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The Afterlife Is Not Dead: Spiritualism, Postcolonial Theory, and Early Christian Studies1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2009

Denise Kimber Buell
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Church History , Volume 78 , Issue 4 , December 2009 , pp. 862 - 872
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Copyright © American Society of Church History 2009

To explore how postcolonial theory may be productive for early Christian studies, I suggest we take an indirect approach and foreground spiritualism, which flourished during the height of the British Empire. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the idea of spirit communication in the present—central to modern spiritualism—was cast by the emerging disciplines of comparative religion, anthropology, sociology, and psychology as emblematic of “primitive” thinking.Footnote 2 At the same time, classicists, historians, and biblical scholars produced a rash of publications on the afterlife, many of which are published versions of endowed public lectures on immortality and afterlife.Footnote 3

With particular attention to the writings of classicist and biblical scholar, Burnett Hillman Streeter (best remembered for his four-source hypothesis to the synoptic problemFootnote 4), I show that the postcolonial interventions of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gauri Viswanathan highlight the significance of colonial encounters and spiritualism for scholarly mappings of early Christian formations. Of the range of distinctive colonial experiences addressed by postcolonial theory, I focus on India and its relationship to British scholarship, given Streeter's interest in the early twentieth-century Indian Christian, Sundar Singh, whom he promoted as a mystic capable of securing Christian missionary efforts in India and revitalizing Christianity in Great Britain.Footnote 5 I suggest that we may better understand the grip of the category of Gnosticism by placing it in relationship to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century practices and representations of colonialism and spiritualism; but I also conclude that the terms of debate about spiritualism indicate limits to postcolonial theory's value to early Christian studies, limits that turn on how postcolonial theory negotiates colonized subjects who credit non-human sources as effective challengers of colonial oppression.

I posit no direct links between spiritualism and postcolonial theory. To juxtapose them, however, helps dramatize both the benefits and limits of postcolonial theory for the writing of early Christian histories.Footnote 6

I. Colonialism and “Gnosticism”: Christian Mission vs. Theosophy in India

Modern spiritualism's heyday was in the second half of the nineteenth century. Spiritualism's loose central propositions—that individual personality persists after death and that communication between human and spirit planes is possible, empirically verifiable, and open to all—were articulated and embraced by women and men of all classes. Spiritualism was regularly associated with activism, especially abolition of slavery, women's rights, and anti-imperialism.Footnote 7 Although most spiritualists were of North American, British, or Continental Christian upbringing, spiritualist propositions were variously inflected to critique and/or reform institutionalized Christianity as well as to establish new religions, including Theosophy.

Spiritualism flourished concurrently with British imperialism, the Tübingen School of higher biblical criticism, and the acquisitions by the Bodleian Library of the Bruce Codex and the Berlin Museum of the Berlin Codex—two of the three codices containing texts identified as “Gnostic” before the 1945 discovery at Nag Hammadi.Footnote 8 Theosophists laid claim to the texts in these codices as, in the words of one Theosophist, “Fragments of a Forgotten Faith.”Footnote 9 Scholars of early Christian history did not miss this link either, even though they were largely hostile to both contemporary Theosophists and ancient “Gnostics”; for example, Streeter understood ancient Gnostics as theosophical.Footnote 10 Theosophists were also the main Western rivals to Christian mission and colonial administration in early twentieth-century India. In his 1913 trip to India, Streeter encountered both Christians and Theosophists who negotiated British colonialism (and Western Christian missionary efforts) in part by appeal to communications from spirits. At the same time, many of Streeter's British and North American contemporaries were still attending séances and fascinated by spiritualism.

In his co-authored book about Christian mystic, Sundar Singh, Streeter directly contrasts the Christian knowledge Singh gains through ecstatic visions with those claimed as legitimate by Theosophists. Streeter's advocacy of Singh was informed by the conviction that communication from the spirits continues today, a view not simply generated inside Christian mystical and prophetic traditions but also the hallmark of the modern spiritualist movement. As such, his promotion of Singh may be interpreted as a kind of response to competing spiritualist interpretations of spirit communication, especially Theosophy.

Although it would be inaccurate to depict Theosophists as free of imperializing baggage, scholars of the British empire have argued that “spiritualism, and Theosophy in particular, played a significant role in the development of a radical, anticolonial politics both in Britain and India.”Footnote 11 Gauri Viswanathan writes: “it is within the colonial context that spiritualism is seen most powerfully to loosen boundaries between closed social networks … the otherworldiness of the occult offered … possibilities for imagining colonial relations outside a hierarchical framework.”Footnote 12 She specifically has in mind the impact of Theosophy. Ten years after founding Theosophy from, and in response to, spiritualism,Footnote 13 Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott arrived in India in 1880 with a splash. They garnered interest in their synthesis of western traditions and so-called Oriental wisdom,Footnote 14 the latter acquired through medium communications from Indian spirit “masters,” also known as “mahatmas.”

Viswanathan argues that “the [Theosophical] masters' communications of occult secrets stage an encounter with a past suppressed by the onset of Western modernity and secularism. They brilliantly combine critique of both colonialism and secularism by admitting the occult into the making of worldly relations, and [thereby offering] a more inclusive account of the world than the one allowed by imperial, secular histories,” one that “would make room for the histories of the people whose knowledge is mined and appropriated.”Footnote 15 The passivity central to communication through mediums alters the typical understanding of colonial relations in which the colonizer is active and the colonized passive. That is, rather than simply representing “natives” because they cannot represent themselves, Theosophists and spiritualists were prepared to hear spiritual truths from “native” spirits whose teachings might lead to critiques of colonial administration.

Streeter and his co-author, A. J. Appasamy, offered a competing alternative to theosophical claims by promoting the Christian Singh as someone through whom authoritative spiritual teachings are transmitted. Yet their book supports Viswanathan's point insofar as these scholars serve as Singh's literary medium of sorts. Streeter and Appasamy quote Singh extensively about his mystical visions. These quotations directly address the issue of how Singh's Christian visions differed from those of the Theosophists. Singh portrays his Christian visions as occurring during a waking state in which he “listen[s] to spirits, especially the holy spirit, as they talk to me.”Footnote 16 He differentiates his visions from those of spiritualists and Theosophists.Footnote 17 Singh judges that the spirit communication received by the likes of Blavatsky are transmitted by “spirits of the lower world,” in fact, naming “certain theosophists and other well known persons both dead and alive whom he believed to have been deluded by these false spirits [but] hinting it might be unwise for us to print them.”Footnote 18 Streeter found Singh's Christian-inflected version of spiritualist claims about the persistence of communication from the spirit world compelling in contrast to the theosophical and other non-Christian ones.

Postcolonial theory helps train our attention on how India was not simply a contested mission field and British colony but also a site for imagining authoritative and potentially transformative communications from spirits in ways that may have informed how scholars of early Christian history constructed and imagined “Gnosticism.” The next section takes a closer look at the temporal blurring in Streeter's writings to suggest additional ways that postcolonial theory helps explain the significance of the colonial present of India for Streeter's construction of the Christian past.

II. Subaltern Pasts and Historical Narratives

“Anyone who has studied the intellectual religious and social background of the Early Church as recovered by recent research, and then visits India,” Streeter writes of his own 1913 visit, “wakes up to find that, so far as the religious situation is concerned, the centuries have vanished and he is again … in the Graeco-Roman Empire of the second century.”Footnote 19 This description of waking up at the edge of the British Empire as similar to time-traveling to the early Roman Empire offers an untimely illustration of what Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to as a “subaltern past” in his postcolonial analysis of historiography: “the capacity (of the modern person) to historicize actually depends on his or her ability to participate in nonmodern relationships to the past that are made subordinate in the moment of historicization… . Let me call these subordinated relations to the past ‘subaltern’ pasts.” Streeter was obviously no subaltern, but Chakrabarty's point is not about identity so much as power: “Elite and dominant groups can also have subaltern pasts to the extent that they participate in life-worlds subordinated by the ‘major’ narratives of dominant institutions.”Footnote 20 In other words, it is because we have experiences like Streeter's that we can craft compelling narratives about early Christianity, but we must suppress such experiences as not fitting the rules of evidence, rationality, and scholarly distance.

Streeter's experience of the present collapsing into the past defies conventional norms of historical narrative,Footnote 21 and his publications on specifically early Christian topics do not mention it.Footnote 22 Rather, he adduces it to address questions such as: How will indigenous Indian traditions, primarily defined as Hinduism here, shape Christianity as it develops in India? How will Indian Christianity interact with European Christianity?

Linking his experience of the Indian religious landscape to the latest “recent research” on early Christianity, Streeter offers this characterization of second-century Christianity: “In the first and second centuries a.d. the wandering ‘prophet,’ whether mystic, preacher, theosophist or ascetic proved to be a useful ferment, a valuable stimulus to experiment and thought, but also a source of danger and distraction to the Church.”Footnote 23 This may read like a historical reconstruction from a scholarly study of early Christianity, but it amounts to a justification of India as an imperial mission field, underscored by the affirmation that time in colonized space has reinforced the author's understanding of antiquity. Unlike spiritualists, Streeter does not claim that his time-bending experience provides him with new knowledge that might upset existing scholarly insights or offer different grounds for knowledge. Streeter and Appasamy use this image of the interaction of individual holy people and organizational structure (“the Church”) to advocate cooperation in the colonial mission field between individual holy people, like Singh, who offer a “new vision” for Christianity, and “organizers of corporate worship and teachers of the achievement of the past in doctrine and in ethics.” They figure Singh as a “valuable stimulus” to Christianity, especially because of his regular communications with spirits.Footnote 24 Streeter thereby re-signifies theosophical claims to ancient wisdom. He and his theosophical rivals see affinities between early Christian Gnosticism and modern Theosophy, but Streeter positions Theosophists—ancient and modern—as the problematic kind of wandering prophet, a source of “danger and distraction” for “the Church,” both in the Roman and British Empires.

In casting India as a place where one can encounter the ancient past, Streeter sounds like a romanticizing imperialist who projects his current ideals for Christianity onto the past. But his experience also echoes those of his European and North American contemporaries—those women and men who communicated with spirits and thereby lived and exemplified “nonmodern” relationships with the past. Chakrabarty's distinction between two modes of relating to the past usefully dovetails with other historiographical interventions, including those formulated within some feminist and literary theories. That is, by setting modern “rational,” historical narrativizing apart from “pasts that resist historicizing” but are constitutively necessary to historical writing and suppressed in its production,Footnote 25 Chakrabarty helps recover the suppressed history of spiritualism and colonialism in early Christian studies, especially in the construction and interpretation of “Gnosticism.” But, as the next section suggests, scholars of Christian history may find fewer benefits from postcolonial theory when it comes to theorizing agency.

III. Some Limits to Postcolonial Theory for Christian History

Postcolonial theory often attempts to recover subaltern pasts, ideally to make the colonized into agents both of history and, potentially, of radical democratic futures. As Talal Asad puts it, in his critical remarks on this project, “more often than not, it is history in the active voice: everywhere, local people are ‘making their own history,’ ‘contesting it,’ ‘borrowing’ meanings from Western dominators, and ‘reconstructing’ their own meanings. This notion of history emphasizes not only the unceasing work of human creators but also the unstable and hybrid character of their creation.”Footnote 26 Without making explicit links to contemporary political, ethical, or religious goals, scholars of early Christian history have found postcolonial theory productive precisely to emphasize the unstable and hybrid acts of self-creation and negotiation entailed in the production of early Christian identities and practices in the spaces of the Roman Empire.Footnote 27

Yet as Asad and Chakrabarty (among others) have noted, subaltern studies and postcolonial theory usually position the colonized—the subaltern—in terms of a modern western notion of a subject (characterized by consciousness of self) whose agency is linked to being a subject.Footnote 28 Accounts of agency that do not neatly align with subjectivity self-evidently pose problems from that standpoint.Footnote 29 Scholars of early Christian history regularly encounter such accounts that attribute agency to divine and demonic sources.Footnote 30

Chakrabarty articulates the dilemma for historiographical conventions of rationality: “Historians will grant the supernatural a place in somebody's belief system or ritual practices, but to ascribe it any real agency in historical events will … go against the rules of evidence that gives historical discourse procedures for settling disputes about the past.”Footnote 31 Chakrabarty cites Rudolf Bultmann, Streeter's slightly younger contemporary, to support this point that history is a science that must presume a closed system—one whose business is not to rule in or out God's existence or God's intervention in history but only to demonstrate human causes and effects.Footnote 32

To illustrate the challenges of conceptualizing subaltern pasts, Chakrabarty discusses a nineteenth-century colonial rebellion in India by a group known as the Santal who testified “that God was the main instigator of the rebellion;” to follow historiographical norms, “the Santal's statement… . has to be … converted into somebody's belief or made into an object of anthropological analysis.”Footnote 33 “But,” Chakrabarty adds,

the Santal with his statement “I did as my god told me to do” also faces us as a way of being in this world, and we could ask ourselves: Is that way of being a possibility for our own lives and for what we define as our present? Does the Santal help us to understand a principle by which we also live in certain instances? [With t]his question…. the Santal stands as our contemporary, and the subject-object relationship that normally defines the historian's relationship to his or her archive is dissolved… .Footnote 34

To accept Chakrabarty's dare of cultivating a nonmodern relationship with the Santal would necessitate taking seriously the distinction between agency and subjectivity that the Santal exemplify and suspending the conventions of temporal difference.

What might it mean to recover pasts that destabilize our sense of what constitutes rationality and agency? Spiritualists, North American and European contemporaries of the Santal, offered a kind of anti-Enlightenment/anti-modernist critique with their embrace of temporal fluidity and spiritual agency (often unmoored from institutional constraints). Spiritualism “challenged the very organization of meaning in modern life.”Footnote 35

Although elaborated more in sitting rooms than academic papers, spiritualism shares with postcolonial theory a concern for re-signifying dominant logics—especially of spatial and temporal relations—and transforming ethics and material practices. Viswanathan also hints at a more direct intersection, noting the function of spiritualism in colonial India: “Otherworldliness (which sometimes takes the form of occultism) is an attempt to recuperate meaning from a suppressed past, which in being suppressed leads to a fragmentary view of history.”Footnote 36 This fragmentary character of suppressed history is a key result of what Chakrabarty calls the submersion of “subaltern pasts.”

Things that may seem silly or weird to us—like spiritualism—may have something to teach us about rationality and reason. Without claiming any causal links, I have suggested that both postcolonial theory and the practices of early Christian historiography are more entangled with spiritualism and its concerns than we have recognized. While only further study can sustain this proposition, I have suggested that the idea of spirit communication in the present, central to modern spiritualism, finds indirect responses in scholarly reconstructions of Gnosticism in early Christianity as well as in postcolonial reconstructions of subalterns in colonial struggles. By the early twentieth century, we find extensive scholarly discussions of “Gnosticism” as a crucial heresy in the formation of “orthodox” Christianity,Footnote 37 yet studies of the modern history of the category of “Gnosticism” have not explored its relationship to theosophy (or spiritualism more broadly).

Spiritualism incited many critics and skeptical inquirers, including those who formed psychical research societies and academics who shaped the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and comparative religion.Footnote 38 Psychical research societies, composed of academics and interested “laypeople,” took spiritualists as objects of study, often arguing that while spiritualists themselves were misguided, the phenomena with which they were concerned was real.Footnote 39 In the name of rationality, these enterprises all demanded critical distance and objectification to render their subject matter knowable.

We have inherited the demand of rationality and critical distance in our own practices, and postcolonial theory (as well as quite a few others, including feminist theory) has helped articulate some of its costs and challenges. Like psychical research, postcolonial theory makes colonial struggles the object of its concern, almost always within academia, and must wrestle with how to represent them, even as it allies itself with its transformative goals. Does postcolonial theory appeal to those of us in early Christian studies who distance ourselves from theological and religious locations in part because it, like feminism, and, dare I say spiritualism, preserves the value of moral, ethical and political commitments even while deliberately critiquing any totalizing claims to reason, knowledge, or power? Does postcolonial theory also, however, appeal because it preserves, even as it struggles with, the academic prioritization of rationality?

References

2 For example, E. B. Tylor, a central figure for both anthropology and comparative religion, viewed spiritualists as evidence of an unfortunate “survival” of a primitive way of thinking otherwise attested primarily in uncivilized colonial or yet to be colonized contexts. See Taves, Ann, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Explaining Religious Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 199Google Scholar.

3 These include: Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality (Harvard, from 1896); Foerster Lecture on the Immortality of the Human Soul (UC Berkeley, from 1928); Drew Lecture on Immortality (Oxford University, by the 1910s); and Read-Tuckwell Lectures (University of Bristol, established in the 1930s). Many other endowed lecture series included talks by classicists and biblical scholars on the afterlife between 1900–1930 (for example, Cumont, Franz, Afterlife in Roman Paganism: Lectures Delivered at Yale University on the Silliman Foundation [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1922]Google Scholar; Strong, Eugenie, Apotheosis and After Life: Three Lectures on Certain Phases of Art and Religion in the Roman Empire [1915; repr., Freeport, N.Y.: Books for the Libraries Press, 1969]Google Scholar).

4 See Streeter, B. H., The Four Gospels: A study of origins treating of the manuscript tradition, sources, authorship, and dates (1924; 4th impression, revised; London: MacMillan, 1930), esp. 149–360; 483–562Google Scholar. Students of the Bible and early Christian history are not, however, encouraged to read his study of the Fourth Gospel, which draws on psychology and comparative mysticism (The Four Gospels, 361–481), let alone his publications on spirits, immortality, the relation of science and religion, and comparative religion (for example, Streeter, et al. , Immortality: An Essay in Discovery co-ordinating scientific, psychical, and biblical research [New York: MacMillan, 1917]Google Scholar; Streeter, et al. , Spirit: God and his relation to man considered from the standpoint of philosophy, psychology and art [London: Macmillan, 1919]Google Scholar; Streeter, , Reality: A New Correlation of Science and Religion [London: MacMillan, 1926]Google Scholar; Streeter, , The Buddha and the Christ: An exploration of the meaning of the universe and the purpose of human life [The Bamptom Lectures for 1932; New York: Macmillan, 1933]Google Scholar). In their survey of New Testament scholarship, Stephen Neill and Tom Wright write, “Of Burnett Hillman Streeter (1874–1937) … it is impossible to write without affection, tinged in his case with a little amusement” (Neill, and Wright, , The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861–1986, 2nd ed. [1988; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 131Google Scholar).

5 Streeter, B. H. and Appasamy, A. J., The Sadhu: A Study in Mysticism and Practical Religion (London: MacMillan, 1923)Google Scholar.

6 That is, I shall not consider how postcolonial theory can yield fruitful interpretations of early Christian history nor how a consideration the Roman Empire might nuance modernist understandings of colonialism—though both are useful (see, for example, Jeremy Schott's essay above).

7 Since Braude's, Ann influential Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon, 1989)Google Scholar, many have written on spiritualist activism; for example, Owen, Alex, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Goldsmith, Barbara, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Knopf, 1998)Google Scholar; and McGarry, Molly, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

8 The third codex identified as containing “Gnostic” material prior to the Nag Hammadi find is the Askew codex containing Pistis Sophia, purchased by the British Museum in 1795.

9 See, for example, Mead, G. R. S., The Gnostics: Fragments of a Faith Forgotten; A Contribution to the Study of the Origins of Christianity (1900; repr., New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1960)Google Scholar. Mead presents himself as a Theosophist.

10 Streeter, , “What we know of Gnostic theosophical speculation is so grotesque that we are apt to wonder what there was about the movement that made it so alluring to that age as to become a really formidable enemy to the Church. No doubt its chief appeal lay in the dualism which offered a solution, theoretical and practical, to the problem of evil” Primitive Church: Studies with special reference to the origins of Christian Ministry (The Hewett Lectures 1928; London: MacMillan, 1929), 6–7Google Scholar.

11 van der Veer, Peter, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 58Google Scholar.

12 Viswanathan, Gauri, “The Ordinary Business of Occultism,” Critical Inquiry 27:1 (Autumn 2000): 2–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Theosophy was closely associated with spiritualism but rejected its understanding that mediumistic trance is available to all, instead appealing to a body of revealed knowledge that they linked both with ancient Christian Gnosticism and, more immediately, with Indian sages, the “mahatmas.” Also unlike spiritualism, theosophists had formal meetings, organizations, and texts, even as many continued to participate in spiritualist activities such as séances.

14 For more on Theosophy in India and Britain, see Viswanathan, Gauri, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), esp. 177–207Google Scholar.

15 Viswanathan, “Ordinary Business,” 19. As she continues, “the bureaucratization of occult knowledge” also calls into question the “notion that secularization is a break with religion” (20).

16 Streeter and Appasamy, The Sadhu, 136.

17 Singh also differentiates his Christian visions from those he experienced pre-conversion through yogic practices, which he views as trance states achieved through self-hypnosis.

18 Streeter and Appasamy, The Sadhu, 151, 152. Singh may be using spiritualist interchangeably with Theosophist in this context, but Theosophists would have felt the potential sting of this critique more than spiritualists. Spiritualists were not especially bothered by deceiving spirits or even fraudulent mediums—these underscored the indeterminacy of communication not the authenticity of spirits or the possibility of truth; this position radically undermines any claims of certainty about whether one has truth (for especially perceptive remarks on this topic, see Cottom, Daniel, Abyss of Reason: Cultural Movements, Revelations, and Betrayals [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 18, 67)Google Scholar. Both Theosophists and Christians pulled back from such radical indeterminacy, however. Theosophists and Singh aimed to persuade listeners of the authenticity of their spirit communications, locating these communications as consistent with their portrayal of a larger organizational, ethical, and philosophical program.

19 Ibid., 253. To this sentence Streeter appends a footnote: “This experience occurred to myself in 1913, and, a little later, quite independently, to my friend Mr. T. R. Glover, of Cambridge” (253). Streeter's phrasing recalls Johannes Fabian's points about how colonized others get framed as occupying anachronistic time (see Fabian, , Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983], esp. 15–18, 25–31Google Scholar). Whether we see it as an imperializing gesture or an intriguing disjuncture, Streeter finds in India the past of his own tradition, eliding Christianity-allied British Empire by analogizing the minority status of Christianity in British colonized India with that under Roman imperial rule.

20 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 101Google Scholar. “Thus what allows historians to historicize the medieval or the ancient is the very fact these worlds are never completely lost. We inhabit their fragments even when we classify ourselves as modern and secular. It is because we live in time-knots that we can undertake the exercise of straightening out, as it were, some part of the knot (which is how we might think of chronology)” (112).

21 As Michel de Certeau writes, “Modern western history essentially begins with a differentiation between the present and the past. In this way it is unlike tradition (religious tradition), though it never succeeds in being entirely dissociated from this archaeology, maintaining with it a relation of indebtedness and rejection.” (de Certeau, Michel, The Writing of History, trans. Conley, Tom [French original 1975; New York: Columbia University Press, 1988], 2)Google Scholar.

22 We might ask how Streeter's travels subsequently altered the way he imagined the second century; in his later book Primitive Church, Streeter emphasizes the dynamic, experimental character of second-century Christians and the lack of any single original or apostolic form of ecclesial organization: “In the Primitive Church no one system of Church Order prevailed. Everywhere there was readiness to experiment, and, where circumstances seemed to demand it, to change…. it is permissible to hint that the first Christians achieved what they did, because the spirit with which they were inspired was one favourable to experiment. In this—and, perhaps, in some other respects—it may be that the line of advance for the Church today is not to imitate the forms, but to recapture the spirit, of the Primitive Church” (Primitive Church, 261–262).

23 Streeter and Appasamy, The Sadhu, 253.

24 Ibid., 254. Depictions of Singh resonate with the idea that colonized subjects occupy a different time: “while we do not suggest that the Sadhu is on the same plane as St. Francis or St. Paul, we feel that, from having known him, we understand them better” (viii). They further note: “coming from the presence of Sundar Singh, men forget themselves, they forget him—but they think of Christ” (xv); during a visit to England, Singh was mistaken for Jesus (42–43). Streeter and Appasamy quote Singh approvingly, but we also see traces of colonial anxieties when they ask him about the content of spiritual transmissions. They ask him twice if he has had visions like those in the Apocalypse of John; he says, “yes, but only like those of the end of the text” (122), never like the middle (123). In another context, Singh also denies an affinity with Book of Revelation (196).

25 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 101. Chakrabarty also calls these modes History 1 (“the past ‘established’ by capital” [64]) and History 2 (“a category charged with the function of constantly interrupting the totalizing thrusts of History 1” [66]) when analyzing historiography using Marx (see 62–71).

26 Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 2Google Scholar.

27 See, for example, Lyman, Rebecca, “Hellenism and Heresy,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11:2 (2003): 209–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nasrallah, Laura, “Mapping the World: Justin, Tatian, Lucian, and the Second Sophistic,” Harvard Theological Review 98.3 (2005): 283–314CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 See Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 12–16.

29 For further discussion of this challenge in a different register, see Keller's, Mary persuasive work, The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power, and Spirit Possession (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

30 See also Buell, Denise Kimber, “Imagining Human Transformation in the Context of Invisible Powers: Instrumental agency in second-century treatments of conversion,” in Metamorphoses: Resurrection, Body and Transformative Practices in Early Christianity, ed. Seim, Turid Karlsen and Okland, Jørunn (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Press, 2009), 263–284Google Scholar.

31 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 104.

32 Ibid., 104–105, quoting Bultmann's, Rudolf essay “Is Exegesis without Presuppositions Possible?” in The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present, ed. Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt (New York: Continuum, 1985), 244Google Scholar.

33 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 105. We still find this distantiation in scholarship on early Christian miracles and exorcisms.

34 Ibid., 108.

35 Cottom, Abyss of Reason, 32. “Spiritualism was everything reason and the rationalized professions were laboring not to be, everything they wanted to overlook, or to survey and repress at the same time. It was popular, unhierarchical, inconsistent, disorganized, idiosyncratic, uneducated, uncultivated, and so, in short, undignified” (41).

36 Viswanathan, “Ordinary Business of Occultism,” 19.

37 For example, “Any elementary text-book of Church History will tell us that the special preoccupation of Church thinkers during the second century was the struggle with ‘Gnostic’ heresies, in the course of which a firmer and clearer orthodox presentation of Christianity emerged” (Burkitt, F. C., Church and Gnosis: A Study of Christian thought and speculation in the Second Century [The Morse Lectures for 1931; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931], 3Google Scholar. See also King, Karen L., What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 55–109Google Scholar.

38 For example, sociologist Herbert Spencer's “ghost theory” of the origins of religion as veneration of dead ancestors might seem to have an obvious connection to spiritualism, but so too his pioneering articulation of the concept of “culture” as the invisible bonds that constitute a group. In his study of the development of the notion of culture, Herbert notes how this smacks of “the occult” and is “potentially scandalous” “for a would-be objective and empirical science” while quite explicitly drawing on language used by spiritualists to express their conviction in the invisible communication and forces between humans (Herbert, Christopher, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991], 14Google Scholar). Anthropologists have continued to take views and practices about death as well as spirit possession as areas of central concern since the late nineteenth century.

39 See Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 200.