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Abstract
"In Jesus' Name" is a groundbreaking work on Oneness Pentecostalism. It seeks to be an exhaustive study, which historically situates OP culturally and theologically within a long tradition of Pietism dating back hundreds of years in Europe, and Christocentrism found in American Evangelicalism of the 19th century. However, in lifting up an African-American as the exemplar of Oneness Pentecostalism, the book introduces the person's "black heritage" as an interpretive key, but then fails to follow through on this insight, despite several works around Oneness Pentecostalism, in particular, and race. This leaves open the possibility that there is a significant hole in an otherwise comprehensive monograph. Indeed, closer attention to social location and the theological problem of race, would have paid off with material that indeed moves the tradition from so-called heterodoxy to a more robust, if contested, conversation with the dogmatic tradition, which the author seeks.
Abstract
Early lectures, which became the book Prophesy Deliverance! by Cornel West, were delivered at the House of the Lord Pentecostal Church in Brooklyn, New York. The location of House of the Lord, which West argued was an exemplar of Afro-American revolutionary Christianity, demonstrates the relational and reciprocal insights Pentecostalism shares with West’s commitments to radical historicism and prophetic pragmatism. Several Black descended Pentecostals–scholars Leonard Lovett and Keri Day, and denominational leader Smallwood Williams–enact both a complex cultural analysis, and a robust social analysis. I argue Pentecostal praxis and critical reflection engage and extend West’s corpus and Black critical thought.
Abstract
American pentecostal political theology is not marked by a fivefold gospel, as key theologians contend, but is best understood as the justification of the color line. That term, popularized by W.E.B. Du Bois, is a theological-political term, and was invoked at Azusa Street. The color line is a spatial and racial order that is both politically and theologically inaugurated and upheld. Political theology, as such, is anti-Black. But at Azusa Street, a Black-led and interracial revival, the color line is washed away. Persons and practices excluded by the color line, and racialized as Black, reject the terms of order and generate the order’s undoing. If this undoing becomes the central interpretive grid for “pentecostal,” then the terms “pentecostal” and “Black” are read synonymously and over against political theology as terms of order. By turning to this generating mode of the Blackness of pentecostal origins, the impossibility of doing a pentecostal political theology emerges.