theological images and historical tropes of lunacy, liminality, anarchy,
and transcendence were used to interpret how interracial Pentecostalism
was able to be generated and operate over against a racial order. In
summary, these hermeneutical devices assist in interpreting early inter-
racial Pentecostalism as a historical reality that operated according to
its self-generated laws, according to the hermeneutic of the uncanny;
was governed by unknown laws, according to the hermeneutic of the
fantastic; inaugurated by a supernatural act that suspended known laws,
according to the hermeneutic of the marvelous; or transcended known
laws, according to the hermeneutic of the miraculous.
The task of the essay was to refocus theologizing on and historicizing
of early interracial Pentecostalism in regards to two persistent questions
which nag at Pentecostal scholarship. How did Pentecostalism go from
being interracial, even if only a fl eeting few months, to being racially seg-
regated as a movement? Even if only pockets of early Pentecostalism were
ever interracial, why didn’t the majority of Pentecostals embrace it as the
Pentecostal distinctive? These questions framed this essay.
This essay intimates on how racial reasoning was structured to erase
the possibility of interracialism and how the racial order was rigged
to abort all forms of interracialism. The images and tropes of lunacy,
liminality, anarchy, and transcendence were employed in the essay to
construct a theological and historical narrative that interprets how the
majority of white Pentecostals joined in the abortion of Pentecostal
interracialism in order to escape the realms of racial lunacy, liminal-
ity, anarchy, and transcendence and secure refuge in the “normalcy”
regulated religion structured by the racial order of segregation and the
hierarchy of the races.
NOTES
- Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975); while Todorov focused on
literary genres, this chapter will use these hermeneutics to focus on a pho-
tograph as a historical document or artefact; Bonnie Honig, Emergency
Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2009); for visual exegesis, see “Visual Exegesis: Sacred Text and Narrative
Art in Early Christianity,” in Robin M. Jensen, Substance of Things Seen:
Art, Faith, and the Christian Community (Grand Rapids, MI: William
B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 27–50.
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