These important and incisive essays, spanning more than two decades of research and engagement, probe facets and episodes of infant baptisms' fortunes over twenty centuries. The story of paedo baptism is traced from its shadowy beginnings as a variant of faith-baptism, through inflated Reformation defenses as it monopolized baptismal thought and practice, to biblical and ecumenical reevaluations and hopeful contemporary rapprochements across divisive waters.

The Christian church confesses "one baptism." But the church's answers to how, whom and when to baptize, and even what it means or does, are famously varied. This book provides a forum for thoughtful proponents of three principal evangelical views to state their case, respond to the others, and then provide a summary response and statement. Sinclair Ferguson sets out the case for infant baptism, Bruce Ware presents the case for believers' baptism, and Anthony Lane argues for a mixed practice. As with any good conversation on a controversial topic, this book raises critical issues, challenges preconceptions and discloses the soft points in each view. Evangelicals who wish to understand better their own church's practice or that of their neighbor, or who perhaps are uncertain of their own views, will value this incisive book.

For more than ten years the Westminster assembly was one of the major institutions of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Members of the assembly were involved in every significant political debate of the decade, and the public blamed or blessed the think-tank for radical changes in the church. At home and abroad, people perceived the assembly to be a powerful patron. Christians wrote from Europe to ask the assembly for advice. Visitors made their way to the abbey, from an unknown Muslim to the elector palatine of the Rhine. Printers and booksellers INSERT: Included in Starkmann 40% promotion, September-October 2014 theologians and members were paraded down London streets and feasted at banquets. The story of the Westminster assembly's accomplishments, as well as its failures, are told in the texts of this edition. The gathering left behind an extraordinary testimony of its reforming activities, and the manuscript minutes constitute one of the most important unpublished religious texts of seventeenth-century Britain. All surviving votes and debates of the assembly are provided here for the first time. This edition documents almost 2,000 examinations of preachers for churches, fellows for colleges, and heretics for heresy. It also includes all known assembly papers, many of them only recently discovered. These texts reveal much of the assembly's work behind the scenes, and explain how the gathering could at once serve as an icon of godly rule, producing classic texts in the history of Christian doctrine and practice, while simultaneously becoming entangled in prolonged debates and the 'democratic anarchy' which characterized the British Revolution.

In three wideranging case studies, Garcia explores how union with Christ functions in Calvins thought. Garcia explains the way Calvin understands the apostle Paul to connect good works to eternal life in the context of union with Christ. He then turns his attention to the relationship of christology and pneumatology in sacramental union or communion with Christ. The third study investigates the role of Christ, the Spirit and the Eucharist in Calvins critique of Osianders views on justifying union with Christ.

A Pathway into the Holy Scripture contains revised versions of papers given at the jubilee meeting of the Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical and Theological Research, an event that coincided with the 500th anniversary of the birth of the English reformer William Tyndale. The book includes a discussion of Tyndale as bible interpreter, surveys of current trends in Old and New Testament scholarship, treatments of biblical theology and of Paul's view of Scripture, chapters on Biblical hermeneutics and the doctrine of inspiration, and studies discussing the role of Scripture in the church in earlier periods and in the present day.

Over 200 international scholars from a variety of demoninations have contributed to this outstanding, one-volume, comprehensive, reference book. Stressing the importance of events, persons, and theological concepts that have been significant to the Reformed tradition, these articles provide authoritative summaries and stimulating discussion.

Fossil crinoids are exceptionally suited to deep-time studies of community paleoecology and niche partitioning. By merging ecomorphological trait and phylogenetic data, this Element summarizes niche occupation and community paleoecology of crinoids from the Bromide fauna of Oklahoma (Sandbian, Upper Ordovician). Patterns of community structure and niche evolution are evaluated over a ~5 million-year period through comparison with the Brechin Lagerstatte (Katian, Upper Ordovician). The authors establish filtration fan density, food size selectivity, and body size as major axes defining niche differentiation, and niche occupation is strongly controlled by phylogeny. Ecological strategies were relatively static over the study interval at high taxonomic scales, but niche differentiation and specialization increased in most subclades. Changes in disparity and species richness indicate the transition between the early-middle Paleozoic Crinoid Evolutionary Faunas was already underway by the Katian due to ecological drivers and was not triggered by the Late Ordovician mass extinction.

Macroevolutionary inference has historically been treated as a two-step process, involving the inference of a tree, and then inference of a macroevolutionary model using that tree. Newer models blend the two steps. These methods make more complete use of fossils than the previous generation of Bayesian phylogenetic models. They also involve many more parameters than prior models, including parameters about which empiricists may have little intuition. In this Element, we set forth a framework for fitting complex, hierarchical models. The authors ultimately fit and use a joint tree and diversification model to estimate a dated phylogeny of the Cincta (Echinodermata), a morphologically distinct group of Cambrian echinoderms that lack the fivefold radial symmetry characteristic of extant members of the phylum. Although the phylogeny of cinctans remains poorly supported in places, this Element shows how models of character change and diversification contribute to understanding patterns of phylogenetic relatedness and testing macroevolutionary hypotheses.

Recent advances in statistical approaches called phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs) have provided paleontologists with a powerful set of analytical tools for investigating evolutionary tempo and mode in fossil lineages. However, attempts to integrate PCMs with fossil data often present workers with practical challenges or unfamiliar literature. This Element presents guides to the theory behind and the application of PCMs with fossil taxa. Based on an empirical dataset of Paleozoic crinoids, example analyses are presented to illustrate common applications of PCMs to fossil data, including investigating patterns of correlated trait evolution and macroevolutionary models of morphological change. The authors emphasize the importance of accounting for sources of uncertainty and discuss how to evaluate model fit and adequacy. Finally, the authors discuss several promising methods for modeling heterogeneous evolutionary dynamics with fossil phylogenies. Integrating phylogeny-based approaches with the fossil record provides a rigorous, quantitative perspective on understanding key patterns in the history of life.