Thresholds of Saliency: Reactions to Jon Bialecki, A Diagram for Fire: Miracle and Variations in a Charismatic Movement. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2017

Introduction

In this forum, four respondents offer reactions to Jon Bialecki's ethnographic study of miracles in the Charismatic Christianity practiced in Vineyard churches. Perhaps to some readers the topic will seem questionably aligned with the primary subject areas covered by this journal: magic, ritual, and witchcraft. In practice, however, where prophecies and miracles are highly prized, deliverance ministries and exorcisms are never far behind. The skills involved in deriving knowledge from wonders, like the power required for identifying and banishing demons, has been part of the life of dedicated Christian religiosi for millennia, and as historians in this area know well, necromancy and exorcism, like divination and petitionary prayer, are basically drawing from the same toolkit. This gives magic and witchcraft a set of close and vital connections with miracles and sanctity. Bialecki's methodology has interest because it potentially helps with certain problems related to this fact.

The Vineyard movement itself will probably be familiar to academic readers from Tanya Luhrmann's groundbreaking study, When God Talks Back, published in 2012. Though both Luhrmann's and Bialecki's studies were conducted in California, the Vineyard is a global movement, describing itself as a "missionally-minded community, committed to carrying the words and works of Jesus into every arena of human life."¹ Vineyard members seek to engage both the gospel mission and the charisms of the apostolic life.

Though sharing Luhrmann's concern with the experiential aspects of the Vineyard's mission, Bialecki's study turns on the axis of a Foucauldian idea of knowledge in relation to power. The "diagram" that informs his title is drawn from Gilles Deleuze's interpretative description of Foucault's "power"; Bialecki himself describes it as "a term for the repeatable set of relations between forces" (199). For Deleuze, the "diagram" is also a shorthand for power, as the "archive" is a shorthand for knowledge. Here is Deleuze distinguishing knowledge from power, in a description that labels power "diagrammatic":

Knowledge concerns formed matters (substances) and formalized functions . . . it is therefore stratified, archivized, and endowed with a relatively rigid segmentarity. Power, on the other hand, is diagrammatic: it mobilizes non-stratified matter and functions, and unfolds with a very flexible segmentarity. . . . These power-relations, which are simultaneously local, unstable and diffuse, do not emanate from a central point or unique locus of sovereignty, but at each moment move 'from one point to another' in a field of forces, marking inflections, resistances, twists and turns, when one changes direction, or retraces one's steps.²

On the next page he adds, "Power relations are therefore not known."

In his Diagram for Fire, Bialecki capitalizes on this quality of power as something "not known" to enable a reading of divine power within the field of social forces. Effectively, he unveils the agency of divinity (the lambent Holy Spirit, hence "fire") from various positions within the diagram. His reading has the advantage of demonstrating how divine power can act like one force among others in the context of a reality where God is part of the social fabric, acting through both human and nonhuman agents to impress itself on the human sensorium. Because of its plasticity, the diagram is particularly suitable for modeling the movement of the Holy Spirit, which "waxes and wanes, but it is never divisible. It is everywhere, yet it moves like a fire, searing some places for a while only to burn out, while bypassing other spaces completely" (5).

How does one know or recognize the actions of the Holy Spirit in the diagram, when the divine operations are necessarily so unpredictable? Bialecki describes the basic operation as a recognition of something having crossed a "saliency threshold":

This saliency is usually framed as the statistically improbable, the physically impossible, the aesthetically striking, or the uncanny. It often involves the crossing of bodily boundaries: divine messages inscribed on the body, divine thoughts injected into [End Page 431...