Renovating the Building versus Restoring the Foundations: The Need for Pentecostal Liturgical History

An analogy will help to describe how the current Pentecostal scholars have engaged their tradition’s worship. In the eighteenth century, numerous artists lived in Rome whose vocation (and source of income) lay in making visual recreations of the ancient city and in restoring its newly uncovered artifacts. Despite Rome’s importance as the seat of papal authority, it had survived since the fifth century as a vast and sprawling ruin occupied by a population 3 percent of its previous size at the pinnacle of the Roman Empire. In the eighteenth century, the transformation of history and archaeology as disciplines, as well as ongoing scholarly debates about the authority of antiquity, generated a new and lively interest in how ancient Rome had looked. The artists who served this need had to be proficient archaeologists. They needed to ensure that their historical recreations were faithful depictions of what had been. Archaeology helped artists to understand the layout of the ruins, the way in which these buildings would have functioned, and the techniques and decorative motifs that would have informed their construction. However, archaeology by itself was not enough. Artists also needed to be architects. Architecture enabled artists to create functional three-dimensional depictions of the buildings that accomplished the creative conjectural leaps necessary for converting the existing ruins into functional blueprints. One of these artists was an architect called Giovanni Batista Piranesi (1720–1778), a prolific producer of historical recreations throughout his career. It was not for his historical images that Piranesi is best remembered though. Instead, Piranesi’s most enduring legacy came through his 1745 creation of a collection of fourteen images that depicted an imaginary prison. This collection was called Carceri d’invenzione (commonly referred to as The Prisons). The prisons that Piranesi envisioned were colossal in scale. From the vantagepoint of the viewer, the prisons’ innumerous staircases, archways, vaults, walkways, beams, and pillars stretch out endlessly. The purpose or function of these prisons are, however, unclear. “The staircases lead nowhere, the vaults support nothing but their own weight and enclose vast spaces that are never truly rooms... Below them, on the floor, stand great machines incapable of doing anything in particular, and from the arches overhead hang ropes that carry nothing.” It is the grandiosity of scale juxtaposed against its oppressive purposelessness that gives The Prisons the power to haunt and intrigue. Piranesi’s Prisons were a unique artistic vision for this period. While architectural fantasists had previously existed, none had explored a single symbol at such depth nor had used architectural scale to generate drama to the extent accomplished by The Prisons. However, while The