David J. McCollough. Ritual and Religious Experience in Early Christianities: The Spirit In Between. WUNT II (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2022).
Interest in ritual behavior and religious experience is a fundamental concern in anthropological approaches to religion. Giovanni Bazzana’s recent study of spirit possession among the early Christ Groups demonstrates the applicability of these questions to the early Jesus Movement.[1] My research participates in this ongoing conversation by exploring fresh methodological approaches to uncover the ways New Testament literature bears witness to ritual practices among early Christians.
First, I work with a constellation of narratological, discourse analysis, and literary tools to examine the Lukan narrative texts as well as the Pauline literature. For example, I ask how a concept is developed sequentially over the course of a narrative. How does each scene focalize the concept? What narrative asides inform the reader about the focalized concept? Instead of looking for wooden repetition, I ask how each scene develops and contributes to the author’s Gesamtwerk. I note the cultural discourse regarding exemplaric stories in the ancient world, namely, that stories inculcated readers in the values and beliefs of society.[2] I consider the research of Sean A. Adams on the genre of Luke-Acts as collective biography which emphasizes the exemplaric role of key characters.[3] In reading Paul, notably 1 Corinthians, I ask how the initial discussion of schism surrounding water baptism serves as a cognitive frame (PATIENT, AGENT, RITUAL, ADMITTANCE INTO GROUP) influencing the reader who comes, sequentially, to later discussions of ‘baptism’.
I then interpret the resultant data in social anthropological terms. While Bazzana interprets the early Christ groups through the lens of an anthropological model of spirit possession inclusive of Cuban Santería and its African provenance,[4] I argue that early Christian sect spirit-possession was situated in what Koenraad Stroeken would term a ‘simplex’ religious cosmology.[5] Stroeken draws upon Max Gluckman who explained interconnections within society in terms of a continuum from simplex to multiplex, with interpersonal complexity in inverse relation to the level of societal stratification.[6] Societies in which individuals are situated within many overlapping social networks are multiplex. These tend to be found in rural areas where neighbors and extended family form an intricate web of sometimes tangled obligations that must be wisely negotiated. Urban centers, stratified and hierarchical, possess a ‘simplex’ relational structure in which social networks tend not to overlap (e.g. your employer is, probably, not related to you).
Stroeken takes Gluckman’s relational principle and applies it to human/spirit interaction. In a multiplex cosmology, a human’s relationship with the spirits is complicated and entangled by various obligations that reach back into the ancestral past. Some spirits may be helpful, some harmless, some capricious, and others malevolent. The pluralist ritual practitioner appreciates this complexity, tolerates the diversity, and, while recognising social obligations contracted with the spirits by his ancestors, negotiates in the present for an optimally harmonious working relationship. A simplex cosmology, on the other hand, does not negotiate. It dictates. It crushes the pluralism of a multiplex world with the assertion of absolute moral/relational ontology – God. All spirits and humans not aligned with the Supreme Being are enemies, are to be fought (spiritually at least), and are ultimately damned. Non-alignment is rebellion, ‘sin.’ Toleration is transgression. Negotiation is anathema. Stroeken’s point? Despite superficial similarities, simplex Pentecostalism is incompatible with multiplex African spirit cults. Drawing on this model, I argue that the early Christianities of Paul and Luke were simplex – God is judge of all, the end of days apocalypse approaches, pagans worship demons, Jesus is the only way, sorcerers must be fought, magic books must be burnt, etc. Consequently, the spirit experiences found within these early Christianities are best compared with simplex Pentecostalism rather than multiplex Cuban Santería or African spirit cults.
This position is consonant with Tanya Luhrmann’s recently completed interdisciplinary, multi-researcher study of religious experience in China, Ghana, Thailand, Vanuatu/Oceania, the United States, and the Ecuadorian Amazon. The Mind and Spirit project, ‘asks whether different understandings of ‘mind’, broadly construed, might be related to the ways that people experience what they take to be real.’ In other words, does culture/worldview/cosmology influence religious experience? Luhrmann’s researchers answered yes:
“…the more a person imagines the mind-world boundary as porous (as permeable), the more they report vivid, near-sensory experiences of invisible others.
We seem to see, in short, that ways of representing the mind (which we take to be cultural ideas) appear to be related to ways of experiencing spirits (which appear to reflect experience, and not just a culturally shaped way of talking).”[8]
That is, one’s cultural framework affects not only one’s discourse about spirit experience, but it affects the sensory experience itself – culture constructs qualia. While the Mind and Spirit project’s immediate results would apply to any cosmology – simplex or multiplex – that includes spirit beings, Luhrmann’s work suggests that we must take seriously Stroeken’s distinction between multiplex spirit cosmologies and the simplex Pentecostalist worldview. A multiplex worldview may produce a qualitatively different spirit experience than a simplex worldview. Hence, Paul’s spirit experiences cannot be assumed to be identical with the experiences of African spirit cult practitioners observed by modern anthropologists of religion. If culture can so shape the religious experience, then, if we wish to use a modern spirit experience to heuristically explore an ancient spirit experience, we should work within similar cultural frameworks – Pentecostalist religion provides such a simplex framework. In other words, while we cannot retreat from the advances that Bazzana has made, neither can we fully follow him in mapping ethnographies of spirit possession from multiplex cosmologies onto the spirit experiences of Paul whose letters suggest that he was working with a cosmology more resonant with simplex models (e.g., 1 Corinthians 10:21-22; 1 Thessalonians 1:9; 5:9). Thus, it is in this sense of Stroeken’s simplex, ‘Charismatic possession’,[9] that we engage in social anthropological analysis of Pauline and Lukan spirit experience.
My key conclusions are several: (1) the Pauline and Lukan streams of Christianity were spirit-possession cults; (2) initiation into Pauline or Lukan communities involved a ritual process of which water immersion was a preparatory rite to the cardinal ritual of holy spirit possession;[10] (3) Christian initiatory spirit experience was dissociative and glossolalic, and, though rightly classed within the broad anthropological category of spirit possession, was flexible in manifestation: initially tending toward the ‘executive’ but progressively becoming more ‘cooperative’; (4) key Pauline concepts such as ‘justification’ were integrally linked to ritual and religious experience; (5) early Christian holy spirit possession created ‘identity fusion,’ a powerful form of social bonding which enables individuals to sacrifice themselves for the group and its cause;[11] (6) early Christian identity fusion worked hand in glove with ‘sacred values,’[12] so that intense religious experience occurred within a legitimating ideological structure and concomitantly, confirmed the validity of that sacred structure; (7) in the growth of early Christianities, social networks had their place, but it was the intense, ‘sticky’ religious experience which kept converts in the new religion and propelled its expansion.[13]
By focusing on what Luke and Paul taught, rather than on the historicity of the stories (Luke could have used Aesop’s fables to make his points), I hope to contribute to critical scholarship of early Christianities. By utilizing the latest narrative critical methodologies, I have sought to access, in a way that can be checked and confirmed by wider scholarship, precisely what it is that was taught, and thus make an original contribution to knowledge. Finally, by employing social anthropology to interpret Lukan and Pauline data on initiatory ritual and religious experience, I have attempted to circumvent the entrenched debates arising from confessional stances, and thus facilitate critical scholarship in the study of the history and anthropology of some of the earliest, nascent forms of a (then) new religious movement and a (presently) newly revived global religious powerhouse.
David McCollough earned a Ph.D. in Theology from Durham University, United Kingdom (January 2022). Previous to that, McCollough completed a Ph.D. in New Testament at the London School of Theology (2014). He taught theology in Singapore for nearly four years, lived and worked in Germany for four years, and spent about seven and a half years in England studying and working. Dr. McCollough currently does research and writing for a local faith community in the state of Washington.
[1] Giovanni B. Bazzana, Having the Spirit of Christ: Spirit Possession and Exorcism in the Early Christ Groups (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020).
[2] See Matthew B. Roller, Models from the Past in Roman Culture: A World of Exempla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
[3] Sean A. Adams, The Genre of Acts and Collected Biography SNTSMS 156 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Sean A. Adams, Greek Genres and Jewish Authors: Negotiating Literary Culture in the Greco-Roman Era (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2020).
[4] Bazzana, Having the Spirit of Christ.
[5] This section discussing Stroeken and Luhrmann is taken directly from Ritual and Religious Experience, pp. 133-135. Koenraad Stroeken, “Witchcraft Simplex: Experiences of Globalized Pentecostalism in Central and Northwestern Tanzania,” in Knut Rio, Michelle MacCarthy, and Ruy Blanes, eds., Pentecostalism and Witchcraft: Spiritual Warfare in Africa and Melanesia (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 257-279; 268.
[6] Max Gluckman, The Judicial Process Among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1955), 19-20. Cf. Marc J. Swartz, The Way the World Is: Cultural Processes and Social Relations Among the Mombasa Swahili (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 149-151.
[7] T.M. Luhrmann, “Mind and Spirit: a comparative theory about representation of mind and the experience of spirit,” in Mind and Spirit: A Comparative Theory: Special Issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Vol. 26, S1 (2020), 9-27; 9.
[8] Luhrmann, “Mind and Spirit,” 23.
[9] Luhrmann, “Mind and Spirit,” 276.
[10] Here I draw on Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1969.
[11] Harvey Whitehouse, Brian McQuinn, Michael Buhrmester, and William B. Swann Jr., “Brothers in Arms: Libyan Revolutionaries Bond Like Family,” PNAS 111, no. 50 (December 2014), 17783-17785; Scott Atran, Hammad Sheikh, and Angel Gomez, “Devoted Actors Sacrifice for Close Comrades and Sacred Cause,” PNAS 111, no. 50 (December 2014), 17702-17703; Harvey Whitehouse, “Dying for the Group: Towards a General Theory of Extreme Self-Sacrifice,” BBS 41, e192 (2018), 1–62; Martha Newson, “Football, Fan Violence, and Identity Fusion,” IRSS 54, no. 4 (2019), 431-444; Scott Atran, Hammad Sheikh, Ángel Gómez, “For Cause and Comrade: Devoted Actors and Willingness to Fight,” CJQHCE 5, no. 1 (2014), 41-57.
[12] Scott Atran, “The Role of the Devoted Actor in War, Revolution, and Terrorism,” in James R. Lewis, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Terrorism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges, “Devoted Actors and the Moral Foundations of Intractable Intergroup Conflict,” in J. Decety & T. Wheatley, eds., The Moral Brain: A Multidisciplinary Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 69-85; 70-71.
[13] Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement became the World’s Largest Religion (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 68; John S. Kloppenborg, Christ’s Associations: Connecting and Belonging in the Ancient City (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019).