Azusa Street as a Post-Modern Revival [Part 1 of 2]

By James K.A. Smith, Ph.D.

Beyond the epistemological emphasis which recognizes the fundamental role that faith and "control beliefs" play in knowing, postmodernism also has a more holistic understanding of the human person. Rather than reducing the human person to a disembodied thinking mind, postmodernism revalues embodiment, and in so doing it offers an account of knowing that revalues what, in the philosophical tradition, has often been referred to as the "heart." In other words, the "seat" or core of the human person is not identified with cognition or the mind, but rather with the affections and the heart. What most defines the human person is not what she thinks, but what she desires, what she loves. Thus it is no coincidence that one of the most formative influences on Martin Heidegger—who came to be one of the most dominant influences for what would come to be "postmodernism"—was the work of Blaise Pascal, who was himself retrieving a vision of knowing first articulated by Saint Augustine. As Pascal famously put it, "the heart has reasons of which Reason knows nothing."

There is a way of "knowing" the world which cannot be reduced to cognition or intellectual perception—and certainly not to "data" or facts. Rather, the more fundamental way of "knowing" is a kind of affective, heart-knowledge. And in fact it is this "knowing with the heart" that is the basis for dealing with the "facts" of the world. What count as "facts" will be determined by our passional orientation—the direction of our heart. Thus Pascal's language invokes the echo of Augustine's opening to the Confessions where, in a prayer, he writes: "You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts our restless until they find rest in You."

The problem with the human condition, for Augustine, is not that we lack information about the world, or don't have enough "facts," but rather that we are looking for love in all the wrong places. Our problem is how we relate to the world, and the nature of that relationship or orientation to the world is governed not by the intellect, but by the affections; it's not a matter of the head primarily, but a matter of the heart. "Getting it"—that is, understanding the world—is not primarily a matter of sorting out the facts; rather "getting it" involves the orientation of the whole person to relate to the world well or rightly, and our orientation of the world is governed by our passional center—the heart—not our cognitive center in the mind.

So postmodernism lowers the core of human identity, as it were, from the head to the heart. This, of course, is not some advanced theoretical excuse for kissing our brains good-bye, nor is it philosophical license to endorse some kind of emotionalism. What we're calling the "heart" or the "affections" does not simply reduce to the emotions, so we're not setting up some kind of dichotomous opposition between head and heart, between love and knowledge, between affection and cognition, between thinking and passion. And postmodernism is not some new French recipe meant to excuse us from the hard work of thinking critically, conducting experiments, and doing our homework. I don't mean to suggest that postmodernism baptizes modes of spirituality that simply retreat into emotional ecstasy, abandoning engagement with the world in order to retreat into a quasi-mystical desire to be immersed in the private world of a worship "experience" with Jesus. Rather, the point is to affirm the primacy of the heart and affections as the basis for a rational, intellectual engagement with and interpretation of the world. And precisely because our passional orientation to the world is reflective of the particularities of our embodiment (our geographical location, gender, religious confession, etc.), postmodernism takes seriously the "perspectivalism" that is an essential feature of being embodied, finite creatures. Indeed, we can summarize the differences between modernism and postmodernism by the stark difference between the modern ideal of dispassionate, disinterested objectivism and the postmodern affirmation of a passional, even confessional perspectivalism.

Now, what does this have to do with Christianity, and with pentecostalism in particular? I hope you've already caught hints of affinity between the postmodern critique of modernity and key aspects of Christian confession. While we could explore this in much more detail (and I have done so in Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?), let me first just highlight two general points of affinity between the postmodern critique of rational and Christian faith.

First, the postmodern critique of Enlightenment dualism echoes what, in the Christian tradition, we might describe as creational or incarnational affirmation of embodiment and materiality. Rather than the thin, reductionistic picture of the human person bequeathed to us by modernity, postmodernity appreciates the "thickness" of being human—that essential to being-human is being-in-the-world, inhabiting a material environment as a body (not just in a body). I am my body (even if I am also more than my body), and as such my body is essential aspect of my identity. To use the language of the automobile industry, being embodied is a standard feature of being human, not an option; being embodied is like the engine or wheels of the car, not a six-disc CD changer. And as a result, all of the things that attend embodiment are not accidental "properties," but rather essential features that make up who I am. To be embodied means that I reside in a time and a place—that I am a person with a geography and a history that constitutes who I am. It means that my identity is linked with my gender, my race and ethnicity, my desires and passions, my physical gifts and even my incapabilities. Postmodernism takes race, class, and gender seriously precisely because it takes embodiment seriously—unlike the disembodied ideal of modern rationalism.

And this emphasis on embodiment, I'm arguing, is essential to the incarnational principle at the heart of Christian confession. The story that God tells us about who we are begins with God's making us flesh, quickening the flesh of Adam as a material, embodied creature—and then saying it was "very good." This affirmation of the goodness of embodiment finds a reaffirmation in the Incarnation of God in Christ, the Word become flesh. And it finds its ultimate re-affirmation in the hope of the resurrection. As Augustine was at pains to point out in the City of God, Christians confess in the Creed their hope for "the resurrection of the body." Ours is not a dream of a Platonic eternity, detached from the prison house of the body and liberated to be a disembodied soul. Our hope is not for redemption from bodies, but the redemption of our bodies—undoing their brokenness in order to be restored to their goodness. Because the goodness of embodiment is consistently affirmed and re-affirmed in the narrative arc of Scripture, we ought to also take seriously the features of being embodied (race, gender, geography, history), as well as those ways of being-in-the-world that are unique to embodied creatures: the world of the arts, for instance, which requires ears to hear, eyes to see, hands to touch, bodies to dance.

In part two we'll consider why pentecostal spirituality is a uniquely postmodern expression of Christian faith.

James K.A. Smith is the associate professor of philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI. He is the author of "Who's Afraid of Postmodernism" and he will soon be co-editing a series with Amos Yong called "Pentecostal Manifestos".

Comments

[Brian LePort]

In essence you understand postmodernism to be a corrective to modernism that serves as a form of Gnosticism. And as I understand it you do not see postmodernism as exchanging the intellect for the emotions, but rather creating a holistic being who uses both? Would you then say that postmodernity does not see the purpose of the intellect to be any less important that modernism, but sees it as needing to be _part_ of the Christian experience rather than the whole of the Christian experience?

[James K.A. Smith]

Good question, Brian. First, let's just clarify that we're using the term "postmodernism" here as a heuristic term. It's not like it's a monolithic "school" or anything. But that said, second, I don't think postmodernism is anti-intellectual. I would say it is anti-intellectualISM. Actually, that still doesn't quite capture what I mean, since it makes it sounds as if postmodernism is "anti-intellectualist." So let me clarify: the target of the postmodern critique--what it names as "modernism"--is intellectualISM, a construal of human persons as fundamentally and essentially "thinking things." So the target of critique is not thinking per se, but rather a reductionistic construal of human persons that reduces us to _just_ thinkers (which then considers embodiment, tradition, emotions, etc. as "impurities" that "taint" pure reason).

But that doesn't mean that postmodernism gives us license to imagine that human beings are NOT "thinkers" (in which case postmodernism would be giving comfort to some of the worst strains of "emotionalist" pentecostalism). Rather, it simply situates our thinking in a holistic picture of the human person, recognizing that our thinking is conditioned by our embodiment, our desires, our loves, our traditions, etc.

I fear I've muddied the waters rather than answered your question. Sorry!

[Brian LePort]

As I read this I sense that the postmodern critique actually lines up well with the Wesleyan Quadrilateral of (1) Scripture, (2) Tradition, (3) Reason, and (4) Experience. Reason/intellect has a place in Christian practice, but is part of the whole, not the whole itself. It is interesting to note it was Wesley's Methodism that eventually would become one of places from which many North American pentecostals would emerge.

[James K.A. Smith]

In one sense that's true (which is why Stan Grenz got excited about the so-called "Wesleyan" quadrilateral way back in his 1993 book, _Revisioning Evangelical Theology_, which had a big influence on me). However, my problem with the quadrilateral is that its "adds" things to reason, it doesn't really call into question the shape of reason itself. That is, I think the quadrilateral positions reason, but doesn't offer a radical critique. Instead, it seems to still assume that reason is "pure" to some extent. (Another way of putting it might be to say this approach still takes reason to be "neutral" or "secular.") One can then see this work itself out in Grenz's own work, where he tends to appropriate, say, social science as if it just "rationally" discloses the world. This is why I've criticized Grenz for taking a "correlational" approach.

[Nick Norelli]

I didn't see a trackback or pingback to the post so I'm not sure if you're aware of it, but you guys might want to check out D. W. Congdon's post about his problems with postmodernism in which he mentions this post.

http://fireandrose.blogspot.com/2008/07/problems-with-postmodernism.html

[Brian LePort]

Nick,

Thanks for the heads up. I will make sure to take a look at that.

[Kyle]

Hi Jamie,

Great post!

This reminds me in particular of Augustine's contention with the Manichaeans where he succinctly posited this epistemology of love that you are delineating here.

In arguing that the Manichaeans did not understand Scripture because they did not love God and similarly, that they did not even understand their own poet Virgil properly because they had not learned to love him first ("In order to understand Virgil you must first learn to love him.") Augustine was articulating the proper orientation and inherent capitulation involved in human knowing. Namely, one must first surrender oneself in love in order to know what is desired to be known. Knowing something or someone, as it it is intended by God to be known, and therefore to be known as it is, Augustine asserted and demonstrated, is contingent upon knowing it in love.

I consider this, like you do, as having several affinities with Pentecostalism. And, while I think an Augustinian epistemology such as this can be salubrious for all Christians in our late modern culture I tend to think that there would need to be, not unlike in Augustine's day, an elucidation of the term "love." Perhaps Marion has perceived this and is working toward it?

Pax Christi.