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  • Spirits and Letters: Reading, Writing and Charisma in African Christianity
  • David Gordon
Thomas G. Kirsch . Spirits and Letters: Reading, Writing and Charisma in African Christianity. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008. vii + 274 pp. Photographs. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $90.00. Cloth.

"The letter kills, but the spirit gives life" (2 Corinthians 3:6), or so St. Paul would have it. Thomas G. Kirsch disagrees. He illustrates how the letter has animated the spirit world of African Christianity. His study of a church that he names the "Spirit Apostolic Church," based on twelve years of intermittent research among the Tonga people of the Gwembe Valley and the adjacent central African plateau, explores the engagement of this community with writing, reading, the Bible, the printed word, and bureaucratic forms of authority.

Kirsch's target is Max Weber's characterization of a universal modernity in which the institutions of the literate and the print world—the bureaucracy [End Page 231] —lord it over the charismatic prophet. A familiar critique of the supposed superiority of "literate" over "oral" forms of knowledge is extended to the world of African Christianity. His central African case study, based in a region where spirits have long dominated forms of religious expression and a Pentecostal-charismatic community with its distinctive emphasis on the agency of the Holy Spirit, unravels much of the conventional wisdom regarding the letter and the spirit, orality and literacy, and bureaucracy and charisma. It challenges scholarship that has overemphasized the authority of the written word in the spread of Christianity across Africa and globally.

Kirsch details how members of the Spirit Apostolic Church community make use of the Bible, read Christian printed texts, distribute certificates that provide officeholders with authority, write church documents, and follow church agendas. He contrasts the writing and reading practices that he encountered with the "schooled" writing practices of mainstream mission churches and the colonial and postcolonial states, where authority supposedly emerges from the texts. For the Spirit Apostolic Church, by contrast, these printed texts, writings, and reading practices attain their significance and power from the Holy Spirit: the letter animates rather than stifles the Holy Spirit.

The conflict between bureaucracy and charisma is not only academic. A church has to reconcile the officeholders who acquire their power in the church bureaucracy with the prophets who acquire their power from the Holy Spirit. The dilemma is particularly pronounced for Pentecostals and charismatics, with their emphasis on the Holy Spirit rather than textual or bureaucratic authority. Does leadership emerge from the Holy Spirit or the church bureaucracy? According to Kirsch, in the Spirit Apostolic Church people gain their bureaucratic position through intermediation with someone who has spiritual capacity. Consequently, officeholders also became spiritual mediums. The church bureaucracy disperses rather than constrains charisma. Furthermore, Pentecostal-charismatic bureaucratic practices mimic those of the state and mainstream churches that allocate power through writing and bureaucracy. This gives Pentecostal-charismatic churches the appearance of compatibility with other bureaucracies, allowing for both internal and external legitimacy. Kirsch argues that this "bureaucracy in the Pentecostal-charismatic mode" is a "facade" that actually supports and enables empowerment by the Holy Spirit.

An intriguing, convincing, and important argument falters on a few specifics. The association between the Bible (or the textual dogma in general) and bureaucracy is taken for granted; in fact, for many Christians these remain distinct forms of authority. Christian (and Islamic) fundamentalists can use the text rather than the Holy Spirit to challenge bureaucratic hierarchies. More important, though, this reader was left unsure of the significance of this particular relationship of the word to the spirit. Kirsch correctly points out that his argument does not apply to other important Christian denominations among the Tonga—the Jehovah's Witnesses and the [End Page 232] New Apostolic Church—who are more closely guided by church texts or by bureaucracy than by the Holy Spirit. Thus Kirsch is not making a general claim for the relationship of spirit to letter or to bureaucracy. This is only one of many possible configurations, and in this local case study, identified only by pseudonym, we are unsure of its centrality to global Christianity, to African Christianity, or even to...

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