C. Douglas Weaver, Professor of Baptist Studies at Baylor University, has written a masterpiece. Not just a story of select ‘bapticostals’, a term for those Baptists influenced by Pentecostal practice in the twentieth century, Weaver argues that inherent within the Baptist tradition has been a concern for both biblical authority and ‘Spirit-led experience, an experiential piety in search of direct encounters with God’ (p. xvi). This ‘Word/Spirit/experience’ religiosity constituted a powerful source of both conflict and change in the recent history of Baptists and wider Christianity, as his twenty rich chapters illuminate.

Despite the broad title, Weaver's scope is generally limited to the twentieth-century United States. He proceeds chronologically, thematically and episodically, organising the narrative into three sections: the American Holiness movement after 1850, Pentecostalism after 1906 and the Charismatic Movement after 1960. The third section on charismatic developments goes up to the present day, including denominationally focused chapters on Southern Baptists and American Baptists, as well as material on the Shepherding and Third Wave controversies. For his sources, Weaver draws upon popular and theological treatises on the Holy Spirit, denominational newspapers and other periodicals, and biographical accounts. In each chapter, under separate subheadings, he discusses a sampling of representative figures, groups, publications and periodicals. This is helpful, given the dizzying array of detail and Baptist denominations that outsiders (perhaps even insiders) would have to keep track of otherwise. There are familiar Baptist faces – William Bell Riley, John R. Rice, Charles Stanley etc. – alongside lesser-known personalities, for example Joseph Smales, who preceded the Azusa Street revival with a Spirit renewal movement at First Baptist Church, Los Angeles. There is discussion of famous Pentecostals and charismatics with Baptist pedigrees, such as Aimee Semple McPherson, William Branaham, Pat Robertson and James Robison.

One of the most significant takeaways from Weaver's study is the Keswick movement's sustained influence on twentieth-century Baptists. Indeed, the ‘higher’ or ‘deeper life’ teaching originating in the 1850s Holiness Movement has cast a long shadow on all American-Evangelical Protestantism. Yet, historians have tended to neglect its ongoing influence, fuelling the misconception that every post-World War II utterance about the Holy Spirit was explicitly ‘charismatic’ rather than a vestige of older piety. As Weaver notes, although theologians and denominational leaders debated the exact process of sanctification, the emphasis of the late nineteenth-century Holiness Baptist A. J. Gordon on being ‘filled with the Spirit’ and ‘endued with power’ for evangelism resurfaced in the Broadman-published author Jack Taylor's writings of the 1970s and 1980s. During this era, Keswick-style spirituality, not just inerrancy, impelled Southern Baptist conservatives to oust liberals from denominational leadership. Some -- but not all -- of these continued to reject charismatic beliefs out of a cessationist dispensationalism. Fortunately, Weaver does not dedicate too many pages to the over-analysed, over-politicised controversy. Instead, he demonstrates that Southern Baptists were arguing over more than simply the Bible's authority, as tensions mounted over what an authoritative, inerrant Bible taught about the continuation of spiritual gifts.

Weaver addresses women and African-Americans together in two out of his twenty chapters –‘Gender and race in the Baptist Holiness Movement’ and ‘Gender and race in the Baptist Charismatic story’. These chapters are welcome, although one wishes each category received fuller, individual treatment, rather than being discussed together. Fortunately, he continues the discussion of women in an additional chapter on ‘Women preachers’ and in other female case studies throughout the text. Weaver demonstrates that many conservative Baptists’ evaluations of supposedly Spirit-led revivals were bound to their views of biblical gender roles and sexual purity. The 1904 Welsh revival, for example, garnered much Baptist support -- but it and other pre-Azusa, Holiness revivals elicited criticism when women evangelists took the stage. During the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, the fundamentalist paragons John R. Rice and J. Frank Norris were both initially sympathetic to the Pentecostal desire and drive for end-times evangelisation. However, once McPherson's character came into question, a chastened Norris condemned Rice's continued support for faith healing and anointing with oil. Decades later, in 1975, the firebrand preacher of First Baptist Church, Dallas, W. A. Criswell, won applause for branding glossolalia a false movement propagated by unruly women. Yet, Weaver argues, it was a woman speaker, Bertha Smith, who ‘surely influenced’ the deeper life movement of the same decade (p. 268). Smith, a former missionary who had witnessed the charismatic 1927 revival in Shantung, China, denounced tongues and distanced herself from Pentecostals while still promoting divine healing and other supernatural phenomena.

Although Weaver's study is largely restricted to one country and one denomination, he connects the material to broader developments in recent Evangelical history. For example, Weaver brings the Southern Baptist-ordained Billy Graham into his analysis, rightly observing that both Graham's autobiography (Just as I am) and Grant Wacker's recent biography (America's pastor) omitted or minimised earlier accounts of the evangelist's post-conversion, Keswick-style experiences with the Holy Spirit, especially the one guided by the British Baptist preacher Stephen Olford in the 1940s. Although there is no solid evidence that Graham spoke in tongues, Weaver notes that he attested to additional ‘anointings’ during his ministry, worked alongside Penteostals and frequently called his audiences to seek the Spirit's infilling. The Graham vignette, combined with Weaver's discussion of the Southern Baptists’ conservative ‘takeover’, speaks to the ongoing historiographical debate over the relationship between the Southern Baptist Convention and northern, American Evangelicals.

Weaver's final chapters analyse contemporary developments with global ramifications, including the 1980s–1990s ‘Third Wave’ or ‘Signs and Wonders’ movement and twenty-first-century debates over missionary candidates’ use of tongues. Weaver highlights the role of the Baptist-turned-Vineyard pastor Randy Clark in the ecstatic, controversial 1994 Toronto Blessing, during which attendees purportedly were ‘slain in the Spirit’, as marked by outbursts of holy laughter and even animal sounds. Baptists’ engagement with the Holy Spirit has not been a clear-cut case of agreement or disagreement with the continuation of spiritual gifts after the apostolic era. Indeed, it has been the particularity of gifts and their relative priority in evangelism and Christian life which has created new ministries and debates. Some Baptists firmly rejected tongues but accepted divine healing, while others credited visions or demonic encounters for their embrace of charismata. In more recent years, the pursuit of Spirit-empowered evangelism and deeper spiritual life have become relatively mainstream. Replete with examples, Weaver's excellent history shows that one Spirit and one tradition (Baptist) have produced a diversity of gifts and interpretations.