Several recent publications focus on the question of religious experience; two of them are particularly devoted to wooing the reader to share the experience of the Catholic ‘charismatic movement’, three of them represent the first published results to emerge from the work of the Religious Experience Research Unit founded in Oxford by Sir Alister Hardy. Since the problems raised by them overlap to some extent, it seems worth while to treat all five books together in a series of articles.

For all its deceptively quiet style, This Promise is for You brings to light the tensions inherent in what we may call the ‘benign’ wing of Catholic Pentecostalism. There are those who are prepared to state fairly bluntly that Catholic Pentecostalism is something quite new, and that it shows up traditional piety as being, basically, ineffective, and this no doubt corresponds to the experience of the pioneers of Catholic, as of other brands of, Pentecostalism. There are occasional hints of this in Abbot Parry’s book, especially on p. 100, where he warns the reader (who is invited to use the book as a course of preparation for ‘baptism in the Spirit’) that “we are on the brink of changing a tangible, familiar, realistic, ‘normal’ life style, for an act of faith in an unseen God”. This is the kind of language we should associate with those who treat a conversion to the ‘charismatic movement’ as being, for practical purposes, a man’s first serious conversion to Christ (which of course it may be in some cases).

But on the whole Parry is concerned to re-assure the reader that the ‘charismatic movement’ is very much in line with traditional piety, that there are no distinctively ‘charismatic’ virtues, that it is not particularly about ‘odd’ manifestations, that ‘baptism in the Spirit’ may be a gradual process, not a sudden experience, that none of it depends on going to any special kind of prayer meeting, and so on. The continuity with ordinary Christian life is stressed rather than the discontinuity.