Coinciding with the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Baptist movement, this book explores and assesses the cultural sources of Baptist beliefs and practices. Although the movement has been embraced, enriched, and revised by numerous cultural heritages, the Baptist movement has focused on a small group of Anglo exiles in Amsterdam in constructing its history and identity. Robert E. Johnson seeks to recapture the varied cultural and theological sources of Baptist tradition and to give voice to the diverse global elements of the movement that have previously been excluded or marginalized. With an international communion of over 110 million persons in more than 225,000 congregations, Baptists constitute the world's largest aggregate of evangelical Protestants. This work offers insight into the diversity, breadth, and complexity of the cultural influences that continue to shape Baptist identity today.

This volume of essays focuses on the thought of John Gill, the doyen of High Calvinism in the transatlantic Baptist community of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Among the topics covered are Gill's trinitarian theology, his soteriological views, his Baptist ecclesiology, and his use of Scripture. Other papers are more focused, examining, for instance, his clash with the Arminian Methodist leader John Wesley over the issues of predestination and election, a clash that decisively shaped Wesley's perspective on Calvinism.
The tercentennial of Gill's birth in 1997 is a fitting occasion to issue this study of a man whose systematic theology and exposition of the Old and New Testaments formed the mainstay of many eighteenth-century Baptist ministers' libraries and who has never been the subject of a major critical study.

"The publication of this volume is cause for celebration! The years of painstaking research in untold towns, cities, and libraries in Europe, as well as in North America, the empathy the author brought to the subject... the skill evident in translating, especially technical terms, and the firm grasp of both minute details and their implications, as well as the overall story, have raised the level of historical scholarship to a new high." -- Cornelius J. Dyck, Church History

The oldest and largest communal society in North America, the Hutterites -- Anabaptists of German origin, like the Amish, Mennonites, and Brethren -- have long been the subject of scholarly study and popular curiosity. Werner Packull tells the comprehensive story of the Hutterite beginnings in their original homelands -- particularly in Tyrol and Moravia -- and discovers important relationships among early Anabaptist sects.

"Extensive quotations from the Hutterite Chronicle, the prison letters, and other witness accounts give immediacy to Packull's narrative and provide English readers with a window on primary sources that remain largely untranslated... With its wealth of evocative source material, it is a highly readable account that will appeal not only to specialists but also to undergraduates and general readers." -- Erika Rummel, American Historical Review

"Packull is to be lauded for doing the research so thoroughly and presenting the results so lucidly. His is a meticulous and masterful piece of scholarship in a neglected area of ecclesiastical history." -- Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance

"An indispensable tool and resources for all who describe and interpret these traditions from religiousand social perspectives." -- Walter Klaassen, Conrad Grebel Review

"This remarkable history of early Swiss and Upper German Anabaptism sets a new norm for scholarship, combining as it does for the first time in such depth the methodologies of social history and the history of ideas. Werner O. Packull seems to have left no stone unturned." -- Leonard Gross, Mennonite Quarterly Review