More Than Tongues Can Tell: Theological Generosity in Black Pentecostal Thought

Pentecostalism is often characterized as an ecstatic movement--centrally involving spirited worship, speaking in tongues, prophecy, and healing--as well as an exclusivist one, primarily aligned with North American white evangelicalism. Yet there is a vibrant Black Pentecostal tradition stretching back more than a century that is both theologically complex and deeply grounded in an ethics of social justice.

In More Than Tongues Can Tell, Eric Lewis Williams dismantles prevailing notions of Pentecostalism’s anti-intellectualism and explores how social contexts shape theologies produced by marginalized groups in America. Through close readings of the work of four pioneering Black Pentecostal theologians--Bishop Ozro Thurston Jones Jr., Bishop Ithiel Conrad Clemmons, Dr. James Alexander Forbes Jr., and Dr. William Clair Turner Jr.--Williams uncovers a theological vision marked by openness to diverse Christian and philosophical traditions alongside a deep commitment to liberation and egalitarianism. Situating these thinkers within African American religious history and the wider landscape of Pentecostal theology, the book reconstructs Black Pentecostalism’s coming of age in the twentieth century.

Foregrounding pneumatology as a site of theological creativity, More Than Tongues Can Tell challenges glossocentric frameworks that reduce the Spirit to ecstatic speech and demonstrates how Black Pentecostal theologians articulate a more expansive and socially engaged vision. The book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of theology and African American and Africana religions, as well as practitioners within Pentecostal communities.

Eric Lewis Williams is Director of the Office of Black Church Studies and Assistant Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies at Duke Divinity School. He is the coeditor of the T&T Clark Handbook of African American Theology.