Paper long abstract:

My paper takes its clue from the common understanding of Christians worldwide that God’s will is unchanging and independent from the vagaries of life on earth, also implying that God is self-identical in eternity. At the same time, it is widely conceded that, for humans, God’s identity remains categorically unknowable in its entirety. Examining the case of Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity in present-day Zambia, I show that pneumatic Christians trust in the fact that aspects of God’s identity reveal themselves in the form of earthly manifestations of the Holy Spirit. They therefore expect each appearance of this spiritual entity to reveal new insights into God’s will and plans. Yet, this also means that the Holy Spirit is expected to always make a difference – to differ from what humans already know about it but, importantly, also from previous instances of it manifesting itself. Consequently, spirit manifestations are only then attributed to the Holy Spirit if they do not merely replicate previous spiritual manifestations but differ from them, if only slightly. In this way, the pneumatic quest for knowing God’s identity resembles what philosopher Jacques Derrida noted about handwritten signatures: They are only then deemed to be a marker of personal identity if each instance of them deviates gradually from preceding instances while at the same time retaining a certain degree of family resemblance with them. Taking inspiration from the latter insight (without otherwise subscribing to deconstruction theory), my paper probes into the analytical purview of it for the study of pneumatic Christianity in Africa (and beyond).