hymns composed by African Americans such as Charles Price Jones that
a sector of blacks and whites sung illustrates this liminality. Glimpses of
“heaven below” were seen in places where blacks and white intermingled
and shared together the leadership of early interracial Pentecostal orga-
nizations, operating outside of racial zones and regulated religion. This
is akin to the heteroglossia or polyvocality of Mikhail Bakhtin; Bakhtin
who interprets liminality as carnivalesque. The narrative could chronicle
the migration of white Pentecostals to the edge of the borders adjacent to
the white racial zone in order to straddle the territory along the border of
the white racial zone. Liminality for these white Pentecostals only reached
glossolalia as the doctrine of initial evidence, making this the defi ning fea-
ture of white Pentecostal theology and experience; glossolalia is the way
white Pentecostalism exited the white racial zone. 16
How might one construe where a 1917 interracial Pentecostal
photograph of the fantastic fi ts within the theological world of early
Pentecostalism? A Pentecostal theology framed by liminality could be
a carnivalesque theology or a theology of play. According to Martin
Mittelstadt, Amos Yong’s concept of “pneumatological imagination” is
akin to Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and Yong’s theological invitation to impro-
vising and performing biblical texts such as Acts 29, a text performed by
early Pentecostals, might be akin to the carnivalesque. According to the
theology of play in Jean-Jacques Suurmond, Pentecostal theology as a
theology of play fl oats between order and chaos. Early Pentecostal practice
challenges, then, the racial order, but it resists lapsing into racial chaos.
There’s a liminal space where play happens. With the church as a baptized
liminal community, the church navigates the borderlands. The Bible is
a liminal book. The canon in the canon offered glimpses to borderland
places in the Bible such as Jesus with the woman at the well and the table
fellowship of Christians from Jewish and Gentile backgrounds. 17
Paul Harvey contends that “early Pentecostalism represented a lim-
inal moment” historically where the racial rules of the society were
suspended and early Pentecostals crossed racial lines. Harvey situates
early Pentecostalism with the late nineteenth-century trajectory of inter-
racial exchanges which operated on the borderlands between the racial
order. According to Harvey, “‘racial interchange’ refers to the exchange of
southern religious culture between white and black believers in expressive
culture, seen especially in music, in the formation of new religious tradi-
tions, and in lived experience. In those liminal moments, the bars of race
sometimes lowered, if only temporarily.” 18
220 D.D DANIELS III