In this irenic intellectual history Carole Spencer presents Quakerism as distinctively embodying the mystical core of Christianity. Illustrating relations between liberal silence-based and evangelical sermon-based Friends, she argues that throughout its history Quakerism has been centered on holiness. Defined as union with God through balancing apophatic and kataphatic mysticism, holiness is evident in early Friends' communal worship. Beginning in “deep [apophatic] silence beyond words and thoughts,” it ends “in a luxuriant [kataphatic] cascading of religious images” (31).

Unlike previous evangelical Quaker historians, Spencer seeks to recover the mystical essence of Quakerism for evangelical Friends while beckoning liberal Friends to reconsider Christ's centrality from its beginnings. Christ-centered Quaker holiness, she insists, issues in orthodox beliefs. Applying a grid (Scripture, Eschatology, Conversion, Charisma, Evangelism, Mysticism, Suffering, Perfection), she shows the presence of holiness in thinkers of each phase of Quaker thought, assessing their divergence toward non-orthodox mysticism or non-mystical orthodoxy.

With this focus she traces continuities between mid-seventeenth-century Quaker origins, late nineteenth-century revivalism, and twentieth-century evangelicalism; assesses imbalances of the 1827 Orthodox-Hicksite split; and identifies holiness not only in evangelicalism but in parts of liberal-modernist thought. Insisting that forms of worship are unimportant, she affirms the value of orthodox holiness whether in silence- or sermon-based services.

Quaker history is complex and since 1827 riven with divisions between evangelicals and liberals. Embodying great contemporary diversity, it is nearly impossible to speak of a commonality of “Quaker.” While Spencer is creative in naming “holiness” as the unrecognized essence, it is not deep and supple enough to embrace fundamental discontinuities in Quaker history and has the bias of being located historically in nineteenth-century revivalism. Acknowledging Friends departing from their founders in the Orthodox/Hicksite split and in the shift to sermon-based churches through revivalism, she nevertheless sees Orthodox, revivalist, and evangelical holiness as the same as seventeenth-century Quaker origins in their heartfelt experiences, stress on perfection, and affirmation of orthodox beliefs in trinity and atonement.

Spencer deplores the doctrinal polemical excesses of revivalism; yet these divisions, from a liberal viewpoint, were inevitable once Quakers shifted toward a kataphatic starting point. The shift in form of worship from silence- to sermon-based, in fact, means shifting primacy from apophatic to kataphatic. While she says the goal of kataphatic revivalism is to reach the apophatic, orthodox beliefs control Divine Mystery and our experience of it through preconceived ideas. Silent worship's spontaneous, creative expressions are curtailed or rejected by “right belief.” “Continuing revelation,” measured by, and subject to communal discerning of, the degree of being filled with Spirit, is replaced by conformity to tradition.

Early Friends' language, I would agree, was unequivocally biblical. While she recognizes that early Friends rejected the trinity as a doctrine because it does not exist in the Bible, she insists they affirmed it practically, not seeing that Friends' concepts were distinctively grounded in metaphors, rooting in apophatic depths. Attacked by English Protestants as unorthodox, Friends interchanged Christ and Spirit as well as other metaphors, such as Light, Seed, Truth, and Life. Within early Friends' metaphoric consciousness, self, world, and God are experientially interrelated in a mysterious dynamism that “right belief” seeks to control.

Unlike Reformation imputed righteousness, early Friends, she observes, embraced inward transformation (sanctification) as essential to atonement. Life's goal is “perfection,” divinization (humans becoming divine through a restored imago dei), like Greek patristic “theosis.” While affirming revivalists' similarity, she does not explore their different views of “atonement.” She overlooks that early Friends affirmed Christ's atonement as revelation, revivalists as transaction. As nineteenth-century Quakers shifted toward mainstream Protestantism, atonement was redefined as the Anselmian transaction of God sacrificing his Son. Affirming that early Friends, like the church fathers, did not emphasize the crucified Christ, she asserts Quaker revivalists' continuity while quoting approvingly their emphasis on sacrificial atonement.

Reconceiving Jesus' death as divine sacrifice in the nineteenth century changes the meaning of holiness. Even though recognizing early Friends' Johannine affirmation of Light present in all, which held together the outward and inward Christ, Spencer does not see that the outward transaction of God sacrificing his Son requires prior belief in this external event before the Holy Spirit enters the believer. Infuriating orthodox Puritans, seventeenth-century Friends affirmed Christ indwelling already as Seed in everyone's apophatic depths. Though Jesus' life and death were understood as the fullest revelation of divine-human indwelling, this grace is present in everyone in some measure and can grow without knowledge of the Bible.

From a liberal perspective, holiness shifts from early Friends' letting go of self and security by entering and being moved spontaneously by formless Divine Mystery, to revivalist Friends' gaining security and certainty about self and God through orthodox beliefs. “Perfection” shifts from the reality of sinking into Presence to a goal to be striven for.

The radical social ethic arising from apophatic depths, which led early Friends to transform unjust forms of British society to achieve liberty of Spirit-led lives in “unity with creation,” shifts under orthodoxy toward conservative exclusivism. While Spencer sees early Friends balancing spiritual and ethical, and celebrates eighteenth-century abolitionist Anthony Benezet as exemplifying this balance, she does not explore how this radical ethic manifests subsequently.

For her the real turning point in Quaker history is in twentieth-century liberal modernism to non-mystical spirituality. While appreciating Rufus Jones's defining Quakerism's essence as mystical, she finds his mysticism to be “intensified self-awareness.” Conceiving God and self as “unsundered,” he denies the Fall, making sacrificial atonement unnecessary; thus failing to rest in the trinity, he cannot transcend his human essence.

Her account of recent holiness is limited by her evangelical Anglo-American perspective, overlooking both mystical liberals—such as Douglas Steere, Howard Brinton, Helen Hole, Elise Boulding, Rex Ambler—and holiness among African and Latin American evangelical Friends. However, up to the 1940s the book's historical sweep is fascinatingly inclusive. It challenges liberals and evangelicals to recognize the centrality of mysticism to Quaker faith across the centuries. Friends and others will be provoked to reflect on how we enter divine Mystery and bring that experience to form.