The Paradox of Becoming

Introduction: Are We Redeemed Yet?

Writing on African Pentecostalism is performing pure madness. This performance of pure madness sinks us into an altered language and metaphorical speech that characterize divergent spiritualities found among African Pentecostals. It is entering the terrains of ambiguities and paradoxes, interruptions, disorders and distractions. It is about allowing the mind to think not what it judges and to believe not what it thinks. There is a thin, dark veil between the mind and pentecostalicity—otherwise lived imaginations. The mind cannot exhaust the conceived, the unruly, the complexities of often fragmented and scattered pieces of Pentecostal experiences. It can only make sense of some facets or aspects of them. Pentecostalicity is a search to live in time-timeless or otherwise possibilities. Pentecostalicity does not follow normative Western Protestant theological and philosophical structures and categories that now dominate many Pentecostal theologians around the world. In the old Pentecostal thinking, they are unconsciously quenching otherwise-intellectual fire of the Spirit or killing distinctive Pentecostal mytheological ways of thinking and becoming in the world. Pentecostalism emerged and continues to be an offbeat spirituality embedded in an unconventional imaginations and ways of doing things. Pentecostal conviction was and is rooted in reality and experiencing the Holy Spirit as foundation for moral regeneration for transformation of the world as against being politically right and merely subscribing to abstract doctrines which intellectualize the mind and simultaneously robbing its capacity “to recognize the insight which directs everything through everything.”¹ Pentecostalicity embodies cosmo-sophia-ic thinking (life-giving-agapeic-thinking) in which techne, episteme, phronesis, sophia, perception, sense-related, taste-related, intellectual, cognitive, scientific, nous, praxis, theory, religious, spirituality and so on are a singular fabric of mater(i)eality and underlies the condition of flourishing-becoming in the world.

This book resists embracing intellectual maturity at the expense and attending an academic funeral of Pentecostal otherwise-intellectuality. It transgresses against forgetting what early Pentecostals fought for and became labeled as anti-intellectuals. Pentecostalicity is an academic radical embrace of the Pentecostal ferment of otherwise-intellectuality. Here we are dealing with radical de-historizing of history and eschatologizing the nowness as Becoming-in-the-world rather than Martin Heidegger’s historization or “Being-in-the-world”². The Pentecostals are among otherwise-intellectuals Friedrich Nietzsche describes as undermining the process of history to “live in timeless simultaneity”.³ The fulfillment of humanity does not lie in an obscured future because “the Christ who is, was and is to come” (Revelation 1:4) is the God of nowness—the expansive infinite active potentiality within creation which is constantly discovered and actively actualized. Christ “is to come” not just in a literal sense but in the sense of being incessantly and actively realizable potential for the flourishing of all life in the nowness. As Nimi Wariboko argues, it is not just about what rationally makes sense but what makes the spirit—“speaking from, to, and for the whole belief system or the Holy Spirit”.⁴ This “is not limited to the sacred, religious, or private sphere of believers but is entangled in the ‘immanent frame’”⁵ and relational overflow of the more-than or, overlived, and overexistence in the excess-nowness or presentness. Again, Wariboko is instructive here:

There is no it-makes-spirit that is not at the same time it-makes-sense insofar as spirituality paradoxically carries with it the potential of both discursive self-legitimation and self-transcendence. Put differently, it-makes-spirit is also it-makes-sense because it-makes-spirit is always already an interpretation, a deconstructive proclivity of rationalism, and a meaningful (re)construction of “sense” that is dialogically embedded in everyday social intercourse. As an interpretation, it is also a transgressive and disruptive penetration into the logic of dominant (post-)Enlightenment discourses of knowledge production (authentication) and epistemological credentials.⁶

In humility, therefore, writing Pentecostalism requires acknowledging the possibilities of deception—not in the sense of being deceived by the Pentecostals, but rather, deceiving oneself in the claim of understanding the Pentecostal phenomenon.

Pentecostalism is “an assemblage of practices, ideas, and theologies—and interpretations of reality—whose tangled roots burrow deep into the three segments of African [a]‌temporalities … the ‘spirit’ of African Pentecostalism does not signify a distilled essence, changeless core, irreducible substrate, or perfection of being but is deployed for the sake of highlighting specific observations, contemplations and questions that point to something of broader significance for understanding the multidirectional openness of African Pentecostal social life without presuming a constrictive universalizing framework.”⁷ It is ongoing assimilations, appropriations and expressions of the gospel through various cultures, customs, ideologies, technologies, sciences and religious traditions of African people. It is not one thing, but an emergent diversity of beliefs and practices engendered by indigenous materialist appropriations and expressions of the gospel “through more or less effected local idioms, but in any case, without necessarily the European Enlightenment frame.”⁸ Pentecostalism is Christianity after Christianity and African religion after African religion. It is the movement in radical transition; Pentecostal becoming. This means that the theologies that would define and determine African Pentecostal imaginations remain fluid and dynamic. The fate of Pentecostalism would be decided in the ways it would respond to contemporary planetary discussions. Its advantage lies in its capacity to appropriate the gospel through indigenous logic without neglecting views from other global systems of thought. This advantage entrenches in Pentecostalism the potential and openness to embracing materialism/science and its belief systems as cohesive and unified aspects of meaning-making. The indigenous logic that informs and shapes Pentecostal reading, interpreting, and understanding of the scriptures and engendering local theologies is rooted in a complex paradoxical ontology (see Chapter One).

To avoid unnecessary essentialization, which honestly cannot be avoided, I have drawn much of the indigenous resources on Muntu from a worldview, by claim, I am familiar with—the Bemba-speaking people of Zambia. The Bemba epistemology and spirituality of the ritual⁹ regard Muntu as rooted in nature, as matter itself, as part of cosmic flux and creative becoming and as an apparatus for mediation of cosmic experiences.¹⁰ The idea of Muntu is a crucial resource with which we cannot adequately articulate African Pentecostal experiences without giving adequate attention to it. The dominant African Pentecostal ideas of “human” are pneumacentric, rather than normative nature mastering anthropocentrism. The challenge is that the Holy Spirit is conceived of only in terms of anthropo-indwelling and little attention is given to the cosmic nature of Spirit indwelling in all things.¹¹ In this sense, prevailing or normative Pentecostalism could be described as pneumatological anthropocentrism and like any other anthropocentrism, is inadequate for understanding and engaging the reality that has radically shifted to “Christ is all and is in all” imaginations (Colossians 3:11). This is a Cosmo-Christo-pneumatological magnetic network and harmonic resonances of life—the human-non-more-and-other-than-human condition. This kind of thinking of Christ has an affinity with the idea of Muntu, an infinitely perpetually ritualized reality (as explained in Chapter Five). The argument is that African Pentecostalism needs a more constructive and planetary language that can empower them to respond effectively to critical questions emerging from a contemporary critique of anthropocentrism and negative Anthropocene. It has to exploit and transform the language of life that it has inherited from pneumatology and indigenous religious heritages. Despite Pentecostalism being a ritualistic movement, not much attention has been given to making sense of the principles that undergird the language of kenosis in dialogue with the African ritual realm as critical for interpreting and understanding Christ as paradigmatic human-non-more-and-other-than-human-becoming.

The aim of this book is to construct a deep Pentecostal theology of human-non-more-and-other-than-human by utilizing resources from indigenous ideas of Muntu and the human-non-more-and-other-than-human Christ. I have argued that a postindigenious critical dialogue between the incarnation of Christ and Muntulogy is critical for constructing a Pentecostal kenotic humanity or new (post)humanity ethics of becoming which requires transcending local geographies and conceiving the self as extensive and expansive, a radical move beyond anthropocentric and locally culturally confined humanities. I utilized an interdisciplinary maneuver through bounded entanglement and theoretical lenses of indigenous (Bemba) materialism, Africana posthuman critical theory and kenotic rituality, in conversation with critical thinkers such as Catherine Malabou (plasticity), Hannah Arendt (natality), Victor Turner (liminality) and Pentecostal thinkers. I have created a postindigenous¹² framework that synthesized these various theories into what I have described as poetics of mysticality and materiasticity (materiality and plasticity). I have elucidated this conceptual framework in Chapter One. This conceptual metaphor helped me in the process of engaging the model of incarnate Christ, not only a template of new creation and kenotic humanity/new (post)humanity but a paradigmatic reality of flourishing becoming. I argued that the major disruptions in new materialist thought have placed the search for planetary humanisms at the center of “planetarity” and bounded entanglement. I have shown that Pentecostalism has inherited a rich and complex paradoxical ontology for constructing a critical theology of “kenotic humanity or new (post)human in Christ”. Following the Bemba worldview, I contend that immanent pentecostalicity pleads for acknowledging that the condition of matter-energy, the Zoetic nature of matter as such, a material pneuma-vitalism (Spirit vitalism) that lives in and through all, exists, but is extraordinarily or mysteriously hidden to give existence the full freedom to choose its course and destiny. This is crucial as Pentecostalism might become a planetary spirituality which has potential to shape and inform the emerging language of flourishing-becoming in the planetary age. Before explaining that, let me delineate my use of the notion of pentecostalicity and its related terms in this book. I turn to this now.

Pentecostalicity

Pentecostalism has become a prominent faith at a time when the epistemic center of gravity is increasingly shifting from anthropocentrism to planetarism. The world’s primal spiritual frequency is being rediscovered, reclaimed and reconstituted. Jesus Christ is increasingly conceived as the human-non-more-and-other-than-human-savior-redeemer. Kwame Bediako has observed that “the Christian presence has undergone literally a sea-change in Africa. It has gone from being, and from being perceived as, a Western factor in African life, to becoming, and being experienced as, an African reality. It seems that it is now time for scholarship to recognize generally, and work with, this transformation of African Christianity.”¹³ At the heart of this transformation is pentecostalicity which is the defining principle of the character and orientation of World Christianity. African Christianity as a whole—Roman Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, Initiated and Pentecostalism—is an indigenous discovery of the principle of pentecostalicity.¹⁴ According to Ogbu Kalu, “The Pentecostal story must be woven into the broader tapestry of Christian presence and African responses. Contemporary scholarship tends to focus on the present manifestations of the Pentecostal movement, and without a long view miss much of the significance of the movement in the Africans’ encounter with the gospel.”¹⁵ Kalu has established how a historical trajectory of African Christianity represents a single “trail of ferment” in which pentecostalicity (capacity of ever beginning and never-ending renewals and revitalizations) is interlaced through African Christianity. Kalu claims this is a result of consecutive “cycles of charismatic revivals that became part of African Christianity.… (E)ach cycle moved the church forward in a new direction and character” which have perennially entrenched pentecostalicity on African Christianity as a whole.¹⁶ The translation of the Bible into mother tongue created safe conditions that enabled African Christians to rediscover their “pneumatic spiritual resources of the gospel” in ways that now shape African Christianity in both the continent and diaspora.¹⁷ A pentecostalicity “trail of ferment” is thereby drawn through the Christian history of the entire continent and diaspora, weaved through the mainline churches, and reinforced in the Pentecostalism. Thereby it gives African expressions of Christianity a distinctive and unquestionable indigenous stamp and identity.¹⁸ “The core argument is that the prophetic movements, revivals and other forms of charismatic religiosity were appropriated by Africans to establish a charismatic spirituality that would define African response to the bible.”¹⁹