Mark Hutchinson, University of Western Sydney, Australia
Michael Wilkinson’s last post on the importance of disciplines such as sociology
to Pentecostal scholarship was, I thought, well made. It focuses on the
problems of ‘relevance’ when the job given to Pentecostal scholars is to ‘think
theologically’. What we don’t usually ask is ‘who wrote the job
description?’ Ideas, especially programmatic ideas, never exist in the vacuum –
as a whole Pentecostal scholars respond to the needs of their emerging
institutions, which in turn answer to the movements and denominations which
support them. The job description given to them is usually phrased
in such terms as ‘tell us what to think about....’ (insert difficult
contemporary issue from a list compiled either by the evangelical school up the
road or the front page of a newspaper). Usually left unsaid are the
conditioning statements. A common one is: ‘... but don’t think too hard because
we need the answer next Tuesday, in the form of an executive summary, which
won’t offend too many people.’ There is nothing wrong with that –
run-of-the-mill ‘scholarship’, by which we mean the language game played to
provide academic institutions with credibility (usually through accreditation)
and respectability (from the significant others which count, and sometimes from
the broader society)—is the norm, regardless of whether the institution is
self-describedly religious or not. Talk to any research development office –
the original and the great are simply too few and scattered to sustain mass
education as we have come to expect it. The rest of us get by as we can.
What probably needs to be said, however, is that in inventing
disciplines on the bases provided by others, we often don’t know what we don’t
know. As a tertiary form of reflection, which relies on other disciplines to do
its observation, data collection and secondary interpretation for it, theology
is particularly subject to this sort of a priori falsification. Two
examples. I came back from a conference in the northern hemisphere only a few
weeks ago. It was an enjoyable experience, where I met good scholars
from distant places to which I have never been, with knowledge I would
otherwise have had no way of accessing. The first thing that became
clear, however, was that the terms of the conference related to theology, not
to history or sociology – the designers of the conference wanted abstracted
outcomes that could be reported back to the funding agencies. And most of the
funding is in the global North. Somehow, the mobile, contextualised knowledge
that the social scientists produced was ... um, interesting, but... The second
thing that became clear was that there were bits of the world (at least as
defined by the United Nations categories), which were simply less knowable than
others. Last time I looked there six such regions (Africa, Latin
America and the Caribbean, Northern America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania). Almost
all of those at the conference, however, knew something about the first five in
ways, which led them to be able to compare and make comparisons. Oceania,
on the other hand, was a blank slate, an empty section of the globe over which
the Pacific rolls uninterrupted by land or people.
Now, the latter can sound like Australian special interest. However,
consider this. Australia is a place where Pentecostalism did not originate at
Azusa Street, which can trace continuous tongues, prophecy and healing back to
the original Irvingite revivals of the 1830s and 1840s, and which had its own
indigenous Pentecostal revivals as early as 1870. In other words, you don’t
know what you don’t know. If you think that Azusa Street is the template for
Pentecostal revival in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and therefore somehow
universal in the application of its tropes, Oceania presents you with something
of a problem. But only if you know it is there. Most scholars
don’t. The implications for the substantiality and generalisability
of their theology is profound.
A second example. Most accounts of Italian Pentecostalism will start (as
do the Azusa Street accounts for North America) with a statement like,
‘Pentecostalism in Italy commenced in 1908 when Giacomo Lombardi ....’ It is a
nice story – the Assemblea Cristiana in Chicago providing a neat genealogical
tie backwards through William Durham to Azusa Street, and forwards (through
Lombardi and Francescon) to Pentecostal works elsewhere. The problem is that,
when one begins to press the sources (remember that? Its what historians do) it
turns out not to be true. A year before Lombardi left for Rome, a young woman
(Luigi Francescon’s neice, Susanna Colantonio) from the North Avenue Mission
was forced by her father to return to a tiny town in the mountainous hinterland
of Abbruzzo. When they were met by their relatives and friends, she began to
preach to them from Acts 2 about 'the great Later Day Outpouring of the Holy
Spirit'. As a result, they began to hold services in the upper room
of their farm house, and Susanna baptised numbers of people in the farm's
brook. It was then that she herself was baptised in the Spirit with the
evidence of tongues. She thus would later claim that she was the 'first person
in Italy at this close in age of Grace to receive this wonderful endowment of
power.'
What is the significance of this? Is it not the fact that the
‘important’ work was in Rome, and that this was, after all, just another person
from Durham’s mission, and hence the same genealogy? Well, yes, and
no. First, it suggests that if this was the case here, what is to
suggest that there were not other cases, which undermine the idea of a single
genealogical trace? Secondly, not to recognize that here is a plurality of
origins is to reinforce the Roman-centredness of the whole of Italian history,
and pay no attention to the fact that Pentecostalism is not always the work of
the powerful, but more often of the poor, the marginalized, the young, the
female, the rural… It is to continue to participate in existing hierarchies of
knowledge, and to ignore the important social contributors to the story. It is,
for instance, a fact that Italian Pentecostal history is written from Rome
outwards – despite the puzzling reality that most Pentecostals live in the
South, in churches that were founded with no reference to the north. The
ideological effects on the self-understandings of Italian churches are
profound. But then, most scholars in the global North (except gems
like David Bundy) would not know that. Most of the sources are in Italian – and
at my conference, there were no Italian scholars – that with regard to the
largest Pentecostal movement in Europe. You don’t know what you don’t know. But
sometimes it is worthwhile listening to others who do.
Cheers
Mark
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