Early interracial Pentecostalism, in the words of Todorov, anticipated a
historical reality that is “controlled by laws unknown,” according to the
hermeneutic of the fantastic; a shock to the known laws of operations,
according to the hermeneutic of the uncanny; a supernatural act that sus-
pends known laws, according to the hermeneutic of the marvelous. Honig
introduced the hermeneutic of the miraculous as a transcending of known
laws. 4
Marion Grau quotes Hans-Georg Gadamer to defi ne hermeneutics
in the following manner: “Hermeneutics operates whenever something
is not immediately intelligible.” As noted above, making something
intelligible as in a linguistic exercise requires at least two acts: (a) deci-
phering or decoding the “text” or object and (b) interpreting. Grau
includes in the hermeneutical exercise a classifying task akin to creat-
ing and identifying genres or species. Among the tasks of this classify-
ing task is the discerning of authentic forms of belonging. Quoting
Werner Jeanrond, Grau interjects: “It is thus evident that any consid-
eration of the various forms of belonging as well as of ultimate belong-
ing requires hermeneutic decisions, that are, strategies of interpreting
authentic forms of Christian life and developing criteria of authentic-
ity for Christian life. No form of human belonging can escape this
hermeneutical predicament.” 5 Grau contends that a task of theological
hermeneutics is the discerning task: the recognition of patterns or pat-
tern recognition. Grau explains:
The term “pattern recognition” employed here for certain kinds of
correlations hopes to capture something between globalizing universalisms
and singular, particularistic, “incomparable” uniquenesses, a place where we
may observe, recognize, link patterns in life and narrative not to insist on
some kind of nonexisting uniformity, but rather to make enough connec-
tions for various life worlds to come into a better view of one another. 6For this essay, hermeneutical devices are used in Pentecostal studies with
the aim of recognizing patterns and making the photograph intelligible by
decoding, discerning, and interpreting the interracial Pentecostal moment
captured in the photograph. These hermeneutics will also assist in inter-
preting authentic forms of Pentecostal and Christian life.
214 D.D DANIELS III