The Pentecostal Hypothesis

Christ Talks, They Decide

Nimi Wariboko

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725254534
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

The Pentecostal Hypothesis is the capacity to resist conventional wisdom in social actions.On a daily basis Pentecostals deploy or enact this capacity through the use of the formula: "It does not make sense, but it makes spirit" in their decision-making processes. This is an alternate way of knowing that is keyed to a particular interpretative understanding of Jesus Christ as constitutive of and normative for the good decisions relevant to human flourishing. The book offers a critical-philosophical analysis of the social-ethical implications of this hypothesis intended for private decisions and social actions. This text is ultimately a critique of Pentecostal reason. In this book Wariboko explores the epistemological dimensions of everyday Pentecostal Christology, their interpretation of Jesus's character and nature as epistemology. For Pentecostals Jesus did not have an epistemology, but the story of his life as a whole is an epistemology. For them the validity of a truth claim is always (in)formed by the story of Jesus that claims them, the story that gives them the meaning and courage to affirm their decisions without fear of being contradicted by Enlightenment rationalism. What kind of normative sway does this orientation to modernity have over Pentecostals' pattern of thought? This book configures the response to this question with profound insights into the convergence of epistemology and Christology within the impelling matrix of a provocative social ethics. The epistemological in this book is not about the that of knowing, but the how (the performative dimension) of knowing, which is affective, emotive, and an embodied practice.The Pentecostal Hypothesis is the capacity to resist conventional wisdom in social actions.

1

Who Christ Is

Sermon on Encountering Christ as an Event of Knowledge

I am grateful to preach from the pulpit of The King’s Temple.90 My assigned topic this morning is Who Christ is. We are all Pentecostals here, so let me tell you that I want to do my job in a very simple manner. I do not want to excite you; I only want you to understand who Christ is. My lesson will start in earnest with a summary statement of who Christ is. Next, I will read the story of Abraham and the binding of Isaac and explain what it means in the context of the topic. Finally, we will explore who Christ is as an elucidation of the summary statement. At the end we will understand what our sister, Pastor Elsie Obed, has been saying for years, on a different level. She often says, It does not make sense, but it makes spirit. The statement says something profound about who Christ is. It is my hope that the spirit of God will reveal to us the full meaning of the statement in the context of understanding who Christ is.

Let me now give you the summary statement of who Christ is; please write it down, if you can, because it decodes everything that I am going to say today. Jesus Christ is the space, the split where the world does not make sense. Jesus Christ is the empty space between meaning and no-meaning. To know him, you must be willing to step into that space, inhabit it, and be faithful to that space.

I now turn to the story of Abraham. We are talking about Jesus Christ, but we will approach him today through Abraham. Oftentimes, when we talk about Jesus Christ and the story of Abraham and Isaac, people think that Isaac reveals who Jesus Christ is. This is true, but we are going to learn today that if you understand Abraham, you will also understand something very crucial about Jesus Christ, which is “how to know him.” We often focus on Isaac because he was about to be sacrificed. But that angle of the story only tells us the function that Jesus Christ did as a savior. Sometimes, we may understand things or people by their functions—other times, by what or who they are. You may understand your mother as somebody who gives you money to pay school fees, but it is different from understanding your mother as who she is. Sometimes, these two dimensions of a person are joined, but they are not the same.

Let me now read the story of Abraham and try to decode it as much as the Holy Spirit will allow us to do today. Genesis 22:1–19 says,

Now it came to pass after these things that God tested Abraham, and said to him, “Abraham!”

And he said, “Here I am.”

Then He said, “Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”

So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son; and he split the wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. Then on the third day Abraham lifted his eyes and saw the place afar off. And Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the lad and I will go yonder and worship, and we will come back to you.”

So Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife, and the two of them went together. But Isaac spoke to Abraham his father and said, “My father!”

And he said, “Here I am, my son.”

Then he said, “Look, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?”

And Abraham said, “My son, God will provide for Himself the lamb for a burnt offering.” So the two of them went together.

Then they came to the place of which God had told him. And Abraham built an altar there and placed the wood in order; and he bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, upon the wood. And Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son.

But the Angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!”

So he said, “Here I am.”

And He said, “Do not lay your hand on the lad, or do anything to him; for now, I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.”

Then Abraham lifted his eyes and looked, and there behind him was a ram caught in a thicket by its horns. So Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up for a burnt offering instead of his son. And Abraham called the name of the place, The-Lord-Will-Provide; as it is said to this day, “In the Mount of the Lord it shall be provided.”

Then the Angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time out of heaven, and said: “By Myself I have sworn, says the Lord, because you have done this thing, and have not withheld your son, your only son—blessing I will bless you, and multiplying I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore; and your descendants shall possess the gate of their enemies. In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice.” So Abraham returned to his young men, and they rose and went together to Beersheba; and Abraham dwelt at Beersheba.

Now think about this important story. To understand what was going on with Abraham is a key to understanding who Jesus Christ is. But this story does not make sense, that is the first thing you have to realize, and no matter how many times you have heard it, you must to come to this realization before you can penetrate the story. Here is a God who never accepts human sacrifice saying to Abraham, “Go and sacrifice somebody to me.” It does not make sense. Here is a man who had been waiting for this son that he was promised, and God was telling him, “Go and kill your son.” The man agreed. He never told his wife. We are not told Sarah’s opinion; he just went along with the divine instruction to kill his son. It does not make sense.

It appears Abraham had come to that point where on one side everything made sense, while on the other side of it, everything was meaningless and foolish. Poor Abraham is split in the middle and he has to make up his mind whether to sacrifice his son. Being put in this situation did not make sense. How could God say to him, “Kill your son”?

What was going on in his mind? Imagine his mental agony in the three days it took him to walk to the designated place of sacrifice. He must have been repeating, “It doesn’t make sense.” If you over-spiritualize the story or over-rationalize it, then you miss its import. If God were to ask you today to kill your son, you would be in a deep crisis. You would respond, “God, it doesn’t make sense.” But in the story, we have Abraham, whom God has asked to do something that absolutely does not make sense. There is no record of God giving such an instruction to believers in the Bible before Abraham got his. Abraham had no past story to rely upon. Today, we know from the Bible that God offered God’s son for the sins of the world. We can say Isaac represents Jesus Christ, but Abraham did not know this. He was at the point where the divine instruction did not make sense. The God he knew was not that kind of a God who would ask him to kill his son. Even more perplexing to the old man, Isaac was the son God had promised would inherit the father’s name. Yet, Abraham obeyed.

Even by the world’s standard today, the divine command still does not make sense. God’s instruction and Abraham’s obedience do not make sense. The normal way that the world derives meaning from its knowledge system does not apply here. Meaning has been suspended, and Abraham was at the point where God’s instruction to him sounded foolish. Even his own actions sounded foolish. Alas, he was caught in the middle, like this aisle between the pews. On one side of the aisle it makes sense by the standards of human wisdom, and on the other side, it does not make sense. But God was calling him to be in the middle, and Abraham could not just walk into it; he had to leap into it. His obedience, his faith propelled him into the middle. He still did not know after leaping whether it made sense. Belief is taking a leap into what does not make sense, and it is in that space that God is.

When everything that you are doing in your own Christianity, in your belief, is calculated and goes well, there is no difference between you and the world. For you to know Christ you must come to that space where it doesn’t make sense, but it makes spirit. It does not make sense means it is foolish to the world. It means obedience or action has no meaning; you cannot calculate or grasp it. Whatever it is, it does not make sense, but you must still come into that middle space of not knowing. Oftentimes, we do not want to stand in that space where it does not make sense, as we think that it is a space of absolute foolishness to the world. For it is in the crack, that space, where Jesus Christ is about to meet us.

When we say it does not make sense, many people in the world assume it means foolishness. But we know that there is a space, a little crack, between absolute sense and absolute foolishness.91 That is where belief, your faith and Christ dwells. Until you can be in that space with God, you are never going to know who Christ is. Abraham was in that space.

Let us not forget, it does not make sense to kill Isaac—God does not accept human sacrifices. But this God asked Abraham to do it, and he obeyed. Abraham was not foolish; he knew that there was something wrong because the story did not make sense. How was he going to explain it to his wife? How was he going to explain it to his neighbors? How was he going to explain it to himself? Yet he obeyed, though he knew his obedience did not make sense. He knew it was foolishness. He also knew that the foolishness of God was far superior to the wisdom of human beings. So between the wisdom, sense and foolishness of the world, and the foolishness of God, he knew there was a space where God was beckoning to him to enter and meet with Him. Therefore, until you are ready to enter that space, live and be faithful, you will not know who Jesus Christ is.

So when they say Abraham is the father of faith or belief, it means that he took a leap into that space. Faith is about jumping into what is missing in the world. Amid the fullness of the wisdom of this world, there is always something that is missing. By his actions, his neighbors would have thought too that there was something missing in his world, if not in his head. His action did not make sense given the calculations and permutations ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• The Pentecostal Hypothesis
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Who Christ Is
• Chapter 2: Exegeting the Sermon
• Chapter 3: This Is Not a Christology
• Chapter 4: Sense and Spirit
• Bibliography