Embracing in one common trajectory the major Baptist confessions of faith, the major Baptist theologians, and the principal Baptist theological movements and controversies, this book spans four centuries of Baptist doctrinal history. Acknowledging first the pre-1609 roots (patristic, medieval, Reformational) of Baptist theology, it examines the Arminian versus Calvinist issues that the General and the Particular Baptists first expressed. These issues dominated English and American Baptist theology during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from Helwys and Smyth and from Bunyan and Kiffin to Gill, Fuller, Backus, and Boyce and were quickened by the awakenings and the missionary movement. Concurrently, the Baptist defended distinctives vis-a-vis the pedobaptist world and the unfolding of a strong Baptist confessional tradition. Then during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the liberal versus evangelical issues became dominant with Hovey, Strong, Rauschenbusch, and Henry in the North and Mullins, Conner, Hobbs, and Criswell in the South even as a distinctive Baptist Landmarkism developed, the discipline of biblical theology was practiced and a structured ecumenism was pursued. Missiology both impacted Baptist theology and took it to all the continents, where it became increasingly indigenous. Conscious that Baptists belong to the free churches and to the believers' churches, a new generation of Baptist theologians at the advent of the twenty-first century was somewhat more Calvinist than Arminian and decidedly more evangelical than liberal.

Revivals are an integral part of Baptist life. Just as Baptists share key convictions regarding believer's baptism, congregational governance, and religious freedom, they have also widely adopted common practices. Revivals have contributed immensely to the vitality and growth of Baptists worldwide. This volume is a contribution to the theme of Baptist revivals. It explores the central role played by revivalism for Baptist life in the U.S. and Canada, Britain and Continental Europe, and the Majority world. For 250 years, beginning with the Great Awakening in the mid-eighteenth century, and in almost every place they have established churches, Baptists have embraced the practice of revivalism. The book offers twenty-five studies of Baptists and their revivals. The authors describe individual revivals and evaluate related issues of gender, race, emotion, and charisma. The chapters push well beyond textbook summaries, which usually notice the Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening but often do not find space to include other revivals such as the Laymen's Revival (1857), the Welsh Revival (1904-05), and revivals associated with World War I and World War II. All of these revivals influenced the Baptist story, and all of them are addressed in these pages. Focusing on Baptists at the local grassroots level, many of these studies analyze in some depth seasons of revival followed by seasons of arid spirituality. The authors explore the dynamics of these movements, searching for possible explanations for this religious phenomenon.

In step with the #MeToo movement and third wave feminism, women's roles provoke lively debate in today's evangelical sphere. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has a complicated past regarding this issue, and determining what exactly women's roles in home, church, and society should be, or even what these roles should be called, has been a contentious subject. In A Marginal Majority: Women, Gender, and a Reimagining of Southern Baptists, editors Elizabeth H. Flowers and Karen K. Seat and eight other contributors examine the SBC's complex history regarding women and how that history reshapes our understanding of the denomination and its contemporary debates. This comprehensive volume starts with women as SBC fundraisers, moves to the ways they served Southern Baptist missions, and considers their struggles to find a place at Southern Baptist seminaries as well as their launching of "teaching" or "women's" ministries. Along the way, it introduces new personalities, offers fresh considerations of familiar figures, and examines the power dynamics of race and class in a denomination that dominated the South and grew into a national behemoth. Additionally, the essay collection provides insights into why the SBC has often politically aligned with the right. Not only did the denomination become increasingly oriented toward authoritarianism as it clamped down on evangelical feminism, but, as several contributors reveal, even as Southern Baptist women sought agency, they often took it from others. Read together, the chapters strike a somber tone, challenging any triumphal historiography of the past. By providing a history of contentious issues from the nineteenth century to the present day, A Marginal Majority provides invaluable context for the recurrent struggles women have faced within the United States' largest Protestant denomination. Moreover, it points to new directions in the study of American denominational life and culture.

As the story goes, an itinerant preacher once visited the Bluegrass region and proclaimed heaven to be "a mere Kentucky of a place." The Commonwealth's first Baptists certainly thought so as they began settling the region a decade before statehood. By 1785 a group of pioneering preachers formed the Elkhorn Association, widely regarded as the oldest Baptist association west of the Alleghenies. Often portrayed in the historiography as the vanguard of a new frontier democracy, the Elkhorn Association, on closer inspection, reveals itself to be far more complex. In A Mere Kentucky of a Place, Keith Harper argues that the association's Baptist ministers were neither full-fledged frontier egalitarians nor radical religionists but simply a people in transition. These ministers formed their identities in the crucible of the early national period, challenged by competing impulses, including their religious convictions, Jeffersonian Republicanism, and a rigid honor code-with mixed results. With a keen eye for human interest, Harper brings familiar historical figures such as John Gano and Elijah Craig to life as he analyzes leadership in the Elkhorn Association during the early republic. Mining the wealth of documents left by the association, Harper details the self-aware struggle of these leaders to achieve economic wealth, status, and full social and cultural acceptance, demonstrating that the Elkhorn Association holds a unique place in the story of Baptists in the "New Eden" of Kentucky. Ideal for course adoption in religious studies and students of Kentucky history, this readable work is sure to become a standard source on the history of religion on the Kentucky frontier.

Eugene W. Baker recounts the eighty-year life of Baylor University's most recognizable founder--Robert Emmett Bledsoe Baylor. Drawing on the personal records of Baylor himself, Baker constructs a complete history of the founder, from his ancestral roots until the time of his death in 1873. One of the three founders of Baylor University, Judge R.E.B. Baylor's life as a committed Christian, military devotee, and Texan is remarkably captured in this comprehensive volume.