads to an acceleration of the expansion of the universe.27 Pentecostals’ firm belief in the work of grace pulls them close to the rest of Christians, but their exuberant stance on the miraculous appears to be pushing them away from Christianity into the unChristianity core of Christianity. Pentecostalism inhabits a space that undermines distinction between Christianity and non-Christianity. This occurs in the same vein as when we say a “person is inhuman” instead of “he is not human,” a new space beyond humanity and its negation is opened up. ‘“He is not human’ means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while ‘he is inhuman’ means something thoroughly different, namely that he is neither human nor not-human, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although negating what we understand as ‘humanity,’ is inherent to being human.”28
Grace as pure means (as we shall see later) not only supports the peculiar subject formation of Pentecostals—subjects subjugated to capital—but also undergirds the pure form for worship. Pentecostal worship is a pure means (the subject of chapter 6: “Worship as Pure Means”). Grace in the form of labile, malleable divine power is not means but pure manifestation. As Ruth Marshall puts it, “As the figure of ultimate sovereignty and historical agency, the power of God through the Holy Spirit takes the form of a pure manifestation, rather than simply a means to whose end is salvation.”29 In my 2012 book, Pentecostal Principle, I argue that the pentecostal attitude “allows” miraculous divine grace to float between the serious matter of saving the soul and ordinary, ephemeral, bodily, existential matters, relieving it of the weight of eternal life. Divine grace in the hands of the Pentecostals has become a pure means, means without ends. Thus Pentecostalism becomes part of the gigantic apparatus of late capitalism that converts every object into means. In this way, Pentecostalism and its subject formation make common cause with late capitalism.30
The “monstrosity” of pentecostal grace is also discernible in its worship or the idea of worship as pure mediality (medium), not as something instrumental, but as free selfless offering to God. We often hear Pentecostals express the view that their worship service is pure, or at least they aspire toward a pure worship, just worship. But this supposedly noble idea or orientation to worship (the splitting of means and ends) expresses a “perverse core” of pentecostal everyday form of theology. Perversity “is what remains embedded, coiled, and concealed within the very illusions of normativity.”31 The condition of worship as pure means is radical freedom, the freedom of worship from its situation as worship directed to a purpose. Worship becomes evental (in the Badiousian sense) like grace. What remains coiled within normativity of service to God is the now-familiar pentecostal inclination to radical freedom, the spontaneity that disengages from tradition (past) and from the chain of causality.
As you might have noticed, chapter 4 (“The Sacred as Im/possibility: Expect a Miracle!”) separates the two sets of chapters (2 and 5, and 3 and 6). It is the proper matrix for contextualizing the problematic addressed in chapters 2, 3, 5, and 6; and it also provides the bridge for each of the pairs to connect. The pentecostal understanding of the sacred informs how these practices (such as discernment and worship) perform the representation of God in everyday life. The notion or theory of the sacred is a powerfully integrating and structuring force for the currents of ideas about discernment, grace, subjectivity, and worship as well as being their “ground.”
This introduction and chapters 1–6 put up the foundation and walls of the architecture of a pentecostal everyday form of theology, so to speak. Chapter 7 erects the roof. Hovering over the lines and fibers of connections we have constructed in the course of the earlier chapters, the chapter affords the reader a bird’s-eye view of everyday theology constructed in this book. Besides, as erected over an “area” bigger than the space required by the preceding chapters, chapter 7 provides the reader an uncommon view of an everyday form of pentecostal theology. A view not captured by an academic theological lens, but by a participant observer.
The size of the roof I have erected over the six chapters owed its size to the fear that the roof could become too small too soon. Indeed, the “ecclesiastical walls” may be erected almost any time without proper measurements. Walk into a typical small church at a barn, camp, or storefront and you will notice a sign displaced above the space designated as altar, “Jesus is Lord.” By appealing to this high (abstract) Christological theme, the members of these small churches are doing something remarkable in the architecture of religious institutions or theological systems. They have constructed their roofs over their heads. But they lack “the ecclesiastical walls of liturgy, governance, and instructions that are normative in a given church tradition.”32
Often, literally, there are no physical walls, only roofs over the heads. And in some cases, there might not even be a roof. I was once part of a pentecostal church in Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria, that had neither roof nor walls—and we were exposed to the tropical sunshine or rain as we worshiped Jesus as Lord. Real, useable theologies issued from the tongues, bodies, cries and moans, and testimonies and celebrations of the hard-bitten followers of Christ in that place. How do we capture or retrieve the theologies in such small places? The concluding section of chapter 7 offers a brief discussion on what I call microtheology. Microtheology is an interpretative analysis of everyday embodied theological interactions and agency at the individual, face-to-face level. It is a study of everyday social interactions of individuals or small groups that demonstrate the linkages between spirituality (practices and affections) and embodied theological ideas (beliefs).