In "Heaven Below," Grant Wacker takes the reader on an exhilarating and informative romp through the early years (1900-1925) of American Pentecostalism. Through extensive research and superior storytelling, he demonstrates how these religious pioneers brought together the clashing impulses of the "primitive" and the "pragmatic" to "capture lightening in a bottle" and launch an explosive movement. Potential readers need to be warned in advance that the author is a social historian and academician. If you are looking for stories of romanticized heroes of the faith or glowing partisan historiography, you'll be disappointed. What you will get is a consistently fair, sometimes surprising, and always interesting account of the early Pentecostals.

In the book's fifteen chapters we get a glimpse into the character, temperament, and daily lives of these adventurous and hearty souls. You'll discover the keys to their effectiveness and the areas where they stumbled. Included among many subjects covered are the movement's leaders, the theology and practicality behind the prominence of women, their changing views on war, the persecutions they faced, and even the "gift of tongues" that helped make their faith distinctive. The stereotype of the poor, illiterate, and disinherited Pentecostals is dismantled. Instead you will meet a representative slice of early 20th century America. They were a people genuinely sincere, deeply committed to their beliefs, and fully convinced that they were instruments in the hands of Almighty God, empowered by the Holy Spirit for the purpose of fulfilling the Great Commission of Jesus Christ.

"Heaven Below" is made up of 269 pages of fascinating reading, followed by an appendix, and 82 pages of footnotes. It also includes a valuable index. I had some difference of opinion with Wacker's conclusions and occasional qualms with his assumptions, but as a social history, I highly recommend "Heaven Below." Grant Wacker is Associate Professor of the History of Religion in America, Duke University.

Grant Wacker has written a wonderful book. His scholarly treatment of early pentecostalism (1900-1925) is matched by his ability to write for a general audience with insight, sympathy for his subject, and a tremendous wit and appreciation. His views are balanced, his anecdotes are well-selected, and his writing is first-rate. He covers all aspects, races, and gender issues in early American pentecostalism. Anyone interested in American religion in general or penetcostalism in particular MUST read this book. A professor told me in grad school that the explosion of new books would only get worse. He advised me to buy only those books that would either change or advance my life: this is such a book.

Wacker's book is a great introduction to nineteenth century American religion. It is most appropriate for those who have no (or very little) background in American religious history. Wacker draws together the main strands of nineteenth century American religion with precision and style. Anyone who wants a quick introduction to American religion in the nineteenth century should check out this book.

This book should be White Anglo-Saxon Pentecostals encounter White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Having said that, as an African-American Pentecostal who is interested in both theological and cultural studies, I do not think this is a racist book, but it has fallen well short of any attempt to forge new territory, or turn the talk white scholars have been having with themselves outward into a dialogue with the real America.

The fact is that depending on how you define the emergence socio-historically of Pentecostalism in the United States, you see it primarily as Whites encounter with a phenomenological experience that they defined as literally replicating the stories of baptism in the Holy Spirit in the New Testament's book of Acts of the Apostles. But there is a critical mass that sees this movement as the sum total of the diversity that was impressive, but short lived, at the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles. The Azusa revival, as a concept, is defined as interdenominational, interracial, interclass, in a word: egalitarian.

The essays in this work disregard that paradigm, in favor of the ID talking to the EGO. In this case, white Pentecostals dealing with white Southern Baptists, or white Pentecostals dealing with white Presbyterians, or white Pentecostals dealing with white Holiness Christians.

One reviewer of this book certainly applauded the "case study" approach of this collection of essays, so in method, it does break new ground. But unlike the "intercultural" approach of say, European theologian/Pentecostal Walter Hollenweger, these authors would continue, intentionally or not, the MYTH that Pentecostalism is primarily a function of white American culture and the Christian theological issues which emerge out of that context, as if whites, and white Pentecostals aren't tremendously influenced theologically, spiritually and culturally by what the "slave religion" of African Americans brought to Pentecostalism, and the challenge that it posed to American Protestantism, both black and white.

The editors missed the perfect opportunity to examine the Neo-Pentecostal movement in the African Episcopal Church, which combines charismatic spirituality with an Africentric socio-cultural outlook. And as for so-called renewal movements among Baptists, there has been none quite as complete as the advent of the Full Gospel Baptist Fellowship among black Baptists, led by Paul Morton, a Baptist minister for over 20 years, and the son of a bishop in the Church of God in Christ. Or, there is the story of one black Pentecostal leader after another who became involved in the Civil Rights movement, and through a commitment to a social justice/human rights agenda, became involved in the ecumenical movement: Bishop Arthur Brazier in Chicago, the late Bishop Smallwood E. Williams in Washington, D.C., Bishop Charles Blake in Los Angeles, or Bishop Herbert Daughtry in New York.

And then there is the fascinating relationship that black Pentecostals have had with the bastion of liberal Protestantism, New York's Riverside Church, built by Rockefeller's fortune. Riverside, under the pastorate of Harry Emerson Fosdick engaged the thinking and ministries of the late Bishop Robert Lawson, founder of the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith, and the late Bishop Ithiel Clemmons -- a member of the general board of the Church of God in Christ -- who was one of the first Pentecostals, period, to attend a liberal divinity school, in Union Theological Seminary. Clemmons created critical theological space for a host of black Pentecostals who would follow him including his brother, who attended Yale Divinity School, and James Forbes, the son of the presiding bishop in the United Holy Church. Forbes, who interacted with both Clemmons brothers at various stages of theological education, became the first black and first Pentecostal senior minister of Riverside in 1989.

And these African-American examples are only the tip of the pluralist Pentecostal iceberg, there are many stories of Hispanic American and Asian American interactions -- for instance the relationship between the Presbyterian and Pentecostal identity for Korean American Christians.

So the confluence of forces -- Puritanism and Pluralism -- certainly marks American religious history and Pentecostal and Protestant interactions. But as the late scholar Robert Kleinhans (whose historiographic essay on Pentecostals is much better than the one the volume included by Augustus Cerillo) muses on what may cause the distorted picture. In writing about Oneness Pentecostals (or Apostolics) in particular, he says in a non-published paper in 1984:

To the Oneness Pentecostals revelation like tongues, prophecy, and healing, was a gift of the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit's gift demanded an exegesis from Christian experience more than from the Fundamentalist juxtaposition of texts. ... This practical and pragmatic approach to exegesis was in the spirit of Pentecostalism (and one might add, that of Black American Christianity), but it would offend and alienate both Fundamentalists and those joining Pentecostalism from the segment of American Evangelicalism greatly influenced by traditional Calvinism.

Kleinhans concluded:

Once this research has been completed, we might well revise our interpretations of developments of American Christianity in the first decades of this century. Perhaps we shall have to focus on more than Fundamentalism as the response to Modernism as well as to describe more fully the influence of Afro-America[n] spirituality on other Christian traditions.

It appears these distinguished editors have another volume to do -- and that is the African-American currents in American encounters of Pentecostalism and Protestantism. I hope they are up to the task.