A Christian plane of immanence?

Abstract

In this article I revisit current debates on immanence and transcendence in the anthropology of Christianity and promote an encounter between the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and my fieldwork experience among committed Pentecostals in Ghana. My argument seeks mutualclarification and oscillates contrapuntally between these two discursive traditions through moments of harmonization and dissonance. The philosophy of radical immanence and Pentecostal spirituality are presented as two lines of flight from the hegemonic "immanent frame" of secular modernity, a shared marginality that facilitates my engagement with Deleuzian notions, such as virtuality, modes, intensity, flow, desire, and refraction, in order to account for the heterogeneous ways whereby the Holy Spirit manifests itself amid the creation. This attempt at reconciliation brings about evident frictions, and I conclude by revisiting some fundamental differences between Deleuze's monistic pluralism and Pentecostals' pluralistic monotheism.

Ordinary ethics and its temporalities: The Christian God and the 2016 Ghanaian elections

“…4. To suggest that ethical practice and its temporalities are entangled through action is not to suggest something new (Bear, 2014;Gell, 1992;Mbembe, 2001), especially not in the literature on Protestant Christianity (see Bialecki, 2009;Bielo, 2017;Meyer, 1999;Reinhardt, 2015Reinhardt, , 2016aReinhardt, , 2016bRobbins, 2007). 5.…”

“…(and) induce religious modes of sensing, feeling, and making sense that effect the very 'beyond' that is posited and form the people addressed as believers" (Meyer, 2015b: 22). Reinhardt (2015) writes that while doing fieldwork on Pentecostalism in Ghana, he "was exposed to a great variety of manifestations of the Spirit of God, which retains its transcendental unity while still becoming entangled immanently with subjects, bodies, and things in diverse ways. "…”

“…This frustration coincided with the not yet of political and social life (the end of dumsor and corruption) and expressed the sentiment of a future that was still not immanent and which required more explicit work. Pentecostal Christianity has been described as a religion that sees the world as already enchanted, where the material and transcendental are mutually implicated in various ways (Brahinsky, 2012;Freeman, 2012;Meyer, 2015aMeyer, , 2015bReinhardt, 2015Reinhardt, , 2016bWebster, 2013). If Ghanaian Christians are told to remain alert for the end times, to have patience and to lead holy lives as they wait for the Second Coming of Jesus, they also believe that they should exact a response from God when they pray for an end to dumsor and corruption.…”

“…that erode the very possibility of the ordinary" (Das, 2012: 134). To suggest that immanence and the transcendent are "intrinsically interconnected, subsisting only in relation to one another" (Sidnell et al, 2010) is not a revelation for most anthropologists working in Ghana, where Pentecostalism attributes importance to the sensuous, bodily, and material aspects of religious life and through which the Holy Spirit is present in the world and in socio-political life (Daswani, 2015;Meyer, 2015aMeyer, , 2015bMeyer, , 2016Reinhardt, 2015Reinhardt, , 2016b). 14 Through sermons and prayers, Prince drew on a transcendental power in order to resolve the immanent problems facing Ghanaians and the imminence of what is to come: the ongoing power crisis, corruption, and even death.…”

What does itfeellike to be post-secular? Ritual expressions of religious affects in contemporary renewal movements

“…79 The role of other worshipping bodies in the ritual setting is essential in summoning the Spirit, or, more accurately, in making the congregation 'ready to receive it'. 80 In joining these bodies together, the immanent experience of the Spirit is not a private experience but becomes publically constituted and economic, 'sticking' adherents together. 81 There is therefore an underlying parity between what anthropologists might label 'communitas' here, and theologians might recognise as 'koinonia' (see e.g.…”