In a provocative recent volume which explores the (post)modern religious revival culturally and philosophically, Gianni Vattimo states that 'the spirit of the times is not the Holy Spirit' (Derrida and Vattimo 1998: x). Let me in some way preface a projected future issue of Australasian Pentecostal Studies which will discuss issues that arise from and are related to the philosophy of Jacques Derrida (co-editor of and contributor to the aforementioned book) by pressuring the ambiguities latent in Vattimo's denial. On the one hand, the statement—'the spirit of the times is not the Holy Spirit'—resonates with the traditionally world-renouncing, millenially charged consciousness of the Pentecostal-charismatic traditions, particularly in its earliest social and theological forms. In fact, such is the foundational opposition which defines a millenarian Weltanschauung: a metaphysical dualism that divides social groups and communities into 'the people of g/God' and those of 'the Anti-Christ', or of 'this world', etc. This statement would, then, emphatically deny with a simple and prophetic clarity that present cultural and philosophical trends or currents are in an implicit—if not explicit—enmity with g/God, and thus will join the godless in the punishment of the final apocalypse.
On the other hand, this is in fact a dangerous reading. For, Christianity in general has not been particularly successful in backing the winning horses, culturally speaking, in that those developments opposed by official Christianity were often thoughtlessly assimilated by subsequent generations once the immediate religious threat posed by such developments had either ebbed or had been shown to be unnecessary. This future assimilation—and here's the rub—is often anticipated, non-cognitively, by a certain complicity (or even a cultural osmosis) in which the 'spirit of the times' and the 'Holy Spirit' are fused in the synchronicity of popular expression. Hence the lack of criticism of the present— which should not be understood as a sort of 'bumper-sticker' dismissal, but rather as critical engagement—reflects the attendant lack of self-criticism.
What seems appropriate and responsible, therefore, is a model of engagement which pressures the boundaries of orthodoxy and 'Truth'—in the institutional, theological and denomination senses—as an exercise in reflexivity, whereby our own cultural and cognitive limits are exposed. Such an operation—which can only be described as heretical—is performed as an act of faith toward what remains in secret, at this moment unexpressed and inexpressible. In fact, according to Derrida, heresy itself bears the indelible mark of responsibility, of the ethical, of the secret.
Now, to the extent that ... heresy always marks a difference or departure, keeping itself apart from what is publicly or commonly declared, it isn't only, in its very possibility, the essential condition of responsibility; paradoxically, it also destines responsibility to the resistance or dissidence of a type of secrecy. It keeps responsibility apart and in secret. And responsibility insists on what is apart and in secret. (Derrida 1995: 26, emphasis original)
Hence, this issue of Australasian Pentecostal Studies is presented simultaneously as an act of faith toward the future and as an heretical operation that brushes criticism and popular conception against its grain in its engagement with the present. We hope it will be received as such.
Works cited
Derrida, J. (1995) The Gift of Death. Trans. D. Wills; Religion and Postmodernism; Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. and G. Vattimo, eds. (1998) Religion. Cultural Memory in the Present; Stanford: Stanford University Press.