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Pneuma 33 (2011) 391-408
Dialogue
Fire from Heaven: Pentecostals in the Secular City
Nimi Wariboko
Katherine B. Stuart Professor of Christian Ethics, Andover Newton Teological School,
Newton Centre, Massachusetts
Abstract
Is Harvey Cox’s Fire from Heaven which focused on Pentecostalism merely a mea culpa for the hubris of predicting the death of God in the 1960s or a case of using the “pentecostaliza- tion” of religions to describe the shape of religiosity in the emerging global civil society, global secular city? Tis essay shows how theologically liberal ideas in both his Fire from Heaven and Secular City are today used to theologize the relevant shape of faith in the global civil society in ways that hauntingly suggest Pentecostalism is implicated in the emergence and working of the global secular city which reject notions of transcendence in religion. Te essay then chal- lenges pentecostal theologians to seriously consider the question: In what way is Pentecostalism already secularized or secularizing from its core?
Keywords
secularization, primal spirituality, global secular city, theonomous, God is dead, Pentecostal Prin- ciple, Harvey Cox
Introduction
Is Harvey Cox’s Fire from Heaven merely a mea culpa for the hubris of predict- ing the death of God or, more precisely, the demise of the received notion of God? After offering a quick overview of the book, I will provide a provocative, outside-the-box interpretation, tying it to his larger theoretical framework of the secular city. Tis reading will disappoint many, including those who thought that Cox only gave Pentecostal Theology much-needed gravitas. Cox was on to something else with his highly acclaimed book. Tis is something I came gradually to discern when I reread the book in January 2011, after being asked by the Philosophy Group of the Society for Pentecostal Theology to
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/157007411X592701
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introduce the book to its members at the March 2011 Memphis conference. Tis something else, this something more, which is like a secret hidden on the face of the sky, is what I am eager to probe.
Te uncovering of the something else is the task of this essay. Te exercise culminates in the thesis that Fire from Heaven (1990s) is the recognition of the religious substrate of the emergent global, cosmopolitan urban civilization (1960s) heralded by Cox’s Te Secular City. Today the spirit of God has escaped from the iron cage of secularization/modernization theory and the idea of God-free civilization prowls about in the dry places of libraries “like the ghost of dead religious beliefs.”1 God, for Harvey Cox, may have escaped the tomb and appeared to the Pentecostals, but he is still headed to the secular city. He died in the city, was buried in the city, and rose after three decades, and he will ascend (disappear, flee) into (immanent) heaven in the city. Exploring how Cox thinks all this is the job at hand.
An Overview of Fire from Heaven
Te key argument of Fire from Heaven is that the growth of Pentecostalism in the twentieth century was due to the surge of common human religiosity. Tis religiosity, which he calls primal spirituality,2 is a common property of all indigenous religions. According to Cox, the primal spirituality expresses itself phenomenologically as primal speech (ecstatic speech, tongue-speaking), pri- mal piety (dreams, visions, trances, dancing, and various other forms of reli- gious experience), and primal hope (eschatological orientation, apocalypticism, millennial fervor).3 His point is that Pentecostalism exploded in the last cen- tury because it tapped into and drank from the deep wells of homo religiosus, arousing a preexisting dimension of humanity that formalistic and creed- oriented religions had tried to suppress for too long.4 “If what I call ‘primal spirituality’ underlies all faith traditions, including the one recorded in the
1
Max Weber, Te Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 182.
2
Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: Te Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Reli- gion in the Twenty-First Century (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 81-83.
3
Ibid.
4
For Cox’s discussion of the reasons for the explosion, see Fire from Heaven, 51, 77-78, 81-82, 103-5. His identification of factors is not parsimonious; he gives so many reasons that the growth is explainable by almost everything.
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Bible, then what pentecostals are doing is reaching deep into the foundation of common human religiosity which also underlies biblical faith.”5
Why this upsurge of common human religiosity in the twentieth century? Te sage of Harvard argues that individuals and communities that have been uprooted, marginalized, and oppressed theonomously drew from this common human religious core, this depth of existence in order to cope with social changes and alienation.
Pentecostalism succeeds because it has retrieved and restored primal spiritu- ality to the Christian tradition; and it does it in a way that correlates questions the masses are raising with primal resources of the faith. Tis restoration has enabled it to build bridges to indigenous religious traditions worldwide and empowered its form of Christianity to draw from various suitable ele- ments of local cultures as it travels around the world. So in South Korea it appropriated shamanism and rebranded it and in Africa it has wedded Chris- tianity and traditional African religions in the AICs (African independent, initiated, instituted churches) with emphases on ecstatic worship, healing, and ecological care.
Te upshot of Cox’s argument is that Pentecostalism might just be the most viable, appropriate, and adaptive form of Christianity in the twenty-first cen- tury and may indeed represent the future of faith, the triumph of primal spir- ituality in the age of the Spirit. Tis marginalized and maligned form of Christianity may well be the fetus that carries the future of the species.6 In fact, from the portion of the subtitle of Fire from Heaven that reads, “ Te Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century,” Cox wants his readers to know that if they understand Pentecostalism they understand (something of ) the shape of religion in our age. Not that Pentecostalism is going to take over all other religions, but that we are going to see the “pentecostalization” of religions: emphases on religious experience, deeds (not creeds, beliefs, and doctrines), and faith as an exemplary way of life and as confidence in encounters with the divine (and not text-orientation).
Tere is plenty to quarrel about with Cox. Many Pentecostal theologians have already locked horns with him on his interpretation of Pentecostalism.7 Tey disagree not only with his equating of Pentecostalism (which he also calls
5
Ibid., 248-49.
6
Here I am using Arnold Toynbee’s metaphorical language. See Harvey Cox, Religion in the Secular City: Toward a Postmodern Teology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 191-92, 196, 267.
7
See Amos Yong, Discerning the Spirit(s): A Pentecostal-Charismatic Contribution to Christian Teology of Religions (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 18-20.
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“Christian shamanism”) with primal spirituality, but also with his obvious neglect of the role of the transcendental Holy Spirit that is also the spirit of Christ. In this response coming fifteen years after the publication of Fire from Heaven, I do not want to engage Cox on the basis of the (negative) implica- tions of his work for Pentecostal theologies, self-esteem, and identity. I want to examine the implicit theory of the global secular city, which now, unlike the 1960s, can accommodate and ride on an emerging global “primitive” religious consciousness. In the 1960s Cox’s vision brought us to the city that was touched and swelled by secularization8 in common cause with a fleeing (rather, a dispersed) God.9 But in the twenty-first century we have come to Mount Secular and the global city of living human religiosity, the New Jerusalem. We have come to an innumerable company of deities, to the general assembly and church of non-fundamentalists who are registered on earth to the immanent Spirit the bond of all, to the spirits of socially conscious men and women made just and perfect, to the nucleus of the human psyche the mediator of new pluralistic covenant, and to the praise of social justice that speaks better things than beliefs and creeds. Te ’60s transcendental God that fled has not come back; Pentecostals and others have only excavated his image buried deep within. As Cox put it clearly, the Pentecostal movement has succeeded
because it has spoken to the spiritual emptiness [read the void created by a dead God or failed transcendence] of our time by reaching beyond the levels of creed and cere- mony into the core of human religiousness, into what might be called “primal spiritu- ality,” that largely unprocessed nucleus of the psyche in which the unending struggle for a sense of purpose and significance goes on. Classical theologians have called it the “imago dei,” the image of God in every person. Maybe the pentecostals are referring to the same thing with different words.10
8
“Secularization is the liberation of man from religious and metaphysical tutelage, the turn- ing of his attention away from other worlds and toward this.” Tis is how Cox formally defined the term in Te Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Teological Perspective (New York: Collier Books, 1990), 1. But in his actual usage in this and later books, it means the radical immanence of God (211-235) in this world such that there is no longer a religious (transcenden- tal) determination of symbols of cultural integration. He uses it also to refer to the process of industrialization, urbanization, and technological expansion that has disenchanted nature, deconsecrated values, and desacralized politics. He traces his concept of secularization to the biblical sources (19-32). As shown below, Cox’s notion of secular city is at the bottom an unde- veloped conceptual gesture toward the now common (among liberal theologians) notion of transimmanence.
9
Based on the evidence in Secular City, Cox did not blatantly argue the God-is-dead thesis. His point is that the divine presence is not in one place, such as the institutional church, but is dispersed and scattered in the secular, well and alive in the so-called godless world.
10
Cox, Fire from Heaven, 81.
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Let us be clear: Cox’s primal spirituality is a form of “creative regression.” He believes that people are reaching down to some foundational experiences asso- ciated with the human evolution or their ascent into civilization. Te retrieval of some of the contents of the deep psyche — instead of the move of the Holy Spirit — harbors possibilities for self-empowerment and rejuvenation as well as pathology.11 Let us set aside for the moment whether Pentecostalism is a work of the Holy Spirit and instead engage Cox on his own turf. Let us exam- ine his language of retrieval or restoration. My question is: Why is this spiritu- ality considered only as primal (first-order, the return of the primitive) and not as emergent? Is it only explainable by preexisting elements and not by an unex- pected configuration of preexisting elements, environment, and so on? Instead of creative regression, why don’t we think of it as creative emergence?12
Te kind of spirituality Cox has analyzed can also be explained as an explo- ration of the phase spaces of human consciousness or spirituality if we resort to emergence. By emergence I mean novel properties, traits that arise from a given set of matter in the right sort of organized complexity. Te properties are novel not only because they cannot be found at lower levels of complexity, but also because they are unpredictable phenomena produced by the interactions between preexisting elements or parts.
Tere are multiple other ways to try to get at what Cox means by primal spirituality. Tey will also raise serious theological and philosophical question about the concept. Apart from describing and analyzing it (in the old sense of reducing a unit to its elements), he did not adequately conceptualize it in a rigorous theological or philosophical framework. Based on his description and the way he deployed the notion of primal spirituality in the book, Cox may have capitulated to some form of essentialism in his understanding of Pente- costalism. Primal spirituality, which he sees across many religious settings and cultures, is some kind of a stable entity, something identified as basic human nature, which is deeply oriented toward God across all time and space. If this interpretation is correct, then what Cox saying is this: transcendence already
11
Ibid., 263-97.
12
It is tempting to explore how the science of emergence can enable us to understand the human relationship with God, but it is better to plug our ears against the siren calls of such an enticing exploration because of the limitation of space. If not that will take us too far afield away from buckling down to examine such questions as this: How does emergence as a sign mediate the human encounter with (and knowledge of ) God? Or, what would the pneumatological imag- ination alert us to with regard to emergence? Tese questions are addressed by Nimi Wariboko, Te Pentecostal Principle: Ethical Methodology in New Spirit, Pentecostal Manifesto Series 5 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011, forthcoming).
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has immanent ground in the imago dei. As it will be demonstrated below, Cox considers the vitality of the primal spirituality as immanent within the earthly realm and it does not go beyond this world or materiality. If so, is primal spirituality shorthand for human nature as being itself transcendent to culture and cultural expression?13
On the whole, Fire from Heaven has something to teach us after these many years, and there is something deeply Pentecostal about it that not many books from the stable of Pentecostal theologians have been able to match. Its meth- odology is an expression of the Pentecostal mood, sensibility, and orientation. It has a novelist feel and the rhetoric of narrative theology of testimonies and sermons, songs and prayers. It celebrates the discursive framework of oral soci- eties that is characteristic of Pentecostal communities. It has the philosophical clarity of an analysis filtered through the enchanted lens of a people whose faces are set toward the eschatological New Jerusalem. And as we shall demon- strate below, instead of seeking to reinterpret the ideas of secular city within the context of the categories of surging spirituality, Cox changed the categories to make them more open to his thought on the secular city, beginning with the definition of core, common “human religiosity.”
In Cox’s thought there is a “genealogical desert” between the God (Yahweh, pure one of the Beyond, whose Son died) who fled the scene (or died) in the mid-twentieth century and the Spirit (a kind of the Real whose spectral logic determines what goes on in every religious reality) who came in the late twen- tieth century.14 Te spirit is an unprocessed psyche. How the dead God engen- dered this Spirit or how the Spirit came to occupy the Void-Place of the former is left unexplained. Te global secular city is located at this genealogical desert. Te foundation of this city is unarticulated; it is Cox’s un-thought. So, to ask the question, “Is this the same Spirit that the Pentecostals celebrate or wor- ship?” is to miss the logic of Cox’s liberal theology whose key point is to create an awareness of the thorough incongruity between the supposedly dead God
13
I am grateful to Professor Dale Coulter of Regent University for pointing me to this line of criticism of Cox’s notion.
14
Here I am making an allusion to Hegel who criticized the materialists of his day for reduc- ing the concept of spirit to a bone, to only what goes on in the bony skull, a dead object. He summed up their conception of the spirit with this statement: “Te spirit is a bone.” Hegel’s insight is also that there is a spirit insofar as there is a material base, some nonspiritual portion of the human being. See G. W. F. Hegel, Te Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), para. 336-40. Tus, I am also drawing attention to Cox’s reduc- tionist conception of the spirit (an unprocessed psyche) along similar lines of thought. See also Slavoj Žižek, Te Fragile Absolute: Or Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting for? (London: Verso, 2008), xvi-xvii, 26-27.
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and the newly resurrected one in the sacred portal. It is this radical incongruity that creates the clearing for the post — God-is-dead global secular city and undergirds its religious pluralism.15
God and the Global Secular City
What struck me on my rereading of Fire from Heaven is that it came across as a theology of history16 and globalization, a theory of the emerging global secu- lar city. Te subtext of this book is about the movement of history, caught on the wings of the Pentecostal (which is beyond Pentecostalism) toward its cul- mination as the New Jerusalem. History is the movement and expansion of a “civil society,” a secular city, an in-between of people called out from blood- based affiliations and identities (race, tribe, caste, ethnicity) and from political totality (nationalism, closed political affiliation, nonvoluntaristic associations) toward an urban, cosmopolitan in-gathering of God’s children.17 (Temporally, it is also an in-between, “the crevasse between what was and what will be”; a catalyptic gap.)18
Tis eventful movement emitted its visceral birth shriek at Azusa Street in 1906, flows on the yellow brick road of American experience and influence,19
15
Tis paragraph was inspired by Žižek, Te Fragile Absolute, 23-27.
16
Cox takes theology of history to mean seeing the church operating in the larger setting in which God works through corporate entities and not always through the “usual suspects.” Tis is obvious throughout Te Secular City. See also his Religion in the Secular City (231), where he exemplifies this theology or reads it into the Christian fundamentalist movement in the United States and into the liberationists.
17
See Cox, Secular City, 93-95, 154-55.
18
Ibid., 101. For a discussion of temporal gaps in shaping ethics, see Nimi Wariboko, Ethics and Time (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010).
19
Te structure of Fire from Heaven bears this out. Te beginning is all about the United States; the middle is all footnotes to what has happened in America. As Cox puts it on page 157: the American experiences of Pentecostalism and jazz “have become highways along which the whole world is moving.” He relentlessly examines events and histories from the lens of Azusa Street (239, 246-49). At the end of the book he comes back to the United States, portraying the encircling motion of American Pentecostalism: “Pentecostalism has encircled the world, but it was born in America” (263; see also 321).
I need to add that Cox is not correct when he attributes the birth of Pentecostalism only to the United States. Te births of Pentecostalism were decentered and interpreting the history of the movement’s development as decentralized and deterritorialized fits even better with his idea of the global secular city, the worldwide civil society with no center. Tere is no center to the emerg- ing global civilization upon which Pentecostalism supervenes and it is likely also to undergird in the future. Global Pentecostalism in its birth and progress is a rhizomatic, networked organism, not an empire with a metropole and periphery. Te global secular city, as he himself argues, is a
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and is headed toward the Chicago-styled White City, not the delectable topog- raphy of beyond-history kingdom of God. Te “White City,” the concrete New Jerusalem that is achievable, is an amalgam of reformed and rebranded primal spirituality (which at its roots is shamanistic and hence common to all forms of religiosity) and entrepreneurial capitalism.20 Te actual yet make- believe White City of Chicago that was engulfed in fire soon after the Great Columbia Exposition of 1893 combined the spirit of capitalism and world- wide religiosity.21 I told you he was on to something else!
Tis way of interpreting the book was strongly suggested by Cox’s opening chapters, which highlighted the notions of New Jerusalem and worldwide reli- giosity as situated within both secular and religious discourses in the late- nineteenth-century United States. In my opinion, the references to Pentecost and New Jerusalem (an urban, cosmopolitan civilization, a global civil society) set the overarching framework or context for the narratives of the book.22 In this context America, or rather American experience and impulse, is the high- way on which this rebranded religion travels.
Te global secular city is a new worldwide human community (polis, com- monwealth), the new (dispersed-into-society) church, the “kingdom of God.”23 Technology, urbanization, knowledge-economy, globalization, and religion are creating a new worldwide public that could approximate the New Jerusa- lem, a new global civilization. Te secular city is seen as a global urban city and civilization (a universal space of freedom) and points to the catholic gathering of all of God’s children as discussed in the book of Revelation.24 It is an agent of social change, a representative of the new that God is doing in our midst.25 God is revealed in the global secular city in the many forms of world and indigenous religions and is available in it to create new possibilities for life.26
complex, inclusive, urban, cosmopolitan civilization. It is a space not beholden to bio-piety (gene pool) or geo-piety (to nations).
20
Cox, Fire from Heaven, 218-19.
21
Ibid., 19-43.
22
Ibid., 21-24, 48. Cox has toyed with the notion of the New Jerusalem for a long time. In Te Secular City (94-95), he stated that the symbol of the secular city embraces the impressive city symbols of the New Jerusalem and the city of God.
23
See Cox, Secular City, 95-98, 100, 197-98 for the seed of this thought (that is, the secular city as the kingdom of God) of interpreting the secular city as today’s equivalent of the kingdom of God.
24
For a discussion of the new global civilization see Cox, Religion in the Secular City, xix-xxi, 207.
25
Cox, Secular City, 197-98, 228-29.
26
“I am not one of those who believes . . . that a single world civilization will inevitably result, sooner or later, in a single world religion.” Harvey Cox, “Afterward and Forward,” in Religion in a Secular City, ed. Arvind Sharma (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity International Press, 2001), xxiii.
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Te best way to understand Cox’s unified philosophy of global secular city, history, and global religious consciousness is the notion of ecclesia, a universal common and what is shared in it. What is shared in the common is primal spirituality and freedom. Te reawakening or recovering of primal spirituality (“the image of God”) is the form in which religion is allowed to enter into this city, to bring its goods and glory into the global in-between. Put differently, the secular city, its social and cultural structures, is ultimately grounded in primal spirituality — or will be, as civilizations move past creeds and beliefs. Primal spirituality is the implicit religious affirmation of the secular city in the twenty-first century. Te useable form of the primal spirituality is that which can only function in the quotidian here and now, in the irreducible context of religious pluralism,
as the sacred in the immanent, the spiritual within the secular. More people seem to recognize that it is our everyday world, not some other one, that, in the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, is “charged with the grandeur of God”. . . . Te prag- matic and experiential elements of faith as a way of life are displacing the previous emphasis on institutions and beliefs.27
Freedom or human flourishing in Fire from Heaven is modeled in the image of the erasure of the color line.28 A close reading of the book easily shows that the “central miracle of Azusa Street” and its abiding message for the world, for the emerging global society, is not the tongues-speaking but the “erasure of the color line.” For Cox the building of a common humanity is the kernel of Pentecost and the fire that fell in Los Angeles. Te Azusa Street Revival, accord- ing to him,
had a powerful archetypal significance . . . It presaged a new world in which both the outer and inner divisions of humankind would be abolished. . . . [T]he pentecostal wave has an irreducibly communal dimension. Te Spirit descends on groups gathered in prayer, not on an inspired painter at an easel, or an isolated sculptor chipping a block of granite. Most importantly, for the pentecostals the purpose of the Spirit’s visitation, unlike that of a muse, is not to ravish the soul of the individual but to gather up and knit together the broken human family.29
27
Harvey Cox, Te Future of Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 2-3 (emphasis in the original).
28
Cox, Fire from Heaven, 17, 58, 61, 99-100, 260, 297.
29
Ibid., 100. For the communal nature of the church and the revival, see also 99-100, 112- 13, 126, 149-50.
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Cox believes that the leader Seymour had the right interpretation of the his- toric role of the fire that fell at Azusa. Seymour, a black man accustomed to being treated as a degraded human being by the majority white population, interpreted the event within the framework of the creation of common human family. Cox quoted Seymour’s words in the Azusa mission’s newspaper Te Apostolic Faith:
Tongues are one of the signs that go with every baptized person, but it is not the real evidence of baptism in everyday life . . . Te secret is: one accord, one place, one heart, one prayer, one soul, believing in this great power. Pentecost . . . brings us all into one common family.30
What I am interpreting as the global secular city is Cox’s vision of the New Jerusalem. It is a combination of William Joseph Seymour’s vision of the new racially inclusive community, the vision of the planners of the 1893 Exposi- tion, which combined a robust capitalism with a world parliament of reli- gions, Cox’s celebrated theorization of the secular city, and his dreams of a new Pentecost and a New Jerusalem rolled into one. Tat is, all three visions are bundled into one universal human family, primed and energized to flourish and roar to great heights in communication, technical progress, social justice, and I-You relationships.
31
Tis notion of a common human family — undergirded by primal spiritu- ality but without a transcendental, beyond-history great power — is Cox’s vision of the global secular city.32 Sadly, he is not sure whether the religious group that bears the name of Pentecost can rise to fulfill this founding vision, this ideal that informs his vision. He laments:
But this ideal faded quickly. Te revival that one visitor said was a demonstration of the power of the Spirit to “wash away the color line with the blood of the cross,” and to purge the church of the sin of racism, had segregated itself very quickly. Today pentecostalism stands in grave danger of losing the invaluable message it could bring to the other churches and to the rest of the world. What had happened to the spirit of Azusa?33
30
Ibid., 297.
31
Note that Cox in Te Secular City (38-42, 230-32) argued for “I-You” instead of Martin Buber’s “I-Tou” relationships in the secular city.
32
Ibid., 197-98, 228-29.
33
Cox, Fire from Heaven, 297.
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My retrieval of the notion of New Jerusalem from Fire from Heaven is to show how Cox’s ideas have changed yet have moved in the same groove. Te New Jerusalem in Fire from Heaven , as we have seen, is a synonym for the secular city and is doggedly earthly. Nevertheless, the global secular city, as being built by the forces of globalization and freedom, or as conceived by Cox, is not considered as a project necessarily against God or transcendence. Rather, it is built on or conceptualized in the ruins of “failed transcendence,” amid the refusal of God to go away or to die. Ten, as Ernesto Laclau advised:
What we need, therefore, is change of terrain. Tis change, however, cannot consist in a return to a fully-fledged transcendence. Te social terrain is structured, in my view, not as completely immanent or as the result of some transcendent structure, but through what we could call failed transcendence. Transcendence appears with the social as the presence of an absence. It is around a constituted lack that the social [common human religiosity] is organized.34
Te secular has a much more complex relationship to religious subjectivity and transcendence in a “one-story world,” not the two-story edifice of earth and heaven, world and after-world, immanence and transcendence.35 On this point Cox approvingly and affirmatively quotes Amos Wilder’s essay “Art and Teological Meaning” to buttress his argument:
If we are to have transcendence today, even Christian, it must be in and through the secular. . . . If we are to find Grace it is to be found in the world and not overhead. Te sublime firmament of overhead reality that provided a spiritual home for the souls of men until the eighteenth century has collapsed.36
Te secular is located in the liminal space between immanence and transcen- dence. What Cox has done in Fire from Heaven and also in his 2009 book, Te Future of Faith, is a change of conceptual terrain, to subtly reconceptualize the secular city. Cox’s theological thought, in this post — God-is-dead moment, “works amid this failed transcendence. Tis means that while there is a rejec- tion of transcendence, there must be an acknowledgement that the failures of
34
Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (New York: Verso, 2005), 244; quoted in Mark Lewis Taylor, Te Teological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2011), 127.
35
Cox, Secular City, 228.
36
Amos N. Wilder, “Art and Teological Meaning,” in Te New Orpheus: Essays toward a Christian Poetic, ed. N. A. Scott (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964), 407; quoted in Cox, Secu- lar City, 228.
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transcendence partially determine the way”37 in which thinking about the secular city occurs now.
We can see this in the way Cox thinks of the primal spirituality in Fire from Heaven. Te vitality of the primal spirituality is immanent within the earthly realm and does not go beyond this world or materiality. It is a retrieval of cer- tain forces within human corporeality, yet the text does not openly demonize or exorcise transcendence. Te concept of primal spirituality only points us to failed attempts to think of religiosity as something of another world, as some- thing pointing us to a transcendental, metahistorical realm. Te primal spiri- tuality, which is an earthy expression of human religiosity, is now to be understood amid the failed theology and explanations of transcendence. Te secular city arises within the ruins of transcendence and does not contradict transcendence. Tere is trans-ascendence, but it is not a movement across (trans in Latin) the face of the earth, its peoples and institutions; it does not go beyond them (without scandere, climb). Te global secular city, unlike its 1960s cousin, is not an immanent’s rejection of transcendence, neither is it a volte-face embrace of transcendence. It is transimmanence. Te concept of the transimmanent global secular city, to quote Mark Lewis Taylor, “emerges from the backdrop of previous discussions, contestations built around the contrast- ing terms transcendence and immanence. One might say that the relationship of transimmanence to transcendence is dialectical; it emerges through (dia-) and in development with transcendence.”38
In the thirty-year interval between Secular City and Fire from Heaven, the nouns of the 1960s secular city have become the verbs of the twenty-first- century global secular city. In the former period the main issue was that there was no mystery of God in the city;39 in the period of the twenty-first century, it is how mystery of God is, how it functions.40 Resorting to the rhetorical flourish of Dietrich Bonhoeffer — and in imitation of Cox’s line of thinking as laid bare in this essay41 — we can state that we have proceeded into a time of manifest religiosity. How do we speak of the secular with increasing religios- ity? How do we speak in religious fashion of the secular city? Based on the
37
Taylor, Te Teological, 23.
38
Taylor, Te Teological, 126 (italics in the original).
39
Cox, Secular City, 52-55.
40
Te concept and “how” of mystery are further elaborated in Cox, Future of Faith, 24-28, 35-38, 194.
41
“We have proceeded toward a time of no religion at all. . . . How do we speak of God with- out religion. . . . How do we speak in a secular fashion of God?” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Prisoner for God (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 123; quoted in Cox, Secular City, 211.
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insights gained from Fire from Heaven, from Pentecostals, Cox speaks of the secular city in religious fashion in his latest book, Te Future of Faith. I told you he was on to something else!
Pentecostals and the Secular City
In light of the above discussions, I dare to suggest that Pentecostal theologians should exercise caution in affirming that it is really, ultimately about Pentecos- talism that the sage Cox, the philosopher of religion and student of compara- tive religions, was interested in when he wrote Fire from Heaven. Even if the book is coded as a Pentecostal study, it is about Cox’s worldwide pilgrimage into the inside, the mystery of the human being, and the nature of primal spirituality in the twentieth century. Cox, the homo quaerens, was probing the depth dimension of the human spirit as it is laid bare by the Pentecostals. He was not really interested in their doctrines, beliefs, or theologies. Te thrill was in investigating their particular expression of the encounter with “ultimate concern,” a particular display of mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
His interest was in using the vehicle, the cover of Pentecostalism to investi- gate the “largely unprocessed nucleus of the psyche.”42 Pentecostalism is a veritable case study of the immanent spiritual reality, latent anywhere, every- where, and “everywhen.” Primal spirituality is his interest and Pentecostalism is a species of it, and as a good naturalist he collected, collated, classified, and documented its spores. In a different language, Pentecostals are the cicadas that happened to pop from the deep, primitive psyche in the twentieth century and must be quickly studied before more civilization, rationalization, secularism, and whatever else drives them below the surface again. Tere is nothing wrong with this kind of academic interest, nothing wrong with situating Pentecostal- ism in the larger context of human religiosity. Tis is what all good theorists do. Cox did a good job of his task and we are attempting to understand him within the explicit and implicit purposes of his project.
His project was about understanding and explaining the shape of religion in the postmodern secular society or the return of nonprivate faith in the secu- lar city. Te case study method, served by “ethnographic” visits and historical surveys, is his signature pattern of scholarship. Tis methodology is also evident in his 1984 book, Religion in the Secular City, where he examined “two representative antimodernist religious movements”: (a) the political
42
Cox, Fire from Heaven, 81.
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fundamentalism of Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in the United States and (b) Christian Base Communities and liberation theology in Latin America. In both cases, he began by narrating the actual history out of which they have arisen. Te reason is precisely to show how God is working in the secular city, liberating people and redefining ecclesiology. Te context in which they arose is the eruption of the Spirit, “which blows where it wills,” into the secular. Te Pentecostal movement is the latest expression of the Spirit of God within the secular city. Note that for Cox the secular is “the people of God.”43 We have also to note that Cox’s work operates in the framework of logos-theos. Te logos is his theory of the contemporary world (which is nothing but the secular city). Te theos is God, Spirit who is immanently present in the world.
44 So the eruption of the Pentecostals, “the eruption of the poor” or, for that mat- ter, the eruption of the Spirit (the God aspect) is understood in terms of the logos aspect.
Cox’s project is also a way of investigating the shape of faith that will be most suitable, common, and widely shared as the future of the New Jerusalem, an urban cosmopolitan civilization. Te New Jerusalem is a form of the secular city that has “openly” appropriated religiosity. Tis religiosity has the form of “pentecostalism.” He writes:
what we call “pentecostalism” is not a church or even a single religion at all, but a mood. It represents what might be called “a millennial sensibility,” a feeling in the pit of the cultural gut that a very big change is under way.45
Te New Jerusalem is a form of civilization, a global secular city that will not suffocate the human spirit, repress the oceanic feeling, or arbitrarily confine God to a zone of abandonment. Te sacred (the spiritual, religion), sanitized
43
Cox, Secular City, 93-95, 154-55.
44
Cox, Religion in the Secular City, 137-38, 148, 176-78.
45
Cox, Fire from Heaven, 116 (emphasis in the original). Tis quotation, which refers to “mil- lennial sensibility,” is particularly interesting as it opens up areas of possible comparison of Cox’s thought to some postmillenarians who wanted to build the kingdom of God on earth. He is probing the best religious form to achieve this goal. Pentecostalism offers him a viable way or model of thinking about the religiosity of the kingdom of God. Dale Coulter of Regent Univer- sity, who specializes in historical theology, pointed me to this historical perspective after reading an earlier draft of this paper. He informed me that Cox might be “recasting the postmillennial position that revivalists like Charles Finney and Asa Mahan (forerunners of Pentecostalism in America) espoused. Tey were political progressives (abolitionists, pro-women rights, etc.) and revivalists because they saw revivalism as the mechanism of transformation in the face of the social ills of their own day. Is Cox’s vision another version of this theological trajectory?” (Per- sonal email communication, February 4, 2011).
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of its pathology and boiled down to its common primal substrate, is within the secular city. Te task of theology in this global secular city is the theorization of the everyday world (horizontal and not vertical, not some beyond-history place, but transimmanent) that is charged with mystery and awe. Tis form of theology (or, as Mark Lewis Taylor will prefer to call it, the theological ) is set forth in Cox’s new book, Te Future of Faith.
Cox’s scholarship challenges Pentecostal theologians to make a turn from theology to the theological, the transimmanence as a dimension of social exis- tence, practice, and thought. Te theological focuses on agonistic politics in which being and being-together are at stake. Cox in his language calls the theological “the theology of politics.”46 Te theological is a rejection of Teol- ogy (capital “T” theology) for theological reflection on the sacred in transim- manence, amid failed transcendence. To quote Taylor one more time:
Unlike the dominant ethos of Teology, the major concern of the theological is not transcendence, and its primary language is not doctrine. Nevertheless, it is a discourse that is alive with force to rival stultifying and repressive sovereignties. . . . Te theo- logical is a discourse that is disciplined, not so much by doctrinal formation, but by reflection taking place at multiple sites of the academies [the storefront churches], and other public thinking. Te theological . . . facilitates human organizing to redress the social exclusion and repression that keep imposed social suffering ever bearing heavily upon those in its agony.47
Another challenge that Cox poses for Pentecostal theologians is for them to expand the foci of their theology. Cox used to think that Exodus and Easter are the only two foci of biblical faith. According to him, they both point to what God is doing in liberating people from political, economic, and cultural captivity.48 But in Fire from Heaven he expanded the focus to include Pentecost,
46
Te political thrust of Te Secular City and also its idea of rethinking theology may be said to have foreshadowed Taylor’s notion of the theological. See Cox, Secular City, 93-95, 98-107, 127-28, 201, 218-23, 228-29.
47
Taylor, Te Teological, xii. Tis is not the time and place to critically engage Taylor on his distinction between theology and “the theological.” His concept of the theological refers in one crucial sense to the kind of discourse that facilitates and is in service of creating sociopolitical structures that create, sustain, and promote human flourishing. And its basic orientation is anti- institutionalism and resistance to transcendence. In very broad terms, Taylor and Cox follow an anti-institutional approach to theology and even the presence of God that leaves out the Church that can be seen — as theologians like William Cavanaugh have done — as the political structure designed to create, sustain, and promote human flourishing. See William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Teology, Politics and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998).
48
Cox, Secular City, 114.
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the place of primal spirituality and faith (rather than texts, doctrines, creeds, and beliefs) in responding to what God is doing and in shaping the Christian religion.49 Te question now is whether Pentecostals will also expand their foci to include the liberating activity of God, social justice. I think they will, and it is already happening, as Donald Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori recorded in their 2007 book, Global Pentecostalism: Te New Face of Christian Social Engagement.50 Tis question should not be answered at the level of praxis alone. Pentecostal theologians need to discern, clarify, and articulate what is happening on the ground.
Concluding Remarks
By way of conclusion let me link the set of challenges to one of the key, pro- vocative arguments of Te Secular City. Te argument goes like this: it is not enough to say that biblical religion is secularized or secularizing. Te truth is, secularization is a religious phenomenon.51 If this argument is true, then Pen- tecostal theologians should be asking, contrary to all the focus on re-enchant- ment, in what way is Pentecostalism already secularized or secularizing from its core?52 What is the seed of secularization in it? Second, if secularization is a religious phenomenon, a “kingdom of God” affair, then how has Pentecostal- ism redefined “Reigning of God”
53
on earth and thus the meaning of secular-
49
For a discussion of spirituality and faith in Pentecostalism, see Wolfgang Vondey, Beyond Pentecostalism: Te Crisis of Global Christianity and the Renewal of the Teological Agenda (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010).
50
Donald Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism: Te New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007).
51
Tis point has been argued by James K. A. Smith and Amos Yong in various places. See Amos Yong, “Radical, Reformed, and Pentecostal: Rethinking the Intersection of Post/Moder- nity and the Religions in Conversation with James K. A. Smith,” Journal of Pentecostal Teology 15, no. 2 (2007): 233-50, and Smith, “Te Spirit, Religions, and the World as Sacrament: A Response to Amos Yong’s Pneumatological Assist,” Journal of Pentecostal Teology 15, no. 2 (2007): 251-61.
52
See my attempt to flesh out this suggestion below.
53
Tis is Cox’s terminology for the kingdom of God:
Te word “kingdom” is problematic. It inevitably evokes the static idea of a spatial realm. Te Hebrew word, malkuth, however, does not convey this inert feeling, but suggests some- thing actively occurring. For this reason, in my own teaching I prefer to use the phrase “Reigning of God.” It implies something that is going on — not a place, but a “happening.” Tis is the grammar Jesus used in speaking of it. To be a “follower” of Jesus means to discern and respond to the initial signs of this “happening” and to work to facilitate its coming to
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ization? We need to respond! Cox appears to have spoken for Pentecostal
theologians: “No one can move beyond the secular city who has not first
passed through it.”54 If the secular city, as Cox maintains, is the kingdom of
God, the New Jerusalem, then Pentecostals are not returning to the secular
city with religion; they are always already in it. Tis may well be the key,
provocative message of Fire from Heaven, the secret on the bare face of the sky
all along.
Gustavo Gutiérrez informs us in his A Teology of Liberation that seculariza-
tion took the form of cultural revolt in the economically advanced countries,
contesting the hegemony of traditional religion and proposing pluralism of
worldviews. In the poor countries, he argues, it took the form of challenging
the misuse of religion by the ruling class to oppress the masses and to sacralize
their privileges.55 What is the form of secularization now in the Pentecostal
era — or what is it likely to be? Te answer to this question may well begin
with the discernment, clarification, and articulation of the Pentecostal Principle
of religion and social existence.56 Such a principle, if it is properly discerned
and grasped, can enable Pentecostal theology not to limp after the reality of
the contemporary world, but to illuminate the future of the world and its
religion from the labile standpoint of the appearance of the new life, the pat-
ency of being. Tis kind of thinking starts from understanding the Spirit as
the one who nudges human sociality toward new possibilities for life.
Let us now attempt to respond to the haunting question: Is Pentecostalism
already secularized or secularizing from its core? I ask this question not because
I have a readymade answer; I am asking it to stimulate thinking. Let me state
how I am currently thinking about a response. Tere are many seeds in the
movement that may be seen as secularizing. Factors such as (a) the dominant
focus of popular Pentecostalism on explanation, prediction, and control of
this-worldly affairs in order to secure material progress, (b) the notion of the
individual as fully endowed to be an agency and interpreter of divine moves,
(c) the denial of authority of traditions, anti-past tendencies in many cultural
contexts and their correlative foci on the now ( saeculum, “this present age”), and (d) the accenting of possibility over actuality, are veritable forces of secu- larization (which is not always anti-religion and anti-transcendence) within
fullness. To follow Jesus, however, does not mean to be a mimic. It means to continue in
our times what he did in his (Cox, Future of Faith, 45; emphasis in the original).
54
Cox, Religion in the Secular City, 268.
55
Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Teology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973), 66-68,
224-25.
56
See Wariboko, Te Pentecostal Principle.
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Pentecostalism. We do not always readily notice them for what they are because the secularizing ideas of individual agency, modern idea of material progress, and notions of rational and methodical action are often embedded within the sacralizing discourses of realizing individual potentials (God’s gifts), freedom from (demonic) traditions, and holistic salvational expectations. Add to this the spirit of free enterprise and the impulse to cross borders and create local, national, and global networks that are characteristic of the movement. Let us respond to the question form another perspective. Arguably in Pen- tecostalism, there is a basic willingness to change one’s position when con- fronted with the “fact” of the Holy Spirit’s movement. Broadly considered, the Pentecostal man or woman is truly a pilgrim, a person on the way. Tis is a mindset that is conducive to the forward-moving impulse of secularization. If we combine this insight with the pluralistic cosmology of many tongues as exemplified in Acts 2, then we might be able to think of a pneumatologically- powered secularization.
Te intersection of the Pentecostal Principle (which is, among other things, a combination of forward thrusting notion of surpassing the extant and emphasis on natality, new birth) and the principle of private judgment (under the influence of the Holy Spirit) that disputes the idea of dogma and com- pleteness render Pentecostalism as a force for radical movement. By subjecting everything to the demands, surprises, and expectations of the new in the name of the Holy Spirit which is moving beyond the encrusted “church,” Pentecos- talism may carry the same punch, the same liberating power, as secularization had on cultures in past centuries.
Te key difference then and now may lie in the fact that Pentecostalism is possibly a secularizing process that is theonomous. In rejecting the notion of an unbridgeable chasm between the finite and infinite, between immanence and transcendence, between matter and spirit, and for supporting the ideas of the infinite Spirit finitely present in the finite and enspirited matter, the secular, the profane, is not in front of the temple, but within. By celebrating the “plural- ism” that comes from speaking in many tongues, the movement undercuts heteronomous imposition of any truth for the privilege of consensual, investiga- tive, pragmatic truth by those who autonomously subject themselves to the Spirit of God. Overall, the freedom to strain toward the new, to reject the age- old religious understanding of divided matter, and to acknowledge truth as divinely-inspired but self-imposed are all ingredients that make for a (theono- mously) secularizing force on cultures, and for understanding of God as fully involved in everyday, everywhere interstices of life.
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