4 books found
This title offers a comprehensive analysis of Baptist theology. Embracing in one common trajectory the major Baptist confessions of faith, the major Baptist theologians, and the principal Baptist theological movements and controversies, this book spans four centuries of Baptist doctrinal history. Acknowledging first the pre-1609 roots (patristic, medieval, and Reformational) of Baptist theology, it examines the Arminian versus Calvinist issues that were first expressed by the General Baptists and the Particular Baptists; that dominated English and American Baptist theology during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from Helwys and Smyth and from Bunyan and Kiffin to Gill, Fuller, Backus, and Boyce; and, that were quickened by the 'awakenings' and the missionary movement. Concurrently there were the Baptist defense of the Baptist distinctives vis-a-vis the pedobaptist world and the unfolding of a strong Baptist confessional tradition. Then during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the liberal versus evangelical issues became dominant with Hovey, Strong, Rauschenbusch, and Henry in the North and Mullins, Conner, Hobbs, and Criswell in the South even as a distinctive Baptist Landmarkism developed, the discipline of biblical theology was practiced and a structured ecumenism was pursued. Missiology both impacted Baptist theology and took it to all the continents, where it became increasingly indigenous. Conscious that Baptists belong to the free churches and to the believers' churches, a new generation of Baptist theologians at the advent of the twenty-first century appears somewhat more Calvinist than Arminian and decidedly more evangelical than liberal.
by James T. Murphy, Jr.
2012 · Xlibris Corporation
An initial introduction to the study of Christian theology is both exciting and invigorating for students of its discipline. One can become enameled in the classic perspectives of theology without any consideration of a possible alternative. Defining Salvation in the Context of Black Theology is an exit from the classic conviction that trumpets the doctrine of soteriology attributing its substance to the posture of eternity while ignoring the importance of salvation in the existential. Careful not to reject the question of eternal life, but examining the nuances of the term "salvation" empowers this work to present the like manner essential that having salvation is just as much about "now" than it is in the here after.
In this, the first full-scale black systematic theology in twenty years, James Evans emerges as a major and distinctive voice in American theology.Seeking to overcome the chasm between church practice and theological reflection, Evans situates theology squarely in the nexus of faith with freedom. There, with a sure touch, he uplifts revelatory aspects of black religious experience that reanimate classical areas of theology, and he creates a theology with a heart, a soul and a voice that speaks directly to our condition.