Baptist theologians Amy L. Chilton and Steven R. Harmon maintain that the congregational freedom cherished by Baptists makes it possible for their local churches to engage in a practice of theology informed by a full range of voices speaking from the whole church beyond the local church, past and present. In their coedited book Sources Of Light, a diverse group of twenty-three Baptist theologians engage in a collaborative attempt to imagine how Baptist communities might draw on the resources of the whole church more intentionally in their congregational practice of theology. These resources include theologies that attend to the social locations of followers of Jesus Christ - not only in terms of ethnic and gender identity, sexual orientation, citizenship status, and physical ability, but also in relation to the wider interreligious and ecological contexts of the contemporary church. They also include the church's efforts to bring its life together under the rule of Christ in its practices of confessing and teaching the faith, navigating moral disagreement, identifying saintly examples for living the Christian life, ordering its life as a worshiping community, and seeking more visible forms of Christian unity across the divisions of the church. This book commends listening deeply to these voices as an ecclesial practice through which the Spirit of God enlightens the church of Christ, whose rule draws the church into deeper participation in the life of the Triune God, forming the church for practices that offer the gift of Trinitarian communion to a fractured world. Contributors include: Amy L. Chilton, Noel Leo Erskine, Nora O. Lozano, Atola Longkumer, Mikeal N. Broadway, Courtney Pace, Susan M. Shaw, Khalia J. Williams, Cody J. Sanders, May May Latt, Jason D. Whitt, Raimundo C. Barretto, Jr., Rebecca Horner Shenton, Curtis W. Freeman, Kate Hanch, Rady Roldan-Figueroa, Stephen R. Holmes, Coleman Fannin, Myles Werntz, Derek C. Hatch, Philip E. Thompson, Jennifer W. Davidson, and Steven R. Harmon.

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.

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.

Baptists originated as a protest movement within the church but have developed over time into a distinct sect, one committed to preserving its place in the hierarchy of denominations. In today's postmodern, disestablished context, Baptists are in danger of becoming either a religious affinity group, a collection of individuals who share experiences and commitments to a set of principles, or a countercultural sect that retreats to early Enlightenment propositions for consolation and support.In Contesting Catholicity, Curtis W. Freeman offers an alternative Baptist identity, an "Other" kind of Baptist, one that stands between the liberal and fundamentalist options. By discerning an elegant analogy among some late modern Baptist preachers, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Baptist founders, and early patristic theologians, Freeman narrates the Baptist story as a community that grapples with the convictions of the church catholic. Deep analogical conversation across the centuries enables Freeman to gain new leverage on all of the supposedly distinctive Baptist theological identifiers. From believer's baptism, the sacraments, and soul competency, to the Trinity, the priesthood of every believer, and local church autonomy, Freeman's historical reconstruction demonstrates that Baptists did and should understand themselves as a spiritual movement within the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. A "catholic Baptist" is fully participant in the historic church and at the very same time is fully Baptist. This radical Baptist catholicity is more than a quantitative sense of historical and ecumenical communion with the wider church. This Other Baptist identity envisions a qualitative catholicity that is centered on the confession of faith in Jesus Christ and historic Trinitarian orthodoxy enacted in the worship of the church in and through word and sacrament.

What Du Bois noted has gone largely unstudied until now. In this book, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham gives us our first full account of the crucial role of black women in making the church a powerful institution for social and political change in the black community. Between 1880 and 1920, the black church served as the most effective vehicle by which men and women alike, pushed down by racism and poverty, regrouped and rallied against emotional and physical defeat. Focusing on the National Baptist Convention, the largest religious movement among black Americans, Higginbotham shows us how women were largely responsible for making the church a force for self-help in the black community. In her account, we see how the efforts of women enabled the church to build schools, provide food and clothing to the poor, and offer a host of social welfare services. And we observe the challenges of black women to patriarchal theology. Class, race, and gender dynamics continually interact in Higginbotham's nuanced history. She depicts the cooperation, tension, and negotiation that characterized the relationship between men and women church leaders as well as the interaction of southern black and northern white women's groups.

Higginbotham's history is at once tough-minded and engaging. It portrays the lives of individuals within this movement as lucidly as it delineates feminist thinking and racial politics. She addresses the role of black Baptist women in contesting racism and sexism through a "politics of respectability" and in demanding civil rights, voting rights, equal employment, and educational opportunities.

"Righteous Discontent" finally assigns women their rightful place in the story of political and social activism in the black church. It is central to an understanding of African American social and cultural life and a critical chapter in the history of religion in America.