Pentecostalism and the Age of Interpretation
Matthew Del Nevo [1]
Broken Bay Institute, Senior Lecturer in Christian Spirituality
matthew.delnevo@dbb.edu.au
Introduction
The age we live in is the age of interpretation and such is a good time for pentecostal churches; but the times have not always been like this. The previous ages of the Church have been metaphysical ages rather than ages of interpretation. This is the topic that I will be elucidating in what follows. What is an age of metaphysics? How is our age different? Why is our age – an age of interpretation – the right soil for pentecostalism? These are the main questions that I will address.
In my article "Pentecostalism and the Three Ages of the Church" [2] I endeavoured to give philosophical groundwork to the claim that Pentecostalism is as different from Protestantism as Protestantism is from Catholicism. In other words, bluntly put: pentecostalism is not a Protestantism. Catholic, Protestant and Pentecostal, then, are the three ages of the Church, and recalling a tradition of thought as old as the New Testament itself, reiterated close to our time by Franz Rosenzweig, I called these Petrine, Pauline and Johannine ages of the Church. Pentecostalism I associated with the Johannine church of the Holy Spirit. In now associating Pentecostalism with an age of interpretation, in line with my previous article, I will be associating Protestantism and Catholicism with ages of metaphysics, or what in recent philosophy is recognised as "onto-theology". Onto-theology is descriptor for what ‘metaphysics’ names, in other words they are roughly synonymous. Why may Catholicism and Protestantism perhaps be called ‘onto-theological’ and Pentecostalism partially avoid this judgement? This is a question which, if we can answer it, will help us with the previous questions and with the whole business (the main business) of seeing Pentecostalism in the light of an age of interpretation.
What is metaphysics or ‘onto-theology’?
The whole question of metaphysics, which has been a main theme of post-modernist philosophers, arose most powerfully in the thought of German philosopher Martin Heidegger. According to Heidegger, ‘metaphysics’ refers to philosophy from Parmenides through Plato and Aristotle right through the ages of culture to Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth century. In other words, the whole history of philosophy is marked by metaphysics or, more simply, is metaphysical. This is necessarily so, because the word metaphysics, as it has come to be understood, means going beyond the realm of physics. Classically this has meant questions like, why is there something rather than nothing? What is the world? What is God? What is man? Or should we ask: Who is God? Who is man? Which question is it? - what or who? On the question depends the answer. On what grounds do we distinguish a question of what from a question of who? Metaphysics means questions of being and also, questions of knowledge: we believe we know, but how do we know we know? - Plato’s question in the Theatetus. Or the question about being and seeming: how do we know whether something we say is true or merely seems true? - Plato’s question in the Sophist. All these questions belong to the sphere of metaphysics and metaphysics names the kind of thinking that sorts them out.
The simplest answer to the question ‘what is metaphysics?’ is that it is a period of time, therefore it is essentially a history, that is marked by having a world view which permeates and unifies the time into a period or an epoch. When that world view crumbles we can see what its basic premises and guiding ideas or illusions (generally the latter) were. An simple illustration is the nineteenth century in Australia, Europe, and North America with its governing and over-arching belief in progress. After the Great War, the so-called ‘war to end all wars’, and hard on its heals, the Second World War, the notion of progress, as governing and unifying the age substantially broke down. People had more modest views, seeing a bit of progress here and there, but no longer believing in progress in general and as a rule. Retrospectively we can see this nineteenth century ideal was just that, an ideal, and illusion, predicated on the mistaken belief in the perfectibility of man under his own steam (no pun intended). We can if we wish, locate the philosophers and the texts that sold the age the Myth of Progress and the infrastructure of thought upon which it was raised up.
The greatest philosophers have tended to be the greatest metaphysicians, so from the ancient world we remember Plato and Aristotle and the schools of thought derived from them. Classic Christianity did not overcome the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle and thought itself in various combinations of Platonic and Aristotelian ways. Rabbinic Judaism had a different metaphysic, perhaps the greatest the world has known. Rabbinic metaphysics has been disconnected from Western philosophy until recent times due to Christianity being the official Western religion and being (in both Catholic and Protestant forms) incredibly anti-Jewish. For this reason Christians have traditionally (and still today) know next to nothing about Jewish oral tradition or rabbinics, although these are much more biblical in a sense Jesus and the apostles would have understood than most Christian theology. As I said this situation has changed in our time and thankfully the repressed is returning.
The Middle Ages effectively ended with the demise of Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics. One factor of this was the rise of method instead of metaphysics, which gave rise to modern scientific approaches, rather than the old fashioned speculative approaches of classical metaphysics. But most powerfully of all, the French philosopher Descartes inserted the metaphysical category of the ego, the I, the subject, or self, into the centre of thought and metaphysics, and along with this Descartes brought the values of clarity and certainty to the concepts of method that abounded in his day. All this was world-changing back then; today, we take it for granted and can hardly imagine the possibility of thinking otherwise than in subjective terms. And yet, it is all too possible!
All Protestant Christianity is modern because it works within a basically Cartesian frame of reference, rather than a Platonic or Aristotelian frame of reference like Catholic Christianity, which still thinks in an essentially medieval manner, framed by Platonic and Aristotelian approaches. Catholic theology will use modern methodologies of course, it is not stuck in the past, but it will always use these insofar as they are predisposed to Greek metaphysics, and not contradicting its ‘laws of thought’. At bottom the reason Catholics and Protestants cannot really see eye to eye is metaphysical; they have metaphysical differences. My claim here is that Pentecostalism is metaphysically different from Protestantism. This is why it is apt to speak of three ages of the Church.
Not until the so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century did new giants of metaphysics arise; principally we could name Kant, Hegel and in the twentieth century, Heidegger. Modern philosophers doing metaphysics with a strong Jewish accent influenced by rabbinics are Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Emanuel Levinas. One product of this Jewish voice in modern philosophy is dialogical philosophy, which is pluralistic, personalistic and experiential. Our age is in fact an exciting time for metaphysics. And, it should be said, an immensely confused one.
If this is metaphysics, what of onto-theology? Onto-theology is a recent term to describe a kind of metaphysics which works from some kind of first principle. This may include all theology, because it works from God as its ‘ultimate signified’, to use the jargon. Atheism works out of ‘reason’ or out of ‘man’ as its ‘ultimate signified’. Therefore both theism and atheism are onto-theological, merely reverse images of one another. A kind of thinking which is not onto-theological in any strict sense is one that is plural, that is historical or genealogical, and that is critical (that is, forward moving and future oriented), for instance messianic thinking, and also which is perspectival and interpretative, as we shall see below. It is in this latter frame that I speak of Pentecostal theology.
We should note, however, that not all theology is onto-theological, because not all theology is ‘theistic’. There is in Christianity a tradition that is biblical that is called, in Greek terms, apophatic or negative which does not think of ‘God’ as an ultimate signified, but as absolute in His unknowability; that is, in His incomprehensibility. [3] This is the tradition of ‘negative theology’, which is a tradition much better kept in Orthodox and Catholic theology, than in Protestant theology, which has positivistic inclinations in keeping with Cartesian metaphysics. Theism and Deism are very much products of Protestant Christianity, but more fundamentally, of Protestant metaphysics, which has marginalised what it considers ‘mysticism’. In positivist theology ‘God’ is the ultimate ‘posit’, to which all other posits (propositions and positions) must logically cohere. But the cloud of unknowing in which God really manifests is thereby dispelled.
Theology is ‘onto-theological’ when the word ‘God’ is wrongly regarded as a noun. As we know, a noun is a naming word, but if we think God is a name, or if not the name of a thing or person, then the name of an idea, then we will not be worshipping God, but an idol of our own making. Judaism has always been better on the Doctrine of God than Christianity. It has avoided thinking God as a noun, as a ‘thing’, by writing it G-d or in traditional literature using the word Hashem (the Name). Thus Jews are reminded that the way they know God is different from the way they know any thing, that in fact God has as much to do with unknowing as He does with knowing, which of course is always the case with true love in true relationship. When Christians forget that God is not a name it can be said that they actually forget God.
The fact is, though, that God has been so forgotten in Western culture, and that in fact a strong intellectual culture of theism, deism and positivism has arisen and been intellectually dominant and mainstream, with churches predicating themselves on this kind of understanding. This state of affairs enabled Hegel to take ‘God’ pretty much as a term of thought. This state of affairs enabled Feuerbach on an anthropological and humanistic basis to say that ‘God’ was just a projection of ‘man’. Feuerbach encouraged his fellow citizens to grow up and forget about this ‘God’ and recall the projections that constituted Him, back to themselves and to the idea of man. Jean-Paul Sartre said God was the end point of man’s desire and a mark of the strength and inwardness of that desire in us. He encouraged his fellows to live in and for themselves. But it was the philosopher Nietzsche, at the end of the nineteenth century, who saw the situation most keenly and addressed it most dramatically. He told the story of a madman who carrying a lamp walked into the market place one fine morning and there among the cultured despisers of religion shattered the lamp on the earth and cried aloud for all to hear: "God is dead!"
What is of greatest significance about Nietzsche’s story of the madman is its ambivalent religious overtones that recall our whole thought of God, and how a Cartesian strain of thinking, which is centred around the self the whole time, in an increasingly facile way, has barbarised it and now killed it.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as though through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. [4]
What is said here is not essentially anything against God in the sense we read of Him in the Scripture, but what we have made of God, despite all that the Scriptures bear witness to. The madman’s words indicate that without God the world is going down, without God we won’t survive, that in murdering God we have committed suicide unbeknownst to ourselves – thus the madman declares it. And of course he is mad because he is the one man that sees what no man in his right mind believes and what no sane man would declare. Thus the story speaks of an inverted order of sense, of a world where ‘the true’ is no longer possible or even perceptible. The madman is the sole single sane one in this world, because the only one who can see what has happened. In this, the madman is like an Old Testament prophet. Nietzsche was a great lover of the Old Testament and his critique of Christianity was predicated on a sense that historic Christianity was a travesty of its Scripture and of Jesus’ teaching. Nietzsche wrote the prophetic element of his thought into this very same story of the madman:
Here, the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground and it broke into pieces and went out. " I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is more distant from them than the most distant stars – and yet they have done it themselves." [5]
Something has happened, God is dead, and it is a happening of our time and in our time, but it is a happening which is somehow still to happen, still to break upon the realization of people. What is to break? - the whole question of God. The greatness of Nietzsche was that in a time of modernism when all cultured people despised Christian religion as passé, as intolerant, as superstition and myth and the mass of people had a nominal or cultural Christianity, which swung so easily and invisibly into Nazism on one side and atheist ideology on the other, Nietzsche raised the question of God as the question of the time, and as the question of our time. Although he railed against Christianity in an unprecedented way; no-one since Jesus himself had raised questions of religion so religiously and so irreligiously – depending how you looked at it. Of course we can see parallels and resonances of all this in Dostoyevsky and in Kierkegaard and others, but Nietzsche was the supreme spirit in this regard: in seeing the whole question of God as a question of metaphysics, and questions of metaphysics as epochal questions that make or break a whole era and a whole civilisation. Nietzsche didn’t talk about a new age of Christianity. He surely couldn’t envisage it. But he laid the philosophical groundwork of an age of interpretation, which is ours, in which a new age, a spiritual age of the Church, can be born and can flourish.
Overcoming metaphysics
Our time is called an age of interpretation because God, considered merely as a First Principle (arche) or ‘ground of Being’ or ‘ultimate source’ is a matter of the question and metaphysics is also a matter of the question. As questions, these are matters open to interpretation. As such the questions and the interpretations of them that we voice take us back to the past to retrieve traditions that we have lost, such as apophaticism that I mentioned above, or Talmudic thinking, which would reflect Jesus’ own philosophy, as it were, and which is truly biblical rather than metaphysical. [6]
Nietzsche is the name principally associated with this age of interpretation, because of the radicality of his questioning, its multidimensionality, and his literaray quality. However, Heidegger was to some extent Nietzsche’s apotheosis, in the sense of his greatest interpreter. In Heidegger’s Seinsfrage (question of Being) which was the leading question of all his writing, early and late, we have a completion of Nietzsche. Heidegger set out in his early major work Being and Time (1927) to deconstruct metaphysics. His basic point, with respect to his leading question of Being, is that metaphysics – whether in Plato, in Aristotle, in Kant – has not inquired into the ground (Urgrund) of metaphysics. Instead, metaphysics – I mean different metaphysical philosophers – decide the ground of metaphysics at the outset. Heidegger made major studies of all the great philosophers to show why they did this and how, one way or another, their philosophy fell short of the question of Being at the same time as they disclosed Being in an originary way. But essential philosophy, Heidegger taught (i.e. his philosophy), was about that ground and the way back into the ground of metaphysics. Later, Heidegger taught that, to begin with, only poetic thinking could take us back into the ground of metaphysics, and only one or two poets at that, because poetic thinking, before any other mode of language, at this stage of history, had an originary relation to language and Being, for Heidegger regarded language, in a famous phrase he used, as "the house of Being". Heidegger called this kind of essential thinking that thought in the direction of the groundwork of metaphysics, ‘overcoming metaphysics’.
Heidegger did not accept the claims of metaphysics – for instance the modernist claim of recent centuries that there was an ‘objective’ world or an ‘objective’ way of looking at things. Neither did he accept the claim that there was, by contrast, a ‘subjective’ truth in any important sense. Heidegger accepted Nietzsche’s basic – and I think very religious – premise that philosophical deconstruction could lead to a change in metaphysics, what Nietzsche called "a revaluation of all values". Heidegger teaches us that this should not be understood as some kind of anarchism:
Metaphysics remains the basis of philosophy. The basis of thinking however it does not reach. When we think the truth of Being [as say, Heidegger believes Hölderlin does], metaphysics is overcome. We can no longer accept the claims of metaphysics that it takes care of the fundamental involvement in "Being" and that it decisively determines all relations to beings as such [because metaphysics is actually only very partial, only perspectival]. But this "overcoming of metaphysics" does not abolish metaphysics. As long as man remains the animal rationale he is also the animal metaphyisicum. As long as man understands himself as the rational animal, metaphysics belongs, as Kant said, to the nature of man. But if our thinking should succeed in its efforts to go back into the ground of metaphysics, it might well help to bring about a change in human nature, accompanied by a transformation of metaphysics. [7]
As far as the three ages of the Church are concerned, listening to this we understand that the old ages are not surpassed by subsequent ages, but that the Christian of a later age is bound to the previous ages. Pentecostal theology is bound to Catholic and Protestant theology. The question is, to what degree, and in what proportion? In my view Pentecostal theology is in very early days and has neither the degree nor the proportions correct. Nor does pentecostal theology stand free within itself as the theology of an age of interpretation, it has not properly yet distinguished itself from patently metaphysical theology. The last part of the quotation above reiterates in Heidegger’s terms, Nietzsche’s vision of some kind of transformation of ‘man’ and of metaphysics. And both Nietzsche and Heidegger realized that to change one meant to change the other.
Elsewhere, Heidegger argued that the reign of technology brought with it a particularly degenerate kind of metaphysics, which would in future bring about a corresponding degenerate man and society. It was in fact to save us from this, that Heidegger believed, as Nietzsche did, who could only see it more distantly, that his kind of thinking in particular, was so important, and crucial for religion as well. Heidegger like Nietzsche believed that our obliviousness to what he called "the darkening of the world" and "the emasculation of the spirit" was the determining mark of our age. This is why, cheaply (and wrongly I think) Heidegger is often called a pessimist. Certainly he did not believe, as our age does, in its notion of ‘man’ as the measure of all things, let alone the sole hope. In the essay quoted above he asks:
What if the absence of this involvement and the oblivion of this absence [Heidegger’s version of the ‘death of God’] determined the entire modern age? What if the absence of Being abandoned man more and more exclusively to beings, leaving him forsaken and far from any involvement of Being in his nature, while this forsakenness itself remained veiled? What if this were the case – and had been the case for a long time now? What if there were signs that this oblivion will become still more decisive in the future? [8]
Heidegger believed that our ‘obliviousness to Being’ (Seinsvergessenheit), to God if you like (although Heidegger studiously avoided that word and that analogy) [9] marked our age in a way which would be disastrous for it. His questions above are not speculative questions, they are questions of life, he believes. The fact that philosophy imagines it has ‘moved on’ from them; that philosophy is not talking about these questions; that it is oblivious to them, Heidegger would think is proof of the timeliness of his questions - proof of their relevance, not their irrelevance. Only a disaster on an unheard of scale, he indicated, could awaken us to what his philosophy (what philosophy worthy of the name) is all about. Elsewhere he wrote:
The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought. [10]
Two generative interpretations for a future thinking
Philosophers have spoken (perhaps too glibly) of our time being ‘after metaphysics’, by this they mean that metaphysics is in question. The idea of being ‘post-modern’ derives from this philosophical state of affairs. There are two generative interpretations which raise the bar if old-style metaphysics is to be sustained into the future, and which while interpretative themselves, the first explicitly so, are generative of interpretation, thus making them metaphysical statements of a sort yet to be fully determined.
The first is actually two quotations of Nietzsche that we will take together and which in my view surround and suffuse his whole philosophical striving to a large degree. The first is this:
There are no such things as facts, only interpretations and this is only an interpretation. (Will to Power §481)
This saying is aimed in the first place against scientific methodology and its concept of ‘fact’, which in Nietzsche’s day was very positivistic indeed. Fact was synonymous with validity and validity with truth. After Heidegger we know that ‘validity’ is a very narrow and non-philosophical notion of ‘truth’. After Popper we know that facts in science are essentially falsifiable, not essentially true or essentially valid. After Kuhn we know that science works in terms of paradigms, which are totalities of theory which can suddenly shift with a new discovery. In living memory, then, the concept of a ‘fact’ has changed quite dramatically. We know these things as the best and most persuasive interpretations, and in this sense as ‘facts’ and as ‘true’.
The second thing Nietzsche is doing in this saying is attacking the connection between truth and objectivity which lies at the heart of modernist mentality. We are reminded of Borges’ Chinese encyclopaedia in which it is written that "animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs (h) included in the present classification (i) frenzied (j) innumerable (k) drawn with a fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies." Michel Foucault quotes this at the start of The Order of Things, in fact quoting it as the inspiration for his book, and adds that what this fable demonstrates is an otherness in which "the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that." [11] Knowing as much makes Foucault, as Borges, a post-Nietzschean writer. For the modern novelist and artist, this break between truth and objectivity is second nature. Theology has been much slower to catch up and in some major instances can be said not yet to have even realised there is some catching up to do. Our objectivity would have been totally bizarre to the fabled authors of that encyclopaedia.
Thirdly, Nietzsche is attacking the connection between truth and method. It would be Heidegger’s student, the philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer who, in a book of that title (Truth and Method, 1960, 1986), would address this subject in a fulsome manner. Methodology as a means of obtaining truth presupposes an objectivity which gives ‘data’ which is neutral and on the basis of which, with right method, facts can be established. Nietzsche does not disagree, only he asserts that "interpretation" is a more reasonable word than "fact". The method itself is a form of interpretation. The "and" in Gadamer’s title, Truth and Method is disjunctive. Method provides us with one kind of understanding, but truth is aesthetic and hermeneutical and is not reducible to method.
Lastly, this quotation of Nietzsche says "…and this is only an interpretation" but in so saying underscores the generative and persuasive nature of the best interpretations. In other words, there is a rank order of interpretation. Nietzsche despised plural relativism in which one interpretation is deemed as good as any other only different, as a stupid misinterpretation of life and thought. Interpretations differ in rank, but the best interpretations will in his view be life-giving and bring life abundant and (he doesn’t use the word) but we might say, blessing or beatitude. Plural relativism brings levelling and herd mentality and for this reason Nietzsche paid it scant heed.
We pass on to the second part of this first point about generative interpretations with another saying of Nietzsche closely related to that above and therefore also typical of Nietzsche’s own practise. In the Fifth Book of The Gay Science published in 1887, Nietzsche speaks in Aphorism 374 of "our new ‘infinite’". The word ‘infinite’ is placed into inverted commas by Nietzsche because of its conventional religious overtones, its association with eternity and heaven and life after death. These latter are, presumably, our ‘old infinite’ which for modern people has become unbelievable or merely nominal, and while not indefensible in themselves, for instance as they appear in the Bible, are indefensible as a metaphysically understood totality ostensible ‘over and above’ us. Our new ‘infinite’ is not opposed to this world, or over and above it – but nor is it reducible to ‘this world’ in a naïve empirical sense.
Nietzsche writes:
…the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives and only in these. We cannot look around our own corner… But I should think that today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty that would be involved in decreeing from our own corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner. Rather the world has become ‘infinite’ for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations. [12]
Our world is infinitely open to interpretation. Reality is perspectival. What it is, depends how you see it (how you see it depends on who you are). No two people see reality exactly the same way. Here, again, we see the break between truth and objectivity, as well as truth and exclusivity. However, once again Nietzsche is in no way providing a philosophy endorsing every stupidity under the sun, far from it. As I’ve said, Nietzsche was a visionary not a relativist. But isn’t perspectivism relativism with another name? one might nevertheless ask.
The key to understanding this view is given by Jewish philosopher Martin Buber where in his influential little masterpiece, I and Thou (1922), he writes, "In the beginning is the relationship". The infinite perspectives are not simply ideas or disembodied interpretations. Every interpretation is rooted and comes out of a life predicated on relationship. Every strong interpretation belongs to a community of some kind. Communities of course are made up of individuals with their own interpretation of what is going on, so there is a relationship between individual and community or communities in the first place. Interpretations are implicit in community practice and influential interpretations often issue from the practices of those communities. Interpretations are as infinite as relations and the multidimensionality of community. Nietzsche’s view is an endorsement of the dignity of personhood and the uniqueness of each one. It is this that is our new ‘infinite’.
The second generative interpretation for a future philosophy is the hermeneutical circle. The key word here is understanding. Method may have to do with the validity of facts, but truth is about understanding and understanding takes place between people seeking to advance peace and good-will on earth. Understanding is in the light of a future not our own. The idea of the hermeneutical circle appeared in the influential nineteenth century philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, but it appears in Heidegger’s deconstructive context in Being and Time. Gadamer reiterates and perhaps universalises the idea across all domains of thought in Truth and Method.
Heidegger describes the hermeneutical situation as methodological in character, but it is methodological in a new post-Nietzschean sense. [13] Heidegger writes: "Every interpretation has its fore-having, its fore-sight, and its fore-conception." [14] By "every interpretation" Heidegger means every feeling, for an emotion automatically and at the same time as felt, interprets. "Every interpretation" means perception and cognition, for we come to our perceptions and cognitions predisposed in some way or other. To everything we come, including to ourselves, with presuppositions and pre-understanding, and these can be shown in our interpretations. The great deconstructions of Western metaphysics carried out by Heidegger had precisely to do with showing the pre-understandings of Being at work within them, hence, what Derrida has called their "closure".
Gadamer regards Heidegger’s existential grounding of the hermeneutical circle as "a decisive turning point", presumably in the history of metaphysics. [15] By "existential grounding" he means that no longer is the idea of the hermeneutical circle just to do with texts, but with the interpretation of everything and anything including ourselves as interpretative beings. In other words we have to live with this situation of interpretation, a chief part of which is mortality. Death is not something (as we often suppose) that happens at the ‘end’ of our life, or which ends our life, but death is constitutive of our life, which means a structure of our existence as a whole. Death therefore enters into every interpretation along with a will to life.
Hermeneutics is called circular because it is moving and dynamic. The interpretation we receive or the new understanding we gain is always in circular relation to the pre-understanding that we bring in the first place. Already in the space of a few decades this sounds like received wisdom, not something very new. The hermeneutical circle is not a cycle however, it spirals because it is forward moving, since it is carried out in time, which cannot return. Gadamer says: "The task of hermeneutics is to clarify this miracle of understanding which is not a communion of souls, but a sharing in a common meaning… The task of hermeneutics has always been to establish agreement where there was none or where it had been disturbed in some way." [16] Hermeneutical philosophy elevates the experience of understanding and of being understanding. Of course, the question of the Sache, of what it is that we are being understanding about, is the crucial one.
"The circle, then, is not formal in nature. It is neither subjective nor objective, but describes understanding as the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter." [17] The "movement of tradition" refers to the origin of our pre-understanding. Interpretation, explained in this way, is always an engagement with the past, and always has consequences for the future. In the long run, interpretation is always historical and of historical import. "Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves. Thus the circle of understanding is not a ‘methodological’ circle, but describes an element of the ontological structure of understanding." [18]
As I said before, understanding takes place between people within communities and traces a history. From their works we will see their understanding – or their lack of it. If old style metaphysics is to be sustained in the contemporary world in which all the deep words of life, of metaphysics, are in question, then our new ‘infinite’ and the hermeneutical circle surely have to be taken into consideration. Our new ‘infinite’ and the hermeneutical circle, to which I have limited my account here for simplicity’s sake, are not just interpretations, but the subsequent history of them has shown them to be, as we’ve said above, generative interpretations; that is, they give a basis for further interpretations, indeed for the whole situation popularly described as ‘postmodern’, whatever that may mean.
My argument so far is that if the Petrine age of the Church is grounded in a Greek metaphysics of Platonism and Aristotelianism, and the Pauline age of the Church is grounded in subjective idealism, the Cartesian metaphysic essentially, then the Johannine age of the Church is grounded in an age of interpretation. This is a post-Nietzschean age in which an overcoming of metaphysics is attempted. This is an age in which generative interpretations achieve a metaphysical status and hold sway with the force of a metaphysic or of a scientific paradigm. The fact is though, these interpretations are contestable. Thought in an age which is ‘overcoming metaphysics’, rather like the myth of Sysiphus (as Camus noticed), is an age of uncertainty.
Conclusions
My story has to be brought to a quick conclusion. It would have been useful to explain the above in terms of the history of nihilism, because that would clarify it. However, let us recap.
Metaphysics can be described many ways but I have followed mainstream hermeneutical tradition as taking metaphysics in the sense of a time, or period of history, that is dominated by a world view. When that metaphysic breaks down, as a result of historical forces, we can see the premises or guiding ideas that upheld the whole system.
Our age is different, it is an age of interpretation because for historical reasons, our stance towards metaphysics – whether Plato, Aristotle, Descartes or the Enlightenment itself – is that we can deconstruct it, and we can demythologise it, as needs be. And what we are left with is not a new whole, but an interpretation. An interpretation is weaker than a metaphysic and hardly grounds and unifies an age the way that Platonism and Aristotelianism could ground the Middle Ages, or Cartesianism could ground early Modernity or the myth of the Enlightenment could ground high Modernity as historic periods.
Pentecostalism is native to this soil. Pentecostalism grows up in an age which is already, in Heidegger’s phrase, "overcoming metaphysics". This is the native environment of pentecostalism. The metaphysical presuppositions of theologians from the major denominations sound strange to a pentecostal’s ears. The Latinate presuppositions of the Catholic. The confessional presuppositions of the Protestant. These are not the presuppositions of a pentecostal. Latin theology may be worthy. The Westminster or Augsberg Confession may be wonderful, but for a pentecostal, the preunderstanding is that it is not an absolute, but an interpretation. Hence the pragmatism of pentecostalism. This pragmatism is not a philosophy, it is merely the result of being a Christian in an age of interpretation, without the presuppositions of the Catholic or the Protestant.
If Catholicism and Protestantism are historically tied to, and to be essentially identified with, ages of metaphysics, then their theology is, in a hermeneutical sense, characteristically onto-theological. Pentecostalism, arising in an age that is ‘overcoming metaphysics’, tends to be interpretative, rather than onto-theological, not unified, not representing a world view or propagating one, but pragmatic, interpretative, dialogical, able to pick-and-choose from pre-understandings as its pre-understanding and basically, from a modernist perspective, disorganised, diverse, and loose. All this from an old Christian perspective may seem a bad thing, but from a pentecostal perspective, it is the environment in which the Spirit today is at work.
Pentecostalism is a child of our age of interpretation. It is the timeliness of Pentecostalism, as the Christianity of today, that it builds the kind of churches (people, not buildings) that can keep up with the times, and that want to, and that can keep in tune with the times and address the contemporary situation in contemporary terms. This sense of a Church of our time, of our unprecedented time, is not insignificant. I have argued here that it is the mark of a great shift from a Protestant to a Pentecostal age of the Church, equivalent to the shift from the Catholic to the Protestant, but hopefully, because of a more Enlightened time, less bloody.
This shift, this ‘periodicity’ is to be understood typologically and only in part as historical. It certainly has a historical dimension, but actually works typologically, so that one can, in our time, find a concurrency of all three ages of the Church, shoulder to shoulder. With regard to the issue of violence, I am saying that the internecine violence of denominations against each other which has been the norm in times passed, in a secular age, is unconscionable. Religious violence is the grossest profanation of the Name of God. The law of love and non-violence is the grounding and generative hermeneutical stance of Pentecostalism, indeed of contemporary Christianity as a whole; but it may be said of Pentecostalism in particular, as the type of Church that most belongs to an age of interpretation. The law of love and non-violence is not a new philosophy or theology, although doubtless it can be turned into ideology, it is not a metaphysic, but an interpretative base for a Church in the age of interpretation.
[1] In addition to his academic role as a Senior Lecturer in Christian Spirituality (at a Catholic institution), Matthew attends Hillsong church in Sydney.
[2] M. Del Nevo, "Pentecostalism and the Three Ages of the Church", APS, 10 (2007)
[3] The work of Vladmir Lossky, most of it published posthumously, has had a huge impact on Anglo theologians in this regard. See for instance, V. Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, [1967] Crestwood NY: SVS, 2001.
[4] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, tr. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage, 1976, Aph. 125 p.181.
[5] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p.182.
[6] The best way into the rabbinic world of Jesus is not an introductory overview, I don’t think, but to read something like Abraham Cohen. Everyman’s Talmud: the major teachings of the rabbinic sages. New York: Schocken, 1995.
[7] Heidegger, ‘The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics,’ [1949] in Existentialism From Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. W. Kaufmann. New York: Meridian, 1956, p.209.
[8] Heidegger, ‘The Way Back to the Ground of Metaphysics’, p.211.
[9] Although ‘God’ is traditionally hyperousia ‘beyond Being’ in orthodox theology, precisely the direction in which Heidegger desired to think.
[10] Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, tr. William Lovitt, New York: Harper Torchbook, 1977, p.35.
[11] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage, 1973, p.xv.
[12] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, tr. W. Kaufmann, New York: Random House Vintage, 1974, p.336, § 374.
[13] Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper & Row, 1962, section 63.
[14] Heidegger, Being and Time, p.275.
[15] Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. Joel Weinsheimer, New York: Crossroads, 1989. p.293.
[16] Gadamer, Truth and Method, p.292.
[17] Gadamer, Truth and Method, p.293.
[18] Gadamer, Truth and Method, p.293.