UCLA

In this paper I argue that asymmetries within and between persons or between expectations and outcomes are given salience as contingency in Charismatic Christian practice. Since Charismatic Christianity emphasizes the ubiquitous availability of supernatural empowerment and use of spiritual gifts to effect change, adherents are frequently faced with the problem of both experiencing the direction and power of a God that is absolute and all knowing, and contending with the fact that others can perceive the putatively same object in different ways, or even fail to perceive or respond to that power. Herein, I draw on narratives taken from interviews with Charismatic Christian participants to make three major points: First, that asymmetry often takes shape in Charismatic Christian settings as contingency, and that this contingency is the experiential basis for God's seemingly paradoxical intimacy and inaccessibility. Second, these asymmetries are the basis for an attitude wherein adherents qualify their experiences as coming from a finite understanding. As a result, adherents often bracket one or more aspects of their lived experience. In such cases, the result is an "inward move" in which adherent's bracket the external efficacy or commensurability of their experience. Third, I argue that the process of bracketing what is beyond their own embodied experience is, for these participants, a significant safeguard against disillusionment since it construes contingency as the experiential evidence of "meaning-to-come."