Scholarship on African American religion may be seen as divided between purely historical work and work with normative interests. Christopher Hobson's book bridges this divide, addressing a favorite topic of normative scholars, prophecy, using a historical method. Most famously, but elusively, Cornel West extols the African American prophetic tradition, and locates himself within that tradition. While the label of prophecy has recently been used by some historians of African American religion, such as David Chappell and Edward Blum, and it has been theorized politically by such writers as Eddie Glaude and George Shulman, Hobson's is the first book to offer a careful, thorough examination of how prophecy was used by African American religious figures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hobson also treats seriously the religious, not just political, dimension of prophecy, focusing his study on Protestant church figures and attentive to theological context.

Sacvan Bercovitch's classical formulation of the jeremiad as a typically American political theological form takes prophecy to consist of a negative motion, calling out the nation's sins, coupled with a positive motion, pointing toward a better future. Hobson's typology adds texture. Did God have a covenant with African Americans, or with the nation as a whole? Had that covenant been broken? Does the prophet announce imminent destruction or does she announce imminent redemption? Hobson begins by helpfully distinguishing four types of prophecy, drawing on Biblical scholarship but attentive to his African American sources. The Exodus-Deuteronomy strand identifies African Americans with God's chosen people, in a covenant with God and bound by God's law, who are wandering in the wilderness but who have been promised freedom. The Isaiah-Ezekiel strand emphasizes turning away from sin toward righteousness. African Americans can help whites, or the United States as a whole, turn away from the sin of racism and towards equality. Thirdly, Hobson identifies a Jeremiah strand of prophecy, one that emphasizes the depth of a community's sins, a depth so great that destruction is necessary before redemption. Finally, there is the Daniel-Revelation strand, emphasizing the imminent end of human rule on earth and the imminent advent of God's rule on earth.

In the four main chapters of the book, Hobson examines how the four strands of prophecy are articulated, and intermingle, in African American Protestantism. The chapters are organized thematically rather than chronologically or typologically, addressing theodicy, the nation, millennialism, and the prophet's vocation. Each chapter draws on published sermons, speeches, articles, and other writings of a variety of church-related figures, with particular emphasis on four: the Presbyterians Henry Highland Garnet and Francis J. Grimké, the Episcopalian Alexander Crummell, and the AME editor and bishop Reverdy C. Ransom. Along the way, more well-known prophetic voices make appearances. Hobson explains the difference between Martin Delany's emigrationism and Frederick Douglass's constitutional faith as a difference in strands of prophecy, with Douglass committed to the possibility of turning the nation towards righteousness after an extended struggle. David Walker is classified as Jeremian, for he argues “that the nation is so immured in depravity as to be probably unreformable and that a day of destruction is close at hand” (85).

Among the virtues of Hobson's book is its exploration of prophecy as a component of African American ministry. He shows that the framework of prophecy can describe not only calls for liberation from slavery in the political arena or from the pulpit but also the pastoral task of entreating congregants to keep their faith in the face of adversity. Furthermore, Hobson demonstrates prophecy is attentive to its audience. Hobson shows how, after Emancipation, Alexander Crummell urged African Americans not to dwell on the past, but rather to acquire practical skills and building character. However, Crummell advised a white audience that equality was on the way through divine intervention, and he warned that the nation would be destroyed if it acts against God's will, refusing equality. Reading these speeches together, Hobson concludes that “these works remind us that the prophet's role was not always or necessarily liberating in an immediate sense” (107).

Frances Watkins Harper's Moses: A Story of the Nile (Philadelphia: Merrihew & Son Printers, 1869), seemingly a prime example of Exodus-Deuteronomy style prophecy, is not mentioned in Hobson's book. Nor is Anna Julia Cooper's powerful A Voice from the South (Xenia, Oh.: Aldine Printing House, 1892), the first chapter of which was delivered to Episcopal clergy. Throughout Hobson's book, the presence of African American women is very limited. He tells us this is “due partly to the almost complete exclusion of women from ministries and higher church positions in this epoch” (xvi), but it would have been interesting to explore whether women's voices, for example, in denominational magazines of the period would have inflected our understanding of prophecy. (Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp has convincingly shown how such writings in this period shift our understanding of African American sacred histories.)

Hobson claims that we ought to view integrationist African Americans as the real radicals because of the transformative potential of their prophetic language, and because of the work for justice that integrationist prophecy has impelled. The possibility of turning the United States around, bending it towards righteousness, motivates action. This foray into normative conclusions is less compelling than Hobson's historical explication, and it obscures a much more complicated political landscape. The movement led by Marcus Garvey, for example, certainly motivated action, but could hardly be classified as prophetic integrationist. Furthermore, the prophetic invocations of a higher law that motivated John Brown, and Frederick Douglass's support of the Harpers Ferry raid, strain the limits of prophetic integrationism. One of the tasks that remains for future scholarship is to examine the mutual influence of African American and white prophecy. Gregg Crane's Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Caleb Smith's The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), both on white invocations of a higher law in the nineteenth century, complement Hobson's explication of the higher law component of prophecy, yet there is no dialogue between these works.