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Book Reviews / Pneuma 32 (2010) 123-175
Margaret M. Poloma and Ralph W. Hood, Jr., Blood and Fire: Godly Love in a Pentecostal Emerging Church (New York: New York University Press, 2008). ix + 257 pp., $42.00, cloth.
Blood and Fire is an ethnographic study of Blood-n-Fire, a Pentecostal emerging church in downtown Atlanta founded by David VanCronkhite, which remained in operation from 1990 until 2006. Margaret Poloma and Ralph Hood, Jr. use the Blood-n-Fire community to investigate whether or not there is a positive correlation between “charismatic encounters with God, sacrifi cial giving of personal dreams and ambitions, and empowerment for ser- vice to the poor and broken” (2). In short, Poloma and Hood attempt to discover whether the Blood-n-Fire community lived up to the bold claim that the love imparted to them during their spiritual encounters actually empowered them to live a life characterized by religious asceticism and demonstrable acts of compassion directed toward the homeless of urban Atlanta. Poloma and Hood use the term godly love to describe this relationship between divine love, asceticism, and compassion, which they defi ne as “the dynamic inter- action between human responses to the operation of perceived divine love and the impact this experience has on personal lives, relationships with others, and emergent communities” (4). Or, more succinctly, godly love is the “love that is perceived to be of divine origin and with a human response that reflects, even if dimly, the compassion of God” (7).
The body of the text comprises a rigorous examination of both the claims and conse- quences of godly love made by founder VanCronkhite and other members of the Blood- n-Fire community, augmented with some particularly salient interviews with some of the urban homeless familiar with the Blood-n-Fire ministry. Poloma and Hood conclude their text by arguing that Blood-n-Fire did not actually exert any demonstrable positive eff ect on Atlanta’s urban homeless. Rather, they claim that Blood-n-Fire existed primarily to serve the spiritual needs of the almost entirely middle-class, suburban members of the congrega- tion who made the weekly commute to Blood-n-Fire’s urban facilities in order to satiate their own spurious self-images as loving, ascetic, and compassionate Christians. Poloma and Hood state: “It is fair to say that despite its once-impressive success as a ministry, BnF failed the homeless by the visionary criteria that VanCronkhite himself established. We saw little evidence that it genuinely served to transform the lives of the homeless” (145).
The authors claim at the outset that it is not their objective to accept uncritically their informant’s accounts of godly love, but, rather, to test empirically whether such a phenom- enon exists. T ey write: “What BnF accepts as an experiential fact, the love of a biblical God for his creatures, we explore empirically, asserting that divine love is experienced as real and therefore can have real consequences” (4). Poloma and Hood rely heavily on sociologist Pitirim Sorokin’s work on love and Randall Collins’s work on interaction ritual chains, and they assert that they “are guided by theoretical insights from social science and method- ological rules”; they claim that their study “is neither a theological treatise nor a philo- sophical critique of love, but rather a social scientifi c eff ort to capture descriptions and measures of reported ritual interactions of godly love” (6).
The authors challenge social science’s commitment to what Peter Berger, in The Sacred Canopy (1967), has called “methodological atheism,” an approach to religious phenomenon that limits the scholar’s examination to that which is empirically available. Poloma and
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/027209610X12628362888478
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Book Reviews / Pneuma 32 (2010) 123-175
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Hood describe this approach to social research as being guilty of “an uncritical subscription to a social constructionism where nothing of experience is attributed to the object of expe- rience” (8). Instead, Poloma and Hood propose a “methodological agnosticism,” which they claim allows them to “take God seriously,” and accept the informant’s perceived divine- human encounters as data for their analysis.
While the rhetorical shift from methodological atheism to methodological agnosticism may initially appear to be an important move, as described by Poloma and Hood, at least, it actually fails to off er anything new. A scholar operating under Berger’s concept of meth- odological atheism can in fact accept perceived divine-human encounters as data just the same as Poloma and Hood propose, as these perceptions are entirely open to empirical observation. Despite their claim to a purely empirical investigation, however, what Poloma and Hood seem to want is not so much a methodological agnosticism as a methodological theism. To be clear, Poloma and Hood do not explicitly state this anywhere in the text, and, to be fair, they write in relation to their informants’ experiences of hearing the voice of God: “it remains outside the parameters of social science to determine whether God was in fact speaking” (213). Nevertheless, Blood and Fire closely straddles the line that separates social science from theology, and one gets the distinct impression that the authors accept not only the veracity of their informants’ perceptions of divine-human encounters, but the actual encounters themselves.
While the authors’ acceptance of the transcendent as an ontological object of experience somewhat jeopardizes their earlier claims to conducting an entirely empirical investigation, as it is empirically impossible to determine whether their informants’ love is divine or merely chemical, for instance, in nature, their attempt to broaden the ontological and epis- temological boundaries of the social scientifi c study of religion will likely stimulate fertile discussion and investigation of these issues. Blood and Fire comprises one of the most fasci- nating, and potentially controversial, social-scientifi c studies of Pentecostalism in recent years, and demands wide readership among all those interested in the social scientifi c study of Pentecostalism, as well as in the institutional eff ectiveness of intentional, holistic, and integral ministries.
Reviewed by Adam Stewart
Doctoral candidate
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada
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