“One way of characterizing the change that took place in British and Irish Particular Baptist life in the course of the long eighteenth century (1680s-1830s) is along the lines of walls and bridges: the Particular Baptists transitioned from being a community of wall-builders to one of being bridge-builders.”
“The pathway to renewal and mission necessitated a literary demolition of what was a regnant theological narrative in far too many Baptist circles, namely, that of High Calvinism, which gloried in eternal justification and rejected the free offer of the gospel.”
When I began to study the Particular Baptist heritage and to sense a call to engage in genuine ressourcement of both the theology and ethos of this tradition, I met a living paragon of this glorious tradition, namely Erroll Hulse. What a remarkable Christian leader and author he was, especially in this area of Christian unity.
Brown’s friendship with Spurgeon through the desperate days of the Downgrade Controversy over the Scriptures in the 1880s was rooted, in part, in a shared conviction of the necessity of upholding the verbal, plenary inspiration of the Bible.
Human strength and human schemes will fail in the expansion of God’s kingdom. It must be God’s work.
The frequenting of cafes and coffee shops by many modern-day students to study, converse, and plug into the internet is actually tapping into a much older phenomenon that goes back to the late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century coffeehouses of England.
Anne Dutton (1692–1765), a prolific Baptist author who corresponded with many of the leading Evangelical figures of the eighteenth century—including George Whitefield (1714–1770) and John Wesley (1703–1791)— was certain that in the Lord’s Supper “the King is pleas’d to sit with us, at his Table.”
Baptists have been profoundly shaped by a loving interaction with and heartfelt submission to the Bible. In their doctrine, their life together, and their spirituality they have been a people of the Book.
“…in his day, especially among members of his community, the Particular Baptists of the eighteenth century, John Gill may rightly be reckoned, in the words of Lloyd-Jones, ‘a very great man, and an exceptionally able man.'”