The Split God

Pentecostalism and Critical Theory

Nimi Wariboko

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781438470207, 9781438470191
• eBook ISBN: 9781438470214
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Although Pentecostalism is generally considered a conservative movement, in The Split God Nimi Wariboko shows that its operative everyday notion of God is a radical one that poses, under cover of loyalty, a challenge to orthodox Christianity. He argues that the image of God that arises out of the everyday practices of Pentecostalism is a split God—a deity harboring a radical split that not only destabilizes and prevents God himself from achieving ontological completeness but also conditions and shapes the practices and identities of Pentecostal believers. Drawing from the work of Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Giorgio Agamben, among others, Wariboko presents a close reading of everyday Pentecostal practices, and in doing so, uncovers and presents a sophisticated conversation between radical continental philosophy and everyday forms of spirituality. By de-particularizing Pentecostal studies and Pentecostalism, Wariboko broadens our understanding of the intellectual aspects of the global Pentecostal and Charismatic movements.

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Day of Pentecost

The Founding Violent Gesture of Splits

Introduction

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly, a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?” Some, however, made fun of them and said, “They have had too much wine.” Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice, and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say. These people are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning!” (Acts 2:1–15 NIV).

The thesis I want to pursue in this chapter is the idea that the current pentecostal notion of a split God and the practices, rituals, and interactions articulated around this notion are (partly) rooted in the inaugural event of Pentecost. I want to show that when the event of Pentecost is approached at its most theoretically accessible point—which is not necessarily its strongest theological point—the violent gesture of splits lies at the origin of the movement. Here I develop an analysis of Acts 2 that illuminates the startling function of the split nature of speaking in tongues and freedom of life-in-the-Spirit in Pentecostalism. The analysis also demonstrates that while at one level the story of Acts 2 illustrates basic religious belief in a complete chain of causality, in fact, the event exemplifies the transgression of this belief. With this chapter, the analysis begun in the preface and introduction reaches a decisive point, profoundly grounding the split-God image of Pentecostals in the ur-moment of the church.

The Violent Gesture of Language

The founding event of Pentecostalism—language, speech in tongues in Acts 2 or here in America (Azusa Street, Los Angeles; or Topeka, Kansas) “bars” (in the Lacanian sense) subjectivity of both God and human beings. For the disciples or the faithful to step into the new era of the Spirit, into the new symbolic order, so to speak, they had to speak a new language. The disciples at Jerusalem did not understand the language they were speaking at the inaugural event, but their hearers did. Speakers and listeners at Azusa/Topeka did not understand what was spoken. As Jacques Lacan teaches us, language designates the entire symbolic order, and the price of acquiring it is the splitting of the subject—subjectivity is barred. Disciples and believers were torn from the psychosocial forces of the old order and the codes that regulated their flow and nourished them, and they were thrown into the new one. Language at least introduced symbolic division between subject (disciples, believers) and the old order (mater, mother, M-Other).

Glossolalia is the language of the other. The “of” here is polyvalent. The language of the other is the Other’s language, and it is speaking through “I.” It might be speaking the desire in me that I am unconscious of. It may well be that my language is the language of the other, “that is the unconscious itself.” The “language of the other” also means my language for the Other and it can also be understood as the desire for the Other.1 Glossolalia represents the experience of the Other, the divine as an “outside that is inside, that forever faulting [the speaker’s] identity.”2 Identity is not oneness.

There is also a split for the Other, the Spirit. The language (desire) for the Other is the desire for the Spirit. To speak the language or fulfill the desire, I would have to do or to be what the Spirit desires. What does the Spirit want (lack)? I guess it is human beings (flesh) who can worship God in spirit and truth (John 4:23–24). This want, desire, lack opens up a gap, a split, between aim and goal, an in-between in the path toward the end and the end itself, between drive and desire.

The language of the Other as well as the Other in language is a game of cleavage, which inevitably splits God, as it were. The Other in language is difference, which in the words of Martin Heidegger is the temple of everything. Building on Heidegger’s idea of language being the temple of Being, Mark C. Taylor states, “Language exhibits the contrasting rhythms characteristic of all cleaving. The poiesis of language both joins and separates. … While language holds together opposites usually set apart, it also holds apart the opposites it brings together. In this way, language eternally returns to the difference—the difference that is the … temple of everything that is.”3

On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit united the disciples and three thousand others into a new community, but each person remained singular, and linguistic difference marked the whole group. Commenting on the place of language on the day of Pentecost, political theorist Anne Norton says, “At the moment in which they recognize themselves as the demos, the people are united by the heilege geist, that common mind and spirit that realizes itself in language, more precisely in linguistic difference. … Their work is in language and through language: not one language but in the diverse forms that language takes. They are all to speak, to write, to bear witness; each is to do so in a particular language, a particular tongue.”4

On the day of Pentecost, language was both the unifying medium of the immanent community and its extension to include the other, and the distinguishing marker of the persons/groups in the commons. Diverse tongues, each person speaking to others and being understood, became the symbol of the interplay between likeness and difference. Norton notes, “Language is a human capacity, but it appears in wildly diverse forms among human beings. One does not learn language, one learns a language, and so becomes human in a distinctive and particular manner. That which is common to all is achieved only in ways that are not common to all.”5

Let us get back to Heidegger to further theoretically ground the observations of Taylor and Norton. Language’s key role is to articulate “the between” where communication can take place. The between keeps alive the ceaseless oscillation of difference; it does not allow difference to turn into identity. In one of Heidegger’s articulations of the differential between that mediates Being and being, he states,

For world and things do not subsist alongside one another. They penetrate each other. Hence the two traverse a mean. In it, they are one. Thus at one, they are intimate. The mean of the two is inwardness. In our language, the mean of the two is called the between. The Latin language used inter. The corresponding German term is unter. The intimacy or inwardness of world and things is not a fusion. Intimacy obtains only where the intimate—world and thing—divides itself cleanly and remains separated. In the midst of the two, in the between of world and thing, in the inter, division prevails: dif-ference. The intimacy of world and thing is present in the boundary of the between; it is present in the dif-ference. The word difference is now removed from its usual and customary usage. What it now names is not a species concept for various kinds of differences. It exists only as this single difference. It is unique. Of itself, it holds apart the mean in and through which the world and things are at one with each other. The intimacy of the difference is the unifying element of the diaphora, the carrying out that carries through. The difference carries out world in its worlding, carries out things in their thinging. Thus carrying them out, it carries them toward one another. The dif-ference does not mediate after the fact by binding together world and things through a mean added on to them. Being the mean, it first determines world and things in their presence, i.e., in their being toward one another, whose unity it carries out.6

The sum of what we have stated in this section is that language as the characteristic feature of the day of Pentecost, both as “language of the Other” or “language for the Other,” causes a splitting in the subjects. This is the implicit violent gesture that is often missed in the theological analysis of the xenolalia, and by extension glossolalia, of the inaugural event of Pentecostalism. This is because they are not approached at their theoretically most accessible point. Let us now examine another type of split that occurred on the day.

Tongues-Speech as Revelation and Reveilation

Speaking in tongues (glossolalia), uttering mysteries in the Spirit (1 Cor. 14:2), is both a revelation and reveilation.7 It conceals communication (communicare, to make common) or the commons (the interspace of persons) by uttering only what the Spirit understands. By withdrawing from the community, interspace, the tongues-speaker is neither a person nor a nonperson. By this (non)placement she is one who is “set apart.” Note that “set apart” is polyvalent. It means in the usual sense that she is “holy,” touched by the Spirit, the one who is privileged, though many will come to be so privileged. In another sense it means she is set apart because she is uttering “secrets” that the others in her immediate community cannot understand. This second sense plays on the etymology of the word “secret,” which is secernere; se, apart, on one’s own, plus cernere, to separate. Tongues that reveal divine presence amid believers only by not revealing harbor the secret of division in the body of Christ, splitting the body from within. Speaking in tongues is that which “set apart” true believers as classical Pentecostals understood so well. But what was unthinkable by them and what is unsaid in their position is that the secret of tongues, the secret they cherish, is also the secret of God. In descending into the human realm (in immanence), God is also “set apart.” God’s position is both an ex-position and “parting” of God’s self. God turns to human beings at Pentecost by turning away from God’s self. Similarly, a turning to sinful human beings at the moment of the cross means God turning from God, God forsaking God, God withdrawing from himself (Matt. 27:46). The secret of the cross is also the secret of Pentecost.

Let us put things differently. Glossolalia, the founding event of Pentecostalism, enables the communication between humans and God by “withdrawing” from language. This withdrawal creates a hole in both human beings and God, so to speak. This hole represents the “originary lack” that births Pentecostalism—at least at Azusa/Topeka. This lack, which marks humans and God alike (or mimics God withdrawing from himself), “is neither the absence of a presence nor the presence of an absence, is not the arche but an anarche that re-moves the ground that once seemed secure. This unground that undercuts every Ungrund is always lacking and hence is ungraspable and incomprehensible.”8 The excess of Pentecostalism and its imbrication in the split-God image—the undercutting of orthodoxy and unsettling of theological grounds—can be traced to this “originary” lack. This tendency to re-move the grounds that seem secure will be further illustrated in the analysis of the various kinds of speaking in tongues.

Three Types of Speaking in Tongues

There are three types of tongues-speech in the Bible: xenolalia (Acts 2, and possibly Acts 10:44–48, 19:1–7), interpreted glossolalia (1 Cor. 14:13), and noninterpreted glossolalia (1 Cor. 14:6–10, 23). I will use these three terms to name some kind of agency that nudges Pentecostal believers, God’s subjects, to act ethically, even as it splits them (their identity). In the first case, the ecstatic speaker does not (necessarily) understand the language, but his or her audience does.9 In the second case, the unknown spiritual language is interpreted for the speaker and audience and it becomes a prophecy. In the final case, both the speaker and the audience (if any) do not understand what is being said. Paul in this case says, “Unless you speak intelligible words with your tongue, how will anyone know what you are saying? You will just be speaking into the air [empty space]. … So if the whole church comes together and everyone speaks in tongues, and inquirers or unbelievers come in, will they not say that you are out of your mind [crazy, mad]?” (1 Cor. 14:9, 23 NIV).

I want to read these three forms of tongues-speech in accordance with Lacan’s triad of Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real (I-S-R)—only as a heuristic device.10 In simple terms, the imaginary refers to identification with ideals (including dreams, imitation of another person, the ego ideal, idealized self-image, some supreme good, some positive determination of the paramount goal of society/institutions/god) in lived experience. The symbolic order refers to the laws, regulations, meanings of our community, institutions, or culture. In fact, it is the so-called “society” that structures a person’s experience of reality. It is the whole trans-subjective symbolic order that conditions a person’s existence. It stands to a person as an external reality. It also refers to a subject’s point of symbolic identification in community. The Real is the enigmatic, impossible demand of the symbolic order, the “Big Other” that eludes symbolization or representation and thus fills the subject with uncertainty and anxiety. As it is not directly observable, experienceable, or symbolize-able, a person is only able to discern through its effects. There is no guarantee that a person gets it right or wrong, which raises a lot of anxiety and marks the person as guilty even before he or she acts.

Table 1 summarizes upfront the analogy I am making between three forms of ton...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: Thinking at the Boundary
• 1 Day of Pentecost: The Founding Violent Gesture of Splits
• 2 Spiritual Discernment: Bathroom Mirror as Metaphor
• 3 The Beauty, Skin, and Monstrosity of Grace
• 4 The Sacred as Im/possibility: Expect a Miracle!
• 5 The Impossible Possibility, Capitalism, and the Pentecostal Subject
• 6 Worship as Pure Means
• 7 Everyday Form of Theology: Between Pentecostal Apparatus and Prosaic Existence
• Conclusion: Ethical Implications of a Split God
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover