of culture can be defi ned as “a theory informing the practice of under-
standing diverse human communities” 27 in which culture is not merely an
existential given, but a critical resource for theological refl ection.
An important and infl uential interlocutor within black religious stud-
ies who is intentional with regard to his debt to a broader conception of
hermeneutics is Charles H. Long. Educated at the University of Chicago
and cofounder, along with Mircea Eliade and Joseph Kitagawa, of the
History of Religions journal, Long’s “view of religion generally and his
view of black religion particularly is more or less the order of the day in
the fi eld of African American religious studies.” 28 The essays in his semi-
nal work, Signifi cations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation
of Religion , are “hermeneutical attempts to make sense of the phenom-
enon of religion on the most general level and of the problematic mean-
ing of religion in the United States in particular.” 29 J. Kameron Carter
remarks that “hermeneutics is the philosophical core for Long’s account
of both history and culture ... it is the philosophical heart of his intellec-
tual program.” 30
Long is explicit that his conception of hermeneutics, following
Schleiermacher, is a “general theory of interpretation and understanding
of human existence.” 31 Hermeneutics for Long is a response to a crisis that
emerges in a given situation, a failure to appropriately respond to a new
mode of thought that appears within humanity. With regard to religion
and black existence in America, Long locates this failure in our refusal to
consider the ways in which religion provided the Western imagination
with a particular set of symbols that allowed the West to impose particular
modalities of meaning upon blacks. In Long’s parlance, religion provides
symbols that have the innate ability to “radiate and deploy meanings” 32
and, in so doing, have provided the means by which blacks have been
“signifi ed” (i.e., the move in which the colonizer names and objectifi es the
colonized). 33 Long believes that the role religion has played as an ally in
the Western colonialist and racial project should provide an opening for a
re-reading of culture. As such, he conceives of America as a “hermeneuti-
cal situation” in that it provides “the possibility of a new interpretation of
human reality” (i.e., a state of affairs where there is an openness to a reas-
sessment of oneself). 34 This openness, at its best, is one in which there is
a critical dialectic between Self and Other. This reciprocal criticism, then,
requires that one fi rst openly acknowledge the myriad ways in which delu-
sions have crept into our self- and other-understanding and have led to an
PENTECOSTAL HERMENEUTICS AND RACE IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH... 235