“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.”
Although Keach authored this work in the seventeenth century, his correctional insights about local church controversy are relevant to every generation of Christians. As such, the remainder of this article features what Keach deemed to be “common causes of discord [in a local church].”
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.
The evangelistic efforts of Johann Gerhard Oncken deserve high recognition, and a deep study will provide encouragement and instruction for how believers today ought to participate in evangelism and missions. As Baptist historian, H. Leon McBeth puts it, “the greatest pioneer of the Baptist faith in Europe was J. G. Oncken.”
Human strength and human schemes will fail in the expansion of God’s kingdom. It must be God’s work.
To rightly examine the life, ministry, and impact of William Carey is to consider a group of friends plodding together for the Lord.
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.”
Unbelief has many shades of dark and darker hues; it appears in the regenerate under a variety of circumstances, but increasingly engulfs the unregenerate.