This work by Daniel McManigal, Senior Pastor of Hope Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Washington, is the published form of his PhD thesis written under the supervision of Ian K. Smith of Christ Church College in Sydney, Australia. McManigal mounts a wide-ranging defense of a novel interpretation of Matt 3:11 in which John the Baptist declares that “a Coming One” “will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (NIV). McManigal understands the “you” of this saying as a reference to Israel represented by the Pharisees and Sadducees who come out to the Jordan where John is baptizing. In Matthew, John meets their arrival with a strongly worded question: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Matt 3:7). Corresponding to this stark warning, the logion of 3:11 anticipates the Spirit’s fiery eschatological judgment “that will come upon the unrepentant nation in Jesus’s generation, upon Jesus himself as he hangs upon the cross for the sins of his people, and upon the wicked on the last day when the judge returns in glory” (pp. 1–2).McManigal begins his argument by making the grammatically plausible case for interpreting the baptism of Spirit and fire as a single baptism in the fire of the Spirit. In doing so, he parts ways from those who split this future baptism into two parts. However, he also differs from those who understand the fire of this single baptism as a metaphor of the Spirit’s purification of the righteous. This baptism, he argues, is punitive rather than purgative. McManigal’s view is closer to the position of James Dunn and others who understand the effect of a single Spirit-fire baptism to depend on the condition of those who receive it—judgment for the wicked but purification for the repentant. For McManigle, the Spirit baptism that the Coming One will administer is strictly punitive.The author devotes three chapters of his study to an in-context exegesis of three OT texts: Isa 11, Mal 3–4, and Dan 7. The justification for the choice of these texts is that these texts set forth expectations regarding the Day of the Lord and the work of a coming ruler. Given the nature of the thesis, one surprise of these chapters is that they do little to demonstrate an expectation that the Spirit would be an agent of eschatological judgment. Instead, McManigle mounts a negative argument against the idea that fire serves as metaphor for purification of the righteous.Following the discussion of OT texts, McManigle turns his attention to Matthew, beginning with an exegesis of Matt 1–2. These chapters set the stage for the Baptist’s stark message by establishing a typological relationship between Israel past and present. McManigle’s treatment of these chapters focuses on the recapitulation of exilic and exodus motifs, emphasizing in particular the identification of Jerusalem/Judea with Egypt and the necessity of departure from Jerusalem to the wilderness. Thus, when large numbers go out from Jerusalem to be baptized by John, “it looks like a large-scale evacuation, an exodus” (p. 78).The heart of McManigle’s argument unfolds over three chapters in which the author undertakes a detailed discussion of Matt 3. Of particular interest in these chapters is a useful discussion of Matthew’s various references to the prophets—and the inclusion of John the Baptist in that group—as well as an evaluation of the symbolic acts performed by the prophets within the OT. Though most seek to the understand the meaning of John’s baptism against the backdrop of purificatory rites, McManigle looks instead to symbolic actions performed by prophets and finds that the vast majority of these acts signify judgment. Thus, those who submit to John’s baptism did not understand it as representing cleansing from sin for the forgiveness of sins; rather, they understand the act as an acknowledgement of impending judgment on Israel that they can hope to escape only by repenting. When Jesus comes to be baptized by John, he does so in anticipation that he himself will become the object of the wrath that is coming on Israel.There is much to commend in McManigle’s study, not least his attempt to discern the theological unity that Matthew seems to maintain between Jesus’s baptism and his crucifixion. Many overlook the importance of Jesus’s baptism for understanding the way in which Matthew narrates atonement, but McManigle does not. Even so, not many will be persuaded by the McManigle’s claim that the righteousness that Jesus’s baptism fulfills (Matt 3:15) is the law’s requirement of divine judgement for its violation (p. 145).McManigle’s thesis raises other questions as well. If the Spirit is the agent of eschatological judgment on Israel, how then does the Spirit function as an agent of eschatological restoration elsewhere in Matthew (especially, Matt 12:28)? This is hardly less clear in Matthew than it is in Luke, which draws a direct and explicit link between Jesus’s reception of the Spirit and his outpouring of Spirit and fire on the disciples in Acts 1. As McManigle seems to recognize, the Spirit that comes on Jesus as he comes up from the baptismal waters is decidedly not an agent of judgment. It may be that McManigle has not fully recognized the significance of Matthew’s identification of Jesus as Israel in the opening chapters of the Gospel. According to the prophets, Israel must undergo a decisive washing from its moral defilement and receive an eschatological endowment of God’s Spirit. Only so would it become the righteous people who live under the reign of heaven. This will indeed require a final act of divine judgment, but there are ample reasons to suspect that this is neither what John’s baptism portends nor what the Spirit-fire baptism of the Coming will accomplish.Though readers may not be persuaded by the overarching thesis, they may nevertheless benefit from this fresh evaluation of the issues and find their own thinking clarified through interacting with an author willing to entertain the possibility that Matthew’s Gospel narrates atonement from its opening pages.