Walter B. Shurden
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.
Elizabeth Flowers
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.
Fisher Humphreys
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.
Molly T. Marshall
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?'
Wayne Flynt
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.
