Dr. Keri Day delivers Sprunt Lectures at Union Presbyterian Seminary

‘Our current Christian dogmas and creed are just words about God, and often domesticate Christian faith’

by Beth Waltemath | Presbyterian News Service

Dr. Keri Day

“Theology is a trustworthy, yet incomplete enterprise. The revelation of God is ongoing in communities marked by diversity and alterity,” says Dr. Keri Day, who delivered the 112^th Sprunt Lecture series at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, this week. “God desires to be experienced and loved by us in the material worlds, not intellectually mastered by us, as our ideas can never exhaust divine reality,” said Day, who is the associate professor of Constructive Theology and African American Religion at Princeton Theological Seminary. Day is the author of four books and numerous articles and a fourth-generation preacher in the Church of God in Christ tradition.

From May 1-3, Day delivered the lectures on the theme of “Undomesticated Faith: A De-colonial Theology of Spirit” in the Watts chapel, a Tudor Revival hall built in 1896. Each of the four hour-long lectures opened and closed with prayers written by various faculty for the occasion and hymns played on a newly installed organ to a congregation of about 100 people. Between lectures, in-person attendees were invited to various alum gatherings featuring Dr. Ted Wardlaw, Dr. Hoffman Brown and Dr. Dawn Devries. The Rev. Dr. Kenyatta Gilbert preached during the opening and closing worship. On Tuesday evening, a farewell reception was held for the seminary’s president, the Rev. Dr. Brian K. Blount. Virtual registrants were invited to view the lectures and the worship services on Union’s YouTube channel, where they remain for public viewing.

Photo courtesy of Princeton Theological Seminary

Drawing on her most recent book, “Azusa Reimagined: A Radical Vision of Religious and Democratic Belonging,” and a manuscript in progress on a decolonial theology of spirit, Day challenged the epistemological (how we know what we know) and ontological (how we determine what exists) claims of Christian orthodoxy that have been used to colonize other cultures and dehumanize the most vulnerable.

“I am concerned that our current Christian dogmas and creed are just words about God, and often domesticate Christian faith,” said Day, who agreed with religious historian Charles Long that “dominant regimes of knowledge serve as a prison house of thought that facilitate dehumanization.” Knowledge dehumanizes when it abstracts and erases historical and material realities of the world. As a case study of this phenomenon, Day discussed the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, which began in 1906 led by the African American preacher, William Seymour. The Azusa Street movement is understood as the origin of the Pentecostal movement. According to Day, it had unique roots in slave religious practice. Black domestic workers and the urban poor were core influencers in the movement.

“The Azusa Street Revival was a transgenerational, trans racial and eventually global movement as Chinese, Mexican, German, Irish, Russian, white Americans and African Americans testified and worshiped together, often greeting each other by declaring, ‘I am saved, sanctified, and prejudice-removed,” said Day, who went on to explore the backlash of critique that the dominant culture and Christian preachers of the time rained onto the Azusa Street movement which lasted till 1915. Seymour’s own mentor, Charles Parham, called the way they practiced speaking in tongues and tarrying at the altar to be a dangerous type of hypnotism. Of this habit to dismiss what we do not understand as heresy in the past and the present, Day said, “I desperately want us to be released of this burden on the need to have the final say on divine reality.” Day identified this as a “colonial impulse” declaring how “it has led to all kinds of trauma and violence. And I think we must be intellectually honest about this as Christians.”

‘When the Spirit moves, it participates in an economy of disruption, interrupting the status quo with respect to dominating and traumatizing ways of knowing, being and living, revealing a God who desires radical communion and participation with us in the material world we inhabit, offering freedom and quality of life to us.’  — Dr. Keri Day

Drawing on her Pentecostal roots, with its embodied ways of accessing the Holy Spirt and of knowing God through those practices, Day sees “theology not as ‘a prison house of thought,’ but as a discursive space and practice of wonder and freedom.” On Tuesday morning after the congregation sang, “I Can Hear God in a Whisper,” Day described some of the particularities of worship in the Azusa Street Revival that resisted colonialist and capitalist narratives of dominance and disregard.

“The Spirit at Azusa attempts to forge a new way of being together which is an affront to the fragmented, divisive, racial logic and material practices of the day,” said Day who described the “built environment” and “sonic aesthetic” of Azusa Street:

“The barn-turned-church had cobwebbed ceilings, a dirt floor and handmade pews that felt like the church was more on a frontier than in a progressive city like LA. The musical instruments that were essential to their worship experience were either hand-created from household items such as washboards, or instruments that were donated after heavy use,” facilitating “a material environment that was seen as the waste of capitalism, the squalor of society,” said Day. “This is the power of the Spirit at Azusa. It reveals a God that seeks to reveal a new humanity at the sight of those most disenfranchised and marginalized at Azusa.”

In her third lecture, Day returned to explore “why it matters that God is revealed in the presumed waste of the world and what that means for how we talk about God.” She drew a connection to how our liturgical life functions as theology and explored the praise and prayer practices of glossolalia (speaking in tongues) and tarrying (preparing the way with prayer) within Azusa. For Day, these expressed a theology of the heart. “Theology of a heart involves practicing faith through divine encounter, learning who God is through yearning” said Day, as she drew on the work of theologian Dr. Wendy Farley to ask, “What if we come to know God through our desire for God?”

In her final lecture, Day invited the audience to consider the ethical and political stakes of reimagining God before inviting questions from the crowd. “When the Spirit moves, it participates in an economy of disruption, interrupting the status quo with respect to dominating and traumatizing ways of knowing, being and living, revealing a God who desires radical communion and participation with us in the material world we inhabit, offering freedom and quality of life to us.”

In its 112^th year, the Sprunt Lectures demonstrate that God and our talk about God is always reforming. Day’s final lecture affirms this spirit of wonder: “God desires to be experienced and loved by us in the material worlds, not intellectually mastered by us, as our ideas can never exhaust divine reality.”