4 - Desire and Disgust: Ways of Being for God

Summary

What do I love when I love God?

—Augustine

Introduction

Nigerian Pentecostalism is erotic. It is erotic in the sense that it has found a way to combine passion with transcendence. Nigerian Pentecostals have rightly discerned that humans are beings governed by passional desire for God—though the desire can easily or often be sublimated or redirected toward other objects or idols. To use James K. A. Smith's words:

They rightly understand that, at root, we are erotic creatures—creatures who are oriented primarily by love and passion and desire…. But meanwhile, the [non-Pentecostal] church has been duped by modernity and has bought into a kind of Cartesian model of the human person, wrongly assuming that the heady realm of ideas and beliefs is the core of our being. These are certainly part of being a human, but I think they come second to embodied desire.

This eroticism, as Iris Marion Young argues, also derives from its openness toward the new: “an attraction to the other, the pleasure and excitement of being drawn out of one's secure routine to encounter the novel, strange and surprising.” As I have shown elsewhere, Pentecostalism is oriented toward the novum, toward what I have called the Pentecostal Principle.

Part of the working of this desire is to capture the operation of the senses—sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell—and redirect or reengineer them toward God. So they are careful not to set wicked things before their eyes (Ps 101:3) or to get involved in coarse jokes (Ps 15:3 and Eph 5:3). Similarly, certain music is avoided as unfit for the ears of the believer attuned to the Holy Spirit. Hugging the opposite sex in greeting is wrong, and so is sitting too close to the opposite sex, even on a crowded bus. If one finds oneself inevitably squeezed together with the opposite sex, one must use the chance to talk to him or her about the Gospel. If one fails to talk to her, one will be accused of “enjoying the heat of fornication on a bus.” Alcoholic beverages and food offered to idols or food offered by Muslims in celebration of their holy days must also be avoided.