Paperback
-
SHIP THIS ITEMIn stock. Ships in 1-2 days.PICK UP IN STORE
Your local store may have stock of this item.
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802866974 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 11/16/2011 |
| Series: | Pentecostal Manifestos (PM) |
| Pages: | 247 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Pentecostal Principle
Ethical Methodology in New SpiritBy Nimi Wariboko
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 2012 Nimi WaribokoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-6697-4
Chapter One
The Pentecostal Principle
The spiritual content of any culture is the imperative of infinite rectification, where rectification "is a movement of righting rather than a fixed position of being right." It rejects any claim of an absolute, final form of culture, or of a determinate thing or order of things. Nothing is absolutely as it should be. Inspired by the Reformation and its famed paradox of justification by faith, Paul Tillich calls this imperative the Protestant principle. The principle as conceived by Tillich ultimately points us beyond all matter. This is exemplified by his resort to kairos, external and heavenly, which can only galvanize static or calcified forms to move forward, to rejuvenate their spiritual force, their restless rectification. Do we need to go beyond all matter to engage the process of infinite rectification?
Tillich draws his inspiration from the Reformation; but, as I have already noted, a turn to the New Testament gives us another inspiration. In Acts 2, we can identify and retrieve the pentecostal principle. Here we see that the spiritual content and its material bearers are combined or networked as the infinite restlessness of existence (life). The creative spirit becomes "incarnate" in 120 material bodies, just as spiritual form can become visible as it was in the Doric column Martin Buber admires in his I and Thou. In Buber's reporting, the material column is occluded by the spiritual form it "incarnates," but on that fateful day of Pentecost in first-century Jerusalem we find the materialization of spiritual content. It was a moving-together of spirit and matter toward actualized goodness. Why a movement toward actualized goodness? Once we accept the materialization (or incarnation) of the creative fire we are bound to actualize (or at least reflect on) what counts as its true actualization in human sociality. How do we measure the adequacy of materialization?
Elsewhere I have stated that there is always a void between materialization and what our true self is, or its actualization. The movement to cover this void which really can never be covered I have called excellence. Whereas excellence is a movement (process) that must have a "product" (material deposits), the pentecostal principle is like "a calling upon that movement, of its essence a provocation or solicitation, a kind of implacable restlessness that is superordinate to any impatience [excellence] might feel on its account."
In this book, I intend to further develop the notion of the pentecostal principle in continuous conversation with Tillich's Protestant principle. My goal is to show that the pentecostal principle offers a better lens to view the dynamism of human social life and the spirit of the twenty-first century. Hopefully the analyses and discussions that pertain to the task of explicating the principle will help us to understand the pentecostal movement which claims to be the bearer of the spirit of the pentecostal principle. It will be clear at the end of this book whether pentecostals are the true historic bearers of the principle. Too, how should the pentecostal principle inform the way we do social ethics? What does the uncovering of this principle mean for ethical methodology? The rest of this chapter proceeds not by direct line of disquisition, but by weaving arguments around the fault lines of the Protestant principle and at the same time bringing forth the kernel of the pentecostal principle.
The Protestant Principle
Tillich's Protestant principle is about constant reform; it refers to the dynamism of social existence. Yet is this mere dynamism or dynamism that is life-giving? What is driving the reform? Is it merely the negative reaction of the infinite toward that which is finite claiming to be infinite, or is it an asymptotic striving toward wholeness in an open future?
The Protestant principle is a symbol of a protest, an outside force or energy reacting against the particular that raises itself to universal status and finality of form and content/dynamics. Can it be reconceived as something that exists or parallels the human tendency to idolatry and something that exists within the Catholic substance, within the structures of human sociality? The notion of pentecostal principle rethinks the idea of protestant principle as the spirit of creativity, the creative transforming energy that operates within the structures and throughout the processes of creation as its law of motion. The pentecostal principle is the power of emergent creativity that disrupts social existence, generates infinite restlessness, and issues in novelty.
Dualism in Tillich's Protestant Principle
Tillich presents his Protestant principle as a transformation of the Catholic substance, implying a certain dualism in the becoming of human sociality, a tension similar to that behind mind and body. Are there two "forces" (principle and substance/substrate) in tension (dualism)? Is the principle ultimately reducible to substance? If one says no to substance, does that represent a triumph of — and a yes to — principle? Or is it both yes and no to substance and principle? To cut through this knot we need a perspective that represents a sensitivity to matter as both being and becoming. And this could be drawn from the philosophy of emergence. It will help us to see how the Protestant principle — a supposed higher power over substance in Tillich's thought — appears from and is constituted by the "lower-level" Catholic substance. This is to explore further the functioning of the higher and more complex principle which is not merely explicable in terms of the substance as it is capable of unpredictable novel properties.
The attempt to rethink Tillich's notion of the Protestant principle in terms of basic arguments in emergentist thought is just one way to view it with unfurnished eyes. It thus becomes easy to note a confusion regarding the principle. What is not very clear in Tillich's presentation of the principle is the response to this question: Is the Protestant principle an individual or group phenomenon? Does it pertain to the basic unit of life or does it depend on the emergence of sociality and relationality? I suggest it is an emergentist property, a property that arises as a result of the multiplicity of activities in a group. Failure to make this distinction can result in three errors. First, the Protestant principle may become reducible to basic ontological element. Second, its power will be thought to be borne by individuals rather than groups, when in fact it is also an interpersonal phenomenon. Finally, we may fail to note the paradox of the Protestant principle, namely, that though it is a group phenomenon, its originary power lies at the individual level. Cultural or interpersonal, networked systems are akin to what physicists call nonlinear dynamical systems. The effects of interactions among individuals are exponential and nonlinear and the influence of one event can have a profound effect on the whole system as time goes on. The bottom line of such interactions is a counterintuitive global behavior (such as the impulse for the Protestant principle that Tillich is talking about) without a common, cultural management unit. Individuals acting on their own can generate a system of complicated and coordinated global behavior.
What is the first question we should ask about the pentecostal principle? It is not "What is the pentecostal principle?" but "What is the meaning of the pentecostal principle?" — that is, "What can be said and understood of the pentecostal principle?" The pentecostal principle is the power of coexistence that perfects or maximizes actuality, which has an emotional attraction to the good. This attraction is visible as the restless search and realization of new forms and unions of form and meaning.
Tillich says that the fire that manifested on the disciples on the Day of Pentecost represents creative fire. But what does it really mean for the Holy Spirit to present itself as creativity alighting on human beings? One possible explanation is that it is creativity-in-and-for-itself. For divine creativity is no longer known merely as substance but also as subject. By demonstrating, reaffirming, or showcasing that human beings are carriers of divine creativity, two things happened at once on that day. On the one hand, divine creativity in ongoing social existence (in the concrete you-and-I sociality of historical being) that is not borne by human subjects (which is creativity-in-itself) is limited inasmuch as it is removed from the instantiation of creativity in which creativity has its reality. On the other hand, creativity that is purely human creativity for itself denies its divine depths. What recommends the Day of Pentecost as a moment when human creativity was linked to divine creativity is that those present saw that the spirit of creativity rejects both disincarnate subjectivity and pure autonomous creativity. Creativity, theonomous creativity, overcomes all dualism.
Following this perspective of creative spirit, Pentecost means that creativity constitutes the true nature of human beings and also the end which human beings need to realize in history. The essence of the spirit is to be free, to set us free from all obstacles, to initiate reconciliation and overcome alienation between human beings and God, and to enable us to be all that we can be. The activity of freedom is rooted in its drive to inclusiveness and expansiveness. The spirit universalizes love that particularizes caring: lifts up our intention, care, or commitment and extends it to the social whole. It wills for one as well as for all others the same thing in relevantly similar situations. A corollary of the spirit's freedom and inclusiveness is its creativity. All human beings who envision the new and act to realize it "necessarily intend that they be free and able to act." In the absence of freedom, which is the condition of the possibility for creative actions as producers of novelty, human beings will be too determined and conditioned to produce the new. Freedom is the precondition for the exercise of creativity. Therefore a relationship of total and complete determination or domination in which no alternative is possible cannot be creative.
This creativity that constitutes the nature of human beings harbors a lack. Yet this lack is not of the sort that is bound to make us despair or to disapprove, but is rather a surplus of the sort that we should glory in. Creativity involves human beings realizing themselves by relating themselves to themselves and to their environment. What constitutes the whole relation? In relating themselves to themselves and their environment they must relate themselves to another. Thus, human creativity cannot possess itself. Finite creativity finds its peace in infinite divine ontological creativity.
Rightness and Goodness in the Protestant Principle
The Protestant principle emerges by the act of first distinguishing Catholic substance and reactions against it, finite form and incompletable, infinite final form. The pentecostal principle is about what lies beyond, what cannot be incorporated into an extant form. This something more has become not only the condition of the possibility of existence, but also the condition of the meaning of existence. The category in which an institution, practice, or position is evaluated under the Protestant principle is "rightness" rather than "goodness" or "fitness." This is so because the point of such an evaluation is to determine how the institution, practice, or position stands with respect to the infinite, which constitutes an absolute, exterior standard to all forms of human accomplishment or cultural functions. But the pentecostal principle is focused on the good toward which all cultural functions are drawn. The question here is how the institution, practice, or position fits with the movement toward the unconditional good of actualizing potentials in relation to the divine depths of existence. The good is actualized fitness; it is maximized existence. Is God satisfied with anything less than the full flourishing of God's creation?
The two principles are reconcilable. It is good for all things to exist maximally, to be moving toward unrealizable full actuality and toward the unreachable divine depths. It is right to serve this end, this good, and it demands that we should not regard any cultural form as final and infinite, but always ready to change, to move forward. Since Tillich also regards excellence as the actualization of potentials, the deeper meaning of his evaluative category of "right" is actualized rightness. The pentecostal principle informs us about what is, what is going on, and what ought to be. It informs us about norming, a pattern or behavior to be followed, the ought-to-be. The pentecostal principle in this sense precedes, embraces, and transcends the Protestant principle. The good is an imperative that claims us and requires us to act in a particular way, to live in a certain manner.
In the attempt to avoid the absolutism of substance (system of eternal structures and essence, unchangeable element), Tillich's formulation of the Protestant principle tilts the weight of ethical analysis toward change itself as the ultimate principle. Yet this formulation fails Tillich's own test for the suitability of religious or theological terms. According to him, religious terms are more adequate the more they express and preserve the tension between the unconditionally real (the power of dynamics, "self-transcendence") and the conditionally real ("realism"). The Protestant principle as he articulates it does not adequately express this paradox in its depth and power. The pentecostal principle, on the other hand, attempts to achieve a necessary balance between these two extremes. The basic idea is that existence ("substance," form), which points to the most general characteristics of all that there is, is used as the very notion which transcends every form that is. It points to substance whose realization depends on the continuous creativity of human beings in history. It calls attention to that unconditional command, the validity of ethics, which can penetrate concrete existence, adapting to the demands of history as well as transforming history.
Key Differences between the Protestant Principle and the Pentecostal Principle
Tillich's notion of substance and its interplay with principle is one difference that sets the conceptualization of the Protestant principle apart from the pentecostal principle. Substance, or reality, consists not of actualities but potentialities (that is, possibilities and probabilities). Tillich assumes that substances are actualities or essences that must not be allowed to be fixed, immutable, or absolute. They must be constantly disturbed or interrupted by the Protestant principle to move them forward even asymptotically to their final state. But from the point of view of the pentecostal principle the starting points are processes that enable the emergence of creativity and complexity in human networks or matter.
Another key difference between the Protestant principle and the pentecostal principle is the way in which each conceives existence as a motion. In conceptualizing the Protestant principle Tillich implicitly assumes that existence is "standing" plus "motion." In this view the Protestant principle gives institutions or cultural functions a kick that sets them in motion — only to stand again. But the pentecostal principle interprets existence as an issue of motion. Here it is germane to quote philosopher Steven G. Smith on the importance of interpreting existence as an issue of "motion, and actually one kind of motion or another":
Better than standing for two reasons: first, because if I am already in motion my reasons for acting give me places to put my feet down (which reasons can indeed give me) rather than pushes or pulls to move me from a standing center (the kind of "motivation" that reasons as such cannot give); second, because if I am essentially one who stands I can meet another only by going forth from my place, which will uproot and alienate me. I will necessarily lose myself in having anything to do with others — which is absurd. (However, to achieve a positively significant stability, one that is not mere stasis or stagnation, it is both sufficient and necessary to parallel my motion with motion of others, in relationship.)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Pentecostal Principle by Nimi Wariboko Copyright © 2012 by Nimi Wariboko. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface viii
Introduction 1
1 The Pentecostal Principle 42
2 Emergence and Ethics: The Ethos of Pneumatological Methodology 71
3 Many Tongues of Pentecost: Ethical Methodology as a Paradigm of Pluralism 107
4 The Pentecostal Spirit: Way of Being for the Pentecostal Principle 130
5 The Promise of the Pentecostal Principle: Religion as Play 161
Epilogue: The End Which Is to Come 196
Bibliography 215
Acknowledgments 224
Index 226