I begin this blog with an apology to Janice Brown who in my final year of High School was my English teacher. 50 years later I can only imagine how easier my life would have been had I actually paid attention in class. The only grade I received that was worse than English that year was French and yet twenty years later I graduated with a Ph.D. from a French University. Don’t tell me that God does not have a sense humor.
Since then, given my grammatical deficiencies, while I have been published in magazines, journals, and anthologies I owe a great debt to editors who consistently make me sound better than I really am.
Here then, in no order, are from my perspective some of the more important and controversial musings I have put together over the years.
Testimony. (circa 2007-2017)
For several years, I was invited to write for Testimony, then the flagship magazine of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. I do not recall how many articles I wrote during those years, but probably my most controversial piece was in connection with the war in Afghanistan/Iraq. In it I questioned whether we could claim such a thing as a “Just War”. In so doing I brought to light the general pacifist position of the PAOC during WWI. After the article was published, in conversation with the editor I understand some copies of the magazine were returned in protest specifically because of my contribution. And I know of at least one pastor who refused to let his staff read that issue. If it is of any conciliation, given the current geopolitical climate, my views have remained the same. I am a mild-mannered pacifist. I am mild-mannered in so much as I have lived a blessed life and have not really had to test my convictions on this question.
On a completely different note, I fondly remember my Testimony article on Cara and Pastor Q. Entitled: Seasons of Resurrection, the article briefly chronicled a story of mutual redemption for two people for whom I only met online, but whose story is the stuff that only God can put together. It is the story of the power of hospitality and resurrection.
I have been a member of the Society of Pentecostal Studies (SPS) since 1994 and my first conference paper presented that year in Guadalajara, Mexico was entitled, Varieties of Pentecostal Experience: Pragmatism and the Doctrinal Development of Pentecostalism. It became the foundation piece for my eventual PH.D. dissertation.
Since then, I have presented several papers to the conference. Arguably one of my most consequential papers concerned the institutional changes that occurred at Eastern Pentecostal Bible College (EPBC) now Masters College in the year 2000. I had left EPBC in 2000 for Providence University College but was still teaching some online adjunct courses at Master’s until myself and Patrick McManus (a former Student Council President of EPBC) presented a co-authored paper on the relocation of the college from Peterborough to Toronto and its subsequent changes. The article was consequential in so much as I was no longer invited to teach online at Master’s as part of their adjunct faculty.
I concluded that “the changes from EPBC to Master’s reflect a growing angst in Pentecostal education over the need to form and train future leaders who can carry the torch into the future and be keepers of the gate both one at the same time.
"It would appear that Leadership desires uniquely Pentecostal institutions but not too unique. Like the proverbial search for Waldo, to borrow an image from popular culture, they desire to stand out and blend in at the same time. In the case of Master’s they promote a hands on educational model of instruction while diminishing the hands-on capabilities of its core faculty. They want to be sensitive to the “grass roots” but are largely unwilling to execute the hard work and long hours to hear from the same people. They want an urban campus reflective of population trends and growth, but they do not want to alienate its largely rural population, which comprises most of its clientele. And finally, they want to reinforce Pentecostal Distinctives without appearing visibly Pentecostal."
As I reread this today and hear of the pending new changes at Master’s and yet another move back to Toronto, I may need to revisit this chapter once again.
And Now for Something Completely Different…
In 2016 I entertained the dislocating world of what we might call Bible paratexuality. French literary critic Gérard Genette defines paratexts as those liminal devices “both within a book (peritext) and outside it (epitext), that mediate a book to the reader: titles and subtitles, pseudonyms, forewords, dedications, epigraphs, prefaces, intertitles, notes, epilogues, and afterwards.”
Genette may not have had the Bible in mind when he published his seminal work on
Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation but today’s Christian Book Store presents one of the best visual displays of the presence and work of the paratext. For paratexts, "are what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public. More than a boundary or a sealed border the paratext is, rather, a threshold...that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back."
They are adds Philippe Lejeune a “fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text.”
Or to put it into theological terms: “Outside the paratext – no sola Scriptura.” My essay was about that liminal intervention between the biblical text and the reader. It was in part cultural and pragmatic as I worked to explore some of the shared tensions between publishers, readers and the Bible itself – a book that publishers seek to sell over and over again oft times to the same people. And it was in part hermeneutical as I identified how the paratext can control both deliberately and unconsciously the reading and reception of the text.
In the essay I go beyond mere translation choices (itself a paratext) and explore why people choose one Bible over the other. My favorite response was,
"This is the one of the nicest Bible I’ve ever purchased. It is exactly what I’ve been looking for. The Thumb tabs remind me of being young with my parents at church. The nice leather feeling gives it a nice slap feeling, so when you are preaching you can slap the back of it and it sounds so pure and natural…slapping the back of this beauty while declaring the Word of God will be a fun occasion."
I also questioned how publishers often jazz up the Bible with commentaries, celebrity endorsements, and contemporary pop culture. Consider Revolve: The Complete New Testament (see above image) it was the best-selling Bible published in 2003. In it's e-zine format in addition to advertising in small font that its contents contain the Complete New Testament, the front cover advertises that inside its pages readers will find “Beauty Secrets You’ve Never Heard Before. Quizzes that explore if you are Dating a Godly Guy? And Instructions on How to get along with your Mom?”
In the end I conclude while we cannot escape paratextuality. Our hope, however, is that we never rob the Bible of its greatest asset: namely its saltiness, its ability to astonish, perplex, disorientate, and keep its readers off balance in the presence of something greater than themselves. Whether that is accomplished through those elements that exist on the threshold or whether it is the text laid bare on its own we proceed at our own risk. And maybe once inside the covers may we be stirred by the Bible’s rawness and natural beauty.
Some SPS presentations made it into Journal form. "Tongues as a Blush in the Presence of God" (SPS 2007) was published in “New Frontiers in Tongues Research: A Symposium,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 20 (2011) 122–154.
Borrowing from the likes of philosophers J.L. Austin and John Searle, authors of Speech-Act theory and the likes of Jewish philosophers Abraham Heschel and Martin Buber. I speculate first that tongue-speech is best understood as a form of speech-act where instead of asking the question what does this mean, we should be asking the question what does this do? And second from Buber and Heschel I wonder if tongues could be better thought of as an acoustic icon where the “ineffable in us stands before the ineffable beyond us.”
“Healing in Search of Atonement: With a Little Help from James K.A. Smith,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 23:2 (2014)
Another SPS conference paper (2013) that ended up in the Journal of Pentecostal Theology is on the Pentecostal teaching of healing. Here I follow the path of medical anthropologists and make a distinction between healing and curing.
In part, I conclude, “Pentecostalism with its traditional privilege towards triumphal living is again on shaky ground. As not only an observer but as a participant in the tradition, I am familiar with the sales pitch. Running on the Holy Spirit, Pentecostals like to boast the best life mileage and trouble-free driving over their competition? But is the advertisement really accurate? I suspect in the absence of empirical data the life span of those who self-identify as Pentecostals is no longer than regional averages of any other people group. All Pentecostals die and most do not die as a ripe apple in the hands of a loving God.
Who is to blame? Is it the individual who is suffering? Is it the fault of Adam and Eve? Is it God who has allowed this drama to continue seemingly unabated? Or is it none of the above? Sure, cures are reported. We rejoice along with John the Baptist who when he asked Jesus, ‘Are you the one, or should I wait for another?’ is told, ‘the blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor (Matthew 11:5)’. But what about the ones who do not receive sight, or remain lame, or who die of cancer? Can we rejoice with the first group and ignore the second group? Or maybe the whole theological healing construct is flawed -– a construction that begins with an unachievable, and more specially an unintended premise of a kind of pristine perfection that bumps up against human finitude.”
Comments