Reading Joseph Tonda’s Postcolonial Imperialism forced me to think against myself and to reassess my own dazzlement. For too long, I have subconsciously focused on how to escape postcolonial dazzlement. Reading Tonda forced me to question not only my scholarship but also my very existence. I have become deeply concerned that the ways in which I preach the gospel and theologise existence might themselves constitute another form of dazzlement. Reluctantly, I have begun to ask what kind of relationship I have with dazzlement. I fear that I am not as distant from dazzlement as I have assumed. I need to reexamine my own entanglement with dazzlement as I may, in fact, be witched by a dazzling Christology of empire.
In a world where it has become increasingly easy to employ such dazzling grammars as postcolonial critique, hybridity, decolonisation, emancipation, the Global South, and, more specifically, African epistemologies, Africanisation, contextualisation, feminist critique, and Black theologising, it is all too easy to become blind to our own postcolonial and theological dazzlements. Thinking through the philosophy of dazzlement has made me realise that resistance to empire, the global coloniality of power and being, racism, sexism, homophobia, ecological domination, and related forms of oppression cannot simply produce alternative spectacles.
As Tonda demonstrates, Pentecostalism and its digitised pneumatological spectacles are among the most spectacular forms of dazzlement in Africa. Many congregants cannot even distinguish the Spirit from pneumatological representations such as wind, fire, tongues, oil, water, miracles, revival, ecstatic speech, prophetic performance, and emotional intensity. Pentecostalism may be an extreme case, but it is not unique. Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, African Initiated Churches (AICs), and even many political movements all in diverse ways generate their own pneumatological spectacles.
I understand this places political theology in a difficult position. I do not intend to resolve the question of how political theology, or any discipline at all, might unmask, resist, or dismantle dazzlement without either becoming entangled in its logic or, worse, fabricating another form of dazzlement. What is clear reading Tonda is that political theology must be conscious and intentional about critiquing “postcolonial imperialism” while appreciating that every human critique is itself historically situated.
Pauline Epistemology of Blindness and Roman Imperial Dazzlement
In the imperial Roman world, dazzlement was an imperial technology of domination. It was not merely an epistemological inaccuracy or visual excess; it was an apparatus for constructing a world in which the empire determined what could be seen, believed, feared, and desired. Spectacle was constitutive of power: crucifixions were public performances designed to communicate Rome’s absolute sovereignty; triumphal processions transformed conquest into civic celebration; imperial cult statues made the emperor’s presence omnipresent; and the monumental architecture, coins bearing the emperor’s image, military parades, and civic rituals all contributed to a politics of dazzlement.
These were not isolated images but elements of a coherent systems of symbolic domination that did not simply conceal reality but sought to determine what counted as real. Thus, the idea of Pax Romana was not just a political achievement; the spectral eclipsed reality. The violence that produced peace was concealed by the spectacle of peace itself. Scholars argue that public executions and the overtaxation of subjects paradoxically both displayed violence and naturalised the imperial order that violence secured.
Judaism was never practised outside this imperial visual regime. Paul lived within Rome’s symbolic order and simultaneously inhabited the religious world of Second Temple Judaism. Even if Paul resisted aspects of Roman religion, his symbolic world was already saturated by imperial dazzlement. The imperial spectacles were not merely means to demonstrate Roman power; they were part of an imperial apparatus for producing a world in which Roman power appeared natural, inevitable and peaceful. Paul’s interpretation of law, messiahship, citizenship, honour, and shame was shaped within an empire that constantly staged its own legitimacy through images.
I am not claiming that Paul’s Judaism was reducible to Roman ideology. I am saying that Paul’s theological imagination was constructed in constant negotiation with imperial dazzlement. Thus, the Damascus event was significant as it exposed Paul’s theological captivity and vulnerability to Roman imperial dazzlement. The dazzling light Paul encountered was not simply a miraculous phenomenon. It disrupted an existing economy of dazzlement. He encountered the light that cannot be assimilated, remains irreducible to the logic of spectacle, and exposes inadequacies of every spectacle, challenging their claim to provide a final account of reality.
This makes Paul’s blindness especially significant. In the imperial Roman world where “seeing was believing,” where seeing was a mode of political domination and formation, where monuments, rituals, executions, and images enchanted subjects and determined what they perceived as “real,” Paul lost the very faculty through which imperial reality had been inscribed upon his vision. Paul’s blindness is not merely physical but relational, political, and theological. It completely suspends participation in the imperial visual regime. Paul’s conversion may be interpreted as a rupture in the imperial regime of perception.
In contrast, Thomas declared, “I will not believe unless I see” (John 20:25). Like many formed within the dazzling logic of imperial power, Thomas assumed that seeing guarantees truth. He did not see because, for him, “seeing” was the measure of truth. Jesus subverted such visual epistemology: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29).
Blindness did not remove Paul from dazzlement. Rather, it made a fracture in the imperial visual regime, introducing within it an optional mode of unseeing in which reality is no longer guaranteed by spectacle or sight but by the person of Christ. This theological tension is clear when Paul writes, “For now we see through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12). Knowledge of, through, and in Christ is real, but incomplete.
In this way, the blind theologian is not someone who has escaped the dazzling field of empire, but one whose blindness has created a rupture within the political economy of dazzlement, becoming blind to the power of dazzlement to define and determine reality. The Damascus event does not merely replace one dazzlement with another. It exposes Paul’s inability to recognise the regime of vision in which he was already participating.
Towards a Theology of Blindness
If one is not careful, one may read Tonda’s Postcolonial Imperialism as expressing a defeatist or Afropessimist position. However, within the dazzlement of his pages lie traces or hints of redemption. If we take his argument seriously, the task of political theology within postcolonial imperialism is not to achieve a position outside postcolonial imperial dazzlement, but to cultivate a theology of blindness that interrupts the authority of dazzlement itself.
A theology of blindness can draw from Pentecostalism, where believers inhabit the world of images, powers, and spectacles through the power of the Holy Spirit so that they do not become the final account of what is real. I must be cautious here. Pentecostalism and its “tongues of fire” are not immune from dazzlement. Since I write from an African Pentecostal theological perspective, I must ask: In what ways can a theology of blindness enable us to rethink the Spirit and Christ within postcolonial imperialism so they are not immediately reduced to spectacle?
This question is significant because the Spirit and all signs through which the Spirit is perceived and articulated are encountered within conditions of mediation. Every human claim to represent, identify, or secure the Spirit remains vulnerable to religio-ideological capture. The actual Spirit never appears as a stable object of human perception: it always-already exceeds spectacle.
Many Pentecostal expressions of Christian can be understood as becoming entangled in a “metaphysics of presence” because they emphasize God’s immediacy, the transparent work of the Spirit, and the desire for concrete nearness to God through signs. Such signs, while having a place in spiritual life, risk granting privileged status to a conception of God confined within the absolute now—the immediacy of the present moment and the experience of the “living present.” In this sense, there emerges a kind of Pentecostal existential-spiritual amnesia or forgetfulness that the sign is never the Real it reveals.
The Spirit, then, is the excess that incessantly disrupts every attempt to identify Christ completely with any spectacle.The Spirit is the principle of uncontainability and not epistemic certainty. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he argued, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going” (John 3:8). As Jean-Luc Marion argues, revelation is not something graspable, but something that overwhelms without ever satisfying the desire for mastery. The moment a Pentecostal preacher says “the Spirit is here” or “I can sense the Spirit” or “I can feel the presence of the Spirit descending like a dove,” or anointing people with oil, dazzlement has already begun.
I am unconvinced that no spectacular can ever eclipse, exhaust, enclose, or subdue the Real. The Real is the Person of Christ. And Christ always exceeds every spectacle. The Real never disappears. We who have been blinded by and, therefore, to dazzlement cannot see the Real. Thus, no regime of dazzlement is final or absolute.
The biblical witness shows that there remain fissures or cracks within all regimes of dazzlement through which the Spirit interrupts the ordinary. We have read this throughout the Bible: footsteps in the cool of the day (Gen. 3), the great deluge (Gen. 6), disrupting linguistic oneness (Gen. 11), destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19), burning bushes in the wildernesses (Exodus 3), gentle whispers in the silence (1 Kings 19), virgin birth, the cross and empty tomb (Gospels), Pentecost (Acts 2), Damascus events (Acts 9, 22, 26) and many other moments unfolding within the fabric of everyday life.
Even as I outline these everyday active and dynamic divine cracks in all regimes of dazzlement, I am also mindful of Eboussi Boulaga’s argument for a “Christianity without fetishes.” Too often, even these cracks may come to function as a system of fetishised dazzlement that substitutes religious representations, structures, and symbols for the living encounter with God. Even in recognising these fissures through which the Real may be glimpsed, we must still ask: how do the living Christ and the Spirit of God elude every spiritual, political, and cultural spectacle that claims to reveal them?
The fundamental problem, therefore, is not that dazzlement encloses and eclipses the Real, but the theological blindness to dazzlement itself. What Tonda’s philosophy of dazzlement helps me, even partially, to recognise is that for epistemic certainty we do not require ever more dazzling visions, including spiritual ones such as Christ appearing in dreams, angelic visitations, miraculous signs, or other spectacular manifestations. Nor should the Spirit be perceived as an epistemic guarantee, as though pneumatological discernment were a possession that finally resolves the ambiguity of human existence. What appears to be required is neither a more compelling spectacle nor a counter-spectacle of resistance, but a theology of blindness to dazzlement itself. This is a kind of dispossession of the gaze that may open us to the inexhaustible presence of the Person of the Real, who, in Christ, and forever exceeds every spectacle.
Thus, a political theology of blindness demands faithfulness to the Person of Christ without confusing Christ with any representation of Christ—including theology’s own representations. This is not to separate Christ from Scripture, for Christ is the incarnate Word to whom Scripture bears faithful witness. Rather, it is to recognise that Christ always exceeds the concepts, images, and formulations by which theology seeks to confess Christ. Therefore, theology while blind remains faithful to the One who cannot be reduced to human seeing, language, or even theology. It is a theology of humility because it recognises that truth is the Person of Christ who cannot be reduced to possession, control, or visibility.
