Baptists and the Holy Spirit

The Contested History with Holiness-Pentecostal-Charismatic Movements

by C. Douglas Weaver

Published by: Baylor University Press

Imprint: Baylor University Press

Sales Date: 2019-06-15

589 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 x 1.62 in

Hardcover
9781481310062
Published: Monday, 1st Jul 2019

$74.99

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Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

The record is clear that Baptists, historically, have prioritized conversion, Jesus, and God. Equally clear is that Baptists have never known what to do with the Holy Spirit.

In Baptists and the Holy Spirit, Baptist historian C. Douglas Weaver traces the way Baptists have engaged—and, at times, embraced—the Holiness, Pentecostal, and charismatic movements. Chronicling the interactions between Baptists and these Spirit-filled movements reveals the historical context for the development of Baptists’ theology of the Spirit.

Baptists and the Holy Spirit provides the first in-depth interpretation of Baptist involvement with the Holiness, Pentecostal, and charismatic movements that have found a prominent place in America’s religious landscape. Weaver reads these traditions through the nuanced lens of Baptist identity, as well as the frames of gender, race, and class. He shows that, while most Baptists reacted against all three Spirit-focused groups, each movement flourished among a Baptist minority who were attracted by the post-conversion experience of the "baptism of the Holy Spirit." Weaver also explores the overlap between Baptist and Pentecostal efforts to restore and embody the practices and experiences of the New Testament church. The diversity of Baptists—Southern Baptist, American Baptist, African American Baptist—leads to an equally diverse understanding of the Spirit. Even those who strongly opposed charismatic expressions of the Spirit still acknowledged a connection between the Holy Spirit and a holy life.

If, historically, Baptists were suspicious of Roman Catholics’ ecclesial hierarchy, then Baptists were equally wary of free church pneumatology. However, as Weaver shows, Baptist interactions with the Holiness, Pentecostal, and charismatic movements and their vibrant experience with the Spirit were key in shaping Baptist identity and theology.

Search every Baptist library you can find and you will not discover anything comparable to this well-written, groundbreaking history on the interaction of the Baptist people with those Christians who lay great stress on the Holy Spirit. Weaver tells us what we did not know, and he describes what we did not expect. Arguing that personal experiential faith unites the two groups, he also notes that interpretation of that experience often divides the parties. Impressive, skillful, and relevant.
~Walter B. Shurden, Minister at Large, Mercer University

A comprehensive and riveting account of the complex relationship of Baptists to the charismatic movement. Attentive to issues of gender, race, and economic class, Weaver has illuminated key competing threads in Baptist and Pentecostal theology which sought to delineate ‘Who is most faithful to the New Testament?’
~Molly T. Marshall, President and Professor of Theology and Spiritual Formation, Central Seminary

C. Douglas Weaver’s Baptists and the Holy Spirit is the definitive account of Baptists’ responses to Pentecostalism and its immediate antecedents and successors. The book is a model of learned, judicious scholarship, but it reads like a thriller. If you have assumed that Baptists, with their intense commitment to personal religious experience, unreservedly welcomed the equally experiential Pentecostalism, this book will constrain you to revisit that assumption.
~Fisher Humphreys, Professor of Divinity, Emeritus, Samford University

Oftentimes books of genius are unpredictable, confounding, and cut across the grain of inherited wisdom. Those adjectives describe Douglas Weaver's tremendously important institutional and intellectual history of Baptist interactions with Holiness, Pentecostal, and Charismatic waves of Christian thought. Whatever glib assumptions readers bring to this book will quickly be dispelled by the reality that unfolds in its pages.
~Wayne Flynt, Professor Emeritus of History, Auburn University

Doug Weaver’s lively prose narrates an absorbing and surprisingly diverse tale of holiness and charismatic Baptists, or bapticostals. The book corrects an imbalance in Baptist scholarship, which has tilted toward the Calvinist side of the story, often leaving African Americans and women behind, but it also shows how Baptists shaped Pentecostalism. Scholars arguing between the pentecostalization or the baptistification of American religion will discover a masterful work that brings these two seemingly disparate worlds together, complicating previous assumptions.
~Elizabeth Flowers, Associate Professor of Religion, Texas Christian University

Weaver paints a vivid and illuminating picture of the complicated relationship between Baptists and the Holiness, Pentecostal and Charismatic movements.
~Ken Camp, Baptist Standard

Weaver covers the entirety of the Baptist tradition and the various embodiments of Baptist identity such as Southern Baptists, Black Baptists, and American Baptists. The research is thorough and the text is engaging. Weaver is to be commended for this important work.
~Choice

Few works have the power to be instantly recognized as not only a singular, self-contained work of painstaking scholarship, but also as a potential spark for several future research projects. Weaver's Baptists and the Holy Spirit is one of these few works.
~João Chaves, Baptist History and Heritage Journal

C. Douglas Weaver, Professor of Baptist Studies at Baylor University, has provided the definitive historical account of the relation of Baptists to the Holiness-Pentecostal- Charismatic movements. He has filled a gap that has surprisingly existed in the studies of these movements for over a century. Weaver’s volume of more than 500 pages takes its place alongside similar landmark works such as Vinson Synan’s The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century (Eerdmans, 1997) and David Edwin Harrell, Jr.’s All Things Are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America (Indiana University Press, 1975). Influenced by Harrell, Weaver’s history evinces the same meticulous scholarship combined with a lucid and engaging narrative that one finds in Harrell’s history as well as his authoritative biography, Oral Roberts: An American Life (Indiana University Press, 1985)."(Indiana University Press, 1985).
~Larry Hart, Spiritus: ORU Journal of Theology

Baptists and the Holy Spirit will be a good resource for students of Baptist history and also for students of the Holiness-Pentecostal-Charismatic movements. It could even serve as a primary text for an advanced course in Baptist history or used alongside other texts for an advanced course on the historical-theological development of the Holiness-Pentecostal-Charismatic movements.
~Karen Lucas, Pneuma

The research contained in this volume is simply magnificent.
~Jeffrey P. Straub, Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal

Baptists and the Holy Spirit will be very valuable for anyone interested in Baptist history, Pentecostal history, and American religious history. It will also make a great text for graduate seminars in these fields. This thorough, clear, well-written, lively, and enjoyable masterpiece of American religious history makes a unique contribution to scholarship, in that the details of the interactions within it have rarely been discussed in previous literature.
~Francis X. Gumerlock, Fides et Historia

…A masterpiece.
~Amber Thomas, Journal of Ecclesiastical History

…Doug Weaver offers the best analysis of how Baptists have responded to practical pneumatology available in a single volume. It is nothing short of an amazing feat.
~Keith Harper, Church History

In addition to his basic (and convincing) argument, Weaver’s work is a rich compendium of information, and may well be used as a gateway for further research into individual episodes in this history.... Weaver’s book is clearly the fruit of many years’ work and will be of value to anyone concerned with the lively question of the place of the Holy Spirit in Baptist life.
~Scott Kohler, Journal of European Baptist Studies