The Ultimate Evidence: Rethinking the Evidence Issues for Spirit-Baptism Review

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The Ultimate Evidence: Rethinking the Evidence Issues for Spirit-Baptism ReviewDr Newman has written a tome which seeks to call into question the Pentecostal teaching of the doctrine of initial evidence. (i.e. Tongues being the initial physical sign that one has been baptized in the Holy Spirit.)
He goes into a lot of the history behind the origin of this belief and how this doctrine developed.
In a nutshell, Newman believes that a believer, when born again, receives all of the Holy Spirit that they are going to receive. Anything further--such as the baptism of the Holy Spirit--is simply an outworking of the already-present Holy Spirit. To put it differently, one activates what they already have and experiences a new dimension. But it is not a separate or subsequent event where the individual gets something that they previously did not have.
Newman believes that tongues are not the only evidence of this baptism. In fact, he holds love to be the determining factor as to whether one has been baptized in the Spirit...or not.
Newman does a great job of showing how historically, the tongues as initial evidence teaching was not shared by all of the leadership of the Pentecostal movement in the early 1900s. Indeed, F.F. Bosworth--author of "Christ the Healer"--broke fellowship with the Assemblies of God over the issue.
The reason that I gave it three stars was for the historical information. But the same old problems of authorial intent surfaced in the book. Newman believes that Luke's intent was NOT to show tongues as evidence; instead, Luke was simply reporting historical information.
However, no matter what Luke's intent was, we know that Luke edited and wrote what he did under the inspiration and direction of the Holy Spirit. And there are several passages in the book of Acts where the Holy Spirit was conferred upon individuals AFTER they had already been born again. To ignore this is to miss the plain facts of what Luke wrote. And if it happened three times, then it is a stretch to say that it was only a transitional period and these are the exceptions, as many claim about Acts. Besides, if every Word is to be confirmed in the mouth of two or three witnesses, the Pentecostals have enough verses to meet the biblical requirements to establish a truth.
In summation: the book is a good source of history regarding the formation of the initial evidence doctrine, but as a polemic against current Pentecostal theology, it sadly lacks a convincing hermeneutic where separability/subsequence and the initial evidence paradigm is concerned.
If you are looking for further "ammunition" against tongues as initial evidence or separability/subsequence, you will have to look elsewhere as the author, in my opinion, did not deal convincingly with those passages which teach otherwise.
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