Thinking In Tongues

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 34 (2012) 95-159

James K. A. Smith, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy (Pentecostal Manifestos Series; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010). xxv + 155 pp., $19.00.

In an article in the spring 2001 issue of Pneuma entitled “Saul’s Armor: The Problem and the Promise of Pentecostal Theology Today,” Lyle Dabney called out pentecostals for merely providing charismatic addenda or gloss to the theologies of other Christian traditions which had neglected the work of the Spirit, subsuming it to a tertiary position behind theologies of the “First” and “Second Article.” The “promise” of pentecostal theology today, Dabney con- tended, was in pentecostals developing a theology of the “Third Article,” with pentecostals starting with the Spirit.

In the introduction to Thinking in Tongues, “What Hath Athens to Do with Azusa Street?,” Smith recalls Dabney’s challenge and applies it to his own philosophical work. If pentecos- tals are to do philosophy, we ought to “drink from our own wells” (also heeding Gustavo Gutiérrez’s admonition). Unapologetic in beginning with the convictions drawn from the lived experiences of pentecostals, Smith found early inspiration in this vocational aspiration from Alvin Plantinga’s “Advice to Christian Philosophers” — that we should be unashamed to draw boldly on our faith in our philosophical work.

A seminal work in pentecostal philosophy, Thinking in Tongues can be read as a rejoinder to Rick Nañez’s Full Gospel, Fractured Minds? (Zondervan, 2005). It takes up the task of drawing out the philosophical implications of the pentecostal way of life, of pentecostal “being-in-the-world.” It thus cannot be a philosophy for “brains-in-a-vat” since “brains-in-a- vat can’t dance before the Lord and make their way to the altar” (61). In going in this direc- tion, Smith is drawing on several key sources beyond his own pentecostal experience. He’s informed by Heidegger’s contention that our pre-reflective take on the world always already forms us before we theoretically reflect upon it; on an Augustinian ontology and epistemol- ogy where faith precedes knowledge; and his own development of an anthropology which understands the self in terms of physical embodiment and formative habits.

This latter conviction was recently developed in his Desiring the Kingdom (Baker Aca- demic, 2009). And Thinking in Tongues, among a trio of initial installments in Eerdmans’ Pentecostal Manifestos Series, which he edits with Amos Yong, has been published just months before Smith’s Letters to a Young Calvinist (Brazos Press, 2010). (Smith, who teaches at Calvin College, is both pentecostal and Reformed). Thus Smith has published three mono- graphs within two years. To add to this collection, the completion of the Templeton Founda- tion funded Science and the Spirit research initiative in Science and the Spirit: A Pentecostal Engagement with the Sciences (Indiana University Press, 2010), also edited by Smith and Yong, was just published. In the long run, it’s sensible to think that Thinking in Tongues will be better understood as in a certain stage of Smith’s work which includes some of these other, now recent, publications, ones in which he is philosophically and religiously working out the insight that we are more our rituals, habits, and practices than we are our minds.

Like in Desiring the Kingdom, in Thinking in Tongues Smith is working out pre-philosoph- ical commitments. This time, he’s developing an understanding of the pentecostal “social imaginary,” a communally presumed implicit map of social space and understanding of the world, a concept again borrowed from Charles Taylor (see Chapter 2 of Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries, Duke University Press, 2004). The second chapter of Thinking in Tongues,

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/157007412X621905

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on a pentecostal worldview, is especially important in doing this as it articulates what Smith considers to be five core elements of the pentecostal imagination: 1) radical openness to God, 2) an “enchanted” theology of creation and culture, 3) a nondualistic affirmation of embodiment and materiality, 4) an affective, narrative epistemology, and 5) an eschatologi- cal orientation to mission and justice. At this point in the text, it is apparent that his goal is not so much description as it is construction and provocation. While he concedes along the way that other pentecostal paradigms or ways of life exist, he is clearly favoring those he finds compelling, fruitful, and which speak truly of God and his ways. There is nothing wrong with this, but his narrations and phenomenologies ought to be understood in this light, and not misread as descriptions “without an agenda.”

Thinking in Tongues is then quite literary and affective. Four of the six chapters and the introduction begin with a story meant to move the reader, performing the type of narrative pentecostal epistemology he advocates in Chapter 3. Like a good pentecostal preacher, Smith likes to tell, and relay, illuminative stories. Yet he does so as he enters into dense philosophical discussions: The third chapter contends for the primacy of the narratival and affective in human understanding. Chapter 4 reinvisions theological engagement with sci- ence by promoting the option of an “enchanted naturalism or noninterventionist super- naturalism” (since the Spirit is already present). Chapter 5 critiques mainstream philosophy of religion for focusing on religion as merely belief systems rather than ways of life, drawing from William Abraham’s “canonical theism.” The sixth and final chapter is a slightly revised version of a previously published analysis of speaking in tongues in relation to several prom- inent approaches in philosophy of language. This is a creative and dense work, one in which the footnotes are well worth reading. In fact, to miss them is to miss many of the connec- tions Smith is making. Chapters 4-6 seem more like a collection of essays, which they each originally were, than book chapters. Yet they are each well worth reading, even if lacking a measure of integration into the whole.

Going forward, I think Smith needs to address those who would contend that he is, effec- tively, justifying an affective fideism, and perhaps one that could be open to theological abuse. It seems to me that Thinking in Tongues could’ve used another serving of theological particularity: Whose “radical openness to God”? Which “enchanted theology”? Maybe the early Jamie Smith (of The Fall of Interpretation, InterVarsity, 2000, and Speech and Theology, Routledge, 2002) would help here, since our doctrines, traditions and texts say, with Peter at Pentecost, “this is that.”

Reviewed by L. William Oliverio, Jr. Lecturer in Theology

Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin [email protected]

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