Attached to Paper Session
Meeting Preference
Kameron Carter argues that Kantian aesthetics, historically, have been leveraged to develop a theological anthropology in which whiteness is conflated with progress toward an eschatological ideal. He argues that, according to the logics of such an account, “whiteness is both ‘now and not yet.’ It is a present reality, and yet it is also still moving toward and awaiting its perfection.”[1] Kantian aesthetics have been leveraged to justify the expansion of white colonial dominance by marking whiteness as the ideal and non-white peoples as an antithetical that must be civilized through subjugation.[2]
This theological anthropology was broadly at play during the formative events of global Pentecostalism, as aesthetic identifications were explicitly employed to shore up white supremacist Christianity and demean non-white worship. For example, during the events of the Azusa Street Revival, white Supremacist theologian Charles Parham[3] leveraged broadly Kantian aesthetics to depict Azusa’s culture as savage and, therefore, counterfeit.[4] Parham would utilize aesthetics to contrast what he understood as white civility, which he believed was appropriate for right receipt of the Spirit, with what he deemed Black apostasy, unfit for the Spirit’s presence.[5] Azusa’s leaders, in response to attacks, affirm the Spirit’s presence with a structural-ethical rather than aesthetic justification. The Spirit is proved by displays of ethical reformation and greater faithfulness to Christ in actions.[6]
So, where Parham employs aesthetics to deem Azusa as uncivil and thus counterfeit, Azusa’s leaders explain their culture by identifying divine works: namely healing, new unity across social boundaries, an end to hierarchy, and common worship of Christ. Each of these is, in its own way, a radical overcoming of racist cultural norms and an implicit rejection of white definitions of civility through a new structural ethic. In other words, aesthetics do not prove the Spirit. Aesthetics are at best a response to the Spirit. For those at Azusa, only structural-ethical fruit can serve the discernment of the Spirit’s activity.
In considering Azusa, and its varied responses, Amos Yong concludes that there are two theological paradigms at play: one phenomenological and the other ethical. Parham licenses his white supremacist ethics via aesthetics. That aesthetic evaluation is based on Parham’s experience: what Azusa looks like and feels like in his estimation. Azusa’s leaders, in contrast, discern the Spirit in ethical upheaval. Yong contends these frames continue to define contemporary pneumatologies. Those who believe that the Spirit is primarily evidenced in personal edification have knowingly or unknowingly inherited Parham’s phenomenology. Those who believe the Spirit is evidenced in ethical reformations that reconcile socio-cultural divisions are heirs of Azusa.[7]
Further, in Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, Ashon T. Crawley traces the aesthetic contours of early 20th-century Pentecostal debates regarding tongues speech. White supremacist Pentecostals largely emphasized xenolalia while Black Pentecostals broadly prioritized glossolalia. Xenolalia was amenable to white supremacist aims because, as a gift of human languages, it imbues persons with the means to speak the language of lands conquered. Glossolalia, in contrast, pursues incoherence unto sanctifying divine encounter.[8] Proponents of xenolalia presumed that sanctification was accomplished at the receipt of the Spirit and so the gift of new languages amounted to divine affirmation. Proponents of glossolalia recognized that tongues speech, in the form of new human languages, did not entail freedom from racialized logics and racist corruption. They argued that ongoing sanctification through divine encounter via the gift of incoherent tongues was necessary for deliverance and healing from these evils.[9] In other words, where aesthetics were at play for Black Pentecostals, it was through a conscious willingness to forgo the optics of civility and mastery unto a willingness to be incoherent that the Spirit might sanctify the believer.
This paper follows after Carter, Yong, and Crawley to develop an ethical pneumatology for discerning the Spirit’s work in contemporary persons and communities. Through engagement with revival history and biblical texts that depict the Spirit’s action, I argue that aesthetics cannot be a primary consideration in discerning where the Spirit is working. Instead, I present an account of the Spirit’s work simultaneously increase ethical fruit and structural-ethical reform in concrete contexts, through the resourcing of love for neighbor in reconciliation, service, and the dismantling of unjust systems. My central argument is that when the Spirit works to bring out these changes, it will likely result in aesthetic upheaval to challenge and disrupt prevailing aesthetic norms entrenching dominance or oppression. This often occurs by empowering the practices of those on the margins.
[1] J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 89.
[2] Carter, Race, 89-90.
[3] Parham believed that Anglo-Saxons were the direct descendants of the twelve tribes of Israel, that Adam and Eve were white and created on the 8th day of creation contrary to the 6th day creation of non-white peoples, and all nonwhite peoples were therefore spiritually and morally inferior. Gaston Espinosa, William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 44-45.
[4] Charles Parham, “Writings of Charles Fox Parham,” in Gaston Espinosa, William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 380-387, 384-385.
[5] Charles Parham, “Writings,” 387.
[6] Anonymous “Beginning of World Wide Revival,” The Apostolic Faith 1.5 (January, 1907): 1.
[7] Amos Yong, “What Spirit(s), Which Public(s)? The Pneumatologies of Global Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity.” International Journal of Public Theology 7(2013): 241-259, 248-249
[8] Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 210-216.
[9] Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath, 214.
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
In conversation with Amos Yong, Ashon T. Crawley, Keri Day, and J. Kameron Carter, I present my own account of an ethical pneumatology describing the Spirit's work to bring upheaval to communities suffering under injustice. In support of that account, I trace the pneumatologies at play in the Azusa Street Revival. Yong notes that phenomenological pneumatologies were utilized to sanction white supremacist attacks against Azusa, while ethical pneumatologies were cited by Azusa’s leaders to justify the countercultural character of their worship. Crawley contends that where Azusa did affirm aesthetics, it was in the privileging of incoherence— through the gift of glossolalia—so that persons and communities might be liberated from the settler colonial logics developed to justify white supremacist dominance. By engaging these analyses, I consider the ongoing entanglement of aesthetic pneumatologies with white supremacy and articulate how ethical pneumatologies can better resist the same.