Jon Bialecki

Virtual Christianity in an age of nominalist anthropology

This article claims that the collective object of an anthropology of Christianity should be Christianity as a virtual object, in the sense used by Gilles Deleuze: a field of multiplicitous potential with effects on the formation of the actual. This position is necessitated by the recurrent inability/refusal/demurral of the anthropology of Christianity to define what its exact object is. This inability/refusal/demurral is a symptom that can be traced back to a larger anthropological shift towards a nominalist ontology, a disciplinary tendency which is exemplified in the recent anthropological interest in Deleuzian-derived assemblage theory. After showing how current anthropological uses of Deleuze have neglected his concept of the virtual due to the same nominalist tendency, this article then argues that taking up Deleuze’s virtual realism would reconfigure assemblage theory in such a way that it would make the project of an anthropology of Christianity substantially more intelligible, as well as undoing what appear to be points of contestation internal to the sub-field.

Introduction: What is an individual? The view from Christianity

The introduction to this special section of Hau focuses on the tensions between individualism and dividualism as modes of personhood; while this essay approaches this foundational anthropological question through recent debates in the anthropology of Christianity, its larger concern is to reopen the question of in/dividualism in order to see whether we can imagine different relations between these two forms of being. As part of this discussion, this introductory essay rehearses the history of individualism and dividualism as concepts, reviews the current controversy over partible Christian personhood in Melanesia, and attends to recent debates about the relation between religion, the nation, and the state in Papua New Guinea that have followed from defacement of the Papuan Parliament Building. Synthesizing this material, we argue for a shift in framing of the question of in/dividualism. Rather than viewing dividualism and individualism as merely heuristics, or as vying but extant modes of organizing the subject, we suggest that in/dividualisms are best thought of as actualizations of a unitary underlying generative problematic. This is a problematic not merely for the anthropologist but for the anthropologist’s interlocutors as well; and as this problematic is worked through in various locales, we should expect not merely a wide variety of dividual and individual crystallizations of the person but also we should anticipate particular ethnographic milieus expressing complex emergent relations between the various extant dividualisms and individualisms.

What is an individual

The introduction to this special section of Hau focuses on the tensions between individualism and dividualism as modes of personhood; while this essay approaches this foundational anthropological question through recent debates in the anthropology of Christianity, its larger concern is to reopen the question of in/dividualism in order to see whether we can imagine different relations between these two forms of being. As part of this discussion, this introductory essay rehearses the history of individualism and dividualism as concepts, reviews the current controversy over partible Christian personhood in Melanesia, and attends to recent debates about the relation between religion, the nation, and the state in Papua New Guinea that have followed from defacement of the Papuan Parliament Building. Synthesizing this material, we argue for a shift in framing of the question of in/dividualism. Rather than viewing dividualism and individualism as merely heuristics, or as vying but extant modes of organizing the subject, we suggest that in/dividualisms are best thought of as actualizations of a unitary underlying generative problematic. This is a problematic not merely for the anthropologist but for the anthropologist’s interlocutors as well; and as this problematic is worked through in various locales, we should expect not merely a wide variety of dividual and individual crystallizations of the person but also we should anticipate particular ethnographic milieus expressing complex emergent relations between the various extant dividualisms and individualisms.

After the Denominozoic

In this paper I argue that sociological denomination theory, despite its success in describing historic denomination cycles, has limits to its contemporary use and does not match the ethnographic description of the variety of ways in which denominationalism is expressed in anthropological ethnographies of Christianity. The cause of this mismatch is placed at the feet of unilinear models of denominational evolution. In its place, a differential model of autopoietic denominational evolution is suggested, where denominations are seen as different and differing solutions to an insistent Christian problematic. The capacities of this model are explored through the Vineyard, an association of charismatic churches that originated in Southern California.

Diagramming the Will: Ethics and Prayer, Text, and Politics

ABSTRACT Framing prayer as an ethical exercise that operates on a recalcitrant will, this essay examines both this practice in the Vineyard, an American Neocharismatic church, and texts written by Vineyard pastors for the purposes of instructing believers in how to engage in prayer. It argues that the same abstract play of forces can be identified in both these areas. But that does not mean the two areas are identical. While prayer as a practice is marked by a certain indetermination about how and in what ways prayer is effective, instructional material about prayer are shown to be much more exacting. However, different choices among pastors in how they situate prayer is shown to have specific political effects; it also suggests some of the benefits for an anthropology of ethics in being careful to disarticulate ethical practice from texts describing means to properly engage in ethical practice.

Apostolic Networks in the Third Wave of the Spirit: John Wimber and the Vineyard

This essay discusses the relationship between the Vineyard and the various other apostolic networks. By comparing the Vineyard with C. Peter Wagner and the New Apostolic Revival, I contend that the chief difference between these two movements lies in a Vineyard interest in pedagogy over a New Apostolic Revival interest in governance, and in the Vineyard’s use of the figure of John Wimber as an exemplar for practice rather than as a figure of authority.

The Third Wave And The Third World: C. Peter Wagner, John Wimber, and the Pedagogy of Global Renewal in the Late Twentieth Century

While a great deal of social science literature has examined the explosion of pentecostal and charismatic Christianity in the Global South as well as conservative and anti-modern forms of resurgent Christianity in the United States, little work has been done to investigate the causal effects of the former on the latter. Drawing from existing literature, interviews, and archives, this article contributes to filling that gap by arguing that in the mid-twentieth century, evangelical missionary concerns about competition from global Pentecostalism led to an intellectual crisis at the Fuller School of World Missions; this crisis in turn influenced important Third Wave figures such as John Wimber and C. Peter Wagner and is linked to key moments and developments in their thought and pedagogy.

Judgment and critique, anthropology and religion

This article attempts to chart the various cross-cutting forms of critique that might surface in an ethnographic investigation of modes of religiosity. It stresses that if ethnography is to be an actual encounter, then it is important to at once understand that critique itself is not limited to merely one form of expression; nor should there be preconceptions as to what subjects are capable of voicing critique. At the same time though, it is equally important to distinguish critique from judgment; the latter can be distinguished from critique in that judgment is a ratification of an already extant metric, category, sensitivity, or esthetic, rather than an open-ended, empirical, and potentially transformative rendezvous with difference.