John H. Y. Briggs
History & Biography
“John Rippon was one of the makers of the Baptist denomination, helping it to benefit from the new life of the Evangelical Revival. He helped to develop denominational consciousness and began to provide it with those agencies and instruments -- periodical literature, hymn and tune books, the preservation of historical documentation and the promotion of itinerancy -- which helped achieve this purpose. Ken Manley's fine study of this influential London minister uses biography to illuminate the life of the Particular Baptists at a turning point in their history.”
History & Biography
“This elegantly-designed study is of importance both for the history of the city of Oxford and for the people called Baptists. A model of judicious scholarship, it has to be taken seriously because of the range of evidence from a wide variety of sources assembled, which are most meticulously interrogated and expounded as becomes a New Testament scholar deploying his textual skills in the interest of seventeenth-century dissenting history. This is no narrow institutional study but rather provides the reader with a rich tapestry of community history in which religious, political, and social themes intermingle.”
Baptism, Church and Society in Modern Britain
Theology
“Renewed interest in sacramental theology, with a focus on the way the churches have responded to Faith and Order's Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry prompts the need for an historical investigation of the changing theology and practice of the sacraments, and of baptism in particular, for even in Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry baptism was the Cinderella of the trio. The publication of David M. Thompson's perceptive and carefully judged Hulsean Lectures on Baptism, Church and Society in Britain since 1800, because it makes essential connexions, fills this kind of gap, and is therefore particularly welcome.”
History & Biography
“In this rich set of essays both the unity and diversity of Baptist thought and life is clearly revealed. The range is wide, from Baptist beginnings in the seventeenth century to the present day with separate sections providing focus of European, North American and global perspectives. In this respect, whilst some tell their own story, it is interesting to see a Canadian and an American analyzing early British Baptist sensitivities, and a Scot and a Pole wrestling with North American biography. Many papers seek to understand, as all good history should, the true nature of Baptist identity by exploring the finite and the particular. But there are other more synthetic articles which seek to bring together the total reality with masterful comprehensive grasp. In this respect it is fitting that the whole collection should conclude with Bill Brackney's relating the deep Baptist concern for religious freedom to the work of effective evangelism. Rich in diversity, this collection of essays will both deepen and extend our understanding of Baptist history.”
History & Biography
Foreword
“The publication of these essays is a testimony to the excellent work done by the Department of Baptist and Anabaptist Studies at IBTS, Prague. It is also an enormously useful tool in providing critical scholarship in English which gives an assessment of aspects of East European Baptist thought and activity hitherto not known outside the literature of the different East European languages. In this sense this collection of essays is excitingly pioneering.”
Theology
“Alan Sell has moved with ease in the different worlds of English Dissent, global Reformed theology, defending Christian theology in and from a university in western Canada, and in his last appointment professing both Christian theology and the philosophy of religion in the essentially dissenting nation of Wales--four careers all bound up in one lifespan. All this is reflected in this collection of essays which pay tribute to all that he has done in forming and informing the mind of the modern Dissent by those who have been his colleagues or whose careers have been shaped by his generous but incisive scholarship. Here they reflect on the spirituality, learning, mission, and churchmanship of the Reformed tradition and its unique contribution to the one catholic church of God.”
Enlightenment, Ecumenism, Evangel
Theology
“An admirable study of those who, like the author, were 'rooted in the history and principles of dissent,' the book seems, in part at least, autobiographical, the several chapters arising out of the developments and interests of Sell's very diverse and rich career. Reflecting, but not burdened with, his wide-ranging historical scholarship and his determination to think theologically, the text ranges insightfully, and elegantly, from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.”
From Woolloomooloo to 'Eternity': A History of Australian Baptists
History & Biography
“Ken Manley tells a good story which is well supported by intensive research. The narrative and analysis both benefit from the skills of a mature scholar who always contexts the particular within the wider context and develops the theological significance of the history he is exploring. Whilst, in part, the story reflects the development of Baptist life in Britain, Manley makes clear from the very beginning the distinctively Australian elements of antipodean Baptist life as they developed within the several different colonies.”
World Religions
“A most remarkable book: large swathes of history, archaeology, and legend, the approach of three very different Abrahamic faiths, present experience, and future hopes, are all here. Whilst there is past celebration, history has also a somber story to tell—of invasion, occupation, and destruction. Present day ethnic conflict, violence, abuse of justice, with pious pilgrimage occasionally giving way to psychotic behavior, obscure the vision of Jerusalem as a symbol of future hope.”
Isaac Backus and the Second Reformation
History & Biography
“If the separation of church and state has provided the healthy environment out of which American Evangelicalism has developed and thrived, then this volume provides essential reading as to an important part of the story.”
Theology
Foreword
“This is a fine example of the interplay of historical research, theological interrogation, and the analysis of emerging ecclesiastical practice, well illustrating the impact of the mental exercise of historical and theological enquiry upon the practical issues presently confronting the Salvation Army in exploring the nature of its identity and mission in the modern world.”
Nonconformity's Romantic Generation
History & Biography
“Mark Hopkins is a careful and sympathetic scholar who gets behind the headline thinking that so easily translated theological differences into divisive controversies. Thus his monograph will be essential reading for all who wish to understand the polarities of late nineteenth-century Nonconformity.”
History & Biography
“Angular and often strident, Ruth, not the normal subject of biography, is admirably presented by Manley in this ‘warts-and-all’ assessment, demonstrating that some defects were not as reprehensible as might at first appear. With theological daring, Ruth disdained traditional shibboleths without betraying evangelical conviction or Baptist principles. . . . Connecting church with everyday life, he made church relevant in contrast to the rather arcane Adventist speculations of some of his contemporaries.”
The European Baptist Federation
History & Biography
“Baptists find it relatively easy to delineate their ecclesiology of the local church but more difficult to focus on the theological significance of larger ecclesiastical units. This is where the present volume provides such helpful insights as to how Baptists develop both the practice and the theology of larger endeavors in associate engagement, which Indicates why a theology that speaks only of the independence of the local church is a dangerous heresy, since properly Baptists must always talk about interdependent gathering communities, coming together under God for the mission with which he charges them. All this underlines why every Baptist library, as well as anybody seriously concerned about the health of Baptist life, needs to possess this book.”
History & Biography
“Notwithstanding the need to revise judgment on many events in the seventeenth century, the Great Ejectment of 1662 remains a significant dividing of the ways in the history of British Christianity, deserving the penetrating analysis that Alan Sell and his colleagues provide, for what was designed to secure an Anglican monopoly in national life, in the event confirmed a large part of the nation in its Nonconformity, thereby giving birth to Britain's unique form of Christian pluralism.”
The Sung Theology of the English Particular Baptist Revival
Theology
“Anne Steele’s hymns provide a most valuable window on the spirituality or piety or devotional life of eighteenth-century Particular Baptists. They also reveal a crucial mechanism for theological formation for it was here, rather than in learned volumes—as Steele’s hymns were read, learned, sung, and remembered—that faith was nurtured. Here, as Carmichael ably demonstrates, Christian hope enlightened discipleship in times of both joy and suffering.”
History & Biography
“In the mid-eighteenth century English Baptists found themselves in a parlous situation. Amongst the Particular Baptists high-Calvinism could all too easily become antinomian, whilst General Baptists faced considerable difficulties in their Christology. Both groups, confronted with these internal difficulties, had their evangelistic outreach blunted. For the General Baptists this occurred just when the Methodist Revival was offering the people of England a warm evangelical faith based upon a theology of Christ dying for all, not just the elect. The story of Andrew Fuller's recovery or an urgent missionary-minded evangelical Calvinism has often been told; less familiar is the story of how Dan Taylor brought into being a New Connexion of General Baptists, both orthodox and mission-oriented. This made its appeal to some influenced by the Methodist Revival but who had developed consciences which began to argue that the soteriology of the new movement demanded believers' rather than infant baptism, and to those General Baptists in the midland England who remained orthodox, untrammelled by Arian or Socinian doctrines. It is the story of these New Connexion General Baptists that Frank Rinaldi helpfully analyses and portrays in this important volume. Their influence was greater than their number because it was they who pioneered many of the institutional structures which were to give shape to the united denomination after 1891.”
Theology
“The author has quite remarkably achieved what he sets out as his aim: the fashioning of 'a coherent Baptist vision of the Christian church in its faith and practice.' The language of its main themes whets the appetite of those who are searching for a recovery of the high churchmanship of our Puritan forebears in the faith, albeit set not within the sectarian frame of mind of the seventeenth century but the ecumenical temper of the twenty-first. The approach is fresh and challenging, not least for twenty-first century Baptists, who in their proper concern to be missionary-minded, are sometimes in danger of losing sight of that other fundamental, the need to express solidarity with the historic traditions of Christendom embraced within the ongoing endeavour to be church.”
NOTE: Only includes books currently in our catalog; not necessarily a complete list.
Arts & Literature
History & Biography
See something wrong on this page? Report a problem