are what hermeneutics is after. Hermeneutic here should be read as being-
in- the-world. That is, to speak of a pentecostal hermeneutic is to speak of
a way of living in the world that is oriented by speaking in tongues. When
we dwell in the pre-interpretive moment of glossolalia, we dwell in the
moment of arrival, or of unconcealment; we dwell in a world in which the
limits of what language is and of what it is capable of are not static and
pre-determined. The absence of (intelligible) words does not indicate the
absence of interpretation, or of meaning. 44 Rather, it signals the possibility
of the world as an opening and offers a way at the end of the way. When
language seems to have failed and we listen to the peal of its silence, when
we rest in that moment and are still, language speaks itself as language, and
we are set anew on a path toward the discovery of our own being. What
Heidegger explicates philosophically and poetically, pentecostals know in
their deepest being when tongues of fi re descend and rest upon them.
NOTES
- Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , trans. Albert Hofstadter
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1971), 190. - James K.A. Smith, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to
Christian Philosophy , Pentecostal Manifestos (Grand Rapids, MI: William
B. Eerdmans, 2010), 23. - My use of “being” here is related to Heidegger’s idea of Dasein. This con-
cept of Dasein refers to the sense of an entity that can know itself and its
essence as being there, existing in the world. However, this sense of exis-
tence is more than the mere idea that we exist. Rather, it refers to a kind of
progression wherein beings can self-inquire into their own being and by
doing so reveal the essence of truth within being itself. - Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , trans. Albert Hofstadter
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1971), 49. - Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , 49.
- Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , 51.
- Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , 51–52.
- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson, 7th ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 52. - Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , 52.
- Martin Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism’” (1946), trans. Frank
A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 239. - Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , 145.
- Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , 147.
64 J. VAZQUEZ