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Book Reviews
429
Nimi Wariboko,The Split God: Pentecostalism and Critical Theory(Albany, New York:
State University of New York Press, 2018). xxi + 239 pp. $85.00 hardcover.
In a certain sense, Nimi Wariboko might be well understood as “the first Pente- costal philosopher.”This is not meant as a slight to those of us who have worked in philosophy as Pentecostals as it is an attempt to understand the significance of Wariboko’s philosophical work. What I mean here is that, on a certain level, and in a certain sense, he is a first for us in the Pentecostal guild as well as the Pentecostal world. He is the first to a) provide a thoroughgoing philosoph- ical program, b) which unpacks the essence(s) of Pentecostalism, and c) is a philosopher of global significance d) doing first tier philosophical work.
The Split God is the seventeenth book Wariboko has authored or co- authored. A native of Nigeria, he is now the Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics at Boston University’s School of Theology. His writings deal with underlying assumptions of human understanding in a way touched on by only a handful of Pentecostal scholars, and arguably with a consistency in depth entirely unseen. While a handful of scholars, who might be best identified as theologians, have provided similar quantities of quality work, none has done so primarily as a Pentecostal philosopher. Yet his work is too little known in our guild. That so few Pentecostals seem to read or even understand his work is not a critique of Wariboko—whose task has been to plumb the depths—as it is demonstrative of the lack of philosophical development among Pente- costals.
Wariboko’sworkisfirstclassphilosophy,of theContinentalapproach,which not everyone appreciates. It is dense material which reconstructs names, parses distinctions, plays with words, and which draws on authors such as SlavojŽižek, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, in particular. This is an approach to philosophy which delves into the ontic waters, and renames the depths of what is, using techniques such as paleonomy—the utilization of an old name to launch a new concept, or reconstructing notions of the sacred or the miraculous.
What good does any of this philosophy do? This approach is, at best, annoy- ing to analytic philosophers, and at worst is considered the whimsical nonsense of the highly intelligent. Not that the Continental style cannot and does not, at times, succumb in ways which gives credence to these accusations. Yet it does, I would contend, so often do important work because, for one thing, it works in the depths of first order logic. That is, it works in reexamining the kinds of assumptions which are embedded in the assumed structures of our thought, and “unthought.” This kind of philosophy, for example—as Wariboko’s Split God does—might free our definition of the miraculous from Humean captiv-
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Book Reviews
ity. Not that this has not been done before, but it is helpful to do so anew with renewed re-conceptualizations.
Following up on major works on Pentecostalism, which include The Pente- costal Principle (2011), Nigerian Pentecostalism (2014), Economics in Spirit and Truth (2014) and The Charismatic City and The Public Resurgence of Religion (2014), the primary thesis ofThe Split Godis that “Pentecostals (especially those in Africa) are continuously ‘tearing’ God apart and then bringing parts of his attributes together into a new unity, into a contingent synthesis that the neces- sity of practice imposes on the manifold parts” (xv). It must be noted that this is a descriptive thesis that is a deconstruction of the actual lived Pentecostal doctrine of God, and one which has correlates in ontological, anthropological, and epistemic splits in the lived Pentecostal understanding of life. Such is a major critical proposal for Pentecostal Theology, a provoking thesis which calls for reflection and response from the Pentecostal guild and Pentecostal practi- tioners.
The Split Godunpacks these splits in Pentecostal life. After the introduction articulates the above project, Chapter 1, “Day of Pentecost,” develops a split in language which is evoked in xenolalia, interpreted glossolalia and noninter- preted glossolalia, with a focus on the last. “Uninterpretable tongues-speech is the enigma of God’s desire, which is completely impenetrable and resists every attempt for the believer to understand it as it resists, eludes, symbolization.The speech opens up a gap of what is in the divine-human relation more than the divine-human relation, of thethingin the relation that resists symbolic identi- fication” (29). This split—in language, the divine-human relation, ontology, as well as anthropologically and epistemically—is also the space of human and all other freedom, and the location of the gap which has eluded human noetic constructions. This is a brilliant thesis, which ought to be wrestled with and reflected upon.
Wariboko develops this thesis in the areas of discernment (Chapter 2), grace and anthropology (Chapter 3), the sacred and the miraculous (Chapter 4), capitalism and late modern economics (Chapter 5), worship (Chapter 6) and microtheology(Chapter7).ThatWaribokodoesnot prescriptivelyresolvethese splits does not mean that he does not have a shalomic vision for Pentecostal life. It does mean he is primarily dealing, as he does in Chapter 7, with microtheol- ogy as “an interpretive analysis of everyday embodied theological interactions and agency at the individual, face-to-face level” (20). His task has been to iden- tify a major issue within the Pentecostal imagination coming from actual lived Pentecostalism, not official theology.
This provocative thesis might help Pentecostal self-understanding in nota- ble ways. Though Wariboko points to prescriptions and spiritual-moral paths,
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The Split God does more to break open underlying areas of the Pentecostal “unthought” than provide a thoroughgoing vision of Pentecostal life. Rather, this important work of Pentecostal philosophy on Pentecostalism itself should be responded to by mature Pentecostal scholars. My concern is that too few are reading his work, and further that some who do will significantly misunder- stand him and—as too many in the conservative theological world are apt to do—mischaracterize work because of lack of understanding on the part of the reader, because they do not understand his tongue, not because his tongue is not speaking truth. My contention here is that this particular tongue is a special gift to us, and that it ought to provoke wise reflection, further understanding and shalomic response.
L. William Oliverio, Jr.
The School of Urban Missions, El Dorado Hills, California [email protected]
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