Deeper Still: The Exiled and Emerging Charismatic Black Baptist Tradition

Reformed theology and respectability politics alienated many, though not all, Black Baptists from the charismatic Baptist river.

Introduction

In previous essays in this series, I have been making the case that what I call Bapticostalism — the Word and Spirit identity recovered and institutionalized most visibly through the ministry of Charles Price Jones is not a theological novelty or a cultural borrowing from twentieth-century Pentecostalism. It is, rather, a retrieval. It is the reassertion of something older, deeper, and more indigenous to Black Baptist faith than the respectable, restrained, cessationist piety that came to dominate Black Baptist institutional life over the course of the twentieth century. To make that case fully, however, requires us to reckon honestly with a question that often goes unasked: how did cessationism become so dominant in the Black Baptist world in the first place? And what happened to the charismatic stream that it displaced?

The Baptist tradition has never been theologically uniform. From its earliest formations in seventeenth-century England, Baptist life has contained multitudes. General Baptists and Particular Baptists, Arminian Baptists and Calvinist Baptists all make up the family. On the specific question of pneumatology Baptists have likewise been divided between cessationists, who hold that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit ceased with the apostolic age, and continuationists or charismatics, who insist that the Spirit’s gifts remain available to the church in every generation. Cessationism has never been a formal article of faith for Baptists as a whole. It is a theological tradition within a tradition, one that gained dominance through specific historical pressures rather than through confessional consensus.

In the Black Baptist context, those pressures have a name. They go by the name of respectability.

Defining the Sanctified Church: Hurston, Gilkes, and Sanders

To understand what was suppressed, we must first understand what it was. The charismatic stream within Black Baptist and broader Black Protestant life did not exist in a vacuum. It belonged to a wider ecosystem of Spirit-accented faith that scholars have come to identify under a single evocative label: the Sanctified Church.

No one gave that tradition a more precise or more prophetic definition than Zora Neale Hurston. Writing from her unique position as both an insider to Black Southern religious culture and a trained ethnographer, Hurston described the sanctified church as a revitalizing phenomenon that had arisen among various groups of “saints” across America. Crucially, she insisted that it was not a new religion. Cheryl J. Sanders, drawing on Hurston’s work in her landmark study Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture, renders Hurston’s definition this way:

[Zora Neale Hurston] defines the Sanctified church as a revitalizing phenomenon that had arisen among various groups of “saints” in America. It is not a new religion and “is in fact the older forms of Negro religious expression asserting themselves against the new.” Moreover, the Sanctified church is a “protest against the high-brow tendency in Negro Protestant congregations as the Negroes gain more education and wealth.”

— Cheryl J. Sanders, Saints in Exile, pp. 3–4

Hurston’s definition is worth sitting with. She is not describing a marginal or deviant movement. She is describing something prior — something that predates the highbrow tendency and that refuses to be absorbed by it. The sanctified church, on this reading, is not a departure from authentic Black religious tradition. It is authentic Black religious tradition pushing back against a more recent and socially constructed version of respectability.

Sociologist Cheryl Townsend Gilkes sharpens this historical picture considerably. Sanders also cites Gilkes’ definition:

Sociologist Cheryl Townsend Gilkes has defined the Sanctified church as a segment of the black church that arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, beginning at the end of Reconstruction, in response to and largely in conflict with postbellum changes in worship traditions within the black community. Its distinguishing mark is adherence to the traditions of oral music and ecstatic praise associated with slave religion. The label “Sanctified church” emerged within the black community to distinguish congregations of “the saints” from those of other black Christians, especially the black Baptists and Methodists who assimilated and imitated the cultural and organizational models of European-American patriarchy.

— Cheryl J. Sanders, Saints in Exile, pp. 3–4

Gilkes’ precision is invaluable here. She gives us a dateable origin — the end of Reconstruction — and a legible social mechanism: assimilation to European-American patriarchal models of church life. The suppression of ecstatic, oral, Spirit-accented worship was not, at its root, a theological conclusion. It was an assimilationist strategy. It was the price that upwardly mobile Black Protestant institutions were willing to pay for social legitimacy in a post-Reconstruction world.

It is Sanders herself who brings these threads together with her framing of the Sanctified Church tradition as a community living perpetually in exile — exiled not from America only, but also from the mainstream of Black Protestant respectability. Her work recovers the integrity, the depth, and the ecclesial coherence of a tradition that has too often been dismissed as emotionalism or enthusiasm. For Sanders, these saints were not simply expressive. They were resistant. Their worship was not disorder. It was defiance.

The Genealogy of Suppression

How, then, did cessationism and the suppression of charismatic expression become so entrenched within Black Baptist life specifically? The answer requires us to trace two converging streams — one flowing from outside the Black Baptist world, and one flowing from within.

The first stream originates in the Princeton theological tradition. Charles Hodge and his successor Benjamin B. Warfield constructed what became the dominant intellectual architecture of cessationism in American evangelical life. Warfield’s Counterfeit Miracles (1918) argued that miracle-working power passed away with the apostles and could not be transmitted beyond those upon whom the apostles had personally laid hands. For Warfield, miracles belonged exclusively to what he called the revelatory period — the biblical era — and any subsequent claim to miraculous gifts was, by definition, suspect. His cessationism was not merely a theological position. It was, as scholars have noted, a Protestant polemical move designed to draw a clear boundary between orthodox Protestantism and what he regarded as the heterodox openness to contemporary miraculous gifts shared by Roman Catholics, proto-Pentecostals, faith healers, and theological liberals alike. John MacArthur’s Strange Fire conference of 2013 is only the most recent and most public expression of the tradition Warfield consolidated.

What is crucial to note, however, is that the Hodge-Warfield cessationist stream was never the only respectable option available within the white Protestant world — not even in Warfield’s own era. Charles Spurgeon, arguably the most celebrated Baptist preacher of the nineteenth century, was no cessationist. A close reading of Spurgeon reveals someone who spoke openly of direct Spirit impressions in his own ministry — well-documented accounts of his naming specific sins of specific individuals during sermons with an accuracy he attributed to the Spirit’s immediate operation. Spurgeon belonged to an experiential Baptist piety far more pneumatically alive than anything Princeton theology produced.

And A.J. Gordon, the Baptist minister who founded what is now Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, wrote The Ministry of the Spirit in 1894, one of the most important continuationist texts of the nineteenth century from within a Baptist framework, arguing explicitly for the ongoing availability of spiritual gifts in the life of the church. Spurgeon and Gordon were not theological outliers. They represented a genuine and academically credible stream of Baptist pneumatology that stood in direct contrast to Hodge and Warfield.

We would do well to reach further back still. The Sandy Creek Baptist tradition, rooted in Shubal Stearns and the Separate Baptist movement of the mid-eighteenth century in the American South, was explicitly and enthusiastically continuationist in practice. Sandy Creek Baptists were known for ecstatic worship experiences, immediate Spirit impressions guiding ministry decisions, and an evangelistic fervor marked by physical and emotional manifestations of the Spirit’s presence. The Sandy Creek tradition is, in fact, the direct ancestral stream of much of Southern Baptist and Black Baptist life in the American South. Which means the charismatic inheritance being retrieved today is not peripheral to Baptist history in America. It is close to the root of it. The cessationism that displaced it was a later importation, not the original soil.

The question that haunts Black Baptist history is this: what would it have looked like if the Black Baptist reformers who were constructing the institutional and theological frameworks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had imbibed more of Spurgeon and Gordon than of Hodge and Warfield? The road not taken was not some exotic Pentecostal path. It was a fully Baptist, fully respectable, academically credentialed continuationist tradition — available, being argued, and embodied in towering figures of the same era. The choice to move toward Princeton rather than toward Gordon was not theologically inevitable. It was socially and institutionally shaped.

And that shaping leads us to the second stream flowing from within Black Baptist life itself. The post-Reconstruction Black church, particularly among its educated leadership class, was profoundly anxious about the association of Black religion with what its critics called fanaticism or enthusiasm. E. Franklin Frazier documented this anxiety with characteristic precision. The formation of the major Black Baptist conventions was shaped in no small part by a middle-class ecclesial vision that defined itself against ecstatic religious expression. Holiness and Spirit-accented worship were coded as lower-class, uneducated, and emotionally unstable. To embrace them was to risk confirming every caricature that white America had leveled against Black religion. Respectability demanded distance from enthusiasm and cessationism, absorbed from Princeton, provided the theological language to justify that distance.

These two streams — external Reformed influence and internal respectability politics — converged to produce a Black Baptist mainstream that was increasingly inhospitable to the charismatic inheritance it had once carried. And the contemporary moment only sharpens the indictment. Today, even within the white Reformed evangelical world, cessationism is far from settled. Craig Keener’s two-volume Miracles (2011) mounts the most exhaustive scholarly defense of continuationism available in any language. Sam Storms argues for the ongoing gifts from within a rigorously Reformed framework with books like Understanding Spiritual Gifts and The Language of Heaven. John Piper’s very public disagreements with MacArthur on this question have demonstrated that the continuationist position is not the property of theological enthusiasts — it is a position being argued with exegetical seriousness by some of the most credentialed scholars in the evangelical academy. If the white Reformed world can debate the perceived cessationist consensus, the question must be pressed: why must Black Baptist institutions treat the matter as closed?

Tributaries of Survival

Black Baptists who have defended a more charismatic tradition have often been exiled. But exile is not extinction. And the charismatic stream in Black Baptist life, though suppressed, was never silenced.

It survived in tributaries. It survived in the work of Charles Price Jones, whose insistence on the fullness of the Holy Spirit as an experiential reality for Baptist believers led to his expulsion from the Black Baptist mainstream and ultimately to the formation of what would become the Church of God in Christ and Church of Christ (Holiness) USA — a Bapticostal institution that preserved the Word and Spirit identity when the conventions would not. It survived in pockets within state conventions, in individual congregations that maintained a more pneumatically alive worship culture even while formally aligned with cessationist institutional bodies. It survived in the quiet charismatic renewal that moved through Black Baptist churches throughout the mid-to-late twentieth century, often unnamed and untheorized but unmistakably present.

And it survived, most visibly and institutionally, in the Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship International. When Paul S. Morton led the formation of the FGBCFI in 1994, it can be contended he was not importing something foreign into the Baptist tradition. He was giving institutional expression to something that had always been there — something that had been pushed to the margins, exiled from the conventions, but never fully extinguished. The FGBCFI became a home for Black Baptist believers who had felt the fire and refused to pretend they hadn’t.

What we see in the contemporary moment — the blurring of worship aesthetics between Baptist and Pentecostal congregations, the prevalence of charismatic preaching and prayer forms in churches that remain formally Baptist in polity and theology, the growing discomfort among younger Black Baptist believers with a cessationism they have never found convincing — is not a crisis. It is a homecoming. The stream that went underground is rising again.

The Retrieval Call

The argument here is not that all Black Baptists should become charismatics. Baptist pneumatological diversity is real, and it deserves to be honored rather than flattened. There is a legitimate Reformed Baptist tradition, and it has produced genuine theological fruit. Cessationism is a coherent position, even if I do not ultimately find it persuasive.

The argument, rather, is this: the dominance of cessationism in Black Baptist life is not a theological inheritance. It is a social and historical formation with a dateable origin and an identifiable set of causes. It was produced by the convergence of external Reformed influence and internal respectability politics in the postbellum and early twentieth-century Black church. And it came at a cost — the exile of a Spirit-accented tradition that was, as Hurston insisted, older than the highbrow tendency that displaced it.

To retrieve that tradition is not to abandon Baptist identity. It is to recover a dimension of Baptist identity that was suppressed but never destroyed. Charles Price Jones was not out of step with Baptist tradition. He was arguably more in step with the actual diversity of Baptist pneumatological history than the reformers who exiled him. The Sandy Creek Baptists knew something about the Spirit that the Princeton theologians never taught. Spurgeon felt something in the pulpit that Warfield’s cessationism could not account for. And Gordon wrote it all down for anyone willing to read.

The saints were sent into exile. But exile, as the biblical tradition consistently reminds us, is not the end of the story. The Spirit was not silenced. The stream kept flowing. And the river, as the old song says, is rising still.