This month marks the hundred year anniversary of a major event in American religious history, the Azusa Street Revival. For those with interest in the subject, one superb historical work on the early Pentecostal movement was published by Duke Divinity School Professor Grant Wacker three years ago. I originally reviewed the book in the journal Bridges and editor Robert Frey gave me permission to reproduce the review here.

Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American
Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 364 pp. ISBN
0-674-01128-7

In Heaven Below, Grant Wacker explores the world of early

twentieth-century first-generation pentecostals, a community he calls

“radical evangelicals.” To understand radical evangelicals, Wacker

himself goes to the root, immersing himself in the published works and

personal documents of leaders and laypeople. The burden he bears is to

argue that “the genius of the pentecostal movement lay in its ability to

hold two seemingly incompatible impulses in productive tension (p. 10).”

The two impulses were a primitive, immediate experience of the

Divine and pragmatic navigation of the affairs of mundane life. On one

hand, the primitive impulse towards utter Holy Ghost consciousness

created an otherworldly ethic of ordinary believers being mere channels

for the Holy Spirit. This primitive consciousness supplied fresh religious

notions which helped to make sense of modernizing

America and created an unprecedented outpouring of energy that was widely characterized as

fire. On the other hand, Wacker detects clear evidence of pentecostal

pioneers demonstrating canny pragmatic leadership and execution that

belied their official renunciation of worldly means. Realistic

thisworldliness served as something of a firebreak to restrain some

primitive excesses and allow the movement to consolidate its vast gains

in adherents. The two impulses, alternately resisting and complementing

each other, comprise a lens through which Wacker assays the unabashedly

religious dimension of multiple arenas of everyday pentecostal life.

The introduction exemplifies the debris-clearing work that

characterizes excellent scholarship. Evangelicalism notoriously defies

easy categorization, and the boundaries and relationships of

fundamentalists, evangelicals, pentecostals, and charismatics to each other

often appear muddied. Wacker’s cartography crisply depicts four

streams—salvation through faith in Jesus, Holy Ghost baptism, divine

healing, and premillennialism—flowing into the pentecostal community.

He further delineates Spirit baptism into tributaries of Oberlin

perfectionism, Keswick higher life, and Wesleyan entire sanctification,

and then identifies other broadly evangelical influences that contributed

to the composition of first-generation pentecostals.Read more

Tim Challies is live-blogging the Together For the Gospel conference taking place April 26-28, 2006 in Louisville, KY.  You almost think Challies has advance copies of the messages; no way I could type fast enough to get all this down. Read more