What Is a "Form of Life?" Can an Outsider Understand One?

Some years ago two of my colleagues came to me asking if I could explain what "pleading the blood of Jesus" meant. I was stumped. I knew very well what it means to Pentecostal (and perhaps other) Christians because I grew up with it. I knew and explained when and why it was done, why and when my parents, for example, "pled the blood of Jesus." But I had trouble expressing the practice to anyone who isn't part of the form of life where that takes place.

Years ago I went through a "Wittgensteinian phase" where I was fascinated by that philosopher's idea of "language games." According to him, and I know I am over-simplifying here, words only have meaning within language games and language games are tied to "forms of life." Wittgenstein was reacting to positivism, especially that of A. J. Ayer.

Two Wittgensteinians caught my attention, partly because I grew up in a form of life whose language is pretty much inexplicable to non-participants, to outsiders. Some people are attracting to Pentecostalism because of the mystique of its form of life, because of their, to use Harvey Cox's language, "ecstasy deficit."

One was theologian D. Z. Phillips of Wales. The other was philosopher-sociologist-anthropologist Peter Winch (pictured above). According to both, outsiders to a language game cannot really understanding it or the form of life to which it is attached. That sounded like relativism, but it wasn't. They were not denying objective reality; they were talking about the fact that we are all participants in a form of life or more than one and that our everyday language and even ways of seeing reality are shaped by it/them. "There is no view from nowhere."

According to Winch, in order to understand a form of life, a distinct micro-culture, one has to participate in it or have participated in it. You cannot be a complete outsider and understand it. Winch went further than Clifford Geertz, another anthropologist who was influenced by Wittgenstein.

I was preconditioned to agree with Winch because every time I met someone who was not Pentecostal and had never been Pentecostal, who attempted to describe it, I knew they were wrong. Oh, they may have known some facts about Pentecostalism, but they had no idea what those facts really meant.

I have seen many attempts to portray something of Pentecostalism on television and in movies and have never felt there was any authenticity in them until I saw "The Apostle" starring Robert Duvall. Then I found out that he was taken to Pentecostal services of worship, revivals, by a woman, either his grandmother or a child "sitter," when he was small. He knew it from the inside. I did detect other actors in the movie who I could tell were either just acting or were Pentecostals themselves. It was obvious to me.

Pentecostals and some others (e.g., some Black Baptists) "plead the blood of Jesus" over a vehicle of any kind before the travel in it. Or before some others travel. It's meant to "cover" the vehicle and the driver and the occupants and protect them from danger. But what it means to the people pleading Jesus's blood cannot really be put into words outsiders would understand. It's understood by insiders as a mystery. They believe it may work. They hope it does. Outsiders no doubt often think of it as magic.

I will go deeper into the mystique of Pentecostalism, at least as it was in the U.S. and probably still is in many places in the world. The deep "logic" of Pentecostalism is an experience that can't be described. It can only be felt. It's a profound connection with God but even "connection" is not a word often used. It's a feeling without words to describe it. It can be provoked by a fervent prayer, by speaking in tongues, by a powerful sermon, by a hymn or gospel song, by...many things.

I still feel something of it myself when I listen to Pentecostal songs on Youtube. "Every time I feel the Spirit, moving in my heart, I will pray...." That's a Black spiritual that white Pentecostals sang in "my day." Pentecostal musician Ralph Carmichael re-arranged it in many ways. Whenever I want to be "transported" back into something, however slight, of my Pentecostal upbringing I go to Youtube and look for Pentecostal songs. I can't exactly describe the feeling, but Pentecostals know it. Maybe some others know it, especially Nazarenes and other Wesleyans.

When I left Pentecostalism and became Baptist I enjoyed a greater degree of freedom of thought. (I was never a fundamentalist Baptist.) But rarely among Baptists (and here I exclude Black Baptists -- from what I am about to say about Baptists in general) did I or do I feel anything like what I felt when I was Pentecostal.

Now, having said all of that, I have to also say that when I was Pentecostal and even afterward, for example when I taught theology at Oral Roberts University in the 1980s, I saw and heard a lot of false feelings, false because manufactured, manipulated. By having grown up in the thick of classical Pentecostalism I developed what I believe to be a relatively reliable discernment of the difference. For example, when I attended a healing meeting by evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman I most definitely felt something and so did others, even some pastors who said they would resist it. I don't know how to describe it. "Better felt than telt." But when I attended a similar healing meeting by an well-known and self-identified successor to Kuhlman all I felt was disgust. The difference was manipulation of feelings.

My point here is that we should all be very careful about criticizing a form of life just because we don't understand it. And we should not think we can understand it if we have never really participated in it from the inside. That doesn't mean every form of life gets a "pass," so to speak, from ethical criticism. But it means we ought to be very careful about ridiculing a form of life we don't really understand because we haven't participated in it.

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