A social profile of the National Holiness Movement within American Methodism for the period 1867-1936. Provides fifty historical photos and extensive statistical tables and charts. Cloth edition previously published 1974. Paperback edition available March 2002.

America in the late nineteenth century was undergoing enormous societal shifts. Immigration and urbanization were changing the face of the country. New discoveries and new perspectives on old verities stretched its mind and stirred its soul. The recently concluded Civil War left America bloodied, its self-confidence bruised, and its capacity for controversy weakened. American churches responded to these upheavals in different ways with long-lasting consequences. The reaction of one small branch of American Protestantism rooted in the broader stream of Methodism opens a window into these troubled times. This book explores how the American holiness movement navigated the societal maelstrom and the role the Bible played in charting its course. The holiness movement's response illustrates the interaction between the Bible and culture. It sheds light on the development of the movement's younger cousin, Pentecostalism. It also adds texture to the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy, an important struggle that marked the early decades of the twentieth century and continues to shape America today.

Though they disagree on virtually everything else, evangelicals and gays, Catholics and agnostics all agree that sex should be innocent and ecstatic. For most of Western history people have not had such expectations. Innocent Ecstasy shows how Christianity led Americans to hope for so much from sex. The book explains how the sexual revolution could have occurred in a nation so deeply imbued with Christian ethical values. Tracing our strange journey from the hands of Jonathan Edward's angry Puritan God to the loving embrace of Marabel Morgan's Total Woman, Gardella draws his surprising evidence from widely disparate sources, ranging from Catholic confessionals to methodist revival meetings, from evangelical romances to The Song of Bernadette. He reveals the sexual messages of mainstream Protestant theology and the religious aspirations of medical texts found at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research. He sheds new light on such well-known figures as Henry Adams, Margaret Sanger, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and introduces us to such fascinating, lesser-known characters as Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and Sylvester Graham, inventors of corn flakes and Graham crackers, who devised their products as anti-aphrodisiacs. While detailing the development of moral obligations to pursue sexual pleasure and to follow certain patterns of sexual practice, Gardella incidentally provides one of the few books to bring together the liberal Protestant, Roman Catholic, and evangelical perspectives on any aspect of American culture. Gardella attributes the American ethic of sexual pleasure to the eagerness of Americans to overcome original sin. This led to a quest for perfection, or complete freedom from guilt, combined with a quest for ecstatic experience. The result, he maintains, is an attitude that looks to sex for what was once expected from religion. In this new edition, a new conclusion explores how popular music, gay liberation, and recovery from sexual abuse have substantially expanded innocent ecstasy during the past thirty years while continuing the Christian themes of redemption and mission. A new afterword deals with contemporary developments in popular culture and offers thoughts about the future

How did Pentecostalism become the fastest growing movement within Christendom in the twentieth century? Faupel contends that Pentecostalism was propelled onto the world stage when early adherents felt commissioned by God to announce that Christ would soon return to establish his kingdom on earth. The gift of tongues would equip them supernaturally to proclaim this message to the nations in the language of the people. Although this expectation was soon disproved, the eschatological hope nevertheless remained the motivating force for Pentecostalism’s rapid growth. This book has been prescribed reading on the Pentecostal hope for many years. This edition makes it available once again to a worldwide readership.

In Spirit-filled Protestantism, Luther Oconer shows how holiness- and Pentecost-themed revival meetings called culto Pentecostal helped form the development of Methodism in the Philippines. He focuses on these revival meetings, their theological content, and the spiritual culture they helped perpetuate. The resulting narrative provides a rich rendering of both male and female American Methodist missionaries, their Filipino counterparts, and their followers that both celebrates and critiques them. Oconer also offers a unique perspective on Philippine Protestantism, which has often been dismissed for being too intellectual and formal. He defies the stereotype by demonstrating how culto Pentecostal revivals, with their emphasis on holiness and the baptism of the Holy Spirit, made Methodism the most innovative and successful of all Protestant denominations in the country prior to the Second World War. Accordingly, Oconer's treatment explains why Methodism provided a fertile seedbed for the emergence of the Manila Healing Revival and, consequently, the rise of Pentecostalism in the Philippines in the 1950s. A long-awaited volume on the history of Methodism in the Philippines, Spirit-filled Protestantism allows us to discern why Pentecostal impulses continue to shape Filipino Methodist identity in the twenty-first century.

The Fourfold Gospel, most often associated with Albert B. Simpson, founder of The Christian and Missionary Alliance, which focuses on the doctrines of Christ as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King, has been identified as a key contributing factor to the birth and development of the modern Pentecostal movement. Through a close observation of the doctrinal themes of select and renowned Evangelical leaders in America (A. J. Gordon of Boston, D. L. Moody of Chicago, A. T. Pierson of Philadelphia/Detroit, and A. B. Simpson of New York), this work shows that the Fourfold Gospel and, therefore, the theological source for modern Pentecostalism, rather than being a marginal movement within late nineteenth-century Evangelicalism was, instead, its very heart.

New in Paperback! "...a model for the kind of study that other denominations now deserve and need."—THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY "...a sympathetic but balanced treatment...Important for social history collections and essential for those emphasizing the sociology of religion or American religious history."—CHOICE "...a selective, yet sensitive, authentic account of the movement...No available work competes...in its description of the varied phenomena of the holiness movement."—LEON O. HYNSON, CHRISTIAN SCHOLAR'S REVIEW Cloth edition previously published in 1974.