After rupture: Visions of history, African spirituality and theological repair in Nigerian Pentecostalism

Abstract

AbstractHow do Pentecostal Christians seek repair and renewal in their lives, after their efforts to rupture with the past and become born again? In this article, I wish to consider the ways that a group of Nigerian Pentecostals who belong to a deliverance church re‐narrativise their lives by constructing and entering into new timelines of history after their attempts to break with the past. This discursive project works to insert a notion of ‘Black Africa’ into an authentically Christian historical chronology that stretches far back into the biblical past and forward to the eschaton. In this way, Africa's unique spiritual character is seen as reflected not only in its reasserted claim to Christian history, but also in its eschatologically driven destiny to re‐evangelise the world. This tells us something about the theological way these Christians reframe their role in history, including how their understanding of a collective past shapes their vision of who they are in the present and will be in the future. In this article, I argue that more attention needs to be given to processes of repair, repositioning and realignment in discussions about how conversion to Pentecostalism can generate efforts to break away from what becomes conceptualised as ‘the past’.