Table of Contents

Pentecostal Manifestos
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Thinking in Tongues - Advice to Pentecostal Philosophers

Excursus: Why a Pentecostal Philosophy?

Plantinga’s Program for Christian Philosophy
A Program for Pentecostal Philosophy

2 God’s Surprise - Elements of a Pentecostal Worldview

Pentecostal Worship: A Vignette

Hermeneutical Courage and Unapologetic Pentecostalism
Elements of a Pentecostal Worldview
Conclusion: Seeing Otherwise

3 Storied Experience - A Pentecostal Epistemology

Introduction: “I Know That I Know That I Know”

Pentecostalism as Countermodernity
I Love to Tell the Story: A Narrative Pentecostal Epistemology
Moved by the Spirit: Affective Knowledge
Imagining the World Otherwise: A Pentecostal Aesthetic

4 Shattering Paradigms, Opening the World - Science, Spirit, and a Pentecostal Ontology

Pentecostalism, Modernity, and the Disenchantment of the World

Whose Naturalism? Which Supernaturalism? Topography and Taxonomy
A Pentecostal Ontological Intervention in the Science/Theology Dialogue
Nature as En-Spirited

5 From Beliefs to Altar Calls - A Pentecostal Critique of Philosophy of Religion

Limits of the “Renaissance” in Philosophy of Religion

Cartesian Ghosts: A Lingering Rationalism in Philosophy of Religion
Against Minimalist Theism: Pentecostal Philosophy and Canonical Theism in Dialogue
Conclusion

6 At the Limits of Speech - A Pentecostal Contribution to Philosophy of Language

 Resisting (and Producing) Concepts: Tongues and Philosophy of Language
The Politics of Tongues-Speech: A Language of Resistance

EPILOGUE
Name Index
Subject Index
 Pentecostal Manifestos

James K. A. Smith and Amos Yong, Editors

PENTECOSTAL MANIFESTOS will provide a forum for exhibiting the next generation of
Pentecostal scholarship. Having exploded across the globe in the twentieth century, Pentecostalism
now enters its second century. For the past fifty years, Pentecostal and charismatic theologians (and
scholars in other disciplines) have been working “internally,” as it were, to articulate a distinctly
Pentecostal theology and vision. The next generation of Pentecostal scholarship is poised to move
beyond a merely internal conversation to an outwardlooking agenda, in a twofold sense: first,
Pentecostal scholars are increasingly gaining the attention of those outside Pentecostal/charismatic
circles as Pentecostal voices in mainstream discussions; second, Pentecostal scholars are moving
beyond simply reflecting on their own tradition and instead are engaging in theological and cultural
analysis of a variety of issues from a Pentecostal perspective. In short, Pentecostal scholars are poised
with a new boldness:

• Whereas the first generation of Pentecostal scholars was careful to learn the methods of the
academy and then “apply” those to the Pentecostal tradition, the next generation is beginning
to interrogate the reigning methodologies and paradigms of inquiry from the perspective of a
unique Pentecostal worldview.
• Whereas the first generation of Pentecostal scholars was faithful in applying the tools of their
respective trades to the work of illuminating the phenomena of modern Pentecostalism, the
charismatic movements, and (now) the global renewal movements, the second generation is
expanding its focus to bring a Pentecostal perspective to bear on important questions and
issues that are concerns not only for Pentecostals and charismatics but also for the whole
church.
• Whereas the first generation of Pentecostal/charismatic scholars was engaged in transforming
the anti-intellectualism of the tradition, the second generation is engaged in contributing to
and even impacting the conversations of the wider theological academy.

PENTECOSTAL MANIFESTOS will bring together both high-profile scholars and newly emerging
scholars to address issues at the intersection of Pentecostalism, the global church, the theological
academy, and even broader cultural concerns. Authors in PENTECOSTAL MANIFESTOS will be
writing to and addressing not only their own movements but also those outside of Pentecostal/
charismatic circles, offering a manifesto for a uniquely Pentecostal perspective on various themes.
These will be “manifestos” in the sense that they will be bold statements of a distinctly Pentecostal
interjection into contemporary discussions and debates, undergirded by rigorous scholarship.
Under this general rubric of bold, programmatic “manifestos,” the series will include both shorter,
crisply argued volumes that articulate a bold vision within a field as well as longer scholarly
monographs, more fully developed and meticulously documented, with the same goal of engaging
wider conversations. Such PENTECOSTAL MANIFESTOS are offered as intrepid contributions with
the hope of serving the global church and advancing wider conversations.
PUBLISHED

Frank D. Macchia, Justified in the Spirit: Creation, Redemption, and the Triune God (2010)

James K. A. Smith, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy (2010)

Wolfgang Vondey, Beyond Pentecostalism: The Crisis of Global Christianity and the Renewal of the
Theological Agenda (2010)
 © 2010 James K. A. Smith
All rights reserved

Published 2010 by
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /
P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

Printed in the United States of America

16 15 14 13 12 11 10 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Cong ress Catalog ing -in-Publication Data

Smith, James K. A., 1970-

Thinking in tongues: pentecostal contributions to Christian philosophy /
James K. A. Smith.
p. cm. — (Pentecostal manifestos)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8028-6184-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Pentecostalism. 2. Philosophical theology. I. Title.

BR1644.S545 2010
230’.994 — dc22
2010005260

www.eerdmans.com
For Rev. Charles Swartwood,

Patrick & Dorothy St. Pierre,

and the saints at Bethel Pentecostal Tabernacle, Stratford, Ontario

for welcoming us to Pentecost;

for Rev. Ron Billings,

David & Stephanie Burton,

and our brothers & sisters at Cornerstone Christian Fellowship,

Abington, PA

for encouraging us to keep the Feast;

and

for Amos Yong,

fellow pilgrim, wise guide, and faithful friend all along the way.
 Acknowledgments

When I once tried to explain this book to a friend who was not a Christian, I realized it sounded like
the plot of a David Lodge farce. Indeed, the very idea of “a pentecostal philosopher” has the quirky,
whimsical makings of a Wes Anderson film or a Dave Eggers story (you know the sort of plot:
“When a one-armed Jewish fashion designer is put in charge of a hog production plant in Pender,
Nebraska ...”). It’s easy enough to imagine a wizened Bill Murray or naive Jason Schwartzman in the
lead role.
But I have been sustained by a circle of friends and colleagues who have provided the plausibility
structures needed for this project to make sense and (hopefully!) resist spiraling into a vaudeville
production. More importantly, they have provided support, encouragement, and opportunities for this
book to become a reality. I think all the way back, for instance, to my correspondence with Ron Kydd,
the first pentecostal scholar I’d ever come in contact with. His letter meant more than he could know.
When I was just beginning to imagine myself as a pentecostal philosopher, I was inspired by the crew
I thought of as “the Cleveland gang”: Chris Thomas, Steve Land, and Rickie Moore, the first editors
of the Journal of Pentecostal Theology. Only later was I nourished firsthand by conversations at the
Society for Pentecostal Studies where, somehow, Don Dayton, Dale Irvin, Ralph Del Colle, and Frank
Macchia always ended up back in the hotel room I shared with Amos Yong. Those late-night
conversations have been treasured opportunities for me.
I first started to imagine this book when Blaine Charette invited me to give the Pentecostal Lectures
at Northwest University in 2006. His kindness and hospitality were matched by Jack Wisemore and
others at Northwest, for which I’m grateful. My colleague at Calvin College, Del Ratzsch, very kindly
passed on to me his personal library of books, tracts, and newspapers on Pentecostalism that now
constitutes the “Del Ratzsch Pentecostal Library” in my office. I’m grateful for his gift, but even more
so for his encouragement. Dean Zimmerman provided critical, constructive feedback on an early
draft of the book (and shouldn’t be blamed for the problems that remain). Ryan Weberling provided
help getting the manuscript into some semblance of a book and assisted with the index.
A grant from the John Templeton Foundation funded research on chapter 5 and, coupled with a
summer research fellowship from Calvin College, enabled me to finish the manuscript. I’m grateful
to Jon Pott and all the good folks at Eerdmans for their patience, and for taking a risk on this little
pentecostal manifesto.
Finally I’m grateful to the gracious Spirit who sent me to the friends and communities to whom I
dedicate this book. Pastor Charlie Swartwood remains a hero and treasured friend for me, and has
journeyed long with our family. Patrick and Dorothy St. Pierre have long supported and prayed for
me, which I value more than they know. And Bethel Pentecostal Tabernacle will always be our “home
church.” But we’re also grateful for the saints at Cornerstone Christian Fellowship who received us
when we made the pilgrimage to Philadelphia. Pastor Ron Billings holds a special place in our
imagination as a generous shepherd, and Dave and Stephanie Burton will always be kindred spirits in
the Spirit. Not surprisingly, Amos Yong’s fingerprints are all over this book because my own
pentecostal imagination has been so shaped by his friendship. It is a joy to have good work to do; it is
untold joy to be able to do so with friends like Amos.
Finally, of course, my thanks to Deanna, whose pentecostal heart taught this Calvinist to dance.
Part of chapter 1 originally appeared as “Advice to Pentecostal Philosophers,” Journal of Pentecostal
Theology 11, no. 2 (2003): 235-47. Chapter 4 incorporates my essay “Is the Universe Open for
Surprise? Pentecostal Ontology and the Spirit of Naturalism,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science
43 (2008): 879-96. Material in chapter 5 is adapted from “Philosophy of Religion Takes Practice:
Liturgy as Source and Method in Philosophy of Religion,” in Contemporary Practice and Method in
the Philosophy of Religion: New Essays, ed. David Cheetham and Rolfe King (London: Continuum,
2008), pp. 133-47, and “Epistemology for the Rest of Us: Hints of a Paradigm Shift in Abraham’s
Crossing the Threshold,” Philosophia Christi 10 (2008): 353-61. And an earlier version of chapter 6
was published as “Tongues as Resistant Discourse: A Philosophical Perspective,” in Speaking in
Tongues: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives, ed. Mark Cartledge (Carlisle, U.K.: Paternoster, 2006), pp.
81-110. I’m grateful to the editors and publishers of these publications for permission to include this
material here.
 INTRODUCTION

What Hath Athens to Do with Azusa Street?

The oak-paneled walls of the McGill Faculty Club glistened with privilege and prestige; the room felt
like it incarnated the university’s global influence and vaunted heritage. The space was abuzz with the
quiet, sometimes affected, chatter and conversation of scholars and fawning graduate students, awash
in dark jackets, khaki trousers, and an inordinate number of bowties, it seemed to me. My first foray
into the environs of the Canadian “Ivy League,” I felt like an early anthropological explorer making
first contact with an “exotic” world. This was a long way from Bethel Pentecostal Tabernacle,
perched on the edge of Stratford, Ontario — five hundred miles east but a world away. My
discomfort, tinged with just a hint of a thrill, was a product of that cultural distance — as if the trip
from Bethel to McGill had stretched taut a rubber band now full of energy, but also prone to snap.
I found myself here due to the hospitality of the Canadian Theological Society (CTS). Each year,
CTS sponsored a graduate student essay competition and the winner enjoyed travel and
accommodations to present the winning paper at the annual meeting. In 1994 this had given me the
opportunity to attend my first CTS meeting in Calgary, Alberta; having won the competition a second
time, I now found myself at McGill.1 The smaller academic world in Canada yields a kind of
professional life that seems more familiar and intimate, more widely suffused with friendship and
collegiality, and so the annual banquet of CTS was a charming, lively, chatty affair. It was at this
banquet that my award was announced, and upon returning to my seat a distinguished Canadian
theologian sitting next to me graciously struck up a conversation. So where are you studying? Who is
your adviser? What are you working on? Slowly these questions, in response to my answers,
migrated to matters of faith and ecclesial identity. Since I was studying at the Institute for Christian
Studies in Toronto, my interlocutor naturally asked: “And so, are you from the Dutch Reformed
tradition?”
“Oh, no,” I replied. “I’m a Pentecostal.”
It’s amazing how much human emotion and communication can be crammed into a nanosecond. By
the time the word had come to the end of my tongue, I knew I had said something wrong. And before I
had even finished the word, a strange brew of academic alarm and snobbery flickered across the face
of my conversation partner. I can’t remember if he actually coughed and choked on his dinner at that
point, or whether that detail is a creation of memory, a pictorial placeholder that captures the
response conveyed more covertly. In any case, the good professor could not mask his surprise and
bewilderment. “You mean you grew up Pentecostal?” he further inquired. This was clearly a strategy
that would allay his cognitive dissonance, as if saying to himself: “A graduate student in philosophical
theology, engaging Heidegger and Derrida and Moltmann, can’t possibly be a Pentecostal. He must
have meant he was a Pentecostal.”
“No,” I replied. “I mean I worship in a Pentecostal church every Sunday. I even preach a little bit.”
His strategy for resolving the cognitive dissonance denied, the conversation quickly devolved into
awkward pleasantries and a final “Would you excuse me?” Left at the table to process what had just
happened, I felt farther away than ever from Bethel Pentecostal Tabernacle. And yet, it was in that
experience that the seeds for this book were planted.
This is not, however, an exercise in Pentecostal apologetics. I’m not out to mount a defense of
Pentecostal scholarship and the perhaps scandalous idea that Pentecostals can be thinkers — though
perhaps this book, as a performative apologetic, might counter the lingering assumptions of those
unable to imagine something like a “Pentecostal philosophy.” 2 Granted, I suppose that, in some
fashion, I can’t help but implicitly write to my surprised interlocutor in the McGill Faculty Club. He’s
been with me my whole career: that astonished look of puzzlement, that submerged sneer, that masked
incredulity at the very notion of a Pentecostal scholar. But I think the existence of a growing
Pentecostal theological and scholarly literature is its own “defense” in this regard, and in footnotes
throughout this book I will “display” this Pentecostal scholarship lest there be lingering concerns,
thus informing non-Pentecostal scholars who may be unaware of Pentecostal scholarship.3 But I am
not primarily interested in demonstrating that Pentecostals can be just as smart as evangelicals or
Catholics are — or more specifically, that Pentecostals can learn to do theology just as evangelicals
or Catholics or Reformed folk can.4
Rather than an apologetic defense of Pentecostal theology, this book is meant to be an unapologetic
articulation of the elements of a distinctly Pentecostal philosophy. In chapter 1 below, I’ll pursue this
further in terms of what Alvin Plantinga describes as the “integrity” of a Christian philosophy. Along
these lines, there have already been clarion calls for a distinct and “indigenous” Pentecostal theology.
For instance, D. Lyle Dabney has diagnosed “the problem and the promise of Pentecostal theology
today” as akin to David’s challenge with Saul’s armor (1 Sam. 17):

The problem consists in the fact that the Pentecostal theologians in [the Catholic-Pentecostal]
dialogue are clearly immobilized by a set of cultural and theological assumptions that render
them virtually helpless before the theological task that now faces them: they, like David of old,
are clothed in “Saul’s armor.” But the promise shines through this dialogue in brief, enticing
flashes, hinting at something that is yet just out of reach: the possibility that Pentecostal
theologians might yet throw off the dead weight of the “might” and “power” of that armor and
discover their own theological voice in a genuine theology of the Holy Spirit — a theological
Pentecost indeed.5

To paraphrase Gustavo Gutiérrez, this is an attempt to show that we can “drink from our own
wells.”6 Animating this is a twofold conviction: first, that implicit within Pentecostal spirituality and
practice is a unique theological “genius” that — when articulated — has a distinct apostolate to the
church catholic and has unique contributions to make to the broader Christian academy. Second,
because of that, it is inadequate and inauthentic for Pentecostals to simply adopt “off-the-shelf”
options in current theological and philosophical discussion. While I think important wisdom is to be
gained in dialogue, and inescapable debts to be recognized, I also believe that Pentecostals should and
can work out the implications of Pentecostal spirituality for how we think about God, ourselves, and
the world, even within the discipline of philosophy. In short, my goal is not to encourage Pentecostals
to drink from the wells of wider Christian philosophy in order to become “mature”7 thinkers; rather,
my goal is to sketch how we might articulate a uniquely Pentecostal philosophy, and what that
Pentecostal philosophy has to offer broader conversations.
At this point, a word of definition and clarification is in order: Just what is meant by “Pentecostal”
in this project of articulating a “Pentecostal philosophy”? To clarify, we need to first appreciate
something of the history of Pentecostal and charismatic movements across the twentieth century.
Pentecostalism is often traced to the Azusa Street revival of 1906-1913 — though there were similar
but independent revivals happening before and after this around the world.8 With deep roots in the
Wesleyan-Holiness tradition and African spirituality, the Azusa Street revival engendered what came
to be described as “classical” Pentecostalism associated with denominations such as the Assemblies of
God, the Church of God in Christ, and the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.).9 “Classical”
Pentecostalism was also usually distinguished by a distinct emphasis on speaking in tongues as “the
initial physical evidence of baptism of the Holy Spirit.” Taking up “second work” theologies from
their Wesleyan heritage, which emphasized an experience of grace and sanctification subsequent to
and distinct from salvation, “classical” Pentecostal theology identified this as baptism in the Holy
Spirit “evidenced” by speaking in tongues — though they also emphasized the continued
manifestation of all the gifts of the Spirit. And all this energizing of the Spirit was directed toward
empowerment for mission.10
In the 1960s and 1970s, Pentecostal-like phenomena and experiences began to be seen in more
mainline denominations and traditional churches. This was identified as the “charismatic renewal”
and signaled a spillover of Pentecostal spirituality into traditional communions; it included the
Catholic charismatic renewal (first begun at Duquesne) as well as renewal movements in Anglican,
Lutheran, and Presbyterian traditions. 11 While the spirituality and practices shared certain
similarities, especially an emphasis on the Spirit’s surprise and the continued operation of even the
“miraculous” gifts, the charismatic movement did not adopt the classical Pentecostal notion of “initial
evidence.” So capital-P Pentecostalism is usually taken to refer to classical Pentecostalism;
“charismatic” identifies those traditions and theologians who also emphasize a central role for the
Spirit’s gifts, but within existing liturgical and theological frameworks. These were later followed by
what is often called the “third wave” or “neopentecostal” movement associated with Peter Wagner.
This refers to the growth of nondenominational charismatic churches such as Vineyard Fellowship.
Like the charismatic renewal, third wave charismatics do not affirm initial evidence, but neither do
they identify with traditional denominations or communions (such as the Roman Catholic Church or
the Anglican Communion).
While there are important differences between classical Pentecostals, charismatics, and “third
wavers,” important similarities are also shared across these movements, particularly regarding the
centrality of the Spirit, the gifts, and the shape of Pentecostal/charismatic spirituality. Thus some, like
Douglas Jacobsen, have adopted the nomenclature of “small-p” pentecostalism as a way of honoring
the diversity of pentecostal/charismatic theologies while at the same time recognizing important
family resemblances and shared sensibilities.12 Indeed, the charismatic movement has been a crucial
factor in the development of ecumenical dialogue. Protestant Pentecostals and Catholic charismatics
found that a shared experience was an important start to honest and open conversations about what
they shared in common and where they disagreed.13
So, by “pentecostal” I mean to refer not to a classical or denominational definition, but rather to an
understanding of Christian faith that is radically open to the continued operations of the Spirit. Thus I
use “Pentecostal” in an older, generous sense, which would now include “charismatic” traditions (and
I myself identify as charismatic, not Pentecostal). But since the convention Pentecostal/charismatic is
so burdensome, henceforth I will employ the convention of small-p “pentecostalism” to refer to the
broader “renewal” or Pentecostal/charismatic traditions.14 Thus when I advocate a pentecostal
philosophy, “pentecostal” is meant to be a gathering term, indicating a shared set of practices and
theological intuitions that are shared by Pentecostals, charismatics, and “third wavers.” I would hope,
for instance, that Catholic and Anglican charismatics would see and hear their own faith practices
informing what I’m calling a “pentecostal” philosophy.
Granted, we will need to unpack just what constitutes the shared constellation of spiritual practices
and theological intuitions I’m calling “pentecostal.” That will be the task of chapters 1 and 2 below.
Here let me just indicate that I will not define “pentecostal” theologically; that is, I do not locate the
center or defining traits of pentecostalism in a set of doctrines. Instead, I will unpack the elements that
make up what I’ll describe as a pentecostal “worldview” or, following Charles Taylor, a pentecostal
“social imaginary.” I do so to honor the lived nature of pentecostalism as a spirituality, an embodied
set of practices and disciplines that implicitly “carry” a worldview or social imaginary.15 One of the
tasks of a pentecostal philosophy, I’ll suggest, is to work at articulating the worldview that is implicit
in pentecostal spirituality. On the other hand, I will also suggest that a philosophy can be “pentecostal”
only insofar as it is nourished and fueled by the intuitions that are implicit in pentecostal spirituality.16
While I hope such a project will serve pentecostal philosophers, theologians, and scholars, I’m
primarily interested in articulating a pentecostal philosophy in order to join conversations beyond the
environs of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. So I don’t aim to articulate a sectarian
pentecostal philosophy for pentecostals; rather, I’m interested in making a pentecostal contribution to
Christian philosophy. My conviction is that there are elements of a pentecostal worldview that are,
one might say, “simply Christian”; that is, I don’t see these aspects of pentecostal spirituality as
optional add-ons to Christian faith. Pentecost is in the DNA of the holy, catholic, apostolic church.
Insofar as the pentecostal and charismatic renewal has reminded the church of her pentecostal
heritage, pentecostal spirituality is a catholic spirituality. In addition, I believe there are aspects of
pentecostal spirituality and practice that uniquely stretch and challenge some of our settled
philosophical frameworks. In this respect, I see the fledgling project of a pentecostal philosophy as
analogous to the philosophical program that came to be described as “Re-formed epistemology.”17
Reformed epistemology, drawing on theological intuitions in John Calvin and the Reformed
tradition, articulated an epistemological framework whose cachet was not limited to philosophers
working within Reformed confessional frameworks; in other words, while the impetus for this
epistemological revolution unabashedly drew upon the particularity of the Reformed tradition, the
model was articulated for a much wider audience. And given the broad reception of the program, one
might surmise that this particular tradition had something to offer to the wider philosophical
community and Christian academy. My hope is that the articulation of a pentecostal philosophy might
have the same wide purchase — that it might offer philosophical insights and frameworks that can be
productively received beyond those philosophers who could identify as pentecostal or charismatic.
However, this is a first shot across the bow — more of a (perhaps indecent) proposal that sketches the
outlines of such a program rather than accomplishing it. I hope it might be received as an impetus for
others to join in the work.
How shall we go about this task? Before diving into the project itself, let me note three
methodological procedures that will be operating throughout the book. First, as already suggested,
and as will be unpacked in chapter 2, my goal is to make explicit what is implicit in pentecostal
spirituality and worship; in other words, one of the tasks of a pentecostal philosophy is to articulate
the worldview that is latent within pentecostal practice.18 Because pentecostalism is primarily a
spirituality — what Land describes as an “integration of beliefs and practices in the affections which
are themselves evoked and expressed by those beliefs”19 — a pentecostal worldview is not a set of
doctrines or dogmas. Instead, latent, implicit theological and philosophical intuitions are embedded
within, and enacted by, pentecostal rituals and practices.20 In talking about a “pentecostal philosophy,”
I don’t want to intellectualize pentecostalism; I’m not out to disclose the propositional core of
pentecostalism. Rather, I’m interested in mining and “reading” pentecostal spirituality in order to
discern the “understanding” of the world that is implicit in these practices.21 Of course, that means
one will best be able to appreciate and understand this project only if one also has some familiarity
with the practices that make up the lived religious experience that is pentecostal spirituality. I cannot
hope to introduce or summarize pentecostalism by drawing up a list of doctrinal claims or dogmatic
propositions. Pentecostalism is not first and foremost a doctrinal or intellectual tradition; it is an
affective constellation of practices and embodied “rituals.” In Wittgensteinian terms, we could say that
pentecostal spirituality is “a form of life.”22 Thus, in articulating the intuitions implicit in this
spirituality, I will be reading practices, not texts, though limited space means that I cannot reproduce
rich ethnographic descriptions. Those readers unfamiliar with pentecostal spirituality will find
helpful descriptions in the explosion of social scientific literature on pentecostalism, particularly
work in anthropology and other ethnographic fields.23
Second, I will philosophically grapple with pentecostal spirituality and practice as a limit case. The
marginality — one might say “liminality”24 — of pentecostal spirituality vis-à-vis the dominant
practices of the Christian tradition(s) makes it a kind of theoretical provocateur.25 For instance, as I’ll
explore in chapter 6 below, the pentecostal practice of glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”) presents a
unique case and challenge to the received paradigms in philosophy of language. The phenomenon
eludes existing reified categories and contests the dominant, settled frameworks for thinking about
language. Because it is such a marginal, and therefore largely unknown, practice, the reality of
glossolalia rarely (if ever) makes it onto the theoretical radar of philosophers of language, even
Christian philosophers. But I will suggest that confronting philosophy of language with the lived
reality of glossolalia is philosophically productive insofar as it pushes us to interrogate the staid
categories with which we have become philosophically comfortable.26 I think this is true across a
range of philosophical questions in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion. Our
philosophical categories are calibrated to a certain range of phenomena and experience; when we
encounter phenomena outside that range, the experience stretches and contests those categories and
frameworks, forcing us to retool and reconfigure our assumptions, categories, and methodologies.27
For instance, an overly rationalist conception of human persons and the nature of the belief will not
be primed to appreciate the nature of a spirituality that is more affective and embodied (as I’ll suggest
in chapter 5, I think this is precisely the case with the regnant paradigms in philosophy of religion). In
that case, an encounter with pentecostal spirituality will point up the narrowness and insufficiency of
current paradigms. More broadly, I will argue that implicit in pentecostal spirituality and the
experience of pentecostal worship are philosophical and theological “intuitions” (I use the word
loosely) that, when made explicit, offer challenges to received wisdom and the status quo.28 Far from
being a seething bed of emotionalist anti-intellectualism, then, pentecostal spirituality can be a source
for philosophical critique.
In concert with this emphasis on pentecostal spirituality as lived practice, a third methodological
strategy will be operative throughout the book: a constructive role for testimony, witness, and story.
Upon first discovering the Journal of Pentecostal Theology, I can still recall reading the opening
editorial that described testimony as “the poetry of Pentecostal experience.”29 This resonated deeply
with my own experience of pentecostal worship and spirituality wherein testimony played a central
role in the shape of gathered worship and in the narration of one’s identity in Christ. In worship at
Bethel Pentecostal Tabernacle, Pastor Swartwood would regularly make room for “God sightings”
— an open time for the saints to share the story of God’s work in their lives, to share testimonies of
the Spirit’s surprises in the past week, to give God praise and glory for healing or the return of a
prodigal child, to attest to the love and compassion of a God who knew the number of hairs on our
head and who knew we needed rent money by Friday. Testimony is central to pentecostal spirituality
because it captures the dynamic sense that God is active and present in our world and in our personal
experience while also emphasizing the narrativity of pentecostal spirituality.30 This is also bound up
with what Hollenweger has called the “orality” of pentecostal spirituality. As he acerbically
comments, “the Pentecostal poor are oral, nonconceptual peoples who are often masters of story.
Their religion resembles more of the early disciples than religion taught in our schools and
universities.”31 And there is something irreducible about this mode of testimony — it cannot be
simply reduced to a mere pool for extracting philosophical propositions, nor can it be simply
translated into theological dogmas.32
Thus one might suggest that memoir is the consummate pentecostal theological genre. Or at the
very least, something like testimony is integral to even pentecostal theorizing, even if this is not
properly “academic.”33 In fact, this is just one performative way that pentecostal theoretical practice
evinces an aspect implicit in pentecostal spirituality: against the Enlightenment ideal of the
impersonal, impartial, abstract “knower,” pentecostalism affirms an affective, involved, confessing
knower who “knows that she knows that she knows” because of her story, because of a narrative, she
can tell about a relationship with God. Thus I have appreciated that pentecostal theologians such as
Amos Yong and Frank Macchia have eschewed academic decorum and instead embraced the
centrality of testimony in their pentecostal theorizing, seeing such narratives as central to the
theological task.34 In a similar way, I see the testimonies and narratives included here as integral to
the sensibility that characterizes a pentecostal philosophy.
With these three methodological procedures in play, my goal is to articulate and make explicit the
philosophical intuitions that are implicit in pentecostal spirituality and practice, with a view to
sketching the shape of a distinctly “pentecostal philosophy.” Chapter 1, echoing Alvin Plantinga’s
“Advice to Christian Philosophers,” is something of a manifesto for the very idea of a pentecostal
philosophy, laying the ground for the articulation of that in chapters 2-4. In chapter 2 I unpack the
elements of a pentecostal “worldview” and then explore the philosophical implications for that in
terms of epistemology (chapter 3) and ontology (chapter 4). Chapter 4 also functions as a sort of
transitional chapter, taking up a more specific “case” of philosophical engagement from a pentecostal
perspective — namely, questions about naturalism in relation to science. This is followed by two
more “case studies” that are meant to function as examples of a pentecostal philosophy “at work,” so
to speak, while also addressing core issues of pentecostal spirituality. Chapter 5 argues that the very
nature of pentecostal spirituality, worship, and practice poses a liminal challenge to the regnant
paradigms in philosophy of religion, which are largely primed for the “heady” religion of more
mainstream Protestantism. I’ll argue for a certain revolution in the methodology in philosophy of
religion as the only way to properly honor the lived reality of pentecostal experience. Chapter 6
considers a hallmark of pentecostal identity — glossolalia, or “speaking in tongues” — as a liminal
challenge to the regnant paradigms in philosophy of language while also suggesting that implicit in
tongues-speech is a sociopolitical critique of the status quo. In short, it suggests that philosophy of
language and ethics are intertwined in important ways and that such an intuition is implicit in
pentecostal experience.
In the end, I don’t want to promise too much for this little book. It makes no claim to being
exhaustive or even comprehensive. It is offered in the mode of both a manifesto and a sketch and is
thus programmatic in two senses. On the one hand, my goal is to articulate a (rather scandalous) call
for a distinctly pentecostal philosophy, but not just for pentecostals. Rather, the wager is that a
distinctly pentecostal philosophy has something unique to contribute to wider conversations in
Christian philosophy and has gifts to offer that can be received by those not necessarily identified
with the pentecostal or charismatic traditions. On the other hand, I’m trying to sketch the outlines and
elements of such a philosophy, hopefully modeling a certain philosophical procedure while also
laying out a program for further research to be taken up by others. The studies here are exploratory
forays, a first report from early reconnaissance, not the final statement on the matter. At times I worry
that the “sketch” or “outline” amounts to little more than a cartoon. But if it can function as a cartoon
in its older sense — a preparatory outline for a fuller painting or tapestry — then this little manifesto
will have done its work. Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, Pre-Raphaelite collaborators on
tapestries and stained glass, created a host of such “cartoons” that would then be executed by a team of
artisans, transforming the outlines of angels into the sumptuous, prismatic colors of stained-glass
narratives. The hope for this “outline” of pentecostal philosophy is that other artisans will join me in
filling in the colors.
 1 Thinking in Tongues

Advice to Pentecostal Philosophers

I must begin with a confession: my vision for a pentecostal philosophy owes an original debt to
Calvinists. In fact, the chapter subtitle hearkens back to my junior year in college: sitting in chapel, I
excitedly opened a letter from the University of Notre Dame. Several weeks earlier I had the audacity
to write a personal letter to one of the leading figures in philosophy of religion: Alvin Plantinga, then
recently appointed as John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame and a key figure in a
Christian renewal in philosophy both at Notre Dame and across the profession. Just before that I had
come across Plantinga’s 1983 inaugural address given on the occasion of this appointment and later
published as “Advice to Christian Philosophers.”35 Plantinga’s manifesto was my tolle lege36
moment, my wake-up call to a vocation. Having heard what I believed was God’s call to become a
Christian philosopher — through my concurrent reading of other Calvinists, like W. G. T. Shedd’s
Dogmatic Theology and Francis Schaeffer ’s Trilogy — I began to contemplate graduate study in
philosophy and turned to the obvious place: Plantinga and Notre Dame. The letter I opened was
Professor Plantinga’s gracious reply that encouraged me in my pursuits. And while my training
would take place at another Catholic university — and in quite a different philosophical tradition — I
am happy in this chapter, which sketches a vision for a distinctly pentecostal philosophy, to repay
something of a debt to Plantinga’s influential vision for an integrally Christian philosophy and his
personal encouragement to an aspiring Christian philosopher.
Plantinga’s “Advice” quickly became something of a manifesto for a movement of Christian, and
largely evangelical,37 philosophers — a call to them to exercise “Christian courage” and “display
more faith, more trust in the Lord” in their development of an “integral” Christian philosophy. “We
must,” he urges, “put on the whole armor of God” (p. 254). I want to issue a similar call to the
community of pentecostal scholars to have the same courage — maybe even “Holy Ghost boldness”
— in the development of a distinctly and integrally pentecostal philosophy. I will do so by engaging
Plantinga’s program for Christian philosophy, then considering how a pentecostal philosophy should
further develop this program.
 Excursus: Why a Pentecostal Philosophy?

But before doing so, I need to first answer some questions. I can anticipate — and have heard —
several initial reactions and objections to the notion of a “pentecostal philosophy.” The first comes
from my brothers and sisters in the Pentecostal and charismatic communities who, quoting
Colossians 2:8, have grave concerns about philosophy per se and are concerned that a “pentecostal
philosophy” would be akin to “pentecostal transcendental meditation.” Since they do not constitute my
audience here, however, I will limit my comments to one point of reply: Paul’s concern in the letter to
Christians in Colossae is not philosophy per se but a specific philosophy that undermined Christian
faith and was founded “according to human tradition” rather than revelation. Paul speaks of “the
philosophy,” indicating a particular philosophical school that would have been known by the
Colossian Christians. The point is illustrated by how he qualifies this philosophy: it is “according to
the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to
Christ” (Col. 2:8). This final apposition points to the possibility of a philosophy that would be
“according to Christ.”38 In addition, Paul himself employs philosophical reasoning in his
proclamation of the gospel (e.g., Acts 17), and other NT authors, particularly in the Johannine
tradition, take up philosophical concepts (such as logos) to communicate the Christian faith.
The second set of reservations would be expressed by scholars from within the pentecostal
community and has two aspects: First, do we really need a “philosophy”? Are not the questions that
such a philosophy pursues already broached by our theologians? Doesn’t the development of a
pentecostal philosophy run the risk of treading upon pentecostal theology’s turf? Second, if we do
need a philosophy, shouldn’t it be enough that it be a Christian philosophy? Can we not simply adopt
the conclusions of other Christian and evangelical philosophers?
In response to the first aspect of this concern, it is important to distinguish between the different
tasks of a philosophy and a theology and the corresponding distinction between their “fields” of
concern. First, we might distinguish between “religion” (or “spirituality”), on the one hand, and
theology and philosophy on the other: both theology and philosophy are modes of second-order
reflection on our lived faith or religion, which indicates our pretheoretical, fundamental
commitments implicit and embedded in practices and disciplines of the faith.39 As Wittgenstein’s
aphoristic interjection suggests, theology is akin to grammar, whereas lived religion or spirituality
— the lived practices of faith — are akin to “speaking the language.”40 A grammar is a second-order
articulation of the norms and rules that are implicit when competent users speak the language — and
one can be a competent user of the language without necessarily being able to articulate the grammar.
One might operate with a competent but implicit understanding of such grammatical norms and rules.
In a similar way, theology and philosophy are articulations of what is implicit in a religion or
spirituality (understood as a constellation of practices and rituals that embody the faith). Theology
and philosophy, as theoretical modes of reflection, bubble up from pretheoretical faith. Thus
pentecostal spirituality or “religion” is not first and foremost a “theology” (which is theoretical) but,
more fundamentally, a kind of “worldview” (which is pretheoretical). Such a pentecostal worldview
— the constellation of practices and beliefs that constitute pentecostal spirituality — should then
undergird both a pentecostal theology and a pentecostal philosophy. What distinguishes the theology
from the philosophy is not its faith basis (as though philosophy were somehow neutral or
autonomous)41 but rather its field or topic. Theology might be described as a “special science” that
investigates and explicates our being-toward-God and God’s revelation of himself in the Scriptures.
As such, theology ought to be done in the church, by the church, and for the church;42 in addition, it
ought to be always a biblical theology rooted in revelation and investigating the narrative of
Scripture and the dogmas of the church that arise from that (classical loci such as incarnation, sin,
grace, and eschatological hope). Philosophy, on the other hand, also undergirded by (pentecostal)
faith, investigates fundamental questions of ontology and epistemology: the nature of reality and
knowledge.43 If the theologian asks, “How can we know God?” the philosopher asks, “How can we
know?” The latter is not a neutral question — and no answer to that question will be religiously
neutral. So it’s not the case that the philosopher is “objective” and “rational” whereas the theologian is
biased and committed. Our philosophical reflection is also always already informed by pretheoretical
faith commitments. But the philosopher is asking questions that are more formal. Because of this, the
philosopher has a different methodological formation (with a specific focus of argumentation and
analysis) as well as a different set of conversation partners across time.44 While these aspects of
philosophy are historically contingent, they do mean that philosophy today constitutes a different
universe of discourse from theology.
There is a further complication of this relationship between faith, philosophy, and theology:
historically, philosophy has often provided the basic concepts (Grundbegriffe) that theology
employs.45 Thus theology has to be suspicious of what’s “loaded” into the philosophical concepts it
employs. If no philosophy is religiously neutral, then the Christian theologian must be critically
aware of the religious assumptions that are implicit in philosophical concepts and frameworks.
Ideally, Christian theology should find its basic concepts in an integrally Christian philosophy —
which should itself be nourished by a Christian spirituality or “worldview.” In a similar but more
specific manner, pentecostal theology should utilize basic concepts forged in a pentecostal
philosophy.46 And just as an integral pentecostal theology cannot simply adopt the theological
frameworks of evangelical theology (as Archer and Dabney have admonished above), so a
pentecostal philosophy should integrally develop from the resources and implicit intuitions that are
“carried” in pentecostal spirituality and worship. 47 In this respect, just as pentecostal theology ought
to be wary of adapting off-the-shelf theological paradigms from, say, evangelical theology, so too
must a pentecostal philosophy exhibit a prophetic suspicion of the regnant paradigms in Christian
philosophy and its evangelical permutations. 48 Outlining just what such an “integral” pentecostal
philosophy could look like is the task of this book.
A third concern about the very idea of a “pentecostal philosophy” — skeptical in tone — might
come from the broader community of Christian philosophers who, after an initial surprise (and
perhaps chuckle), will question what pentecostals could possibly bring to the philosophical table.49
Will there now be altar calls at meetings of the Society of Christian Philosophers? Would papers be
delivered in tongues? These, of course, are caricatures; but they are intended to indicate that the
broader Christian philosophical community is only acquainted, secondhand, with caricatures of
pentecostal worship and lacks an understanding of pentecostal distinctives that would make a
difference in the philosophical community. One of the goals of this “outline” of pentecostal
philosophy will be to indicate those distinctive pentecostal commitments that should impact
epistemological and ontological reflection. In doing so, I hope to lay out the task of the ensuing
chapters as well as sketch a program for an emerging generation of pentecostal philosophers.
 Plantinga’s Program for Christian Philosophy

A model for the development of a distinctly pentecostal philosophy can be found in Plantinga’s
“Advice” to those developing a Christian philosophy. In this seminal article Plantinga consistently
emphasizes three key themes: (1) an apologetic movement defending the “rights” of Christian
philosophers to philosophize from out of their Christian commitments; (2) a related call to Christian
philosophers to demonstrate more “autonomy” vis-à-vis the philosophical establishment and more
“integrity” or “integrality” (p. 254) in their philosophizing; and (3) the need for Christian philosophy
to display more Christian boldness or self-confidence. Let me briefly unpack each of these before
considering their implications for the development of a distinctly pentecostal philosophy.
First, Plantinga’s address is dominated by what we could describe, following Mary Ann Glendon,
as “rights talk.” Here, in response to the (secular and antitheistic) philosophical establishment’s
dogma regarding the “objectivity” or “neutrality” of philosophy, Plantinga clears space for the
viability of a Christian philosophy by pointing out that even these supposedly “secular” philosophers
begin from fundamental prephilosophical commitments and assumptions (pp. 255-56). So if the
neutrality thesis of the philosophical establishment is a myth, and “secular” philosophers have a
“right” to their prephilosophical assumptions, then by the same rules Christian philosophers cannot
be denied their corresponding “right” (an “epistemic right” [p. 261])50 to philosophize from their
Christian prephilosophical assumptions. Plantinga functions here as a kind of civil rights advocate
for Christian philosophers, standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (or, in fact, under the
shadow of the Golden Dome and Touchdown Jesus)51 demanding, not “special” rights for Christian
philosophers, but simply equal rights with respect to the role of prephilosophical assumptions in
philosophizing. If W. V. O. Quine can begin from his philosophical assumptions, then “the Christian
philosopher has a perfect right to the point of view and pre-philosophical assumptions that he brings
to philosophic work” (p. 256).
But while this is a persistent apologetic element of his article, it is interesting to note that the point
is precisely to free Christian philosophers from the self-imposed burden of only engaging in
apologetics. In asserting that “the Christian philosophical community quite properly starts, in
philosophy, from what it believes,” Plantinga then notes that “this means that the Christian
philosophical community need not devote all of its efforts to attempting to refute opposing claims
and/or to arguing for its own claims” (p. 268).
By thus outlining the “rights” of Christian philosophers to begin from their fundamental Christian
commitments, Plantinga is led to the second key emphasis of his “Advice”: the need for the Christian
philosophical community to demonstrate more independence and autonomy from the guild of
philosophy at large (which is dominated by assumptions antithetical to Christian faith). By this he
means that the agenda of investigation for the Christian philosopher should not be determined by
trends in the philosophical establishment, but rather by questions that arise out of the Christian
community and the Christian faith of the philosopher. “My plea,” he emphasizes, “is for the Christian
philosopher, the Christian philosophical community, to display, first, more independence and
autonomy: we needn’t take as our research projects just those projects that currently enjoy widespread
popularity; we have our own questions to think about” (p. 268).52 Note that this alternative agenda
stems from the fact that the Christian philosopher serves the Christian community, the church: “The
Christian philosopher does indeed have a responsibility to the philosophical world at large; but his
fundamental responsibility is to the Christian community, and finally to God” (p. 262). Plantinga also
warns, however, that this does not mean that Christian philosophers should withdraw from the wider
philosophical community into a kind of Christian ghetto: “Nor do I mean to suggest that Christian
philosophers should retreat into their own isolated conclave, having as little as possible to do with
non-theistic philosophers.... Christian philosophers must be intimately involved in the professional
life of the philosophical community at large both because of what they can learn and because of what
they can contribute” (p. 270). In other words, one of the responsibilities of the Christian philosopher
will be to function as a witness to the broader philosophical community — but not in the narrow sense
of evangelism. Rather, such philosophical work witnesses to creational wisdom and unveils the
structures of a good creation. Indeed, it gives witness to the creational goodness of engaging in the
cultural task of philosophizing. This leads to what Merold Westphal describes as the “two hats thesis”:
the Christian philosopher has two audiences (the church and the academy) and even two allegiances
(first to the church and secondarily to the academy, based on the notion of “integrity” below).53 As
such, we also have two vocations: to serve the Christian community but also to be a witness and
testimony to the academy.
Christian philosophers, then, will demonstrate more autonomy by establishing an agenda that arises
from their own faith commitments and their service to their own (distinctive) faith communities. This
demands what Plantinga calls “integrity” or “integrality”: our philosophy and philosophizing must
begin from our Christian commitments, not assumptions laid down by the antitheistic philosophical
establishment. “The Christian philosopher who looks exclusively to the philosophical world at large,”
he warns, “who thinks of himself as belonging primarily to that world, runs a two-fold risk. He may
neglect an essential part of his task as a Christian philosopher; and he may find himself adopting
principles and procedures that don’t comport well with his belief as a Christian” (p. 264). While we
may display autonomy by choosing philosophical questions that are unique to the Christian
community, we must also think about those questions in a way that does not unwittingly adopt
frameworks that are foreign to, and likely antithetical to, our fundamental Christian commitments.
Now, to display this autonomy the Christian philosopher — as part of the Christian philosophical
community — will need to be reflective and critically consider just what those “fundamental Christian
commitments” are and what they entail. Then she or he will be in a place to critically evaluate trends
in the broader philosophical community. As a result, the Christian philosopher who demonstrates
such integrity “may have to reject certain currently fashionable assumptions about the philosophic
enterprise — he may have to reject widely accepted assumptions as to what are the proper starting
points and procedures for philosophical endeavor” (p. 256).
This is why Plantinga also argues that the development of an autonomous, integral Christian
philosophy will demand Christian boldness or “Christian self-confidence” (p. 254). The integrity and
autonomy of a Christian philosophy will require Christian philosophers to display “less readiness to
trim their sails to the prevailing philosophical winds of doctrine and more Christian self-confidence”
(p. 258). Why, he asks, “should we be intimidated by what the rest of the philosophical world thinks
plausible or implausible” (p. 269)? Plantinga’s own work is a testament to such courage.
 A Program for Pentecostal Philosophy

Plantinga’s clarion call and program for a Christian philosophy provide a model for the development
of a distinctly pentecostal philosophy.54 My only major criticism of Plantinga, voiced elsewhere, is a
too easy identification of “Christian philosophy” with a merely “theistic” philosophy (see, e.g., pp.
254, 264, 267, 270). I think this compromises the distinctiveness of a Christian philosophy that begins,
not with the simple affirmation of “the existence of God” (p. 261), but with a relationship with the
triune God who has revealed himself — uniquely — in Christ, and more specifically God in Christ as
he gave himself on the cross. Thus a Christian philosophy must be fundamentally incarnational and
cruciform, rooted not simply in theism but in the revelation of the incarnation, the scandal of the
cross, and the confession of the resurrection. And it should be just this incarnational starting point that
distinguishes Christian philosophy from merely “theistic” philosophy. But with that proviso in mind,
let me sketch how Plantinga’s program might be further specified for the development of a
pentecostal philosophy.
First, we should recognize our “right” to philosophize not only from out of our broadly Christian
prephilosophical commitments, but also from our distinctly pentecostal assumptions; indeed, it would
be difficult — and ill advised — to separate the two. But this raises the question of just what these
“fundamental pentecostal commitments” would be and how they would differ from those of the
broader Christian or evangelical philosophical community. As I will suggest in chapter 2, I think this
constellation of commitments must be located as implicit within the practices of pentecostal
spirituality. So instead of identifying certain key doctrines or dogmas, I will tease out the
prephilosophical commitments latent within pentecostal spirituality. The articulated form of the
implicit assumptions will be described as a pentecostal “worldview” or, following Charles Taylor, a
pentecostal “social imaginary.”55 Whether one considers the small congregation gathering for a
revival in the Appalachians, or Nigerian pentecostals worshiping in Brooklyn, or Catholic
charismatics engaged in prayer in the Philippines, or Indian Anglicans testifying to miracles in
Bangalore, my wager is that there are five key aspects of a pentecostal worldview that are shared
across this range of global contexts and denominational traditions.

1. A position of radical openness to God, and in particular, God doing something differently or
new.57 In terms adopted from continental discourse, we might describe this as a fundamental
openness to alterity or otherness.58 More traditionally, we might simply describe it as an
openness to the continuing (and sometimes surprising) operations of the Spirit in church and
world, particularly the continued ministry of the Spirit, including continuing revelation,
prophecy, and the centrality of charismatic giftings in the ecclesial community.
2. An “enchanted” theology of creation and culture that perceives the material creation as
“charged” with the presence of the Spirit, but also with other spirits (including demons and
“principalities and powers”), with entailed expectations regarding both miracles and spiritual
warfare.
3. A nondualistic affirmation of embodiment and materiality expressed in an emphasis on
physical healing (and perhaps also in gospels of “prosperity”).59
4. Because of an emphasis on the role of experience, and in contrast to rationalistic evangelical
theology, Pentecostal theology is rooted in an affective, narrative epistemology.
5. An eschatological orientation to mission and justice, both expressed in terms of
 empowerment, with a certain “preferential option for the marginalized.”

A complete exegesis of this pentecostal worldview will have to wait until chapter 2. And I would be
very happy to see this articulation of a pentecostal worldview challenged, revised, and supplemented
— indeed, the task of identifying and reflecting upon pentecostal philosophical commitments should
be part of the agenda of a pentecostal philosophy. In any event, I believe that if we engage in
reflection we will be able to see, and then demonstrate, that these distinctively pentecostal assumptions
have significant implications for classical philosophical questions. And, pace Plantinga’s program,
we will be well within our “rights” to pursue such questions out of these prephilosophical
commitments. For example (to name just a few), in epistemology, the pentecostal emphasis on
experience and affectivity would be the ground for a critique of dominant rationalisms (particularly
in evangelical philosophical and theological circles) 60 and provide a fund for unique developments
in phenomenology and our accounts of knowledge. In addition, given the centrality of testimony and
witness in pentecostal experience, one might expect pentecostal philosophers to grapple with
epistemological questions surrounding testimony with a unique urgency and interest.61 In ontology,
the pentecostal belief in a continually “open” universe, evidenced in the central belief in the
miraculous and God’s continued activity in the world, should make a fundamental difference in the
way we construct our metaphysics. And pentecostal beliefs in the holistic nature of the gospel, healing
both soul and body, should contribute to a unique philosophical anthropology and theory about the
nature of the human person. Chapters 4-6 below are intended as studies that carry out just this sort of
work.
Further, pentecostals (or at least, philosophers with a pentecostal sensibility) might approach the
history of philosophy with a different set of commitments and questions that could open up historical
figures and texts in new ways. I am thinking, for instance, of the unique readings and new insights that
might result from a pentecostal engagement with Pascal or Augustine — the way in which unique
sympathies might open new interpretive trajectories that could be instructive for the philosophical
community as a whole.62 I also think that pentecostal research in the history of philosophy would
raise interesting questions about the philosophical “canon,” insofar as pentecostals might be
positioned to find resources in more marginal sources in the history of philosophy, or at least be
prone to be attentive to important figures who are less read today.63 Indeed, it seems to me that a
pentecostal history of philosophy would work from the margins, so to speak, seeking to give voice to
voices that were ignored or silenced by the dominant Western (and rationalist) tradition.64 So when I
advocate the development of a pentecostal philosophy, I am also advocating a pentecostal history of
philosophy — not as exhaustive or comprehensive (seeking to debunk “mainstream” history of
philosophy), but as a unique contribution to be made by pentecostal scholars.65
Second, following Plantinga’s program for Christian philosophy more generally, pentecostal
philosophers will need to display autonomy and integrity, pursuing philosophical questions and a
research agenda that grows out of their pentecostal commitments and the pentecostal communities of
which they are a part. In this way they will display autonomy not only vis-à-vis the broader
philosophical establishment, but even with respect to the broader Christian or evangelical
philosophical community. For instance, we would expect pentecostal philosophers to engage the
classical question of miracles in a way that poses the issue not merely as a matter of historical
possibility,66 but rather as a question of contemporary possibility, given our belief in the continued
miraculous work of the Spirit in the church. Or pentecostal reflections on philosophy of language and
the possibility of God-talk might develop uniquely, given the core practice of glossolalia. Our
philosophical “curiosity” should grow out of our pentecostal commitments — and we must be alert to
the risk of adopting even “Christian” philosophical commitments and methods that run counter to our
pentecostal beliefs. One of Plantinga’s concerns was the number of Christians who were trained in
philosophy but never trained to integrate their faith with their philosophy; in the same way, we want
to avoid having pentecostals develop a philosophy that is unconnected to their distinctly pentecostal
faith. In this way we will display “integrity” as pentecostal philosophers who have integrated our
philosophical projects and methods with our pentecostal beliefs and practices.
Finally, given the fact that we are within our “epistemic rights” to pursue our own agenda, we need
to exhibit confidence and boldness — “Holy Ghost boldness” — in the development and pursuit of
such a philosophic program. Indeed, if pentecostal philosophy is to be rooted in the practice of
pentecostal spirituality (and not just working with the ideas of a pentecostal theology), then such a
philosophy must be pursued from within a web of worship practices that inform and inculcate a
pentecostal worldview. The work of the pentecostal philosopher will not be a compartmentalized,
merely “academic” operation carried out upon charismatic “topics.” Rather, refusing an anti-
intellectual pietism, we need to ask for grace and perhaps an “anointing” to undertake such a task with
courage found in humility and dependence. With Paul, we need to pray that we “may not be bold with
the confidence with which I propose to be courageous to some, who regard us as if we walked
according to the flesh” (2 Cor. 10:2). Paul continues, “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war
according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for
the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against
the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor.
10:3-5). The mission and task of the pentecostal philosopher will be unapologetically informed by the
practices of a pentecostal spirituality. This is just to say that a pentecostal philosophy is not merely a
matter of topic, but of method and approach. A pentecostal philosophy will not simply be a detached
philosophical reflection on charismatic phenomena; it will be a charismatic reflection on
philosophical questions. The moment that pentecostal phenomena are reified and abstracted from the
“form of life” that is pentecostal spirituality, the resulting philosophy will fail to be pentecostal in a
radical, integral sense — possessing a form of pentecostal spirituality but denying the power
thereof.67
 2 God’s Surprise

Elements of a Pentecostal Worldview

 Pentecostal Worship: A Vignette

A rather flat light glances off stucco houses and strip malls as we make our way down Inglewood
Avenue into the northern environs of Hawthorne, California. Once ravaged by the Los Angeles riots
of 1992, the area has been restored to its prior mediocrity: low-slung tract housing interspersed with
cash-advance stores and fast-food restaurants. We make our way past the remnants of a mall long
abandoned on our way to one of the many nondescript strip malls that is home to Resurrection Life
Assembly.
The tiny parking lot is already full so we find space on a side street. We see other pilgrims making
their way up the sidewalk from the nearby apartment complex, while also noting the stream of folks
already leaving the storefront sanctuary, having just participated in a Spanish service. It’s curious to
see parents who are leaving the church greeting their teenage children just arriving, making their way
to the English service.
There is much laughter and conversation happening on the sidewalk and in the parking lot. Young
children are dashing around the lot oblivious to any vehicular threats, hiding between the skirts of
their grandmothers or behind the trash bin, giggling all the while. The atmosphere is one of relaxed
jocularity coupled with spiritual earnestness seen in an array of eager and interested conversations,
expressions of concern on worried faces in conversation, and a demonstrative prayer huddle with
hands laid on a young mother. No one seems too eager to move inside, though music is already
thumping through the large plate glass windows on the front of the storefront space, under a
temporary vinyl banner proclaiming this as the home of Resurrection Life. As we make our way to
the door, we are greeted with smiles and nods. When the glass door opens, the music spills out and the
rhythmic thud of the bass and drums begins to hit us in the chest.
After our eyes adjust from the external sun to the interior fluorescent lighting, we survey the space
— the “sanctuary.” The tiled, ten-foot-high ceiling feels as if it’s pressing down on the group and
compressing the sound of the band within a narrow depth. About twenty-five feet wide, the worship
space is narrow and deep, with what are probably stairs to a basement just visible in the back. The
walls are draped with a rainbow of flags (which we later learn represent the nations of birth of
members of the congregation). The remnant of a cashier ’s counter now functions as a welcome
center, and we are warmly greeted with a two-fisted handshake from an elderly African American
woman who seems to carry herself with matriarchal concern and motherly welcome. We are given a
black-and-white photocopied brochure with information for visitors and invited to make ourselves
comfortable in the sanctuary. But before we move to the chairs the woman gets down on both knees to
introduce herself to our children, ask them their names, and invite them to join the other children at
“kids’ church” in the basement after the singing is finished. Promises of candy seem to trump their
anxiety about unfamiliar surroundings.
We turn back to the interior to find seats amongst the folding chairs lined up in two sections with a
central aisle. There are about 100 seats available, and currently no one is sitting in any of them,
though folks are congregated amongst them. Instead, a musical team at the front seems to be
providing a sound track for their conversations. Stopped along the way by several folks who
introduce themselves and welcome us to Resurrection Life, we find several chairs near the back just
as a change in the music signals parishioners to make their way inside and find their seats — but not
to sit down. Instead, a worship leader — a young Latino man — comes to the microphone. He
immediately begins to pray, and the congregation joins him in their posture: eyes are closed, hands
are outstretched or arms are raised, some are swaying and also praying quietly as the worship leader
invokes the “King of Heaven”: “King of Heaven,” he prays, “we gather today to worship you, to exalt
your name, to see you high and lifted up. We long for your coming. Maranatha! Even so, come now,
Lord Jesus! But until you come, we long to meet you here, in this place. Father in Heaven, send your
Spirit so that our eyes and hearts are open to meeting Jesus....” His prayers are met with shouts of
“Amen!” and “Yes, Lord!” A woman surrounded by young children tugging on her pants has begun to
weep, but almost immediately a middle-aged woman has moved beside her and wrapped her arms
around the young mother, praying quietly but fervently with her other hand raised, sometimes
clenched like a clam, at other times opened and pleading. As the opening chorus is sung, the women
embrace and the young woman “enters in” to worship.
No one has been seated since the service began, and only an elderly couple are seated during forty-
five minutes of sung worship — interrupted only by another prayer of adoration from the worship
leader that washes over the congregation until almost everyone, simultaneously, is engaged in
prayers of exaltation and praise, many singing extemporaneous prayers, some singing in tongues. But
far from the cacophony one might expect, there is an almost surreal symphonic character to the
prayer. This leads into a quieter, more meditative song service, which seems aimed at introspection as
parishioners seem to retreat into themselves a little more. Some are now kneeling, rocking in
supplication; others have abandoned their inhibitions in bodies splayed on the floor; while still others
remain standing, arms outstretched as if asking heaven to come down. Some of the children watch
their parents curiously but quietly, puzzled and perhaps not a little perplexed by tears from their
father.
Quietly the lyrics end, but an electronic piano continues to play as the pastor, also quite a young,
burly man with tattoos on his neck and left hand and a suit that doesn’t quite fit, comes to the front of
the sanctuary (there’s no podium or rostrum), invites people to be seated, and begins to pray. It begins
as a prayer of intercession for parishioners who are beset by illness, unemployment, financial
difficulties, and prodigal children, but he also prays for the public school system and about recent
gang violence in the neighborhood. He prays against the work of the devil and all the ways the enemy
threatens — that the name of Jesus would give victory over the evil one, and that the Spirit of God
would enable them to resist the wiles of the devil. The prayer then concludes with thanksgiving for the
offering that is about to be received. At the conclusion of the prayer, the music becomes a little louder
and once again the congregation stands, so we join them. We sing songs of adoration and
thanksgiving as deacons stand at the front of the church with baskets. During the singing, parishioners
randomly make their way forward to leave their offering.
We are once again seated as the pastor comes to the front with his Bible in hand and invites us to
read along (in the Bibles we should have brought with us!) in Mark 9. We note that this is the first that
the Word has been read, and yet find that the cadences and rhythms of the prayers have been so
suffused with Scripture that we didn’t notice earlier. The sermon focuses on the call to discipleship —
to take up our cross and follow Christ. The preacher courses across the front of the sanctuary, even
making his way halfway down the center aisle — referring to parishioners by name, laughing with
them, sometimes weeping, almost always quite loud. The sermon is more aesthetic than didactic, an
exhortation not a lecture, and draws on metaphors and illustrations of mainly working-class life and
football. Having a general (and perhaps mistaken) impression that many of the folks here endure
daily struggles with which we are unfamiliar, we are somewhat surprised that the preacher seems to
add to their burden by exhorting them to take up their crosses. But our middle-class expectations are
chastised when the pastor brings the service to its culmination: the altar call.
As he leads us in a concluding prayer of confession, the musicians once again play softly in the
background. The pastor then speaks again: “I sense that the Spirit of God has work to do here today.
That some of us need to take up our crosses again, that we’ve traded them for our own comfort and
pleasure. The Spirit is inviting us to recrucify our passions and pleasures and selfishness. To come to
this altar with a broken and contrite heart — and find healing. Find restoration. Find hope.”
In the space of his pause for breath, a voice calls out from the middle of the chairs: “Thus saith the
Lord!” A middle-aged woman has mustered the courage to be obedient in sharing a prophetic word, a
sort of targeted encouragement from God for this congregation, in this place, at this time. Its
cadences and language find their provenance in the canon of Scripture. Rather than bringing some
“new” or secret knowledge, this word is prophetic because it is targeted. “I am Jehovah Rothah,” she
begins, “the Lord your healer. I am able to restore what the locusts have eaten. I alone can bring good
from evil. I want to redeem your life from the pit. Why do you resist my invitation? Why would you
stay mired in sadness? Cast off those things that so easily entangle you! Come to me you who are
weary and heavy-laden. I’m here to give you rest.” Her voice trails off and the word is received
somberly but gladly. The pastor chants quietly, “Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, thank you, Lord,”
while shouts of “Amen!” and “Praise the Lord!” resound from around the sanctuary along with the
sniffles and muffles of weeping.
The pastor explains that this has been a prophetic word from the Lord, directed to the saints at
Resurrection Life — that God is calling them to come. Almost immediately people begin to stream
from their chairs toward the front of the sanctuary. Chairs at the front are shuffled back
unceremoniously to make room for those who have come to pray. They are shortly surrounded by
others from the congregation who lay hands on their shoulders and heads. A young couple has
timidly come to the front, hand in hand, and they are now surrounded by an elderly gentleman, an
older couple, and another young couple who have all laid their hands gently on their shoulders. The
younger woman asks what they can pray for, and the shoulders of the man who came forward begin
to heave as sobs rack his body. His wife falls into his chest in an embrace, and all the “prayer
warriors” huddle close, tenderly embracing them. They each continue to take the lead in prayer, then
fade into quiet prayer, some in tongues, asking for redemption, restoration, forgiveness, and healing.
While the altar has invited brokenness, its end is healing.
The pastor walks prayerfully between the clusters of people kneeling for prayer and being “prayed
over” by others, carefully stepping over legs and bodies. He stops at each group and adds to the
chorus of prayer, gently touching each one. An older gentleman has made his way to the pastor and
whispers briefly in his ear. The pastor listens carefully and then explains to the praying congregation:
“Jack has received a word of knowledge from the Spirit and has been obedient in sharing that,”
turning the microphone over to this elderly man, who takes it awkwardly. “The Spirit has told me,” he
timidly begins, “that there is a woman here who is suffering as Sarai did. You have been unable to
have a child; you’ve had much trouble getting pregnant. You and your husband have been quietly
suffering because of this. You haven’t even told your family. But the Lord knows your suffering; he
knows that you have been crying in private. He has heard your prayers! He has healing in his wings.
He wants to give you hope and a future. He wants to make you a Hannah.” A gasp of sobbing erupts
from behind us, as if this word has birthed from her a sadness that has been incubating within her for
months. A woman has nearly collapsed, supported and sustained by her husband, who now carefully
leads her to the front for prayer as the congregation breaks into spontaneous applause, its own
hopeful prayer. The matriarchal woman who met us at the door has met her at the front of the
sanctuary, and has carefully placed her hands upon the young woman’s belly, fervently interceding,
claiming the promise of God’s prophetic word.
A glance around the space takes in what could seem like a chaotic scene with all sorts of different
activities bustling in different corners of the room. The staid, orderly rows of chairs are now
sprawled askew, as if swirled by a whirlwind. Perhaps they have been. As this “work” of prayer
continues, the pastor briefly informs those few of us still in our seats that the Spirit still has work to
do today; we are to feel free to leave with the Lord’s blessing, but if we would like to stay, the church
is having a potluck lunch immediately following the service.
 Hermeneutical Courage and Unapologetic Pentecostalism

In the chaos and confusion that must have been the Pentecostal feast narrated in Acts 2, I reserve a
special admiration for Peter. And my interest in Peter stems directly from my work as a scholar and
academic; indeed, I see Peter as providing a model and exemplar of some virtues that I, as a scholar
— and particularly as a pentecostal scholar — ought to emulate. The two integrated virtues that I
would highlight are embedded in Acts 2:14-16 (NASB): “But Peter, taking his stand with the eleven,
raised his voice and declared to them: ‘Men of Judea, and all you who live in Jerusalem, let this be
known to you, and give heed to my words. For these men are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only
the third hour of the day; but this is what was spoken of through the prophet Joel.’ ” In this prefatory
narrative to Peter ’s Pentecostal proclamation, what I find exemplary is what we might describe as
Peter ’s hermeneutical courage or interpretive boldness. You will notice Peter ’s boldness in verse 14:
Peter took a stand; he “stood up” (NIV) and so stood out from the crowd — and he did so precisely in
the face of many who were mocking (v. 13) and disparaging him and his associates (“Aren’t these
people uneducated Galileans?” [v. 7]). But then, notice to what end this courage and boldness are
enacted. What does Peter do when he takes a stand? He offers an interpretation. In other words, he
marshals courage to articulate an interpretation of the events that are unfolding — a construal of the
world in which they find themselves. When Peter raises his voice, it is to offer an explanation — an
account of the phenomena that are swirling around them. His bold interpretation is actually a
counterinterpretation. The mockers had already offered an interpretation: these phenomena (speaking
in other tongues) were attributed to drunkenness. But Peter courageously offers a different
interpretation. An outlandish and surprising one, to be sure — which only heightens the boldness that
such an interpretive stand required. Peter ’s interpretation hinges on verse 16: “this is that”;68 in other
words, what you’re seeing is actually the fulfillment of a promise spoken by Joel — that a day would
come when God’s Spirit would be poured out so lavishly and with such extravagance that it would
erase old distinctions of class and gender. This Spirit would wash over both men and women, both
young and old, with indiscriminate abandon. It would signal the inauguration of a new economy of
abundance rather than the miserly administration of an old order. It would indicate a new creation that
entailed even cosmic transformation. It would signal the last days — which is to say, a new day. And
that day, Peter proclaimed, is today.
And so right there at Pentecost we already see something we have come to associate with
postmodernity: a conflict of interpretations.69 The complexity of the world and events gives rise to
the question, “What does this mean?” (v. 12),70 and in response we can offer only interpretations. The
mockers offer their own rendering of phenomena (the “wine theory”); Peter courageously offers an
alternative (the “Spirit theory”). And the bold proclamation of the interpretation does not guarantee
that others will see the world in this way (not all “received his word” [v. 41]).71 Nevertheless, the
interpretation Peter offers revolutionizes how many see the world. What marks Pentecost, then, is
Peter ’s interpretive courage that offers a new hermeneutical framework. Pentecost, we might say, is a
hermeneutic.72 And this interpretive stance is what marks pentecostal spirituality that functions as
nothing short of a revolutionary interpretation of the world unapologetically proclaimed as a
counterinterpretation of the world — one that counters the regnant interpretations (“wine theories”)73
of our world and events that unfold within it.
Drawing on Walter Brueggemann’s account of Israel’s “legitimate sectarian hermeneutic,” Cheryl
Bridges Johns captures this hermeneutic nature of pentecostalism. In his reading of 2 Kings 18-19
(the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem under Hezekiah’s reign), Brueggemann notes two different
universes of discourse at work in the narrative: the narrative of empire “on the wall” versus Israel’s
language “behind the wall.” “Both conversations construct reality. On the wall, the empire constructs
reality utilizing the agenda of the imperial system. In this conversation, no prophet speaks and
Yahweh is silent. The conversation behind the wall constructs reality based on the decisive prior claim
of covenant with Yahweh. Here we have the voice of the prophet. Here the imperial voice is silent.
Here only Hebrew is spoken. It is the language of the covenant.”74 Each functions as a hermeneutic, “a
proposal for reading reality through a certain lens.” But Israel’s constitutes a “counter-perception of
reality” that challenges the hegemony of the dominant, imperial hermeneutic.75 “It serves as a basis
for ordering a community in such a way that puts a distance between it and the dominant order.”76 On
the basis of this Hebrew precedent, Johns admonishes pentecostals toward maturity by embracing the
legitimacy of a sectarian hermeneutic, thus exhorting pentecostals to exhibit the sort of hermeneutic
courage we see in Peter ’s Pentecost sermon: “They [should] have the courage to pose the question,
‘Will the real sectarian stand up?’ By raising this question, a challenge is made to the old scientific
paradigm which assumed that there was the possibility of a nonsectarian, noninterested, nonpartial
hermeneutic. By raising this question Pentecostals could feel free to bring to the Christian table their
own imaginative proposal for ordering the Christian household without bringing with it a pervading
sense of shame.”77
Pentecostal spirituality is a construal of the world, an implicit understanding that constitutes a
“take” on things. And this pentecostal construal of the world has something to say not only on the
steps of the temple in Jerusalem (Acts 2), but also in the Areopagus of Athens (Acts 17). One of my
claims in this book is that pentecostal spirituality is relevant and important not only for “religious”
edification, but also that a pentecostal “worldview” has something unique, powerful, and viable to say
to the academy precisely because implicit within pentecostal practice is a take on our being-in-the-
world. Pentecostal spirituality is not just a compartmentalized way of being “religious”; the practices
of pentecostal spirituality carry within them an understanding of the world that spills over any
sacred/secular divides.78 Thus I want to offer an interpretation of pentecostal faith that involves not
only speaking in tongues, but also — to stretch the metaphor — thinking in tongues.79 Pentecostalism
offers not only a distinct way of worshiping, but also a distinct way of thinking; embedded in
pentecostal practice is not only a spirituality (in the narrow sense), but also something like a
“worldview.” If, as I suggested in chapter 1, there is to be something like a “pentecostal philosophy,”
then we need to discern the shape of the prephilosophical assumptions that constitute this constellation
of pentecostal commitments. To appreciate the ranging implications of this, I don’t want to narrowly
describe this as a pentecostal “theology”80 — unless by a “theology” we just mean the nexus of
practices that make up pentecostal spirituality (which might be described as an “implicit theology” or
perhaps even a “folk theology”).81 But usually “theology” is associated with the more narrow,
propositional aspect of faith — doctrines, dogma, and theoretical reflection. Following Steve Land, I
want to emphasize that what defines pentecostalism — and what is shared across the range of
Pentecostal and charismatic traditions — is a spirituality. To describe this as a spirituality is not to
retreat into mushy emotivism; that would be the case only if we assumed the modern dichotomy
between “reason” and “emotion.”82 By a “spirituality,” Land means “the integration of beliefs and
practices in the affections which are themselves evoked and expressed by those beliefs and
practices.”83 Such a spirituality, then, has its own kind of knowledge — what Land describes as “an
affective understanding.”84 In the milieu of pentecostal worship (as described in the opening vignette
of this chapter), we see a panoply of embodied (we might say “liturgical”) practices that “carry”
within them a tacit understanding, a latent sort of knowledge. Implicit in these practices are not only
“beliefs,” but also an unarticulated, affective understanding that, when articulated, we will describe as
a pentecostal “worldview.” However, it should be noted that being able to articulate this is not a
requirement for absorbing the understanding; rather, this affective understanding can be
transformatively absorbed, shaping our passions and dispositions, even if we might not have the
theoretical ability to articulate what we “know.” While the pentecostal believer might not be able to
elucidate this tacit understanding in theologemes, she’s nonetheless right when she emphasizes, “I
know that I know that I know.” This is a knowledge, an “affective understanding,” that is on a register
prior to propositional articulation.
A pentecostal philosophy will be a philosophy informed and nourished by a pentecostal spirituality.
But this is possible only because implicit within pentecostal spirituality is a tacit, unique
understanding of the world. I’m suggesting that, rather than describing this tacit understanding as a
pentecostal “theology,” we might describe it as a pentecostal “worldview.” 85 By referring to this as a
worldview, I don’t mean to suggest that this is a system of doctrines (as the term has sometimes been
used); rather, a worldview is a passional orientation that governs how one sees, inhabits, and engages
the world.86 In outlining the elements of a pentecostal worldview, then, I would like to work with a
definition of “worldviews” offered by James Olthuis: “A worldview (or vision of life) is a
framework or set of fundamental beliefs through which we view the world and our calling and future
in it.”87 Note several elements of this account of worldview:

1. It is a framework of fundamental beliefs: a worldview provides the grid or framework through

which we “make sense” of our world — the “set of hinges” on which our thinking and doing
turn.
2. It is a framework of fundamental beliefs: as fundamental, we could say that these beliefs are
pretheoretical. They are often not beliefs that we consciously, rationally reflect upon. They are
the “control beliefs”88 that operate subterraneously. Thus, I would suggest that we think about
a worldview operating at the level of imagination, not thinking. (We’ll return to this below.)
3. It is a framework of fundamental beliefs: as “ultimate beliefs,” worldviews are fundamentally
religious in character, shaping the root commitments of individuals and communities. It is in
this sense that Abraham Kuyper can describe all of life as religious in some fundamental
sense, even for the naturalistic atheist.
4. It provides a view of the world: as such, worldviews are comprehensive, giving us an account
of how the big picture hangs together. In this way, they help us make sense of the totality of
our experience, not just our “religious” experience.
5. A worldview tells us something about our calling: how we understand our world then
determines how we understand our roles in it. By determining our calling, worldviews shape
our identity by constituting the telos of our being-in-the-world. It defines what matters.

Olthuis emphasizes that, in a way, a worldview provides answers to questions that “elude our
intellectual grasp”: they are ultimately confessions of faith.89 To put this otherwise: there is no such
thing as a “secular” perspective, if by “secular” one means neutral and objective — as if operating
without some faith commitments.90 The crucial implication here is a certain leveling of the playing
field: if everyone operates on the basis of a worldview, and all worldviews have a basically
confessional status, then a specifically Christian or pentecostal worldview has as much right to come
to the scholarly table as any other.91
So, to speak of a worldview is to speak about our most fundamental orientation to the world; a
framework that operates even prior to thought; a passional orientation of our imagination that filters
and explains our experience of the world. It operates unconsciously at the very core of our identity.
But precisely because a worldview is not just a rational system or set of cognitive beliefs, we might
also consider a couple of related terms as near synonyms, and try to hear this in our use of the term
“worldview.” In particular, I find Charles Taylor ’s notion of a “social imaginary” and Amos Yong’s
account of the “pneumatological imagination” to be rich ways of naming what I’m trying to get at
here.
Taylor develops his notion of the “social imaginary” along lines adopted from Heidegger. In Being
and Time, Heidegger distinguished between “knowledge” (Wissen) and “understanding” (Verstehen).
“Knowledge” referred to the sort of standard picture of knowledge we usually assume — knowledge
as justified true belief that traffics in objectified, propositional content. However, Heidegger
distinguishes this sort of intellectual, cognitive knowledge from a precognitive “understanding” — a
more primordial, affective “attunement” to the world that constitutes the matrix for knowledge.
“Thinking” is thus a derivative of “understanding.”92 Drawing on this distinction between knowledge
and understanding, Taylor emphasizes that human action and understanding are embedded not, first
and foremost, in frameworks of “knowledge” but rather in “social imaginaries” that are “much
broader and deeper than . . . intellectual schemes.”93 The social imaginary is a tacit, affective
understanding of the world that constitutes the “background” of our being and doing: “It is in fact that
largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole situation, within which particular
features of our world show up for us in the sense they have.”94 Very similar to what we’ve described
above as a worldview, Taylor emphasizes the “imaginary” descriptor because it captures the sense
that this understanding is affective, even aesthetic. This understanding is not an implicit set of
propositions; it is more like a story we know by heart. So it is “not expressed in theoretical terms, but
is carried in images, stories, and legends.”95 The social imaginary traffics in the currency of the
imagination and, Taylor emphasizes, is “carried” in practices. This understanding is not something
that is transferred and absorbed by trading propositions; it is a disposition and attunement to the
world that seep into our imagination through the practices that “carry” it. As Taylor puts it, such an
understanding is “implicit in practice.”96 The ritual is its own kind of understanding. So when I argue
that pentecostal spirituality has latent within it a pentecostal worldview, we might say that carried in
the practices of pentecostal worship is a precognitive understanding that constitutes a “pentecostal
social imaginary.”
This resonates with Amos Yong’s description of the “pneumatological imagination.”97 This locates
the imagination at the orchestral center of our experience — receiving, synthesizing, and constructing
in a “holistic connection between the mind . . . and the heart: the human center which coordinates the
affections, the will, and the spirit.”98 In this framework, Yong continues, “thinking itself is a
selectively valuational enterprise, beginning with the imagination and proceeding toward
interpretation, theory, and the pursuit of responsibility.”99 Thus the pneumatological imagination
“drives both discernment and engagement.”100 In short, pentecostal spirituality is a nexus of practices
that dispose us to imagine the world in a certain way, to “make” the world under a Spirit-charged
construal.101 The praxis of pentecostal spirituality affectively forms both our dispositions and our
understanding (Verstehen). A pentecostal social imaginary takes practice; it is practice. In other
words, a pentecostal worldview is first embedded in a constellation of spiritual practices that carry
within them an implicit understanding.102 Pentecostal worship performs the faith.
 Elements of a Pentecostal Worldview

I have been arguing that pentecostalism has distinctive elements of its own worldview that offer a
unique interpretation of and orientation to the world that, in turn, would inform a distinctly
pentecostal philosophy. By a “pentecostal worldview” I don’t mean to suggest that pentecostalism has
its own catalogue of propositional truths sitting on a shelf that deductively tell us how to think
differently about the world. Rather, I mean that embedded in the embodied practices and spirituality of
pentecostalism are the elements of a latent but distinctive understanding of the world, an affective
“take” on the world that constitutes more of a social imaginary than a cognitive framework.103 My
goal in this section is to make explicit what is implicit in pentecostal spirituality — to articulate what
is unarticulated in the practices of pentecostal worship. Thus we’re interrogating not pentecostal
doctrine as much as pentecostal practice. In effect, I’m asking: What understanding of the world is
implicit in the pentecostal worship sketched in the opening vignette of this chapter? What tacit
construal of the world is operative in the practices that constitute pentecostal spirituality? My goal is
to “read” these practices in order to discern the pentecostal social imaginary that is implicit in
them.104 Once we have articulated the elements of a pentecostal worldview, we’ll then consider their
philosophical import in the following chapters.
But first a brief word about how I understand the relation between a distinctively pentecostal
worldview and the shape of a broader Christian worldview. On this point I am unapologetic: I think
the key elements of pentecostal/charismatic spirituality represent the way to be authentically Christian.
In other words, I think the birth of the body of Christ at Pentecost represents that the church is
properly — and therefore should be — pentecostal. To be Christian is to be charismatic.105 Authentic,
radical, catholic Christianity is properly charismatic or pentecostal. Therefore, I would suggest that
the elements of what I’m calling a distinctively “pentecostal worldview” ought to be the elements of a
(catholic) Christian worldview. However, insofar as the broader Christian — and especially
evangelical — imagination has been captivated by a cessationist assumption, a pentecostal worldview
in practice is not synonymous with a more generally Christian worldview.106 But I think the fullest,
most authentic expression of radical discipleship is a Christian faith that is both catholic and
charismatic.
With that in mind, as already outlined briefly in chapter 1, I suggest we can identify five key
elements of a distinctively pentecostal worldview:107 (1) a position of radical openness to God, and in
particular, God doing something differently or new; (2) an “enchanted” theology of creation and
culture; (3) a nondualistic affirmation of embodiment and materiality; (4) an affective, narrative
epistemology; and (5) an eschatological orientation to mission and justice. With this formulation I am
trying to articulate the “understanding” implicit in pentecostal spirituality in its most “catholic” (i.e.,
universal) form. It is my hope that charismatic Christians around the globe would find in these five
elements what they consider to be core aspects of their spirituality, whether in Angola or Alabama,
Zion or Zambia.108
 1. Radical Openness to God

At the heart of pentecostal spirituality, as glimpsed in our opening vignette, is a deep sense of
expectation and an openness to surprise. One of the reasons pentecostal spirituality is so often linked
to spontaneity is that pentecostal worship makes room for the unexpected. Indeed, we might say that,
for pentecostals, the unexpected is expected. The surprising comes as no surprise. While I don’t mean
to propose a ranking of these five elements of a pentecostal worldview, I do think the first is the
condition for all the others: a position of radical openness to God, and in particular, openness to God
doing something differently or new. I take the central point of the narrative of Acts 2 to be Peter ’s
courage and willingness to recognize in these strange phenomena the operation of the Spirit and
declare it to be a work of God. To declare “this is that” (Acts 2:16) was to be open to God working in
unexpected ways. In other words, the crux of the Pentecost story is not the spectacular events of Acts
2:1-4, but rather later, in 2:16, where Peter, with characteristic hermeneutical boldness, asserts: “This
is from God!”
We need to appreciate the context here: the disciples have gathered in Jerusalem to await the
promised Holy Spirit, as the Lord commanded (Acts 1:8). Ten days later, on the Sabbath, everyone is
together and “suddenly” very strange things begin happening: a loud noise like wind and a startling
phenomenon that looks like fire. And then the cacophony of voices as 120 people begin speaking in
other languages. I don’t think this is what the apostles expected! In other words, this inbreaking of the
Spirit was not something that was anticipated or predelineated. To use the language of Gadamer ’s
hermeneutics, this was not anticipated by their “hori-zons of expectation.”109 In fact, they likely
expected God to move quite differently, in ways that their past experience could imagine and
anticipate.
But despite all the strangeness and chaos; despite the fact that this is not what they had expected;
despite the fact that God had never done this before, Peter stood up and boldly proclaimed: “This is
God! This is what the prophets spoke about! This is what we’ve been waiting for! This is the
Spirit!”110 Such a claim required a unique hermeneutic able to nimbly respond to the advent of
surprise, as well as a kind of hermeneutical courage to make such a claim. In short, it required
forsaking existing, status quo ideas and expectations of how God works. That is why I think Pentecost
is really about radical openness to God — especially an openness to a God who exceeds our horizons
of expectation and comes unexpectedly.111 This comes up time and time again in the Spirit-filled
narrative of Acts (continuing, I think, the unexpected advent of the incarnation); as, for example, when
God begins to move amongst the Gentiles (Acts 10:9-16). The church, of course, does not “kiss its
brains good-bye” (hence the meeting, Acts 11:18; 15), but it was open to having its idea and
expectations of God changed by God himself. It is this openness that I think lies at the heart of
Pentecost, at the heart of being pentecostal, and so at the root of a pentecostal worldview.
It must be admitted that, in our late modern world, increasingly governed by the naturalisms of
technology and the market (indeed, the technology of the market), such an openness to divine surprise
is easily disdained — looked down upon by the secularly enlightened as parochial, provincial, and
primitive.112 Indeed, such a worldview seems to be a fossil of traditional societies, or a parasitic
reaction to the threats of modernity. Pentecostalism clings to the plausibility structures of a mythical
world, and these habits of mind are, at best, quaint and, at worst, dangerous. If it’s not demonized as a
backward retreat from progress, it’s patronizingly dismissed as a “simple” faith. But in describing
this as a worldview, we’re also trying to level the playing field a bit — which will require (in chapter
4) that we point up the ways in which the confident secular naturalism that dismisses the “simplicity”
of pentecostalism is also a worldview, a constellation of commitments that narrates the world on the
basis of a kind of faith. And if we can level the playing field, perhaps we can also turn the tables and
suggest that this “simple” faith has a kind of complexity about it that has a certain beauty — that the
practices and plausibility structures that sustain pentecostal spirituality have their own sort of “logic.”
And that these plausibility structures have an enduring significance that has been sustained, and will be
sustained, longer than the tenuous naturalism that has captured the hearts and minds of a secular elite.
In this respect, I find myself contemplating Félicité, the “simple soul” featured in Flaubert’s Three
Tales — a character whose sensibility we might describe as “pentecostal.”113 Granted, there is an
ambiguity in the narrative voice: it might be that Flaubert embodies the gaze of just this naturalized
elite, looking down his nose at the “bliss” (félicité) of such a simple soul whose bliss is, no doubt, the
fruit of her proverbial ignorance. On the other hand, his tale functions as a beautiful encomium to
Félicité, a moving portrait of one who, despite her class and circumstances, in a life marked by piety
and charity, has secured a joy (a félicité) that eludes her aristocratic masters. Perhaps piety has a
secret that has eluded the enlightened.114
Like so many of Flaubert’s characters, Félicité inhabits the lower spectrum of provincial life in
France. She moves in a stratum of the world not so far from the majority of pentecostal believers.
Rather than defined by wealth (of which she has none) or intellect (apart from attending catechism
with her charge, she has received no education), she is her affections. “Like everyone else,” Flaubert
alerts us, “she had her love story.”115 But her story is not a tale of just one courtship gone awry but
rather of a life marked by charity on all fronts; Félicité is shaped by her loves. And this love is
nourished by a tactile spirituality, a faith that traffics not in the abstract realm of dogma and concepts
but in a sort of gritty religion of practices and materiality. Each day she would arise at dawn “so as
not to miss Mass,” and she would go to sleep each night “with her rosary in her hands.”116 When she
takes young Virginie to catechism, it is Félicité’s imagination that is activated by the imagery of the
faith. It is the stained-glass depictions of a story that capture this simple heart, and when the priest
begins to outline the sweeping narrative of redemption, “Félicité saw in imagination” the scenes
unfolding. The story of the Passion moved her to tears, and the Gospels’ imagery of lambs and
sowers and doves and stables took her to a familiar world, but also transformed how she inhabited
her own world.117 “She found it difficult, however, to imagine what the Holy Ghost looked like, for it
was not just a bird but a fire as well, and sometimes a breath.” This turns Félicité to consider her
familiar environment as perhaps enchanted by this Spirit: “She wondered whether that was its light
she had seen flitting about the edge of the marshes at night, whether that was its breath she had felt
driving the clouds across the sky, whether that was its voice she had heard in the sweet music of the
bells.”118 Her devotion is not a Gnostic desire for escape or a Manichean denigration of materiality;
quite to the contrary, for Félicité, Spirit and matter intermingle in messy but natural ways. Thus her
piety is material: her devotion finds its most elaborate expression in her zealous commitment to the
Corpus Christi feast, but it is also seen in her mundane attachment to relics. Her room, “to which few
people were ever admitted, contained such a quantity of religious bric-à-brac and miscellaneous
oddments that it looked like a cross between a chapel and a bazaar.”119 Her veneration on both counts
is testament to a sacramental faith that finds the Spirit in and through the material. For a “simple
heart,” the so-called natural world is more than it seems; in other words, this “simple” soul has an
understanding of the world that complexifies it (in contrast to the reductionistic naturalisms of those
who would disdain her simplicity).
This sacramental devotion finds its apogee when Félicité is finally given an image to help her
picture the Holy Spirit. While she had difficulty picturing the Holy Ghost, something (someone)
enters her life that will change this. A departing aristocrat leaves with the house a parrot, Loulou, to
whom Félicité becomes immediately devoted. At one point, she sees something anew: “In church she
was forever gazing at the Holy Ghost, and one day she noticed that it had something of the parrot
about it. This resemblance struck her as even more obvious in a colour-print depicting the baptism of
Our Lord. With its red wings and its emerald-green body, it was the very image of Loulou.”120 To the
official, doctrinaire religion of the elite, to even suggest this is not only gauche but almost
sacrilegious.121 But for Félicité, this brought new significance to both: “They were linked together in
her mind, the parrot being sanctified by this connexion with the Holy Ghost, which itself acquired
new life and meaning in her eyes.” This mutual illumination deepens her faith and devotion and finds
expression in practice: “although Félicité used to say her prayers with her eyes on the picture, from
time to time she would turn slightly towards the bird.”122 The connection was a tactile gift for this
simple soul. And it becomes the occasion for a final, saintlike ecstasy in her dying breaths: “A blue
cloud of incense was wafted up into Félicité’s room. She opened her nostrils wide and breathed it in
with a mystical, sensuous fervour. Then she closed her eyes. Her lips smiled. Her heart-beats grew
slower and slower, each a little fainter and gentler, like a fountain running dry, an echo fading away.
And as she breathed her last, she thought she could see, in the opening heavens, a gigantic parrot
hovering above her head.”123
Like the practices of pentecostal spirituality, such strange devotion is scandalous to the staid
rhythms of a disenchanted Christianity. But the awkward messiness and even sensual devotion that
characterize pentecostalism are informed by a simple sacramentality like Félicité’s coupled with a
sense of enchanted expectation and craving for God’s surprise. Indeed, Flaubert notes that it is this
same expectation that marks “simple hearts” like Félicité: “to minds like hers,” he notes, “the
supernatural is a simple matter.”124 It is that “natural” expectation of the so-called supernatural that
marks pentecostalism’s radical openness to divine surprise.
It is because pentecostal faith constitutes a community characterized by a radical openness to God
that pentecostal communities emphasize the continued ministry of the Spirit, including continuing
revelation, prophecy, and the centrality of charismatic giftings in the ecclesial community.125 In short,
pentecostal spirituality takes the book of Acts as a picture of “normal” and “normative” Christianity.
As Jack Deere succinctly puts it, “The book of Acts is the best source that we have to demonstrate
what normal church life is supposed to look like when the Holy Spirit is present and working in the
church. Here we find a church that has passion for God, is willing to sacrifice — even to the point of
martyrdom — and is a miracle-working church.”126 This translates into a dynamic ecclesiology in
practice — where worship is shaped by a persistent openness to surprise and an expectation of the
miraculous. 127 The “miraculous” gifts are affirmed as operative, and thus pentecostal spirituality is
shaped by a fundamental mode of reception; while it is crucial that the gifts be exercised, even their
exercise is a matter of reception. Gift, for pentecostal spirituality, goes all the way down. Thus in our
opening vignette, at the heart of pentecostal worship is an “altar service” that both makes room for
God to be heard (in prophecy, in tongues, in “words of wisdom”) and makes room for God to work
(to heal, to convict, to transform, to grab hold of the body in all sorts of ways). The pentecostal
emphasis on “signs and wonders,” along with the continued operations of all the spiritual gifts, grows
out of this fundamental conviction: that God’s Spirit is a spirit of surprise.
 2. An “Enchanted” Theology of Creation and Culture

However, in addition to producing a more dynamic ecclesiology — the sense that the Spirit remains
dynamically active in the church — implicit in pentecostal spirituality is also a unique theology of
creation and culture.128 Endemic to a pentecostal worldview is the implicit affirmation of the
dynamic, active presence of the Spirit not only in the church, but also in creation. And not only the
Spirit, but also other spirits. Thus central to a pentecostal construal of the world is a sense of
“enchantment.”129
Pentecostal spirituality, we’ve noted, is bound up with an expectation that the Spirit operates within
the created order. In other words, pentecostal spirituality is marked by a deep sense of the Spirit’s
immanence. While it might not be articulated as such, implicit in the prayers of pentecostals is a
richly pneumatological understanding of creation that affirms the Spirit’s continued presence and
activity in what we could call the “given” or physical layer of creation — “nature” — as well as the
Spirit’s operation in the “made” or human layer of creation — “culture.”130 The Spirit is understood
to be the Trinitarian person in which creation lives and moves and has its being. So nature, in a sense,
is “suspended” in the Spirit of creation; or we might say that creation is “charged” with the Spirit’s
presence. 131 Nature, then, is always more than “the natural.” It is suffused with something more; there
is always more than meets the naturalizing eye.132 But the Spirit’s presence in creation is not only
found in “nature.” As Vincent Bacote has recently suggested, a robust sense of the Spirit’s presence
and activity in creation as culture translates into a more positive approach to the Spirit’s work in the
realm of human culture-making, including the spheres of politics, commerce, and the arts.133 This
sense that all of creation — nature and culture — is charged with the presence of the Spirit is implicit
in the prayers and practices of pentecostal spirituality.
However, there is a flip side to this sense of the Spirit’s enchantment of creation: pentecostal
spirituality is also deeply attentive to what we might describe as the mis-enchantment of the world by
other spirits. And this, too, is present in the prayers and practices of pentecostal spirituality.
Pentecostal praxis is sometimes almost overwhelmed by a concern with spiritual warfare and the
demonic that finds expression in ministries of “deliverance” and liberation. There is a deep sense that
multiple modes of oppression — from illness to poverty — are in some way the work of forces that
are not just “natural.” Thus the “full gospel” of pentecostal salvation sees Christ’s triumph over “the
powers” expressed in the Spirit’s ministry of deliverance. Prayer and worship are a mode of struggle
against “the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against
the spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12). While North American pentecostalism is
increasingly “naturalized” on this score, all commentators agree that the implicit cosmology assumed
by spiritual warfare is one of the primary factors in the explosion of Christianity in the majority
world, particularly where indigenous or “primal” religions emphasize a similarly enchanted
cosmology. This clearly has implications for working out a pentecostal ontology, as well as the shape
of a pentecostal engagement with the sciences — an increasingly important encounter to stage as both
pentecostalism and science represent two very different modes of globalization.
 3. A Nondualistic Affirmation of Embodiment and Materiality

Included in this ministry of the Spirit is a distinctive belief in the healing of the body.134 This once
again reflects the fact that the pentecostal understanding of the gospel tracks closely that of Jesus for
whom the message of salvation was primarily a message of liberation from sin and its effects,
including the material effects of illness and disease, as well as oppression and poverty (Luke 4:18-19).
Deliverance and liberation, then, are not just “spiritual”; the gospel is not just a tonic for souls.
Implicit in this affirmation of bodily healing is a broader affirmation, namely, a sense that the full
gospel values the whole person. In other words, inchoately embedded in this central affirmation that
God cares about our bodies is a radical affirmation of the goodness of creation that translates (or
should translate) into a radical affirmation of the goodness of bodies and materiality as such. Here, I
think, is one of the most underappreciated elements of a pentecostal worldview. Or rather: here is a
central element of pentecostal practice, the implications of which have not been completely
appreciated by the pentecostal tradition. Indeed, this central belief is an indication of a (potential)
pentecostal deconstruction of fundamentalist dualisms — dualisms that pentecostal Christians have
too often adopted uncritically.135 By dualism I mean a basically Manichean (or Platonic) approach to
the world that sees material reality — both bodies and material elements associated with bodies
(sexuality, the arts) — as fundamentally bad or evil, and therefore something to be avoided,
suppressed, and ultimately escaped.136 This runs counter to God’s own affirmation of the goodness of
material creation (including bodies, Gen. 1:27), as well as the reaffirmation of the body in the
incarnation (John 1:14) and resurrection.
What I’m suggesting is that, even though pentecostals have often accepted such dualistic rejections
of “the world,” a core element of a pentecostal worldview — the affirmation of bodily healing —
actually deconstructs such dualism. One of the concomitant effects of this should be a broader
affirmation of the goodness of embodiment and materiality, and therefore an affirmation of the
fundamental goodness of spheres of culture related to embodiment, such as the arts. We might note
that it is precisely the holism of this aspect of pentecostal spirituality that might also explain why
pentecostal spirituality is also often attended by a prosperity gospel. That is, the prosperity gospel
(for all its failures) might be an unwitting testimony to the holism of pentecostal spirituality. The
prosperity gospel — which often attends pentecostalism whether in Africa, Brazil, or suburban Dallas
— is, we must recognize, a testament to the very “worldliness” of pentecostal theology. It is one of the
most un-Gnostic moments of pentecostal spirituality that refuses to spiritualize the promise that the
gospel is “good news for the poor.” In this sense, we might suggest that the implicit theological
intuition that informs pentecostal renditions of the prosperity gospel is not very far from Catholic
social teaching or liberation theology. It is evidence of a core affirmation that God cares about our
bellies and bodies.137
 4. An Affective, Narrative Epistemology

Keep in mind that we are trying to explicate the elements of a pentecostal worldview from implicit
assumptions and affirmations that are embedded in pentecostal practice and confession. I want to
suggest that implicit in pentecostal experience is a unique understanding of the nature of human
persons — what we could call a philosophical anthropology. Because of an emphasis on the role of
experience, and in contrast to rationalistic evangelical theology (which reduces worship to a didactic
sermon, and conceives of our relation to God as primarily intellectual, yielding only “talking head”
Christianity), pentecostal spirituality is rooted in affective, narrative epistemic practice.138 According
to this model, knowledge is rooted in the heart and traffics in the stuff of story. It’s not that
propositional truths can be “packaged” in narrative format for “the simple”; rather, the conviction is
that story comes before propositions — imagination precedes intellection. We know in stories. As
Christian Smith has observed, “we not only continue to be animals who make stories but also animals
who are made by our stories.”139 Implicit in pentecostal spirituality is the epistemological intuition
that we are “narrative animals.” And as I hope to demonstrate in the next chapter, it is precisely this
affective, narrative epistemology that yields a deep affinity between postmodernism and a pentecostal
worldview.
 5. An Eschatological Orientation to Mission and Justice

While baptism in the Holy Spirit, or even speaking in tongues, is often considered the hallmark of
pentecostal spirituality, a growing cadre of scholars has emphasized that eschatology is as or even
more important in early pentecostal spirituality. The outpouring of the Spirit has meaning and
significance precisely because this is a sign of “the last days”; in other words, the baptism of the Holy
Spirit functions as a sign only within an overarching narrative that has an eschatological orientation
toward the coming kingdom. Thus Steven Land describes pentecostal spirituality as an “apocalyptic
vision.”140 Peter Althouse captures this intertwinement of the Spirit, tongues-speech, and eschatology:
“The ability to speak in tongues was thought to empower the recipient to proclaim the ‘glorious
fulfillment’ of Jesus’ imminent coming to establish his kingdom. At the same time, though, the
eschatological message of early Pentecostals envisioned a world that was more equitable and just
because it was a foretaste of the rule of Jesus Christ and anticipated the second coming.”141
So, contrary to common assumptions about the “otherworldliness” of pentecostals — indeed,
contrary to some of the habits of pentecostals themselves — endemic to a pentecostal worldview is an
eschatology that engenders a commitment both to mission and to ministries of empowerment and
social justice, with a certain “preferential option for the marginalized” tracing back to its roots in the
fishermen at Pentecost. This empowerment of the marginalized was reactivated at Azusa Street as a
kind of paradigm of marginalization — a revival in an abandoned stable, led by an African American
preacher, William Seymour.142 This stems, I think, from our first principle: the revolutionary activity
of the Spirit always disrupts and subverts the status quo of the powerful. That is why the Corinthian
church — the church that was perhaps a little too open to the gifts of the Spirit! (1 Cor. 14:39-40) —
was a community of me onta, those who “are not,” the despised and foolish of the world. Amongst
this revolutionary community of the Spirit, one does not find “many wise according to the flesh, not
many mighty, not many noble” (1 Cor. 1:26). Thus one of the signs of the eschatological inbreaking
of the Spirit into the present is the subversion of the powerful by the weak — who, in the Spirit,
function as the very power of God. This is why, as Cheryl Sanders comments, Azusa Street preacher
William Seymour found more “evidence” in racial reconciliation than glossolalia: “Seymour saw the
breaking of the color line as a much surer sign than tongue-speaking of God’s blessing and of the
Spirit’s healing presence.”143 The “latter rain” of the Spirit translates not into a desire to escape from
this world but into a desire to embody and model the coming kingdom, and even to foster the
transformation of this world. As Althouse points out, this is “an eschatology of transformation rather
than one of world destruction.”144 So, contrary to expectations of a militant chiliasm as a kind of
cosmic death wish, the eschatological orientation of pentecostal spirituality translates into a social
program that seeks to embody the kingdom in the midst of a broken creation — a pentecostal
rendition of the social gospel. “While the social gospel wanted to make the world a more just place,”
Althouse remarks, “early Pentecostal belief in tongues and healing as a prolepsis of the Second
Coming embodied within it (albeit in embryonic form) material social implications for the
transformation of society.”145 Thus pentecostal communities — like the interracial community at
Azusa Street, or early pentecostal pacifism146 — are called to be countercultural witnesses of how
culture can and will be otherwise.
Now granted, distilling this eschatological emphasis on cultural transformation as a core element
of pentecostal identity might actually be the occasion for critical reflection on contemporary
Pentecostal practice. If a Pentecostal denomination can produce the likes of John Ashcroft (emerging
from the Assemblies of God, Ashcroft was a functionary of the Religious Right in his role as attorney
general in the Bush administration), then there are clearly tensions within pentecostal practice —
tensions between what’s implicit in pentecostal spirituality and what pentecostals have more explicitly
adopted as their cultural stance. In this respect, articulating the elements of a pentecostal worldview
can be an occasion for critical reflection on who we are, and who we’re called to be — and might
thereby be the occasion for a deconstruction of who we’ve become. In particular, recovering a sense
of the prophetic, eschatological edge of a pentecostal worldview should be an occasion for us to call
into question the way in which North American pentecostals have been so quick to ally themselves
with power and the status quo — with “law and order” and military might, rather than the meek of the
earth and “weak things of the world” (1 Cor. 1:27). Thus rather than the convergence we so often
witness between Pentecostalism and prosperity — between the “full gospel” and big business — we
ought to expect a certain confluence between “Marx and the Holy Ghost.”147
 Conclusion: Seeing Otherwise

We know and confess the Spirit as the Lord our healer. And included in the Spirit’s healing and
renewing work is the very way in which we perceive the world — the worldview that governs our
perception, the imagination that orients how we inhabit our world. In outlining these key elements of
a pentecostal worldview, I mean to highlight the way in which the Spirit invites us to see the world
otherwise. In the ensuing chapters I will consider the philosophical implications of this pentecostal
“understanding,” aiming to outline more concretely the shape of a pentecostal philosophy that begins
unapologetically, to paraphrase Plantinga, from “what we ‘know’ as pentecostals.”
3 Storied Experience

A Pentecostal Epistemology
 Introduction: “I Know That I Know That I Know”

As she made her way to the altar, Denise carried herself in a way that indicated she already knew her
story was “irrational.” Her steps were halting and timid, her eyes cast downward in a shaded look of
mild embarrassment — as if the criteria for “rationality” were perched on her shoulder like little
devils, mocking her and trying to dissuade her from testifying to such nonsense. Indeed, it wasn’t just
the ethereal taunts of demonic dissuaders she was contending with; she could easily recall the flesh-
and-blood skepticism of her father and sister as she had relayed the story to them earlier that week.
Through a million little channels Denise had absorbed enough of the wider culture’s plausibility
structures to “know” that this was crazy. And yet here she was, making her way forward in response
to the pastor ’s invitation for the congregation to share their “God sightings” for the past week —
their stories and testimonies about where they saw the Spirit living and active in their day-to-day lives.
Granted, this Sunday evening ritual could easily devolve into a parade of tales about divinely secured
parking spaces or supernatural deliverance from failing to do one’s homework. But the “testimony
service” was woven into the very warp and woof of discipleship at Cornerstone Vineyard Fellowship
— these stories of faith were as important as any Sunday morning sermon.
Grasping the microphone handed to her by the pastor, Denise has to catch her breath and clear her
throat. While a week ago she couldn’t imagine standing in front of 300 people and speaking in public,
tonight she can’t imagine not doing it.
“Um, hi. I’m Denise,” she says just a little bit too loudly, the mic squealing mildly in response.
Jolted, she holds the microphone away from her face and pauses again before continuing — the
pastor nodding and smiling in encouragement, a hand on her shoulder.
“Uh, I’ve never done this before. But when Pastor invited us to share our ‘God sightings,’ the Spirit
wouldn’t let me sit on my hands any longer. I just have to tell you — I have to tell someone,
everyone.” Her words are met with various echoes of “Yes, Lord!” and “Amen!”
“As some of you know, Gary and I have been married for almost eight years. And maybe you
noticed that we don’t have any children.” There is a crackle in her voice but she continues: “I’ve
shared with some of the ladies at Bible study how much trouble we’ve had getting pregnant. It’s been
so hard, and so long.” The cacophony of prayers and shouts settles down to a rapt silence as Denise
continues her story.
“And I’ve gotta be honest with you: I’ve been pretty mad at God. There are all these women in the
Bible who couldn’t have babies. But it seems like their stories always ended with a miracle. ‘Where’s
my miracle?’ I kept asking God.” Her voice has fallen off, her face has dropped, and her shoulders
are beginning to tremble. The pastor inches closer and wraps her arm around Denise in comfort and
encouragement. The congregation’s attention is suspended in a bit of a netherworld, not sure where
this story is going. Only rarely have “God sightings” been honest laments. But Denise takes a deep
breath, wipes the mascara from her cheeks, and resumes her story. Gary has joined her at her side.
“A few weeks ago at Bible study I had . . . well . . . a complete meltdown!” she announces in a tearful
laugh. Others join in her mirth and some of the older ladies smile at one another knowingly. “I was
just so frustrated and hopeless — and angry, to be honest. I was just so sad and so tired. But then sister
Rose stopped everything and said, ‘We’ve gotta pray.’ And so all the ladies gathered round me, and
laid their hands on me, and they prayed and prayed and prayed. It was as if they were lifting me on a
blanket in their prayers and I fell back into them in the strangest feeling I’ve ever had. I heard sisters
praying the names of Sarah and Hannah and Elizabeth and I so wanted their story to be my story. But I
was too tired to believe it anymore — but I was also kinda too tired to not believe it. So I just let
myself fall back into their prayers. I think I might have even fallen asleep!” Denise testifies with a
sheepish grin. Gary smiles with her, his eyes fixed on the carpet, his hand trembling around her waist.
“When I woke up, I didn’t feel any different. A little embarrassed maybe. In fact, that’s why I didn’t
come to church last Sunday. I was too embarrassed to see all those ladies again.” The ladies respond
with puckered chins and frowns meant to be encouraging. “Anyway, I pretty much forgot about the
whole thing. Or at least I tried to forget about the whole thing. It’s just so tiring to keep thinking about
it.”
“But ... ,” Denise begins, but her breath seems taken away. She resumes her story in a rapid, breathy
falsetto, trying her best to get the words out: “Something was sorta wrong this past week — in a way
that could be good, or really, really bad. Gary encouraged me to go to the doctor, so I had an
appointment on Friday.” She’s now doubled over, shaking her head in disbelief, but then explodes up
like a Jack-in-a-box and loudly proclaims, “I’m pregnant!” The words roll out of her in an ecstasy
that tilts between joy and sorrow; she is overwhelmed and exhausted by the tale. Pastor and Gary have
now enfolded her in an embrace, supporting her as the congregation erupts in shouts of praise and
thanksgiving. But Denise has more to say.
“Some people didn’t believe me. When the doctor told me, I just had to tell him about the prayer
meeting. He talked to me about hormone levels and stress. Even when I told my father and sister, they
looked at me like I was a freak — like I didn’t know what I was talking about. But like Brother Jack
always says: ‘I know that I know that I know!’ I know that I know that I know that God was working
my belly! And I don’t care what others think,” she adds, now falling back into the King James English
of her upbringing. “I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is
able!”
 Pentecostalism as Countermodernity

“I know that I know that I know” is a common refrain in pentecostal worship services that make room
for testimony and witness. And making room for testimony is central to pentecostal spirituality
precisely because narrative is central to pentecostal identity. As Grant Wacker observes, “Like
countless Christians before them, early pentecostals assumed that their personal faith stories bore
normative implications for others. Consequently, they devoted much of the time in their worship
services — maybe a third of the total — to public testimonies about their spiritual journeys.” 148 This
narrative function of testimony is bound up in the very DNA of Pentecost where, in Acts 2, we see
Peter and the disciples making sense of their experience by weaving it into a larger received
narrative: to be able to say that “this is that” (Acts 2:16, pointing to Joel 2:28-32) is to frame and make
sense of the phenomenon by situating it within a narrative.149 In testimony, then, pentecostals enact an
identity by writing themselves into the larger story of God’s redemption. “Crucifixion, resurrection,
Pentecost, parousia, all formed one great redemption, one story in which they were participants with
assigned roles to play.”150 Narrative provided a framework to make sense of their own struggles and
victories: “by interpreting their daily life and worship in terms of the significant events of biblical
history, their own lives and actions were given significance.”151 And this narrative understanding of
God’s action yielded a practice that was integral to pentecostal worship: testimony.152 As Wacker
summarizes, “The testimony forcefully asserted that the believer ’s passage on this earth formed part
of a magnificent drama in which cosmic good vanquished evil.... Each person’s private struggles
somehow soared above the merely private and reappeared in a framework that spanned the
millennia.”153
In chapter 2 I outlined the basic elements of a pentecostal worldview that are implicit in the
practices of pentecostal worship and experience. The point of that “articulation project” — making
explicit what is implicit in pentecostal practice — is to now consider the philosophical ramifications
of this pentecostal “understanding.” In this chapter I want to particularly consider the tacit epistemic
commitments that are embedded in the pentecostal practice and experience of testimony, to consider
the inchoate “understanding of understanding” at work in the pentecostal claim that “I know that I
know that I know.” In particular, I want to suggest that at work here is a kind of proto-postmodern
intuition about knowledge that constitutes a performative critique of modern criteria for knowledge
— a pentecostal critique of the rationalism (or cognitivism or “intellectualism”)154 that characterizes
modern accounts of knowledge. Pentecostal practice can function as a sort of countermodernity.155
Thus there are elements of a pentecostal worldview that resonate with a “postmodern” critique of
autonomous reason such that we might see Azusa Street as a postmodern revival.156 In this chapter I
want to first explore how pentecostal testimony and experience constitute an implicit critique of
rationalism. I’ll then consider how the function of story and narrative carries within it fundamental
epistemic commitments (exploring how these resonate with a biblical epistemology). Finally, given
the centrality of affect and imagination in pentecostal narrative and testimony, the chapter will close
with a tentative outline for a pentecostal aesthetics.
When Enoch Adeboye, leader of the Redeemed Christian Church of God in Nigeria, gives his
testimony, it has “the usual Augustinian elements: prestige, women, booze.”157 But as Andrew Rice
goes on to note, Adeboye also confesses a “distinctive weakness”: an “idolatrous reliance on reason.”
As Pastor Adeboye explains, “It begins to give man the impression that man is the almighty, that man
can do anything. He can go to the moon, go to Mars, perform operations with a laser beam without
spilling blood. The problem, the way I see it, is that because of the advance of technology, science and
investing, the Western world began to feel that they didn’t need God as much as before. Whereas in
Africa, we need him. We know we need him to survive.”158
Most philosophers would be getting uncomfortable at this point. This critique of an “idolatrous
reliance on reason” sounds like license for just the sort of anti-intellectualism that is often associated
with pentecostalism, and such an anti-intellectualism would not only be unphilosophical but also
antiphilosophical. And, of course, there’s no shortage of examples of pentecostal anti-
intellectualism.159 But I’m suggesting that we need a more finegrained analysis of what’s embedded
in pentecostal experience and what’s being said in such testimonies. While pentecostals (like all sorts
of other evangelical Christians) might be prone to fall into anti-intellectualism, I don’t think this is
endemic to pentecostal spirituality as such. Rather, it attends the populism that characterizes most
expressions of pentecostalism. But if we filter our analysis more carefully, and try — at least
theoretically — to sort out populist anti-intellectualism from the pentecostal practice of testimony, I
think we can discern in pentecostal spirituality a sort of inchoate epistemic grammar, perhaps best
described as a hermeneutic — a tacit understanding of what constitutes “knowledge” and the means by
which we know. This incipient epistemology is not antirational, but antirationalist; it is not a critique
or rejection of reason as such but rather a commentary on a particularly reductionistic model of
reason and rationality, a limited, stunted version of what counts as “knowledge.” If the pentecostal
practice of testimony is a kind of critique of our “idolatrous reliance on reason,” it’s not reason that
is the target, but our idolatrous construction of it.
In its critique of idolatrous constructions of reason — rationalisms of various stripes —
pentecostalism amounts to a kind of proto-postmodernism insofar as postmodernism (as a loosely
bounded set of ideas) is itself a critique of modern, Western rationalism.160 As trickle-down from a
conglomeration of philosophical sources, we have inherited a particular picture of what constitutes
and counts as “knowledge” — a picture bound up with a related picture of human persons as
“thinking things,” autonomous rational agents, transcendental logical egos, disembodied centers of
cognitive perception.161 For instance, the implications of Descartes’s famous delineation of the
essence of the human person as a thinking thing, a “mind” only contingently and temporarily housed
in a body, are twofold: a valorization of thinking as the core of human identity and a devaluation of
embodiment as a source of deception and distress. Thus we can describe this understanding of the
human person as rationalism because it privileges reason or thinking as the essence of what it means
to be human, and denigrates material embodiment as not only accidental to being human, but even
regrettable. Furthermore, it conceives the nature of reason and “thinking” on a narrow register of
calculation and deduction — as a kind of “processing” of the world that would provide the metaphors
for our increasingly computerized world.162
This picture of the human person as a “thinking thing” or essentially rational being has further
implications, beyond the general denigration of material, embodied existence. First, if the essence of
the human person is thinking, then what really matters is what can be thought — and what can be
thought is what can be calculated, inferred, deduced, and articulated in propositions. In other words,
there is an attendant cultural privileging of what is cognitive, what can be thought and calculated —
which finds its culmination in what Lyotard described as the “computerization” of knowledge. 163
What counts as “knowledge” is that which conforms to the calculable standards of logical operation.
Or even worse, what counts as knowledge is only what can be reduced to “information” or data.164
In addition to the priority of the cognitive, modernity’s rationalistic picture of the human person
has a second important side effect: the emergence of a new focus on the universality of reason — or
perhaps better, the neutrality of reason because of its universality. Beginning with the assumption that
reason or thinking is what is essential to the human person — what really defines the human person
— and having relegated the particularities of embodiment to the realm of the contingent, accidental,
and impure (the body as a “taint” on reason), modernity yields a new universalism of a sort. The idea
is this: the disembodied minds that really define us as human share in common the universal
principles of reason and logic. So what counts as “rational” must be the same for everyone. What
make us different are only the particularities and contingencies of our embodied lives: where we live,
the cultures we inhabit, the languages we learn, the religions we believe, the traditions we have
received, the (gendered) bodies we inhabit, and so on. But, for instance, the Enlightenment mission
(as a particular instantiantion of modernity) is to negate all those particularities, precisely because it
has already negated the body. Those features of embodied existence that shape and tailor our
“perspective” on the world must be suppressed and negated in order to escape to the pure, untainted
realm of reason and cognition — the world of the intellect of which all human beings are citizens.165
It is this confident assumption about the universality and therefore neutrality of reason that yields one
of modernity’s most powerful fruits: the notion of secularity and the doctrine of secularism — both of
which remain powerful forces today, in Europe especially, but also in the United States. “Secular”
becomes code for what is (supposedly) neutral, objective, unbiased, and above all, not religious.
Religious belief, then, becomes the very antithesis (and nemesis) of reason — and religious
experience would only be worse. Indeed, the Enlightenment offered universal reason as a cure for the
disease of religious belief and “superstition.”
It is just this rationalism (or “cognitivism”)166 — along with its attendant denigration of
embodiment and promotion of secularism — that is called into question by the postmodern critique
of reason. Contrary to caricatures, the postmodern critique is not a rejection of rationality and a
celebration of irrational madness; rather, it is a critique of the thinkingthing picture of the human
person bequeathed to us by Descartes, Kant, and others. In other words, what postmodernism calls
into question is not rationality per se but the particular construal of rationality and knowledge
characteristic of modern rationalism. And it does so in an interesting way: First, postmodernism167
calls into question the supposed neutrality and universality of reason as proclaimed by the moderns.
At the risk of falling into cliché, the postmodern critique of modernity found that what was often
touted as “rational” turned out to be what white European males thought would be a good idea.168 In
other words, the lineaments and conclusions of universal reason are, at the end of the day, only one
particular perspective writ large as if it were not a perspective but “just the way things really are.” So
what claimed to be a universal, neutral, God’s-eye-view of the world turns out to be only the elevation
and deification of one particular perspective pretending and parading as if it were not a “perspective”
at all. And what is hailed as “knowledge” and “rationality” is one particular mode or register of
calculation and perception — one particular way of “processing” the world according to the rubric of
a particular logic.169
Second, beyond merely pointing out the reductionist nature of Enlightenment “rationality” and the
veiled particularity of modernity’s feigned universal reason, postmodernism actually revalues
embodiment and particularity. In other words, postmodernism offers a fundamentally different
philosophical anthropology or understanding of human nature that does not reduce human identity to
thinking or a disembodied mind. To the contrary, postmodernism takes seriously the particularities of
race, gender, class, and geography precisely because it takes seriously the fact that we are embodied
creatures who inhabit a world of space and time — and we inhabit this world in particular ways, in
particular places, at particular times.170 This is not a regrettable state of affairs to be lamented, but
rather an essential aspect of being human that is to be affirmed. And because postmodernism rejects
the reductionistic picture of human beings as merely thinking things, it also calls into question the
privileging of reason or intellect as queen of the faculties. Instead, postmodernism argues that our
orientation to the world is not primarily mediated by intellectual perception, but rather by a more
fundamental “passional orientation” — an affective comportment to the world that “construes” the
world of experience on the basis of an “understanding” that is precognitive.171
So rather than reducing the human person to a disembodied thinking mind, postmodernism
revalues embodiment, and in so doing it offers an account of knowing that revalues what, in the
philosophical tradition, has often been referred to as the “heart.” Thus it is no coincidence that one of
the most formative influences on Martin Heidegger ’s account of “affective” understanding was the
work of Blaise Pascal, who was himself retrieving a vision of knowing first articulated by Saint
Augustine.172 As Pascal famously put it, “the heart has reasons of which Reason knows nothing.” This
is a way of “knowing” the world that cannot be reduced to cognition or intellectual perception — and
certainly not to “data” or facts. Thus postmodernism lowers the core of human identity, as it were,
from the head to the heart. This, of course, is not some advanced theoretical excuse for kissing our
brains good-bye, nor is it philosophical license to endorse some kind of anti-intellectual
emotionalism. What we’re calling the “heart” or the “affections” does not simply reduce to the
emotions, so we’re not setting up some kind of dichotomous opposition between head and heart,
between love and knowledge, between affection and cognition, between thinking and passion. I don’t
mean to suggest that postmodernism baptizes modes of spirituality that simply retreat into emotional
ecstasy, abandoning engagement with the world in order to retreat into a quasi-mystical desire, to be
immersed in the private world of a worship “experience” with Jesus. Rather, the point is to affirm the
primacy of the heart and affections as the basis for a rational, intellectual engagement with and
interpretation of the world. And precisely because our passional orientation to the world is reflective
of the particularities of our embodiment (our geographical location, gender, religious confession,
etc.), postmodernism takes seriously the “perspectivalism” that is an essential feature of being
embodied, finite creatures. Indeed, we can summarize the differences between modernism and
postmodernism by the stark difference between the modern ideal of dispassionate, disinterested
objectivism and the postmodern affirmation of a passional, even confessional perspectivalism.
Now, to get back to the task at hand, what does this have to do with pentecostalism? I hope my brief
account of the postmodern critique of modern rationalism has already hinted at a fundamental affinity
between the postmodern critique of modernity and key aspects of pentecostal spirituality. Indeed, my
core claim is that pentecostal worship constitutes a kind of performative postmodernism, an enacted
refusal of rationalism. Implicit in the practices of pentecostalism are both a philosophical
anthropology and an epistemology that resist the slimmed-down reductionism of modern
cognitivism. These practices sustain a “form of life” (in Wittgensteinian terms) that nourishes what
Peter Berger would call “a cognitive minority” — a people whose plausibility structures have not
succumbed to the de facto naturalism of market-driven, technological construals of the world.173
Rather, pentecostal spirituality fosters a more expansive, affective understanding of what counts as
knowledge and a richer understanding of how we know. “I know that I know that I know” is an
almost-nonsensical, quasi-glossolalic mantra that is struggling to articulate what might be
inarticulable — a sense that there are ways of knowing that cannot be translated into propositions or
syllogisms. Thus I’m suggesting that we “read” the practices of pentecostal spirituality as expressing
a tacit, even unwitting, critique of modern rationalism, and carrying an implicit, constructive
epistemological vision. In particular, I would highlight two features.
First, the postmodern critique of Enlightenment dualism echoes what we might describe as a
creational or incarnational affirmation of embodiment and materiality that characterizes pentecostal
worship. Rather than the thin, reductionistic picture of the human person bequeathed to us by
modernity, postmodernity appreciates the “thickness” of being human — that essential to being-
human is being-in-the-world, inhabiting a material environment as a body (not just in a body). I am
my body (even if I am also more than my body), and as such my body is an essential aspect of my
identity. And as a result, all the things that attend embodiment are not merely accidental “properties,”
but rather essential features that make up who I am. To be embodied means that I reside in a time and a
place — that I am a person with a geography and a history that constitute who I am. It means that my
identity is linked with my gender, my race and ethnicity, my desires and passions, my physical gifts
and even my incapabilities. Postmodernism takes race, class, and gender seriously precisely because
it takes embodiment seriously — unlike the disembodied dualism of modern rationalism.
Such an affirmation of embodiment is essential to the incarnational principle at the heart of
Christian confession. The story that God tells us about who we are begins with God’s making us
flesh, quickening the flesh of Adam as a material, embodied creature — and then saying it was “very
good.” This affirmation of the goodness of embodiment finds a reaffirmation in the incarnation of
God in Christ, the Word become flesh. And it finds its ultimate reaffirmation in the hope of the
resurrection. Ours is not a dream of a Platonic eternity, detached from the prison house of the body
and liberated to be a disembodied soul. Our hope is not for redemption from bodies, but the
redemption of our bodies — undoing their brokenness in order to be restored to their goodness.
Because the goodness of embodiment is consistently affirmed and reaffirmed in the narrative arc of
Scripture, we ought to also take seriously the features of being embodied (race, gender, sexuality,
geography, history), as well as those ways of being-in-the-world that are unique to embodied
creatures: the world of the arts, for instance, which requires ears to hear, eyes to see, hands to touch,
bodies to dance.
In this respect pentecostalism is a distinctly embodied practice of Christianity — which is precisely
why I think an integral pentecostalism resonates with postmodernism whereas certain strains of
(cessationist) evangelicalism, which have significantly absorbed the assumptions of modernity, have
been allergic to the postmodern critique of modern rationalism. But pentecostalism is its own critique
of rationalism and dualism. Its critique of dualism is implicitly embedded, for instance, in the
pentecostal affirmation of bodily healing. To say that God cares enough about bodies to heal them is
to recapture the creational affirmation of the goodness of embodiment against the neo-Gnosticism of
modernity. In other words, if we really teased out the implications of our central affirmation
regarding bodily healing, we ought to reject the dualism that denigrates the body as the source of all
evil — a dualism that pentecostals have too often absorbed, and absorbed precisely from the
widespread dualism that characterizes generic evangelicalism that reduces faith to a kind of “talking
head” Christianity that mirrors the rationalistic dualism of modernity.
In fact, we might say that pentecostalism is a quintessentially incarnational faith and practice — a
very embodied way of being-before-God, and being in relation to God. As we’ve noted, pentecostal
spirituality sees the body as essential to worship.174 Indeed, I still remember making my way to
Pentecost from a rabidly fundamentalist and cessationist tradition. I remember how physically
difficult it was to get my body to participate in worship. I remember the utter awkwardness of raising
a hand in praise, almost as if it were cemented to my side. But then I also remember the remarkable
sense of release — the almost sacramental dispensation of grace and liberation and renewal that
seemed to flow down through upstretched arms, as if the very positioning of my body opened
channels for grace to flow where it couldn’t otherwise. I remember the remarkable charge of grace
that would come with a hand laid on my shoulder in prayer — the very embodied, material
connection that was solidified by touch. “Thinking things” can’t raise their hands in praise, or fall
prostrate in worship; disembodied minds can’t lay hands on a brother or sister in prayer; brains-in-a-
vat can’t dance before the Lord and make their way to the altar. So what have we to do with the stunted
dualistic anthropology of modernity?
This affirmation of embodiment and eschewing of dualism have epistemological implications.
Early Pentecostals in particular were more attentive to the antithesis between the dreams of modernity
and their Spirit-filled visions of the coming kingdom. In fact, we might suggest that the community of
faith gathered at Azusa Street had a firsthand acquain-tance with the underside of modernity’s myths
of reason (recall that one of its most important preachers was a son of former slaves). And their
experience of meeting God in embodied worship led them to resist and reject the rationalism of
modernity, in favor of an understanding that gave primacy to the affections, to the “heart.” In other
words, the philosophical anthropology embedded in pentecostal faith and practice does not yield
merely a “thinking thing,” but rather an embodied heart that “understands” the world in ways that are
irreducible to the categories and propositions of cognitive “reason.” In testimony, when the
pentecostal believer claims that “I know that I know that I know,” she is trying to express that how she
knows and what counts as knowledge cannot be formulated simply as “I know X” or “I have a
justified true belief about Y.” She will not reduce the criteria for knowledge to those accepted by the
cognitive majority. In pentecostal experience there are construals of the world and an understanding
of God that are irreducible to the tidy categories of cognition. That does not constitute a rejection of
cognition or propositional truth; but it does situate and relativize that particular mode of knowing. In
the next section I will consider how the central pentecostal category of “story” yields an epistemology
that situates the narrow mode of knowing associated with cognition within a wider, richer account of
embodied knowing.
 I Love to Tell the Story: A Narrative Pentecostal Epistemology

In Denise’s testimony above, we can note several things of epistemological import: First, she recounts
what she knows — what she “knows that she knows that she knows” — in a narrative form. Why
doesn’t she come up and simply announce that she’s pregnant? Why not just provide the requisite
information, “just the facts,” as it were? But she doesn’t merely provide information, articulate
propositions, or make factual claims. She recounts a story — a sequence of events with a narrative
arc, with a crisis and complications, even with elements of suspense building to a climax.175 While
she begins by telling us she’s never done this before, Denise seems to emerge on the scene as an
accomplished storyteller. This is because she has been inhaling stories as the oxygen of pentecostal
worship. Second, Denise locates her story within another story: her micronarrative from the past
several weeks is allusively situated within the macronarrative of Scripture. Her barrenness is situated
and signified against the backdrop of barren “exemplars,” as it were. This wider story both gives her
own story a narrative arc and provides a context for the meaning of her own story. Third, God is a
character in Denise’s story; the Spirit is an agent, a player, in this narrative. Indeed, one might say that
the Spirit is the protagonist of the story even though he’s never named.176 Denise’s testimony, then, is
a charged practice loaded with core aspects of pentecostal spirituality.177
Telling stories is what comes “naturally”178 to pentecostals. And I am certainly not the first to
highlight this. Kenneth Archer in particular has articulated the importance of pentecostalism’s
narrativity, describing “the Pentecostal story” as the “hermeneutical filter” by which pentecostals
make sense of their world and their experience.179 The world of experience is layered by stories: the
believer ’s experience is situated vis-à-vis the story of the “Last Days” outpouring at Azusa Street,
which is read in light of the outpouring at Pentecost (Acts 2), whose significance, in turn, is
understood against the prophetic heritage of Israel (Joel 2).180 Furthermore, Archer has explained
how and why such narrativity is constitutive of pentecostal identity. There’s no need for me to repeat
his important work here. Instead, I want to build on this analysis in order to suggest ways in which the
role of story181 in pentecostal spirituality points up the limits of regnant epistemological paradigms,
particularly within Christian (and perhaps especially evangelical) philosophical circles. As will
become a pattern in the remaining chapters, I’m seeking here to provide a phenomenology of an
aspect of pentecostal spirituality precisely in order for it to function as a liminal case study, pushing
back on existing paradigms and thus becoming a productive catalyst for theoretical revision, drawing
on a kind of inchoate “genius” embedded in pentecostal experience.
In particular, I want to suggest that pentecostal testimony points to the irreducibility (and perhaps
primacy) of “narrative knowledge.”182 I use this term to denote a certain kind of knowledge, distinct
from run-of-the-mill knowledge, which is usually understood (philosophically) as “justified true
belief,” where “belief ” is understood as assent to propositions, or at least characterized by a
propositional attitude. “Narrative knowledge,” then, would be a different kind of knowing, knowledge
of a different order, on a different register — knowing by other means. There is, on this account, a
“distinct understanding that narratives supply” that is “inseparable from its form.”183 And it is just this
sort of epistemic intuition that is implicit in pentecostal spirituality. For the pentecostal practice of
testimony, narrative is not just a decorative form, a creative medium, a jazzier vehicle for truths that
can be distilled and known otherwise. The truth is the story; the narrative is the knowledge. If the
testimony is translated into “mere” facts, codified into propositions, distilled into ideas, then we are
dealing with a different animal: I would both “know” something different and “know” it
differently.184
So, what characterizes “narrative knowledge”? What is irreducible about narrative knowledge? In a
way that particularly resonates with pentecostal experience, David Vellman has suggested that what is
distinctive about narrative knowledge is found in the connection between narratives and emotions.
Narratives articulate a kind of “emotional understanding”; a narrative “means something to an
audience in emotional terms.”185 But what does that mean? What’s the connection between narrative
and emotion? Vellman and others suggest it is twofold: First, the claim indicates that the way
narratives work is affective. A narrative makes sense of a life, a series of events, or an experience by
a “logic” that is not deductive but affective. The linkage and production of meaning are not the result
of a cognitive inference but rather of an affective construal. A story is “a particular way of
organizing events into an intelligible whole,”186 but the mode of this organization “is at bottom an
affective one. The essential narrative connection is neither causal nor temporal; instead it is
emotive.”187 One is almost tempted to fall back on the old language of “faculties” to try to describe
this. With such a lexicon, we could say that narrative is a way of understanding the world that draws
upon an affective or emotive faculty (rather than a judgment about the world effected by the intellect).
But, second, narrative works on this affective register precisely because the emotions are themselves
already “construals” of the world.188 The emotions themselves are already hermeneutic filters,
“noncognitive affective appraisals” 189 doing the work of interpreting our world. Narrative is a mode
of explication and articulation that feeds off (and fuels) the sort of affective, imaginative construal of
the world that already characterizes the emotions. In other words, there is a kind of “fit” or
proportionality between narrative and our affective register; and in concord, both work to “make
sense” of our world and our experience in a way that is irreducible.
If there is an irreducibility of narrative knowledge, there may also be a primacy of narrative
understanding that bubbles up from our embodiment as an adaptive strategy of our evolutionary
development. Anthony Damasio, Daniel Dennett, and others have emphasized the ways in which the
construction of an “I” — an identity — is bound up with being able to tell a story about oneself.190 As
Oliver Sacks once put it, “each of us constructs and lives a ‘narrative,’ and ... this narrative is us, our
identities.”191 And there might be a sense in which we are “wired” to be storytellers, that storytelling
comes “naturally” in a “first nature” sense as well. Damasio argues that “the self” is the narratival
product of the neurological structure of the brain that yields what he describes as a “feeling of
knowing.”192 The storiedness of our identity, on this account, emerges not just as a cultural construct
but from our bodies. As Paul John Eakin summarizes, “narrative is biological before it is linguistic
and literary.”193 So if, as he concludes, “the identity narrative impulse that autobiographies express is
the same that we respond to everyday in talking about ourselves,” and if “both may be grounded in the
neurobiological rhythms of consciousness,” then we might conclude that the pentecostal impetus to
narrative and testimony gives expression to this fundamental, bodily impulse.194
Story, then, is not just an optional “package” for propositions and facts; nor is narrative just a
remedial or elementary form of knowledge that is overcome or outgrown by intellectual maturity.
(Even “we moderns,” Christian Smith emphasizes, “not only continue to be animals who make stories
but also animals who are made by our stories.”)195 Rather, narrative is a fundamental and irreducible
mode of understanding — and “pentecostal knowledge” attested in testimony bears witness not only
to the Spirit’s work but also to this epistemic reality. But our existing epistemological paradigms and
categories are not well calibrated to deal with “narrative knowledge.” Our epistemic tools, as it were,
are better suited to discrete “beliefs” and facts, “items” of knowledge that can be articulated in
propositions, plugged into syllogisms, and “defended” by apologetic strategies. And while we might
even have epistemologies that make room for the Holy Spirit,196 we don’t have an array of
epistemological theories or tools that honor and make sense of the kind of knowledge that
characterizes “narrative knowledge.” In short, pentecostal experience and testimony may require us to
stretch our epistemologies to account for such knowledge. In this respect, I expect that a pentecostal
epistemology will find resonance with a long history of pragmatism, a philosophical tradition that
has long contested reductionism in philosophy. Wittgenstein’s account of an irreducible “know-how,”
Peirce’s “abduction,”197 and Brandom’s emphasis on practice as the fount for “articulating reasons”
are all trying to get at something that is implicit in pentecostal experience: that there is a means of
“knowing” before and beyond propositions.
This epistemological push from pentecostal experience might actually press philosophers to also
develop epistemological models that honor something more like a “biblical” understanding of
knowledge. Indeed, I am struck by the resonance between what I’ve been describing as
pentecostalism’s “narrative knowledge” and recent accounts of Paul’s epistemology. Consider, for
instance, Ian Scott’s analysis of “Paul’s way of knowing” in which we look to Paul as a contemporary
resource for thinking about knowledge precisely because “[i]n Paul we have the opportunity to see
how someone approached religious knowledge who was at one and the same time foundational in the
development of Western culture and yet relatively untouched by epistemological currents which so
many now suspect are bankrupt.”198 Scott unearths a “narrative structure to the Apostle’s knowledge,”
a distinct narratival “logic” that is operative beneath his speech (pp. 5-6, 10). In doing so, Scott brings
“to the surface [Paul’s] tacit assumptions about how people in general can come to knowledge,”
discerning “assumptions which the Apostle himself may never have brought to full consciousness” (p.
11).
The focus here is less what is known and more a matter of how we know. So, for example, in Paul’s
“critique of pure reason,” as it were (or perhaps better, echoing Dooyeweerd rather than Kant, Paul’s
critique of the pretended autonomy of theoretical thought), in Romans 1:21-31 and 1 Corinthians
1:18-2:16, Paul’s target of critique is “not reason in and of itself, but reason which has been hijacked
by human vices” (p. 44). The root problem is an “unwillingness to accept the limits of human
autonomy” (p. 28). So the work of the Spirit is not the provision of new content, but instead the
gracious granting of “access”: “The Spirit appears in these verses [1 Cor. 2:6-16] not as one who
uncovers hidden content, but as one who allows believers to recognize the (openly presented)
message as true” (pp. 46-47). But the Spirit’s epistemological operation in this regard is not magical
or Gnostic. Rather, the Spirit’s gracious epistemic operation is a combination of moral regeneration
— “healing the believers’ moral constitution” (p. 47)199 — and narratival location — situating the
believing community within a story that provides a new context for understanding their experience.
This is a kind of Spirit-induced paradigm shift. In a way that significantly echoes (or rather,
anticipates) Archer ’s account of the role of narrative in pentecostal understanding, Scott notes that
“the moment of revelation for Paul comes not in the pre-reflective experience but in the interpretation
of that experience, when the meaning of the experience is hermeneutically grasped and appropriated”
(pp. 75-76). The hermeneutical frame is provided by a story that functions as the “narrative
substructure” of Paul’s knowledge (pp. 95-96). “When Paul thought about theological matters,” Scott
summarizes, “his thoughts in fact had a narrative structure. He thought of actions and events which
were both causally and temporally related, and which were all governed by the overarching plot of
God’s rescue of his creation” (p. 118).200 Thus what Paul preached, and what Paul was calling both
Jews and Gentiles to embrace, was not just a constellation of ideas, a set of beliefs, or a collection of
doctrines; rather, their salvation depended on affectively and imaginatively absorbing a story — and
seeing themselves in that story. Thus for Paul, “ethical knowledge” is not just a cognitive grasp of
laws or duties, or knowledge of a set of moral principles; ethical knowledge is “the emplotment of
one’s life in the theological narrative” (p. 10).201
Understanding events — which is central to Paul’s gospel — is not a matter of logical deduction
but rather a kind of narratival reasoning. For example, Paul’s understanding of causality is not a
linear, efficient causality: “We are rarely presented with cases of a sufficient cause and its inevitable
effect. Rather we find the more ambiguous causality which is more common in narrative, in which
one event serves as part of the reason for another” (p. 104). To understand this distinction between
efficient causality and narrative causality, consider our discomfort with some developments in a film.
Let’s say a film has been following the story of two estranged brothers who have been separated for
years. In a climactic scene near the end of the film, the younger brother, distraught and depressed, is
on the top of a Brooklyn apartment building, perched there with suicidal intent. In fact, as the camera
pans in closely upon his back, he leans forward to take the plunge. In a shot, a hand reaches to grasp
him and restrain him from self-destruction. As the younger brother, now on his back, looks up,
squinting into the sunshine, he finds himself in the shadow of, you guessed it, his older brother. Now,
a filmmaker can deal with the issues of efficient causality. They can now sit on the roof of the
building, have a beer, with the younger brother asking: “How’d you get here?” The older brother can
recount the machinations of how he arrived. But what that won’t answer is our narrative sense that
this “cause” doesn’t make any sense. His arrival is a deus ex machina — a shorthand term to describe
an event or move within a story that violates not efficient causality but narrative causality. If we can
recognize the sort of “gut” reaction we have at such moments — a “sense” that something’s not right
— then we have some intuitive grasp of what I (along with Scott) am calling “narrative knowledge”
and “narrative causality.” Story makes sense of our world, our experience, and events on a register
different from the deductive logic of efficient causality. In short, what Paul “knows” is more than just
what he “thinks” and “believes” (p. 156). It is this kind of knowledge — this sort of “know-how” —
that is implicit in pentecostal spirituality, particularly the practice of testimony and the centrality of
story in pentecostal preaching. Making room for this sort of knowledge would be one of the effects
of a distinctly pentecostal philosophy.
 Moved by the Spirit: Affective Knowledge

If Denise’s knowledge of the Spirit’s activity is constituted by narrative — that is, if she “knows that
she knows that she knows” because she understands the story (or rather, a plurality of stories) —
there is also a significant sense in which she “knows” the truth from experience.202 Indeed, what could
be more pentecostal than experience? Denise’s testimony is embedded within a rich environment of
tactile, embodied experience: she has just participated in a service that will have been deeply affective
in music and word; she has engaged in a ritual of “coming forward,” moving her body through a
motion that carries its own significance; she is recounting her testimony while her husband and the
pastor are laying hands on her shoulders; she is recounting an earlier embodied experience of
communal prayer; her emotions are welling up and expressing themselves in and through her body
— even while her own story is affecting others, moving them in a host of different ways. All of this
and more constitute the “experience” of pentecostal worship and spirituality.
But what are we naming when we talk about experience? And what does it mean to claim that one
knows “on the basis of” experience? The folk discourse of pentecostal spirituality will often speak of
being “moved by the Spirit,” and without question, charismatic spirituality is moving and emotive
(for which it is often denigrated). But is there something “philosophically interesting” going on in
this milieu? Might closer phenomenological attention to this scene and this experience also press and
stretch our philosophical categories? How might we philosophically make sense of pentecostal
experience? And might pentecostal experience carry within it an implicit “sense” that would add to
our philosophical repertoire? In this section I will tackle these themes analogically, drawing on Carl
Plantinga’s account of “affect” in film to illuminate the “affect” of pentecostal experience. Pentecostal
spirituality is, in a sense, looking for words — for categories and frameworks to articulate its
implicit “genius,” the intuitions embedded in practice. My engagement with Plantinga’s account of
film and emotion is meant as an analogical dialogue that will provide a conceptual framework to
unpack what’s going on in pentecostal experience. In the next section, I’ll build on this engagement
with film to discuss some wider aesthetic implications of this account, sketching elements of a
pentecostal aesthetic.
First, we need to appreciate that there is an incipient philosophical anthropology at work in
pentecostal worship — a tacit, assumed model of human persons. The reason why pentecostal
worship is so affective, tactile, and emotive is because pentecostal spirituality rejects “cognitivist”
pictures of the human person that would construe us as fundamentally “thinking things.” Pentecostal
worship is “experiential” because it assumes a holistic understanding of personhood and agency —
that the essence of the human animal cannot be reduced to reason or the intellect. Or, to put it
otherwise, rather than seeing human action and behavior as entirely driven by conscious, cognitive,
deliberative processes, pentecostal worship implicitly appreciates that our being-in-the-world is
significantly shaped and primed by all sorts of precognitive, nondeliberative “modular” operations.
In short, we feel our way around the world more than we think about it, before we think about it.
Consider, for instance, a scenario one could glimpse in pentecostal worship: at the conclusion of a
service, in response to a “word of knowledge,” a pastor issues an altar call to husbands and fathers
who have been neglecting their responsibilities, failing to love their wives as Christ loved the church
— and perhaps engaged in all sorts of behaviors that are corroding families. When, in response, a
man comes forward for an altar call, the embodied acts of coming forward, kneeling at the altar, and
even the emotional “work”203 in tears are not merely emotional adornment, as if some kind of
baroque superfluity. The work of conviction and transformation is not just an intellectual matter;
rather, repentance has to seat itself in the core of the person. In order for this to really effect
transformation, what’s needed is not just a change of mind but a change of heart, a reorientation of
one’s comportment to the world, to others, to oneself. And if our most basic comportment to the
world is pre-cognitive and affective, then such transformation has to be channeled through affective,
embodied means. This husband has perhaps been “convinced” for weeks that he needs to make a
change; that is, he has “known” (cognitively, intellectually) for a long time that his behavior is
inconsistent with his confession. But mere intellectual conviction has not effected change because the
“driver” of our behavior is not just (or even for the most part) intellectual. This is why the
“experience” — which taps the embodied, affective, and emotional aspects of the person — is not just
a superfluous addition, an emotivist add-on. Rather, the experience and its activation of emotion is
precisely what reaches the core of the human person as an affective animal.
Carl Plantinga’s account of affectivity and emotion in film is out to make a similar claim. Thus we
find him contesting reductionistic paradigms of film theory that want to reduce a film to its
“message,” as when film critics and scholars talk of “reading” a film, implying that “film viewing is
a cool, intellectual experience.”204 Thus the critic decodes the film by boiling it down to the hidden
meanings that can then be distilled in propositional form. Such a paradigm of criticism assumes that
films are basically just elaborate vehicles for information that is ultimately propositional and
intellectual. Thus “this way of thinking about film diminishes the art form by reducing it to a bare
bones propositional message.” And as a result, all that is “moving” about movies is relegated to the
nonessential and superfluous. But as Plantinga rightly asks, “Are all of these affective elements of
film spectatorship mere epiphenomena, the throwaway detritus of what is worthwhile about the film
viewing experience?” 205 The burden of his book is to suggest otherwise: that the affective, emotional
aspects of film — precisely those aspects of movies that move us — are essential and irreducible. As
he comments, “Any abstract meaning that a film might have is ancillary to the experience in which
that meaning is embodied.”206 What a film means cannot be reduced to the propositional “message”
that might be gleaned from it. This is because “[e]xperience creates its own meaning, and in some
cases the meaning to be taken from the experience of the film may contradict the abstract meaning an
interpreter might glean from film dialogue, for example. Affective experience and meaning are
neither parallel nor separable, but firmly intertwined.”207
The cognitivist theory — which would reduce film-viewing to proposition-receiving — assumes a
tacit picture of movie viewers. In other words, it is not just a theory about films but about spectators.
And it assumes that spectators are fundamentally rational, cognitive processors of information who,
when watching a film, are coolly engaged in a deliberative process of interpretation, “reading” a
film.208 Plantinga is out to contest a cognitivist209 theory of film precisely because he thinks it
assumes such a reductionistic picture of spectators. Indeed, it is characterized by what he calls a
“cognitive fundamentalism” that overemphasizes the role of consciousness and rational deliberation.
The cognitivist accounts for emotion by tracing it to prior beliefs; so, for instance, “the experience of
fear requires that the fearing subject consciously subsume the feared object under the category
‘seriously threatening’ or ‘dangerous’ ... and that such conscious deliberation must precede having the
emotion of fear.” But we are not fundamentally or even for the most part “cognitive” animals; “[o] n
the contrary,” he continues, “much of what leads a person to have an emotion must occur at the level
of what I call ... the ‘cognitive unconscious.’ ”210 Thus our experience of a film — and our experience
of the world — is constituted and construed by processes that are “automated” and “automatic.”211
Indeed, film is the supermedium it is precisely because it affects us on so many levels and in so many
ways — drawing on visual spectacle, narrative power, musical affect, temporal energy, and more.
Viewing a film is a holistic experience that would be reduced and ruined were we to deliberately sit in
the theater “reading” for the “message.” We would be short-circuiting the affective and emotional
experience that the film was meant to engender. Because we are the sorts of animals who are directed
not only by cognition but also by affect and emotion, we are able to “understand” a movie by quasi
faculties that are operative well beyond the ken of our cognitive deliberation. A film “works on us”
because it taps into these automated layers of our being — those affective aspects of the self that elude
conscious articulation. So in contrast to cognitivist paradigms (and their attendant assumptions about
spectators), Plantinga articulates a “cognitive-perceptual theory” that “preserves room for
unconscious and non-conscious spectator responses and for responses that, while not necessarily
illogical or irrational, bypass the conscious inferencemaking that is mistakenly thought to underlie all
cognitive film theory.”212
I want to suggest that something similar is at stake in pentecostal spirituality (on my interpretation)
that also contests the “cognitive fundamentalism” that seems to characterize philosophical
understandings of Christian faith, construing Christianity as primarily a “message,” a constellation of
beliefs and propositions to which believers give assent.213 And just as cognitivist film theory assumes
that human persons are, fundamentally and for the most part, conscious deliberators who traffic in
propositions and beliefs, so cognitivist accounts of faith assume that believers are proposition
processors who make their way in the world by conscious deliberation. But what if we are,
fundamentally and for the most part, oriented by the adaptive unconscious? What if we make our way
in the world by construals that are pre- and noncognitive? What if our action and behavior are driven
not primarily by conscious deliberation but instead by a kind of nonconscious “feel” for the world?
This would be quite a different philosophical anthropology, and it is just such an affective, holistic
anthropology that is implicit in pentecostal practice. If we are oriented by a kind of affective
“engine,” then the Spirit’s transformation must tap our emotional core. And if our emotional and
affective life is tethered to our embodiment, then the Spirit, in incarnational logic, must reach us
through our bodies.214 So when the husband makes his way to the altar and kneels in penitence; and
when the ambient music of worship and the chorus of prayer in tongues elicit his sorrow (and joy);
and when brothers and sisters lay their hands upon his shoulders in prayer; these affective elements
are not just “epiphenomena, the throwaway detritus”215 of an experiential husk that can be discarded
once we discern the kernel of propositional truth. Rather, these affective elements are essential and
irreducible; they are constitutive of the “truth” of the experience and attest to the fact that we “know
that we know that we know” on levels that elude propositional articulation. Pentecostal worship
implicitly understands this.
I would even grant that there is something like a psychoanalytic moment to pentecostal worship. I
suggest this cautiously since many critics and skeptics would like to reduce pentecostal experience to
psychosis, or at least to some kind of mass therapeutic paradigm explainable in naturalistic terms.
However, I don’t mean to suggest that; rather, it seems to me that affectivity and emotion are central
to pentecostal spirituality because they implicitly recognize that our being-in-the-world is primarily
and for the most part “driven” at an unconscious, affective, predeliberative level. Thus pentecostal
worship digs down past and through the cognitive, conscious, and deliberative register to the
affective and emotional core of our identity — a noncognitive core that directs much more of our
action and behavior than we’d like to admit.216 A life of discipleship — a life of obedience and joy, a
life of repentance and transformation — is not the fruit of merely intellectual assent or conviction.
Indeed, the spiritual giants throughout the ages (think of book 8 of Augustine’s Confessions)
regularly attest that the challenge of discipleship is not solely one of knowledge, but more a matter of
will and desire. The husband can know he’s not supposed to be doing X and Y but still finds himself
almost helpless to stop. Why is that? Augustine would say that this is because his love remains
disordered; pentecostal spirituality implicitly says that the affective and emotional core of his identity
needs to be reformed and redirected. Changes in a way of life will not take place until that affective
core is reached.217 And that is exactly what the tactile, visceral, and emotional nature of pentecostal
worship aims to effect.218
My point is that pentecostal worship is primed to reach us on a different register.219 This is not
properly “psychoanalytic” since it does not require assuming a Freudian or Lacanian theory about the
unconscious.220 But it does recognize that our being-in-the-world is governed by habituations that are
sedimented in our unconscious, and that these unconscious habitualities orient and guide our actions
and behavior. If this preconscious or unconscious aspect of the self is identified with affect or
emotion, then we could say that we feel our way around the world more than we think our way
through it. Here, too, Plantinga’s account of film and emotion provides a helpful analogue. Plantinga
also draws on Roberts’s account of emotions as “concern-based construals,” which we’ve noted
above. As we emphasized, this means that emotions are not just reflexive responses or the “irrational”
detritus of experience.221 Emotions are themselves “takes” on the world — irreducible, precognitive
construals and interpretations that constitute the world for us in particular ways even before we
“think” about it or “perceive” it. In phenomenological terms, we’d say that emotions mean — they
intend the world, constitute phenomena, giving “sense” to the world even if on a register that is not
intellectual or cognitive. As a concern-based construal, an emotion “is like a perception in the
extended sense of the word.”222 And if our emotions construe the world before and more often than
our intellectual, cognitive perceptions, then the shape of our emotions makes our world most of the
time — in which case, discipleship would be more a matter of training our emotions than of changing
our minds. It is this intuition that I think is inchoately central in pentecostal worship and spirituality.
So how might the role of emotion in film be an illuminating analogue? Two features are
suggestive. First, Plantinga emphasizes that the affective experiences generated by movies “may burn
themselves into the memories of audiences and may become templates for thinking and behavior.”223
The cinematic experience becomes an emotional template, embedding certain emotional habits that
then become templates for later, extracinematic, thinking and behavior. Because in movies emotions
are embedded in narratives, 224 the power of movies in this respect is amplified, to the extent that
Plantinga claims “[m]ovies are influential enough that they have the potential to attach emotions and
affects to kinds of stories, thus regulating emotional experience.”225 This “regulative” role of
paradigmatic experiences engendered by movie watching is further specified in terms of “priming”
and “disposition.” Movie effects and strategies can prime us to experience certain emotions in certain
situations, and can even embed in us a long-term disposition or “propensity to experience certain
emotions in relation to situations and construals.”226 In sum, we might simply say that the affective
experiences staged by movies train us emotionally, thereby priming and disposing us to affectively
construe the world in particular ways.
Second, while the film provides an affective experience that can become a template for emotional
habits, the film itself always already embodies a certain emotional “take” — it is itself an embodiment
of a certain construal of the world (even if the film cannot be reduced to auteur expressivism).
Plantinga refers to this as “affective prefocusing” and claims that “all films are affectively prefocused
to some extent.” Just as “emotions direct us to salient elements of our environment, bringing relevant
perceptual phenomena to our attention,”227 so do films “direct” our emotional attention and focus our
affective engagement. The prefocused narratives of movies are already “ways of interpreting the
world.”228 So if movies “train” our emotions, and thus shape our affective construal of the world, this
“education” of emotion is not neutral or generic. It is always already an inculcation into a particular
focus and interpretation.
It seems to me that this provides a way of understanding what happens in pentecostal worship. The
tangible, visceral, emotional nature of pentecostal spirituality works as a pedagogy of the affects, an
education of the emotions, priming disciples to precognitively construe the world of their experience
in a certain way outside of worship. In other words, in its best moments, the emotional fervor of
pentecostal worship is not an escape from the “realities” of a cruel world, nor is it merely a
quasinarcissistic immersion in an emotional “high.” Rather, what’s going on in the affectivity of
pentecostal worship is emotion training that amounts to construal training — it is the inculcation of a
preconscious hermeneutic, shaping and forming our “concern-based construals.” Pentecostal worship
is affectively prefocused, patterned to highlight certain aspects of experience as salient; it is also
regulative or exemplary, seeking to inculcate certain emotional habits that, when inscribed and
sedimented in the believer, become part of her emotional repertoire beyond gathered worship, thus
priming and disposing her to construe the world of her experience in certain ways. In this way we
might see pentecostal experience as epistemic and hermeneutic training.
 Imagining the World Otherwise: A Pentecostal Aesthetic

Pentecostal worship operates on the tacit assumption that we are moved by stories. As we’ve already
seen, film operates on the same assumption — as does literature. One could see, then, how the
affectivity of pentecostal spirituality resonates with the imaginative arts. Indeed, I would suggest that a
pentecostal epistemology is always already a kind of aesthetic, an epistemic grammar that privileges
aisthesis (experience) before noesis (intellection).229 Thus our schematic reflections on the outline of
a pentecostal epistemology invite reflection on the shape of a pentecostal aesthetic. Are there inchoate
intuitions in pentecostal spirituality that suggest the shape of a pentecostal cinema? Are there aspects
of the pentecostal social imaginary that invite the articulation of a pentecostal literature?230 Might
there be ways that the art of filmmaking resonates with core assumptions of pentecostal spirituality
and practice?
Pentecostalism is marked, even defined, by an openness to “signs and wonders”; as such, it is a
spirituality of signs, of the visible and the invisible — it is a religion of manifesting, displaying, and
showing.231 Pentecostal spirituality and worship are very much a visual economy, a spectacular,
visible, fantastic world of the sort created by the fantastic world of film. Like the visual world of film,
pentecostal worship is semiotic; but also like film, it is more than visual, affecting other senses and
affecting us via narrative, etc. So I will argue that given certain distinctive features of a pentecostal
worldview, pentecostals should be creatively engaged in the production of visual culture.
In the discussion of the pentecostal social imaginary in chapter 2, I emphasized that implicit in
pentecostal spirituality is a holistic affirmation of embodiment — that there is a kind of
sacramentality of pentecostal worship that sees the material as a good and necessary mediator of the
Spirit’s work and presence. There could be no pentecostal spirituality without the matter of bodies; in
other words, for pentecostalism, bodies matter.232 Furthermore, in this chapter we have seen that
same affirmation of embodiment expressed in the pentecostal emphasis on narrative, affectivity, and
emotion, yielding an epistemology that prioritizes “narrative knowledge.” This is a kind of intuitive,
even “emotional” knowing (“I know that I know that I know”) that is the basis for “intellectual”
knowledge, but is irreducible to such knowledge. Our most primary and fundamental mode of
“understanding” is more literary than logical; we are the kind of creatures who make our way in the
world more by metaphor than mathematics. The way we “know” is more like a dance than deduction.
Both of these elements of a pentecostal worldview are fertile soil for articulating a pentecostal
aesthetic. In short, pentecostal worship tacitly appreciates that we are aesthetic creatures: we are
shaped, moved, and influenced by the fictive-like movements of stories more than we are by the
enumeration of propositions. The way story (even fiction) communicates truth affects us more deeply
than the presentation of “facts.” The film Schindler’s List affects us more deeply and significantly than
a textbook presentation of facts about the Holocaust. Why is that? Because we are aesthetic animals;
stories are the air we breathe. In addition to these, I would also highlight a third element of a
pentecostal worldview as relevant: the eschatological orientation of pentecostalism that prioritizes
hope. As I’ll suggest below, this futural orientation — with its implicitly political envisioning of the
coming kingdom — would also shape a pentecostal aesthetic sensibility.
How might these elements of a pentecostal worldview inform a pentecostal aesthetic, or at least a
certain aesthetic sensibility? Let me just briefly imagine the shape of a pentecostal aesthetic by
imagining a particular genre — the possibility of a pentecostal cinema.233 Documentary filmmaker
Francisco Newman — who speaks a lot about the influence of his upbringing in a storefront
Pentecostal church, often participating in dramas staged by the church234 — once said in an interview
(speaking about an article on Jean-Luc Godard): “Before that, I’d never thought about being a
filmmaker, but that article got me interested in making films because, growing up as a Pentecostal, we
were taught that movies were of the devil. It wasn’t until I grew up that I found out they were right!
Well, they just assumed that all movies were from the devil because of what we see coming out of
Hollywood. So they just didn’t watch any kind of movies. It never occurred to them that it’s possible
to make a film that isn’t demonic.”235 I would suggest that given what pentecostals implicitly affirm
about human nature — that we are embodied, imaginative, affective, narrative animals — pentecostals
should see film and movies as an almost uniquely pentecostal aesthetic medium! Pentecostals and
charismatic Christians should see filmmaking as a cultural expression uniquely fitted to their
sensibilities. Indeed, film is a unique medium — what someone has called a “supermedium” — that is
aesthetically powerful precisely because it reaches multiple aspects of our affective nature. Images
coupled with the music of a score reach right into the heart region of our affective imaginations and
get hold of our attention and desires.236 And the ability of film to narrate, to tell us a story that invites
us to relate to characters over time, draws us into an experience of a world that can be transformative.
As a medium uniquely equipped to be imaginative, affective, and narrative, film presents a powerful
opportunity to pentecostals to tell stories about the world that offer renarrations and
counternarrations to competing stories being offered. (However, I should note that I don’t mean that
pentecostals should just start making movies about the Holy Spirit or Jesus or even explicitly
“religious” films.237 Rather, a “pentecostal” film would tell the truth, but tell it slant.)
If film presents an opportunity to renarrate the world, it also provides a unique medium to imagine
the world otherwise — and I think that is at the heart of the pentecostal experience, and pentecostal
eschatology in particular. Pentecostal spirituality is enlivened by a vision of a coming kingdom that
imagines the world otherwise — a world no longer plagued by racism or disease or poverty — the
world as envisioned at the end of the book of Revelation. However, to be able to imagine that, our
imaginations need to be converted, freed from the logics of power, scarcity, and consumption that
constitute “rationality” in our world. In short, there is a significant way in which we need to contest
what counts as “rational,” and that is at the heart of the pentecostal social imaginary. As Margaret
Poloma has noted, “When most reflective of its distinct identity, Pentecostal/charismatic ritual reflects
a worldview that in many ways is at odds with the metanarrative of materialism, scientism and
instrumental rationality that characterizes Western culture.”238 In many ways the broader culture lacks
the imagination to imagine the world otherwise, and it is the pentecostal vision of a coming kingdom
that can both contest and loosen up the petrified imagination of a world culture bent on consumption,
violence, and the pursuit of power and exploitation.
Filmmaking would be most pentecostal when it offered a renarration of the world that breaks the
stranglehold of modern instrumental rationality and frees the imagination to imagine the world
otherwise. In terms suggested by Herbert Marcuse, “phantasy” or imagination is a mode of intending
the world that retains a high degree of freedom vis-à-vis the “reality principle” of modernist
instrumental rationality.239 In fact, it is phantasy or imagination that subverts the regnant paradigms
of “rationality” (what Marcuse, following Freud, would call “the reality principle”) that would
consign our hoped-for world to the impossible realm of “utopia.”240 “While this harmony has been
removed into utopia by the established reality principle, phantasy insists that it must and can become
real, that behind the illusion lies knowledge. The truths of imagination are first realized when
phantasy itself takes form, in which it creates a universe of perception and comprehension.”241 And
this, Marcuse rightly emphasizes, happens in art that instantiates “the truth value of the
imagination.”242 In this way art plays a critical, we might say “prophetic,” function: it refuses to
accept the limitations of “rationality” dictated by a stunted “reality principle.” It is in art that the dream
of a coming kingdom is made real in the here and now, as a foretaste of what is to come. But since
our imaginations are so restricted by the dictates of the logic of an instrumental rationality, art must
free up the imagination, break its bonds and loosen its shackles. Thus Marcuse points to the crazy,
fantastic, magical world of surrealist art as a medium in which the imagination is set free to imagine
the world otherwise. 243 Surrealism breaks the rules; it stops us short because its images and
movements defy the conventions of rationality, even the conventions of sensory perceptions. Its
graphic images and visual contortions make the world strange even for our affective habits, thereby
inviting us to acquire new habits of vision and imagination.
In this way, I think pentecostal filmmaking — and a pentecostal aesthetic more generally — would
be a kind of surrealism, constantly pushing back against what “they” say is possible. Film presents a
unique medium to embody the fantastic, but to do so, it will have to traffic in tropes and visions that
seem surreal to our contemporary rationality. As such, I think that pentecostal filmmaking will be
more like the fantastic, magical surrealism of Pan’s Labyrinth than the so-called realism of The
Passion of the Christ. In this way, pentecostal filmmaking might be an analogue of pentecostal
worship: a space in which God’s Spirit breaks in to fantastically give a foretaste of the coming
kingdom.
4 Shattering Paradigms, Opening the World

Science, Spirit, and a Pentecostal Ontology

 Pentecostalism, Modernity, and the Disenchantment of the World

Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity is nothing if not fantastic. Particularly in its global
expressions, pentecostalism inhabits a world that is very much “enchanted.” The world of pentecostal
worship and spirituality replays what Bultmann dismissed as the “mythical” world of the New
Testament: a world of “signs and wonders,” a space where the community expects the unexpected and
testifies to events of miraculous healing, divine revelation in tongues-speech, divine illumination,
prophecy, and other “supernatural” phenomena. One of the central features of pentecostal spirituality
is the unique combination of a gritty, material, physical mode of worship that is radically open to
transcendence. Thus above I have argued that one of the core components of a pentecostal worldview
is a sense of radical openness to God, with a distinct emphasis on the continued operation of the Holy
Spirit in the world and the church.
However, this clearly has ontological implications that need to be worked out, as well as
implications for pentecostal participation in (and appropriation of) regnant paradigms in the natural
and social sciences — as well as paradigms that govern the science/theology dialogue. If it is an
essential feature of pentecostal belief and practice to be open to God’s surprises, this presupposes a
sense that the universe and natural world must also remain open systems. But this ontological claim
would seem to stand in opposition to two key affirmations of contemporary science: (1) what we
could call “metaphysical naturalism,” which affirms (beyond strictly “scientific” evidence) that the
universe is a determined, closed, immanent system of natural processes; and (2) “methodological
naturalism,” which, while it may remain agnostic with respect to metaphysical naturalism,
nevertheless claims that science qua science must operate as if the universe were a closed system.
Given the enchanted worldview of pentecostalism, is there any room for a pentecostal contribution
to metaphysics? And given the naturalist vogue in contemporary metaphysics, what possibility is
there for a uniquely pentecostal intervention in the science/theology dialogue? By asserting the
centrality of the “miraculous” and the fantastic, and being fundamentally committed to a universe
open to surprise, doesn’t pentecostalism thereby forfeit admission to the conversation? A pentecostal
contribution to the science/theology dialogue would be inevitably gauche precisely because it would
transgress an unspoken taboo in the parlor of the science/theology conversation, namely, that one not
question the “science” side of the conversation, and in particular, one not ruin the party by calling into
question the governing naturalistic assumptions of science. In such an environment with a settled
genteel etiquette dominated by deference to “what science says,” pentecostals would spill into the
parlor as a rather raucous bunch, refusing to defer to the implied rules of such parlor games. As such,
response to pentecostals in the parlor of the science/theology dialogue will not be unlike the response
to the revival at Azusa Street, which was also dismissed by the gentry.
With the hopes of avoiding such an awkward scene, in this chapter I would like to work out some
of the ontological implications of a pentecostal worldview in order to make a preliminary
contribution to the science/ theology dialogue as a pentecostal scholar working unapologetically
from a pentecostal worldview. My project is a bit of a two-edged sword: on the one hand, I want to
suggest that a pentecostal worldview need not (and should not) entail a “naive” supernaturalism —
even that the language of supernaturalism is a kind of Deistic hangover that is problematic. There will
be an element of internal critique here, suggesting that pentecostals have too often and too easily
adopted a simplistic or hyper-“supernaturalism.” On the other hand, pentecostal spirituality is defined
by the miraculous, by ontological surprises that naturalism wants to deny (or rather, refuses to
recognize). Thus I will suggest that pentecostals should push back against the regnant assumptions
regarding naturalism that govern not only scientific practice, but also the parameters of the
science/theology dialogue in particular. If we run with the parlor metaphor above, one might say that
my goal is to dust off pentecostalism and show that it’s not quite as boorish and naive as those in the
parlor might suspect. However, I will also suggest that an integral pentecostal engagement with
science will not be simply a deferential guest. While we’re not out to ruin the party, we are going to
be interested in loosening things up a bit — which might involve what could be a rather rude
questioning of the host.
My central thesis is this: Embedded in pentecostal practice is a worldview — or better, social
imaginary — whose ontology is one of radical openness and thus resistant to closed, immanentist
systems of the sort that emerge from reductionistic metaphysical naturalism. I believe that a
pentecostal contribution to metaphysics — and to the related science/theology dialogue — should
begin from and draw on this experience of the elasticity of “nature” as always already inhabited by
the Spirit.244 Such an approach is its own kind of empiricism that seeks to honor and take seriously
the observation and experience of the miraculous (rather than, ironically, the sort of aprioristic
naturalism that, in the name of scientific observation, rules such experiences out of court de jure). So
any pentecostal engagement with the sciences must begin from an experience of the Spirit’s
transcendence and surprise that is central to the fantastic nature of pentecostal worship and spirituality.
However, pentecostal practice also attests to a strong sense of the immanence of the Spirit’s presence
and activity.245 As such, a pentecostal ontology would resist both dualistic and Deistic
supernaturalisms and naturalisms of various stripes, both reductionist and nonreductionist. This is
why I will suggest that the “understanding” of nature that is implicit in pentecostal practice can find
resources for articulation in the “participatory ontology” articulated by “Radical Orthodoxy.”
To undertake this project I will first provide a map of “naturalisms” and the correlate
“supernaturalisms” that they take themselves to be rejecting. I will then sketch how a pentecostal
ontology (implicit in pentecostal practice) refuses the distinctions behind both these naturalisms and
rejected supernaturalisms. Instead, a pentecostal ontology — akin to Radical Orthodoxy’s
participatory ontology — is characterized as an “enchanted naturalism” that differs from
reductionistic naturalism, as well as naive supernaturalism. I will also be concerned to show how this
pentecostal ontology of “enchanted naturalism” (a noninterventionist en-spirited naturalism) differs
from a close cousin: Clayton and Griffin’s nonreductive naturalism (or monism). It will be important
to note the differences between these, precisely because they share so many concerns in common.
Finally, I will indicate the opportunities and challenges that this ontology brings to the
science/theology conversation.
 Whose Naturalism? Which Supernaturalism? Topography and Taxonomy

A pentecostal engagement with science will quickly run up against the issue of “naturalism.” Such a
“super”-natural religion would seem to be at direct odds with the naturalistic orthodoxy of
contemporary scientific practice, as well as the widespread commitment to the incontestability of
naturalism in the theology/science dialogue. The price of admission to the dialogue would seem to be
giving up extravagant claims to supernatural phenomena of just the sort that are central to pentecostal
spirituality and practice. Of course, there is a sense in which this is true for any Christian tradition that
would affirm, for example, the physical, bodily resurrection of Christ. However, I am suggesting that
the issue is intensified and also more “mundane” for pentecostalism precisely because the miraculous
and “supernatural” are not only attributed to past events but are also expected (and witnessed) in
contemporary worship and experience. This would seem to bring us to an impasse: either pentecostals
give up their claims to miraculous phenomena or they remain outside science and the science/
theology conversation.
However, upon closer inspection things are more complicated. This is because “naturalism” is a
more contested concept than one might expect. Indeed, rather than speaking of “naturalism,” we
would do better to speak of “naturalisms.” This has a correlate implication: what such naturalisms
reject under the banner of “supernaturalism” is also rather slippery. As such, one might legitimately
ask whether the supernaturalism rejected by, say, Dennett is actually a description of the
“supernaturalism” embedded in the pentecostal social imaginary. For instance, if “supernaturalism”
for Dennett refers to an interventionist framework (a picture where a transcendent God intervenes and
interrupts the “laws” of nature), and if (as I hope to show) pentecostal spirituality implicitly rejects
such an interventionist framework, then Dennett’s rejection of interventionist supernaturalism would
not constitute a rejection of pentecostal supernaturalism. To sort out the complexities of this terrain,
we need to ask (in the spirit of MacIntyre): Whose naturalism? Which supernaturalism?
I think we can identify at least two naturalisms. The reductionistic246 naturalism of folks like
Dennett, Dawkins, Jaegwon Kim, and others is a “nothing buttery” naturalism: there is “nothing but”
the material or physical, and thus all phenomena can be explained by reference to physical laws and
processes. There is no nonphysical something-other in the universe. This naturalism is a physicalism:
all entities are physical entities. This is sometimes described as “metaphysical” (as opposed to
“methodological”) naturalism insofar as it makes ontological claims about the sorts of things that
constitute the furniture of the universe. Alvin Plantinga (along with others) refers to it as
“philosophical naturalism,” which he describes as “the belief that there aren’t any supernatural
beings.”247 In any case, such reductionistic naturalisms are understood to be disenchantments par
excellence, evacuating the world of any spirits or magic or mystery — any stuff that is not material
and subject to the laws of matter.
The second set of naturalisms we might call nonreductionistic naturalisms (Griffin, Clayton,
Peacocke). Such nonreductionistic naturalisms are fighting on two fronts: on the one hand, they reject
the reductive physicalism of the usual naturalisms. On the other hand, nonreductionistic naturalism
remains very critical of supernaturalism. David Ray Griffin, for instance, criticizes the reigning form
of naturalism — what I’ve called reductionistic naturalism — as an overreaching form of naturalism.
Thus he distinguishes this reductionistic naturalism, which he calls naturalismsam (“sam” symbolizing
“sensationist-atheistic-materialistic”) from a more minimalist naturalism, called naturalismns (where
“ns” is simply “nonsupernaturalist”).248 In a similar way, Philip Clayton articulates an “emergent”
monism that simply “presumes” naturalism because “if we do not make [this presumption], science as
we know it would be impossible.”249 However, his emphasis on the emergence of complexities that
then function as top-down causalities yields a naturalism that does not assume that all phenomena can
be explained by or reduced to physical laws. What makes Griffin’s and Clayton’s ontology
“naturalisms” is the fact that they are still monisms, allergic to any “dualism” that would posit some
ontological “stuff ” that is not physical. There is nothing “super”-natural, nothing beyond “nature.”
Thus Clayton: “[O]ne must acknowledge an initial presumption in favour of metaphysical naturalism
— though here the presumption is once again weaker than before. By metaphysical naturalism I mean
the view that there are no things, qualities, or causes other than those that might be qualities of the
natural world itself or agents within it.”250 It takes only a little philosophical suspicion, it seems to
me, to ask just what “natural” means in this claim.
However, what’s interesting is that both of these naturalisms (reductionistic and nonreductionistic)
seem to be rejecting the same “supernaturalism,” what we’ll call an “interventionist” supernaturalism.
(My enemy’s enemy is my friend!) In fact, one might suggest that what defines both of these sorts of
naturalisms is only their rejection of any supernaturalism. In that case, “naturalism” seems to be
defined as “antisupernaturalism.”251 Thus Dennett, in defining religion as a “natural” phenomenon,
says the claim amounts to saying that “religion is natural as opposed to supernatural, that it is a
human phenomenon composed of events, organisms, objects, structures, patterns, and the like that all
obey the laws of physics or biology, and hence do not involve miracles.”252 In a similar way, when
David Ray Griffin describes Whitehead’s process philosophy as a form of naturalism, he emphasizes,
“To say that it is a new form of naturalism is to say, and only to say, that it rejects supernaturalism,
meaning the idea of a divine being who could (and perhaps does) occasionally interrupt the world’s
most fundamental causal processes.”253 While nonreductionistic naturalists like Griffin and Peacocke
seem to have room for a greater diversity of metaphysical furniture in the universe (stuff such as
emergent minds and spirits), they share with reductionistic naturalism a conviction regarding the
ironclad nature of natural “laws.”
Indeed, the essence of naturalism is often less defined by an articulated conception of “nature” and
more often by an opposition to supernaturalism. Naturalism isn’t quite sure what it is, but it is
absolutely certain what it is not. This is confirmed by Owen Flanagan’s topography of naturalism.
Following Barry Stroud, Flanagan concludes that “anti-supernaturalism is pretty much the only
determinate, contentful meaning of the term ‘naturalism.’ ” So while it’s clear what naturalism is
against, what it means positively is not spelled out. Instead, it remains “a very general thesis; neither
what is ‘natural’, ‘a natural law’, or ‘a natural force’, nor what is ‘non-natural’, ‘supernatural’, or
‘spiritual’ are remotely specified. All the important details are left out or need to be spelled out.”254 In
short, naturalists are not very forthcoming about just what they mean by “nature.”
So all varieties of naturalism are marked by this trenchant rejection of the supernatural. As
Flanagan summarizes, across the varieties of naturalisms, “some kind of exclusion of the
supernatural, of the spiritual, is required.”255 These naturalisms across the spectrum are defined by a
rejection of ontological dualism (no “stuff ” other than “natural” stuff) and a rejection of the
miraculous as violations of the “laws” of nature. This common rejection of “supernaturalism” raises
at least two questions:

1. Just what is being rejected in this rejection of supernaturalism? If, as we’ve seen, there are a
variety of naturalisms, then avoiding caricature requires us to admit that there might be a
variety of “super”naturalisms. If that’s the case, then we would need to determine just which
 supernaturalism is being rejected by naturalism. Could there be other models?
2. Why the rejection of supernaturalism? What is it that motivates the rejection of the
supernatural, and often so vehemently?

On the first point, it seems clear that the supernaturalism being rejected is what we might call an
interventionist supernaturalism. This assumes an ontology whereby a basically autonomous world
operates for the most part according to a “normal” causal order — but this order is not closed, and
therefore the system is open to interruptions or interventions from outside the system by a
transcendent God.256 Such “interventions” are taken to suspend the “normal” causal order and
therefore cannot be explained and cannot be anticipated. Thus Griffin summarizes his “ontological
naturalism” as stipulating “that there are never any divine interruptions of the world’s normal causal
relations,” and as “the doctrine that there can be no supernatural interruptions of the world’s normal
cause-effect relations.”257
This then explains why naturalists are so keen to reject supernaturalism. Because “science” is
governed by commitment to the regularities of causeand-effect (and the successes of science have
been the fruit of the predictive power of just such a “normal” causal structure), any theology that
would remain viable must concede naturalism. Or, to put it conversely, to cling to supernaturalism is
to forfeit the ontology that underwrites the overwhelming success of “science.”258 It is this primary
concern of acceding to the naturalism of science that motivates the growing commitment to
naturalism by theologians engaged in the theology/science dialogue.259 I would describe this as a
“correlationist” project: a theological project that cedes the “truth” of a particular sphere to a
“secular” and supposedly neutral, rational science and then seeks to “correlate” theological claims to
conform to the standards established by the secular (Bultmann remains a classic case).260 In this
particular case, “science” is the primary authority and is the first to stipulate what could be
theoretically acceptable. Theology then looks for places that remain “open” to theological
intervention. After science has made first and preeminent claim to the territory, theology can then
look for remaining corners of the realm where it can set up shop. The natural sciences, then, are taken
to be “objective” arbiters of “the way things really are,” and theology (and religious communities) is
expected to modify and conform (“correlate”) its beliefs and practices to the dispensations of the
scientific magisterium. Failure to accede to these conditions of engagement entails refusal of
admission to the “parlor,” and being written off as a “fundamentalist.”
This correlationism is starkly exhibited in the project of Arthur Peacocke, but also that of John
Polkinghorne — and, in a way particularly relevant here, in Polkinghorne’s account of the “Spirit” in
the cosmos.261 As he says, he is out to “find room” for theology in contemporary cosmology and
ontology.262 Quantum cosmology — “that science puts forward” — discloses an “intrinsic
cloudiness” and unpredictability that leave room for a hidden Spirit to be at work. Thus he concludes
that “the scientific picture” is “open to” the possibility of the Spirit’s presence in the world.263 But on
this picture, it is “science” that is the gatekeeper and bouncer. The gatekeeper will not tolerate
unanticipated interventions, but is perhaps open to leaving room for “cloudiness” as a space for
theological claims (“fogginess” might be more apt!). In short, theologians are motivated to accede to
naturalism because that is the price of admission for scientific respectability. This is repeatedly
exemplified by Griffin and Peacocke.
We can see the same methodological push in Clayton’s rich articulation of an emergent monism.
For instance, consider just one example of a common trope in Clayton’s work: “I have assumed, on
the one hand, that if a given account of mental influence is incompatible with natural science, that
would be a telling argument against it.”264 Thus the general stance is one of deference since, for
example, “our knowledge of physics represents the most rigorous, most lawlike knowledge humans
have of the world.”265 Thus theological claims must wilt before “scientific” knowledge. Otherwise
one would “obviate” scientific study.266 J. Wentzel van Huyssteen rightly criticizes Clayton’s strategy
(and mutatis mutandis, that of Griffin and Peacocke). As he summarizes, Clayton’s project is focused
on what sorts of “altered notions of divine creation and providence would be required for any
theology that would seek to be consistent with the natural sciences.” But in doing so, “Clayton still
seems to yield to an allegedly superior scientific rationality.... This move, taken to the extreme, could
be fatal for theology, because it reveals a total commitment to the epistemic priority of science — and
at the expense of theological boundaries.”267 He goes on to note a tension: “These arguments of
Clayton suggest a proper epistemic respect for the natural limitations of scientific knowledge and
scientific explanations but remain strangely in tension with his earlier argument for divine action at a
personal level.... As became clear earlier, on this view God’s action (and our theological
understanding of it) clearly seemed to be limited by a ‘superior ’ scientific explanation.”268
So all varieties of naturalism reject supernaturalism; more specifically, they reject an
interventionist supernaturalism, and they reject this precisely because such interventionism is not
scientifically admissible. However, from a pentecostal perspective, this raises several questions:
Could we imagine another option or ontological model? I would suggest that the supernaturalism
rejected by these naturalisms is not the ontology that is implicit in pentecostal spirituality and practice.
So, if there can be a variety of naturalisms, could we — on the other end of the continuum —
recognize some nuance and differences between what might traffic under the banner of
supernaturalism? Could we perhaps imagine something like a noninterventionist “supernaturalism”?
Flanagan seems to leave the door open to this possibility. As he stipulates, naturalism requires the
rejection of “the objectionable form of supernaturalism.”269 The qualifier is significant for my
project. He goes on to suggest that the requirements of naturalism do not preclude affirming
“spirituality or religion.” They only require rejecting versions of such that espouse “the
objectionable form of ‘supernaturalism’ ” or “supernaturalism in the objectionable sense.”270 While
Flanagan wants to leave his door open for naturalistic spiritualities, and while I suspect he would still
find pentecostal claims to the miraculous highly “objectionable,” he does at least make room for
some nuance and complexity on the “supernaturalist” end of the spectrum. Does he not also leave the
door open to the possibility of not only nonobjectionable spiritualities, but also perhaps a
nonobjectionable supernaturalism? If we make room for a variety of supernaturalisms, could we
imagine a model of “supernaturalism” (I have reservations with the word) that might not fall prey to
aspects of the naturalist rejection (the ontological concern about interventions and interruptions) —
but nonetheless retains features that even the nonreductionist naturalist paradigm will not admit (e.g.,
miracles)?
Already the “super” prefix might be a misnomer. An alternative model — which I will suggest is
implicit in pentecostal spirituality — will both stretch and question the “super” here. Indeed, I have
concerns that “super”-language almost inevitably communicates an interventionist dualism. But I have
equal concern that losing the “super” means a collapse of transcendence, shutting down surprise, and
de jure ruling pentecostal experience of the miraculous an impossibility. (We might say this is a
Chalcedonian challenge, seeking to retain immanence without reduction, and transcendence without
dualism.) Thus in what follows I will suggest that this “third way,” rather than being described as a
noninterventionist supernaturalism, might be better described as an “enchanted naturalism” or an “en-
Spirited naturalism.”
We might summarize or map the terrain of our discussion so far by noting at least these
ontological options, plotted along something of a continuum:
It is the middle of the continuum that is most interesting and most complex, since both (2) and (3) are
fighting on two different fronts. These options are “close” to one another in some respects but
different in others. In particular, I propose that (3) — which I’m suggesting is the ontology implicit in
pentecostal spirituality — is unique with respect to all the others precisely because it rejects the notion
of an autonomous, self-sufficient “world” that runs on its own steam, as it were. In other words, I
actually think that (1), (2), and (4) ironically share a very similar conception of “the world” as an
independent (basically) closed system to which God is “Other.” But again, I grant that (2) is unique in
this regard insofar as the panentheism that usually attends this position emphasizes the immanence of
God to the world as the world’s dynamic principle. This differs from the pentecostal ontology (3)
insofar as the “God” internal to the world, as it were, does not, would not, and cannot act outside of
the “laws” of nature. In short, the key difference between (2) and (3) is the question of miracles. And I
don’t believe that nonreductionistic naturalism has shown sufficient reason to reject miracles apart
from the desire to concede to “what science says.” Or, in terms I’ll use below, I don’t think
reductionistic naturalism has ever questioned whether the price of admission to modern, scientific
“respectability” has perhaps been a bit inflated.
Granted, for (4), God can intervene and interrupt this order. But one could suggest that the “world”
of (1) and (2) is just the sort of world that would be left after the extrinsic God of (4) is eliminated.271
Even nonreductionistic naturalism still accedes to the false dichotomy of Dennett’s reductionistic
naturalism — “natural as opposed to supernatural”; this is because both work with a static ontology of
an autonomous universe and an account of causality that refuses surprise. But this is also true of (4):
even interventionist supernaturalism still works with a notion of an autonomous “nature.” In contrast,
the ontology of (3) would refuse such compartmentalizations and false dichotomies; it would refuse
to see the natural as “opposed to” the supernatural (and vice versa). In fact, it would argue that one can
only have a robust “nature” insofar as it is charged by grace. This is just to say that model (3) works
with a very different ontological picture of “nature.”
In the next section I want to argue that embedded in pentecostal practice and the pentecostal social
imaginary are the resources for articulating a unique, noninterventionist supernaturalism. I should
note here (and will explain further below) that I don’t mean to suggest that pentecostals “in the pew”
(or rolling on the floor, perhaps!) would articulate it in this way. That is, I concede that pentecostals,
when pressed, would speak in terms of interventionist supernaturalism — and I have, to this point,
tried to concede to that practice. However, I want to suggest that they should stop talking that way
because of their own pentecostal commitments: the ontological framework that is assumed by
interventionist supernaturalism mitigates against the pentecostal experience of the Spirit as natural.
Part of the genius and uniqueness of pentecostal experience is precisely that one does not see the
Spirit’s care and activity as exceptions or interruptions of the “normal” ordering of the universe. A
feature of the strange and fantastic world of pentecostal spirituality is a sense that the miraculous is
normal, that the surprises of the Spirit are normal, whereas interventionist language still presumes the
steady, static ontology of “nature” that informs both naturalism and Deism. So when pentecostals
adopt interventionistspeak, I believe they are picking up a foreign tongue that is inadequate to
articulate their own experience and the theological intuitions implicit in their spirituality. In other
words, I think implicit in pentecostal spirituality are the resources for a unique ontology. And because
this ontology is walking a tightrope between naturalism and supernaturalism, I suggest that the
elucidation and articulation of this implicit ontological aspect of the pentecostal social imaginary will
find assistance in the “participatory” ontology associated with the nouvelle théologie and its
contemporary rendition in “Radical Orthodoxy.”
 A Pentecostal Ontological Intervention in the Science/Theology Dialogue

I have been emphasizing that embedded in pentecostal practice is an “understanding” of the world that
eschews the dualistic opposition272 of the “natural” and the “supernatural.” Pentecostal spirituality is
not escapist, disembodied mysticism, nor is it merely pragmatic materialism. Instead, pentecostal
worship and practice are characterized by a kind of gritty materiality as space for work of the Spirit.
Thus some pentecostal theologians have described pentecostal spirituality as sacramental in
character.273 We might say that the ontology embedded in pentecostal practice is a material
supernaturalism or a supernatural materialism. Again, our lexicon is limited as the very prefix
“super” has us falling back into old paradigms. Perhaps we need to adopt a strategy of the young
Derrida who recognized such inadequacies of language and suggested that we write sous rature,
under erasure. In that sense, one might say I’m articulating a supernatural materialism. As such, it
contests the natural/supernatural distinction274 — which is why I’ve argued that we need to revisit the
identification of pentecostalism as a “supernaturalism.”
In this respect, the ontology implicit in pentecostal practice is very much akin to the vision
articulated by those theologians associated with nouvelle théologie, particularly Henri de Lubac. As
such, I am suggesting that their earlier articulation of such a nondualistic supernaturalism can provide
resources and conceptual tools for pentecostals to articulate the ontological “understanding”
embedded in the pentecostal social imaginary. By eschewing the simple distinction between discrete
realms of “nature” and “super-nature,” de Lubac struggled to articulate a paradoxical phenomenon,
namely, that nature is oriented to the supernatural and that this orientation to the supernatural is
“natural” (i.e., constitutive of creaturehood). John Milbank notes the tightrope de Lubac was walking:
“this insistence could appear to the ecclesiastical authorities at once ‘radically’ to threaten the gratuity
of the supernatural and the revealed order, and ‘conservatively’ to threaten the autonomy of the
natural domain of reason.”275 Creation is (and “nature” is) insofar as it participates in and is
indwelled by God, in whom we live and move and have our being. Thus the shape of de Lubac’s
“blurring” of the natural/supernatural distinction276 finds a more detailed ontological articulation in
Radical Orthodoxy’s “participatory” ontology, which provides a dynamic sense of the God/world
relation that would eschew both naturalism and supernaturalism.
The shape of this theological or participatory ontology is nonreductive and incarnational: on the
one hand, it affirms that matter as created exceeds itself and is only insofar as it participates in or is
suspended from the transcendent Creator; on the other hand, it affirms that there is a significant sense
in which the transcendent inheres in immanence. “Things,” then — and the created order in general —
do not have any kind of “sheer” or “autonomous” existence, as if possessing some kind of inalienable
right to be. Rather, being is a gift from the transcendent Creator such that things exist only insofar as
they participate in the being of the Creator — whose Being is Goodness. Thus Graham Ward suggests
that the very words of institution in the Eucharist (“This is my body”) already require a more
dynamic ontology.277 If one begins with a radical sense of creation’s dependence or gift-character,
then the autonomous stasis of materiality must be revised in such a way that this ontological scandal
of the eucharistic pronouncement can be absorbed — just as the doctrines of Christ’s bodily
resurrection and ascension must entail a distinctly Christian ontology of materiality. Hence “[t]here is
only one radical critique of modernity — the critique that denies the existence of the secular as self-
subsisting, that immanent self-ordering of the world which ultimately had no need for God.... The
Christian doctrines of incarnation and creation stand opposed to closed, immanentalist systems.”278
Thus, to counter the politics and epistemology of secular modernity, it is necessary to subject its
ontology to critique (and unveil its status as a mythos), then articulate the only counterontology that is
able to do justice to materiality and embodiment as such. Such a participatory ontology provides a
groundwork for rethinking the God/world relation, and so reconsidering several key themes in
science /theology dialogue, including questions about divine action in the world, the nature of
scientific “laws,” a nonreductive materialist account of the human person, and perhaps even a
“naturalized” account of the sacraments. In sum, Radical Orthodoxy’s participatory ontology
provides the groundwork for thinking about the reenchantment of the world in dialogue with science.
The key here is that this dynamic, participatory ontology refuses the static ontologies that presume
the autonomy of nature. While I would prefer to drop “nature” from our lexicon, working with it we
might say that nature is always already suspended in and inhabited by the Spirit such that it is always
already primed for the Spirit’s manifestations. Pentecostal spirituality and practice don’t merely
expect that God could “interrupt” the so-called “order” of nature; rather, they assume that the Spirit is
always already at work in creation, animating (and reanimating) bodies, grabbing hold of vocal
cords, taking up aspects of creation to manifest the glory of God. Thus Amos Yong has recently
offered a “pneumatological assist” to this participatory ontology, which I received with thanks.279
Specifically, Yong points to the Spirit as the agent of “suspension,” the triune person in whom the
material world is suspended. This only further invites us to see Radical Orthodoxy as a resource, ally,
or partner in the explication of distinctly pentecostal ontology. In response to Yong’s
pneumatological assist I have articulated an account of the God/world relation in the Spirit in terms
of intensities of participation. While all that is participates in God through the Spirit, there are sites
and events that exhibit a more intense participation. Thus phenomena that might be described as
“miraculous” are not instances of God “breaking into” the world, as if God were outside it prior to
such events; rather, they are instances of a unique and special mode of participation that always
already characterizes creation.
Thus the participatory pneumatological ontology I’m suggesting is not an “interventionist” model;
in short, it is not really a “super”-naturalism. Hence I’m even somewhat cautious about adopting the
language of an “open” creation since this still seems to presume a picture of “nature” as basically
autonomous but open to intervention by God from the outside. But such language of “intervention”
has at least two problems:

1. A scientific problem: it fails to honor the overwhelming success of science predicated on the
predictability of nature’s lawlike regularity (it also tends to punt on questions about the
mechanics of intervention).
2. A theological problem: it assumes a picture of the world, and of the God/world relation, that
actually cedes an autonomy to the natural order akin to Deism. I would call this the
“discretion” model because it carves out “the world” as a discrete, autonomous realm that God
then has to “enter,” a closed system that God comes to “interrupt” or in which God
“intervenes.” This “discretion” model — the sense that God and the world are “discrete” — is
shared by both the naturalists who reject such interventions and the supernaturalists who claim
such interventions. Both basically see “nature” as an autonomous system; what they disagree
about is whether or not God can/does intervene into this discrete, closed system.

But should we think of the cosmos (“nature”) as a discrete, closed, autonomous system, as both
naturalists and supernaturalists assume? I think such an assumption rests on a problematic theology of
creation. In particular, I think it rests on a theology of creation that is devoid of any sense of the
essential, constitutive, dynamic presence of God the Spirit in creation.281 I suggest that embedded in a
pentecostal social imaginary is an “understanding” of the God/world relation that eschews the
“discretion” model and refuses to grant “nature” the autonomy of a closed system. Rather, the Spirit is
always already present at and in creation. The Spirit’s presence is not a postlapsarian or
soteriological “visiting” of a creation that is otherwise without God; rather, the Spirit is always
already dynamically active in the cosmos/world/nature. God doesn’t have to “enter” nature as a
visitor and alien; God is always already present in the world. Thus creation is primed for the Spirit’s
action.
 Nature as En-Spirited

According to this pentecostal ontology, nature is always already en-Spirited. Thus it begins from a
picture of creation that emphasizes the Spirit’s essential and dynamic presence in nature. This
nuanced, dynamic ontological picture makes it possible to account for both the regularity of natural
processes and the special action of the miraculous (in contrast to even the nonreductionistic
naturalism of Griffin and Clayton).

1. Regularity. Science’s successes and insights are predicated on the regularity and (relative)
constancy of natural processes. Naturalism claims that this must entail an understanding of
nature as a closed system of “laws,” but this is not a properly scientific (empirical) claim. The
affirmation of the Spirit’s dynamic presence in creation is not opposed to recognizing that, for
the most part, this presence is manifested by God’s steady, sustaining care of the universe
along the lines of what seem like “laws.” For pentecostals, it would be spurning God’s faithful,
steady presence to not recognize this. So I think it is important to note that a pentecostal
worldview does not require rejecting a sense of a steady, faithful presence of the Spirit in
creation — even if it does remain open to the ways in which God might surprise us
(ontological surprises!). This is particularly important given that some pentecostal and
charismatic traditions have been given to a kind of hyper-supernaturalism that refuses medical
(scientific) treatment of illness and disease. I’m suggesting that this is not only bad science, it
is also bad pentecostal theology, working from a caricatured pneumatology that sets the Spirit
in opposition to the creation that the same Spirit sustains. Therefore there is nothing
inconsistent about working from a pentecostal worldview and affirming a minimal
disenchantment or methodological naturalism. I think this is important to emphasize precisely
because some Pentecostals have thought that the confession of God’s dynamic work in
creation required ignoring this steady, lawlike manifestation of the Spirit’s presence in the
world. While a pentecostal worldview affirms both the dynamic presence of the Spirit in
creation and a nondualistic emphasis on bodily healing, I think some Pentecostal traditions try
to be more spiritual than the Spirit by rejecting the Spirit’s more mundane operations that are
discerned by medical science. It is precisely this hyper-supernaturalism that makes me think
that a healthy dose of minimal disenchantment and methodological naturalism might actually
be a better way to recognize all the ways that the Spirit is dynamically present in creation.282
2. Special Action. Because nature is always already inhabited by the Spirit, it is also primed for
(not merely “open to”) special or unique singularities; these will not be “antinature,” because
nature is not a discrete, autonomous entity. Rather, we can think of these “special” miraculous
manifestations of the Spirit’s presence in creation as more intense instances of the Spirit in
creation — or as “sped-up” modes of the Spirit’s more “regular” presences.283 Augustine
describes them as “extraordinary” actions that are meant to refocus our semiotic attention on
the “miraculous” nature of the ordinary. A “miracle” is not an event that “breaks” any “laws”
of nature, since nature does not have such a reified character; rather, a miracle is a
manifestation of the Spirit’s presence that is “out of the ordinary”; but even the ordinary is a
manifestation of the Spirit’s presence. Augustine enjoins us to see nature as miracle.284
We are told by naturalists (both reductionist and nonreductionist) that the price of admission to the
theology/science dialogue (yea, to science and the proverbial “modern world”) is naturalism. Thus
the theology/science dialogue is a kind of Rawlsian original position that requires believers to strip
down at the entry, leaving them with only what all “rational” people hold in common. But paying that
price of admission requires pentecostals to pawn what is essential to pentecostal spirituality: the
Spirit’s miraculous surprises. What I have tried to argue is that the so-called price of admission has
been illegitimately inflated — that certain gatekeepers of science (and of the science/theology
dialogue) have suggested that the price of admission to science (and “scientific respectability”) was
metaphysical naturalism, or at least ontological monism, coupled with rigid conceptions of the
“laws” of nature. I have tried to offer an alternative description of nature that, negatively, points out
the illegitimate inflation stemming from a conflation of science with naturalism, and positively,
provides a rationale for careful empirical observation and prediction without a priori ruling out the
miraculous. Such, I hope, begins to make room for pentecostals in the science/theology dialogue, and
encourages pentecostals to engage the sciences.285
 5 From Beliefs to Altar Calls

A Pentecostal Critique of Philosophy of Religion

I would like to invite you to a tiny little mission church in north Philadelphia. It is the site of one of
my most treasured memories of ministry, but also an event that constantly challenges my inherited
paradigms in philosophy of religion.
It is an early winter evening, so darkness presses against the windows of the rented sanctuary as a
small group of believers are gathering; light and song push back against that darkness and ooze out
of the cracks of the aging, tiny structure. We have gathered for an evening service of celebration as
several members of a neighborhood family, new to the church, have presented themselves for
baptism. Over the past several months we have witnessed a transformation in the mother and some of
her children, and tonight they make public profession of their newfound faith by dying and rising in
the waters of baptism. The father and some uncles have come for the service to honor those being
baptized, but as with previous visits to Sunday worship, they remain aloof, distant, and unengaged.
But tonight that will change. Baptism in a Pentecostal church brings together the charismatic and the
sacramental: their baptism is situated in a narrative enacted through song and sermon, echoed in the
story of their testimonies as they present themselves for baptism. And as they are baptized, the pastor
draws upon the materiality and physicality of the sacrament as a picture of the gospel itself. Tonight
it’s not just a matter of telling, but a matter of showing. As the mother emerges from the water it feels
as if we are witnessing the resurrection itself. Pastor and parishioner embrace in tears as the
congregation can no longer contain its “Hallelujah’s” and shouts of praise; their songs and prayers
become the sound track of resurrection. He is risen! She is risen! As the teenagers are baptized, they
each renounce the Evil One and pledge allegiance to the coming King. They have a new story, a new
love, a new desire.
And then we notice that slowly the father has made his way to the front of the sanctuary. He has
been gripped by something in what he has witnessed. As others notice, a hush comes over the
congregation. His brothers with him, the father quietly but urgently speaks with the pastor, and then a
laugh of surprise and joy breaks across the pastor ’s face as he embraces the father and assures him,
“Of course!” The men have come asking: “Can we be baptized, too? Can we become Christians?” The
waters of baptism stir once again and the sound track of resurrection becomes even louder as an
entire family is enfolded into the family of God.
Just what happened there? More to the point, to what extent can the regnant paradigms in
philosophy of religion understand or explain a scene like this one? This father ’s desire to embrace
the Christian story — and be embraced by Christ — was not an instance of intellectual resolution.
Christ was not the “answer” to a “question.” Jorge was not drawn to “theism,” and when he, too,
emerged from the waters of baptism he did not rise with a new “perspective” or “worldview.” He
didn’t die to skepticism and rise to “knowledge” (cf. Rom. 6:1-14). Something other, something
different, something both ordinary and extraordinary was witnessed there. Are the dominant
frameworks in philosophy of religion able to do justice to what happened there in that tiny sanctuary
on a winter night? Or are they plagued by a kind of reductionism and rationalism that is poorly
calibrated to understand a scenario like this one? What picture of the “believer” is assumed in our
philosophies of religion? In this chapter I want to consider how pentecostal spirituality functions as a
liminal case that stretches the conceptual assumptions operative in contemporary philosophy of
religion.
 Limits of the “Renaissance” in Philosophy of Religion

There has been much discussion of the “renaissance” in the philosophy of religion in the last several
decades of the twentieth century. After the last gasp of positivism and the final attempt to police
philosophical discourse through ordinary language philosophy, there emerged the space for a
renewed consideration of religion within the halls of philosophy in two senses: on the one hand,
religious themes and questions once again became legitimate topics for philosophical reflection; on
the other hand, and perhaps more radically, a critique of the supposed neutrality and objectivity of
philosophical reason opened the space for religious philosophy — that is, philosophical reflection
undertaken from a perspective and orientation that were unapologetically religious and confessional.
The “of” in this renewal in philosophy of religion was both an objective and subjective genitive:
religion was reintroduced as a legitimate mainstream topic of consideration (objective genitive), and
religion was admitted as a legitimate orienting perspective for philosophical research and reflection
(subjective genitive).
Work along the former lines included renewed interest in religious phenomena such as miracles,
the perennial problem of evil, as well as the conditions of possibility of religious language or “God-
talk.”286 This developed into a more robust renewal of “philosophical theology” now exemplified in
the work of Eleonore Stump, Marilyn Adams, Stephen Davis, Brian Hebblethwaite, Brian Leftow, and
many others.287
Developments along the latter lines of a religious philosophy were closely connected with the
development of “Reformed epistemology” as articulated by Nicholas Wolterstorff and Alvin
Plantinga — a distinctly nonfoundationalist epistemological project that sought to contest the criteria
of “rationality” that had been marshaled to exclude religious belief from both the halls of philosophy
and the sphere of public discourse. 288 Articulating a critique of the supposed neutrality and autonomy
of reason, Wolterstorff and Plantinga argued that religious belief was just as “warranted” as other
presuppositions in philosophy that, in fact, shared the same epistemic status.289 Thus Reformed
epistemology undercut the foundationalist rationalism of philosophy and thereby opened a path of
legitimacy for philosophical reflection oriented and informed by religious presuppositions. This
critique of foundationalism and neutrality resonated with other developments in philosophy,
including Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of the “traditioned” nature of rationality,290 as well as the
tradition of “hermeneutic” philosophy associated with Heidegger and Gadamer which emphasized the
constitutive role of presuppositions in shaping rationality — anticipating the shape of a “postmodern”
critique of foundationalist reason.291 While these different schools of thought are not often associated
(indeed, Reformed epistemology remains virulently allergic to “postmodernism”), I would suggest
that, in fact, these tensions represent a kind of sibling rivalry.292 Their work, as I’ve already noted,
made room for the very idea of a “Christian philosophy,” which in turn made it possible to imagine
something like a “pentecostal philosophy.”
In this chapter I want to offer an appreciative critique of these developments in philosophy of
religion. Recognizing my own indebtedness to this earlier work, I nonetheless want to suggest a
significant lacuna, or blind spot, namely, the absence of any rigorous attention to worship, liturgy, or
the practices of religious communities. In sum, one could argue that philosophy of religion has been
attentive to beliefs but not believers. It has been characterized by a kind of epistemological fixation
that myopically focuses on either the epistemic status of religious belief or an explication of the
propositional content of specific beliefs (e.g., the goodness of God, God’s eternity, or resurrection).
But philosophy of religion has spent very little time being attentive to how embodied, flesh-and-blood
believers experience religion primarily as a form of life. A formative and usually central aspect of
that form of life — across religious traditions — is participation in corporate worship, liturgical
practices, and other forms of shared spiritual disciplines. In other words, believers tend to focus on
faith as a way of life (“what we do”) whereas contemporary philosophy of religion tends to treat faith
as a way of thinking (“what we believe”). In this respect, I think pentecostal experience can function as
a case study that will press a way forward for a philosophy of religion that seeks to overcome this
blind spot and direct the attention of philosophy of religion to practice.
 Cartesian Ghosts: A Lingering Rationalism in Philosophy of Religion

Levinas famously remarked that Dasein is never hungry.293 And yet, does Dasein ever eat? In the
same vein we might ask: Does Dasein ever worship? Or more pointedly, do the believers
countenanced in contemporary philosophy of religion ever kneel or sing?294 Do they ever respond to
an altar call, weeping on their knees? In fact, do believers ever really make an appearance in
philosophy of religion? Is it not most often taken up instead with beliefs? Judging from the shape of
the conversation in contemporary philosophy of religion, one would guess that “religion” is a feature
of brains-in-a-vat, lingering in a particularly spiritual ether but never really bumping into the
grittiness of practices and community. Indeed, one wonders whether such “believers” really even need
to go through the hassle of getting up on Sunday morning. Once the beliefs are “deposited,” it’s hard
to see what more is needed to be faithful.
The renaissance in philosophy of religion in the past thirty years has been beholden, I would
contend, to a lingering rationalism that remains at least haunted (if not perhaps governed) by a sort of
Cartesian anthropology that tends to construe the human person as, in essence, a “thinking thing.”
Because it assumes a philosophical anthropology that privileges the cognitive and rational (an
anthropology criticized in chapter 3 above), philosophy of religion thus construes religion as a
primarily epistemological phenomenon. As a result, the “religion” in philosophy of religion is a very
cognitive, “heady” phenomenon — reduced to beliefs, propositions, and cognitive content, which are
the only phenomena that can make it through the narrow theoretical gate that attends such rationalism.
Believers, insofar as they appear, seem to be little more than talking heads. The result is a
reductionism: religion, which is primarily a “form of life” and lived experience, is slimmed down to
the more abstract phenomena of beliefs and doctrines. The rich, dynamic, lived experience of
worshiping communities is reduced to propositions that can be culled from artifacts produced by
these communities (e.g., documents, creeds, scriptures). If philosophy of religion pays any attention
to liturgy or other religious practices, it is usually only in order to mine the artifacts of liturgy for
new ideas and propositions.
Thus philosophy of religion as currently practiced tends to reflect a working (or at least
functional) assumption that doctrine is prior to worship and thus ideas and propositions trump
practices. Practiced in this rationalist mode, philosophy of religion finds a ready-made
proportionality to theological doctrines, ideas, and propositions. Hence what has flourished in
philosophy of religion has been philosophical theology of a particular sort.295 At best, this amounts
to a reduction of “religion” to propositional thinking, a narrowing of the richness of religious lived
experience. At worst, the result is not just a “thinning” of religion, but a falsification of it, insofar as
religion construed as primarily a cognitive or propositional or epistemological phenomenon fails to
discern the heart of religion as practice. What one works on is often a reflection of one’s tools. If all I
have is a hammer and nails, I’m not equipped to work on an electric circuit. In that vein,
contemporary philosophy of religion is equipped with a tool belt made for thinking about thinking —
analyzing concepts of a certain sort. As a result, the philosopher of religion is equipped only to
“work on” religion insofar as it can be made (and thus cut down) to the measure of conceptual,
cognitive thinking.296 Attention to aspects of religion as a form of life and set of practices would
require a different, or at least expanded, tool belt.297
A new renaissance in philosophy of religion could be sparked by reversing this assumption and
taking seriously the priority of religious practices to doctrinal formulations. I have been describing
pentecostalism as a “spirituality” (rather than a system of doctrines) in order to appreciate that
pentecostalism is what Wittgenstein would describe as a “form of life” — a constellation of practices,
rituals, and embodied habits that “carry” a story and an understanding. A philosophy of religion that
would do justice to pentecostal experience will have to recover a sense of religion as a form of life
and embodied experience — and that will require challenging the rationalist philosophical
anthropology that underlies contemporary philosophy of religion. In a way, pentecostal spirituality
already does this: pentecostal experience — and the ways of life associated with pentecostal
communities — resists rationalist reduction and exhibits a way of being-in-the-world that manifests
the fundamentally affective nature of the human person.298 In sum, it is precisely the phenomenon of
religious life that points up the paucity and thinness of the Cartesian “thinking thing” as a very
unnatural beast. It’s not that a cognitivist philosophical anthropology is just too narrow or selective,
but that it actually falsifies the engaged, embodied character of our being-in-the-world. So attention to
religion as a form of life and nexus of liturgical practices brings us up against a phenomenon that
challenges and deconstructs the lingering rationalist anthropologies that continue to shape method in
philosophy of religion. There is, one could say, a very different, nonrationalist philosophical
anthropology implicit in pentecostal spirituality such that worship becomes a catalyst, even a
“revelation,” that unsettles overly-cognitivist pictures of the human person. In sum, it is the very
phenomenon of religion as liturgical practice that functions as a “shot in the arm” to philosophy of
religion by calling for a philosophical anthropology that honors our primarily affective,
precognitive, communal, and “practiced” mode of being-in-the world. Thus there is a dialectical
relationship envisioned between philosophy and liturgy: on the one hand, the lived religious
experience embodied in liturgical practice points to the necessity of an affective (nonrationalist)
philosophical anthropology; on the other hand, the development and assumption of an affective
philosophical anthropology enable philosophy of religion to be primed for dealing better with the
more fundamental phenomena associated with religion, namely, practices rather than doctrines.
In fact, it was just this impetus — this interjection of embodied, lived religious experience as a
“shock” to regnant philosophical method — that was the prompt for the young Heidegger ’s critique
of the lingering Cartesian rationalism that characterized Husserl’s early phenomenology.299 Thus we
can find the resources for this retooling philosophy of religion by considering an analogous critique
in the rudimentary elements of Heidegger ’s critique of Descartes and Husserl. A central aspect of
Heidegger ’s project in Being and Time was to call into question the rationalist anthropology assumed
by Husserl, who still tended to construe human beings as primarily perceiving things — as if we
inhabited the world as observers and spectators who spend time thinking about the world. In contrast,
Heidegger argued that primarily and for the most part, we don’t think about a world of objects;
rather, we are involved with the world as traditioned actors. The world is the environment in which we
swim, not a picture that we look at as distanced observers.300
Careful phenomenological attention to the dynamics of religious life — that is, religion as a way
of life (Hadot) or form of life (Wittgenstein) — manifests something about the nature of human
being-in-the-world that is missed by the overly-cognitivist paradigms that currently govern
philosophy of religion. In particular, the communal practices that shape religion show us that human
being-in-the-world is oriented more fundamentally by desire than thinking, and manifests itself more
in what we do than in what we think.301 As such, it is precisely the visceral, embodied nature of
religious life302 that calls for a revision of the philosophy at work in “philosophy of religion.”
 Against Minimalist Theism: Pentecostal Philosophy and Canonical Theism in
Dialogue

I want to close by suggesting that a pentecostal philosophy of religion will find an ally in the work of
William Abraham, Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation, in particular because I believe he
provides hints of a paradigm shift that can do justice to the religious experience of “ordinary
believers.” 303 In a spirit of charitable critique, humble boldness, and noholds-barred irenics, he
manages to call out almost every existing school in contemporary philosophy of religion for
uncritically buying into various versions of the “standard strategy” that obfuscates the nature of faith
precisely by canonizing some epistemological theory. Granted, Abraham’s charm might fool us into
missing the fact that he’s calling us to the mat for pawning the family jewels to the highest
epistemological bidder.304 The “standard strategy,” as Abraham describes it, is a widespread project
that seeks to “secure the rationality of theism” by first articulating a “general” epistemology that then
provides a foothold for demonstrating the rationality of theistic belief. The general epistemology
provides “a foothold outside of theology” that functions as an anchor to which theistic belief can be
tethered (p. 6).305 This standard strategy is characteristic of a wide range of particular
epistemological theories; it is a big tent under which one will find an eclectic collection, from classic
natural theologians and “Wittgensteinian fideists” to Schubert Ogden and Reformed epistemologists
(a lot of folks who would be surprised to find themselves on the same team, as it were).
I can’t here adjudicate Abraham’s claims regarding who is and is not a practitioner of the standard
strategy. I am more interested in his insightful critique of two significant problems that are often
outcomes of this strategy. The first he describes as “methodism” (surely a playful suggestion to make
from the halls of SMU). The standard strategy opts for a kind of one-size-fits-all epistemology that
establishes general criteria for knowledge — and often the bar is set very (perhaps even impossibly)
high.306 As a result, all sorts of beliefs that don’t meet these criteria or can’t make it over the bar are
denigrated as mere opinion, “faith,” and thus subject to doubt. What’s going on here is a sort of
vanilla-izing of epistemology: the map of knowledge is flat and monolithic. It shows no signs of
attention to texture, depth, or gradations in the epistemic terrain. In contrast to the methodist, the
“particularist” comes to questions of knowledge with a more finegrained map of the epistemic
landscape. She rejects the monolithic (and hegemonic) assumptions of the methodist’s one-size-fits-
all epistemology and instead embraces an Aristotelian (p. 29 n. 10) principle of “appropriate
epistemic fit,” which means that she is primed to “look for relevant differences in the way we
adjudicate different kinds of claims” (p. 45).307 The particularist is an epistemic pluralist and expects
to find different habits of belief and justification when we are dealing with different subject matter
and objects of belief. Whereas the methodist is an “epistemic miser” (p. 34) who countenances only a
small range of legitimate modes of belief, the particularist is epistemically generous and is not
surprised by different epistemological habits when it comes to different subjects of knowledge.
Because philosophy of religion is dominated by methodists (the preponderance of Reformed
epistemologists notwithstanding!), contemporary paradigms in philosophy of religion are prone to
impose on religious belief epistemic criteria that are inappropriate to the subject at hand. Animated by
the standard strategy, methodists in philosophy of religion adopt a generic epistemology and then
require “believers” to exhibit those modes of believing and knowing. And it is just this generic
methodism that leads philosophers of religion to ignore or even rule out of court particular Christian
claims to knowledge such as “revelation.” Thus Abraham’s bold project of making the particularity
and specificity of divine revelation central to Christian epistemology is an outcome of his desire to
abide by the particularist principle of appropriate epistemic fit — a principle spurned by methodists.
There is a second important outcome of the standard strategy in philosophy of religion: what
emerges on the other side of the project is a very “thin” version of religious belief, a “minimalist
version of theism” (p. 10) in which “crucial theological claims are systematically ignored or set aside
because they would not fit the schema in hand” (p. 9). Abraham aptly describes this as “the mere
theism that normally detains the philosopher of religion” (p. 95): “rarely, if at all, do these proposals
secure the deep content of Christian belief” (p. 9). Furthermore, the “mere theism” of contemporary
philosophy of religion, while failing to do justice to the “thickness” and particularity of Christian
belief, also fails to do justice to “the way in which a host of Christian believers actually believe” (p.
10, italics added). Here Abraham names a problem that motivates this chapter: Just what sort of
animal is pictured when contemporary philosophy of religion talks about “believers”? And I think the
most promising and radical aspect of Abraham’s project is his clarion call for philosophy of religion
to develop “an account that will begin to do justice both to the faith of the ordinary believer and to the
faith of the saints and martyrs” (p. 10). This will require retooling the conceptual framework in
philosophy of religion to do justice to the thickness and particularity of Christian faith, which
Abraham describes as “canonical theism,”308 in contrast to the thinned-out, “mere” theism that is
usually the currency of philosophers of religion. Canonical theism is

that rich vision of God, creation, and redemption developed over time in the scriptures,
articulated in the Nicene Creed, celebrated in the liturgy of the church, enacted in the lives of the
saints, handed over and received in the sacraments, depicted in iconography, articulated by
canonical teachers, mulled over in the Fathers, and treasured, preserved, and guarded by the
episcopate. (p. 43)309

The Christian does not just believe in God as causa sui or a fine-tuner of the universe; she believes in
the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jesus Christ. Abraham’s articulation of a specifically canonical
theism might be seen as a kind of Pascalian project.
In addition to the thickness and specificity of the content of canonical theism, Abraham is also
attentive to how Christians come to believe. One does not come to canonical faith magically or by a
merely interior operation of the Holy Spirit (pace Plantinga?). Abraham’s proposal stems directly
from his work on the history of evangelism and conversion, particularly the role of catechesis and
material practices of formation (p. 51).310 On the basis of this he “became convinced that becoming a
Christian — or better, Christian initiation — was not first and foremost gaining a theory of
knowledge but was coming to love the God identified in the rich canonical heritage of the church. In
bringing people to faith the church articulated a very particular vision of God, creation, and
redemption that had to be seen as a whole and received as a whole” (p. xiii). Because of its rationalism
or intellectualism, philosophy of religion has been inattentive to the material practices that nurture
and give rise to the thick particularity of Christian faith.311 Thus Abraham rightly and persistently
calls for an account of belief and knowledge that can “take seriously the kind of epistemic
suggestions advanced by the ordinary believer” (p. 45).312 And I have tried to provide a brief
exposition of the project precisely because I think Abraham’s project hints at a paradigm shift in
philosophy of religion that can do justice to understanding just what was happening on that winter
night of baptismal resurrection — in a way that intellectualist paradigms cannot. Thus I suggest that
Abraham begins to articulate an epistemology for the rest of us. In this respect, I’m reminded of the
book How the Other Half Worships,313 a photographic essay documenting the varied spaces in which
many Christians worship. Outside the few who actually worship in cathedrals and pristine New
England oak-lined sanctuaries, the majority of Christians worship the risen Lord in storefronts and
mud huts, ramshackle lean-tos and dark, dingy basements. Intellectualist philosophy of religion has
given us cathedral epistemologies; Abraham’s canonical theism points toward a storefront
epistemology.
My deep sympathy with this project leads me to one critical question: Are “ordinary believers”
really canonical theists? Is another — albeit thick, particular — theism really a radical alternative to
the “mere” theism that has been the staple of philosophy of religion? Is this perhaps still too
intellectualist? Here I mean only to invite Abraham to consider what it might look like to pursue his
project even further.314 While he rightly rejects the cognitivism or intellectualism that reigns in
contemporary philosophy of religion, does a concern with canonical theism still remain rather distant
from the lived religion of “ordinary believers”? While he rightly contests the “primacy of
epistemology” (p. 21), do Abraham’s “ordinary believers” still seem a bit fixated on the propositional
content (p. 43) and doctrinal assertions (p. 41) embedded in canonical theism? Though he is surely
right to note that “[i]t is odd to think of Jesus conducting seminars on epistemology for his disciples”
(p. 20), might it not also be odd to think that Jorge was drawn to the baptismal tank because he longed
to become a “canonical theist”? I suspect, in fact, that Jorge would have a hard time knowing just what
a canonical theist is and would be surprised to learn that he is one. I think Jorge would be especially
surprised to find out that “canonical theism is first and foremost a rich ontology” (p. 44).
My concern is that Abraham doesn’t follow up on his own hints of a paradigm shift. Instead, the
account remains fixated on the “intellectual content” of canonical theism (pp. 41, 45) and the
“assertions” and “propositions” that constitute it as an “intellectual entity” in a way that would remain
foreign, I think, to many “ordinary believers.” This is crystallized, for instance, in his nuanced
account of the “logic or grammar of revelation” (p. 81). While Abraham criticizes the “explanatory
hypothesis” as “too intellectualist and rationalistic” because it construes belief formation as
“fundamentally a matter of forming theories and then testing them by data and evidence” (p. 71), I
worry that his own phenomenology of divine revelation still construes the confrontation as a
primarily cognitive or intellectual affair.315 Suggesting that the “core meaning” of revelation is
“disclo-sure” (p. 84) keeps revelation quite solidly tied to a theoretical or intellectual lexicon, a
matter of “seeing” things differently — as if the primary telos of revelation was to engender “belief.”
He takes it that “revelation involves the crossing of an intellectual threshold” (p. 92, italics added).
Or, in other words, “the acceptance of divine revelation” is “a world-constituting experience for the
believer” (p. 92).
My question is whether the phenomenology of the confrontation (p. 64) that characterizes divine
revelation is aptly or adequately characterized in terms of intellectual content. Does the construal of
divine revelation /confrontation as an intellectual event indicate a lingering intellectualism that
characterizes canonical theism? Is the event of revelation and divine confrontation primarily an event
of illumination and crossing an “intellectual threshold”? Or should our phenomenology of revelation
recognize it as first and foremost a kind of precognitive, affective seizure of our desire — a
capturing of our imagination on a register that is not readily commensurate with the intellect? A more
persistent rejection of intellectualism and rationalism in philosophy of religion will eschew
intellectualist pictures of the human person and instead emphasize that we are primarily affective,
desiring animals — and that the thickness and particularity of the gospel (which, it seems to me,
remains still thicker than “canonical theism”) grip our “hearts” before it ever gets articulated as a
“theism” — even a rich, canonical theism.316 While the event of revelation/ divine confrontation is
“world-constituting,” it is important to emphasize — following Heidegger — that constitution
happens at a level that is precognitive. Before they’re ever “intellectual,” “ordinary believers” are
gripped by divine revelation in a way that is irreducible to the cognitive.317
 Conclusion

William Abraham’s project is animated by a desire for philosophy of religion to remember

“ordinary believers” and the ways ordinary folks come to faith in Jesus Christ. This is informed by
his historical understanding of conversion and catechesis in the early church, but also by a
contemporary sensitivity to the dynamics of conversion (chapter 7).318 Our philosophical accounts of
the nature of Christian belief will be fitting and illuminating only to the extent that they can help us to
understand how “ordinary” folks believe — that is, folks without Ph.D.s or college degrees, who
don’t share the philosophers’ fixation on epistemology. Too often our Christian philosophizing
betrays the fact that we tend to paint all believers in our own rationalist image, as if all believers
spend their time fretting about coherentist accounts of truth, or are vexed by issues of warrant that
plague testimony, or are persistently haunted by the specter of antirealism. We do well to be reminded
otherwise — to discipline our theoretical reflection by regularly confronting it with “ordinary”
believers with whom we worship each Sunday.319
As I think about these matters, I try to regularly ask myself: Is this true of Tom? Tom is my
neighbor on the west side of our home. He lives in a house that is home to quite an eclectic crew, and
sometimes quite volatile (let’s just say the police are familiar with the address). His face is carved
with lines that speak of a difficult life shuffling below the shadows of middle-class comfort most of
us take for granted. We don’t share very much in common, but we can talk for an hour about two
things: NASCAR and Jesus. Several years ago Tom underwent a conversion, and since that time he
has been our neighborhood’s most vocal witness. His catechesis, from what I gather, has been a blend
of Alpha courses, a twelve-step program, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. But he is
always eager to come over and share with me stories of “the powerful One”; he is a believer in ways
that I’ll never be. It is clear that the gospel is not, for him, an ontology or an epistemology — or even
an “answer” to his “questions.” It is the good news that someone loves him, that the God of heaven
would endure death on a cross to embrace him. For Tom, faith is not a matter of knowledge — it’s a
matter of love. Over my desk I have an image of Jesus that Tom photocopied for me — one of those
terribly sappy, sentimental images that looks like it has been photocopied a thousand times. But for
Tom it is an icon, the real presence of the God of love. We might say that, metaphorically, William
Abraham’s project invites us to do the same: to hang a picture of a photocopied Jesus over our desk
as a reminder that the church is perhaps more Tom’s than ours, and then get to work articulating an
epistemology for the rest of us.
 6 At the Limits of Speech

A Pentecostal Contribution to Philosophy of Language

Perhaps nothing is so synonymous with pentecostalism as “speaking in tongues.” But in order that
pentecostalism not be reduced to this admittedly strange practice, I have saved consideration of
glossolalia until this final chapter. And as with our previous “case studies,” I want to consider
tongues-speech as a liminal case in philosophy of language. Dominated as it has been (at least in
Anglo-analytic circles) by a valorization of “ordinary language philosophy,” philosophy of language
has had little room for considering a strange, quite extraordinary phenomenon such as glossolalia.
As a kind of speech or discourse that hovers on the very fringe of language, there is a deep sense in
which tongues-speech resists philosophical analysis or conceptual description. However, in this
chapter I want to argue that this resistant nature of tongues-speech is what is precisely most
philosophically interesting — that it is part of the very nature of tongues-speech to be a discourse of
resistance, in a dual sense: on the one hand, it is a kind of speech (or, as we will say below, a speech
act) that resists categories currently on hand in philosophy of language; on the other hand, I also want
to argue that tongues-speech is a kind of discourse that arises out of resistance to given cultural
norms and institutions. In other words, we could say that tongues-speech is the language of
communities of resistance who seek to defy the “powers that be.” To describe tongues as a discourse
of resistance, then, is to indicate both a conceptual and an ethical aspect. Thus, in this philosophical
analysis of tongues, I want to take a wider view of tongues-speech, considering it not only within the
purview of philosophy of language, but also briefly with respect to ethics and social philosophy.
I will first offer an account of tongues-speech through the lens of philosophy of language; more
specifically, I consider glossolalia in light of three contemporary modes of philosophical analysis of
language: (1) phenomenology, engaging Husserl and Derrida in particular; (2) philosophical
hermeneutics, drawing on Heidegger and Gadamer; and (3) speech act theory in the wake of Austin
and Searle. In the final section (the most “experimental” part of the chapter), I turn to the ethical and
social implications of tongues-speech viewed through the lens of what we could variously describe as
critical theory, socialism, or “New Left” categories.
Before proceeding, let me make one methodological prefatory note: in what follows I have, for the
most part, bracketed specifically theological questions about glossolalia. My analysis, for example,
takes no stand on whether tongues is the “initial physical evidence of baptism in the Holy Spirit” (as
classical Pentecostals would assert) or whether it is simply one of the charismatic gifts that remains
available to the ekklesia.320 Nor do I take a position on whether glossolalia is the utterance of existing
languages previously unknown to the speaker (xenolalia) or simply ecstatic speech uttered by the
power of the Spirit (though our analysis below will require us to consider the implications of such
accounts).321 Insofar as I hope my analysis is not simply antiquarian or historical, the one theological
assumption that remains relevant is that tongues-speech remains a viable and authentic mode of
discourse for the believing community, which is the Christian ekklesia.322 However, someone who
does not share this theological assumption but nevertheless believes that tongues-speech was a viable
mode of Spirit-led discourse (as a cessationist would, for example), may find at least historical
significance in my analysis. And in either case, I hope tongues-speech can function as a kind of limit
case that will illuminate questions and issues in philosophy of language — that is, as a case or
instance of utterance that challenges the current conceptual categories in philosophy of language and
thus might push us to transgress the limits of these categories. So it could even be possible that
someone who holds no theological affirmation of tongues-speech might still find the notion a
productive thought experiment for philosophy of language.
A final methodological preface: my analysis of tongues-speech will constitute something of a
phenomenology of glossolalia. As such, I want to take seriously the normative accounts of practice in
the New Testament, but also consider the ways in which tongues-speech is currently practiced in
pentecostal communities. At some points the contemporary practice is difficult to map onto the
normative account in the New Testament, and the attempts to warrant contemporary practice often
rely on a kind of interpretive injustice of these New Testament texts. However, if tongues-speech
constitutes an illuminating limit case for philosophy, these instances for illuminating resistance might
also be found in contemporary practices.
 Resisting (and Producing) Concepts: Tongues and Philosophy of Language

Though I want to argue that tongues-speech resists the categories of analysis currently employed in
philosophy of language, I want to suggest that this resistance to given categories is actually
philosophically productive;323 in other words, because tongues-speech constitutes a limit case for
available modes of philosophical analysis, it provides an opportunity for rethinking, expanding, and
revising these philosophical methodologies and lexica of concepts. The fact that glossolalia cannot
easily fit existing categories can be an opportunity to revisit these categories and call into question the
regnant paradigm (though, admittedly, it can also be an occasion to disregard glossolalia).324 The
resistance of tongues-speech to analysis can be an occasion for illumination.
In this section I will consider tongues-speech in light of three prominent modes of analysis in
philosophy of language in the order of their historical emergence.325 Each poses an important
question for tongues-speech; and the phenomenon of tongues-speech poses challenges to the
conceptual categories of these philosophical analyses. Husserl’s phenomenological analysis poses
perhaps the most basic question: What is tongues-speech? What does it mean to “speak” in tongues?
Hermeneutics raises the question of interpretation or meaning: How is tongues-speech “understood”?
What “gets said” in tongues? And speech act theory poses a question about action: What “gets done”
in tongues-speech? What does glossolalia effect?
These three modes of philosophical analysis are complementary, but also discrete. As such, each
section seeks to provide an account of tongues-speech from a particular “camp” within contemporary
philosophy of language. I think it is important to utilize all three approaches because each approach
offers a unique perspective on tongues; but together, they provide a well-rounded philosophical
engagement.326
 “Tongues Are for a Sign”: Phenomenology

The longest and richest tradition of philosophical reflection on language is what we would now
loosely describe as “semiotics” — an account of language in terms of signs (semeia). While the
notion of semiotics is most often linked to twentieth-century figures such as Ferdinand de Saussure
and C. S. Peirce, this tradition of reflection has a long pedigree reaching back through Augustine to
the Stoics.327 One of the most powerful and influential restatements of such an analysis of language
was offered by Edmund Husserl, most especially in his earlier work, the Logical Investigations, and a
later piece, The Origin of Geometry.328 Because Husserl’s phenomenology of language was so
foundational for much of the work that would follow in the twentieth century, and because it provided
the first impetus for my thinking about tongues and philosophy of language, I want to consider his
philosophical framework fairly closely.329
In the first of the Logical Investigations (“Expression and Meaning”), Husserl seeks to map the
different modes of expression and speech by asserting a number of distinctions. For Husserl, the
overarching category is that of signs, so what we get in the First Investigation is not really his account
of language, but most specifically (yet more broadly) his theory of signs — of which language is a
subset. Within the broad category of “signs” (Zeigen), Husserl asserts a first, fundamental distinction
between those signs that express something — an “expression” (Ausdruck) — and those signs that do
not express or “mean” something — what he calls “indications” (Anzeigen). Expressions are
“significant” insofar as they “signify” or “mean” (Bedeuten) something, whereas indications are only
“indicative” and serve merely as pointers (LI, p. 269). However, one should not overstate or
misunderstand this distinction between “expression” and “indication.” For instance, the two are not
mutually exclusive: it is possible, Husserl notes, for a sign to be indicative but also “happen to fulfil a
significant” function as well. Moreover, the distinction between expression and indication should not
be understood on the register of genus and species; it is not the case that expression is really a
particular kind of indication.330 Indeed, Husserl’s most surprising (and most contested) claim is that
there can be modes of expression that do not involve any aspect of indication; in other words, there is
a sphere — what Husserl calls “isolated mental life” — in which there is meaning without
indication.331
Indications are pointers that stand for something else; in this sense, Husserl notes, “a brand is the
sign of a slave, a flag the sign of a nation” (p. 270) — the indications aid us in recognizing some
thing to which the sign is attached. In some cases this attachment is contingent, even arbitrary (as in
the case of a flag or brand); but other attachments of signs to their referents are more “natural”; it is
in this sense that we can say, “Martian canals are signs of the existence of intelligent beings on Mars,”
or, “fossil vertebrae are signs of the existence of prediluvian animals” (p. 270). In short, smoke is a
sign of fire in the sense of being an indication (Anzeige). The relation between the indicative sign and
its referent is motivational: what is given (the indicative sign) motivates me to consider what is not
given, but only indicated in its absence: the referent. On the podium in Greece, the flag of the United
States motivates the consideration of a nation-state on the other side of the globe, etc. Essential to the
nature of indication, then, is an absence of the referent; indication operates on the basis of a certain
lack.332
Indicative signs are to be distinguished from expressions, which are “meaningful signs” (p. 275).
Thus Husserl wants to reserve the term “expression” for a specific instance of signification,
drastically narrowing what we might describe, in ordinary language, as an indication. For instance,
we often speak of “facial expressions,” but on Husserl’s register these are not properly Ausdrucken
(“expressions”) because, according to him, such bodily signs “involuntarily accompany speech
without communicative intent” (p. 275).333 “In such manifestations,” he continues, “one man
communicates nothing to another: their utterance involves no intent to put certain ‘thoughts’ on
record expressively, whether for the man himself [i.e., the one making the bodily gesture], in his
solitary state, or for others. Such ‘expressions,’ in short, have properly speaking, no meaning” (p.
275, italics in original). In other words, they are not properly “expressions” at all because they are not
communicative. The question is, are these bodily gestures still a mode of language? Could there be an
instance of noncommunicative, nonexpressive language? What would that be? We will return to this
below.
When Husserl considers expression, his focus is on speech because it is in speech that we find
intention: a speaker, by means of a sign, means to communicate something to a listener. The
connection between sign and referent with respect to expression is, we might say, “tighter” than it is
with indication; as Husserl puts it, in speech the signs given (the “expressions”) are “phenomenally
one with the experiences made manifest in them in the consciousness of the man who manifests them”
(p. 275). There is almost a sense in which the referent inheres in the expressive sign in a way it does
not in the indicative sign. Indeed, he goes on to describe an expression as “a verbal sound infused with
sense” or meaning (p. 281, italics added). Thus Husserl privileges speech as the site of expression.
However, here we find an interesting twist (which is also the fulcrum of Derrida’s critique). Speech
is the best exemplar of expression for Husserl, but not all speech is communicative for him. In fact,
insofar as speech is communicative (that is, involves the intersubjective exchange of expressions), it is
necessarily implicated with indication. “All expressions in communicative speech function as
indications” (p. 277). This is because there is a kind of essential absence in the intersubjective relation
between speaker and listener. Expressions in speech “serve the hearer as signs of the ‘thoughts’ of the
speaker ... as well as of the other inner experiences which are part of his communicative intention” (p.
277). The word-signs that I utter are given to the hearer and thus are present to the hearer, but they
serve to indicate what can never be present to the other person, namely, my inner thoughts and
consciousness. Nevertheless, insofar as these utter-ances are intentionally given by me to
communicate or express meaning, they count as expression. Communicative speech involves the
interweaving of both expression and indication.

But what other kind of speech could there be? If intersubjective communication always involves
indication, could there be a kind of expression that is not always already “bound up” with indication?
Could there be a kind of “pure expression”? For Husserl, yes: and we find this in “solitary mental
life,” in the inner soliloquy of consciousness (pp. 278-79). Properly speaking, for Husserl (who
again, we must recall, does not admit any unconscious), we do not “talk to ourselves” in our interior
mental life;334 we do not need to employ signs (as indications) of our own inner experiences. This is
because he sees interior mental life characterized by a kind of immediate self-presence, which does
not admit any absence or lack. There are no secret parts of consciousness for Husserl; I am master of
my thoughts and intentions. So insofar as indication is a kind of sign given to point to what is absent,
such signs would be superfluous for interior consciousness. The main point is that Husserl sees this
interior soliloquy of consciousness as the site of “pure” expression (pp. 279-80).
In the figure at the top of the page I have tried to provide something of a map of Husserl’s theory
of signs. While for Derrida the most interesting (and problematic) part of Husserl’s account is the
suggestion regarding “pure expression” (which Derrida contests), for our study of glossolalia I am
most interested in an unstable quadrant of this map: Husserl’s hints about a kind of nonexpressive
speech. On Husserl’s account, there are indications that are nonexpressive (e.g., bodily gestures); on
the other hand, there are expressions that are nonindicative (e.g., the soliloquy of solitary mental life);
there is also a third, intermediate category, which constitutes the bulk of what we consider
“communication” or speaking — intersubjective communication — which involves both expression
and indication. When we overlay this with a consideration of “speech” in particular, Husserl would
contend that speech is essentially communicative, and thus essentially indicative (p. 277); in the
soliloquy of solitary mental life, “there is no speech in such cases” (p. 280).
However, Husserl’s precise distinctions become unstable at this point, on a couple of levels. First,
though “speech” is clearly an important category for his account, it is left quite undefined. As such, he
seems to simply link speech to “verbal utterance” — though he clearly wants to specify this as verbal
utterance with meaning (that is, “infused” with intention). The question is whether Husserl can have
what he wants. Must “speech” as vocal utterance always conform to the patterns of a discernible
language to count as speech? Husserl stipulates that the “articulate sound-complex, the written sign
etc., first becomes a spoken word or communicative bit of speech, when a speaker produces it with the
intention of ‘expressing himself about something’ through its means” (pp. 276-77, italics added). But
what counts as a word? Must the meaning of a vocal utterance be “intentional” — and only intend to
communicate a “thought” — to count as a “word”? Could a vocal utterance mean without the referent
of that meaning being a “thought” in the (intentional) consciousness of the utterer?
Second, Husserl’s account relies on a highly questionable rejection of facial expression and bodily
gestures as “expressive”; they are, for him, meaning-less because they communicate nothing (p. 275).
While one could contest this by calling into question the theory of self-present consciousness behind
this,335 we could also simply cite counterexamples. For instance, in the American presidential debates
of 1988, when George H. W. Bush merely glanced at his watch during the broadcast, this clearly
“said” something to the American public (the gesture was often cited after Clinton won the election).
This gesture, though perhaps not “intentional,” was neverthe-less expressive. This is not to say that all
bodily movements “mean” something; obviously a nervous tick or reaching for a glass of milk does
not “mean” in this way. But the question is whether it is legitimate for Husserl to cast all bodily
gestures into the outer regions of mere indication.
Within this schema, where could we map tongues-speech? Could glossolalia perhaps be a case that
would help us in revising Husserl’s schema according to the hints above? Is it “speech,” properly
speaking? Is it a mode of expression bound up with indication (as is everyday speech)? Insofar as it
involves vocalization, we can be certain it is not characteristic of the “pure expression” of
soliloquy.336 To go further, we should recall a theological question bracketed earlier: if we think of
tongues as xenolalia (the utterance of an identifiable language by one without previous knowledge of
the language), then tongues-speech would be an instance of communicative speech. This is clearly the
case in the instance of the Pentecostal outpouring in Acts 2. In fact, in that case, it is clear that the
primary reason for the miracle of glossolalia was to provide a witness to the gospel in terms that
could be readily received and understood by the hearers. “How is it that we each hear them in our own
language to which we were born?” the listeners asked (Acts 2:8). Glossolalia as xenolalia is a clear
case of communicative speech.
The cases suggested in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians are a little more complicated. On the one
hand, Paul seems to chastise the Corinthians for tongues-speech that does not properly communicate
meaning: “There are perhaps a great many kinds of languages in the world,” the apostle notes, “and
no kind is without meaning. If then I do not know the meaning of the language, I shall be to the one
who speaks a barbarian, and the one who speaks will be a barbarian to me” (1 Cor. 14:10-11). This is
why Paul requires that tongues-speech be accompanied by interpretation (or translation, 1 Cor. 14:13,
27). So here the goal of tongues-speech is communicative, in which case it again can be mapped onto
Husserl’s schema.
But there are hints in this Corinthian correspondence of a different understanding of tongues-
speech, not as primarily communicative but as a testimony, which is not properly “intentional” but
nevertheless expressive. First, Paul suggests that “one who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men,
but to God; for no one understands, but in his spirit he speaks mysteries.... One who speaks in a
tongue edifies himself” (1 Cor. 14:2, 4). Here Paul hints at a kind of private use for tongues-speech,
which is not necessarily linked to existing natural languages, but is perhaps more akin to ecstatic
religious speech.337 In this case, the point of tongues-speech does not appear to be primarily
communicative. Second, later in the chapter Paul notes that “tongues are for a sign” (14:22) in the way
that the “signs and wonders” of the apostles were a testimony to the divine authority of their message.
In these cases, miraculous phenomena such as tongues are aimed not just (or perhaps even primarily)
at the penultimate end of communicating something (or healing a person) but rather at the ultimate
end of indicating the Spirit’s presence and activity within the believing community. In fact, the
category of “signs and wonders” is illuminative for our semiotic discussion: in both the Gospels and
Acts, the miraculous works of Jesus and the apostles — usually bodily healing — are persistently
described as signs.338 The “signs and wonders” were a mode of attestation that, rather than
communicating an “idea” in the consciousness of an “utterer,” nevertheless expressed something,
namely, the power and grace of the God of Jesus Christ attested in the Gospel. Thus these signs
functioned as a mode of expression without being linked to a kind of authorial intent.
It seems to me that the case of tongues-speech as a sign operates in the same manner, and
destabilizes Husserl’s tidy distinctions. In the case of tongues as an ecstatic utterance (perhaps without
interpretation), the fact of this kind of utterance — though it does not “communicate” because it is not
a discernible language — nevertheless “says” something, attests to a divine reality (e.g., the presence
of the Spirit in the community). In this respect, we might say that tongues-speech is a kind of speech
that functions as a gesture, but the kind of gesture that calls into question Husserl’s exclusion of
gesture from the realm of expression.339 Glossolalia (understood here as ecstatic religious speech),
we might say, is a mode of speech that does not employ words (in Husserl’s sense) but nevertheless is
expressive. If the phenomenon of tongues-speech points up the limits of Husserl’s phenomenological
schema, it may also point us to another mode of linguistic analysis. Below I will suggest that the
notion of “speech acts” will give us some conceptual tools to consider the “work” that tongues-speech
does in these instances, such that speech act theory might be considered a kind of supplement to
Husserl’s phenomenological semiotics.
There remains another mode of contemporary pentecostal glossolalic practice that I have not yet
considered. In the above, I have largely been concerned with the public exercise of tongues-speech
within the ecclesial gathering. But in current practice, many pentecostals employ tongues-speech in
private prayer (as a “prayer language”). Beyond citing 1 Corinthians 14, the practice often draws on a
reading of the Spirit’s work noted in Romans 8, where Paul asserts that “the Spirit also helps our
weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with
groanings too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26). In this prayer practice, the Christian “prays in tongues”
when she lacks the words to properly express her longings or anguish or desires. The practice is
deeply cathartic and represents a kind of spiritual discipline. On the Husserlian schema we have
unpacked, one might suggest that such a practice is communicative insofar as the prayer is directed to
God as “listener.” But the vocalization is not necessary for a prayer to be heard. Therefore, I would
suggest that such a practice is an instance that may conform to the marginal category engendered by
Husserl’s distinctions; namely, the practice would be an instance of nonexpressive speech.
 “Let the One Who Speaks in a Tongue Pray That He May Interpret”: Hermeneutics

What is known as hermeneutics — or more specifically philosophical hermeneutics or hermeneutic

phenomenology — emerges from the phenomenological tradition through Husserl’s most important
student, Martin Heidegger, and one of Heidegger ’s students, Hans-Georg Gadamer.340 This
hermeneutic tradition has been one of the — if not the — most significant developments in
philosophy of language over the past century. Its influence is perhaps most powerfully felt in what has
come to be known as the “linguistic turn”: the fundamental assertion (now the received position, as it
were) that our being-in-the-world is fundamentally constituted by language, or at least by an
interpretive mode.341 In other words, there is no naive, simple, pure “access” to “the way things are”
apart from a way of construing the world through a kind of semiotic lens (though the language of a
“lens” still gives a false sense that this is extrinsic to being human).342 This was first and most
forcefully delineated by Heidegger, who noted that we inhabit the world as interpreting creatures. We
encounter things in the world not as things “in themselves” but as things that we use, as things “for”
something. Because we encounter entities in the world as things “for” something, we also encounter
them always already “as” something. This is something like the fundamental axiom of hermeneutics:
the as-structure of our being-in-the-world.343 Our construal of the world as something is informed by
the world or environment that we inhabit, insofar as that environment constitutes a horizon within
which these construals take place. “Whenever something is interpreted as something,” Heidegger
notes, “the interpretation will be founded essentially upon fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-concept.
An interpretation is never a presuppositionless apprehending of something presented to us.”344 The
world I always already inhabit constitutes the horizons of possibility for my understanding and
construal of the world and things in the world.
Heidegger, and Gadamer after him, established the hermeneutical character of existence: that we
engage the world from a set of presuppositions (or “fore-havings”) that orients us to the world in a
certain way. Both were preeminent philosophers of finitude who recognized the situationality of our
knowledge.345 Another related and central theme of hermeneutics is the role of tradition in
constituting this world: the environment that provides the conditions of possibility for understanding
the world is handed down to me by tradition (linguistic, cultural, religious, etc.). So rather than being
ahistorical, disembodied egos who encounter the world with a blank slate, I come (in)to the world
traditioned — indebted to a tradition (or plurality of traditions) that primes me to engage the world
with certain habits of construal.346 Even those communities who eschew tradition (such as
“primitivist” Pentecostal and charismatic communities) have a tradition of rejecting tradition (just as
Gadamer points out the Enlightenment prejudice against prejudice).347
Finally, in addition to the situationality and traditionality of human being-in-the-world (what
Heidegger called the interpretedness of Dasein),348 hermeneutics asserts the ubiquity of
interpretation. Interpretation is not a specialized activity we engage in when reading texts, discerning
legal briefs, or viewing a work of art. Interpretation is synonymous with being-in-the-world.
“Experience” is interpretive. As such, it is a fundamental, pretheoretical aspect of being human.
“Interpretation is carried out primordially not in a theoretical statement but in an action of
circumspective concern.... From the fact that words are absent, it may not be concluded that
interpretation is absent.”349 To be human is to interpret; to experience the world is to interpret the
world.350
 Hermeneutics has a complex relationship to the philosophy of language. On the one hand, it clearly
draws on notions of language since interpretation has always been linked to lingual phenomena
(whether spoken or written). On the other hand, hermeneutics seeks to expand our understanding of
interpretation beyond merely lingual phenomena (books, utterances, etc.) to the entire panoply of what
we encounter in the world. But even with this expansion, the link to language remains insofar as
hermeneutics tends to then consider the world a kind of macrotext.351
Now, in what ways could hermeneutics provide a framework for thinking about glossolalia? The
relationship between interpretation and tongues-speech is intriguing. On the one hand, even within the
New Testament witness, glossolalia is bound up with the question of interpretation. Paul’s account of
this is a rich field for hermeneutical reflection, given the distinct interest of hermeneutics in
understanding:

[O]ne who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men, but to God; for no one understands [or
hears], but by the Spirit he speaks mysteries. But one who prophesies speaks to men for
edification and exhortation and consolation. One who speaks in a tongue edifies himself; but one
who prophesies edifies the church. Now I wish that you all spoke in tongues, but even more that
you would prophesy; and greater is one who prophesies than one who speaks in tongues, unless
he interprets, so that the church may receive edification. But now, brothers and sisters, if I come
to you speaking in tongues, what shall I profit you, unless I speak to you either by way of
revelation or of knowledge or of prophecy or of teaching? Yet even lifeless things, either flute
or harp, in producing a sound, if they do not produce a distinction in the tones, how will it be
known what is played on the flute or on the harp?... So also you, unless you utter by the tongue
speech that is clear, how will it be known what is spoken? For you will be speaking into the air.
There are, perhaps, a great many kinds of languages in the world, and none is without meaning.
If then I do not know the meaning of the language, I shall be to the one who speaks a barbarian,
and the one who speaks will be a barbarian to me.... Therefore let one who speaks in a tongue
pray that he may interpret. (1 Cor. 14:2-13 NASB, modified)

Tongues, in this excursus, are necessarily linked to interpretation. The primary concern here is for
understanding — a connection between utterer and listener via the utterance, which requires the
interpretation/translation of the utterance into terms that can be received by the listener.352 So with
respect to tongues as communicative speech (to recall a Husserlian category), the telos of such speech
is understanding, which requires that the utterance be mediated through the structures of
interpretation. In this respect, Paul’s concern that tongues-speech be aimed at understanding, and his
recognition that this required interpretation, makes his account a kind of proto-hermeneutics. His
affirmation of the supernatural activity of the Spirit within the ecclesial community did not lead him
to posit some kind of magical (or Gnostic) conduit for secret knowledge; rather, his account
emphasizes the way in which even the miraculous operates according to the conditions of finitude that
characterize the human community — even that distinct community of the Spirit that is the ekklesia.353
However, on the other hand, in contemporary pentecostal practice and understanding, one often
encounters a sense that tongues (and prophecy) are immediate deliveries from the divine, without
mediation or translation. In other words, in the popular imagination, glossolalia is often thought to be
a quintessentially unmediated, divinely given, ecstatic discourse that bypasses the conditions of
interpretation — a kind of pure conduit from God, without the static or supposed distortion of
semiotic mediation.354 An appreciation of the conclusions of hermeneutics must challenge and
mitigate such claims: no revelation is ever unmediated. Notions to the contrary would be a kind of
neo-Gnosticism of the sort that Paul decidedly rejected in the hermeneutic conditions specified in 1
Corinthians 14.
But I think there is a further line of hermeneutic inquiry relevant to tongues-speech. Central to
hermeneutic philosophy is an appreciation of the way our environment and tradition provide the
conditions of possibility for how we can interpret our experience — they establish the horizons for
our “as” construals. This is not to be understood as a limitation or hindrance, but more positively as
the conditions of possibility for opening up a world of experience. But as such, the presuppositions or
“fore-havings” that we bring to our experience do condition our engagement with the world. It seems
to me that a community that is open to the authentic possibility of tongues-speech as both a voice of
the Spirit and a sign of God’s presence has a distinct set of “fore-havings” that opens up the world of
experience in a distinct way. To put it differently, the role of tongues-speech within a community
would seem to be necessarily linked to a “worldview” that would eschew reductionistic naturalism
and would encounter the world as a kind of “open system” — as a site for the inbreaking of the
divine. 355 This would seem to entail that the pentecostal community would/ should inhabit its world
differently than others. I hope to explore the nature of this difference in the final part of this chapter.
 “Let All Things Be Done for Edification”: Speech Act Theory

Perhaps the most fruitful development in philosophy of language for reflection on glossolalia is the
speech act theory of language developed by J. L. Austin and John Searle.356 This work grows out of
the groundbreaking theories of the later Wittgenstein (of the Philosophical Investigations).357
Rejecting his own earlier account (in the Tractatus) of language as some kind of representational
“picture” of the world, Wittgenstein began to appreciate that language is not always — and perhaps
not even primarily — about “reference” or representing a state of affairs. Rather, language is a
medium of action: words, when used in different ways, do different things. A statement or sentence or
utterance can “get things done” or “make things happen” — and the same sentence or utterance can
get different things done when the context (or “rules of the [language] game”) is changed.358
It is this linkage of language to action that characterizes the speech act theory of Austin and Searle.
As Searle puts it, “a theory of language is part of a theory of action, simply because speaking is a
rule-governed form of behaviour.”359 A helpful element of speech act theory, then, is its appreciation
of language as a social phenomenon, governed by rules that are constituted by a community. As such,
speech act theory emphasizes the conventional nature of language use. It is a social community that
constitutes the rules of a “language game.”360
Austin’s unpacking of speech acts emphasizes the performative nature of utterances. Utterances are
more like dramatic statements on a stage than abstract points in geometry; that is, speakers are actors,
who speak to get something done. And what they want their speaking to do is not always to express a
thought (as Husserl seems to think); rather, sometimes we speak to make something happen, or to
effect a state of affairs. Most often when I say to my wife, “I love you,” my primary motivation for
the utterance is not the communication of a piece of knowledge, but a testimony meant to effect
comfort or intimacy. When I say “I love you” in such contexts, my utterance is not the expression of
an idea; it is meant to do something else. In this respect we could suggest that the picture of language
we get from Husserl’s semiotics tends to be more rationalistic; that is, it tends to be reductionistic,
only imaging that speech is a conduit for thoughts. Speech act theory, in contrast, has a richer
understanding of language and speech that recognizes that language does more than just shuttle ideas
from one mind to another. In this respect, and with its appreciation for community, it seems to me that
speech act theory resonates with a more incarnational ontology and anthropology that recognize that
human beings are multifaceted creatures, not just quasi-Cartesian “thinking things.” And this
resonates with the elements of a pentecostal worldview that eschew the reductionism of rationalism
and affirm the multifaceted aspects of communal embodiment. In other words, I think that the distinct
pentecostal emphases on an affective epistemology and affirmation of embodiment (as seen in
emphases on both physical healing and embodied worship, including tongues) should lead pentecostal
theorists to find a helpful ally in speech act theory, insofar as it recognizes the multifaceted,
embodied, communal, and performative elements of language.361
Speech act theory, then, provides an account of what language does. More specifically, Austin and
Searle both distinguish three different kinds of linguistic acts:362 (1) the locutionary act, which
involves the vocal utterance of phonemes and/or sentences; (2) the illocutionary act, which is what
one intends to “get done” in the utterance (e.g., promising, commanding, asserting, etc.); and (3) the
perlocutionary act, which refers to the effect of the utterance (and illocutionary act) on the
hearer(s).363 These acts are often overlaid in the same speech act; for instance, when I move my lips
and tongue to utter the phoneme “Stop!” to my son, I am, in this one exclamation, uttering a word (a
locutionary act), making a command (an illocutionary act), and (hopefully) effecting a change in my
son’s behavior (a perlocutionary act). But there is not a necessary identity between these three. For
instance, the same phonematic utterance (e.g., “Sam smokes”) can in fact be different illocutionary
acts depending on the stance of the speaker. For instance, if I raise my voice at the end of the
utterance, the illocutionary act will be a question: “Sam smokes?” If not, the illocutionary act will be
an assertion: “Sam smokes.”364 Furthermore, as Searle notes, “one can perform an utterance [a
locutionary act] without performing a propositional or illocutionary act at all. (One can utter words
without saying something.)”365 Not every sound that comes out of a human mouth is a speech act.
What is important to note here is that the perlocutionary effect of a speech act might not be tied to
the propositional content of an utterance at all. What “gets done” by a locutionary act is not
necessarily linked to what is “said” in the act. Searle furnishes an interesting example:

Suppose that I am an American soldier in the Second World War and that I am captured by Italian
troops. And suppose also that I wish to get these troops to believe that I am a German soldier in
order to get them to release me. What I would like to do is to tell them in German or Italian that I
am a German soldier. But let us suppose I don’t know enough German or Italian to do that. So I,
as it were, attempt to put on a show of telling them that I am a German soldier by reciting those
few bits of German I know, trusting that they don’t know enough German to see through my
plan. Let us suppose I know only one line of German which I remember from a poem I had to
memorize in a high school German course. Therefore, I, a captured American, address my
Italian captors with the following sentence: Kennst du las Land wo die Zitronen blühen?366

As Searle notes, when I say, Kennst du das Land ..., I do not intend to ask whether the hearer “knows
the land where the lemon trees bloom”; rather, my intent is to effect something in the hearer, namely,
the belief that I am a German soldier. The content of the utterance in this case is completely irrelevant
to that intended perlocutionary effect. In fact, what will be more important are the guttural aspects of
the actual phonemes that I utter, which no doubt I will do with as much Germanic gusto as I can
muster. Speech act theory provides a unique account of the way language works — or more
specifically, that language is a realm of action that does work beyond the narrow task of conveying
ideas from one mind to another. As such, it also does justice to the pluriform ways that language
functions in different contexts and for different interests. As Kevin Vanhoozer summarizes, “Each
sphere of life in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of use.”367
Now, how does speech act theory serve to illuminate a consideration of tongues-speech? In order
to consider this, I want to bracket xenolalia, since clearly tongues-speech that involves the utterance
of known languages (albeit without the prior knowledge of the utterer) would operate according to
the given rules of that language and thus could be easily subsumed under standard speech act analysis.
Instead, I want to take the “hard” case of ecstatic religious speech that is not identified as a known
language and does not conform to the conventions of a given language.368 To do so, I will consider a
common scenario in contemporary pentecostal communities: prayers in tongues-speech uttered
during an “altar call.” Consider the following example:

At the conclusion of a worship service focused on physical healing, the pastor invites the entire
church to spend time at the front of the sanctuary — “at the altar” — in a time of prayer. Those
with specific needs for physical healing are first invited to the altar, as a demonstration of faith
and to seek healing from God. Others in the congregation are then invited to join them at the
 front, encircling each individual, laying hands on them, asking their specific prayer need, and
then praying with them for healing. Seven people have gone to the altar for prayer, and gathered
around each are five or six men and women interceding on their behalf. In a couple of the
groups, intercessors begin to pray “in tongues” — in a kind of ecstatic speech that does not
conform to a known language: “hack shukuna ash tuu kononai; mee upsukuna shill adonai;
etc.”369

Does speech act theory help us to understand what is happening here? I think so. The question we
should ask is not, “What does this prayer mean?” but rather, “What does this prayer do?” What is the
illocutionary stance of the one praying, and what is the perlocutionary effect on the hearers,
especially the person seeking healing? The intention of the prayer is less about saying something and
more about doing something. Let us first consider the illocutionary stance of the person praying.
What does the pray-er mean to do? I think we could suggest at least two linguistic acts that accompany
such an utterance in this context.370 First, an illocutionary act of praying or beseeching:371 the person
praying in tongues is, first and foremost, doing just that — praying, and praying to God, and thus
seeking to express a desire to God “in groans too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26). Such a prayer is not
intended to communicate propositional content, but rather to express the depth of a desire when “we
do not know how to pray as we should” (Rom. 8:26). Such a glossolalic prayer expresses a depth of
dependency upon God, and thus a humility before the divine. It also indicates a dependence upon the
Holy Spirit in particular since the Spirit is thought to be the one who “intercedes” through such
groans (Rom. 8:26) that do not conform to the conventions of a given language. One might say that
such a prayer in such a context is a kind of sacramental practice of emptying, recognizing the failure
of even language to measure up to such an exchange. Glossolalic prayer is a means of making
oneself both receptive to and a conduit of the Spirit’s work.
Second, the glossolalic prayer utterance has a perlocutionary dimension on the hearers, and in a
twofold sense: (1) as a prayer, one of the hearers is God, and the desired perlocutionary effect is for
God to act in healing; but also (2) the other hearers of the utterance include the person seeking
healing and others who are interceding for her. It seems to me that the glossolalic utterance also has
the perlocutionary effect of encouraging faith in the (human) hearers and encouraging them to open
themselves up to the miraculous. In other words, precisely by uttering a speech act that does not
conform to “normal” or natural speech, the person who utters the speech act effects on a lingual level
what is being sought on a physical or bodily level: a certain “interruption” of the “normal” in order
to effect healing. The prayer, then, often has the perlocutionary effect of encouraging openness to
such interruptions.372
It must be noted that both these illocutionary and perlocutionary acts are produced by utterances
whose content is basically irrelevant. Like the American who utters Kennst du das Land ... in order to
effect his identification as a German soldier, so the one who prays in tongues utters phonemes that do
not have any essential connection to the illocutionary or perlocutionary acts. Indeed, the utterances
are not propositions of any sort.
So tongues-speech is a kind of speech act that can be illuminated by the categories of speech act
theory, but at the same time it resists one of speech act theory’s fundamental assumptions and thus
calls for a revision. In fact, for tongues-speech to even “count” as a speech act will require a certain
retooling of some basic assumptions in Austin and Searle. As noted above, one of the baseline axioms
of speech act theory is that sentences are the basic units of language; in other words, for an utterance
to “count” as a speech act for Austin, it needs to conform to the rules of what counts as a sentence.373
On that account, the prayer in tongues does not count. But our speech act analysis of a glossolalic
utterance above has already yielded philosophical fruit. So why should we assume, as Searle does,
that only sentences do something when uttered? To get at this differently: Searle offers a basic
hypothesis, which is eventually “substantiated”: “[A] speaking a language is engaging in a rule-
governed form of behavior. To put it more briskly, [A’] talking is performing acts according to
rules.” Searle takes A’ to simply be a (more “brisk”) restatement of A. But this is not necessarily true.
Could there not be a mode of “talking” (speech) that is governed by rules but such rules are not
identifiable as the rules of a discernible language? It seems that one could affirm A’ but reject A. If
one were to properly restate, backwards as it were, A’ in the terms of A, one should say simply that
“speaking is engaging in a rule-governed form of behavior”; the stipulation that one must be
speaking a language (by which Searle seems to mean an identifiable natural language) is
unwarranted.374 Admittedly, Searle’s concern is to distinguish vocal utterances that count as speech
acts from verbalizations that are simply “noise.” What distinguishes the two is precisely the rule-
governed character of the former. But it is not at all clear that the only way to secure rule-governed
utterances is to require that they submit to the rules of given languages.375 One could easily imagine
utterances being governed by rules, but ones that cannot be mapped onto a given language. For
instance, hunters or soldiers on a reconnaissance mission might create a system of “calls” — vocal
utterances — that communicate a change in direction, approaching danger, etc. As such, they must be
said to count as illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. The case of tongues-speech analyzed above
suggests the same and indicates yet another way that glossolalia’s resistance to given philosophical
categories is nevertheless constructive.
 The Politics of Tongues-Speech: A Language of Resistance

In the first sections of this chapter we considered the way in which tongues-speech could be
illuminated by three strains in philosophy of language, as well as how its resistance to given
categories pointed a way forward for philosophy of language. As a kind of vocal utterance on the
margins of language, tongues-speech functions as an instructive “limit case” for the philosophy of
language. But philosophy of language is not the only mode of philosophical analysis that should find
tongues-speech a topic of interest. In this final section I want to consider yet another way in which
tongues-speech is a language of resistance that illuminates and is illuminated by another sector of
philosophy, namely, social and political philosophy. Speech act theory provides a transition to our
second consideration of tongues as a discourse of resistance. As an action, one of the things that
speaking in tongues does is to effect a kind of social resistance to the powers-that-be. Or perhaps we
should say that tongues-speech is the language of faith communities that are marginalized by the
powers-that-be, and such speech can be indicative of a kind of eschatological resistance to the
powers.376 We might say that the proletariat speaks in tongues.
This account could be substantiated historically (see, e.g., Steve Land and others on early
Pentecostal community),377 but I want to consider this from a contemporary perspective enlisting
some insights from the social sciences coupled with the critical theory of Herbert Marcuse and the
neo-Marxism of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. What we will find, I suggest, is a certain
confluence between “Marx and the Holy Ghost.”378
In his recent analysis of the almost exponential growth of urban poverty, concentrated in slums that
parasitically grow on the world’s megacities, Mike Davis documents the way in which this is a result
of the globalization of capitalism. What we are seeing, he suggests, is the “late capitalist triage of
humanity,” a “global residuum lacking the strategic economic power of socialized labor, but
massively concentrated in a shantytown world encircling the fortified enclaves of the urban rich.”379
But the extent of disempowerment prevents the urban poor from even constituting “a meaningful
‘class in itself,’ much less a potentially activist ‘class for itself.’”380 Marxist talk of “historical
agency” seems misplaced and illusionary.
But here Davis notes a significant shift: “Marx has yielded the historical stage to ... the Holy
Ghost.”381 More specifically, he suggests that Pentecostal Christianity, especially in Latin America
and sub-Saharan Africa, now occupies “a social space analogous to that of early twentieth-century
socialism and anarchism.”382 In this respect, he draws on the earlier (albeit contested) analysis of
Robert Mapes Anderson, who claimed that the “unconscious intent” of Pentecostalism was
“revolutionary.”383 Described as “the first major world religion to have grown up almost entirely in
the soil of the modern urban slum,” pentecostalism “has been growing into what is arguably the
largest self-organized movement of urban poor people on the planet.”384 Thus quite contrary to what
one might have expected on Marxist terms, Davis sees in pentecostalism a revolutionary streak of
radical resistance: “with the Left still largely missing from the slum, the eschatology of
Pentecostalism admirably refuses the inhuman destiny of the Third World city that Slums [the UN
Report] warns about.”385
But what does this have to do with tongues-speech? While glossolalia is only one of several
distinctives of Pentecostal faith and practice, it is a central and particularly symbolic one. I would like
to suggest that, at least on a certain level or from a certain angle, tongues-speech could be seen as the
language of the dispossessed — or the language of the “multitude”386 — precisely because it is a
mode of speech that can be an expression that resists the powers and structures of global capitalism
and its unjust distribution of wealth. In other words, tongues-speech is a discourse that is symbolic of
a deeper and broader desire to resist and call into question the existing economic and political
structures. It is the language of a countercultural “exilic” community.387
I think Marcuse once again provides categories for us to think about this. In his account of late
capitalist society (now globalized), Marcuse describes the way in which “the reality principle” — and
the corresponding rules of rationality — takes form as the “performance principle”: “under its rule
society is stratified according to the competitive economic performances of its members.”388 As a
result, humans are instrumentalized and alienated from their labor (the negation of the pleasure
principle).389 Even leisure time, supposedly for pleasure, is colonized by work and gives birth to an
entertainment industry.390 What counts as “rational,” then, is governed by the material interests of
industrial, capitalist society; indeed, this performance principle is what constitutes what counts as
“real.” But as we noted in chapter 3, Marcuse also points to a chink in the armor of the reality
principle: the role of imagination or “phantasy” and its ability to resist the strictures of the
performance principle (the late capitalist instantiation of the reality principle). The “mental forces” of
imagination and fantasy “remain essentially free from the reality principle” and thus are free to
envision the world otherwise.391 Because this was expressed by the imagination, we noted, Marcuse
saw such resistance and revolutionary intimations in the realm of art, and more specifically, in
surrealism.392 But could we not also envision tongues-speech as a kind of linguistic surrealism? If,
globally, pentecostalism is the religion of the urban poor (the “multitude”), Davis suggests, this is
because it resists the unjust structures of global capitalism, and glossolalia is the language of such
resistance — a mode of speech that remains “essentially free from the reality principle” of late
capitalist logic (and for that very reason is castigated as “mad”).393 It is the language of an
eschatological imagination that imagines the future otherwise — the foreign speech of a coming
kingdom.
 EPILOGUE

Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy

The cartoon outline has been sketched, inviting the work of other creators to attend to the details, add
color from their own rich palettes, even revise the image. In the spirit (Spirit?) of Plantinga’s “Advice
to Christian Philosophers,” my goal has been to encourage and embolden pentecostal philosophers to
articulate the unique understanding implicit in pentecostal practice. Working in the space carved out
by Reformed epistemologists and other Christian philosophers, pentecostals can make their own
unique contributions to current philosophical discussions, working unapologetically as pentecostals
whose imaginations have been informed by the embodied rhythms of pentecostal worship and
spirituality. But while I hope pentecostals can take a seat at the wider philosophical table, I hope they
won’t forget the simple, humble tables “back home.” And if, mirabile dictu, pentecostal philosophers
come to regularly wander among the dreaming spires, or at least in the vicinity of the Golden Dome
and Touchdown Jesus, I hope they will still remain philosophers who also serve their pentecostal
sisters and brothers — saints who don’t have much time for ontology or epistemology but are
nonetheless empowered by the Spirit for mission. May we see wise, faithful philosophy as an
expression of that ministry, may our philosophical reflection serve that mission, and may the
kingdom even be glimpsed in those thinking in tongues.
Name Index
Abraham, William
Adeboye, Enoch
Althouse, Peter
Anderson, Robert Mapes
Archer, Kenneth J.
Augustine
Austin, J. L.
Bacote, Vincent
Berger, Peter
Blumhofer, Ellen
Clayton, Philip
Cox, Harvey
Dabney, D. Lyle
Damasio, Anthony
Davis, Mike
Deere, Jack
Dennett, Daniel
Derrida, Jacques
Descartes, René
Dooyeweerd, Herman
Eakin, Paul John
Flanagan, Owen
Flaubert, Gustave
Gadamer, Hans-Georg
Griffin, David Ray
Gutiérrez, Gustavo
Hardt, Michael
Heidegger, Martin
Hollenweger, Walter
Husserl, Edmund
Huyssteen, J. Wentzel van
Jacobsen, Douglas
Johns, Cheryl Bridges
Kuyper, Abraham
Land, Steven J.
Lubac, Henri de
Lyotard, Jean-François
Macchia, Frank
Marcuse, Herbert
Milbank, John
Moreland, J. P.
Nañez, Rick M.
Negri, Antonio
Newman, Francisco
Olthuis, James H.
Overall, Christine
Paul
Peacocke, Arthur
Peter
Plantinga, Alvin
Plantinga, Carl
Polkinghorne, John
Poloma, Margaret
Rice, Andrew
Roberts, Robert C.
Sanders, Cheryl J.
Scott, Ian
Searle, John
Smith, Christian
Taylor, Charles
Vanhoozen, Kevin
Velleman, David
Wacker, Grant
Ward, Graham
Westphal, Merold
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
Wolterstorff, Nicholas
Yong, Amos
Subject Index
Aesthetic, pentecostal
Affections
Affective prefocusing
Assemblies of God
Azusa Street revival
Bethel Pentecostal Tabernacle
Canadian Theological Society
Canonical theism
Charismatic movement
Classical Pentecostalism
Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.)
Cleveland school, the
Cognitive fundamentalism
Cognitive science
Cognitive unconscious
Cognitivism
Concepts
Conflict of interpretations
Correlationism
Cosmology
Divine action
Dualism
Eastern Orthodoxy
Embodiment
Emotion; and film
Emotionalism
Eschatology
Experience
Feminist philosophy
Glossolalia; manual. See also Xenolalia
Healing
Hermeneutics. See also Legitimate sectarian hermeneutic
Imagination. See also Pneumatological imagination
Laws of nature
Legitimate sectarian hermeneutic
Liminality
Liturgy. See Worship
Miracles
Music
Narrative. See Story
Narrative causality
Naturalism; enchanted; metaphysical; methodological; varieties of. See also Supernaturalism
Pacifism
Participatory ontology
Pauline epistemology
pentecostal (small-p), defined
Perspectivalism
Phenomenology
Philosophical anthropology; cognitivist
Philosophical theology
Philosophy, history of
Pneumatological imagination
Pragmatism
Primitivism
Prophecy
Prosperity gospel
Psychoanalysis
Rationalism, critique of
Reformed epistemology
Saul’s armor
Semiotics
Social imaginary. See also Worldview
Society for Pentecostal Studies
Society of Christian Philosophers
Speaking in tongues. See Glossolalia
Speech act theory
Spirits
Spiritual gifts
Spiritual warfare
Spirituality, pentecostal; carried in practices; as a form of life (Wittgenstein); as interpretation; and
pentecostal worldview; relation to pentecostal philosophy; relation to theology; relation to
worldview; as sacramental
Story; as narrative knowledge
Supernaturalism; anti-; hyper-; interventionist; naive; noninterventionist
Testimony
Theology; as grammar; relation to philosophy
Third Wave
Verstehen (understanding)
Virtue epistemology
Wesleyan tradition
Worldview; pentecostal. See also Social imaginary
World Christianity
Worship; body essential to; philosophical anthropology implicit in; relation to thinking
Xenolalia. See also Glossolalia
 1

A version of that 1994 paper in Calgary later appeared as James K. A. Smith, “How to Avoid Not
Speaking: Attestations,” in Knowing Other-wise: Philosophy on the Threshold of Spirituality, ed.
James H. Olthuis, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy Series (Bronx, NY: Fordham University
Press, 1997), pp. 217-34; the 1995 paper presented at McGill later appeared as Smith, “Fire from
Heaven: The Hermeneutics of Heresy,” Journal of TAK 20 (1996): 13-31.
2

I’ve already done something like this “apologetic” work in James K. A. Smith, “Scandalizing
Theology: A Pentecostal Response to Noll’s Scandal,” Pneuma: Journal of the Society for Pentecostal
Studies 19 (1997): 225-38, and more recently in “Thinking in Tongues: The Past and Future of
Pentecostal Theology,” First Things, April 2008, pp. 27-31.
3

Those unaware of Pentecostal scholarship will find that a lively conversation has developed over the
past forty years, beginning with the founding of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, which now
includes “tracks” in biblical studies, theology, history, ecumenism, missions, practical theology,
religion and culture, and (since 2002) philosophy. Similar societies have been formed in Asia,
Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and there is a Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements unit within
the American Academy of Religion. Scholarship is published in a global network of scholarly
journals that includes Pneuma: Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, the Journal of
Pentecostal Theology, the Asian Journal of Pentecostal Studies, the Journal of the European
Pentecostal Theological Association, Australasian Pentecostal Studies, and others. Ph.D. programs in
Pentecostal studies can be found at the University of Birmingham, the Free University of Amsterdam,
and the Regent University School of Divinity.
4

Unfortunately this seems to be the thrust of Rick M. Nañez, Full Gospel, Fractured Minds? A Call to
Use God’s Gift of Intellect (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), which seems to lament that Pentecostals
aren’t evangelicals in the mold of Mark Noll. While I have the utmost respect for Noll and the cadre
of evangelical scholars of which he is the doyen, here I’m suggesting that Pentecostal scholarship is
not just “evangelical” scholarship + a pneumatology, but that there is a unique “genius” implicit in
Pentecostal spirituality that should yield a distinct and integral philosophy. As Terry Cross helpfully
and illustratively puts it, Pentecostals are not just providing the “relish” for the evangelical “main
course.” See Cross, “The Rich Feast of Theology: Can Pentecostals Bring the Main Course or Only
the Relish?” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 16 (2000): 27-47.
5

See especially D. Lyle Dabney, “Saul’s Armor: The Problem and Promise of Pentecostal Theology
Today,” Pneuma: Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 23 (2001): 115-46, at pp. 116-17. For a
similar methodological manifesto, see Kenneth J. Archer, “A Pentecostal Way of Doing Theology:
Method and Manner,” International Journal of Systematic Theology (2007): 1-14. Below we will have
to return to cognate issues of catholicity — how a uniquely Pentecostal theology relates to Christian
theology more generally; or, in other words, how this vision for a “Pentecostal philosophy” could be
nonsectarian.
6
Gustavo Gutiérrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis, 1984). For a more direct and explicit engagement with Gutiérrez from a Pentecostal
perspective, see Eldin Villafañe, The Liberating Spirit: Toward an Hispanic American Pentecostal
Social Ethic (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), especially pp. 165ff.
7

The theme of “maturity” seems to emerge in a number of discussions about Pentecostal theology and
scholarship. The latent assumption is that Pentecostalism is inherently immature and childish, an
emotional form of Christianity that needs to “grow up” and be rational — which seems to be equated
with adopting the regnant paradigms in other Christian traditions, particularly evangelical models.
Below I will suggest that Pentecostal thought can undergo a “maturation” process without having to
become something else.
8

This is an important point made by Allan Anderson, Spreading Fires: The Missionary Nature of Early
Pentecostalism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2007), p. 4: “Pentecostalism is not a movement that had a
distinct beginning in the USA or anywhere else, or a movement that is based on a particular doctrine
— it is a movement or rather a series of movements that took several years and several different
formative events to emerge. Pentecostalism then as now is a polynucleated and variegated
phenomenon.” Cornelis van der Laan recounts a story with a similar exhortation: “When the
Pentecostal assembly of Amsterdam in 1981 commemorated its seventy-fifth anniversary, an
American missionary recalled how the Pentecostal message started in the United States and from
there came to Europe. The next speaker was Emmanuel Schuurman, the oldest Dutch Pentecostal
pioneer still alive. The aged warrior corrected his American colleague by stating that Pentecost did
not come from America, but from heaven.” Cornelis van der Laan, Sectarian against His Will: Gerrit
Roelof Polman and the Birth of Pentecostalism in the Netherlands (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press,
1991), p. 1.
9

For theological backgrounds, see classic studies by Donald W. Dayton, Theological Roots of
Pentecostalism (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1987), and Walter J. Hollenweger, The Pentecostals
(London: SCM, 1972). On Azusa Street and its aftermath, see Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early
Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), and Cecil M.
Robeck, The Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement
(Nashville: Nelson, 2006), though one should note Anderson’s concern about “Azusacentrism.” For a
classic account of the emergence of a “classical” Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God,
see Edith L. Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American
Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
10

Robert P. Menzies, Empowered for Witness: The Spirit in Luke-Acts (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic
Press, 1991), and Frank D. Macchia, Baptized in the Spirit: A Global Pentecostal Theology (Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), pp. 75-85.
11

For a synopsis, see Peter D. Hocken, “Charismatic Movement,” in The New International Dictionary
of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, ed. Stanley Burgess (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002),
pp. 477-519. See also Michael P. Hamilton, ed., The Charismatic Movement (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1975).
12

See Douglas Jacobsen, Thinking in the Spirit: Theologies of the Early Pentecostal Movement
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 8-12.
13

See Kilian McDonnell, “Improbable Conversations: The International Classical Pentecostal/Roman

Catholic Dialogue,” Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 17 (1995): 163-88.
14

In this sense, I’m using the term “pentecostal” in a way that is similar to Mark Cartledge’s use of the
term “charismatic” in Encountering the Spirit: The Charismatic Tradition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis,
2006), p. 18 and passim. Cartledge reserves “Pentecostal” and “Pentecostalism” for specific
denominations. I have opted to not simply use the term “charismatic” since the lexical range of the
term seems just a bit too expansive such that a “charismatic philosophy” might simply be taken to be
an “enthusiastic” philosophy; in this respect, I think “pentecostal philosophy” is more immediately
descriptive.
15

Cp. Hollenweger ’s final chapter of The Pentecostals: “Practice as a Theological Statement,” pp. 497-
511. More recently, Steven J. Land has sought to honor pentecostalism as a spirituality and to see that
spirituality and its practices as theology (see Land, Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the
Kingdom, Journal of Pentecostal Theology Supplement 1 [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993],
pp. 15-57). Cartledge also describes a charismatic “spirituality” as something “akin to a ‘worldview’ ”
(Encountering the Spirit, p. 27).
16

I grant that the prospect for a distinctly pentecostal philosophy assumes, and is indebted to, wider
projects that have articulated the possibility of Christian philosophy. I can float the rather outlandish
idea of a pentecostal philosophy only because philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas
Wolterstorff, Eleonore Stump, and C. Stephen Evans have already laid the groundwork by articulating
and defending the shape of a Christian philosophy more generally. In this respect, I should also note
that, for the most part, the renaissance in “Christian philosophy” has largely amounted to a
renaissance in merely “theistic” philosophy. Insofar as the more specific aspects of a distinctly
Christian philosophy remain underdeveloped, the more specific notion of a pentecostal philosophy
will seem proportionately outlandish. (My thanks to Del Ratzsch for a helpful conversation on this
point.)
17

On Reformed epistemology, see Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, eds., Faith and
Rationality: Reason and Belief and God (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), and
Kelly James Clark, Return to Reason: A Critique of Enlightenment Evidentialism, and a Defense of
Reason and Belief in God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990). I don’t mean to suggest overlapping
intuitions between pentecostal philosophy and Reformed epistemology, though one should note the
important role of the Spirit in Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000), chapter 8.
 18

In chapter 2 I will distinguish this from the task of pentecostal theology, though I’m not concerned
with neat and tidy boundaries between the two.
19

Land, Pentecostal Spirituality, p. 13. Cartledge describes charismatic spirituality as a framework of

narrative, symbols, and praxis (Encountering the Spirit, pp. 28-30).
20

Granted, classic Pentecostals will not be entirely comfortable with “ritual” language, but for an
analysis of pentecostal spirituality through the lens of ritual studies, from a pentecostal perspective,
see Daniel Albrecht, Rites in the Spirit: A Ritual Approach to Pentecostal /Charismatic Spirituality
(Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999). For an analysis of Catholic charismatic spirituality, see
Thomas J. Csordas, The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), and Csordas, Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual
Life of a Religious Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
21

In chapter 2 it will become clear that I am indebted to Charles Taylor and Robert Brandom for this
way of formulating the project.
22

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York:
Macmillan, 1958), §23. So perhaps, paradoxically, I am offering a “culturallinguistic” account of
pentecostal spirituality despite the fact that it seems to be a quintessential example of what George
Lindbeck would describe as an “experiential-expressive” religious framework (Lindbeck, The Nature
of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984], p. 16).
23

On this score, see the work of Csordas noted above and Donald Miller, Global Pentecostalism: The
New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), which
also includes a DVD of pentecostal worship and ministry.
24

As employed by Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1977). For a development of this notion with respect to pentecostalism, see
Albrecht, Rites in the Spirit; Craig Scandrett-Leatherman, “Can Social Scientists Dance? Participating
in Science, Spirit, and Social Reconstruction as an Anthropologist and Afropentecostal,” in Science
and the Spirit: A Pentecostal Engagement with the Sciences, ed. James K. A. Smith and Amos Yong
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); and Margaret Poloma, “Glossolalia, Liminality, and
Empowered Kingdom Building: A Sociological Perspective,” in Speaking in Tongues: Multi-
Disciplinary Perspectives, ed. Mark Cartledge (Milton Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 2006), pp. 169-73.
25

Perhaps the marginality of pentecostal spirituality is most intensely seen in the serpent-handling
tradition in the Appalachians, which takes seriously the pentecostal epilogue to Mark’s Gospel: “And
these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with
new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them;
they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover” (Mark 16:17-18 KJV). For a comprehensive
discussion, see Ralph W. Hood, Jr., and W. Paul Williamson, Them That Believe: The Power and
Meaning of the Christian Serpent-Handling Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2008).
26

I think this encounter is also mutually beneficial insofar as grappling with philosophy of language
becomes an occasion for pentecostals to critically reflect upon their experience as well as the
institutional frameworks in which such a practice is embedded.
27

One can see a similar challenge for social scientific accounts of pentecostal spirituality. See Hood and
Williamson’s delineation of the problem with “empiricist-analytic psychology” and their proposal
for a hermeneutic and phenomenological approach in Them That Believe, appendix 3, pp. 247-56.
28

At the conclusion of chapter 6 I’ll explore this “liminality” of pentecostal experience as a mode of
what David Bromley describes as “spiritual edgework” in Bromley, “On Spiritual Edgework: The
Logic of Extreme Ritual Performances,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 46 (2007): 287-
303.
29

Steven J. Land, Rick D. Moore, and John Christopher Thomas, “Editorial,” Journal of Pentecostal
Theology 1 (1992): 5.
30

I will attend to the dynamics of pentecostal narrative epistemology in chapter 3 below. For a Christian
philosophical reflection on the importance of narrative, see Kelly James Clark, “Story-Shaped Lives
in Big Fish,” in Faith, Film, and Philosophy, ed. R. Douglas Geivett and James S. Spiegel (Downers
Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2007), pp. 37-51.
31

Walter Hollenweger, “The Pentecostal Elites and the Pentecostal Poor: A Missed Dialogue?” in
Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture, ed. Karla Poewe (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1994), p. 213.
32

This has been the burden of Kenneth Archer ’s work on story as the central “hermeneutic” for
pentecostal spirituality and, hence, for pentecostal theology. See Kenneth J. Archer, “Pentecostal
Story: The Hermeneutical Filter for the Making of Meaning,” Pneuma: Journal of the Society for
Pentecostal Studies 26 (2004): 36-59. Thus he later cautions against Pentecostal theologians
abandoning such narrative intuitions in their theologizing, cautioning that, even if their task might be
to “explain” the story, it is important to appreciate the irreducibility of story. In short, we need a
pentecostal theological methodology that resonates with the narrative character of pentecostal
spirituality. Thus Archer cautions, “In explaining, Pentecostals may opt for modernistic
epistemological modes that are inherently hostile to Pentecostal practices of story-telling and
testimony” (Archer, “A Pentecostal Way,” p. 6). I’m trying to heed the same admonition in developing
a pentecostal philosophy.
33

On this point, I think a pentecostal philosophy resonates with a critique of philosophical methodology
that has been articulated by feminist philosophers who have argued for the significance of narrative
and taking seriously our “standpoint.” In their critique of the methodological status quo, these
feminist critiques make room for autobiography and narrative testimony. For related discussion, see
Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Hilde Lindemann Nelson, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Susan Sherwin, “Philosophical Methodology and
Feminist Methodology: Are They Compatible?” in Feminist Perspectives: Philosophical Essays on
Method and Morals, ed. Lorraine Code et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); and most
winsomely, Christine Overall, “Writing What Comes Naturally?” Hypatia 23 (2008): 227-35.
34

In Amos Yong, Discerning the Spirit(s): A Pentecostal-Charismatic Contribution to Christian

Theology of Religions (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), and Yong, Theology and Down
Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007),
each chapter opens with a narrative testimony. Similarly, Macchia’s Baptized in the Spirit opens with
and intersperses testimony throughout.
35

Alvin Plantinga, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” Faith and Philosophy 1 (1984): 253-71.
(Subsequent references will be included in parentheses in the text.) One should note that this also
appears in the inaugural volume of Faith and Philosophy, the journal of the Society of Christian
Philosophers that has now grown into the leading society in its field and is an important model for
Christian academics. In some ways this spawned more specific societies such as the Evangelical
Philosophical Society (publisher of Philosophia Christi), the Wesleyan Philosophical Society, and the
Philosophy Interest Group of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. (An earlier draft of this chapter was
presented in the inaugural year of the latter.)
36

Augustine, Confessions, trans. H. Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 8.12.28.
37

However, the renaissance in Christian philosophy spawned by Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Bill
Alston, and the Society of Christian Philosophers has also been a catalyst for a renewal in Catholic
philosophical circles and the American Catholic Philosophical Association (see the work of Linda
Zagzebski, John Zeis, John Haldane, and others).
38

For a helpful commentary on the Greek text, see F. F. Bruce, The Epistles to the Colossians, to
Philemon, and to the Ephesians, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), pp. 97-99.
39

I develop this distinction in more detail in James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy:
Mapping a Post-secular Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), pp. 166-79. According to
the rubric there, what I’m here calling “theology” would be equivalent to “theology2.” In this respect,
I completely concur with Kenneth Archer ’s claim that “[w]orship is our [i.e., pentecostal] primary
way of doing theology” (Kenneth J. Archer, “A Pentecostal Way of Doing Theology: Method and
Manner,” International Journal of Systematic Theology [2007]: 9). This is why I described worship as
“theology1” in Introducing Radical Orthodoxy.
40

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1952), §373: “(Theology as grammar).”
41

For my critique of this notion of an “autonomous, neutral” philosophy that operates on the basis of
“pure, unaided human reason” (including a critique of Plantinga’s version), see James K. A. Smith,
“The Art of Christian Atheism: Faith and Philosophy in Early Heidegger,” Faith and Philosophy 14
(1997): 71-81.
42

One of the laudatory elements of Plantinga’s “Advice” is to remind us that Christian philosophers
also do their work for the sake of the church. This is reemphasized by Merold Westphal in his
“Taking Plantinga Seriously,” Faith and Philosophy 16 (1999): 173-81, where he calls on Christian
philosophers to “close the gap between metaphysics and spirituality” (p. 180) and develop “a different
way of doing metaphysics, one in which metaphysical reflection grows . . . directly out of practices of
prayer and public action” (p. 181). While Plantinga’s work provides a seminal model, I would
recommend Westphal’s work in Christian philosophy as another important resource and example of
integral Christian philosophy.
43

I have provided a more detailed account of the relationship between theology and philosophy in my
“Scandalizing Theology: A Pentecostal Response to Noll’s Scandal,” Pneuma: Journal of the Society
for Pentecostal Studies 19 (1997): 225-38.
44

I’m passing over significant differences of methodological orientation within “philosophy” itself
(e.g., the difference between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy). In some ways, the distinction
between theology and philosophy might be as fuzzy (or as difficult to delineate) as the distinction
between analytic and continental philosophy. They are both the sort of distinction that almost anyone
can see but almost no one can articulate well.
45

For further discussion of this point, see Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologie und Theologie (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1970) / “Phenomenology and Theology,” trans. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo, in
Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 39-62. For a fuller discussion of Heidegger ’s
understanding of theology, see my Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation,
Radical Orthodoxy Series (New York: Routledge, 2002), chapter 3.
46

For a helpful analysis of the relationship between theology and philosophy as sketched here, see
Herman Dooyeweerd, In the Twilight of Western Thought: Studies in the Pretended Autonomy of
Philosophical Thought, Collected Works B4, ed. James K. A. Smith (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen
Press, 1999), pp. 91-106.
47

This sentiment expresses what I think of as the “Cleveland school” in pentecostal theology. As I see it,
the questions I’m raising here are parallel to the broader historical and theological question of how
pentecostalism relates to evangelicalism (or, to cite an even more specific case, how one views the
inclusion of a Pentecostal denomination like the Assemblies of God in the National Association of
Evangelicals [NAE]). One school of thought (the “Springfield school?”) has viewed pentecostalism as
something like evangelicalism with a special accent on pneumatology. This school views the
assimilation of Pentecostals into the NAE, and evangelicalism more generally, as a positive
development consistent with the “evangelical” nature of Pentecostalism. As Pentecostals were thus
absorbed into an evangelical “mainstream,” Cheryl Bridges Johns notes, “the enemies of the
Evangelical peer group became the enemies of the Pentecostal movement. Evangelical battles became
Pentecostal battles” (Johns, “The Adolescence of Pentecostalism: In Search of a Legitimate Sectarian
Identity,” Pneuma: Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 17 [1995]: 7). However, there is
another school of thought, which I’m calling the “Cleveland school” since I see its catalytic epicenter
located at the Church of God Theological Seminary in Cleveland, Tennessee — though one could
argue that this is developing an emphasis seen in the work of Walter Hollenweger (see Johns, p. 4 n.
4). According to the Cleveland school, the assimilation of Pentecostals into evangelicalism represents
a selling of their birthright and a compromising of the distinctives of pentecostal spirituality. While
I’m not a card-carrying member, so to speak, my project here has deep sympathies with the Cleveland
school.
48

I think one can see something like this sort of “synthesis” in the recent work of J. P. Moreland (see his
Kingdom Triangle: Recover the Christian Mind, Renovate the Soul, Restore the Spirit’s Power [Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 2007]). While I applaud Moreland’s newfound appreciation for the supernatural,
and his abandonment of cessationism, I don’t think he has let this charismatic openness impinge upon
the rationalist models of “knowledge” appropriated from evangelicalism. In short, I would suggest
that if Moreland followed through the implications of his openness to the Spirit’s power, he should
also revisit his epistemological and ontological commitments.
49

Of course, there would be an even more incredulous response from the broader philosophical
community, who are generally skeptical about Christian philosophy and whose criticisms would be
intensified when faced with the proposal for a pentecostal philosophy. My response to the broader
philosophical community would follow the same lines as Plantinga’s apologia and need not be taken
up here.
50

This is related to Plantinga’s later work on the concept of “warrant.” See his trilogy from Oxford
University Press: Warrant: The Current Debate (1993), Warrant and Proper Function (1993), and
Warranted Christian Belief (2000). A broader version of this sort of argument can be found in
George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998).
 51

Plantinga’s “Advice” was originally delivered at Notre Dame.

52

In this light, I was impressed by John Christopher Thomas’s testimony, in the preface to his The Devil,
Disease, and Deliverance: Origins of Illness in New Testament Thought, Journal of Pentecostal
Theology Supplement 13 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), p. 7, where he shared that he
determines his research projects by prayer.
53

Westphal, “Taking Plantinga Seriously,” pp. 174-75.

54

As noted above, by a “pentecostal” philosophy I do not mean, of course, some kind of official
“denominational” philosophy, but rather a philosophy that begins from pentecostal or charismatic
prephilosophical commitments. In “Advice,” Plantinga employs only the broad term “Christian” (and
even broader “theistic”). Elsewhere, however, Plantinga speaks of a distinctly “Reformed
epistemology.” So it seems to me that the more specific project of a “pentecostal” philosophy is not
excluded by his program for a Christian philosophy. Indeed, we might ask whether a philosophy
could ever be simply “Christian.” Would it not always already be “Reformed” or “Wesleyan” or
“Catholic,” etc.?
55

This is somewhat akin to what Donald Dayton describes as the “gestalt” of early pentecostal theology
(Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1987], pp. 16-17).
However, Dayton’s account is still quite narrowly focused on specifically doctrinal or theological
aspects of pentecostalism. We’ll return to these issues in chapter 2.
56

I first articulated something like this outline of a pentecostal worldview in James K. A. Smith, “What
Hath Cambridge to Do with Azusa Street? Radical Orthodoxy and Pentecostal Theology in
Conversation,” Pneuma: Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 25 (2003): 97-114. I have since
slightly revised the formulation.
57

As I’ll unpack in chapter 2, I take the central point of the narrative of Acts 2 to be Peter ’s courage and
willingness to recognize in these “strange” phenomena the operation of the Spirit and declare it to be
a work of God. To declare “this is that” (Acts 2:16) was to be open to God working in unexpected
ways. There will be some ironic tension, I concede, between this reading of Pentecost as openness to
God doing something “new” and the Pentecostal primitivism that takes itself to be recovering the
spiritual practices of the first century. (Such primitivism seems to be shared by classical Pentecostals
and third wave charismatics, not Catholic or mainline charismatics.)
58

In Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical phenomenology, to be open to the Other is precisely to be open to

novelty, to something new.
59
As will become clear below, by “nondualistic” I mean an ontological model that does not denigrate
materiality as evil. Pentecostal spirituality is clearly predicated on a duality between material and
immaterial (“spiritual”) entities (the latter including angels and demons). I will generally reserve the
term “dualism” for positions that not only make this distinction but also devalue and denigrate the
material.
60

Here again I think J. P. Moreland’s project is an interesting case in point. I suggest that while he has
come to embrace something like a pentecostal worldview, he has not yet appreciated how aspects of
that spirituality might impinge upon the philosophical commitments he has adopted over the course
of his (precharismatic) work.
61

Such a line of research would do well to return to Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Testimony,” in
Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis S. Mudge (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), pp. 119-54.
Ricoeur opens by asking (and answering) a question of relevance to pentecostal spirituality: “What
sort of philosophy makes a problem of testimony? I answer: A philosophy for which the question of
the absolute is a proper question, a philosophy which seeks to join an experience of the absolute to the
idea of the absolute” (p. 119). Epistemological (and political) questions around “testimony” could
also facilitate a pentecostal philosophical engagement with the history of philosophy (e.g., with
Hume, for whom the question of testimony is at the heart of his critique of miracles). Furthermore,
this line of inquiry would be another point of contact with feminist scholarship, particularly the work
of Julia Kristeva. For a relevant discussion, see Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
62

Consider, for instance, Amos Yong’s engagement with Charles Sanders Peirce’s unique rendition of
pragmatism in Yong, Spirit-Word-Community: Theological Hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 151-65.
63

For instance, if there are important resonances between German pietism and pentecostalism (see
Frank D. Macchia, Spirituality and Social Liberation: The Message of the Blumhardts in the Light of
Wuerttemberg Pietism [Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993]), then pentecostals should be interested
in the voices of countermodernity in the work of Hamann and Jacobi. Or, given the affective
epistemology implicit in pentecostal spirituality, we should expect pentecostals to be engaging an
alternative Augustinian tradition in epistemology that runs through Pascal up to Heidegger. (Cp., for
instance, James R. Peters, The Logic of the Heart: Augustine, Pascal, and the Rationality of Faith
[Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009].)
64

I think a pentecostal history of philosophy would have some sympathy with Michel Foucault’s method
of historical investigation that participates in an “insurrection of subjugated knowledges.” See
Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault /Habermas Debate, ed.
Michael Kelly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 17-46.
65

Consider, for instance, the role Reformed epistemology played in retrieving the importance of
Thomas Reid for contemporary epistemology. See Nicholas Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid and the Story
of Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
66

As seen, for instance, in Norman Geisler, Miracles and the Modern Mind (Grand Rapids: Baker,
1992).
67

This is not meant to be a way of insulating pentecostal experience from critical analysis. However,
any critique must also honor the unique nature of pentecostal spirituality as a spirituality and not
simply castigate it for not being a form of piety that is more “intellectual” or “evangelical.” In
general, I am not engaging in an apologetic defense of pentecostal spirituality in this book.
68

This terse phrase, laden with pronouns, was the title of a famous tract by Pentecostal evangelist Aimee
Semple McPherson: This Is That: Personal Experiences, Sermons, and Writings (Los Angeles: Echo
Park Evangelistic Association, 1923). See an excerpt in Douglas Jacobsen, ed., A Reader in
Pentecostal Theology: Voices from the First Generation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2006), pp. 185-96.
69

For a classic discussion, see Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics,
ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974). The fact that there is a plurality of
interpretations going on here — a state of affairs that seems quite undeniable — does not mean that
all interpretations are equal, or that Peter is offering just “one more” interpretation. Peter takes his
interpretation to be the right interpretation, the true interpretation (and I agree with him). Recognizing
the hermeneutic nature of Peter ’s claim does not deflate it as a truth claim. For relevant discussion
about the hermeneutical issues here, see James K. A. Smith, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical
Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000), especially pp.
159-84.
70

Somewhat akin to Aimee Semple McPherson’s This Is That, a classic Pentecostal work on tongues
took up this later question: Carl Brumback, What Meaneth This? A Pentecostal Answer to a
Pentecostal Question (Springfield, MO: Gospel Publishing House, 1947).
71

The conflict of interpretations could be a helpful lens through which to read the narrative of Acts, as a
series of episodes in which phenomena are accounted for differently — and in response to which we
see different “receptions” (e.g., at Mars Hill [Acts 17:32]; Festus in Acts 25).
72

On charismatic spirituality as (and not just “having”) a unique hermeneutic, see Mark Cartledge,
Encountering the Spirit: The Charismatic Tradition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006), pp. 125-31.
73

Indeed, we might say that the wine theory of Acts 2:13 was the first naturalistic account of religious
phenomena — a proto-Daniel Dennett.
 74

Cheryl Bridges Johns, “The Adolescence of Pentecostalism: In Search of a Legitimate Sectarian

Identity,” Pneuma: Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 17 (1995): 3-17, at p. 12,
summarizing Walter Brueggemann, “The Legitimacy of a Sectarian Hermeneutic,” Horizons in
Biblical Theology 7 (1985): 1-42.
75

One of the burdens of Brueggemann’s argument is to show that the imperial hermeneutic is no less
sectarian (Brueggemann, “Legitimacy,” p. 22).
76

Johns, “Adolescence,” p. 13.

77

Johns, “Adolescence,” pp. 16-17. One might suggest that Plantinga’s project also calls into question
the sectarian/nonsectarian distinction. A Christian philosophy is legitimate precisely because every
philosophy is, in a sense, “sectarian.”
78

Edith Blumhofer summarizes early Pentecostal experience as an experience of “divine encounter”

that “infused the present with cosmic significance, offered tangible solutions for every pressing
problem, provided a community of likeminded believers, and introduced meaning, certainty, and
mission into even the most humble existence.” Edith L. Blumhofer, “Pentecost in My Soul”:
Explorations in the Meaning of Pentecostal Experience in the Early Assemblies of God (Springfield,
MO: Gospel Publishing House, 1989), p. 16.
79

As will become clear below, I’m also stretching the notion of “thinking” with this already-stretched
metaphor. Cp. Stathis Gourgouris, Does Literature Think? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2003).
80

However, Douglas Jacobsen is surely right to emphasize that, contrary to the popular myth of
pentecostals as emotivists lacking any theology, in fact theology is central to pentecostal practice. As
he summarizes, “There is no question that spiritual affections are hugely important within
pentecostalism, but that emphasis on experiential faith does not require a concomitant diminution of
the intellect or a rejection of theology. In fact, one might argue that, apart from theology,
pentecostalism would not exist. It is not necessarily the uniqueness of their experiences that set
pentecostals apart; it is the way those experiences are theologically categorized and defined”
(Jacobsen, introduction to Reader in Pentecostal Theology, p. 5).
81

Thus Jacobsen’s Reader in Pentecostal Theology finds its resource mainly in sermons. One might
suggest that, in this sense, pentecostal theology is a liturgical theology par excellence. Jacobsen’s
anthology of early Pentecostal theology well conveys its kerygmatic matrix. This is theology forged
at the pulpit and in prayer, in the heat of revival and swelter of the camp meeting. One might say that it
is a theology that bears the stamp of its liturgical origins (Pentecostals might be a tad skittish about
the “liturgical” bit, though that’s changing). In this Reader we find a collection of pastor-theologians
who, though they lacked the imprimatur of the German academy, were nonetheless engaged in
serious theological reflection on the work of the Spirit. It is non-Pentecostals who impose such
caricatures and false dichotomies on Pentecostal and charismatic traditions. While early Pentecostal
theology could not marshal the categories of academic theology, it was not therefore essentially
atheological or anti-intellectual (though, admittedly, anti-intellectualism — so common to the
American psyche in general — also manifests itself within Pentecostalism).
82

As Land rightly comments, “in a postmodern era perhaps the dichotomy of reason and emotion,
which has characterized much of American historiography, can be transcended, and new, more
wholistic, integrative categories devised. Pentecostals, perhaps more than any other group, came to
recognize the dangers of mere emotionalism very early in the movement” (Steven J. Land,
Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom, Journal of Pentecostal Theology Supplement 1
[Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993], pp. 122-23). Reflection on emotion would be another
appropriate and important line of research for pentecostal philosophy. Such a trajectory would do
well to begin with the work of Christian philosopher Robert C. Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of
Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), but will also find an important
dialogue partner in feminist thought. See, for example, Alison Jagger, “Love and Knowledge:
Emotion in Feminist Epistemology,” in Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being
and Knowing, ed. Alison Jagger and Susan Bordo (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989),
pp. 145-71.
83

Land, Pentecostal Spirituality, p. 13.

84

Land, Pentecostal Spirituality, p. 133.

85

Cartledge also deploys this term to get at something of the “essence” of charismatic spirituality; for
pentecostals and charismatics, he observes, “God is encountered in the preaching of Scripture, in the
community of the Church as people have fellowship together and in many events within the life of the
worshipping and witnessing church because the Spirit can and does ‘enliven’ all things within the
kingdom of God. The ways in which all these features can be located within a framework are akin to a
‘worldview’ and provide a set of lenses through which the world is viewed and by which reality
makes sense” (Encountering the Spirit, p. 27).
86

I develop these themes in more detail in James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship,
Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), pp. 27-34.
87

James H. Olthuis, “On Worldviews,” Christian Scholar’s Review 14 (1985): 155.

88

See Nicholas Wolterstorff, Reason within the Bounds of Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984).
89
For further discussion of this notion of faith, not as assent to propositions, but as a pretheoretical trust
and commitment, see James H. Olthuis, “Dooyeweerd on Religion and Faith,” in The Legacy of
Herman Dooyeweerd, ed. C. T. McIntire (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), pp. 21-40.
90

I explore this in much more detail in James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a
Post-secular Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004).
91

Making this case was the burden of Plantinga’s “Advice to Christian Philosophers” and, more
expansively, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
92

For the classic discussion, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), §§31-32. I discuss this in more detail in Desiring the
Kingdom, pp. 63-71.
93

Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 23.
94

Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, p. 25.

95

Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, p. 23.

96

Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, p. 26.

97

Amos Yong, Spirit-Word-Community: Theological Hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 119-49.
98

Yong, Spirit-Word-Community, p. 129.

99

Yong, Spirit-Word-Community, p. 131.

100

Yong, Spirit-Word-Community, p. 149.

101

This is consistent with Yong’s later account of the relationship between Christian beliefs and practices
— and how doctrine emerges from practices. See Amos Yong, Hospitality and the Other: Pentecost,
Christian Practices, and the Neighbor (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008), pp. 38-64.
102

In putting it this way, I slightly disagree with Michael Wilkinson’s account of the relation between
Pentecostal theology and practice. As he puts it, “Despite some of the vast differences among
Pentecostal and charismatic Christians, there is an underlying narrative, a shared spirituality, a set of
beliefs about a ‘normative social order.’ This conception of ‘how life ought to be’ has given rise to a
set of practices and social institutions that constitutes and directs social life for these Pentecostal
charismatic Christians.” See Michael Wilkinson, “Pentecostalism in Canada: An Introduction,” in
Canadian Pentecostalism: Transition and Transformation, ed. Michael Wilkinson (Montreal and
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), p. 7, citing Christian Smith, Moral, Believing
Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). I completely concur that there is a shared
narrative and spirituality we can describe globally as “pentecostal.” Where I differ is in the relation of
beliefs and practices. While Wilkinson sees the beliefs “giving rise to” practices, I’m suggesting that,
in some significant sense, it is the practices that give rise to (articulated) beliefs.
103

As noted in chapter 1, it is my hope that what I delineate as the elements of a pentecostal worldview
will have a global validity about them; that is, I believe these aspects of pentecostal spirituality would
be tacitly affirmed by pentecostal and charismatic practices throughout world Christianity. In this
sense, “pentecostalism” is a kind of “global culture.” That said, I also appreciate Michael Wilkinson’s
caution: “It is often thought that Pentecostalism is a global culture. Yet that means different things to
different people. It is usually claimed that Pentecostals share a common culture characterized by
Spirit baptism and speaking in tongues, healing, dreams and visions, and prophecy. It is often thought
that Pentecostalism is experiential, biblical, egalitarian, and motivated by mission. While this may be
true, it cannot be assumed that these characteristics look the same in all cultures. Specifically, these
cultural qualities of Pentecostalism also intermingle with the local cultures in which they take root.”
Wilkinson, “Pentecostalism in Canada,” p. 6.
104

I have done a similar exegesis of the practices of historic Christian worship in Desiring the Kingdom,
chapter 5.
105

This, of course, does not at all translate into some kind of primacy for “Pentecostal” denominations.
In fact, I would argue that classical Pentecostal denominations compromise the catholicity of
charismatic Christianity; however, I’ll not make that argument here.
106

On cessationism and the evangelical tradition, see Jon Ruthven, On the Cessation of the Charismata:
The Protestant Polemic on Postbiblical Miracles (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993).
107

Or, to put this otherwise, there are five pentecostal distinctives of an authentically Christian
worldview. So I don’t take these five elements to be exhaustive of a “Christian” worldview. For an
exposition of the elements of a Christian worldview implicit in Christian worship more broadly, see
my Desiring the Kingdom, chapter 5.
108

See Ogbu U. Kalu, “Preserving a Worldview: Pentecostalism in the African Maps of the Universe,”
Pneuma: Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 24 (2002): 110-37.
109
See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd
rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 1993), pp. 300-307. One could also describe this openness to surprise
in terms of Jacques Derrida’s account of the “invention of the other” in “Psyche: Inventions of the
Other,” trans. Catherine Porter, in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 25-65. This particular case, admittedly, is
complicated. On one level this mode of the Spirit’s advent was not “expected” by the disciples
gathered in that upper room. So it came as a surprise. On the other hand, the narrative and story of the
people of Israel, including Joel’s prophecy, enabled them to narrate this surprising advent in terms of
a particular significance. Indeed, the surprising descent of the Spirit had a retroactive effect, making
ancient Scriptures come to life in a new way.
110

This is not meant to provide a blanket affirmation of all such claims. Certainly this aspect of
pentecostal spirituality is open to abuse. For a novelistic account of this, see Tim Parks, Tongues of
Flame (London: Heinemann, 1985).
111

Such openness, of course, has its risks and dangers. For a philosophical analysis, see Richard
Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London: Routledge, 2002). For a
theological caution about charismatic experience in particular, see We Believe in the Holy Spirit: A
Report of the Doctrine Commission of the General Synod of the Church of England (London: Church
House Publishing, 1991).
112

Peter Berger suggests that a secularized world is an essentially “surprise-free” world. See Berger, A
Rumour of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1969), p. 30.
113

Gustave Flaubert, “A Simple Heart,” in Three Tales, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 1961),
pp. 17-56.
114

Jean Morris comments that, with the “newfound sense of plenitude and unity” at the end of the story,
“the ironic charge that the name Félicité appeared to carry is dissipated.” Morris, “Félicité,” in A
Gustave Flaubert Encyclopedia, ed. Laurence M. Porter (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), p.
124.
115

Flaubert, “A Simple Heart,” p. 19.

116

Flaubert, “A Simple Heart,” p. 18.

117

“The sowing of the seed, the reaping of the harvest, the pressing of the grapes — all those familiar
things of which the Gospels speak had their place in her life. God had sanctified them in passing, so
that she loved the lambs more tenderly for love of the Lamb of God, and the doves for the sake of the
Holy Ghost.” Flaubert, “A Simple Heart,” pp. 29-30.
118

Flaubert, “A Simple Heart,” p. 30.

119

Flaubert, “A Simple Heart,” p. 49. I’m reminded here of Jean-Luc Marion’s evaluation of the
“kitschy” expressions of devotion associated with Saint-Sulpice parish in Paris, site of a bazaar of
religious merchandise. As Marion notes, such “Sulpician” art “practices, more than ‘great art,’ the
impoverishment of the image and the transfer of veneration from the image to the original. Its
unintentional arte povera assures that less than ever does it seize veneration for the sake of the image,
thus protecting it against every tyranny of the image.” Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, trans.
James K. A. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 63-64.
120

Flaubert, “A Simple Heart,” p. 50.

121

But in a beautiful scene of pastoral care near the end of the story, when Félicité wants to donate
something for the altar at the Corpus Christi feast, it is the priest — representative of “official
religion” — who allows her to place Loulou’s stuffed body on the display. “The neighbors protested
that it would not be seemly, but the curé gave his permission” (Flaubert, “A Simple Heart,” p. 53).
This brings to mind the church’s hospitality shown to Lars and his artificial companion (a sex doll) in
Lars and the Real Girl.
122

Flaubert, “A Simple Heart,” p. 53.

123

Flaubert, “A Simple Heart,” p. 56.

124

Flaubert, “A Simple Heart,” p. 39.

125

See Thomas W. Gillespie’s sketch of the dynamism of the early ecclesial community, drawing on
Paul’s epistles and the Didache, in The First Theologians: A Study in Early Christian Prophecy (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).
126

Jack Deere, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1993), p. 114. On the
centrality of Luke-Acts to specifically Pentecostal narrative identity, see Robert P. Menzies,
Empowered for Witness: The Spirit in Luke-Acts (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991),
especially part II. Granted, this retrieval of Luke’s pneumatology is, in many Pentecostal
denominations, accompanied by an ecclesiological primitivism and a penchant to recover “New
Testament Christianity.” However, I don’t see this ecclesiological primitivism as endemic to a
pentecostal worldview since the dynamics of a Lukan pneumatology are clearly affirmed by Roman
Catholic and Anglican charismatics whose ecclesiological sensibility would be opposed to any naive
primitivism or restorationism.
127

Here I think pentecostal theology is poised to make unique contributions to broader discussions.
Indeed, the Catholic charismatic movement has already impacted ecclesiology in liturgical renewal
within the Catholic tradition. For development of this claim, see the forthcoming manifesto along
these lines by Wolfgang Vondey, Beyond Pentecostalism, Pentecostal Manifesto Series (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, forthcoming). Primarily what I have in mind here is a picture of the church operating “in
the Spirit” — functioning dynamically as recipient of God’s continued gifts and activity within the
body of Christ. For a more popular but rich discussion of this, see Deere, Surprised by the Power of
the Spirit. I should “testify” that this book was crucial in my own pilgrimage and pentecostal
formation.
128

I take “culture” (the work of human “making” that elucidates the potentialities folded into creation) to
be itself part of “creation.” In distinguishing “creation” and “culture” this way, I only mean to
distinguish between “nature” and “culture.”
129

For a discussion of wider, nonpentecostal attempts to “reenchant” the world, see James K. A. Smith,
“Secularity, Globalization, and the Re-enchantment of the World,” in After Modernity? Secularity,
Globalization, and the Re-enchantment of the World, ed. James K. A. Smith (Waco, TX: Baylor
University Press, 2008), pp. 3-13.
130

For a rich articulation of just such a pneumatological theology of creation, see Amos Yong, The
Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh: Pentecostalism and the Possibility of Global Theology (Grand Rapids:
Baker Academic, 2005), pp. 267-302.
131

I unpack this in more detail in James K. A. Smith, “The Spirit, Religions, and the World as Sacrament:
A Response to Amos Yong’s Pneumatological Assist,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 15 (2007):
251-61.
132

Harvey Cox, commenting on a leading scientist’s account of the mysteries of quantum order,
confessed the following: “as I read these words it seemed a little humorous to me that even though
many western Christians and certainly most academic theologians would find the primal cosmos of
the African indigenous churches ‘primitive’ or even ‘superstitious,’ the real situation is very different.
We may be the ones who are behind the times. Perhaps modern, liberal western theology — the kind I
learned as a graduate student — has been vainly striving to reconcile religion to an allegedly
scientific worldview which is actually becoming more outdated every day. Paradoxically, the
traditional African cosmology, which the indigenous Christian churches incorporate so inventively,
may be more in tune with the ‘quantum world’ than western theology is.” Cox, Fire from Heaven: The
Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-first Century (Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), pp. 257-58. For a scientific account of “the natural” that sees room for
the emergence of spirit, see Philip Clayton, Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). We will return to these issues in more detail in chapter 4.
 133

Vincent Bacote, The Spirit in Public Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), pp. 117-48.
This would also entail (as Bacote notes, pp. 136-39) a sense of the Spirit’s more general presence and
operation in another sphere of human culture, namely, religion — even non-Christian religion. This
point, of course, has been the central contribution of Amos Yong’s work. See Yong, Discerning the
Spirit(s): A Pentecostal-Charismatic Contribution to Christian Theology of Religions, Journal of
Pentecostal Theology Supplement 20 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000) and Beyond the
Impasse: Towards a Pneumatological Theology of Religions (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003).
134

Some classical Pentecostal denominations see physical healing as an aspect of Christ’s work of
atonement. See, for example, the Assemblies of God Statement of Fundamental Truths, §12: “Divine
Healing is an integral part of the gospel. Deliverance from sickness is provided for in the atonement,
and is the privilege of all believers (Isaiah 53:4-5; Matthew 8:16-17; James 5:14-16).” See also John
Christopher Thomas, The Devil, Disease, and Deliverance: Origins of Illness in New Testament
Thought, Journal of Pentecostal Theology Supplement 13 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
1998), especially the concluding chapter.
135

See Doug Petersen, Not by Might nor by Power: A Pentecostal Theology of Social Concern in Latin
America (Oxford: Regnum, 1996), pp. 35, 97-106.
136

As noted above, pentecostal spirituality remains dualistic in a different sense insofar as it maintains an
ontological distinction between spirit and matter, and affirms the existence of immaterial entities.
137

Granted, this means something very different in the comfort of an air-conditioned megachurch in
suburban Dallas (where “prosperity” signals more consumer accumulation of luxury) as opposed to
what “prosperity” promises in famished refugee camps in Uganda. The former deserves our
criticism; the latter requires careful listening. I discuss this further in James K. A. Smith, “What’s
Right with the Prosperity Gospel?” Calvin Theological Seminary Forum (Fall 2009).
138

The most systematic development of this to date is found in Steven J. Land’s Pentecostal Spirituality,
especially pp. 125-81, where he develops this in dialogue with Jonathan Edwards. The same theme is
broached in an earlier work by Howard M. Ervin under the rubric of a “Pentecostal epistemology.”
See Ervin, “Hermeneutics: A Pentecostal Option,” Pneuma: Journal of the Society for Pentecostal
Studies 3 (1981): 11-25.
139

Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals, p. 64.

140

Land, Pentecostal Spirituality, pp. 58-121. The now classic study on early Pentecostal eschatology is
D. William Faupel, The Everlasting Gospel: The Significance of Eschatology in the Development of
Pentecostal Thought (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). For an analysis of contemporary
Pentecostal eschatology, see Peter Althouse, Spirit of the Last Days: Pentecostal Eschatology in
Conversation with Jürgen Moltmann (London: T. & T. Clark, 2003), especially pp. 61-106.
141

Peter Althouse, “Apocalyptic Discourse and a Pentecostal Vision of Canada,” in Canadian

Pentecostalism, p. 59.
142

For a helpful narrative tracing this connection between the early beginnings of the movement and
Pentecostal social theory, see Petersen, Not by Might, pp. 1-40.
143

Cheryl J. Sanders, Empowerment Ethics for a Liberated People: A Path to African American Social
Transformation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), p. 73. Cp. Cox, Fire from Heaven, p. 63.
144

Althouse, Spirit, p. 22. Crucial here is Gerald Sheppard’s account of the tension between a properly
pentecostal eschatology and the dispensationalist eschatology that many Pentecostals came to accept.
See Gerald T. Sheppard, “Pentecostalism and the Hermeneutics of Dispensationalism,” Pneuma:
Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 2 (1984): 5-34.
145

Althouse, “Apocalyptic Discourse,” p. 66.

146

As Paul Alexander has demonstrated, early Pentecostals were almost universally pacificist. See
Alexander, Pentecostals and Peacemaking: Heritage, Theology, and the 21st Century (Eugene, OR:
Pickwick, 2009) and Peace to War: Shifting Allegiances in the Assemblies of God (Telford, PA:
Cascadia/Herald, 2008). See also Joel Shuman, “Pentecost and the End of Patriotism: A Call for
Restoration of Pacifism among Pentecostal Christians,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 9 (1996): 70-
96, and Jay Beaman, Pentecostal Pacifism: The Origin, Development, and Rejection of Pacific Belief
among the Pentecostals (Hillsboro, KS: Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies, 1989).
147

This is the title of the final section of Mike Davis’s essay, “Planet of the Slums: Urban Involution and
the Informal Proletariat,” New Left Review 26 (2004): 5-34. We’ll explore this in more detail in
chapter 6 below.
148

Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001), p. 58.
149

Steven Land reminds us that this narratival hermeneutic is also eschatological: it’s not just a matter of
filling in a “back story,” but also projects a future that is envisioned by the narrative (Land,
Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom, Journal of Pentecostal Theology Supplement 1
[Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993], p. 72 n. 1). This same narratival move is then repeated by
early pentecostals in the 1900s who, confronted with strange phenomena, make sense of them by
framing them in terms of a larger narrative (viz., the biblical story) that is also ultimately
eschatological. See, for instance, Aimee Semple McPherson, “This Is That,” in A Reader in
Pentecostal Theology: Voices from the First Generation, ed. Douglas Jacobsen (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2006), pp. 186-96.
150

Land, Pentecostal Spirituality, p. 72.

151

Land, Pentecostal Spirituality, p. 73.

152

Wacker considers the basic structure and substance of early Pentecostal testimony in Heaven Below,
pp. 58-69. Testimonies (from around the world) also made up a significant part of the material
published in the Apostolic Faith, the newsletter of the Azusa Street Mission published from 1906 to
1908 (reprinted in Like as of Fire, collected by Fred T. Corum [Wilmington, MA, 1981]). Edith L.
Blumhofer ’s “Pentecost in My Soul”: Explorations in the Meaning of Pentecostal Experience in the
Early Assemblies of God (Springfield, MO: Gospel Publishing House, 1989), also collects testimonies
of first-generation Pentecostals.
153

Wacker, Heaven Below, p. 69.

154

Charles Taylor criticizes “intellectualist” models of the human person in Taylor, “To Follow a Rule
...,” in Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 45-60.
155

I use the term advisedly. One of Wacker ’s aims, it seems, is to show the extent to which Pentecostals,
despite their stated opposition to “modernism,” nonetheless deeply drunk from its well. I don’t
necessarily deny that; I would admit that pentecostalism is complex and variegated on this score. In
seeing its implicit account of knowledge as “countermodern,” I have in mind John Milbank’s reading
of the “radical pietists” Hamann and Jacobi as modern critics of modernity. See John Milbank,
“Knowledge: The Theological Critique of Philosophy in Hamann and Jacobi,” in Radical Orthodoxy:
A New Theology, ed. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (London: Routledge,
1999), pp. 21-37.
156

Carl Raschke has recently suggested that “Charismatic Christianity is not modern, but instead
thoroughly postmodern.” See The Next Reformation: Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity
(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), p. 157.
157

Andrew Rice, “Mission from Africa,” New York Times Magazine, April 12, 2009
[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12churches-t.html].
158
Rice, “Mission from Africa.”
159

This is the primary concern in Rick M. Nañez, Full Gospel, Fractured Minds? A Call to Use God’s
Gift of Intellect (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), pp. 19-131.
160

For a fuller account of postmodernism as a critique of modern rationalism, see James K. A. Smith,
Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (Grand Rapids:
Baker Academic, 2006), pp. 59-80.
161

I expand my critique of this philosophical anthropology in James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom:
Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), chapter 2.
162

Cf. Heidegger ’s critique of “calculative thinking” in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson
and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
163

This theme in Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) is not
often appreciated. But central to Lyotard’s “report” on the state of knowledge is his account of how
the “status” of knowledge is altered because it has been commodified. “[O]nly if learning is translated
into quantities of information” can it count as “knowledge” (p. 4). Thus, “[a]long with the hegemony
of computers comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of prescriptions determining which
statements are accepted as ‘knowledge’ statements” (p. 4). Indeed, the reduction of knowledge to what
can be “stated” is the first step in this reduction.
164

This priority of the cognitive and rational made a huge impact on the institutions of modernity, and
also came to have a major impact on the church and theology, perhaps particularly in evangelical
circles (even though the Enlightenment thought it was precisely this rationalism that made religion
merely superstition and part of a “tradition” from which reason liberated us). Charles Hodge, for
instance, famously declared that the Bible was a “storehouse of facts,” indicating a very modern,
reductionistic way of understanding the narrative of Scripture. I would suggest that the regnant
orthodoxy in evangelical theology and philosophy adopts this rationalistic picture of the human
person and thus reduces Christian faith to a set of logical propositions to which we give our cognitive
assent. Somewhat ironically, I think it is this rather reductionistic model of rationality that is
advocated by Nañez’s call for Pentecostals to embrace “the life of the mind” (in Full Gospel,
Fractured Minds? pp. 135-43 and 163-83), and something similar is extolled as an antidote to
“relativism” by J. P. Moreland, Kingdom Triangle: Recover the Christian Mind, Renovate the Soul,
Restore the Spirit’s Power (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), pp. 111-39. I’m suggesting that the
epistemology implicit in pentecostal spirituality would call into question this embrace of rationalist
models of knowledge.
165

Well, truth be told, the Enlightenment folks didn’t actually think all Homo sapiens qualified as rational
human beings; in particular, women and Africans were considered less than human in this respect.
And so there’s a dark underside to modernity’s triumphalism that finds expression in institutions such
as slavery and patriarchy. I think it is not insignificant, then, that early Pentecostalism contested both
racial segregation and the exclusion of women from ministry. But, of course, such “modern” bigotry
was nothing new.
166

“Cognitivism” is a slippery term; I use it here as shorthand for a picture of knowledge that reduces
knowledge to the propositional. In this respect, I was encouraged to see Robert C. Roberts recognize a
similar difficulty with the term “cognition.” In a footnote to his discussion of the emotions as
“construals,” he notes that “cognition” is a word that “does not have well agreed-upon boundaries, but
it is perhaps usual that a mental event is a cognition only if it has one or more of the following
characteristics: a) it is truth-asserting, b) it is inferred from some other datum” (in Roberts, “What an
Emotion Is: A Sketch,” Philosophical Review 97, no. 2 [April 1988]: 188 n. 12). This is in the ballpark
of how I’m using the term when I criticize “cognitivism.” Another near synonym might be what
Charles Taylor describes as “intellectualism” — a working picture that sees “the human agent as
primarily a subject of representations.” This subject, he comments, “is a monological one. She or he
is in contact with an ‘outside’ world, including other agents, the objects she or he and they may deal
with, her or his own and others’ bodies, but this contact is through the representations she or he has
‘within.’ ” As a result, “what ‘I’ am, as a being capable of having such representations, the inner space
itself, is definable independently of body or other.” See Taylor, “To Follow a Rule ...,” p. 49.
167

For merely heuristic purposes, I’m going to use the term in a monolithic way. Of course, none of it is
as simple and clean as I’m portraying it here. However, the postmodern sensibility I’m describing
would be shared by a host of twentieth-century thinkers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Foucault,
Derrida, Polanyi, Kuhn, and many more.
168

Here is another point at which I think the philosophical intuitions implicit in pentecostal spirituality
resonate with feminist philosophy. For a representative feminist critique of reductionistic models of
rationality (particularly Kant’s transcendental logical ego) articulated in relation to the Christian
philosophical tradition, see Janet Catherina Wesselius, “Points of Convergence between
Dooyeweerdian and Feminist Views of the Philosophic Self,” in Knowing Other-wise: Philosophy at
the Threshold of Spirituality, ed. James H. Olthuis (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 1997), pp.
55-68. See also Andrea Nye, Feminist Theory and the Philosophies of Man (New York: Routledge,
1988).
169

Cp. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1972), pp. 100-101.
170

See, for instance, Linda McDowell’s critique of “thinking-thing”-ism in her Gender, Identity, and
Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
171

See Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, chapter 2, where I develop this more explicitly from Heidegger ’s
account of Verstehen.
172

See James R. Peters, The Logic of the Heart: Augustine, Pascal, and the Rationality of Faith (Grand
Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009). As Steven Land has shown, this same Augustinian emphasis was later
articulated by Jonathan Edwards in terms of “the affections” (Land, Pentecostal Spirituality, pp. 122-
36). See also Evan B. Howard, Affirming the Touch of God: A Psychological and Philosophical
Exploration of Christian Discernment (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000), where he
describes discernment as an “affectively-rich act of knowing.”
173

On the notion of a “cognitive minority,” see Peter Berger, A Rumour of Angels: Modern Society and
the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 18, 31; on “plausibility
structures,” see Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A
Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1967), pp. 154-56.
174

I think the same is true of sacramental, liturgical traditions in which the very material elements of
bodily posture, taste, touch, even smell are central to worship formation. This is why I think worship
in the kingdom is a catholic charismatic community. In this respect, pentecostalism is a catalyst for
recovering ancient Christian emphases — an occasion for creatively recollecting the Christian
tradition.
175

Paul Ricoeur would say that Denise’s narrative indicates a process of “emplotment.” See Paul
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984).
176

Granted, this is also the point of temptation for pentecostal testimony — to make the story about me.
Thus “testimony nights” can sometimes seem to turn into spiritual duels of one-upmanship. So I
would want to distinguish something like “authentic” pentecostal testimony (in which it is God who is
the protagonist) from inauthentic, egocentric, selfcentered stories that seek pity or grandstand one’s
own spirituality. In this respect, I like Christine Overall’s notion in her discussion of feminist
autobiographical philosophy: “I have only a bit part in my own autobiography” (Overall, “Writing
What Comes Naturally?” Hypatia 23 [2008]: 229). In pentecostal testimony, while my life might be the
stage, it is the Spirit who is the lead actor. (One can see similar contrasts in autobiography and
memoir: contrast the egocentric centrality of the author in Barbara Brown Taylor ’s Leaving Church
with the persistent deflection to others in Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking.)
177

Testimony and narrativity would be, I think, an example of why this “pentecostal” spirituality is
shared across theological and denominational traditions since such storytelling would be common
not only to classical Pentecostal meetings, but also to charismatic and third-wave worship.
178

“Naturally” in the sense of a “second nature,” an acquired habit, a disposition. In this respect, the role
of testimony in pentecostalism is akin to the lives of the saints in Catholic devotion.
 179

Kenneth J. Archer, A Pentecostal Hermeneutic for the Twenty-first Century: Spirit, Scripture,
Community (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 94-126.
180

Archer explicates this “Pentecostal story” in particular in A Pentecostal Hermeneutic, pp. 100-114.
181

For the purposes of my argument, I will treat “story” and “narrative” as synonyms. Other analyses,
asking a different set of questions, will want to distinguish stories from narratives (where narratives,
for example, will be understood as a particular kind of story with a resolution or conclusion). For
discussion of these matters, see Ismay Barwell, “Understanding Narratives and Narrative
Understanding,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (2009): 49-59, at p. 49.
182

Normally I would want to make a (Heideggerian) distinction between “understanding” (Verstehen)

and “knowledge” (Wissen). In the ensuing discussion, I will speak of “narrative knowledge” as
distinguished from something like “propositional knowledge.” If we were to map this onto the
Heideggerian distinction, “narrative knowledge” would be that sort of “knowledge” characteristic of
“understanding.”
183

Barwell, “Understanding Narratives,” p. 49.

184

Narrative knowledge is not opposed to propositional or quantifiable or “codeable” knowledge, but it

does relativize and situate such knowledge. However, the difference between the two does present a
challenge for pentecostal methodology in theology and philosophy (recall Archer, “A Pentecostal
Way of Doing Theology: Method and Manner,” International Journal of Systematic Theology [2007]:
6, cited above, p. xxiii n. 32). “Pentecostal knowledge,” we might say, is narrative knowledge, but the
genres of philosophical analysis and theological articulation are decidedly nonnarratival (even
“narrative theology” is a genre of propositional and theoretical analysis that makes the case for the
importance of narrative in a nonnarratival mode). We will address this methodological challenge in
more detail in chapter 5. But in this context I am reminded of Christine Overall’s account of
“autobiographical philosophy” as a mode of resistance to regnant methodological paradigms in
philosophy: “feminists have to continue to resist cultural messages that say women’s lives are not
important, our experiences have no significance, and our feelings are excessive or uncontrolled and
therefore irrational [a pretty common description of pentecostals!]. Autobiographical philosophy is a
way of ‘talking back’ to those messages” (Overall, “Writing What Comes Naturally?” p. 233).
185

David Velleman, “Narrative Explanation,” Philosophical Review 112 (2003): 1-25, at p. 6.

186

Velleman, “Narrative Explanation,” p. 1.

187
Paisley Livingston, “Narrativity and Knowledge,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (2009):
25-36, at p. 31.
188

See Robert C. Roberts, “What an Emotion Is,” pp. 183-209, and Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of
Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
189

Jenefer Robinson, Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997). Robinson also ties affective appraisal to the physiology of
embodiment — a further resonance with pentecostal experience.
190

Perhaps the strongest and most comprehensive version of this claim is Alasdair MacIntyre, After
Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 216: “man is in his actions
and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal.” But MacIntyre does not tend
to root this in claims about biology or evolutionary psychology as Damasio and Dennett do (though,
in Dependent, Rational Animals, MacIntyre clearly honors our “animal nature”). For a critical
discussion of these claims, see Peter Goldie, “Narrative Thinking, Emotion, and Planning,” Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (2009): 97-106, and Bernard Williams, “Life as Narrative,”
European Journal of Philosophy 17 (2007): 305-14.
191

Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (New York: Harper
and Row, 1987), p. 110. The context is a discussion of Mr. Thompson, who, because of a brain
impairment, cannot retain memories — and thus at stake is his very identity since a narrative, a
biography, requires memory (and anticipation).
192

Anthony Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
(New York: Avon, 1995), pp. 6-7.
193

Paul John Eakin, “What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?” Narrative 12 (2004): 121-
32, at p. 128.
194

I think there is a further sense in which pentecostal testimony “gives voice” to narrative identity — by
providing an occasion and opportunity for the poor to find a story and articulate their own story. In
our culture of the twentysomething memoir, we should recognize that the bourgeoisie have no
shortage of opportunities to “find their voice” and “tell their story.” Indeed, the privilege of a liberal
arts education institutionalizes such. But the implicit democracy of pentecostal worship means that
everyone’s story is significant. Pentecostal worship evokes a story and gives all people an occasion
and space to narrate their identity.
195

Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 64.
196
Cp. Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp.
290ff. While I appreciate Plantinga’s recognition of an epistemic role for the Holy Spirit, my concern
is that the Spirit functions largely as the guarantor of assent to propositions (“teachings” of faith).
197

For further discussion, see Amos Yong, “The Demise of Foundationalism and the Retention of Truth:
What Evangelicals Can Learn from C. S. Peirce,” Christian Scholar’s Review 29 (2000): 563-88.
198

Ian W. Scott, Paul’s Way of Knowing: Story, Experience, and the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2009), p. 4. (In relation to my project of attempting to make explicit the epistemological
intuitions that are implicit in pentecostal practice, it’s interesting to note that an earlier version of
Scott’s book, published in Germany, was entitled Implicit Epistemology in the Letters of Paul.) Page
numbers placed in the text refer to Scott.
199

Or as Scott later puts it, “The Spirit would thus be responsible for faith in the sense that he restores
the human moral constitution, making it possible for human beings to follow the [narrative] logic
which leads to the Gospel” (p. 65). Thus, as Scott notes but does not develop, knowledge becomes a
matter of virtue. For further discussion of links between virtue and epistemology, see Linda
Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Robert C. Roberts,
Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (New York: Oxford University Press,
2007); and Daniel J. Treier, Virtue and the Voice of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).
200

Scott raises an important and obvious question: If Paul’s thinking and knowledge are so
fundamentally shaped by this narrative, “then why do we not find him simply telling the story” (pp.
108-9)? Why are the epistles so didactic, so unlike the Gospels? Scott suggests that Paul’s own letters
are a kind of “criticism”; that is, they are written to help us understand and appreciate the story in the
same way that, say, the criticism of Edmund Wilson opens up and deepens our appreciation for
Nabokov’s fiction even though Wilson’s criticism is decidedly didactic. The didactic or “reflective”
form of the Pauline epistles, however, still grows “organically out of the process of narration.” In this
way, “the narrative itself would seem to be primary” even if Paul never simply recounts the story in
narrative form.
201

Cp. pp. 122-23 where Scott shows this is true of Paul himself: “the ‘little story’ of Paul’s life finds
meaning by being related to the ‘big story’ of which the organizing center is Christ.” This then raises
interesting questions about Paul’s own claims to “knowledge.” For example, when Paul says he
“knows” (oida) that his coming to Rome will be “in the fullness of the blessing of Christ” (Rom.
15:29), what is the ground for that knowledge? What sort of knowledge-claim is this? Is this
supported by propositions in Scripture? Propositions from some secret revelation? Or is Paul
engaging in his own narrative deduction? Is this more like Paul saying “I know that I know that I
know”?
202

Scott also discusses a related kind of knowledge in Paul — “noncognitive” modes of knowledge
rooted in “experience” (Paul’s Way of Knowing, pp. 143-55) — which also resonates with pentecostal
spirituality.
203

Cp. Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003).
204

Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2009), p. 2.
205

Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers, p. 3.

206

Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers, p. 3, italics added.

207

Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers, p. 3.

208

As Carl Plantinga later summarizes, “The phrase ‘reading a film’ mischaracterizes the viewing
process as literary, with the effect of distracting us from the medium’s sometimes disavowed quality,
namely, that film is a powerful sensual medium.... When critics talk about reading a film, they infuse
film viewing with the patina of intellectual distance and implicitly ally film viewing with the
ostensibly more active and legitimate activity of reading. By using the language of reading, however,
such critics also downplay the prerational elements of spectatorship” (Moving Viewers, p. 112). I think
Plantinga’s use of the term “literary” in this context might be a bit too broad, since “literary” texts
(novels, poetry) move us in ways that are quite similar to films. Perhaps Plantinga could say that he’s
critical of those critics who reduce films to “texts.” I might add that such critics mistakenly fail to
appreciate the extent to which reading practices are also prerational and automatic. The act of reading
calls on a wide panoply of nonconscious processes that are affected by the materiality of the page,
print, etc. (This is one aspect that Derrida’s “deconstruction” tried to highlight about “texts.”)
209

As we’ve already noted, “cognitivist” is a slippery term. In this context, I would suggest that
“cognitivism” refers to a picture of the human person that assumes that human agency and action —
our comportment to the world, our being-in-the-world — are directed by conscious, deliberative
processing of “beliefs.” So, for instance, a “cognitivist” account of emotion would say that beliefs
precede emotions. In contrast, Carl Plantinga remarks, “Our affective life, I would argue, is certainly
influenced by our beliefs, but it is not wholly determined by them. In many cases, our modular minds
generate responses that are in part independent of belief” (Moving Viewers, p. 65).
210

Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers, p. 49. In Desiring the Kingdom (pp. 55-62) I discuss the “adaptive
unconscious.” Plantinga and I differ slightly insofar as he wants to preserve a cognitive moment to
this unconscious; so it seems that his “cognitive unconscious” is unconscious because it is not
deliberative, and not because it is not cognitive. In contrast, I emphasize that the adaptive unconscious
harbors a kind of noncognitive understanding. Plantinga may think I tend toward what he calls
“conscious inessentialism” — “the view that consciousness matters little in our moment-to-moment
response and judgments” (Moving Viewers, p. 52). I do think that current research in cognitive science
suggests something very close to this. It’s the “little” that we’d be quibbling over.
211

Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers, pp. 51-52. I discuss automaticity in Desiring the Kingdom, pp. 55-62.
212

Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers, p. 8.

213

I’ll return to this problem in chapter 5 below.

214

I would grant that this implicit intuition is not only true of pentecostal worship. I think the same
principle holds for Catholic sacramental traditions. Or, conversely, we might say that the pentecostal
tradition is a kind of sacramental tradition in this respect and thus shares much in common with the
Catholic tradition. For arguments that pentecostal spirituality is sacramental, in a sense, see Frank
Macchia, “Tongues as a Sign: Towards a Sacramental Understanding of Pentecostal Experience,”
Pneuma: Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 15 (1993): 61-67, and Simon Chan,
Pentecostal Theology and the Christian Spiritual Tradition (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
2000).
215

Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers, p. 3.

216

For a non-Freudian way of articulating this, see Timothy Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering
the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
217

It is this, I think, that makes pentecostalism a “mystical” tradition as expressed, say, in the disciplines
of Saint John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul.
218

I can attest to this from experience: As a young family in grad school, we had never developed very
good habits of tithing and giving; in short, we hadn’t really made economic discipleship a way of life.
And even though, over several months, we became (intellectually) convinced that we ought to, and
even that it would be good to do so, this didn’t touch our ingrained habits. But then one night during a
prayer service in Lansdale, Pennsylvania (not our “home” church), an altar call specifically invited
families who were struggling financially to find God’s provision in a commitment to principled
giving. And the pastor did the strangest thing — though just the sort of thing that caricatures of
Pentecostal televangelists would lead us to expect: he asked us to come to the altar with our wallets!
Not in order to give money (they didn’t ask for a dime), but in order for the prayer team to pray over
us with our pocketbooks in hand. This was an absolute turning point in our economic well-being. At
the same time, we began to adopt practices concerned with economic justice. I “know that I know that I
know” that this visceral experience, charged by the presence of the Spirit, made a difference for our
practices.
 219

I think this is precisely the way to understand the centrality of music in pentecostal worship. Rather
than being seen as an instrument for fostering emotional frenzy (to which, I admit, it is easily prone
and often used), I would suggest that music in pentecostal worship effects a certain effacement of the
cognitive, a displacement of the “executive” function of deliberation, opening the person to
operations of the Spirit on the affective register (which can also include a process of unearthing
repressed desires and sins, but also opening up the core of our affections to redirection and renewal).
In this sense, music in pentecostal worship has a kind of mystical function. This reading of pentecostal
music does not preclude also seeing it as a unique means of expression with its own irreducible
“sense.” Thus David Daniels, in his “acoustemology” of pentecostalism, rightly describes the unique
mode of sound “as a way of knowing,” a hermeneutic, a “sonic way of knowing.” See David D.
Daniels, “ ‘Gotta Moan Sometime’: A Sonic Exploration of Earwitnesses to Early Pentecostal Sound
in North America,” Pneuma: Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 30 (2008): 5-32, especially
pp. 26-29. Cp. Jeannette Bicknell, Why Music Moves Us (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
220

It’s interesting that Plantinga, since he’s also trying to make room for the non- and unconscious in
film viewing, also has to ward off the specter of psychoanalysis by distinguishing his understanding
of the unconscious (drawing on recent cognitive psychology) and a Freudian understanding of the
unconscious (see Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers, pp. 18-19).
221

Carl Plantinga distinguishes between “affect” more broadly and “emotions” in particular. Affects are
more reflexive responses, “felt bodily states” (Moving Viewers, p. 57), whereas emotions “have a
stronger cognitive component” — that is, they are about something (p. 29). Affects are more visceral
and “cognitively impenetrable” whereas emotions, as construals, can be “understood” in a sense. Or
one could simply say that emotions are “intentional”: “not in the sense of being deliberative and
considered but in their ‘aboutness’ ” (p. 55). However, Plantinga cautions that “[t]his distinction
between affect and emotion is not meant to carry any heavy theoretical weight” (p. 57).
222

Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers, p. 56.

223

Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers, p. 6. Later he briefly emphasizes that the “memory” here is bodily
(pp. 119, 129), more like “muscle memory” than conscious recall. For further discussion of such
bodily memory, operative outside the mechanisms of conscious recall, see Edward S. Casey,
“Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty,” Man and World 17 (1984): 279-97, and Casey,
Remembering: A Phenomenological Case Study, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2000), chapter 8 (“Body Memory”).
224

“As concern-based construals,” Plantinga remarks, “emotions can be communicated as stories —

stories we tell ourselves about our experiences” (Moving Viewers, p. 80). This resonates with our
exploration of narratival knowledge in the preceding section and confirms the implicit wisdom of the
pentecostal conjunction of narrativity and affectivity.
225
Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers, p. 60.
226

Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers, p. 61.

227

Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers, p. 79.

228

Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers, p. 80.

229

I suggested something similar in James K. A. Smith, “Staging the Incarnation: Revisioning

Augustine’s Critique of Theatre,” Literature and Theology 15 (2001): 129-30.
230

Here we would first have to distinguish between a descriptive and a constructive pursuit of these
questions. Of course, on the one hand, one could find artifacts of pentecostal film (the classic The
Cross and the Switchblade immediately comes to mind). My project, however, is more concerned
with a constructive analysis: What would be some of the elements that would shape an integral
pentecostal aesthetic? (There is also another line of exploration I can’t explore, namely, the perceived
tensions between pentecostal “supernaturalism” and the worldwide pentecostal embrace of media
technologies, including film. However, my concern here is the aesthetic rather than the technical side.
For a discussion of the tensions in pentecostal appropriation of technology, see Birgit Meyer,
“Religious Revelation, Secrecy, and the Limits of Visual Representation,” Anthropological Theory 6
[2006]: 431-53.)
231

As such, I think pentecostal spirituality and practice — marked by a central role for the spectacular
and visual — contest traditional “Protestant” privileging of hearing and voice (cf. Stephen Webb, The
Divine Voice: Christian Proclamation and the Theology of Sound [Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004]), and
the correlate Protestant critique of theologia gloria and economies of visibility. In sum, the
pentecostal economy of signs and wonders is further evidence of its Catholicity and sacramentality.
So this renewal framework maps better onto Orthodoxy and Catholic paradigms than Protestant ones
(cp. Amos Yong, Spirit-Word-Community: Theological Hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective
[Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002]).
232

Here is yet another point of contact for further dialogue between feminism and a pentecostal
philosophy. Springboards for such a conversation should include Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies:
Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), and Judith Butler,
Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993).
233

There is, I grant, a certain irony (or opportunity) here: many pentecostal churches occupy former
cinemas. In a way, I’m suggesting that there could be good reason for pentecostals to recover these
spaces as cinemas as well.
234
Francisco Newman, “Cinema of the Oppressed,” Callaloo 27 (2004): 715-33. Newman emphasizes the
“theatricality” of pentecostal worship (pp. 717-19).
235

Newman, “Cinema of the Oppressed,” p. 722.

236

For a few discussions related to this, see three essays in Richard Allen and Murray Smith, eds., Film
Theory and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997): Edward Branigan, “Sound,
Epistemology, Film” (pp. 95-125), George Wilson, “On Film Narrative and Narrative Meaning” (pp.
221-38), and Carl Plantinga, “Notes on Spectator Emotion and Ideological Film Criticism” (pp. 372-
93).
237

“Religious” films almost always reduce to propaganda; that is, they let the “facts” of a “message” or
doctrine trump the imaginative, aesthetic aspect of the art. For a discussion of the tendency of
“Christian” art to devolve to propaganda (shutting down “allusivity”), see Calvin Seerveld, Bearing
Fresh Olive Leaves: Alternative Steps in Understanding Art (Carlisle, U.K.: Piquant, 2000), pp. 117-57.
I have not addressed an important theme given the Holiness impetus of pentecostal spirituality,
namely, the importance of not just producing “sanitized” or “safe” films, but the necessity for true
films to grapple with the brokenness of the world. For a discussion, see James K. A. Smith, “Faith in
the Flesh in American Beauty: Christian Reflections on Film,” in Imagination and Interpretation:
Christian Perspectives, ed. Hans Boersma (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2005), pp. 179-89.
238

Margaret Poloma, “Glossolalia, Liminality, and Empowered Kingdom Building: A Sociological

Perspective,” in Speaking in Tongues: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives, ed. Mark Cartledge (Milton
Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 2006), p. 156. I would only emphasize that the “ritual” (i.e., the practices)
precedes “the worldview”; that is, rather than ritual “reflecting” a worldview, I would say that a
worldview is an articulation of an “understanding” that is embedded in practice (Taylor).
239

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 140.

240

“The relegation of real possibilities to the no-man’s land of utopia is itself an essential element of the
ideology of the performance principle” (Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 150).
241

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 143.

242

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 148. Marcuse goes on to claim, alluding to André Breton: “That the
propositions of artistic imagination are untrue in terms of the actual organization of the facts belongs
to the essence of their truth” (p. 149).
243

It is perhaps also of interest to pentecostals that Breton, in his first Surrealist Manifesto (1924), was
concerned to redeem “dreams,” as it were, from their Freudian denigration. For surrealism, dreams
— rather than being merely portals into pathology — were a means of envisioning what could be
real.
244

This methodology for a distinctly pentecostal engagement is analogous to Alexei Nesteruk’s model
of engaging science from the distinctive “experience” of Eastern Christianity (Nesteruk, Light from
the East: Theology, Science, and the Eastern Orthodox Tradition [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003], p. 4).
Nesteruk emphasizes the “specialness” of Orthodox relationship to science as being rooted in the
essential (and distinct) “theological underpinnings” regarding the nature of the human person, etc., as
understood in the Orthodox “experience.” So, too, should pentecostal engagements in the
science/religion dialogue begin from the distinctives of pentecostal “experience” and the distinct
elements of the pentecostal social imaginary.
245

Amos Yong, “Ruach, the Primordial Waters, and the Breath of Life: Emergence Theory and the
Creation Narratives in Pneumatological Perspective,” in The Work of the Spirit: Pneumatology and
Pentecostalism, ed. Michael Welker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), pp. 183-204.
246

For an account that happily owns up to the reductionism of this form of naturalism, see Michael
Devitt, “Naturalism and the A Priori,” Philosophical Studies 92 (1998): 45-65.
247

Alvin Plantinga, “The Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism: An Initial Statement of the
Argument,” in Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument against
Naturalism, ed. James Beilby (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 1-14, at p. 1. It should
be noted that the heart of Plantinga’s argument against naturalism actually stems from his
epistemological project, which he describes as a “radical naturalism.” Thus he seeks to demonstrate
that “naturalism in epistemology flourishes best in the context of a theistic view of human beings:
naturalism in epistemology requires supernaturalism in anthropology” (Plantinga, Warrant and
Proper Function [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993], p. 46; the argument is fully developed on
pp. 194-237).
248

David Ray Griffin, Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 22.
249

Philip Clayton, Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), p. 163. Technically, and empirically, it seems to me that this claim is invalid. Both
historically and in the present there are scientists who do experimental work who do not presume
naturalism. Clayton concedes that “here the arguments are not decisive” (p. 165).
250

Clayton, Mind and Emergence, p. 164.

251
Michael Bergmann, “Commonsense Naturalism,” in Naturalism Defeated? p. 83 n. 40.
252

Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006), p.
25. Dennett also defines “religion” as “belief in a supernatural agent” and then stipulates that part of
the defining creed of “brights” (Dennett’s term for the “church” of enlightened antisupernaturalists) is
that they do not believe in the supernatural (p. 21). Dennett has a remarkably confident grasp of what
constitutes “nature.” Or rather, one should say that, remarkably, Dennett — like most naturalists —
spends little time interrogating the concept of “nature.” I would say the same tends to be true of
discussions of “nature” in the science/theology conversation.
253

Griffin, Reenchantment without Supernaturalism, p. 21, italics in original.

254

Owen Flanagan, “Varieties of Naturalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed.
Philip Clayton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 433. Flanagan goes on to concede a
distinction that Griffin and others do not, viz., a distinction between “ontological” and “methological”
naturalism, or what Flanagan calls “strong” versus “weak” naturalism. “Weak” naturalism simply
emphasizes that “one should dispense with the supernatural in explaining things” (p. 434). He
concedes that one could be, say, a weak naturalist about economics, but nonetheless be an ontological
nonnaturalist (pp. 434-35).
255

Flanagan, “Varieties of Naturalism,” p. 433. It should be noted that rejection of the supernatural is
“required” in order to be a naturalist. Flanagan does not articulate just why one should be required to
be a naturalist.
256

This is also the “supernaturalism” (or model of “miracle”) rejected by Hume, Enquiries concerning
Human Understanding and the Principles of Morals, ed. P. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975 [1777]), section X, where he considers “prophecy” as an instance of the miraculous. This
should remind us that “supernatural” and “miraculous” seem to be almost synonymous here — which
is why pentecostalism has such a vested interest in these issues.
257

Griffin, Reenchantment without Supernaturalism, p. 182, italics added.

258

Griffin is particularly critical of halfway attempts that opt for a “methodological” naturalism but
cling to an ontological supernaturalism (Griffin, Reenchantment without Supernaturalism, pp. 25-26).
259

For some critical discussion of this tendency, see Alvin Plantinga, “What Is ‘Intervention’?” Theology
and Science 6 (2008): 369-401, especially pp. 371-73.
260

I have discussed correlationist methodology in more detail in Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy:
Mapping a Post-secular Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), pp. 35-37. I hint
specifically about an application of this to the science/theology dialogue on p. 148 n. 19.
261

Peacocke, All That Is: A Naturalistic Faith for the Twenty-first Century, ed. Philip Clayton
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007); John Polkinghorne, “The Hidden Spirit and the Cosmos,” in The Work
of the Spirit, pp. 169-82.
262

Polkinghorne, “The Hidden Spirit,” p. 169.

263

Polkinghorne, “The Hidden Spirit,” p. 177.

264

Clayton, Mind and Emergence, p. 139.

265

Clayton, Mind and Emergence, p. 188.

266

Clayton, Mind and Emergence, p. 187.

267

J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, “Emergence and Human Uniqueness: Limiting or Delimiting Evolutionary
Explanation,” Zygon 41 (2006): 649-64, at pp. 657-58.
268

Van Huyssteen, “Emergence and Human Uniqueness,” p. 659.

269

Flanagan, “Varieties of Naturalism,” p. 433, italics added.

270

Flanagan, “Varieties of Naturalism,” p. 436.

271

In short, it would be just the kind of world that emerged after Scotus’s bifurcation of an
“autonomous” world, culminating in Kant. For discussion, see Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy,
pp. 95-103.
272

As noted earlier, I’m using the term “dualistic” in a strong sense as including not just the distinction
between the natural and supernatural (or material and spiritual) but also the opposition between the
two and the denigration of materiality. Thus by dualism in this context I mean a kind of Gnosticism —
one not entirely foreign to some strains of evangelical piety.
273

Frank Macchia, “Tongues as a Sign: Towards a Sacramental Understanding of Pentecostal

Experience,” Pneuma: Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 15 (1993): 61-76.
274

Amos Yong, The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh: Pentecostalism and the Possibility of Global
Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), pp. 292-301.
275

John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate concerning the Supernatural
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 10.
276

Indeed, doesn’t the very notion of creation blur this distinction? See Yong, “Ruach, the Primordial
Waters, and the Breath of Life.”
277

Graham Ward, Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 90-91. It would be interesting to
compare and contrast how Ward and Peacocke approach the Eucharist. For Ward, the eucharistic
pronouncement is an occasion for theology to “push back” on philosophy and science, and in
particular the ontologies bequeathed to us by modernity. In Peacocke, by contrast (see All That Is,
chapter 8), eucharistic theology needs to submit to revision on the basis of “what science tells us.”
Thus Ward and Peacocke represent two paths for pentecostals considering the theology/science
dialogue. I would suggest that walking down the path with Arthur Peacocke would entail the
evisceration of pentecostal spirituality.
278

Ward, Cities of God, p. 94.

279

Amos Yong, “Radically Orthodox, Reformed, and Pentecostal: Rethinking the Intersection of
Post/modernity and the Religions in Conversation with James K. A. Smith,” Journal of Pentecostal
Theology 15 (2007): 233-50; James K. A. Smith, “The Spirit, Religions, and the World as Sacrament:
A Response to Amos Yong’s Pneumatological Assist,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 15 (2007):
251-61.
280

I don’t think the problems I enumerate here are the same ones addressed in Plantinga, “What Is
‘Intervention’?” pp. 383-88.
281

As I’ve suggested, a close cousin of this position (an enchanted naturalism or non-interventionist
supernaturalism) is something like Clayton’s panentheism. I am in some ways sympathetic to such
panentheism (and would follow Jonathan Edwards on this score) except to the extent that it assumes an
ontological rigidity to “natural law.” That is, I think Clayton’s panentheism does not start from a
sufficiently dynamic sense of the contingency of the “laws” of nature. This will require an account of
the regularity of “natural” processes without attributing to them a reified lawlike character. In general,
I find that process theologians such as Griffin and Clayton tend to ignore questions about science as a
contingent, cultural institution, and are somewhat naive about scientific practice, including the
contingent role of metaphor (such as “law”) in describing the world.
 282

It should be noted, however, that this is an alternative description of what passes under the banner of
“methodological naturalism.” I am not suggesting that pentecostals accede to methodological
naturalism to secure intellectual respectability or to bow to “what science says.” Rather, I’m
suggesting that the kind of attentive observation of nature that constitutes science yields fruit by
recognizing regularity — without thereby ramping such regularity up into the de jure, ironclad status
of a “law” of nature. In this respect, I actually think I agree with David Hume.
283

Cp. C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Macmillan, 1947), pp. 132-42.

284

For a discussion of Augustine on this point, see Chris Gousmett, “Creation Order and Miracle
according to Augustine,” Evangelical Quarterly 60 (1988): 217-40.
285

For further development of these themes, see James K. A. Smith and Amos Yong, eds., Science and
the Spirit: A Pentecostal Engagement with the Sciences (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2010).
286

As an example of this development, consider, for instance, the work of Antony Flew: Hume’s
Philosophy of Belief (London: Routledge, 1961); God and Philosophy (New York: Dell, 1966); and
Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, eds., New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: SCM,
1955).
287

For just a sample of representative work in this vein, see Kelly James Clark, ed., Our Knowledge of
God: Essays on Natural and Philosophical Theology (The Hague: Kluwer, 1992); Eleonore Stump,
ed., Reasoned Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology in Honor of Norman Kretzmann (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1993); Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Brian Hebblethwaite, Philosophical Theology and
Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); and Stephen T. Davis, Christian Philosophical
Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
288

There is also a European and Catholic story to be told here associated with Blondel and, later,
Gilson’s claims regarding a “Christian philosophy.” As usual, at stake here is how we receive the
legacy of Thomas Aquinas — a debate that has come to the fore again with contemporary retrievals
of nouvelle théologie. However, I cannot do justice to these issues here. For relevant discussion see
Francesca Aran Murphy, “Gilson and Chenu: The Structure of the Summa and the Shape of Dominican
Life,” New Blackfriars 85 (2004): 290-303; D. Stephen Long, “The Way of Aquinas: Its Importance
for Moral Theology,” Studies in Christian Ethics 19 (2006): 339-56; and Adam C. English, The
Possibility of Christian Philosophy: Maurice Blondel at the Intersection of Theology and Philosophy,
Radical Orthodoxy Series (London: Routledge, 2006).
289
Most famously, Plantinga pointed out the analogy between the epistemic status of belief in “other
minds” and belief in God. See Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds: A Study of Rational
Justification of Belief in God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967).
290

MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1989).
291

For a summary of this related to philosophy of religion, see James K. A. Smith, The Fall of
Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic (Downers Grove, IL:
InterVarsity, 2000), and Smith, “The Art of Christian Atheism: Faith and Philosophy in Early
Heidegger,” Faith and Philosophy 14 (1997): 71-81.
292

Much work remains to be done on this score, and I can’t pursue it further here. Suffice it to say that
Plantinga’s critique of “postmodernism” (Warranted Christian Belief [New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000], part III) is a rejection of a straw man, and that, in fact, his nonfoundationalist account of
warranted belief has much in common with Heidegger, Rorty, and perhaps even Derrida. For some
recent hints along this line, see the discussion of Plantinga and Rorty in G. Elijah Dann, After Rorty:
The Possibilities for Ethics and Religious Belief (London: Continuum, 2006).
293

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press, 1969), p. 134.
294

To his credit, it should be noted that in the later Heidegger, believers dance and pray. See Martin
Heidegger, “The Onto-Theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” in Identity and Difference, trans.
Joan Stambaugh (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 72. For further discussion, see Merold
Westphal, “Overcoming Onto-Theology,” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo
and Michael Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 146-63.
295

For instance, when philosophers of religion consider prayer, they focus primarily on the
epistemological challenges, or how prayer can be reconciled with the doctrines of God’s
omniscience and omnipotence. See, for example, Eleonore Stump, “Petitionary Prayer,” American
Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 81-91, and Lawrence Masek, “Petitionary Prayer to an
Omnipotent and Omnibenevolent God,” in Philosophical Theology: Reason and Theological Doctrine,
Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 74 (2000): 273-83. For a contrasting
philosophical engagement with prayer, see Peter Ochs, “Morning Prayer as Redemptive Thinking,” in
Liturgy, Time, and the Politics of Redemption, ed. C. C. Pecknold and Randi Rashkover (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2006), pp. 50-90. For further discussion of Ochs’s work in this regard, see James K. A.
Smith, “How Religious Practices Matter: Peter Ochs’ ‘Alternative Nurturance’ of Philosophy of
Religion,” Modern Theology 24 (2008): 469-78.
296

I don’t think this is a phenomenon unique to “analytic” or Anglo-American philosophy. Much

“continental” philosophy of religion also exhibits an epistemological fixation.
297

In Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation (London: Routledge, 2002), I argue
that this was precisely the project of the young Heidegger: to come up with a new “concept” that could
do justice to the richness of lived experience, and religious lived experience in particular (see pp. 67-
113).
298

Social scientific accounts of pentecostal spirituality must grapple with a similar challenge. For a
relevant discussion in this regard, see the nuanced methodological appendix in Ralph W. Hood, Jr.,
and W. Paul Williamson, Them That Believe: The Power and Meaning of the Christian Serpent-
Handling Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 247-56.
299

Another impetus was the messiness of lived ethical experience as analyzed by Aristotle. For a
discussion of Aristotle in these terms, see Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations with
Respect to Aristotle: Indications of the Hermeneutic Situation [1922],” trans. Michael Baur, Man and
World 25 (1992): 355-93.
300

I have unpacked this in more detail in Speech and Theology, pp. 67-82.
301

Religion as a form of life (“what we do”) also confirms important developments in philosophy of
mind, cognitive science, and neuroplasticity, which emphasize the ways and extent to which our
comportment to the world happens at the level of the bodily, tactile, and preconscious. Philosophy of
religion has yet to engage these conversations, but a turn to liturgy provides the catalyst for such
explorations. For relevant discussions, see Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering
the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), and Shaun Gallagher,
How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005). This just comes down to requiring that
philosophy of religion take embodiment seriously. For an important beginning, see Sarah Coakley,
ed., Religion and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
302

I should clarify that I think all modes of religious life are embodied — whether pentecostal, Catholic,
Muslim, or Buddhist. I mean to suggest only that this aspect of religious practice is particularly
amplified (and affirmed) in pentecostal spirituality, making pentecostalism a fruitful catalyst for
pressing this methodological paradigm shift in philosophy of religion.
303

William J. Abraham, Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).
Subsequent parenthetical references in the text refer to this book.
304

I’m reminded of Kierkegaard’s quip about theology selling itself to philosophy: “Theology sits all
rouged and powdered in the window and courts its favor, offers its charms to philosophy.”
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 32. Abraham’s critique suggests that “Christian
philosophy” might actually be playing the pimpish mediator in this process.
305

One might wonder whether there is a certain return of a standard strategy in Abraham’s account of
divine revelation, which begins by first placing it in “the conceptual field of revelation” per se (p. 60)
or from what we know about “personal human agents that we know” (p. 65). However, I won’t pursue
this here.
306

This is why methodism breeds skepticism (p. 33). I think Abraham’s critique of skepticism applies
well to certain schools in “postmodern” philosophy of religion (p. 39 n. 24), though I think he
misunderstands Radical Orthodoxy on this point.
307

As a way of bridging the analytic/continental divide in philosophy of religion, it might be interesting

to note that the young Heidegger, whose theoretical breakthroughs were very much motivated by a
desire to do justice to the realities of lived religious experience, was directly influenced by this same
Aristotelian principle of finding concepts “appropriate” to the subject matter (Sache) under
consideration (Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics 1094.24-25). See Heidegger, “Phenomenological
Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle.” For relevant discussion, see Smith, Speech and Theology,
pp. 75-79.
308

I cannot do justice to his earlier articulations of this notion. In Crossing the Threshold Abraham
helpfully points to relevant earlier accounts of canonical theism in Abraham, The Logic of Evangelism
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988) and Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology (Oxford: Clarendon,
1998). For further explication see William J. Abraham, Jason E. Vickers, and Natalie B. Van Kirk,
eds., Canonical Theism: A Proposal for Theology and the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).
309

We might note that mere theism has no bishops.

310

See Abraham, The Logic of Evangelism.

311

I think a similar criticism is articulated by Evan Fales’s critique of Plantinga in “Proper Basicality,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (2004): 373-83.
312

The interests or concerns of the “ordinary believer” are not those of the tenured academician: “Those
who heard the word of God had more on their minds than recording the phenomenological features
of their experience” (p. 61). On the flip side, Abraham also rightly reminds the philosophers that the
Word did not become flesh in order to generate dissertations in epistemology: “Nor did God send his
Son so that we might hold extended seminars on ontology and metaphysics” (p. 63).
313
Camilo Jose Vergara, How the Other Half Worships (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2005).
314

For a response, see William J. Abraham, “Response to Professors Long, Smith, and Beilby,”
Philosophia Christi 10 (2008): 363-76.
315

Abraham suggests that “a prophet or apostle occupies a radically different intellectual space.... What
sets a prophet apart is epistemology. The critical appeal is to divine encounter and divine speaking”
(p. 82). While he means to emphasize that this is a different intellectual space or appeal, I’m asking
whether we should think about it first and foremost as an intellectual event.
316

I mean to echo Charles Taylor ’s claim regarding “social imaginaries”: “Humans operated with a
social imaginary well before they ever got into the business of theorizing about themselves” (Taylor,
Modern Social Imaginaries [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004], p. 26). I can’t develop this
further here, but pursue this in more detail in Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, pp. 63-71.
317

And I don’t mean to suggest that this is just true of “simple” or uneducated believers. I think it
remains true of theologians with academic credentials, too — despite all the stories/theories we might
develop otherwise, theories that paint us as primarily cognitive animals.
318

It seems to me that in the literature of Reformed epistemology, very rarely do we find prototypical
“believers” who are converts; more often than not, “Jane” and “Jones” just find themselves believing,
have never not believed. Does this indicate the theological and ecclesiastical experiences that inform
our philosophizing?
319

Unfortunately, Sunday worship is not always a corrective in this score given the realities of class
division and the common phenomenon of “the university church” — a congregation where, in fact,
many do exhibit the kinds of “believing” that one finds in the dominant paradigm in philosophy of
religion.
320

This is not to say, however, that I don’t take a position on this. As a “charismatic” — not Pentecostal
— Christian, theologically I reject the claim that tongues is the initial and only physical evidence of
baptism in the Holy Spirit (and would also suggest, philosophically, that such language of “evidence”
is linked to a problematic, modernist, and foundationalist epistemology — but cannot expand on that
here). But for the purposes of this essay, these questions are not relevant.
321

In the analyses below, I tend to focus on tongues as ecstatic speech. This is because instances of
tongues as xenolalia could be easily subsumed under existing categories in philosophy of language; I
am interested in those cases that resist the categories currently on offer.
322
Though, again, for the most part I will bracket — as far as possible — theological evaluations of
whether what is currently practiced in Pentecostal and charismatic congregations qualifies as
authentic tongues-speech.
323

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari suggest that the essence of the philosophical project is the
production of concepts. See Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
324

We might recall here Thomas Kuhn’s account of the way in which existing paradigms tend to simply
not see what does not fit with the paradigm’s expectations (in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970]). “Normal science” (what Kuhn describes as the regnant
“orthodoxy” within a discipline) in philosophy of language, coupled with a general bias against
distinct (and admittedly strange) religious phenomena such as tongues-speech, would almost
guarantee that glossolalia would not be suggested as an arena for research. Hopefully the present
essay can go some way to resisting this tendency.
325

One could also consider tongues-speech along the lines of accounts of orality and literacy developed
by Walter Ong and others. I will not pursue this line of inquiry here, but have provided a sketch in
James K. A. Smith, “The Closing of the Book: Pentecostals, Evangelicals, and the Sacred Writings,”
Journal of Pentecostal Theology 11 (1997): 49-71.
326

This is not to say I am providing an exhaustive account. Further research should consider tongues
from the perspectives of C. S. Peirce’s pragmatic semiotics and Wittgenstein’s notion of “language
games.” But space here does not permit such an investigation.
327

For an account of an Augustinian semiotics (and references to the relevant literature), see James K. A.
Smith, Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation, Radical Orthodoxy Series
(London: Routledge, 2002), chapter 4. For a lucid introduction to semiotic theory in a context related
to tongues-speech, see Graham Hughes, Worship as Meaning: A Liturgical Theology for Late
Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially chapter 3.
328

Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970
[1900; 2nd. ed., 1913]), vol. 1, henceforth abbreviated in the text as LI; Husserl, “The Origin of
Geometry,” in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David
Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970). Both of these works captured the attention
of the young Jacques Derrida. On the Logical Investigations, see Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena,
trans. D. B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Derrida was the translator of
Origin of Geometry into French (1962), and his extensive introduction to the translation was Derrida’s
first major publication (see Derrida, An Introduction to Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry,” trans. John P.
Leavey, Jr. [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989]).
329
Others have thought about tongues as “sign,” but not explicitly within a semiotic context. See, for
example, Frank D. Macchia, “Tongues as a Sign: Towards a Sacramental Understanding of
Pentecostal Experience,” Pneuma: Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 15 (1993): 61-76.
330

“The two notions of sign do not therefore really stand in the relation of more extensive genus to
narrower species” (LI, p. 269).
331

It is precisely this central claim that is subjected to relentless critique in Derrida’s Speech and
Phenomena. Indeed, the core thesis of Speech and Phenomena is that there is an essential
“entanglement” (Verflechtung) between expression and indication. I have dealt with Derrida’s critique
in detail in James K. A. Smith, “A Principle of Incarnation in Derrida’s (Theologische?)
Jugendschriften,” Modern Theology 18 (2002): 217-30. For Husserl, meaning is always “bound up”
with indication only in the case of communicative speech (LI, p. 269). As we shall see below, this has
implications with respect to tongues-speech.
332

This, of course, is a central theme in Derrida’s critique (and gives rise to what he will describe as “the
metaphysics of presence”).
333

It should be noted that Husserl has no sense of an “unconscious” or “subconscious,” which we almost
assume in a post-Freudian, psychoanalytic climate. For Husserl, the “Freudian slip” and body
language are meaningless (whereas for Freud they are oblique access to what one really means).
334

Husserl does grant that one could, very loosely, speak of “talking to oneself,” but this would only be
metaphorical and by analogy (LI, pp. 279-80).
335

This is a major aspect of Derrida’s critique of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena. In addition, one
could say that Derrida sets out to show that all “words” function as “gestures,” thus erasing the
hierarchical distinction made by Husserl. See Speech and Phenomena, pp. 37-38.
336

I will bracket here any consideration of whether one could speak in tongues “to oneself” or “in one’s
mind.” I am not aware of this as a common spiritual practice among charismatic Christians. Of
course, there is a practice of praying by oneself in tongues (and some advocate the notion of tongues
as a “private prayer language”), but prayer, insofar as it is directed to God, is essentially
communicative. (Even if one prayed silently in tongues, insofar as this is prayer, it would be
communicative.) On Husserl’s register, prayer in tongues is another interesting limit case. On the one
hand, according to the theological presuppositions of charismatic prayer, my thoughts are fully
present to God (just as Husserl considers my own thoughts to be fully present to myself). In this
respect, prayer in tongues-speech could, curiously enough, be an instance of pure expression. But on
the other hand, it remains vocalized, in which case it remains “tainted” by indication, on Husserl’s
terms.
337
In charismatic justification of the practice, this is often linked (mistakenly, I think) to Paul’s
hyperbolic talk of “tongues of angels” earlier in the letter (1 Cor. 13:1).
338

This is a central theme in John’s Gospel; see John 2:11; 3:2; 4:54; 6:2-30; 7:31; 9:16; 10:41; 11:47;
12:18; 20:30. In John 9, these signs operate in the absence of Jesus, who is absent for most of the
narrative, appearing in only the opening and closing “scenes.” But he asserts that the miracle that
healed the blind man’s sight was performed “in order that the works of God might be displayed in
him” (v. 3).
339

It is interesting to note that some have even attested to a kind of gestural tongues, or what is
sometimes described as “manual glossolalia,” where the “utterer” “speaks” in hand signs. For a
discussion, see J. L. Smith, “Glossolalia, Manual,” in The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal
and Charismatic Movements, ed. Stanley M. Burgess and Eduard M. Van der Maas (Grand Rapids:
Zondervan, 2002), pp. 677-78.
340

Paul Ricoeur is another important figure here, but I will not draw on his work in the present essay.
For a helpful introduction to philosophical hermeneutics, see two recent works: Jean Grondin,
Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1997), and Jens Zimmerman, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An
Incarnational-Trinitarian Theory of Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004).
341

See Richard Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Rorty,
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).
342

Again, this comes back to Derrida’s critique of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena in the Logical
Investigations, Husserl asserts a realm of pure, unconditioned consciousness; the point of Derrida’s
critique is to say that signs go all the way down: consciousness, we might say, is semiotically
conditioned. It is neither a “blank slate” nor a pure conduit.
343

See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco:
Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 190-91. I have unpacked Heidegger ’s hermeneutic theory in more detail
in James K. A. Smith, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational
Hermeneutic (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000), pp. 87-113.
344

Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 192.

345

See, for instance, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.
Marshal, rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 1989), pp. 276-307.
346
See Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 277-85.
347

Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 276.

348

Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the

Hermeneutical Situation,” trans. Michael Bauer, Man and World 25 (1992): 363.
349

Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 200.

350

For a fuller thematic consideration of these core themes of hermeneutics, see Smith, The Fall of
Interpretation, pp. 149-59.
351

This last move is not essential to hermeneutics, but is a commonly related one.
352

It is not illegitimate to say that all interpretation constitutes a kind of translation whereby an utterance,
statement, or text is “translated” into terms that can be “received” by the finite listener or reader,
facilitating what Gadamer calls the “miracle of understanding” (Truth and Method, p. 292). For a
further analysis of the conditions of reception by finite interpreters, see Smith, Speech and Theology,
pp. 153-76.
353

In Speech and Theology I argue that this mode of divine accommodation to finitude is exemplified par
excellence in the Incarnation, and that this provides the model for all modes of revelation and
communication.
354

Granted, many who think of tongues this way also tend to think of the Bible in the same way, despite
its obvious textuality and semiotic character. For a critique of such an “immediacy” model of
interpretation, see Smith, The Fall of Interpretation, pp. 37-60.
355

For early suggestions along this line, from within the Pentecostal tradition, see Howard M. Ervin,
“Hermeneutics: A Pentecostal Option,” Pneuma: Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 3, no. 2
(1981): 11-25.
356

See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); John R.
Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1969); and Searle, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979).
357
For a helpful and accessible overview of the emergence of speech act theory, see Kevin Vanhoozer, Is
There a Meaning in This Text? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), pp. 207-14.
358

There tends to be an assumption in speech act theory that the sentence (rather than the word) is the
most basic unit of language. (Speech act theorists criticize semiotics for mistaking the word as the
basic component.) However, in the brief analysis below, I will suggest that the case of tongues-speech
should be an occasion to call into question this valorization of the sentence as the unit of language
that “gets things done,” as it were.
359

Searle, Speech Acts, p. 17.

360

On “language games,” see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M.

Anscombe, 3rd ed. (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1999) §§23-43.
361

Others have employed speech act theory in consideration of charismatic themes and communities.
See, for instance, Matthias Wenk, Community-Forming Power: The Socio-Ethical Role of the Spirit in
Luke-Acts, Journal of Pentecostal Theology Supplement 19 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
2000), and Amos Yong, “The Truth of Tongues Speech: A Rejoinder to Frank Macchia,” Journal of
Pentecostal Theology, no. 13 (October 1998): 107-15.
362

Though Searle notes that he does not accept Austin’s distinction between locutionary and illocutionary
acts (Searle, Speech Acts, p. 23 n. 1).
363

For this threefold distinction, see Searle, Speech Acts, pp. 23-26, and Austin, How to Do Things,
lectures 8-10.
364

Searle, Speech Acts, p. 24.

365

Searle, Speech Acts, p. 24. Below, however, I will raise the question whether it is legitimate for Searle
to confine speech acts, as he seems to do here, to saying something. Could it not be the case that if
speech is performative — that if speech does things — it might do things beyond saying? Of course, I
think we still need to distinguish speech acts from mere noisemaking; I just think the distinction is
harder to draw, and much that might seem like noise (given speech act theory’s sententional bias)
might count as speech acts. But insofar as speech act theory is interested in distinguishing noise from
speech acts, it might also provide a helpful critical framework for establishing the authentic practice
of glossolalia for the ecclesial community.
366

Searle, Speech Acts, p. 44.

367
Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning? p. 210.
368

It should be noted, however, that even ecstatic tongues-speech has been shown to conform to a certain
kind of convention or habit of phonematic formulation. See E. M. Pattison, “Behavioral Science
Research on the Nature of Glossolalia,” Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation (September
1968). To identify a mode of tongues-speech as “ecstatic” is not to deny that it is conventional, but
only to deny that it conforms to the conventions of a given, known language. Indeed, if ecstatic
tongues-speech were not conventional in some way, it could not count as a speech act, since the
definition of a speech act is an utterance governed by (some kind of) rules.
369

I will also bracket normative theological considerations about whether such practices are warranted
by the New Testament.
370

Context is a central feature of speech act theory; what a speech act does or effects shifts with context.
The same is true for the utterance of the phonematic string “hack shukuna ash tuu kononai; mee
upsukuna shill adonai.” In fact, it might be the case that in the sacramental context of the prayer
service, this phonematic string “counts” as a speech act, but if something similar were uttered by a
toddler it would not. (However, not even the latter is a given, since — as Augustine suggested in book
1 of the Confessions — sometimes the garbled phonematic strings and grunts of a baby are intended
to have perlocutionary effects (the provision of a bottle, the retrieval of a toy, etc.).
371

Among the illocutionary acts that Searle cites as examples are the English verbs “request” and
“demand” (Searle, Speech Acts, p. 23). Prayer is clearly a mode of requesting (or even demanding).
372

Of course, there could be a whole host of perlocutionary effects of glossolalic prayer, not all of
which are good. For instance, the one uttering such a prayer may do so to bring about the
perlocutionary effect of securing a superior status in the religious community, or to “appear
spiritual” to those gathered around. These perlocutionary effects are probably as common as (or
more common than) those I have described above.
373

“Illocutionary and propositional acts consist characteristically in uttering words in sentences in

certain contexts, under certain conditions and with certain intentions” (Searle, Speech Acts, pp. 24-25).
I will take his qualifier “characteristically” as an open door for suggesting that it could be otherwise,
even if we might concede that for the most part this is true.
374

This raises fascinating questions that cannot be fully pursued here. But immediately after the above
hypothesis, Searle says his goal is to “state some of the rules according to which we talk” (Speech
Acts, p. 22, italics added). But who is this “we”? A later discussion indicates that Searle is a kind of
deep structuralist on this score. When discussing the relation of languages to speech acts, he says:
“Different human languages, to the extent they are inter-translatable, can be regarded as different
conventional realizations of the same underlying rules” (p. 39). So the speech act, in French, je
promets, and the English speech act, “I promise,” are different according to the conventions of
utterance but the same according to the supposedly universal “rules” of promising. So while Searle
speaks of convention, convention does not go “all the way down” for him. Searle’s “we” seems to
denote some universal lingual community — a notion I think could be legitimately questioned.
375

Of course, with respect to tongues-speech, if glossolalia is understood as xenolalia, then this

stipulation is easily met. But if there is to remain legitimate space for glossolalia as ecstatic speech
not hooked to known languages, then the speech act account must be revised.
376

On “powers,” see John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1994), chapter 8, and Marva Dawn, Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2001).
377

More recently, see Gary B. McGee, “ ‘The New World of Realities in Which We Live’: How Speaking
in Tongues Empowered Early Pentecostals,” Pneuma: Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies
30 (2008): 108-35. Robert Beckford, following Michael Dyson, has suggested that for black
pentecostals, “speaking in tongues can be experienced as speaking a radical language of equality.”
Robert Beckford, “Back to My Roots: Speaking in Tongues for a New Ecclesia,” The Bible in
Transmission (Summer 2000): 1. Cp. Beckford, Dread and Pentecostal: A Political Theology for the
Black Church in Britain (London: SPCK, 2000), pp. 171-73.
378

This is the title of the final section of Mike Davis’s essay “Planet of the Slums: Urban Involution and
the Informal Proletariat,” New Left Review 26 (2004): 5-34.
379

Davis, “Planet of the Slums,” p. 27. Davis’s essay considers the findings of the report from UN
Habitat, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements, 2003 (London: UN-HABITAT,
2003).
380

Davis, “Planet of the Slums,” p. 28. He notes that “because uprooted rural migrants and informal
workers have been largely dispossessed of fungible labour-power, or reduced to domestic service in
the houses of the rich,” they “have little access to the culture of collective labour or large-scale class
struggle” (p. 28).
381

Davis, “Planet of the Slums,” p. 30. Throughout he also suggests a parallel role for “populist Islam,”
which I will not consider here.
382

Davis, “Planet of the Slums,” p. 30.

383

Robert Mapes Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 222. See also Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of
Resistance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). For helpful cautions about avoiding
Anderson’s reductionism, see A. G. Miller, “Pentecostalism as a Social Movement: Beyond the
Theory of Deprivation,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 9 (1996): 97-114.
384

Davis, “Planet of the Slums,” pp. 31, 32.

385

Davis, “Planet of the Slums,” p. 34.

386

The “multitude” is Hardt and Negri’s term for “the set of all the exploited and the subjugated, a
multitude that is directly opposed to Empire” (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire [Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000], p. 393). Cf. their expanded and more recent discussion in
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
387

Davis, “Planet of the Slums,” p. 33.

388

Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press,
1966), p. 44.
389

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 45. Marcuse does suggest the possibility of “libidinal work” that
would accord with the pleasure principle (p. 47 n. 45).
390

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 47-48.

391

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 139. As in Marx, we find in Marcuse a kind of quasi eschatology
that envisions (and hopes for) a “nonrepressive civilization.” This is decidedly not “utopian.” In fact,
he criticized the reality principle for pushing this hope off into an impossible utopia (p. 143).
392

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 144-45.

393

I would venture a hypothesis that is admittedly anecdotal: as Pentecostal denominations (such as the
Assemblies of God in the United States) climb the ladder of social class (John Ashcroft, former
attorney general in the Bush administration, is an A/G member), the practice of tongues-speech in
congregational worship contexts decreases. This, I would suggest, is precisely because such a
“strange” practice does not conform to the rationality (reality principle) of capitalist logic; and
insofar as such upwardly mobile congregations are seeking to advance by capitalist logic, they
eschew the language of resistance.