ORAL HISTORY ON PNEUMATOLOGY
PROFESSOR WILLIAM C. TURNER, JR., PHD
DUKE UNIVERSITY DIVINITY SCHOOL
WITH DR. YAHYA JONGINTABA (INTERVIEWING)
DATE: DECEMBER 6, 2013
FILE: TURNER.ORAL.120613a
Topics: Turner’s Virginia and United Holy Church upbringing - black church influences on
pneumatology - early educational influences leading to attending Duke University undergraduate activist years at Duke University - theological education at Duke University –
the role of the Spirit in shaping the course Turner’s studies and career at Duke University - the
language of the Spirit versus the language of science and history – the spiritual dialect of people
in their local traditions - the challenge of Spirit speech in light of differing publics – Spirit speech
strategy of going first to the primary sources - Enlightenment discourse diminishing available
Spirit language – reading of the reformatory history of Duke University pneumatologically – the
Spirit as the guide of history and the applicability of Martin Luther’s King’s notion of ‘the Spirit
of the times’ – the Spirit working through and in contexts of both righteousness and
unrighteousness – the Spirit comingling the efforts of unsuspecting partners.
YJ: Say some of what you just said.
WT: Okay, getting back to what I was saying. What I was talking about is the difficulty
that I have in—what’s the word—contemplating, that’s probably the word. I get the
energy that I need out of doing. The energy, the impetus, the occasion comes out of the
doing. It brings or generates its own passion. So I am constantly writing, constantly
producing, both for the church and for the academy. The problem that I have is
meeting the market. They want to know ‘Who is this pitched for?’ Necessarily that
means I have got to crawl back inside of the work, thinking in a very focused and
sustained way about how people hear. I am thinking of a term [Professor] Charles
Long used. He talks about the archaeology of the subject and how you have to crawl
back into the subjectivity. That’s where I have problems. I realize as time goes along
there are different—what shall I call them--encyclopedias of memory, and that over the
years I have had experiences that are no longer common.
YJ: Explain that.
WT: Well, you know, I was born in the forties, in 1948. I remember the fifties almost
from start to finish. I remember with crystal clarity the panic of the fifties. I remember
clearly the U-2 plane crash during the days of Eisenhower and the hysteria that arose
with the launching of Sputnik. And so I predate the computer age entirely. You know,
I remember –what shall I call it?—apartheid in the United States.
YJ: Let alone South Africa.
WT: Yeah. And I think sometime when I am flying in planes that no longer do they
break the sound barrier. When they used to break the sound barrier kids would crawl
up under their desks because we thought the Russians were coming. I remember
preachers getting on the radio and they are trying to identify the anti-Christ as
Khrushchev, and all this kind of thing. So there are some ingredients, elements, in my
encyclopedia of memory. It was common knowledge—there is knowledge that was
commonly held among us in the fifties and even into the sixties, and when you begin to
draw on it in this day and time people look at you with a blank stare. They do not
know what you are talking about. So I do not always know where those points of
disjuncture occur, especially if I start speaking freely and coming out my bag.
YJ: Is that true of the Spirit also, when you talk about the Spirit, that—?
WT: Well, I think that to some degree that’s true of the Spirit, especially for someone
who was raised in a church community where there was copious reference to the Spirit.
People talked about the Spirit freely. I think there’s a sense in which that is endemic to
African American religious life, but even more particularly when you’re talking about
Holiness-Pentecostal culture. We talk about the Spirit just like we talk about the Son, if
not more. But one talks about the Spirit as common speak. And that language
simply—I mean, that terminology—just populates the language. So the challenge is,
How do you dial back to the point of intersection between two audiences, two
generations, two cultures, two ways of inhabiting the world and knowing the world?
You are talking about two kinds of knowledge, or two forms of knowledge, where one
is the knowledge that is intelligible. And intelligibility implies a certain kind of
suggenia or a set of common meanings. And so you don’t always know where the
break point is. Where---.
YJ: Do you find that in the classroom and in the church equally?
WT: I find it very much in the classroom, even more in the classroom than in the
church. And the reason that you find it in the classroom is twofold. At present now the
students are so young.
YJ: Maybe that’s because you’re older.
WT: Yeah, I’m older and they’re younger.
YJ: Oh really? Okay.
WT: The student body—it’s a younger student body. The median is just much—.
YJ: I see.
WT: And in addition I’m older. When I started teaching I was in my mid-thirties and
there was nothing uncommon about having half the class or a sizable percentage of the
class older than me. And now the kids are younger by several years than my baby.
They could be my grandchildren. In the church it varies. It has a lot to do with how
people were raised. In one sense you have much more frequency of Spirit-speech in
this day and time because what earlier was cordoned off into Holiness and Pentecostal
denominations has now seeped back, has now come into the mainstream by virtue of
both the Charismatic Movement and the Neo-Pentecostal. By ‘Charismatic’ I am talking
about the mid-century where in mainline churches—and this is mostly white—people
began to have experiences of the Spirit that previously had been relegated to and
named by the discourses of Pentecostalism.
YJ: Why is that?
WT: I don’t know the white church like I do the black church, but I know the black
church that I grew up in you at best had perforated lines between Evangelical, Baptist,
Methodist, Holiness, Pentecostals. The boundaries were always perforated, and so you
had people constantly coming from these churches to Holiness churches, and Holiness
and Pentecostal preachers preaching in these churches and running revival, and people
finding the Lord and getting filled with the Spirit and all that. You had this constantly
steady mingling, and so the language was there. Now from the other side you see what
undergirds or is extremely essential for the language of the Spirit is a way of being in
and knowing the world.
YJ: What do you mean?
WT: When your world is rationalized and essentially reduced to the discourses—the
measures, the canons, if you will—of science and history, only certain forms of
knowledge count—rational knowledge, knowledge that can be adduced and measured
scientifically or historically. When you talk about science you are talking about certain
empirical measures, a la the size and shape of a table. The height can be measured.
Even the inner world of the atom or the electron—the inner world of magnetism, of
friction, of force, et cetera—all of this can be measured. With history you can deal with
dates and sources: somebody wrote it, put it in print, as compared with the world in
which knowledge is transmitted orally, or where knowledge is learned just simply by
being around and following people who have it. When you translate that back into the
life of the Spirit, you know—Who is the Spirit? How you know the Spirit? How you
know you got the Spirit?
YJ: Talk about that. How do you know the Spirit?
WT: Okay. Now, it depends on what world you are in. If you are in a world where a
people are in tune with plenary reality, or kind of surplus, a reality that has not been
reduced to metrics, you know the Spirit from being around people who got the Spirit.
They talk about the Spirit, they pray over you, the Spirit comes in you, and they tell you
when you got the Spirit.
YJ: So break that up. So you know the Spirit by—.
WT: A certain kind of language, a certain kind of discourse. People name the Spirit as
the one who spoke to me.
YJ: So that’s a mental knowing, if someone is talking about the Spirit, as opposed to if
you feel the Spirit—that’s a feeling.
WT: Well, it’s both, it’s both. They talk about the Spirit but you also feel the Spirit in
them.
YJ: They talk about it with feeling.
WT: They talk about it with feeling, but you also feel the Spirit in them. The Spirit in
them moves you. The Spirit moves people to behave in certain ways and you ask—if
you inquire about those motions—they say “the Spirit.”
YJ: What motions?
WT: Motions of praise, certain motions of praise in singing, in ejaculations.
YJ: Movement.
WT: You see movement, dancing, running, rolling, falling out—.
YJ: Gestures.
WT: Gestures, slain in the Spirit.
YJ: Charismatic, charisma.
WT: Healings and all this kind of thing. When you live in those spaces, both the
presence of, and the account, is part of the very tissue of your life. Now from the other
side, in a more rationalized world, then the questions arise: How do you know? How
do you name? How do you measure? There is a sense in which that’s in part what’s
attempting to be bridged in Pentecostal orthodoxy where people ask these questions of
‘evidence.’ There is a lot to be said about that whole—.
YJ: Okay, now talk about this difference between ways of knowing and the complexity
of writing about pneumatology.
WT: Okay. The complexity there is that in order to write, writing assumes a certain
intelligibility and suggenia—namely, that the word I use has a meaning that is not
merely notional. There is a common encyclopedia of meaning, that when I use this
word I‘m using it in the same way that other people who use this word use it, that there
is a common ground of meaning. If it is not there then I have got to do further
elaboration that takes up both the tissue, the texture, and the thickness of my world and
the thickness and texture of the world of the one to whom I am speaking.
YJ: Explain that.
WT: The best explanation I can give for that is of learning a language, and I use this
illustration often. I never learned so much English as I did when I studied German.
Because in order to learn a language you got to learn the rules of grammar, the syntax,
not only the meaning of words but all kinds of—what do they call it?—the conjugation
of verbs and declensions. But in learning all of this in another language, it forces you to
see what the parallels are in your language, which you did not learn first. You learn to
speak it first.
YJ: Right, right.
WT: You learn to speak your language and then later on, perhaps—because everybody
who speaks a language hasn’t studied the grammar and syntax and yet they can speak
the language because they are around people who speak it. It is axiomatic, it’s given,
that it’s possible for a child to learn one language just as easily as the other. No matter
how much I complained about the difficulty of speaking German, it is no more difficult
for a baby born in a German-speaking environment than it is form me [to learn English].
You hear people talk about the complexities and the nationality and the idiosyncrasies
of English. Well, I never knew that because I grew up speaking it. In addition, for me, I
never—I didn’t know the difficulty that people have in speaking what we used to call
‘the King’s English,’if you grew up in an environment where they spoke a certain kind
of patois. You know, you go down in South Carolina and you hear the Gullah and the
Geechee. And people now talking about ebonics, broken English, and all that kind of
thing. Well, I didn’t know nothing about that. I grew up in a home with a mother who
was an English major, and so proper English, the ‘King’s English,’ is all that was
permitted. So I had no difficulty learning grammar and the agreement between subject
and verb. That was no challenge, because from the very time you started talking if you
did it wrong you were corrected. The standard—we didn’t use slang, much less cuss. It
was not permitted. Standard English, as we called it, was the norm.
Okay, so if you translate that back into what I’m talking about here about the
Spirit, when you grow up around people for whom that is primary and constant
language then you’re not even, you’re not always, aware of where the crossover points
and necessity for translation occur. I don’t know that I have ever been confronted with
that as much as when I was working on my dissertation and C. Eric Lincoln told me,
“You need an editor.” And I got the editor—Mary Sawyer, you might remember—
YJ: I remember Mary.
WT: But she was constantly interrogating me, “What do you mean? What does this
mean? I don’t know what this means.” And I’m saying to myself…
YJ: But you know it means.
WT: …everybody knows what this is.
YJ: So do you find it more comfortable to speak of the Spirit in the church than you find
it to speak of the Spirit in the academy?
WT: Well, yes and no. Over the years I have been teaching pneumatology for over
thirty years, and so in reading books on pneumatology I have become far more sensitive
about the crossover points and points of intersection of language and speech. So I can
anticipate how to make those translations.
YJ: But they are two separate languages, in a sense.
WT: Well, yes and no. There is a language of the Spirit in the academy.
YJ: Is it the same language of the Spirit in the church?
WT: Not necessarily, because what happens in the church is that the language gets
translated into—what shall I say?—the spiritual dialect of the people in their local
tradition. You talk about the Spirit—you talk about the Spirit one way in Holiness and
Pentecostal circles. You talk about the Spirit in another way in Baptist circles. If you
cross over from Methodist to Holiness or Pentecostal, there are certain crossover points.
You know, I blow the minds of my students who come from Holiness, Pentecostal,
Charismatic, Free Church backgrounds when I put the Book of Common Prayer in their
face as a text and show them the rich pneumatology of that book. Or when I expose
how much of the speech that you get in the church in the hymns, in the liturgies: the
pneumatology is there. It is almost like you have a—there are so many words—it’s
almost like you have a thin membrane over the words. You pull the membrane off and
you got pneumatology. Language of grace, of assurance, conviction, unction, anointing
may or may not be comprehended as language of the Spirit depending on how keen
you are to the crossover points, the translations, and where the membranes are.
YJ: Say more, though, because we were talking initially about the difficulty of writing a
book on pneumatology. Why would that be difficult still after all these years?
WT: It’s not necessarily that difficult for me now to say it. The challenge is to say it so
that differing publics can comprehend what you are saying. That’s the challenge.
YJ: And there are many publics.
WT: Right.
YJ: That’s the problem. So I suppose it’s difficult: I’m going to speak to this particular
one, Baptists. Or I am going to speak to this particular one, Holiness. How do you
somehow conflate all of that? Is that part of the issue?
WT: It’s part of the issue. And the approach that I tend to take is to go to the primary
sources first, namely the scriptures and the deep traditions of the church.
YJ: Which are?
WT: Which are your Orthodox and Catholic sources.
YJ: Okay.
WT: And the reason I say ‘Orthodox,’ is because when we say ‘Catholic’ we tend to
mean Roman Catholic, but with Roman Catholic you have already gestured toward the
West. When you say ‘Orthodox,’ I am talking now about the early church, the
ecumenical church, and the Eastern churches. Because you have the deep treasures in
the ecumenical church, or the Eastern, that precedes the split between East and West.
This is precisely where you have an early form of the struggle where the Occident
meets the Orient, when language that is derived out of the Oriental world, the AfroAsiatic world, language deriving from Afro-Asiatic civilization, comes into dialogue
with Greco-Roman civilization. Some serious issues of translation occurred. You have
a body of that struggle, the material, you have the body of that in your patristic sources.
The labors are lengthy. What controls the meaning of your language? Is it this Oriental,
Afro-Asiatic world of Jerusalem, Palestine, Egypt, Ethiopia, Fertile Crescent, Syria,
Libya? What controls the meaning of the language? Is the Oriental, Afro-Asiatic world
or the world of Greek philosophy? That’s the ongoing battle within the early church.
And in some sense it kind of gives you a paradigm for how these issues are and ought
to be prosecuted.
Now, I have no doubt, as a matter of fact I know, that you have some similar
discourse in the church of Ethiopia. Now the difference there is that Christianity in
Ethiopia builds upon Judaism, and the tensions between the words are not quite as
strong as in Asia-Minor and southern Europe that have come under the domination of
first the Greeks and then the Romans. But there you have at least one paradigm for this
struggle over how to interpret back and forth. So that’s where I tend to start, with
those. Then the next move is to attempt to comprehend the local theology, whether it is
denominational, whether it is the distillation that occurs within a cultural group, an
ethnic group. And, by the way, I look at all of humankind as a collection of ethnicities.
So that Western Europe and Enlightenment civilization is no less ethnic than African
American.
YJ: Absolutely.
WT: So it’s a question of how to penetrate ethnicities, and that comes in part from my
training as a social scientist. I studied with C. Eric Lincoln and spent a lot of time
studying with Lincoln and [Charles] Long and doing ethnography. So there’s a certain
kind of ethnographical base that underlying, under-lurking the penetration and
comprehension of ethnicities. So I attempt to turn myself into a student of the ethnicity,
of the ethnic group, the local theology of those to whom I am speaking. I have been
fortunate in that regard to have had wide and deep exposure to African Methodists,
Afro-Baptists, and Afro-Pentecostal life. There is a sense in which if you, once you,
comprehend those three you pretty much have the black church.
YJ: In what regard?
WT: In what regard? If you move into, say, Anglican strands, they are already
antecedently present in African Methodism. You got Anglican strands that are
antecedently present. If you go Afro-Baptists, you—.
YJ: Anglican strands of pneumatology?
WT: Anglican strands of pneumatology and ethnicity.
YJ: Oh okay, alright.
WT: It’s very much in the liturgy. The liturgy of African Methodist churches comes
straight from the prayer book that John Wesley gave Methodist preachers when he sent
them over. So you’ve had far more reforms within mainline Methodism than within
African Methodism. So what you get in African Methodism is almost an uncut blend
between old Anglicanism and the world of Africa that was in the hearts and minds of
the people to whom Richard Allen and his cohorts preached. It’s just straight up: you
can go back to the old Anglican prayer book and just see this. It’s interesting because
around here, in the university, whenever you do a liturgy that’s African Methodist,
African Methodists say, “Ah, we’ve finally got AME or AME Zion worship. But
Anglicans say, “Oh, it was so refreshing to have old Anglican liturgy.” And in some
cases, because of the deep roots of Anglicanism, sometime it ain’t even old. It’s
amazing how Anglican liturgy resonates around the world. You have places in Africa
where you got far more Anglican Christians than you do in England.
Okay, but similarly, once you get to Afro-Baptists you are only a step away from
Reformed Protestantism.
YJ: Which is?
WT: Presbyterian, Congregational, and then the resonances between Lutheranism are
there, and within, say, Disciples [of Christ], UCC [United Church of Christ]. You can
see the remnants and the elements if you start—your starting point—is Afro-Baptists
and there is a serious taking of the Baptists element or component there. It’s a short
step back to other Reformation traditions. The common node that runs through is Afro.
The same thing with Pentecostals because there’s a schizophrenia within Pentecostals.
On the one hand they want to be people of the Spirit but then on the other hand—white
Pentecostals in particular—but on the other hand, they want to be Fundamentalists.
There is a certain kind of scholasticism that’s present, scholasticism and rationalism
that’s present within Fundamentalism that’s incompatible with Pentecostalism. Of
course you see it again with Baptists, this tension between being free and being
fundamentalists. It’s a real tension. But, in any event—.
Then, of course, when you’re talking straight-up Africa, Afro-Caribbean, et
cetera, there’s a certain ethnic knowledge or ethnic sensitivity or ethnographic
suggenia, I mean, and that comes both from exposure to the culture but also, for me,
also from my studies in African religion and Afro-American religions and so forth. So
you bring that, what I call, you bring a sense, you bring the ethnic sensitivity and the
knowledge of the local theologies. You intersect that with the ancient and classical
knowledges which, by the way, when you press back far enough predate and precede
the Enlightenment. Which is why, for example, that Pentecostals and Roman Catholics
or Pentecostals and Eastern Orthodox theologians find so much common ground.
There’s a sense in which the Enlightenment of the world, which pushes back against
mystery, is also inimical to the Spirit. There’s a certain incompatibility between
Enlightenment—to Enlightenment of the world—and pneumatology because the Spirit
is clothed in mystery.
YJ: So it makes it difficult—turning back—it makes it difficult to write...
WT: To write or even speak, to have language—
YJ: …about the Spirit.
WT: Enlightenment discourse diminishes the available language.
YJ; Say more about that. It diminishes it why, because—.
WT: Because, precisely because, the whole project of Enlightenment is to understand
the world, to push back the boundaries of mystery, to reduce the world to the forms of
knowledge that can be controlled.
YJ: Forms of knowledge that we accept as valid?
WT: You actually get the dictum in Hegel—the rational is real. If it is not rational, don’t
trouble me with it. If you can’t prove it, don’t bring it to me. It is a notarial disposition,
where there must be a human referee where the human subject is the referee. But the
referendum occurs in a way that either implies or requires that more than one human
subject can agree on the same content. In other words, for example, if I measure the
height of the table, there is a way to determine—. If we measure and we come up with
two different answers, there is a way to determine who is right and who is wrong. One
of us measured right or one of us measured wrong, or we use a different metric. Of
course you see it full-blown in the courtroom. Everything that is true is not necessarily
a fact in the court. Just look at this last case that came out today and they said, “Okay,
we are not going to prosecute the quarterback.” What happened that night in that
room? Yeah? She said, he said. What happened? Or, was it rape or consensual sex?
YJ: Because, yeah, you don’t have more than one testimony to validate—.
WT: Now, if there were a third party who actually witnessed the physical overpowering
of a resisting woman then you have another point at which to referee that event.
YJ: So relate this back, speaking about the Spirit.
WT: Well, by the Spirit’s nature, the Spirit is like Jesus said. It’s like the wind, it comes
and it goes. It blows. You hear the sound of it. You don’t know where it came from.
You don’t know where it went.
YJ: You can’t measure it.
WT: Right. Or if you did measure it, it would no longer be wind.
YJ: Right.
WT: And the same thing with running water. If you bottle it up to measure it, it’s no
longer running water. Or like a bird in flight. If you ever capture the bird, that bird is
no longer in flight.
YJ: So what does that say that when you speak about the Spirit it is no longer the Spirit
about which you are speaking?
WT: Well, the question is, the question for pneumatology is, With what speech can I
speak? If I use the speech of history and of science, I have already limited the range of
discourse. What you get in the scriptures about the Spirit really is given more in the
language of images, metaphors, movement, life.
YJ: Which are not the thing-itself but point to the thing of the Spirit.
WT: Well, you see, once you say ‘the thing-itself’ you have already moved into another
discourse that’s really more of the rational, empirical. And if you look at the testimony
of the scriptures, you never get there. The Spirit is who the Spirit is. The Spirit shows
the Spirit’s self as the Spirit. Yeah? Sure. The Spirit performs what the Spirit performs.
YJ: So, again, keep going back to this thing of, How do you speak about that, and is the
speech about it authentic? Or is it really that—or maybe I am going into the rational.
WT: Well, yeah, and that’s the question. How do you establish valid speech? Who is
the referee and who makes the measure for the validity of the speech?
YJ: What are the options?
WT: What are the options? Well, I would say that the option is the revelation that we
have in the scriptures and, of course, the experiences that believers have. I put the two
together because invariably when you don’t have the metrics the question does become
what is purely notional and not proper to the Spirit at all. That’s where pneumatology
comes in, because it is a critical discourse that intersects the speech about the Spirit with
other forms of speech. Now, what’s the logic? What are the rules? That is the nature of
pneumatology. For example, we do not speak of the Spirit in a manner that is dissected
or removed from our speech concerning the Son, the Father. And there is what James
Loder would call, and I would agree, is a logic of the Spirit. So that the logic of the
logos, which is implied in pneumatology—o-l-o-g-y—so that the logic is consistent with
the mystery and the revelation. So the question then becomes whether you open
yourself to and submit even to the logic of the Spirit that is given in texts—in testimony,
in texts, in revelation, in the ongoing tests and contests of the church. Do you submit to
that?
YJ: And ‘submit to that’ means what?
WT: It means to study it, to learn it, to become a student of pneumatology. That’s the
question. Of course some people say, “No, I don’t need to do all that ‘cause all you
need to do is get it [the Spirit]. Once you get it you know it. Once you receive—.”
YJ: What do I say to that?
WT: What do I say to that? I say, I ask, “How do you know? How do you know it’s the
Spirit?” And I refer back to the language of the scriptures that connect intimately the
Spirit and the incarnation and revelation of the Son—and that language is there. But
also, from the other side, you cannot give an account of the incarnate Son without the
Spirit. Similarly you cannot give an account of—.
YJ: The Spirit without the Son.
WT: Well, the Spirit is somewhat different because you can give an account of the Spirit
in the Old Testament. But then the theological question kicks in: whether or not the
Spirit is divine or whether or not the Son is divine. So, if the Spirit is divine, the Son is
divine, then what is so in time, space, and history must be so from eternity. You can’t
talk about the beginning and the end of God. If you do then you’ve got to answer all
kinds of questions about source, origin. But the language of theology, and there
pneumatology anticipates and comprehends those—.
YJ: Let me, I want to change this to—the direction of this a little bit—and go back
because I’m trying to get you to consider writing on pneumatology in the context of this
particular academy, implying the academy in general. What’s your reaction to that,
first of all, just the whole idea of writing about pneumatology or the Spirit in university,
or as related to the university? I am not sure of the language to use. Just talk about
speaking of the Spirit in the context of university, as opposed to—… [shifting] I am not
really sure what I am trying to get at.
WT: I’m not either. And don’t know how to answer that. Because, see, the only way I
can talk at that level is to talk about how I got here.
YJ: Alright. Alright, go ahead. Do that. And keep making those connections as you
move on.
WT: At the time I came here, the mid-sixties, as we very well know—… [shifting] Midsixties—and I guess I necessarily have to be somewhat circuitous in order to get to
where I’m going. I was not that serious about what I was intending to do with my life,
and all that stuff. I mean, I probably would have been content to go in service or to
work or something like that while I kind-of sorted that stuff out. But in the heyday of
Vietnam—and once again that’s something that’s difficult to describe to people who did
not come through that era. I mean, when your friends enlist in the army, go to ‘Nam,’
as we say, few weeks they come back in a box. When we finished high school one of the
songs, one of the popular songs of that era ,was, I forget who sang it but it went,
“Greetings, this is Uncle Sam, I’m gonna take you to a far-off land. I need you.” You
know, stuff like that.
I’m full of myself playing football and getting exposed to the work world, getting
exposed to—what shall I call it?—white, roughneck, working-drinking culture from the
jobsite. I had never been exposed to that world till I went to the jobsite. You read
something like [Samuel] Proctor’s Substance of Things Hoped For and you get some
insight into the kind of community I grew up in—protected, sequestered, all-black
basically, where people groom you and expect you to be high achievers, and all that
kind of thing. Well, my math teacher, he puts an application in my hand one day, my
senior year. Now, mind you, as a senior I’m taking trigonometry and calculus because I
am part of this man’s math team. He was one of the football coaches. At the end of
football season he’d start coaching his math team. And so we had just as much fun—
we had just as much fun doing math as we did football. That was the way it was in
these all-black schools where you have what they called the crème de la crème, the
smartest and brightest blacks folk are teaching. So he had a talent for making math fun.
“Hey, come here ya turkeys. I’m gonna see who can work this problem. Don’t ya let
this little—. Turner, you’re a Junior, don’t ya let this little Sophomore beat ya. Come on
here. Come on here. I’m gonna read ya this problem, see who can work it the fastest.”
Stuff like that, and he took us home. Now, mind you, this same man had been turned
out of the public school system in Prince Edward County because that was a county in
Virginia that said before we integrate we’ll shut down the public schools.
Okay? Now what I’m doing is I’m weaving in the Spirit. Now, I’m talking about
the Spirit here in the way that [Martin Luther] King would talk about it—the Zeitgeist,
the Spirit of the times. Or if we move back another step to the language of the Old
Testament, it would be the Spirit as the guide of history, the Spirit as mishpot, the
prophetic Spirit.
YJ: But it is still the Spirit.
WT: The Spirit. This is the way the Spirit is talked about in the Old Testament—the
Spirit as the guide of history. The Spirit as in—the Spirit in Joseph. I forget what it—“a
good Spirit in Joseph,” for example. So he gets sold into Egypt as a slave, right?...
[shifting] Sold into Egypt as a slave, but he has the Spirit in him, [shifting] a good Spirit,
a Spirit of wisdom. And this Spirit supplies him with dreams so that he has this
knowledge of what God is doing that Pharaoh needs for the protection of the whole
land. And by his dreams now he can instruct Pharaoh in what to do, and the whole
land of Egypt is saved and his kinsfolk are saved.
So, there you have this notion of the Spirit guiding history, or the Spirit speaking
through and acting through and operating through prophets to move and bend history,
if you will, in a manner that’s consistent with God’s will. Or to put it another way, you
have this tension between history as human story and history as divine story. And the
Spirit is guiding history in the ways that God knows. Known to God from the
beginning are all of God’s own works, so God knows God’s own works and how to
move and manipulate and situate and position people even when they do not know.
He’s in a dungeon. He’s in a pit because his brothers sold him. And he’s in slavery,
and all this kind of thing. But in the midst of it all the Spirit is guiding and directing
movements and motions that people cannot even comprehend.
And the same kind of thing with Moses. Pharaoh is killing the babies, but his
mother hides him and when she can’t hide him anymore she puts him in the basket and
sends the sister to the river. The sister says to the Pharaoh’s daughter, “I got a nurse for
you.” So his own mother nurses him. But he’s trained in Egypt with all the
knowledges of Egypt so he knows exactly how to go to Pharaoh and speak to him. But
from the other side, he’s being directed and guided by God. So that’s an Old Testament
theme, and so—. And [Martin Luther] King picks this up and uses the language of the
Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the times. But essentially what he’s talking about is that Old
Testament prophetic notion of how God moves and guides.
How do you know it is God? You know it is God by the measure of justice and
liberty. ‘Cause one could make a similar kind of argument—and, as a matter of fact,
this is what William Jones does with his theodicy. He problematizes the claims of black
theology with what he calls this notion of multi-equivalent meaning, so you can argue
that God is on Pharaoh’s side just like you can that God is on Moses’s side. That’s
where this whole matter of faith comes in and watching this thread. But getting back to
that…
YJ: To the math teacher.
WT: …to the math teacher. But the digression was extremely...
YJ: Yes, I understand it.
WT: …extremely important here.
Alright, my father is working for the railroad, so he is in and out of North
Carolina all the time, and he is fascinated with this young governor, Terrie Sanford.
Who—and I had no way of comprehending it at that time—who broke with the
Southern strategy of interposition, nullification, massive resistance against the federal
orders. He breaks with the Southern strategy, fascinates my father, who then begins to
implant in my mind, you know, this notion of going to Duke. So we’d just ride through
the campus sometime when he would be coming back from Hamlet, North Carolina.
He would just digress and come through Durham and stop in front of the Chapel and
point up to it and say, “How you like that, son?”
Now, my pastor at that time was James Forbes, who, by the way, was not
admitted to Duke when he finished Howard because it had not changed its admissions
policy. Then the pastor in the community was Miles Jones. But my point is, I’m under
the influence of three men who, you might say, have an ax to grind but, even more than
that, who can see the way history is moving, or who have a sense, if you will, of how
God guides and directs. So here I am poised to do what neither of them could do, and
they essentially tap me on the shoulder and say, “Go there.”
YJ: Yes, but there seems that there was also a sense in which they submitted themselves
to the influences of the Spirit, yes?
WT: I would say so, but also I would say they submitted me to the influences of the
Spirit. In a manner similar to what I was just saying about Moses being put in the
basket. That wasn’t by his consent. Or Joseph in the dungeon, it wasn’t by his consent.
Or you pick it up again with Jeremiah when Jeremiah finds himself in the dungeon and
prophesying in stocks and all that kind of thing. He gets upset with God and asks God,
“What have you done to me? You’re taking advantage of me because you knew I was
just a child. And God says to him, “Hey look, it’s worse than that. Before I formed you
in the belly, I knew you.”
Or with my father, for example. I come here and I study engineering. Along the
way I get tied up with Philip Cousin at St. Joseph’s [AME Church] and also with fellows
in the Divinity School. During my senior year I’m on my way to Washington D.C.
There was some kind of meeting of the AME Church, the Second Episcopal District. I
stop in Richmond, my father comes to the bus, and I say to him—I say to him, I said,
“What would you say if I told you that next year I’ll be back at Duke?” He said, “What
for?” I said, “Divinity School.” He looked at me, he smiled, he said, “I could’ve told
you four years ago you weren’t an engineer but you wouldn’t have listened.” Or the
woman who asks my mother, Mother Mary Jones asks my mother—. Now she was in
Providence Baptist Church—right? She asks my mother, she says, “How’s my
preacher?” My mother says, “He’s not a preacher, he’s studying engineering.” She
says, “Don’t pay that no mind ‘cause I told you that boy going to preach.” You see? So,
in retrospect, it was these kinds of choices that weren’t mine alone but that situated and
moved me into a flow of life, a stream of life, over which I had no control. And one
thing leads to another in my own personal history.
And here’s the other point in that regard. Because at one point, see, I am
considering accepting another appointment, and I have a conversation with [Samuel]
Proctor—S. D. Proctor.
YJ: Another appointment?
WT: Yeah.
YJ: Pastoral.
WT: No, not pastoral. This would have been—. Well, there were pastoral options
and—but this particular one would have been a deanship. Okay, so I’m having a
conversation with Proctor and he looks at me and says, “How many black folk have
been at Duke as long as you? How many know the place like you do? How many
students would you have where you’re going? You have almost as many black
students at Duke as you would have at the other school. What would it take to replace
you in terms of what you know about the school and what the students need?”
Another case of being situated, not even necessarily by your own decision or choosing,
but being situated, like Joseph, in a place where you can be, to use the language of
Genesis, ‘a father to Pharaoh.’ That’s a powerful image.
YJ: Explain that.
WT: Well, that’s what when he meets his brothers and they are all upset when they
realize how they have mistreated him, how they’ve done him wrong, and they’re afraid
that he’s going to hurt them back. He says, “You meant it for evil, God meant it for
good, and God has made me a father to Pharaoh.” In other words, “God has put me
right beside the one who has the power in such a manner as to direct the course, to
change it, to make these crucial differences that none of us could anticipate or see
without this guiding hand.
YJ: So Proctor was in a situation where he kept you in that line where you could become
that…
WT: Right.
YJ: …and as a consequence pneumatology evolved at Duke Divinity School.
WT: That’s the way it works. And I guess the culmination of that would be the speech
that I made in the Chapel at—.
YJ: For the Fifty Year celebration [Fifty Years of African Americans at Duke University].
WT: Where the final word in that speech is just simply saying “Proceed.” And they use
that, they actually took that speech and they did some kind of—whatever they do with
holograms and all and had that word just reverberating to the generations of students
that have come. They showed the students coming through and in this quandary trying
to figure out which way to go and then had my image there projected on the screen
saying—doing excerpts from the speech—saying to them, ‘Proceed.’
Now, all of this, all of this is the narrative of a little boy from Henrico County
[Virginia] who’s in Randolph High School, a segregated black school, growing up in the
United Holy Church of America in the fifties and early sixties with no clue whatsoever
as to where life might take me, who I might see or meet. And looking back over it all
and being—and having to say without blinking my eye, “I had no plan for any of it.”
As a matter of fact, one of the reasons for the direction that I took is a football injury that
led to a knee operation which left screws in my knee. As a high school student I had
applied for a Navy ROTC scholarship and would have had it except for the
compromised knee. It was the knee that gave me the 4-F classification that ruled me
ineligible for military service. When I got here they tried to change it to 1-A, which
means you’re the first to go. When I discovered that, I went to see the dean and found
that the only other black male here at Duke from Richmond was in the exact same
thing, which made it appear to be a scheme of the draft board in Richmond. But, once
again, this keeps me from following an ROTC course and brings me back—.
YJ: On course.
WT: Well, yeah, on course to engineering. Now, the other piece in there—now I see all
of this stuff in retrospect. When I applied to Divinity School I had become thoroughly
enmeshed in the movement. And if I had to name the person who was most influential
for all of that it would be Fanny Lou Hamer.
YJ: Explain.
WT: Well, we had what we called Black Week in 1969, just before we took over the
Allen Building. One of the people who came that week was Fanny Lou Hamer, who
was a freedom fighter for Mississippi, a sharecropper on Senator Eastland’s plantation.
She walked with a limp. A deeply spiritual and powerful woman. I believe her roots
were Pentecostal. But any way, she led that Mississippi Delegation and they unseated
the Democratic regulars. I believe it was in the 1968 convention. Which is in part what
turned the southern whites against the Democratic Party and ushered them into the
Republican Party. But she made this speech where she literally convicted us and just
forced the issue. Where you were located, the opportunities you have, put a burden
and demand on you to do something, to do something significant, to help your people,
to bless your people, and on and on and on she went.
YJ: Where?
WT: Right there in Page Auditorium. That’s where she spoke.
YJ: That was before you took over the Allen Building.
WT: Before. It was in part what moved us to do it. We did it right after Black Week.
YJ: Within how much time of her speech?
WT: A couple weeks maybe. But that speech really is what radicalized us. And what
moved me to the point where I just simply could not give myself to engineering. Here’s
where I’m going with that. So I applied to the School of Engineering—I mean I applied
to Divinity School. One of the letters of reference came from Howard Wilkerson, the
same Howard Wilkerson that Proctor is in conversation with about the president who
said no Negro will preach [in the Chapel] except over his dead body, right? Alright, so
Howard writes me a letter—writes the letter. I think Philip Cousin wrote a letter too
but I know Howard wrote a letter. Howard wrote a letter and some other people. I had
no clue what the letter said. Twenty years later, I’m standing in Duke Chapel preaching
to the congregation—to the Convocation for Pastor’s School. I look out and I see
Howard.
YJ: Howard Wilkerson?
WT: Howard Wilkerson, the same Howard who wrote the letter twenty years later with
his arms folded, looking at me with an approving nod and an approving shaking of his
head. He came back by my office—because back then, at that time, I was I Dean of
Black Affairs, not the Director of Black Church Affairs—showed me a letter that he had
written twenty years earlier for my admission to Divinity School. Part of—in part the
letter said, to the Dean, right, to the Dean: “I can see why you may be a bit frightened of
him, as we all would be of any Negro militant. But I believe the young man is sincere
and would urge you to give him a chance.” Twenty years later he shows me that letter.
What I’m talking about here, again, goes back to the notion, the concept of, the
Zeitgeist—the Spirit guiding history. [shifting]
FILE: TURNER.ORAL.120613a
WT: Okay, Howard Wilkerson, he was the Minister to the University in the early to
mid-sixties. He wasn’t the Dean of the Chapel. The Dean of the Chapel was James
Cleland. But Wilkerson was the Minister to the University. And, like I said, he’s the
same one who invited [Samuel] Proctor to preach in Duke Chapel as the first African
American. Proctor writes about how he had heard the president had said no Negro
would preach here “except over my dead body.” And before he got up to preach he
asked Howard, “Is he dead?” Howard said, “Yeah, he’s dead.” “Where is he buried?”
“Sam, he buried right under your feet.”
Proctor was kind of like, to me kind of like, a father. He and my mother were
high school classmates, and he never called—he always called me just simply ‘Ruth’s
boy.’ So I am talking about these people who are positioned, situated, to do some
guiding and moving of my own life and career in ways that I couldn’t comprehend,
much less have anything—I had nothing to do with where they were located and how
they—. So that’s a sense in which you have a metaphor for how the Spirit guides and
directs and moves.
YJ: So in terms of speaking about the Spirit, is something about narrative theology
that—.
WT: Well I think what I would say there is, that’s precisely how we know the Spirit in
the Old Testament.
YJ: Through narrative.
WT: Yes. You don’t—. The Spirit is not abstract, not abstract from, not even a subject to
discuss and codify and regularize. But the Spirit is in the very tissue…
YJ: Of the story.
WT …of the story, just like the wind is moving in the air or like the current is running
the water, or like the dew that settles at night, or like the fire that burns and consumes.
These are the metaphors of the Spirit, right on the boundary between the visible and the
invisible to bring the life, vitality, and power of a world that you cannot see into the
world that you can see. The breath of life, the breath of God.
YJ: Haven’t you just made an argument, then, to contextualize your pneumatology
within your story?
WT: Well, I think you could very well do that.
YJ: Isn’t that an ideal way of presenting your pneumatology, to do so in the context of a
larger story in which the Spirit is moving history rather than dealing theoretically with
pneumatological language and trying to get people to understand?
WT: Well, I would agree with what you said in terms of the two levels. So instead of
saying ‘rather-than,’ I would say ‘both-and.’
YJ: Alright, keep going, keep talking about that a little.
WT: Yeah, because, like I say, on the one hand you have this intense, inseparable locus.
You have this locus of the Spirit but—and the Spirit is, it’s in the tissue, it’s in the
texture, it’s in the story. But then you cannot get away from your question that you
raised earlier, ‘How do you know this is the Spirit?’ ‘How do you recognize this as the
Spirit?’ You get in the Old Testament, for example,’ you get this language of “an evil
spirit from Yahweh.” Okay? So how do you decide, how do you know, what is the
good Spirit?
YJ: The Holy Spirit.
WT: Yeah, but it’s sometimes referred to as “the good Spirit.” “A good spirit was in
him,” I think that’s what it says about Joseph. A good Spirit—how do you know the
good Spirit, the Holy Spirit? The Spirit, how do you know that it’s guiding or calling to
God’s course? Because you do get that language of the evil spirit. Or you have this
reference to the Spirit of God coming upon Samson, where he pushes down the temple,
and the judges where they go in and—what do you call it?—and assassinate people.
And you get this evil spirit from the Lord that comes upon Saul, and the lying spirit
that gets in the mouth of the prophets. Okay? So how do you make these judgments?
And that’s where—.
YJ: Pneumatology.
WT: Yeah, that’s where the pneumatology comes in. When I look back in retrospect,
everything I did was not honorable. So how do I distinguish what was dishonorable
and what was moving me into the purposes and the will of God and the works of
justice? How do I make those judgments? That is where pneumatology comes in.
YJ: And what about—.
WT: So, because, when you look back, in retrospect, when I look back in retrospect—
hey, everything I did wasn’t honorable. I did some stuff that was raunchy.
YJ: Yeah, I think we all did.
WT: Okay, so now, how do I distinguish between the stuff I did that was raunchy and
the stuff I did that was moving me into the purposes of and the will of God and the
works of justice? How do I make those judgments? That’s where pneumatology comes
in, and that’s where this other discourse comes in. Because the second, more theoretical
discourse is already adumbrated, it’s already implied, in the first.
YJ: What do you mean?
WT: That is, how do I talk—. In other words, how did I link up those pieces? There is a
whole lot more to my life as a teenager, as a football player, as a rascal. There’s a whole
lot to it. So how do I link up the dots in order to talk about where the Spirit…
YJ: The good Spirit.
WT: …the good Spirit, the Spirit—. How do I name these particular—these acts? And,
in a sense, it gets back to the question that William Jones—the multivalent or multiequivalent ways of talking about this narrative. Yeah?
YJ: Because there are other sides to it.
WT: There are other sides to it. There are other sides to it. And in some ways even you
can talk about—you can even talk about the guiding hand of God even in the other side.
Here’s an illustration of the other side. A few years ago my son called me and said,
“Dad, she sent me an e-mail telling me she’s engaged. This was a little girl he was in
love with from undergraduate school. She wanted to get married. She was very
mature and ready to get married. He wasn’t ready and he knew it. So basically she was
telling him this is your last chance. She sent him the e-mail. So he’s down in the
mouth. Oh man, he’s—. He said, “I ain’t gonna tell you no lie, Dad, I’m down in Duke
Garden and got a fifth of Bacardi Rum.” I said to him, I said, “Now, son, let me tell you,
now put the bottle away ‘cause the bottle’s not your friend, but your daddy will be
there.” So I go down to Duke Garden. I walk into Duke Garden and look around the
Garden and I see him, and I say, “Oh, my God, I was in the same place forty years ago
with the same refreshments, ‘cause Bacardi was my favorite. Now, that’s a case in
which I would—I could talk about, you know, walking through Duke Garden with a
bottle of rum and turning it up in the Garden as an act of rascality. But in a broader
picture I can talk about those exploits as empowering me with intense and focused
knowledge for how to talk to my son.
So what I’m getting at is, there’s a sense in which the ‘ology’ of it, the logos, the
theoretical, if you will—that’s how you make decisions and judgments about how it is
that the Spirit is working. During all of those days that had that thick texture, that thick
historical texture that I did not even touch, what I distilled from it was how the hand of
God, the finger of God—. That’s another term used for the Spirit in the New
Testament—the finger of God, how the finger of God is directing and guiding. How—
how do I norm that? How do I norm and name the hand of God, the finger of God? Or
to use [Martin Luther] King’s term, the Zeitgeist, how do I name and norm the hand of
God in this thick, dense textured history as my story. How do I discern how the Spirit
is navigating God’s story through my life? What is the principle by which I can say, In
the midst of all this stuff, here is what God is doing so then the dots can be connected?
And that’s what pneumatology does, and that’s why you need both discourses.
YJ: Both discourses?
WT: Yeah, both the narrative but also—because now, see, in the way that I told the
narrative the other is implied.
YJ: What do you mean? The way you told the narrative? Oh, the way you—
WT: Yeah, and I made some judgments about how—.
YJ: The pneumatological is implied.
WT: It’s implied in that telling. Why’d I tell this and not that? Why’d I put the accent
here and not there?
YJ: I see. Good, good.
WT: Why don’t I major in the rascality? Or even if I talk about the rascality, why do I
talk about the rascality in a way that connects...
YJ: The dots.
WT: …with something, yeah, and that connects with something that’s redeeming?
YJ: I see. So, when you speak about, yes, the days when you were drinking rum in the
Garden, that rascality, you’re able to speak of that now in a redeeming way as regards
your son.
WT: Right.
YJ: Alright. So the Spirit—.
WT: And all this other, and not just my son, but there are so many areas of ministry
where I have an implicit knowledge of what to say and how to do because of what I’ve
done. So it’s not a celebration of the rascality, but there is a knowledge of the other, of
the location, of the data, of the detail in which people are found.
YJ: Alright. And the Spirit is—the Spirit plays what role in that language?
WT: The Spirit works. The Spirit works through that data, that detail, even the dirt and
the rascality, to give me insight and inside knowledge of what someone else is dealing
with, what people are or going through.
YJ: So the Spirit, then, is working retrospectively?
WT: Well, I would say—.
YJ: You’re not saying the Spirit—. Are you saying the Spirit was working then when
you were in that—those times of rascality, or are you saying that it is working
retrospectively in terms of your ability to use it?
WT: I would say both. I would say both. There are some ends to which I could have
come in that rascality that could have truncated and terminated everything that’s
redeeming.
YJ: I see. I see.
WT: There’s so much about my life that could have ended in the rascality. So the Spirit
is working both—working in the rascality to prolong, to protract…
YJ: Protect.
WT: …protect, lengthen out my days and bring me to a point where I can do something
redeeming. But, at the same time, now the Spirit gives me insight through the data, the
detail, the dirt, the rascality to know what to say, what to do, and how to reach others.
YJ: So relate this back to Joseph saying to his brothers, “You were doing wrong but
God—.
WT: Well it’s what’s called the doctrine of providence. The doctrine of providence—
God guiding human history or moving inside of human history for a purpose and an
end that the actors, that the players, they can’t even see.
YJ: What about if someone says, “Okay, the same was true of slavery. What do you say
to that—slavery, segregation, apartheid in South Africa…
WT: I would not disagree.
YJ: … colonialism?”
WT: I would not disagree. But I would say that the fact that God worked through this
dirt don’t mean it ain’t dirt.
YJ: I see. I see, I see.
WT: Even though God moved and situated and positioned people who were going
through evil doesn’t mean it wasn’t evil. Just ‘cause God tutored me in rascality don’t
mean I won’t a rascal.
YJ: I see what you mean.
WT: It’s kind of like the Fifth Dimension used to sing a song: “Surry down to a stone
soul picnic.” Part—one of the lines say: “Please don’t tell my mama that I’m a wine and
a moonshine lover.” Then they come back and they say: “Don’t let daddy hear it
because he don’t believe in the gin mill spirit.” So I’m not looking back on that stuff
and trying to paint it over or brush it over with some patina and to say that I was some
kind of little saint, no.
YJ: And what about Duke University? You have the history of segregation, and so
forth, against which you had to fight.
WT: Right, the same principle.
YJ: So speak of how the Spirit was involved in that in a redeeming way.
WT: Okay, yeah. Well, the same—. Now I would use myself as a case study but I could
also name other people as well.
YJ: Alright, start with yourself.
WT: Well, I‘ve already started with myself. I’ve talked about myself.
YJ: Okay, alright. I see, I see.
WT: Okay? But I could talk at length—I could talk about people like Brenda
Armstrong, Charles Beck, C. G. Newsome. I could go on and on and on naming people
who came through the cauldron and, in some cases, you know, had a touch of rascality.
Dan Blue, Melissa Harris Perry. I could just go on and—Ray Gavins. I could just go on
and on and on.
YJ: He [Gavins] went through Duke, he was a graduate?
WT: He wasn’t a graduate but came here straight out of graduate school and been here
almost fifty years teaching history—all the people that he’s taught, all the lives that
have been shaped. I could talk about the way in which the presence of black students
here has transformed this university. I could talk about the first four—Wilhelmina
Reuben, Nat White, Gene Kendall, Mary Mitchell. I can talk about them, and they can
tell their own stories about what they went through. It’s not to glorify the university.
It’s not to remove the tarnish, the stain. It’s not to proclaim some sort of pristine
history. It’s kind of like what I said in that (I don’t know if I sent that one to you or not)
but the speech that I did in the Chapel.
YJ: I want to get that.
WT: Okay. So it’s not like you are re-narrating or re-lecturing or tidying-up the story.
It’s not like you’re doing that. But this is a different read, how in the midst of all this
scrum and rum and grime and dirt, it’s kind of like Lou Rawls sung on “Tobacco
Road”: “I despise ya ‘cause you’re filthy but I love ya ‘cause you’re home.” But just
‘cause you’re home and I love ya don’t mean that ain’t filthy. You got skeletons, you
got dirt, you got all this kind of stuff. But that’s the nature of God’s story. God’s story
never requires pristine people or circumstances. And one of the biggest mistakes that
ever gets made in the day and age is to take a good outcome as an occasion for renarrating or re-lecturing in such a way as to take out the dirt.
YJ: To clean it up.
WT: Yeah. No, you don’t clean it up. God don’t need that. God don’t need any
cleaning the story up in order to show where the hand of God is at work. I think that is
one of the very valuable—that’s part of what’s so valuable about pneumatology, okay?
That pneumatology helps you to see how God is moving in the midst of a mess without
having to rename it and not claim it as a mess.
YJ: Why does pneumatology help you do that?
WT: It helps you do it because that’s the pattern that …
YJ: I see, from the scriptures.
WT: From the scriptures. That’s what you have in the incarnation. The incarnation is a
scandal.
YJ: In what way?
WT: Well, if you read it in Luke, the angel Gabriel comes to this little girl who ain’t
married and tells her she’s going to have a baby. She is deeply aware of the scandal.
Read Luke 1, she said: “Oh no, no, no, this can’t be, I have not known a man.” Or, “I’m
not that kind of girl. How in the world am I going to deal with this?” Scandal. The
angel says, “The Holy Ghost come upon you, the power of the most high will
overshadow you, the holy thing conceived in you shall be the son of God. And it goes
on and on with this. Then hear what he tells her. He says, “Okay, now, I know you got
a problem with this. I know you got a problem because of what I’m telling you. But
here’s how I’m going to help you. Go to your cousin, Elizabeth, ‘cause she’s in the same
shape.” Mind you now, he didn’t say “Go to your momma,” he didn’t say “Go to your
daddy” but “Go to your cousin who’s in a similar kind of situation.” And the text says
that when she walked in there Elizabeth said the baby leaped in her womb—gave her
the witness. She’s the one who strengthened Mary. Alright?
Now, from the other side, Matthew takes it from the other side—what Joseph is
dealing with. “My God, what in the world is I going to do. This girl is swelling, getting
a ‘baby-bump’ here, and I ain’t—I’m fittin’ to lose my honor.” He would have lost his
honor. In a matter of fact, he did. He lost his honor. And he was struggling with that
thing. He was having a hard time over the fact of losing his honor. And it says, “The
angel of the Lord comes to him in a dream and tells him, “Do not—what?—do not fear
to take Mary. ‘Cause I know it’s—I know what you’re thinkin’, bro,’ I know what
you’re thinking, I know what the boy’s gonna say ‘bout you.” ‘Cause he was studying
how to put her away quietly and not make a scene. ‘Cause the scandal was already
there, right? So the angel says, “Okay, tell you what’s going on. The child inside of her
is by the Holy Ghost.”
YJ: Then at the other end of that story, I guess, the crucifixion keeps it equally a
scandalous—.
WT: Right, absolutely, because Jesus is crucified as a criminal, as an insurrectionist, as a
threat to the Roman Empire. So it never gets tidy. It never gets tidy. But all along the
way, all along the way, here is the Spirit moving. And there’s a certain ‘sensus
numinous,’ a sense of the Spirit, that one derives only from reading the story and
watching the history and geography of the Spirit. There’s a certain sensitivity to the
history and the geography of the Spirit. And the only way you get it is from reason,
from projecting the way you think things ought to go. The logic of the Spirit comes—
out of the story. You can’t eliminate the story and get it. You can’t get it just from
reason, from projecting the way you think things ought to go. You can’t get it from
that. It comes—the logic of the Spirit comes out of the story. Ain’t no other way to get
it. But at the same time the story becomes something entirely different without it. Or,
to put it another way, all you have without the Spirit is history as human story. You
must have the Spirit in order to have God’s story. In order to have history as God’s
story you must have the Spirit. It is only by the Spirit that you have God’s story.
YJ: My question is, because of this tension, does the Spirit need—. Does it need—I don’t
know if ‘need’ is the proper word—but does it need that tension between good and evil.
My language is really faulty today but (I’ve been up since 2:30 a.m.), but it seems that
the Spirit kind of has some intentionality when it’s clearing a path or making a way or
making sense of this tension between good and evil, or something like that.
WT: Well, see, you get the discussion of that, or the discourse on that, in the New
Testament. In First Corinthians, is it First Corinthians 2, where Paul talks about the
Spirit as searching the deep things of God, the Spirit as knowing the mind of God and
navigating. Or you get it—and he’s probably drawing from this source as well—in
Proverbs, Proverbs 8 in particular, where you get the Spirit, if you will, the Spirit as this
wise woman. That’s the language that gets picked up in the New Testament—as this
wise woman who’s walking the streets giving wisdom, giving guidance, crying out,
calling out, directing. That just may even be where this notion of the Spirit as the guide
of history comes from, from this woman, this wise woman. She says, “I was with God
from the beginning of his ways. I know the ways of God, and I can guide you and
direct you. So you get this kind of—what shall we call it?—this inner history, this inner
history which is God’s story, which simply can’t be told, certainly without—. Certainly
it cannot be told with any consistency without the Spirit.
YJ: So, does that make Duke University a good story in which to speak of the Spirit?
WT: Well, I think you can do it at Duke. Quite possibly you can do it at other places
too. It’s just that in order to do it requires a certain sensitivity to how God’s story
moves inside of this larger story. The larger story, what, it’s money, it’s buildings, its’
the—
YJ: Yeah, power.
WT: It’s the power.
YJ: Privilege.
WT: Privilege. Or, to use another metaphor, we know Washington Duke, right? You
know about him and his millions and his empire. Few people know about Billy, Uncle
Billy. There is a picture of Uncle Billy over in the Washington Duke Hotel, but there’s a
story of Uncle Billy out at Duke Chapel Methodist Church. Uncle Billy was a Methodist
preacher. He was a circuit rider, a wild preacher. You could hear Uncle Billy down in
the woods at night praying. Now, here’s my question, and I don’t know the answer.
What kind of influence did Uncle Billy have on Washington? Okay, when the history of
the Dukes is told, Washington Duke and his sons are at the center. When the history of
Duke Chapel Church is told, Uncle Billy is at the center.
YJ: When the story of Duke Chapel is told, Uncle Billy—.
WT: Of this chapel is told, Washington is at the center. But Duke Chapel Church is told,
Uncle Billy is at the center.
YJ: Duke Chapel Church, okay.
WT: Over on Old Oxford Highway.
YJ: Okay.
WT: So that’s another way of talking about it, you know, how the Spirit—. So, when
you talk about Duke University, what spirit is operating, the spirit that’s in Washington
or Uncle Billy? Look, I preached for the 75th Founder’s Day, right? Nan [Nannerl]
Koehane asked me to preach. I preached at Duke Chapel. I used the text, I think it’s
Luke 17, the parable of the unprofitable servant. And I used the term, I called it,
‘kingdom calculus.’ And I said in kingdom calculus it is not possible to be profitable
‘cause everything you use belongs to someone else. God gives you everything. You
don’t own nothing. You don’t come up with nothing on your own. It’s all put in your
hand. And the most you can do is with what someone else has put in your hands, and
it has to do with what’s in your reach, what’s within my reach and what’s within your
hands. Alright, so I used that as the principle to level out the contribution between
Washington Duke and my granddaddy, who was a hod carrier when they were
building the original hospital. A hod is a tray that you put on your shoulder and you
balance it with a pole. And you put the bricks in the hod and climb up the scaffold.
That’s how the bricks were carried to the bricklayers, by men. Alright, so I put
Washington Duke and my granddaddy on the same level for their contribution. Now
here is the pneumatological principle, alright? After the service one of the
granddaughters—she was either grand or great-grand, I don’t know, but she’s a
granddaughter of Washington Duke—came into the chaplain’s office. Will Willimon
was the dean of the Chapel then. Came into the office in tears, and I’m saying to
myself, “What in the world have I done?” But you know what she said? She said,
“You’re right.” She said, “Granddaddy was a robber-baron. He had to do something
with his money or they would have taken it away. You read the story and see that he
tried to give the money to Princeton and Princeton wouldn’t take it. He found a little
school down at the edge of Randolph and Guilford Counties and moved that school
here and gave his name and his money. He had to do it, just like the Vanderbilts, the
Rothschilds, the Mellons.
YJ: And that was the beginning of Duke University?
WT: That’s the beginning of Duke University, when he moved that school from
Randolph County here to the edge of Orange and Durham Counties and put his money
and his name. What is my point? My point is that there is more than one way to
narrate a human story. You got human actors. A decision is made about how to tell it.
You could tell it—you could talk about the swindle, how the land from which the stone
came, how it was swindled from a black man. You could tell it as a story about how
tobacco built the school that is now smoke-free, okay? I chose to tell it, or choose to tell
it, as a story—and this is the language I used in that sermon—how God comingles the
efforts of unsuspecting partners. But also I choose to tell it now with pneumatology
giving the guiding light for how—for its best understanding.
A similar kind of theme is in the Old Testament where the Spirit is referred to as
the panim, or the presence of God, where Moses asks—. This is the root, this may even
be the root, of that whole notion of the Spirit as the guide of history. Where Moses says
to God, “Look, I’m not going any further unless you go with me. You going to have to
guide me and go with me.” That’s what you see in that story: the pillar of fire by night
and the pillar of cloud by day. They’re moving by the guidance of God. And he says,
Moses says, “I don’t want any angel, I want your presence. Unless your presence goes
with me, I ain’t goin’.” And God says, “Okay, I’ll give you my presence.” That’s what
the Shekinah is: the fire by night and the cloud by day. You get that picked up in the
hymn, “Guide me, O thou gracious—let the cloud and fiery pillar lead me.” Or the end
of the song, “Guide me”—the Spirit as the guide. So how do you read human history
looking for the ways in which God is the guide? Where is God guiding? How is the
Spirit guiding, guiding this history? What is your principle, your hermeneutic, your
principle for interpreting? What’s the thread?
YJ: Pneumatology is what gives you—.
WT: I’m offering pneumatology as the principle. You could use money, economics,
buildings, gifts. People write all kinds of—. Was it Bob Durden wrote a book, The
Dukes of Durham? Basically he follows the money and the power.
YJ: And what’s the difference between a book like that and a book that takes a
pneumatological approach? What would the world look like if we only had history as
written from the perspective of that author as opposed to history that’s written by a
pneumatologist? What would the world look like if that’s all we had? Do you
understand my point?
WT: I understand your point. I think back—African American history is a case in point.
There’s one way to write African American history as the story of what white folk did
to slaves, and that’s basically the kind of American history on which we read—
presidents, powerful white men. There’s a contest going on now in the academy in the
canon: What is the canon? Does it consist only of the story that is told by powerful
white men? Or are there other ways to tell the story? Do we need to hear some other
voices? This way of telling the story is, “Hey, listen to the Spirit’s voice.” Here’s one
example of how you can read it and see another data.
YJ: But, again the question: If you only have the history of the negative sort, the history
of power and privilege, and oppression and so forth, and you didn’t have that
redeeming history being told, what would our world look like? It seems like it would
be far worse if we didn’t have some hope, some source of faith.
WT: Look at Mandela. You can tell the story of Mandela as a story of what they did to
him. You could write a whole history of Mandela from the twenty-seven—was or
twenty-seven or twenty-nine years?—the twenty-seven years on Robbins Island. That’s
one way to tell his story. But, my God, how much more wonderful it is to see a man to
whom the whole world looks…
YJ: Because he’s overcome?
WT: …well, because he gives you a vision of hope for the human family. We don’t have
to be trapped in that morass, in that mire. They were talking today even about how
after, just after he was elected, the whole nation could have plunged into civil war, and
he says, “Hold it, let’s don’t go there.” And he holds back the tide.
YJ: So in a sense the pneunatological read of history can serve in that capacity...
WT: Sure.
YJ: …and does serve in that capacity.
WT: Right.
YJ: That without it the world literally could collapse in chaos because of hopelessness.
Is this an over—?
WT: No, it’s not an ‘over’ and it’s actually [Martin Luther] King’s notion, use of
Zeitgeist. It’s actually a—what shall I call it?—it’s a critique, a signification even, on
Hegel. Where Hegel sees history as the march of God but narrates it essentially around
themes of power—the Bismarcks , iron and blood, domination. So essentially what he
does, he says that when you look at the empires and the exploits and the works of the
powerful, what you see there is the hand of God, the guidance of God—a whole
different notion of the Geist, the Spirit. What you get with King is a quarrel, it’s
basically a quarrel with Hegel. Where is the Geist? Where is the Spirit moving? Is it
moving in the succession of empires, the march of the powerful and the wealthy?
YJ: Or is it moving where?
WT: Or is it moving in a course that follows liberation and justice? That’s the Old
Testament battle all over again. In Samuel, Kings, they’re not shy about saying that
such-and-such-and-such did evil in the sight of God. He was a king but did evil in the
sight of God and walked not in the ways of his father David. There’s a sense in which
this, what I’m talking about now, is—the Geist, the Spirit as the guide of history, this
prophetic way of reading history—is precisely what you get in the Old Testament, in
the historical books. Who is evil and wicked, and who walked in the ways of God? A
kind of discernment, judgment, is being made. The prophetic view, of course, is just
graphically demonstrated with the prophet who walks up to the king with his finger in
his face and tells him, “You disobeyed God. You got the power but judgment is
coming.” You see it there with Nathan and David. You see it with Elijah and Ahab.
You see it with Jeremiah and the sons of Josiah, over and over and over, where the
prophet is the spokesperson for God to tell the king and the nation the way that God
wants to move it. And, of course, you see it again with John the Baptist and Herod.
You see it with Jesus and Pilot.
YJ: In what you’re saying now fit the Divinity School, because you can read the history
of Duke University from these different perspectives. Where does the Divinity School
fit in there? Is it somehow a placement also? Would you see it that way?
WT: Well, I don’t know. I think you can—there are a number of ways you can do it.
One, you can look back at the original indenture that put the Chapel where it is and the
Divinity School beside it and preserved for the University this serious and significant
place for a School of Religion and a Divinity School. And the integration of the
university, you can see the significant pressure that comes from the Divinity School.
Now I don’t know that you can make it the Divinity School exclusively because you
have a similar kind of thing happening in the Law School and the Med School.
YJ: Both of them fighting for integration, or all three?
WT: All three of the professional schools leading the way.
YJ: Interesting. Say more about that, especially the Divinity School.
WT: Well, you have letters of petition going to the president and Board of Trustees and
one of the—there’s several people who are right in the eye of that storm. One was
Waldo Beach.
YJ: Professor, right? Waldo, I remember—.
WT: Waldo Beach, yeah. And I don’t know, I didn’t know—there were some others
involved too. I didn’t them. Beach I knew. But there’s a history there that can be
combed to find out who some of the other players were. [shifting]
END.