Nimi Wariboko’s The Pentecostal Hypothesis and African Pentecostalism during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the world in significant ways just as it has opened new vistas of thought in both secular and religious circles. This article is situated within the frames of African Pentecostalism, which found itself in a gap during the lockdown in early 2020. This ‘gap’ is grounded on Nimi Wariboko’s The Pentecostal Hypothesis, which I use as a theoretical framework to interrogate how the African Pentecostal churches, which inadvertently found themselves in a ‘gap’ responded to the predictions that Africa would be the most hit by the pandemic, and how it also impacted on their teaching and praxis. The thrust of The Pentecostal Hypothesis is the creation of, and insertion into, a gap between sense and spirit, and how such a gap creates an opportunity for meaning-making: “It does not make sense, but it makes spirit.” That is, even though something may not make sense on the basis of scientific data and rational argument, there is a sense in which appealing to spiritual data, it will still be meaningful. In order to achieve this, the author adopted interpretive method, a qualitative method that helps to engage Wariboko’s socialtheological worlds of the Pentecostals within the context of COVID-19. Through this method, we analyze the responses of African Pentecostals and attempt to validate them against The Pentecostal Hypothesis. It was thus observed that many Pentecostals’ theological explications of the COVID-19 pandemic cannot pass as absolute epistemology of the pandemic as some of them assumed. Consequently, it is concluded that there is the need for a constructive engagement so that sense and spirit can be utilized for human flourishing in a pandemic or crisis situation.