Conclusion

After recapitulating the arguments of the book, the conclusion asks what in what way this book’s claims might be salient for a larger anthropological discussion of religion? It argues that religion’s unfixed and open nature, the very traits that have caused some to question whether religion is an intelligible comparative category, is actually what informs religion as a meaningful category. It argues that the absent nature of the more than human beings and forces that stand at religion’s heart allows it to take up a plurality of different forms of materiality, and that this wealth of different materialities allows religion to operate in effect as a fly-wheel for other social-cultural processes and assemblages, accelerating, decelerating, or mutating other processes to an unmatched degree.

Tolle, Lege

This chapter discusses communication with God. It analyses a range of activity that is understood this way in the Vineyard, from simple prayer, to reading Bible verses as a form of ‘personal communication,’ to being contacted by God directly through voice or vision. It addresses how saliency, exteriority, and most of all surprise function as variables that make these events intelligible as supernatural communication, and as something that exceeds, divides, and reconfigures the will. Finally, both typification and elaboration, processes that constrain the expressions of the charismatic diagram, are introduced.

Vineyard Time

Through a discussion of Worship in the Vineyard, this chapter charts the various scales of temporality that give the movement its shape. It identities the temporalities of embodiment and training, of social organization, of musical performance, of biographical arcs and of changing relations with God, and finally the cosmic ‘already/not-yet’ temporality that the Vineyard associates with messianic time and their vision of “Kingdom Theology”.

Introduction

What are miracles as social phenomena, and what lessons do they have for anthropology? This chapter starts the inquiry into these questions by introducing both the Vineyard, and the wider Pentecostal-Charismatic tradition is sprang from. This chapter also frames the miracle as a response to a problem of divine withdrawal and absence. It also introduces the notion that the miracle as effectuating in both individuals and institutions, and that the plasticity exhibited by the miracle can be a tool for thinking through Christian variation without falling into the trap of an anthropological nominalism.

A Diagram for Fire

This chapter suggests that the object best suited to be thought of as organizing the Vineyard, and also of maintaining its internal diversity, is the diagrammatic logic of Gilles Deleuze. It goes on to suggest that the miracle can be diagrammatically understood as a specific arrangement of signs and forces that can be instantiated in different ways, and thus work to different effects. After visiting some of the implications for anthropological implications of assemblage theory and ontology, it closes by revisiting the discussion of worship presented in chapter one, and showing how in can be framed as being an actualization of the Vineyard’s diagrammatic miracles.

Collapses, Traversals, and Intensifications of the Part-Culture

How is it that various instantiations of this diagram collapse, mutate, or colonize other aspects of the world? This chapter addresses the various failure-states and limits of the charismatic diagram. It addresses de-conversion, but also the production and adoption of even more extreme aspects of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity (and the role that a larger Christian mediascape plays in these intensifications and mutations). It closes with a discussion of how the charismatic diagram can be effectuated in places that seem to be organized by different logics, such as exchange or politics; concluding with the observing that the charismatic diagram is equally capable of animating progressive as well as conservative political projects.

The Body, Tongues, Healing, and Deliverance

This chapter transitions from language to concerns about embodiment and bodily boundaries, as it ethnographically depicts and addresses speaking in tongues (also known as glossolalia), healing, and demonic attack as instances of the diagrammatic miraculous. It concludes by arguing that demonic attack is a potential involution of the charismatic diagram, where the relation between constituent elements of the diagram become indistinct, and where the force of surprised becomes associated with willful or unwilling forces, instead of catalyzing willing forces.

The Living Room Seminars

This chapter investigates the religious pedagogy and techniques of subjectification associated with learning to hear from God, which in essence is the act of training oneself to at once prepare for and cultivate surprise. It follows a small prayer group of young Vineyard believers as they both debate about and learn how to receive prophecy. It also shows how language ideologies serves as an engine of typification and elaboration, affecting the way that prophecy is expressed, and concludes by explaining how the very act of recounting prophecy functions as an instantiation and continuation of the prophecy itself.

Institutions and God’s Agents

This chapter starts by questioning any account that would see the Vineyards mere epiphenomenon. It then asks whether, despite its constituent heterogeneity, the Vineyard is held together by either the governing structure of institutions, by an ethic of responsibility, by church growth and management techniques, or by a shared aesthetic. This chapter shows that these forces, sensibilities, and techniques do have effects; in particular the Vineyard is shaped by it being in effect a ‘trust’ for an absent owner (a structure similar to that found in publicly held corporations). However, neither this force, not any other discussed in this chapter, have either the flexibility or the capacity to scale necessary to account for the Vineyard.