Practicing the Passion of Pentecost

Scholars are steadily situating pentecostal studies within the embodiment turn, recognizing its foci as imperative to ongoing twenty-first-century pentecostal/charismatic studies. Yet this enjoins greater movement beyond the earlier “linguistic turn,” which too often overlooked the crucial perspectival role of human flesh. For from the horizons of incarnation and Pentecost, Christian faith propagates God’s turn toward flesh. This suggest that pentecostal spirituality generates an eschatological urgency. Fostering this “urgency” into the twenty-first century, however, requires recasting its source and expression within pentecostal spirituality. Drawing from Acts 2:17 (“I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh”), this essay explores how this turn to the flesh might aptly ground and generate eschatological fervor. Doing so, however, exposes deficiencies with pentecostal sacramentality, recognizing links between it and eschatology. The essay addresses this by engaging Kearney’s “anatheist...

Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 brill.com/pneu Practicing the Passion of Pentecost Re-envisioning Pentecostal Eschatology through the Anatheistic Sacramentality of Richard Kearney Monte Lee Rice | orcid: 0000-0002-2237-819X Asia Pacific Theological Seminary, Singapore, Singapore monterice@gmail.com Abstract Scholars are steadily situating pentecostal studies within the embodiment turn, recognizing its foci as imperative to ongoing twenty-first-century pentecostal/charismatic studies. Yet this enjoins greater movement beyond the earlier “linguistic turn,” which too often overlooked the crucial perspectival role of human flesh. For from the horizons of incarnation and Pentecost, Christian faith propagates God’s turn toward flesh. This suggest that pentecostal spirituality generates an eschatological urgency. Fostering this “urgency” into the twenty-first century, however, requires recasting its source and expression within pentecostal spirituality. Drawing from Acts 2:17 (“I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh”), this essay explores how this turn to the flesh might aptly ground and generate eschatological fervor. Doing so, however, exposes deficiencies with pentecostal sacramentality, recognizing links between it and eschatology. The essay addresses this by engaging Kearney’s “anatheistic sacramentality.” It concludes with several implications with particular attention to the violent tragedy of world hunger. Keywords Acts – embodiment – eschatology – hospitality – Pentecost – Richard Kearney – sacramentality – violence © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/15700747-bja10015 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access 44 1 rice Introduction Across academic fields, contemporary scholarship exhibits an increasing turn to issues of embodiment and how this methodically factors within a given research scope.1 Conversely, scholars are steadily situating pentecostal studies within this turn. For the bodily kinesthetic qualities, ritual expressions, and tactile practices of Pentecostalism convincingly demonstrate that embodiment issues are imperative foci to ongoing twenty-first-century pentecostal/charismatic studies.2 Moreover, studies have observed in these an efficacy toward shalomic flourishing.3 For notwithstanding its failings, world Pentecostalism at its best—insofar as its varied discourse communities discursively will themselves toward Pentecost as their “core theological symbol”4—demonstrates a unique vision grounded in an “eschatological orientation to mission and justice” for a more equitably flourishing world order.5 I have thus far tersely specified the promising potential of pentecostal embodiment for our century and beyond. But in view of the painful realities of racism and race-based populist nationalism that over these past years significantly haunts both popular and scholarly discourse worldwide, I find myself increasingly drawn to Willie James Jennings’s watershed thesis about a “diseased social imagination,” spawned from the former Western colonialist era, that has sense plagued modern Christianity, specifically impending practiced theologies of embodied flourishing that robustly envision the saving promise of Pentecost.6 More pointedly, a “racialized” construal of human “bodies” effect- 1 Cognitive science is highly influential, for it establishes a thorough mutual causality between the body and mind; Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., Embodiment and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–13; Mark Johnson, Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason: How Our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 1–34. 2 Michael Wilkinson and Peter Althouse, eds., Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, vol. 8: Pentecostals and the Body (Leiden: Brill, 2017). Especially note the essays by Wilkinson and Althouse, “Social Theory, Religion and the Body,” 1–14 (2) and Michael Wilkinson, “Pentecostalism, the Body, and Embodiment,” 17–35 (17–21). 3 Later in this essay I shall reference relevant research when reviewing Wolfgang Vondey’s work on pentecostal sacramentality. 4 Wolfgang Vondey, Pentecostal Theology: Living the Full Gospel (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 1, 11–12, 283–291. 5 James K.A. Smith, Speaking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 41–43, 44–46, 60–61; Vondey, Pentecostal Theology, 119–121, 201, 216–220. 6 Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 6–7, 265–271, 289–294; Jennings, “Theology and Race,” Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access practicing the passion of pentecost 45 ing anaemic visions of flourishing, discursively rampant throughout the global apparatus of Christian theological discourse through its historically seminated, normalizing ideology of “whiteness” as a universal telos of human salvation.7 Herein moreover, Jennings argues, lies the primary root to an array of destructive forces (for example, racism, sexism, patriarchy, nationalism, poverty, planetary exploitation, and so forth) that violently characterize our world today.8 I must therefore also stress how varied contemporary vicissitudes are freshly awakening many of us to their deeply entrenched, formative power operating within world Christianity; indelibly consequent, as Jennings well demonstrates, to the historic “colonialist moment” of former European imperialist, hegemonically-willed expansion worldwide.9 With Jennings, however, I must stress that this anemia cannot be simply registered as solely a Western or Anglo/European matter, as the earlier “colonial moment” and ongoing process of globalization have indelibly formed local expressions of Christian life and theology worldwide.10 Yet more pointedly, my concern is how world Pentecostalism must conversely labor through this inferred task of decolonization, insofar and howsoever its vision of Pentecost also pathologically suffers through the aftermath of Western colonialism and its consequent Whiteness ideologies11 that formidably fuels patriarchally rooted will(s) to hege- 7 8 9 10 11 in The Routledge Companion to Modern Christian Thought, ed. Chad Meister and James Beilby (London: Routledge, 2013), 783–794 (794). Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 6–7, 241–249, 285–286, 293–294; “Theology and Race,” 786–789, 792; Jennings, “Can White People Be Saved? Reflections on the Relationship of Missions and Whiteness,” in Can ‘White’ People Be Saved? Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission, ed. Love L. Sechrest, Johnny Ramírez-Johnson, and Amos Yong (Downers Grove: ivp Academic, 2018), 27–43 (28–32, 38). As an ongoing fallout of Western colonialism, I define “Whiteness” as social/political structures that continue producing realities of: 1. raced-based privilege, specifically, those of “White”-race descent; and 2. systemic racism embedded within those structures. A third facet I would add is that the culture of Whiteness strives to assimilate and thus “normalize” non-Whites within its idealized culture of White European heritage. For a similar definition, see Johnny Ramírez-Johnson and Love L. Sechrest, “Introduction: Race and Missiology in Glocal Perspective,” in Can ‘White’ People Be Saved? 1–24 (12–14). Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 292–293; Jennings, “Can White People Be Saved?,” 28. Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 8; Jennings, “Theology and Race,” 784. Jennings, “Theology and Race,” 792. Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 166–170; Anderson, Spreading Fires: The Missionary Nature of Early Pentecostalism (London: scm Press, 2007), 5–8, 31–32; Chris Green, “The Spirit that Makes Us (Number) One: Racism, Tongues, and the Evidences of Spirit Baptism,” Pneuma 41 (2019): 397–420 (402–409); Nimi Wariboko and Bill Oliverio, “American Pentecostalism, the 8:46 Moment, and the covid-19 Pandemic,” Pneuma 42 (2020): Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access 46 rice monic power that discursively shapes global theological discourse(s),12 and violence against women worldwide.13 We should thus acknowledge that the “colonial aftermath” that plagues Christianity indelibly shapes local Christian expressions worldwide through the sheer discursive power of global networks that rhizomatically structure contemporary world Christianity; including world Pentecostalism. For such a time as this, there is, therefore, much we must mine from Jennings’s work. Though in this essay I particularly attend to three crucially integrated dynamics descriptive of pentecostal spirituality that we must assess on our way to a postcolonial vison and practice of Pentecost; namely, embodiment, sacramentality, and eschatology. For these reasons, I fully concur with Wolfgang Vondey, who has recently argued that, notwithstanding the intrinsic risks of hegemonically willed power plays for ideological dominance within global theological discourse, we must nonetheless pursue the difficult and too often failed task of articulating some form of a globally funded, theological “tradition,” “identity,” and practiced discourse that can normalize healthier visions, pathways, and practices of Pentecost.14 Notwithstanding the challenges I have briefly described, I therefore believe that as an embodied religious movement, world Pentecostalism comprises uniquely efficacious powers for fostering global healing and shalomic flourishing, though contingent to fostering visions of Pentecost that evoke a practiced eschatology for materializing the eschaton through actions willed toward hospitably embracing human differentiation. While acknowledging its horrific failures, world Pentecostalism can and should narrate how the shalomic potential of embodied practices within any Christian or religious tradition is contingent on how well these practices counter hostility against human alterity, by materializing in daily mundane life the embracing hospitality of God’s kingdom. 12 13 14 169–174 (169–171). We might also rope in here the role contemporary Pentecostalism has played thus far within “Christian Trumpism” worldwide. See, for instance, Leah Payne and Erica Ramirez, “The Christian sect that has always cheered on Donald Trump,” The Washington Post, March 21, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made‑by ‑history/wp/2018/03/21/the‑christian‑sect‑that‑has‑always‑cheered‑on‑donald‑trump/ (accessed January 13, 2021); Erica Ramirez and Leah Payne, “President Trump’s hidden religious base: Pentecostal-charismatic celebrities,” Religion News Service (August 27, 2020), https://religionnews.com/2020/08/27/president‑trumps‑rnc‑religious‑base‑pentecostal ‑charismatic‑kari‑jobe‑paula‑white/ (accessed January 13, 2021). Wolfgang Vondey, “Pentecostalism as a Theological Tradition: An Ideological, Historical, and Institutional Critique,” Pneuma 42 (2021); 521–535 (532–533). Linda M. Ambrose and Kimberly Alexander, “Pentecostal Studies Face the #MeToo Movement,” Pneuma 41 (2019): 1–7 (2–3). Vondey, “Pentecostalism as a Theological Tradition,” 535. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access practicing the passion of pentecost 47 Yet I would also wager that this direction enjoins greater movement beyond the earlier “linguistic turn,” particularly within hermeneutical philosophy and its predominant attention to “texts” as signifiers beyond the concrete.15 For too often, this signified a shift from the crucial perspectival role of sensately functioning human flesh.16 More specifically, the past “linguistic turn to the text” too often comprised “a turning away from the flesh—in practice if not in principle.”17 For from the horizon of incarnation, Christian faith propagates God’s turn toward flesh: “the Word became flesh.”18 Thereby the Spirit of God incarnates the eschaton, making phenomenologically present the kingdom of God.19 Appropriating these trajectories suggests that at its best, pentecostal spirituality generates an eschatological urgency (what Steven Land famously called a “passion for the kingdom”),20 thereby materializing the eschaton through its public acts of service. Yet I also share Daniel Castelo’s sentiment that given the delayed Parousia, doctrinally funded as it was by earlier “end-time” dispensationalist-rooted schemes, fostering this “urgency” into the twenty-first century requires that we theologically “recast” its source within pentecostal spirituality and what our “eschatological expectation ought to look like.”21 Drawing inspiration from the eschatologically framed promise of Acts 2:17— “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh”, giving us prophesy, vision, and dreams—I therefore suggest we consider how this return to the flesh might aptly ground and generate our eschatological fervor. I find a promising orientation through sacramental sensibilities that we can discern within the ethical-phenomenological and materialist-ontic concerns of post-continental philosophy of religion. In fact, we can situate these concerns and the embodiment turn within a broader sacramentality that twenty-first century scientific cosmology is evok15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, “Introduction: Carnal Hermeneutics from Head to Foot,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 1–11 (10); Richard Kearney, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, 15–56 (17, 46). Kearney, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” 49, 59. Kearney, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” 17. John Panteleimon Manoussakis, “On the Flesh of the Word: Incarnational Hermeneutics,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, 306–315 (306–307). Manoussakis, “The Promise of the New and the Tyranny of the Same,” in Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now, ed. Neal DeRoo and John Panteleimon Manoussakis (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 69–89 (72–76, 84). Steven Jack Land, Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom, JPTSup 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993; Cleveland: cpt Press, 2010), 23–24, 120, 164–167, 172–178, 219– 220. Daniel Castelo, Revisioning Pentecostal Ethics: The Epicletic Community (Cleveland: cpt Press, 2011), 111. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access 48 rice ing and thus further substantiates toward the growing problematic yet kairotic promise of pentecostal eschatological passion. In this essay I am thus suggesting what I believe is a promising philosophical foray toward theologically constructing a pentecostal practiced eschatology, oriented toward materializing, through our embodied acts of witness, the embracing hospitality of God’s kingdom. This argued turn toward the flesh, moreover, wields greater moral import toward addressing from within the passion of pentecostal eschatological expectation the twenty-first-century problematics of global violence and suffering toward human alterity. For example, with help from Levinasian-Derridean philosophical reflection,22 pentecostal scholarship has substantially retrieved from the imagery of “Pentecost” its implicit motifs of God’s affirming hospitality toward human differentiation. Yet thus far, it has given lesser weight to how or why such discussions warrant attention to its implications toward human suffering and violence, particularly noting how both Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida posited hospitality and violence as integrated phenomena, given that opportunity for hospitable action comprises a dual risk toward violence.23 Crucial to their respective works was their shared conviction that inscribed on human faces, particularly those destitute, vulnerable, or in diasporic conditions (exemplified by the Torah’s quadric reference to the “poor, widow, orphan, and ‘stranger’”), is the divine command to “not kill,” but welcome.24 So we might say that “violence” begins whenever we engage some form of “defac- 22 23 24 Frank D. Macchia, Baptized in the Spirit: A Global Pentecostal Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 187; Amos Yong, Hospitality and the Other: Pentecost, Christian Practices, and the Neighbor (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2008), xiii–xv, 56–59, 105–121; Daniela C. Augustine, Pentecost, Hospitality, and Transfiguration: Toward a Spirit-inspired Vision of Social Transformation (Cleveland: cpt Press, 2012), 18–20, 44–45, 65–72; 123–124; 145–148; Augustine, The Spirit and the Common Good: Shared Flourishing in the Image of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019), 49–51, 58–60. Granted, Augustine, who directly addresses problems of actual fleshy involved, human violence, is an exception; The Spirit and the Common Good (chap. 2, “From the Iconoclasm of Violence to Love as the Life of the New Creation”), 61–120. See Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 55; Derrida, “Hospitality,” trans. Gil Anidjar, in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. and trans. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 358–420 (359–362). Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Hijhoff, 1979), 215; Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 9, 18; Derrida, “Hospitality,” 363, 365. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access 49 practicing the passion of pentecost ing” a person or people; that is, when by not seeing them having a “face” like ours calling for “our moral recognition,” we thus diagnose them “as a threat” to our existence.25 So we might ask ourselves, is there more to what these “faces” signify before us—whether they be geographically near or far—than, as hermeneutical reflection too often primarily nuances, “traces of transcendence” or metaphysical truths? For as Roman Catholic continental philosopher Richard Kearney stresses, these “faces” are never merely “textual signifiers” but, rather, “living sensible flesh,” from which the possibility of divine incarnation actually gestures, calling us to loving action,26 materializing the kingdom of God. Therefore, through this essay, I will raise some further problematics with pentecostal “eschatological urgency” that I find linked to deficiencies with the tradition’s sacramentality. Thereafter, I will further develop my proposed orientation by retrieving, from Kearney’s sacramental envisioning of continental philosophy of religion, his “anatheistic sacramentality,” particularly drawing on two crucial elements—namely, Kearney’s “diacritical hermeneutics” and then his “micro-eschatology.” I will then conclude with several implications, particularly appropriating this re-envisioning of pentecostal eschatology to the violent tragedy of world hunger. I thus hope to establish here a promising philosophical resource for theologically constructing a pentecostal practiced eschatology oriented toward materializing, through our embodied acts of witness, the embracing hospitality of God’s kingdom. 2 Problems of Pentecostal Eschatological Urgency and Sacramentality As a caveat, I must stress that in view of the historic context I surveyed earlier, I do not correlate this assessment of pentecostal eschatological urgency with world Pentecostalism altogether, but with particular eschatological visions— 25 26 William H. Smith, “Neither Close nor Strange: Levinas, Hospitality, and Genocide,” in Phenomenologies of the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality, ed. Richard Kearney and Kascha Semonovitch (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 242–257 (252). Augustine thus suggests we define violence as “an iconoclastic … denial of the divine face in its incarnate proximity,” beginning with our “refusal to recognize the other’s humanity”; The Spirit and the Common Good, 66. Kearney, “Epiphanies of the Everyday: Toward a Micro-Eschatology,” in After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy, ed. John Panteleimon Manoussakis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 3–20 (6). Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access 50 rice namely, those rooted in past Anglo/European colonialist-era-funded theological trajectories—that overly construe Christian salvation as primarily a matter of post-mortem afterlife. For example, we must acknowledge that throughout its history, world Afro-Pentecostalism substantially escapes my critique. For whether we look at Black theology, African-American Pentecostalism, Black African Pentecostalism on the African continent, or its diasporic expressions elsewhere in the world, we could amply characterize these as showing forth visions of eschatology that orientate Christian salvation as very much, teologically, this-worldly oriented.27 So as I have therefore earlier discussed, we may root the problems I am raising in, as Jennings stresses, the “colonialist moment”–rooted Christian imagining of flourishing28 that has funded anemically “deformed” doctrines of creation, soteriology, reconciliation, and mission.29 And as I am particularly arguing, by way of his labor toward a better vision of Pentecost,30 this has thus caused anemic notions of embodiment, sacramentality, and eschatology.31 Having established my preceding caveat, I can now say that to the problem of pentecostal eschatological urgency I find an apt entry point through David Perry’s phenomenological study on how the pentecostal experience of Spirit baptism has effectually caused pentecostal mission and ministry worldwide.32 27 28 29 30 31 32 Frederick L. Ware, “On the Compatibility/Incompatibility of Pentecostal Premillennialism with Black Liberation Theology,” in Afro-Pentecostalism: Black Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in History and Culture, ed. Amos Yong and Estrelda Y. Alexander (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 191–206 (193–197, 200–201); J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, “Pentecostalism and the Transformation of the African Christian Landscape,” in Pentecostalism in Africa: Presence and Impact of Pneumatic Christianity in Postcolonial Societies, ed. Martin Lindhart, Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies 15 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 100–114 (107–109); J. Ayodeji Adewuya, “Constructing an African Pentecostal Eschatology: Which Way?” in Perspectives in Pentecostal Eschatologies: World without End, ed. Peter Althouse and Robby Waddell (Eugene: Pickwick Publications; Wipf & Stock, 2010), 361–374 (366–368). Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 6–7, 293–294; Jennings, “Theology and Race,” 788– 789; Jennings, “Can White People Be Saved?,” 27–43 (28–29). Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 9–10, 93, 112–114. 143–145, 165–168, 232–233, 245–249, 250–251. Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 10–11, 265–268, 270–271, 286–288, 291–293. Amos Yong similarly appropriates Jennings’s analysis to problems with pentecostal construals of salvation and eschatology in his essay “Conclusion: Mission after Colonialism and Whiteness: The Pentecost Witness of the ‘Perpetual Foreigner’ for the Third Millennium,” in Can ‘White’ People Be Saved?, 301–317 (302, 306, 317). David Perry, Spirit Baptism: The Pentecostal Experience in Theological Focus (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 176. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access 51 practicing the passion of pentecost Pentecostalism commonly conceptualizes this link through reference to Acts 1:8, positing Spirit baptism as an “empowerment for ministry.”33 Perry argues, however, that the past several decades of the tradition’s “shifting eschatology” logically challenges this effectual meaning.34 For its “eschatological expectation” toward the imminent return of Christ35 that has largely framed this effectual cause has steadily diminished36 via factors such as pentecostal upward socioeconomic mobility, increasing affluence,37 and the cognitive difficulty of indefinite expectation of Christ’s immediate return.38 Against this framing, Perry proposes that we rather frame the effectual meaning of the pentecostal experience of Spirit baptism within the rubric of God’s love poured into us through the Holy Spirit (Rom 5:5), thereby effecting mission and ministry.39 While I strongly affirm his effectual link, for many reasons I do not believe we should separate the substance of God’s love from the historic notion of “eschatological expectation.” For example, I think Frank Macchia effectively captures this integration by casting Spirit baptism as “a baptism into divine love”40 while tightly correlating the eschatological movement of God’s kingdom breaking in through Spirit baptism, as virtually concomitant to the outpouring of God’s love.41 I therefore believe that Castelo provides a more appropriate direction, suggesting that, rather than displacing the effectual role of pentecostal “eschatological expectation,” our present historic task is theologically recasting what this should look like.42 By mining the traditional pentecostal imagery of “tarrying,”43 he proposes we temper our “urgency” with the broader “Christian virtue of patience.”44 Yet while I affirm this, I suggest instead a recasting not to temper but rather to foster our sense of urgency. I thus suggest we consider how we might draw our eschatological passion from discerning how and where God’s kingdom and hence the commissioning presence of Christ our coming king, is breaking into our present time—sacramentally. More specifically, propheti33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Perry, Spirit Baptism, 150, 157. Perry, Spirit Baptism, 159, 161, 176. Perry, Spirit Baptism, 152–159, 176. Perry, Spirit Baptism, 159. Perry, Spirit Baptism, 159–161. Perry, Spirit Baptism, 160–161. Perry, Spirit Baptism, 176. Macchia, Baptized in the Spirit, 258. Macchia, Baptized in the Spirit, 259–261, 269–272. Castelo, Revisioning Pentecostal Ethics, 111. Castelo, Revisioning Pentecostal Ethics, 28. Castelo, Revisioning Pentecostal Ethics, 112. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access 52 rice cally envisioning moments that the kingdom sacramentally materializes, as we responsively act before bodily spheres of human and creational suffering. This “recasting” builds on the amply explored notion of pentecostal “sacramentality,” a term historically derived from the contemporary Roman Catholic affirmation that prior to the sacraments, creation incarnationally discloses the risen Christ and God’s kingdom, when humanly recognized.45 Chris Green and Wolfgang Vondey respectively evidence the most comprehensive effort toward a pentecostal theology of sacramentality. In a 2010 jointly written essay, they argued how the concept well describes pentecostal perceptions of and engagement with reality. Following James K.A. Smith’s earlier work, they characterized this as “surrealistic,” suggesting a “manifoldness” to all realities, thus enjoining not singularly intellective but affectively rooted epistemologies for comprehension.46 Green later published his book, Toward a Pentecostal Theology of the Lord’s Supper: Forecasting the Kingdom, which in many ways remains the most singularly focused monograph on pentecostal sacramentality.47 For the purpose of this discussion, the main value of Vondey’s and Green’s essay and the latter’s work on a pentecostal theology of the Lord’s Supper is that both strongly stress how pentecostal spirituality accentuates the eschatological substance of sacramentality and liturgical practices, particularly the Eucharist, and thereby the “corporeal nature of eschatology.”48 Reflecting on the Acts 2 phenomena,49 along with pentecostal liturgical practices commonly observed worldwide through phenomenological studies,50 Vondey suggests we define pentecostal sacramentality as “manifestation of the Spirit that leads toward, makes possible, and carries further the 45 46 47 48 49 50 K.W. Irwin, “Sacramental Theology,” in The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., vol. 12, ed. Thomas Carson and Joann Cerrito (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 465–479 (473); Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium 48–51, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat‑ii _const_19651118_dei‑verbum_en.html# (accessed June 16, 2016). Wolfgang Vondey and Chris W. Green, “Between This and That: Reality and Sacramentality in the Pentecostal Worldview,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 19 (2010): 243–264 (244, 247–248, 256); see Smith, Speaking in Tongues, 80–85. Chris E.W. Green, Toward a Pentecostal Theology of the Lord’s Supper: Forecasting the Kingdom (Cleveland: cpt Press, 2012). Vondey and Green, “Between This and That,” 258–260, 263–264; Green, Toward a Pentecostal Theology of the Lord’s Supper, 272–277, 286–288. Vondey, “Pentecostal Sacramentality and the Theology of the Altar,” in Scripting Pentecost: A Study of Pentecostals, Worship and Liturgy, ed. Mark J. Cartledge and A.J. Swoboda (London: Routledge, 2017), 94–107 (98). Vondey, “Pentecostal Sacramentality,” 95; Vondey, “Embodied Gospel: The Materiality of Pentecostal Theology,” in Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, 102–119 (103). Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access practicing the passion of pentecost 53 meeting of the human being with God.”51 He posits that chief among these practices is the pentecostal practice of coming to the “altar” expecting a transforming human-divine encounter.52 From Vondey’s and Green’s respective efforts, we can observe value yet limitations to pentecostal sacramental sensibilities. Positively, pentecostal sacramentality attributes an efficacious role to the worshiper’s bodily actions within the sacramental environment of pentecostal worship. In pentecostal spirituality, the physicality of the gathered community through bodily involvement constitutes its implicit sacramentality.53 Hence, while implicitly presuming a sacramental understanding of creation,54 I think we might say that pentecostal sacramentality primarily describes their vision of congregational worship as a “sacramental environment” that emerges from its intensely “embodied spirituality.”55 So regarding the mediating role of materiality, pentecostal sacramentality accentuates the mediative role of human embodiment and actions and their potential efficacy toward mediating spiritual realities.56 Past and ongoing empirical research confirms this, consistently suggesting that these practices comprise efficacious and formative outcomes.57 It thus also accentuates the epicletic invocation of the Spirit on the community gathered for an expected divine-human encounter.58 Negatively, in contrast to more explicitly avowed sacramental traditions that more readily perceive sacramentality operative throughout creation, discussions on pentecostal sacramentality, including the works of Vondey and Green 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 Vondey, “Pentecostal Sacramentality,” 102. Vondey, “Pentecostal Sacramentality,” 95, 99–102; Vondey, Pentecostal Theology, 30–31. Vondey, “Pentecostal Sacramentality,” 103. James K.A. Smith, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 61, 99; Castelo, “Mediation and the Pentecostal Experience of God,” in Pentecostal Theology and Ecumenical Theology: Interpretations and Intersections, ed. Peter Hocken, Tony L. Richie, and Christopher A. Stephenson (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 180–199 (193–194). Daniel Tomberlin, Pentecostal Sacraments: Encountering God at the Altar, rev. ed. (Centre for Pentecostal Theology: Cherohala Press, 2015), 59. Vondey thus argues that pentecostal spirituality operates from and suggests a highly materialist soteriology stemming from its radically embodied liturgical practices; “Pentecostal Sacramentality,” 98–101; Vondey, “Embodied Gospel,” in Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, 102–103, 114; Vondey, Pentecostal Theology, 18, 28, 30–32, 51, 114. Martin Lindhardt, “Introduction,” in Practicing the Faith: The Ritual Life of PentecostalCharismatic Christians, ed. Martin Lindhardt (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 1–48 (1); Joel Robbins, “The Obvious Aspects of Pentecostalism: Ritual and Pentecostal Globalization,” in Practicing the Faith, 49–67 (51, 65). Vondey, “Pentecostal Sacramentality,” 101; see also Castelo, Revisioning Pentecostal Ethics, 22. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access 54 rice I have reviewed earlier, consistently restrict it primarily if not exclusively to the topic of worship settings. I thus pose the question, might it therefore be possible that this restriction significantly gestures why Pentecostals have historically prioritized evangelistically oriented endeavors over such endeavors as social/societal justice, cultural development, and creational/earth care— hence, endeavors that broader notions of sacramentality naturally evoke?59 As Perry assessed, Pentecostals have usually, cognitively correlated their eschatological “urgency” to doctrinal belief in a rapture of the church out of the world just prior to the Lord’s return. This expectancy has thus usually prioritized evangelistic and missionary endeavors (though I would qualify both as oriented toward the aim of church planting) over concerns for social/societal justice and activism, notwithstanding the tradition’s impact within these spheres.60 Notwithstanding that pentecostal soteriology is highly materialistic, aiming toward physical healing and thus bodily flourishing,61 in many ways, like their Evangelical counterparts, Pentecostals have tended to cognitively understand ‘salvation’ experience as preparatory for “future other-worldly postmortem existence” rather than as bodily flourishing within present life.62 As Yong notes, we can especially see this within the “therapeutic existentialism” significantly operative within typical contemporary pentecostal/charismatic “praise and worship” worldwide. For, on one hand, this far too often functions as a “feel good” sedative pitched toward the “affective domain.”63 I say “sedative” to stress that the problem is not its affective orientation per se, for this is certainly crucial to the nature and aims of Christian music and worship practices,64 but rather, following James K.A. Smith’s definition of liturgies as “pedagogies of ultimate desire,”65 its lack of telos toward shaping within 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 Mathai Kadavil, The World as Sacrament: Sacramentality of Creation from the Perspectives of Leonardo Boff, Alexander Schmemann and Saint Ephrem (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 86, 306–307. Perry, Spirit Baptism, 164–166. Vondey, Pentecostal Theology, 114–121. Wayne Morris, Salvation as Praxis: A Practical Theology of Salvation for a Multi-Faith World (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), 42, 44. Yong, “Improvisation, Indigenization, and Inspiration: Theological Reflections on the Sound and Spirit of Global Renewal,” in The Spirit of Praise: Music and Worship in Global Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity, ed. Monique M. Ingalls and Amos Yong (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 279–288 (282). On its positive integral role see Peter Althouse and Michael Wilkinson, “Musical Bodies in the Charismatic Renewal: The Case of Catch the Fire and Soaking Prayer,” in The Spirit of Praise, 29–44 (33–36). James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, vol. 1, Cultural Liturgies (Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2009), 24–25, 53, 86–87. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access practicing the passion of pentecost 55 worshipers important theological foci regarding the mission of God within creation. On the other hand, Yong stresses that far worse is how the contemporary praise and worship industry and consuming market thereby fosters a “debilitating otherworldliness that disempowers Christian engagement with the present world and its challenges.”66 Meanwhile, Perry also notes the growing dissonance that Pentecostals face toward maintaining the effectual links among Spirit baptism, eschatological urgency, and evangelistic/missionary action, thus transitioning to a more “inaugurated eschatology of the kingdom of God.”67 Arguably, these developments are tightening the evangelistic and social/societal justice poles of pentecostal ministry.68 Vondey also addresses this dissonance through his notion of “eschatological practices,” defined as church “practices” for enacting its mission to “transform the world.”69 He argues that while other traditions express these, Pentecostalism grants them an “eschatological intensification” expressed through “apocalyptic urgency,” also believing that God accompanies them with miraculous “manifestations” of the Spirit’s outpouring, signaling the inbreaking of God’s kingdom.70 He notes, too, how Pentecostals are increasingly engaging ministry endeavors attending to present-life bodily flourishing,71 adding that their “apocalyptic vision” can effectually foster this aim.72 But Vondey ultimately returns to the same impasse diagnosed by Castelo and Perry, namely, the steady waning of pentecostal “apocalyptic urgency” given the seeming delay of the Parousia according to earlier dispensationalist schemes of 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 Yong, “Conclusion,” in The Spirit of Praise, 282. For helpful analysis on how today’s culture industry formidably drives the preceding comments on contemporary Christian praise and worship music, see Dave Perkins, “Music, Culture Industry, and the Shaping of Charismatic Worship: An Autobiographical/Conversational Engagement,” in The Spirit of Praise, 230–246 (230, 232, 243–244). Nimi Wariboko also attends to how “late capitalism” thereby interpellates the Christian worship industry for the aims of inculcating consumer compliancy to its profit-making aims; The Split God: Pentecostalism and Critical Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), 113–120, 128, 130–131; see also Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 24–25, 93–110. N.T. Wright helpfully discusses how this otherworldliness shapes popular notions of “heaven” in manners theologically opposed to its material implications, in Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 16–26. Perry, Spirit Baptism, 160–162. Perry, Spirit Baptism, 161–167. Vondey, Pentecostal Theology, 136. Vondey, Pentecostal Theology, 137; also 148–151. Vondey, Pentecostal Theology, 139–141. Vondey, Pentecostal Theology, 148. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access 56 rice eschatology.73 Thus we come back to the question on whether “eschatological expectation” and “urgency” are effectually and constitutively integral to pentecostal spirituality. I have been arguing that it is, though our contemporary setting enjoins us rather toward a more carnal grounding of our “eschatological urgency.” 3 Sacramental Sensibilities in Post-Continental Philosophy of Religion Therefore, my suggested recasting of pentecostal eschatological fervor carnally grounds it and its resultant practices on the very promise of Pentecost: Spirit immanentizing flesh. As earlier noted, I find a promising philosophical orientation for funding this move in the sacramental sensibilities of the post-continental philosophy of religion. I should thus note that this argued reenvisioning of eschatological urgency represents one argued trajectory within the presently increasing development of pentecostal philosophy and thick philosophically funded theological methodologies within pentecostal studies.74 But I have been observing that with the exception of Nimi Wariboko’s increasing effectiveness toward popularizing the critical and ethical import of continental philosophy,75 this development presently exemplifies a decidedly North American orientation toward analytic philosophy, striving to capitalize on its nuanced concerns for reasoned, cognitively-conceptual precision and analysis.76 And as J. Aaron Simmons notes—with which I agree—thus far “the vast majority of pentecostal philosophical work” is generally transfixed within the defensive apologetical contours of “Plantinga-type Christian philosophy,” thereby perpetuating, I would argue, the colonialist-rooted malaise that I have earlier summarized (Simmons indeed concludes how it reinforces 73 74 75 76 Vondey, Pentecostal Theology, 137. Wariboko and Oliverio, “American Pentecostalism,” 172–173; J. Aaron Simmons, “Prospects for Pentecostal Philosophy: Assessing the Challenges and Envisioning the Opportunities,” Pneuma 42 (2020): 175–200 (176–177, 185–194). Wariboko, The Split God: Pentecostalism and Critical Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018); Wariboko, The Pentecostal Hypothesis: Christ Talks, They Decide (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2020). Note the essays that notably argue or at least suggest preference for the analytic rather than continental tradition: Christopher A. Stephenson, “Should Pentecostal Theology be Analytic Theology?” Pneuma 36 (2014): 246–264 (248–249, 258–264); Simmons, “Prospects for Pentecostal Philosophy,” Pneuma, 188–194; Yoon Shin, “Confessing at the Altar: A Call and Response,” Pneuma 42 (2020): 201–219 (216–219). Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access practicing the passion of pentecost 57 “the theological insularity that underwrites so much of our contemporary social discourse”).77 Thus, contra this rather North American-sourced, analytic-Plantinganian direction, I am pleading that the problematics I have thus far reviewed warrant significant turn toward (as Simmons rightly describes) the “embodied material,” though I would add, critically ethical orientation of the continental philosophy of religion.78 Following are several relevant descriptives. First, the continental philosophy of religion labors toward “critical, phenomenological, political, and cultural analyses of religious beliefs and practices” within human life.79 It thus generally approaches theism or transcendence with respect to embodied life and its vicissitudes.80 Among foundational influences, I find most pertinent Levinas’s stress on ethical practice toward human alterity in religion and Derrida’s justice orientation via his deconstructive methodology.81 Hence, its methodology has been generally phenomenological and its resultant ethic oriented toward just practices toward human alterity.82 77 78 79 80 81 82 Simmons, “Prospects for Pentecostal Philosophy,” 194–195. Simmons, “Prospects for Pentecostal Philosophy,” 192. John D. Caputo, “Continental Philosophy of Religion,” in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. Charles Taliaferro, Paul Draper, and Philip L. Quinn (Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010), 667–673 (667). Eugene Thomas Long, “Self and Other: An Introduction,” in Self and Other: Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, ed. Eugene Thomas Long (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 1–7 (2). Morny Joy, “Introduction,” in Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion, ed. Morny Joy, Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, vol. 4 (New York: Springer, 2011), 1–16 (3–4); Philip Goodchild, “Continental Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction,” in Rethinking Philosophy of Religion: Approaches from Continental Philosophy, ed. Philip Goodchild (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 1–39 (14, 19–22). I should point out here that contrary to popularized but mistaken assumptions that Jacques Derrida’s “deconstruction” concept and links between hospitality and violence are conclusively nihilistic, I rather urge recognition that underwriting both themes was his drive toward “justice”: hence, “Deconstruction is justice,” and justice is not deconstructible; Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 230–298 (243); and “Hospitality,” 358–420 (361– 362). More specifically, then, driving these themes was Derrida’s impassioned urgency toward fostering attention to human rights against the backdrop of global migration, while proposing philosophical frameworks for negotiating global problematics of race/ethnic/ cultural-based violence against one another; Elisabeth Weber, “Introduction: Pleading Irreconcilable Differences,” in Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace, ed. Elisabeth Weber (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 1–17. See also Nicole Anderson, Derrida: Ethics under Erasure (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012), 1–2. Clayton Crockett, B. Keith Putt, and Jeffrey W. Robbins, “Introduction: Back to the Future,” Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access 58 rice I draw the prefix “post” from John Mullarkey’s reference to a turn within the tradition, signifying an increasing prioritizing of the “immanence” over “transcendence” category, thus further accentuating focus on materiality and embodiment.83 This trend thus also explains how we might understand “transcendence” operative within “immanence.”84 Yet the immanent turn thus frames the embodiment turn within the emerging twenty-first-century cosmology that increasingly posits quantum-level, mutual causality between elements of spirit, mind, and materiality, all existing in “mutual entanglement.”85 Physicist Karen Barad thus argues that “anachronistically” prior to our engagements with living entities, this causality obliges us toward responsibly discerning our best ethical actions, for “our (intra)actions matter—each one reconfigures the world in its becoming.” Moreover, our “(intra)actions” thereby “become us.”86 To reiterate, our material movements always comprise ethically charged decision points and outcomes that either foster or hinder mutually just flourishing.87 83 84 85 86 87 in The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion, ed. Clayton Crockett, B. Keith Putt, and Jeffrey W. Robbins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 1–18 (2). Brian Treanor helpfully associates “otherness” with “similitude,” meaning aspects of things or others that are in some ways “familiar or understandable to us,” and “alterity” with things or others that are “unfamiliar, alien, or obscure” to us. Alterity thus refers to how encountering otherness presents us with new or unforeseen phenomena, and similitude refers to aspects of otherness that we can understand more adequately or comfortably; Aspects of Alterity: Levinas, Marcel, and the Contemporary Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 229. Treanor’s approach thus parallels Richard Kearney’s “diacritical hermeneutics,” which I will soon discuss; 224. John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 1–2; see also Goodchild, “Continental Philosophy of Religion,” 25–27; Patrice Haynes, Immanent Transcendence: Reconfiguring Materialism in Continental Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), 1–2. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, “Introduction: Do We Need to Transcend Transcendence,” in Transcendence and Beyond: A Postmodern Inquiry, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 1–14 (7). Karen Barad, Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), ix, 33, 147, 152; Davies, Theology of Transformation: Faith, Freedom, and the Christian Act (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 47–48. More accurately, continental philosophy is increasingly suggesting a “non-reductive materialism” that appreciates concepts such as spirit and matter or mind and body as integrated throughout; hence best described through the “paradoxical notion of immanent transcendence”; Haynes, Immanent Transcendence, 3. We might best, then, theologically appreciate the “transcendent/immanent” pole as a heuristic device rather than actual “binary” poles; Davies, “Holy Spirit and Mediation: Toward a Transformation Pneumatology,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 16, no. 2 (April 2014): 159–176 (160). Barad, Halfway, 392, 394. Barad thus defines responsibility as not a “commitment that a subject chooses but rather Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access 59 practicing the passion of pentecost 4 Richard Kearney’s Anatheistic Sacramentality Richard Kearney is widely recognized as one of the most inspiring and respected early twenty-first-century voices in continental philosophy regarding its so-called “theological turn”88 and a sacramental turn within continental philosophy of religion.89 Since his 2010 book Anatheism: Returning to God after God, we may sum up his key themes as “anatheistic sacramentality.”90 On one hand, Kearney’s project thus falls within the historic “death of God” theological discourse, yet on the other it critically exemplifies a post–deathof-God trajectory, for—working from unique readings within radical Christian apophatic theology—it innovatively aims toward fresh ways of articulating theism (coupled with the notion of “sacredness”) beyond both commonly defined, atheistic (and agnostic) and metaphysically grounded theistic categories either “against” or “for” sacred divinity within today’s postShoah/secular/Christendom religiously pluralistic context.91 Briefly, Kearney appreciates God as posse (“possibility of being”) rather than esse (“actuality of being as fait accompli”) as being.92 Hence, he stresses that contingent to the efficacy of God’s saving power or action toward suffering humanity and creation is the human reply to the divine summons for responsible action.93 I thus feel that Kearney’s posse-grounded understanding of God actually resonates well with pentecostal sensibilities toward a deeply passible, immanently 88 89 90 91 92 93 an incarnate relation that precedes the intentionality of consciousness.” Hence, “an obligation which is anachronistically prior to every engagement” with other living creatures, human or otherwise; Halfway, 392. John Panteleimon Manoussakis, “Introduction,” in After God, xv–xx (xvi–xvii). Kearney, “Epiphanies of the Everyday,” in After God, 362. Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 3–7, 16. Kearney, Anatheism, xiii–xiv, 16, 53–53, 58–61, 72–73; Kearney, “Preface,” in Reimagining the Sacred: Richard Kearney Debates God, ed. Richard Kearney and Jens Zimmermann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), vii–vii (xiii); Kearney, “Epilogue: In Guise of a Response,” in Reimagining the Sacred, 240–249 (244, 248–250). Kearney more thoroughly develops his “anatheistic” articulation of God in his earlier work, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); see also Kearney, “Enabling God,” in After God, 39–54 (45). Kearney, The God Who May Be, 4; Kearney, “Enabling God,” 41–49. Kearney, “Enabling God,” 40, 43–45, 53–54. For an excellent summary of Kearney’s thinking and its contemporary relevance as, moreover, a theistic apologetic, see Christina M. Gschwandtner, “Richard Kearney: Postmodern Charity,” in Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments for God in Contemporary Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 265–286. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access 60 rice nuanced doctrine of God94 that appreciates the efficacious role of human action in the divine cause toward creation.95 The prefix “ana” (“back again, anew”) signifies the return, after experiences of loss, to one’s “primal experience” in newer, fuller, and forward-moving epiphanic receptions.96 Kearney’s root issue is theistic: a “returning to God after God.”97 He experiences this as a “loss of God” according to ontological “omni-” descriptions,98 to a more phenomenologically ethically nuanced and ontically grounded understanding of God.99 To use the Ricoeurian expression, “anatheism” signifies a “second naïveté” by discovering “ourselves before God” in new ways. More specifically, though retrieving yet crucially differing Levinas’s abstracted notion of the “face” (“prosopon”) as a “trace” of God, anatheism discerns calling us through the “concretely enfleshed phenomenon” of “faces from” before us, particularly through “strangers.”100 Now, given that I may represent the first fairly extended engagement with Kearney’s work within pentecostal studies, let me more pointedly note now how our contemporary setting warrants this retrieval, particularly given its placement within the “death of God” discourse, which I also don’t think has received much attention. Here I think the key foray is, as just mentioned, Kearney’s “ana”-nuanced conception of a “second naïveté” stressing the “retrieval” of something lost but now re-found in some surprisingly new ways.101 Following the post-Shoah/theodical reflections of Jürgen Moltmann and Paul Chung vis-à-vis Levinasian-Derridean discourse, this discussion references the metaphor within our “late Capitalist” setting to the death God shares within 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 Samuel Solivan, The Spirit, Pathos and Liberation: Toward an Hispanic Pentecostal Theology, Journal of Pentecostal Theology Supplement Series 14 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 54, 59–61, 149; Clark H. Pinnock, “Divine Rationality: A Pentecostal Contribution to the Doctrine of God,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 16 (2000): 3–26 (6–7, 13–16, 18–21); Keith Warrington, Pentecostal Theology: A Theology of Encounter (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 28–29, 33; Kenneth J. Archer, The Gospel Revisited: Toward a Pentecostal Theology of Worship and Witness (Eugene: Pickwick, 2011), 84, 91; Andrew J. Gabriel, The Lord Is the Spirit: The Holy Spirit and the Divine Attributes (Eugene: Pickwick, 2011), 133f., 156–157; Wariboko, The Split God, xvi–xix, 2–5, 10–11, 16, 72, 195–196. Archer, The Gospel Revisited, 84–85; Wariboko, The Split God, 2, 4, 10–12, 71–73, 79–80, 107– 110, 116, 165, 168. Kearney, Anatheism, 3. Kearney, Anatheism, xvi, 3, 167. Manoussakis describes these as “omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence” and their produced “triumphalist teleologies” and “ideologies of power”; “Introduction,” xvi, xviii. Kearney, “God after God: An Anatheist Attempt to Reimagine God,” in Reimagining the Sacred, 6–18 (10). Kearney, “Epiphanies of the Everyday,” in After God, 6–7. Kearney, “Epiphanies of the Everyday,” 8, 12. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access practicing the passion of pentecost 61 violence toward and in solidarity with oppressed, excluded, or peripheralized human alterity, consequent to the will-to-hegemony indelibly operative within human civilizational progress.102 I thus establish warrant for this engagement in response to, as I have earlier surveyed, all the contemporary vicissitudes I have noted regarding our increasing grappling with historic Western colonialism in all its ongoing aftermath, coupled with how these interface, moreover, with the deepening problems with pentecostal eschatological passion and sacramentality. Though in many ways Kearney’s broader theological reinvisioning reaches beyond orthodox Christian theism,103 let me stress that I especially find a compelling fittedness between his work and pentecostal studies through (according to Justin Sands’s assessment) his passionate grounding and engagement “within biblical and theological texts” coupled with his evident aims not toward replacing “traditional or orthodox belief” but, rather, at teasing out, I think, the notion of divine summons to responsible action toward “Otherness and alterity” that oftentimes gets “obscured” through more mainstream conceptions of Christian theism.104 Particularly when esse takes precedence over posse toward the topic of establishing the role of human action within the healing mission of God. I believe this essay’s subsequent discussion should make this conviction even more convincing. Two concepts compose Kearney’s sacramentality: his “diacritical hermeneutics” and “micro-eschatology.” Both derive from an archetypical narrative of human-divine encounter that Kearney finds throughout Scripture and that thus structures the primal narrative of anatheistic sacramentality: namely, God coming before us as a “Divine Stranger” summoning us to ethical response and bodily welcome, calling us to repentance (“turning”) from “hostility” to “hospitality” (for example, Genesis 18 and 32; Matthew 25; Luke 1 and 24).105 He thus calls these encounters “threshold” events106 comprising the potential of 102 103 104 105 106 Jürgen Moltmann The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R.A. Wilson and Jon Bowden (London: scm Press, 1974; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 200–201, 207, 277–278; Paul S. Chung, Critical Theory and Political Theology: The Aftermath of the Enlightenment (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 32–33, 63–64, 311–318. For critical concerns see the varied response essays in After God (particularly William Desmond, “Maybe, Maybe Not: Richard Kearney and God,” 55–77). Justin Sands, “Passing through Customs: Merold Westphal, Richard Kearney, and the Methodological Boundaries between Philosophy of Religion and Theology,” Religions 7, no. 83 (2016): 1–13 (10). Kearney, “God after God,” in Reimagining the Sacred, 10; Kearney, Anatheism, 4, 17–30. Kearney, Anatheism, 4. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access 62 rice Epiphany (Heb 13:2).107 His “diacritical hermeneutics of alterity” is thus the practice of anatheistic sacramentality.108 Recalling traditional medical practices of “diagnosing” bodily “symptoms,”109 it discerns between a “good” (the stranger, the widow, the poor, and the orphan) and a “bad” alterity, the latter meaning a genuine evil willing violence against us.110 This “diacritical” practice represents what Kearney and similar advocates describe as “carnal hermeneutics,” stressing that hermeneutics begins not with linguistic understanding, but with the sapiential (etymologically derived from sapere, “to taste”) causing “sensation” of tactile, fleshly embodied human life (16–17).111 As the prefix “dia” (“between”) infers, diacritical hermeneutics is thus a phenomenologically oriented “dialogical” method.112 Through it we diagnose the “other” before us, and though we might perceive this “other” as “strange,” we might also discern variables in our “self” that might be causing us to respond with rejection or hostility rather than with welcome,113 or, more pointedly, to discern the possible sacred summons these encounters present us.114 Within anatheistic sacramentality, Kearney’s micro-eschatology exemplifies a “retrieving” of eschatology “after” (ana) standard “macro-eschatological” depictions of the kingdom’s coming via notions of “sovereignty, omnipotence, and ecclesiastical triumph.”115 He constructs this from a “sacramental methodology” that discerns “the divine” operative within kairotic “events of quotidian existence.”116 Thus, as a phenomenological practice in the form of diacritical 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 Kearney, Anatheism, 29, 31, 38; Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London: Routledge, 2003), 3; Kearney and Kasha Semonovitch, “At the Threshold: Foreigners, Strangers, Others,” in Phenomenologies of the Stranger, 3–29 (4–5, 8). Kearney and Semonovitch, “At the Threshold,” 20; Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, 17, 229. Kearney, “What is Diacritical Hermeneutics?,” Journal of Applied Hermeneutics (December 10, 2011): 1–14 (3). Kearney and Semonovitch, “At the Threshold,” 17. Carnal hermeneutics thus corrects past continental philosophical and postmodern themes that have approached the physical body as “signifier” within cognitive reality construction (through both the “hermeneutical” and “linguistic” “turns”), thereby bypassing its primordial role toward human understanding; Kearney and Brian Treanor, “Introduction,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, 1–2; Kearney, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, 16–17; Treanor, “Mind the Gap: The Challenge of Matter,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, 57–73 (58–59). Kearney and Semonovitch, “At the Threshold,” in Phenomenologies of the Stranger, 20. Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, 18. Kearney, “What is Diacritical Hermeneutics?,” 9. Kearney, “Epiphanies of the Everyday,” 8, 42. Kearney, “Sacramental Imagination and Eschatology,” in Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now, 55–67 (55–56). Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access practicing the passion of pentecost 63 hermeneutics, “micro-eschatology” discerns the “eschaton” bodily breaking out before us, particularly in the most banal of settings and the lowliest forms of suffering humanity.117 Temporal and spatial metaphors clarify Kearney’s “micro-eschatology.” He draws the temporal from the continental philosophical construal of “messianic time” via the works of Levinas and Derrida,118 yet particularly through Walter Benjamin’s reflection: “at the heart of every moment of the future is contained the little door through which the Messiah may enter.”119 Benjamin’s statement reflects Jewish rabbinical notions of the messianic waiting within human suffering, thereby summoning our moral response.120 Kearney calls this a “weak messianism,” for it characterizes “messianic” events coming to us through weakness rather than through power.121 Here we can readily appreciate Kearney’s “spatial” metaphors from the Gospel descriptions of the kingdom as “a mustard seed, a pearl, a reed, an infant,” and Jesus’s reference to how a blessed “judgment of the Kingdom” is contingent to our response to the “least of these” (Matt 25:40).122 Kearney stresses how these metaphors converge through fleshly incarnated loving actions—the extended “cup of cold water” to thirsty people, particularly to the “least”—whereby we materialize God’s kingdom.123 He thus posits that the hope of messianic eruption ethically summons our response to moral action, beginning with our expectancy toward these moments,124 which pri- 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 Kearney, “Epiphanies of the Everyday,” 4. Kearney, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 45. In continental philosophy, messianism speaks of the promise of transcendence breaking into immanence, though as a potentially unsettling ethical summons (particularly via Derrida’s and John Caputo’s deconstructive themes) toward human “alterity”; Clayton Crockett et al., “Introduction,” in The Future of Continental Philosophy, 3–4. Walter Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment” (1921), in Benjamin, One Way Street (London: nlb, 1979), 155f.; quoted in Kearney, “Enabling God,” 39–54 (43). Elsewhere Walter Benjamin similarly writes, “the ‘time of the now’ … shot through with chips of Messianic time … for every second of time” is “the straight gate through which the Messiah might enter”; “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zhon, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 263–264. This reflects the rabbinic fable of a rabbi asking the prophet Elijah: “When will the Messiah come?” Elijah replies, “Go and ask him himself.” After the rabbi asks, “Where is he?,” Elijah replies, “He is sitting among the lepers”; Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 71. Kearney, The God Who May Be, 45–46; Kearney, Anatheism, 59. Kearney, “Enabling God,” 41–42. Kearney, “Enabling God,” 42. Kearney, The God Who May Be, 46. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access 64 rice mordially open before us through encountering suffering human alterity.125 The messianic moment especially summons our hospitality to those different from ourselves.126 To use Derrida’s language, in these decision-making events between violence or hospitality comes the possible deconstructive “advent” of “Messiah” standing before us.127 Let me now briefly summarize Kearney’s project. First, in “micro-eschatology,” the logic of Christ’s incarnation is kenosis, and the logic of kenosis is embodied response to human and creational suffering within their fleshly existence. The eschaton thus works through the sacrament of incarnation, for its “logic … obeys that of an inaugurated eschatology.”128 As I read Kearney, his phrase “the sacramental move,” which describes God’s kenotic “descent into flesh,” captures this logic yet “depends on our response” to the messianic moment’s “sacred solicitation.”129 Its resultant outcome is a “sacramental ethics” that kenotically translates “epiphanies of transcendence” into the “immanence of hospitable everyday action.”130 Second, Kearney’s themes demonstrate how “incarnation” is thoroughly an “eschatology” concept, making our actions the “eschaton embodied” when responsive to messianic eruption.131 Finally, as earlier stated, Kearney’s anatheistic sacramentality insists that God’s kenotic aims are contingent on human response, a principle he denotes through his dictum “God of the possible.” This he constructs from contrasting the fifteenth-century German mystic Nicholas of Cusa’s rendering of the Latin term posse as “the possibility of being” with the term esse (actuality of being). From this, he argues that God’s loving action in the world as posse requires our response in the moments of potential messianic eruption. Hence, God waits for us “to hear the call” and “answer the posse with esse, to make the word flesh.”132 Within this interplay, Kearney thus suggests a divine-human dialogue: “I can125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 Kearney, Anatheism, 17–22, 29, 54. Kearney, Anatheism, 54. Derrida, “Avowing—The Impossible: ‘Returns,’ Repentance, and Reconciliation: A Lesson,” trans. Gil Anidjar, in Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace, ed. Elisabeth Weber (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 18–41 (40); Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 269–276 (273–274); Derrida, “Hospitality,” 362, 364; Derrida, “Force of the Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Acts of Religion, 230–298 (243). Kearney, “Sacramental Imagination,” 55. Kearney, “Sacramental Imagination,” 56. Kearney, Anatheism, 133. Manoussakis, “Toward a Fourth Reduction?” in After God, 21–33 (31). Kearney, “Enabling God,” 45. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access practicing the passion of pentecost 65 not become fully embodied in the flesh of the world, unless you … answer my call ‘Where are you?’ with the response ‘Here I am.’”133 Hence, God does not “become incarnate … until we open the door, until we give the cup of cold water, until we share the bread, until we cry, ‘I am here.’”134 5 Conclusion What I have broadly proffered by engaging the “embodiment turn” within the humanities and sacramental sensibilities of post-continental philosophy of religion illustrated in Kearney’s anatheistic sacramentality is a recasting of pentecostal “eschatological expectation.” Such a recasting is also responsively attentive to the decolonizing task and ethos that must, I believe, increasingly negotiate our search for better readings and visions of Pentecost and thus human and creational flourishing: namely, one that grounds and generates this “urgency” from discerning God’s kingdom sacramentally breaking out within our quotidian opportunities to act lovingly, with our lives sensibly turned, as Kearney stresses, to the “micro” places where the eschaton summons our responsive action. More specifically, in those moments that the continental philosophical tradition calls the deconstructive events of “messianic” possibility; thus the moments when we must decide whether to act with hostility or hospitality—thereby eschatologically practicing salvation toward bodily spheres of human (yet perhaps also broader creational) suffering. What emerges is a pentecostal practiced eschatology, oriented toward materializing, through our embodied acts, the embracing hospitality of God’s kingdom. Recalling, on one hand, Kearney’s notion of “diacritical hermeneutics” and, on the other, the eschatologically framed promise of Acts 2:17—“my Spirit on all flesh”—this orientation moreover suggests a discerning critique to our resultant acts of public witness and service. Grounded in the generated passion of Pentecost, this re-envisioned eschatology thus enjoins our periodic critique toward the “worth” of our public acts,135 that we may indeed bodily enact and 133 134 135 Kearney, “Enabling God,” 43. Kearney, “Enabling God,” 40. Following Augustine’s deference to the book of Acts, I use the term “acts” to ascribe a pentecostally “pneumatological emphasis” to our “vision of Christian service,” an emphasis that theologically assumes that the Spirit imbues these acts “with the hospitality of God”; The Spirit and the Common Good, 200, n. 7. Also in this context, my reference to the term “service” calls to mind an understanding of “liturgy” in its broad etymological sense (leitourgia), denoting “the work of a people” organizing their lives in behalf of the public good. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access 66 rice materialize God’s coming kingdom through the Holy Spirit acting on us. Moreover, as Daniella Augustine notes, these acts ascetically embody the kingdom as we missionally practice them for the world’s transformation. For through their “ascetic respacing and kenotic self-sharing” movements, they heal us as well from our own inward turn.136 Yet moreover, this practiced eschatology of discerning the disruptive events of Pentecost also questions how we might best materialize the blessing of Christ as Spirit baptizer exalted not beyond but within bodily suffering humanity, thereby beckoning our urgent response to this fleshly locality.137 For beckoning us here is a crucial revelatory site where God wills “divine causality” for the world’s healing.138 For as Christian ethicist Clemens Sedmak argues, the Matthew 25 parable suggests the “least of these” functions as a divine “source of revelation;” as a morally mattering place,139 where the Spirit of God is “causally” present for effecting the world’s healing.140 Though a dense statement, I will unpack this through three concluding ramifications emerging from this essay’s preceding themes. First, as I have earlier inferred, pentecostal intuitions would situate this sacramentally tuned practiced eschatology within a strong pneumatological grounding. Drawing on the pneumatology of Eastern Orthodox theologian Eugene Rogers, we could thus say that pentecostal sacramentality theologically demonstrates the “paraphysicality” of the Spirit, meaning that the Spirit proactively “re-befriends the physical,” particularly the human body to redeem, transfigure, and exceed it (Acts 2:17–18).141 This is why Pentecost and all Christian experiences of Spirit baptism are sacramental outcomes of Christ’s ascension 136 137 138 139 140 141 Augustine stresses these themes via the term’s earlier athletic etymology (askesis); The Spirit and the Common Good, 21, 51–53, 129–130, 137–138, 159. Also pertinent is Steven Jack Land’s description of pentecostal spirituality as an ascetically oriented spirituality, particularly given its practices of “pentecostal prayer” that generate eschatological passion; Pentecostal Spirituality, 69, 74–91, 120–121, 133–177 (esp. 163–172), 182–183, 219. Frank Macchia, “A Theology of Christ as Act: A Response to Oliver Davies,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 24, no. 2 (2015): 145–153 (148); Macchia, Jesus the Spirit Baptizer: Christology in Light of Pentecost (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), 124, 127, 342–343. Paul D. Janz, “Revelation as Divine Causality,” in Oliver Davies, Paul D. Janz, and Clemens Sedmak, Transformation Theology: Church in the World (London: T & T Clark, 2007), 63–88 (68). Barad argues that our actions always ethically “matter” given the realities of “quantum entanglement”; Halfway, ix–xi, 3, 384. Clemens Sedmak, “The Disruptive Power of World Hunger,” in Davies et al., Transformation Theology, 115–141 (115–116). Eugene F. Rogers Jr., After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Modern West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 2, 15, 49, 57–58. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access practicing the passion of pentecost 67 as Spirit baptizer.142 While addressing platonic tendencies implicit in many Christian hermeneutical approaches thereby effecting a “spiritualizing” of the “flesh,” Eastern Orthodox philosopher-theologian John Panteleimon Manoussakis thus argues that the “the claim by which Christianity stands or falls” is that “the Word became flesh.” Thus, he moreover argues that the aim of Christian ascetics is not turning “flesh into spirit,” but spirit into flesh, “rendering the suprasensible sensible.”143 For in this mattered place, the Spirit of God incarnates the eschaton, making phenomenologically present the kingdom of God.144 Second, this essay suggests we situate the notion of pentecostal orality within current embodiment studies while conversely bringing it into dialogue with what Kearney and others are calling “carnal hermeneutics,” particularly conversing with his “diacritical hermeneutics.” Beginning with Walter Hollenweger’s research, which closely corresponded to anthropologist Walter Ong’s seminal 1960s/1970s-era work on orality studies and epistemology, pentecostal orality has long been described as a physically embodied sensory, transrational, and dialogically oriented way of communication and knowledge perception.145 Pentecostal studies, however, have tended to orientate orality research on the phenomena characterizing pentecostal congregational worship practices, though substantially demonstrating how pentecostal orality has granted the tradition worldwide, its twentieth-century deep resonance with the world’s poor, who, though often print-illiterate, have found in Pentecostalism a spirituality deeply congruent to their “oral literacy.”146 Hollenweger thus called this the “oral root” of Pentecostalism.147 142 143 144 145 146 147 Macchia, Jesus the Spirit Baptizer, 153, 183; 185; Vondey, “Pentecostal Sacramentality,” in Scripting Pentecost, 101; Vondey, Pentecostal Theology, 97, 100–101. Manoussakis, “On the Flesh of the Word: Incarnational Hermeneutics,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, 306–307, 310. Manoussakis, “The Promise of the New,” in Phenomenology and Eschatology, 72–76, 84. Walter J. Ong called this the “sensorium,” referring to the bodily sensory modes humans use for engaging their exterior world; The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Culture and Religious History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 1–16, 88; see also 22–35, 111–113; Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 3rd ed. (Methuen & Co., 1982; New York: Routledge, 1982, 2002, 2012), 31–32, 45–49, 67–68; Walter J. Hollenweger, Pentecostalism: Origins and Developments Worldwide (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997), 18–19, 34, 38, 294; Néstor Medina, “Orality and Context in a Hermeneutical Key: Toward a Latina/o-Canadian Pentecostal Life-Narrative Hermeneutics,” PentecoStudies 14, no. 1 (2015): 97–123 (114). Walter J. Hollenweger, The Pentecostals (London: scm Press, 1972; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1988), 457–467; Hollenweger, Pentecostalism, 20, 33–34, 196, 198, 270, 273, 293. Hollenweger, Pentecostalism, 19–23. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access 68 rice Yet, noting that pentecostal sacramentality seems too categorically restricted to the tradition’s worship practices, Kearney’s “diacritical hermeneutic” challenges us to a better missional orientation. I thus also argue that a pentecostal “diacritical” or “carnal”-oriented hermeneutic should be “sensibly” (referring to sensory phenomena) discerning God’s “divine causality” presently operative within specific situations of human embodied life as well as throughout the world within acute settings of violence, hostility, and suffering.148 Conversely, pentecostal/charismatic Christianity proffers to Kearney’s anatheistic sacramentality and the notion of carnal hermeneutics a pneumatologically rich and charismatic orientation that it could benefit from through this exchange. Third, this essay’s broad themes closely dovetails with similar methodological premises and outcomes characterizing the “Transformation Theology” orientation of Roman Catholic theologian Oliver Davies, philosophical theologian Paul D. Janz, and Christian ethicist Clemens Sedmak. This confluence probably stems from my past and ongoing affinity with their shared efforts. In fact, a 2015 issue of the Journal of Pentecostal Theology extensively explored this orientation as a promising conversation partner with pentecostal theology.149 Transformation Theology is a triadically integrated “doctrinal,” “methodological,” and “ethical” reflection oriented toward a confessed belief that divine revelation vis-à-vis the ascended Christ is materially present—incarnationally as an “embodied reality”—within our existing space and time, causing its transformation toward God’s eschatological aims as the New Creation.150 148 149 150 Paul D. Janz, “Revelation as Divine Causality,” in Davies et al., Transformation Theology, 63–88 (68–69, 76–78). Castelo, “Transformation and Pentecostal Theology,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 24 (2015): 137–144. Oliver Davies, Paul D. Janz, and Clemens Sedmak, “Prologue: Transformation Theology,” in Davies et al., Transformation Theology, 1–8; Davies, Theology of Transformation, 60. The “doctrinal” refers to Davies’s Christology of the ascended commissioning Christ, bodily or incarnate present within the church and beyond in suffering humanity; Theology of Transformation, 3, 18, 54–55, 58–62, 68–70, 85–86, 126–127; Davies, “The Interrupted Body,” in Davies et al., Transformation Theology, 37–59 (44, 47–53). The “methodical”: Janz’s “revelation as divine causality” dictum, positing “sensible human embodiment” and the world as “indispensable” sites of divine transcendence, and thus also theological authority and accountability; “Revelation as Divine Causality,” in Davies et al., Transformation Theology, 63–88 (76–84); Davies, The Command of Grace: A New Theological Apologetics (London: T & T Clark, 2009), 54, 118, 132, 137, 139, 141, 144. And the “ethical” refers to Sedmak’s stress that Christian ethics is primarily not “conceptual” articulation but a “causal” praxis demanding the practitioners’ sensible encounter with actual bodily suffering and tragedy; “The Disruptive Power of World Hunger,” 115–141 (115–116); Davies, “The Wound of Knowledge: Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access practicing the passion of pentecost 69 Moreover, Transformation Theology correspondingly emerges from engaging continental immanentist-phenomenological themes151 yet more deeply still, increasing scientific understandings of mind/spirit and physical materiality as integrated in mutual causality.152 Presuming this cosmology, it thus substantiates the “pentecostal witness” to the “objective” and thus “material aims” (Acts 2:33, “what you see and hear”) of Pentecost; for the Spirit comes to seminally transform not our spirit or mind but, rather, matter into new creation.153 I must also add that Transformation Theology thereby further suggests how we can indeed draw our eschatological passion from discerning the commission of Christ calling us to action toward suffering humanity; that his kingdom may sacramentally erupt through our actions, thereby grounding our “passion” to the “disruptive urgency” of varied yet tragic forms of bodily suffering worldwide.154 With an eye toward Jesus’s word, “whatever you did for … these … you did for me” (Matt 25:40), this orientation suggests, then, that suffering humans theologically reveal God’s causative presence in the world aimed also toward our own transformation—contingent to how rightly we respond to their suffering.155 Finally, we must not construe this practiced eschatology as merely discerning how the eschaton waits for us, but rather as a practiced “naming” to grave violence worldwide. For underlying this study is the conviction that a crucial formational outcome of pentecostal orality-rooted liturgical ascetics is bodily healing from our inward turn, making us outward-facing, primed for tactile union with God’s mission to heal creation. Hence, contingent to the integrity of Christian liturgical ascetics are how well they capacitate us for loving action in the world. Emerging from this essay’s thrust is one worthwhile ascetical practice that can involve us as loving agents of “divine causality,” even when living far outside their proximity.156 I draw this from Sedmak’s effort toward delineating ethical implications of Transformation Theology for world hunger and acute material 151 152 153 154 155 156 Epistemic Mercy and World Hunger,” in Davies et al., Transformation Theology, 142–166 (145, 150–151, 160–161). Davies, Theology of Transformation, 199–200, 216–217. Davies, Theology of Transformation, 12–14, 29–30, 48–52. Davies, “Transformation Theology and Pentecostalism,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology, 172–186 (176–177). Sedmak, “The Disruptive Power of World Hunger,” 135–136; Sedmak, “The Wound of Knowledge,” in Davies et al., Transformation Theology, 150. Janz, “Revelation as Divine Causality,” in Davies et al., Transformation Theology, 68, 76–82; Sedmak, “The Disruptive Power of World Hunger,” 115–116. Sedmak, “The Wound of Knowledge,” 154. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access 70 rice poverty, which, if we accept his assessment that its existence always implicates ourselves as well, we might name a “violence” against humanity.157 As Sedmak argues, at a very basic level we can causally involve ourselves through the Christian—and I would stress historic—pentecostal liturgical practice of fasting. For as Sedmak explains in the specific cases of world hunger and material poverty, it is one thing to have a “non-wounded” though well informed conceptual comprehension of global sufferings. Yet it is another to sensibly gain, through our own bodily deprivation, a “personal knowledge” that comprises the power to disrupt our conceptual awareness with the divine summons implicit within this pain, to act morally and lovingly158—hence, to take small steps toward extending the “boundaries of our self” in ways that make us “epistemically vulnerable”159 and thus postured toward the “disruptive power of divine causality.”160 For if regularly practiced, fasting can familiarize us with hunger pains, so that at least in some small ways those pains can create in us compassion, which may generate greater action.161 This practiced food deprivation, may thus ready us for the “disruptive” and thus “deconstructive” event of world hunger, turning us to Christ, who, among the poor and hungry of the world, summons us to act lovingly, mercifully, and justly for the world’s healing (1 John 3:18). More immediately, it thus transforms us into compassionate people, feeling a growing kinship with global pain. We may extrapolate this logic to a plethora of other endemic suffering and violence whether near or across the world. To conclude, from within bodily suffering worldwide, Christ our coming king commissions us to action. There are people who need miracles from “heaven” that can “part the red seas” before them. Yet on us comes the Spirit of Christ, that we may cause these miracles. For as Karl Rahner earlier stressed, ever since the incarnation, our coming to “the God whom we confess in Christ” contingently comprises our kenotically causing union to him within suffering humanity.162 Hence, the closer we sensibly move to the world’s pain—to cause justice, mercy, and healing—the closer we move to God in his mission to heal 157 158 159 160 161 162 Sedmak, “the Disruptive Power of World Hunger,” 125–129, 156. Sedmak, “The Disruptive Power of World Hunger,”; Sedmak, “The Wound of Knowledge,” 148–156. Sedmak, “The Wound of Knowledge,” 149. Sedmak, “The Wound of Knowledge,” 155–156. Sedmak, “The Wound of Knowledge,” 162. Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 226; see also Janz, “Revelation as Divine Causality,” 85–86. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access practicing the passion of pentecost 71 the world.163 We might also conclude that if little we do ever touches the world’s poor—or causes them to touch us—we know nothing about Pentecost (1 Cor 13). 163 Sedmak, “The Wound of Knowledge,” 162–163; Janz, “Revelation as Divine Causality,” 86. See also Augustine, The Spirit and the Common Good, 153–154. Pneuma 43 (2021) 43–71 Downloaded from Brill.com 06/12/2024 10:00:12AM via free access

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