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Thinking in Tongues – Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy

Author:	James K A Smith
Published By:	Eerdmans (Grand Rapids)
Pages:	155
Price:	£12.99
ISBN:	978 0 8024 6184 9

Reviewed by Philip Joy.

This book is billed as the inaugural volume of a forthcoming “Groundbreaking Pentecostal Manifestos Series”. It aims to articulate for Pentecostals, as well as for others, a distinctive Pentecostal philosophy, growing out of the ‘lived’ thinking of Pentecostals - hence the title: glossosalia itself being a challenge to the drier, cerebral epistemologies of traditional Christian theology. Pentecostalism offers not merely a distinct way of worshipping, but a distinct worldview. This worldview is characterized by a radical openness to God, a deep sense of spiritual immanence, a refusal of the poor to spiritualize away the prosperity element of salvation, a narrative epistemology, and an eschatology that emphases the now, as well as the not yet: social justice, reconciliation and transformation.

Smith gives us a substantial chapter about the epistemology of Pentecostalism. To illustrate the importance of this, I will take his analogy of film. As aesthetic beings, Schindler’s List “affects us more deeply and significantly than a textbook presentation of the Holocaust.” It is in the nature of STORY that it powerfully affects us: as human beings, the way we know is less deductive than intuitive. Furthermore, Pentecostalism goes on to imagine new ways of being, a sort of re-narration of the world, God’s story: supernatural, imaginative and poetic, more like Pan’s Labyrinth than The Passion of the Christ.

With its emphasis on the supernatural, the question arises: how can Pentecostalism be taken seriously in contemporary debate with the cultural predominance of scientific naturalism, even among Christians? Smith deals with this next amid his concern that Pentecostals stand up and be counted (much of the book is aimed at Pentecostal scholars who he hopes will go on to flesh out his various theses). What Smith attacks is the presumed autonomy of nature. Following Augustine and perhaps unwittingly echoing Jonathan Edwards, he offers a ‘grace-theology’ of matter: the belief that creation is an ongoing gift in which all things hold together in Christ. In such a world, where the Spirit is already at work, miraculous ‘interventions’ are actually no more miraculous that the continuing existence of the created order.

In the heart of his book, Smith advocates that Pentecostalism demands a new Philosophy of Religion which focuses not only on beliefs, but on believers and their practice. Lingering is the notion that doctrine is prior to worship, that ideas trump practices. In fact, we are more orientated by desire than thinking. Life, in a Heideggerian sense, is less a picture we observe than an ocean in which we swim, in which case faith is less a matter of knowledge than love. It is not arid questions about the nature of truth that motivate the majority of ordinary Christians in the world today (poor, third-world, Pentecostal); rather, it is knowing the truth that there is One who loved them to the uttermost and whose new-born life burns in their breast. It is of this that the philosophers of religion need to take account.

So what of Tongues, as per the title of this fascinating volume? For Smith, speaking in tongues is evidence of a community of resistance, for glossolalia resists traditional and contemporary linguistic analyses, and demands broadening of these categories. Tongues are both a hermeneutical challenge, since in public tongues must be interpreted, but also a sign of the miraculous - of God’s potential inbreaking - since, in private, tongues are groans which cannot otherwise be expressed. In the context of the third world sprawling urban slums in which Pentecostalism predominates, tongues are simultaneously the language of the dispossessed and the foretaste of the coming Kingdom.

This is a fascinating, though not always easy, read, which, if it challenges card-carrying charismatics such as myself, it should challenge us all. Pentecostal Theology is coming of age: watch this space!