God is Not Possessive
A response to Giovanni Bazzana’s Having the Spirit of Christ: Spirit Possession and Exorcism in the Early Christ Groups
At SBL/AAR in San Antonio this year, I took part in the Society for Pentecostal Studies panel discussion of Giovanni Bazzana’s Having the Spirit of Christ. Ekaputra Tupamahu and Melissa Archer gave first-rate papers, per usual, and Bazzana’s response was simply delightful, as was the conversation that followed from it. I know most of you won’t have read Bazzana’s book, but I still think you might find my paper at least somewhat worthwhile if you’re at all interested in the themes of spirit possession.
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(1)
I’m not sure what possessed me (!), but I had hoped to draft this response as a dialog. I first imagined it as an exchange between William Seymour and Aimee Semple McPherson. Try as I might, however, I could not get them on the same page. One of them—I won’t name names—refused to read past the first chapter: “This business of Jesus being possessed by Beelzebub scandalizes me,” she said. (Believe me when I tell you this woman is not easily scandalized.) “I think he’s the one who’s gone out of his mind! You can’t de-center Jesus!”
Somewhat dispirited, realizing I could not compel either Brother Seymour or Sister Aimee to share their thoughts on Bazzana’s fine book, I reached out to a number of other luminaries and notables, including Smith Wigglesworth (he just shook his head); Maria Woodworth-Etter (I couldn’t rouse her from her trance); J.H. King; C.H. Mason; a young Oral Roberts; an old Kathryn Kuhlman—to no avail. Truth be told, given the theme of this session, I should’ve just taken Lee Roy Martin’s sage advice: “Do not think beforehand what you should say, only open your mouth and the Lord will fill it.” Alas, you’ll have to settle for my own thoughts today, thoughts which as I’m sure you’ve already perceived come neither with enticing words of man’s wisdom nor, I’m afraid, in demonstration of the Spirit and of power!
(2)
In all seriousness, I found this work exceptionally instructively odd. It’s almost always worthwhile, I think, to make the texts of Scripture newly strange, to cast them in different, contrasting lights. And I am always glad to engage work that does not dismiss as mere superstition what the NT says about spirits or assume that those who try to take seriously what the NT about spirits are either ill or depraved. I applaud Bazzana’s willingness to engage in what can only be called daring cross-disciplinary/inter-disciplinary work, and I especially appreciate his efforts to do some justice to the complexity, the conflictedness—indeed, the unfathomable mystery—of human intersubjectivity. I mean it when I say that I agree with Reed Carlson (one of Prof. Bazzana’s former students): this is a book that should be welcomed by Pentecostal scholars.
That said, I disagree—spiritedly!—with pretty much every single conclusion Bazzana draws in these chapters! I do not think Jesus was possessed by Beelzebub. I do not think the first Christians, the followers of the Way, thought of Jesus as “a particularly important spirit” or of themselves as needing to be possessed by his peculiar presence. I do not think the designation of God as Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit as God was a later theological development. I do not think “possession,” however conceived, played a more significant role in the lives of Jesus’ followers than baptism or the Eucharist did. I do not think Paul’s “thorn in the flesh,” the tormenting “messenger of Satan,” was a possessing spirit. I do not think 1 Corinthians 13 imagines love as “group allegiance” or that 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 describes “tongues” as ecstatic utterance. Etc., etc., etc.
It’s not all that surprising for me to disagree as I do, because Bazzana and I inhabit different worlds. His aims, unlike mine, are primarily historiographical, not theological and pastoral. Thus, my disagreements with him should not be read as a statement on the viability or success of his project. To the contrary, Pentecostal scholars should welcome this book, I believe, precisely because it casts into relief so much of what it is that we actually believe about spirits/spirit possession, making it possible for us to consider from a new perspective how and why our beliefs and practices differ from what seems to be the consensus of “modern NT scholarship” and the regnant paradigm in which that scholarship makes sense. Intentionally or not, Bazzana’s book, at least in my reading, does something like what the Spirit of Christ does—making space for us to see the truth of the world as it comes to us and to hear the truth of the Word as he’s presented to us in the performance of the Scriptures.
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