The Pentecostal Art of Anatheism: Response to Richard Kearney’s “God Making: Theopoetics and Anatheism”

Bringing Richard Kearney’s anatheisti philosophy into conversation with Nimi Wariboko’s account of African Pentecostal praxis, the paper argues that Pentecostal spirituality harbors a radical theological grammar beneath its confessional orthodoxy. Through the category of the “split God,” it shows how everyday Pentecostal practices fracture and recombine the divine, generating a non-holistic, internally cracked image of God that mirrors an ontologically incomplete world. Rather than dismissing this as incoherence, the essay reads it through Kearney’s notion of anatheism—faith after the collapse of ontotheology. Pentecostalism emerges as a lived oscillation between theism and atheism, transcendence and immanence, sacred and secular. Its God is neither the classical omnipotent sovereign nor a simple projection of desire, but a figural, operational divinity forged in praxis and sustained in performance. This fractured divinity carries ethical force. The split God destabilizes absolutism and gestures toward hospitality, pluralism, and openness to the stranger. What appears as excess—prosperity rhetoric, spiritual instrumentalization, ecstatic practice—also encodes an unthematized return to God-after-God.Pentecostalism, read anatheistically, becomes a site where belief trembles, breaks, and risks beginning again.