‘Right Now!’: Historiopraxy and the Embodiment of Charismatic Temporalities

Abstract

I focus on the experience of time and perception of history within the Word of Life charismatic ministry in Sweden, demonstrating the mutual implication of the physical and the temporal, the biographical and the historical, in members' lives. While conversion draws on a personal frame of reference in relation to the passage of time, spiritualised temporality can also be given a more ambitious frame, incorporating major events that might lead to Christ's return. Believers wrestle with at least two ways of dealing with history. One pertains to a mimetic relation to previous action: invoking history. The other involves the articulation of something discontinuous and new, an ‘event’ that moves towards the ultimate salvationist and transformative aims of the faith: making history. Both raise the question of how novelty can be invoked through deploying cultural resources that, seemingly paradoxically, recall actions taken in the past – a process I term ‘historiopraxy’.

Keywords:

• Time
• history
• continuity/discontinuity
• historiopraxy
• charismatics
• Sweden

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Miranda Klaver, Linda van de Kamp, Joel Robbins, Danilyn Rutherford and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. A version was given to the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto.

Notes

Contained in Magazinet för ett Segerrikt Liv April 1994. Article (no author given) is called ‘Fri från Bitterhet’ (‘Free from Bitterness’), pp. 10–12; quotations here are from p. 12.

In Swedish, the connotation is of ‘awakening’.

Engelke (2009:157) notes that time is generally assumed by Christians to be a medium of divine operation (Engelke 2009:156). Thus, the history of the world has been set in motion by God through a number of non-repeatable events – such as the Crucifixion and the Day of Judgement – whose ‘finite’ history contrasts with a notion of eternity that exists in time but is not of it, achievable only via salvation.

The term ‘rupturability’ is taken from Danilyn Rutherford's discussant's comments on this paper, American Anthropological Association Meetings, 2006. Session: ‘Disjuncture’, the Political and ‘Actually Existing Christianities’.

Note Robbins's brief reference to the need for a model of the positive role of repetition in Christian discourse, based on Harding (2000).

There are resonances between my approach and those of performance theorists such as Judith Butler, relating to the roles of repetition, difference and performance in the construction of the subject.

My argument has some echoes with that of Robin Shoaps's (2002) discussion of use of language among two Assemblies of God congregations in the USA. Shoaps (2002:34–7) focuses on a tension between ‘routinised’, formulaic religious language and that which appears to come spontaneously and ‘authentically’ from the heart. In these terms, spontaneity is linked to the presence of the Spirit, indexed by verbal and corporeal participation in songs whose tempos may shift in the course of singing and playing (Shoaps 2002:40). The spontaneous is also expressed in deictic grounding devices emphasising the moment of speaking, for instance signalling temporal devices such as ‘right now’ and ‘this morning’.

‘Vilket Sverige Vill Du Ha?’, Livets Ord Nyhetsbrevet, August 1985.

Discussant's comments.

Robbins's nuanced response to points made by Maxwell and Peel are found in his concluding response to ‘comments’ on his 2007 piece, including his point that he saw the article as responding to the existing anthropological bias toward continuity, rather than as simply advocating a one-dimensional focus on discontinuity.

I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for some of the wording of this point.