Exploring Christian Heritage provides students and teachers with a rich and substantial introduction to the texts that have shaped the Christian faith. Including works by Augustine, Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Wesley, John Calvin, and Karl Barth, among others, this collection also highlights essential movementsafrom the second to thetwenty-first centuriesaoften glossed over in primary source readers. From Pentecostalism and Baptists to feminism and religious liberty movements, Exploring Christian Heritage succinctly joins together the most influential voices of Christian history and theology with those that have been forgottenand sometimesignored. Now in its second edition, voices ancient and modern have been added to deepen and widen the story of Christianity in varied forms. Exploring Christian Heritage , second editionalso contains additional classroom resources, including new textual introductions and over ninety new quizzes.

This work offers a survey on the history of Baptists. When John Smyth organized the first Baptist church, he wanted to establish the New Testament church; believer's baptism was the missing link. Baptists of subsequent eras often continued the search to embody 'New Testament Christianity'. Unique to surveys of Baptist life, Doug Weaver highlights this restorationist theme as a way to understand Baptist identity. Weaver does not force the theme, but the 'search' is ever present. It is found in the insistence upon believer's baptism, but also in examples like the Sabbath worship of Seventh Day Baptists, the 'nine rites' of colonial Separate Baptists, the women preachers of Free Will Baptists, the 'trail of blood' of Landmarkism, the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch, the 'fundamentals' of fundamentalism and the ministry of the European pioneer Johann Oncken. Like other recent Baptist studies, Weaver describes Baptist diversity. Still, he highlights the persistent commitment of most Baptists to an informal constellation of 'Baptist distinctives'. Alongside the quest for the New Testament church (and congregational community), Weaver especially highlights the Baptist commitment to religious liberty and the individual conscience. This emphasis, while later reinforced by Enlightenment ideals, could already be found in the biblicist piety of the earliest Baptists who insisted that individual believers must have the right to choose their religious beliefs because they would stand alone before God at the final judgment. Both chronological and thematic, this book addresses such themes as the role of women, the social gospel, ecumenism, charismatic influences, and theological emphases in Baptist life. The book's focus is America, but it also includes helpful introductory chapters on early English Baptists and international Baptists.

The Acts of the Apostles: Four Centuries of Baptist Interpretation is a landmark work of research, containing examples of specific ways that Baptists have used Acts in their confessions, sermons, tracts, commentaries, monographs, devotional and denominational literature, speeches, and hymns. Including the entirety of the Acts as translated by Baptist luminary Helen Barrett Montgomery, this commentary beautifully illustrates the diversity of Baptist responses to this book of Scripture, and in so doing, a variety of hermeneutical approaches within the Baptist tradition.

The book is a collection of essays from the International Conference of Baptist Studies VI that was held at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, North Carolina in July 2012. The topic of Baptist Identity remains important for Baptists across the globe. This collection of essays reveals the richness and the diversity of conceptions about Baptist identity that have been shared by and about Baptists. The essays, written by an international set of authors, examine issues of Baptist origins and questions of identity up to the present. Written with attention to historical context and grounded in primary source research, the essays will contribute to current and future debates about Baptist history and identity past and present. -Publisher

This study of William Marrion Branham's ministry reveals much about the healing methodology of deliverance evangelists. Branham's theology of healing highlights the widely accepted role of evangelists as mediators between God and the afflicted. The dynamic growth of Pentecostalism in the twentieth century is a major feature of the modern religious scene. Branham is acknowledged as a leader of the healing revival movement. Although little known outside of the Pentecostal movement, his work had tremendous influence on today's televangelists and the whole of Pentecostalism itself.

The record is clear that Baptists, historically, have prioritized conversion, Jesus, and God. Equally clear is that Baptists have never known what to do with the Holy Spirit. In Baptists and the Holy Spirit , Baptist historian C. Douglas Weaver traces the way Baptists have engagedaand, at times, embracedathe Holiness, Pentecostal, and charismatic movements. Chronicling the interactions between Baptists and these Spirit-filled movements reveals the historical context for the development of Baptists' theology of the Spirit. Baptists and the Holy Spirit provides the first in-depth interpretation of Baptist involvement with the Holiness, Pentecostal, and charismatic movements that have found a prominent place in America's religious landscape. Weaver reads these traditions through the nuanced lens of Baptist identity, as well as the frames of gender, race, and class. He shows that, while most Baptists reacted against all three Spirit-focused groups, each movement flourished among a Baptist minority who were attracted by the post-conversion experience of the "baptism of the Holy Spirit." Weaver also explores the overlap between Baptist and Pentecostal efforts to restore and embody the practices and experiences of the New Testament church. The diversity of BaptistsaSouthern Baptist, American Baptist, African American Baptistaleads to an equally diverse understanding of the Spirit. Even those who strongly opposed charismatic expressions of the Spirit still acknowledged a connection between the Holy Spirit and a holy life. If, historically, Baptists were suspicious of Roman Catholics' ecclesial hierarchy, then Baptists were equally wary of free church pneumatology. However, as Weaver shows, Baptist interactions with the Holiness, Pentecostal, and charismatic movements and their vibrant experience with the Spirit were key in shaping Baptist identity and theology.

John Rowan Claypool IV (1930-2005) was one of the most prominent white, progressive Baptist preachers in the South during the latter half of the twentieth century. From the 1960s to the mid-1980s, he was pastor of influential Baptist churches in Louisville, Kentucky, Fort Worth, Texas, and Jackson, Mississippi, and a co-pastor in Lubbock, Texas. Claypool's pulpit prowess was known to most Baptists through published sermons mailed out weekly by the churches he pastored. His book of sermons, Tracks of a Fellow Strugglers (1974), described the death of his ten-year-old daughter, Laura Lue, in 1970 and became the basis of a ministry of confessional preaching that was experienced as pastoral care from the pulpit. In his fifties, the prominent Baptist became an Episcopal priest and served a parish in Birmingham, Alabama, from 1986 to 2000. Claypool was no less popular and no less loved among Episcopalians, and he found rich fulfillment in the ministry of the sacraments. As an Episcopal priest, Claypool concluded his career teaching at Mercer University's McAfee School of Theology in Atlanta, Georgia. This book is the first to analyze the various aspects of Claypool's ministry, from his work in local church/parish settings to his ministry as pastor, priest, and professor. Contributors include Loyd Allen, John W. Arnett, Raymond Bailey, John Rowan Claypool V, R. Alan Culpepper, David W. Hull, Charles Johnson, W. Glenn Jonas, Jr., Mark LaGory, Julie Whidden Long, Henry Parsley, Steven Shoemaker, Walter B. Shurden, and Ruth Wagoner. Their analysis, while celebratory, is insightful and captures the gifts of John Claypool--the confessional pulpiteer and pastor who embodied for so many that ""Life is Gift.

Local church history is important. What great thinkers have written and what denominational bodies have declared in resolutions and organizational ministries are important, but ""lived religion"" at the ground level provides a fuller picture of the story of the Christian faith. The fifty-year (1967-2017) story of Northminster Baptist Church in Jackson, Mississippi, is one of those narratives that richly adds to our understanding of how faith has been lived in a particular setting. ""Different and distinctive but nevertheless Baptist"" is a phrase that tells the rich, unique history of Northminster Baptist Church. Baptist churches are known for claiming the priesthood of believers as a Baptist distinctive, but no church emphasizes it as much or implements it more than Northminster. Alongside a conscious lay emphasis, the church has had notable pulpit ministers like John Claypool and Chuck Poole (twice). Originally affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, its young professional base was seen as an alternative to First Baptist Church, Jackson. The church became involved in the Alliance of Baptists and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. At the same time, the theologically progressive church remained active in the Mississippi Baptist Convention-despite its frequent ordinations of women ministers-until its ouster in 2017. Northminster's story tells of a strong, notable, interfaith relationship with the Beth Temple Israel synagogue, an innovative social ministry (Wider Net) to the inner city of Jackson, and a theology of reverent worship that is liturgically ""high church."" Different, but proudly Baptist, no doubt.