"Baptists and the Cross" Conference Audio Now Available

The audio for this year's conference "Baptists and the Cross: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives" is now available online.  Plenary sessions include lectures by Tom Schreiner, Stephen Wellum, David Bebbington, Glendon Thompson, Maurice Dowling, James Fuller, and Danny Akin.  There also twelve parallel sessions an hymn-fest, and a bonus discussion between Drs. Haykin and Bebbington.  View the complete schedule and listen online or download MP3s here.

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research and Administrative Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin.

Baptist ministers in the 18th century: a further reflection

Standing at the far left of the picture of the Baptist ministers we have been considering is Samuel Pearce (1766-99), one of my Baptist heroes. Immediately to his right is William Steadman (1764-1837), who played a central role in Baptist renewal in the North of England. Steadman far outlived Pearce, but the two had been close friends during their time together at Bristol Baptist Academy, where they both studied in the late 1780s. Whoever drew this picture must have known of their friendship for their being placed together is not fortuitous. It corresponds to two other groups of friends that we will consider at a later point. Pearce was widely known to be a friend of Andrew Fuller and John Ryland, both sitting in the picture, but the friendship with Steadman was not as widely known, which makes this point quite interesting.

Baptist ministers in the 18th century: a continuing rumination

Looking at the previous post and its picture: is it significant that the only two clearly visible figures holding Bibles are Hall and Kinghorn? As mentioned in the previous post, a bewigged Dan Taylor also has a Bible, but he is obscured by Hall. Hall and Kinghorn, of course, had a very well known debate in the nineteenth century about open and closed communion (for the record, my sympathies and convictions side with Kinghorn). Does the prominence of Hall, standing not seated like Kinghorn, say something about the sympathies of the artist of this picture? I would not be led down this track, if it were not for the presence of two General Baptists in this picture: Dan Taylor (bewigged and in the back row) and next to him, on his left, John Deodatus Gregory Pike (1784-1854), a man much admired by C.H. Spurgeon. Does their presence bespeak an open attitude towards the General Baptists that came to typify many English Baptists by the end of the century, which would befit the ecumenical Hall more than the Reformed catholic Kinghorn?

Pike's presence also probably helps us to date the picture: post 1854. But not too many years after that date, for which English Baptist could resist including Spurgeon if the picture were being done in the late 1860s or the 1870s, unless he wanted to create a period piece?

Many questions!

Baptist Ministers in the 18th Century: ruminations on a picture

(Click on photo to enlarge)

This is quite a well-known picture that depicts many of the luminaries of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century English Baptist community. Recently, Cody McNutt, a PhD student at SBTS, pointed out to me the central place held by Robert Hall, Jr (1764-1831) in this picture. Cody is doing a much-needed thesis on Hall and that is why his attention was drawn to Hall's place in the picture.

The seated figures in the front row--(from l. to r.) William Carey, Joseph Kinghorn, John Ryland, Jr., Andrew Fuller, and John Foster--were all remarkable figures, but the creator of this portrait seems to have wanted to highlight Hall. He is standing in a posture that surely bespeaks the preacher with a Bible in his right hand. And if the Baptists of that era were about anything it was preaching. As a means of grace, it was second to none as a way of communicating God's will and presence. All of the men in the picture were preachers (except for Foster, who tried to preach but failed miserably in it--his forte was the written essay), why highlight Hall in this regard? Does it reveal the conviction that Hall represents the cream of Baptist preaching? There is no doubt, for many of that era, Hall was the greatest of a great generation of preachers.

Kinghorn also has a book, probably a Bible, but by having him seated it seems he has been depicted in a more prayerful, meditative pose. This depiction of Kinghorn is dependent on the A. Robertson painting of Kinghorn (1813). This painting was popularized through an engraving by the engraver W. Bond. And upon close inspection, Dan Taylor (directly behind Hall and the only bewigged figure in the picture--also one of only two General Baptists, the other is J.G. Pike, on Taylor's left) is also holding a book--probably a Bible? But one has to look very closely to see it. He is definitely overshadowed by Hall.

This is a fascinating picture and a tremendous window into Baptist thinking of that day. Thinking about Hall's place in this picture has sparked further thoughts about the figures in this picture, which I hope to share later.

New Book on Andrew Fuller Provides Solid Model of Pastoral Ministry

Broadman & Holman have been publishing a new series of monographs on the history of Baptists entitled “Studies in Baptist Life and Thought.” These monographs explore Baptist life together and Baptist thought, and are vital reading for anyone who loves the truths that Baptists have lived and died for. Given the many significant changes that the world is undergoing in our day, Baptists are being tempted to divorce themselves from their theological and spiritual roots. Behind this series is the conviction that such would be suicidal and that the volumes in this series will provide a way in which Baptists can learn from the past how to live faithfully for God in the present. The latest volume in the series is Paul Brewster’s Andrew Fuller: Model Pastor-Theologian, has just been released. Brewster, pastor of Ryker’s Ridge Baptist Church in Madison, Indiana, and a PhD from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, examines Fuller as a pastor and theologian and the way in which he was able to frame a theological perspective in the midst of a very busy pastorate.

In recent years, with the upsurge of interest in Reformed theology, there are a number of theologians who have been the focus of attention, Edwards, for example, or some of the Puritans like Owen. But when it comes to a solid model of Baptist ministry, who do we have? Spurgeon, without a shadow of a doubt. Well, after Spurgeon I would suggest that Fuller is a prime example of what a pastor-theologian looks like. Read Brewster’s book and see for yourself!

You can order from Amazon.com for $16.49.

Dr. Haykin Interviewed About Alexander Whyte

Dr. Michael Haykin was recently interviewed on Covenant Radio about his book A Consuming Fire:  The Piety of Alexander Whyte.  They will be replaying the program a few times in the next month or two on their 24/7 internet radio station, Sola5 Radio.  They have also placed a direct link to the audio and brief notes concerning the interview on their blog.  You can also access the interview directly by MP3 download here.

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research and Administrative Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin.

Human cultural artifacts and the Empire of the Holy Spirit

"The wise of the world, Aristotle or Plato or Socrates, who were skilled in knowledge, were like great cities, but they were laid waste by the enemies because the Spirit of God was not in them" (Macarius-Symeon, Homily 42.1). This is an astute remark that raises all kinds of questions about the experience of common grace and how Christians relate to culture. I take it as a given that an acultural Christianity is a non-entity. To be involved in the work of saving sinners, Christians must impant themselves in a culture. But what is the value of that culture? Left to itself, I can readily affirm with Macarius-Symeon that any culture will perish. But if indwelt by the Spirit, ah, there is the question? What will be its end result?

Let me make my beliefs plain: I look forward to that day when all that is best and good and true in the kingdoms of this world will be transformed into the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus and become the Empire of the Holy Spirit.

Reading Macarius/Symeon

Central to the closing of the late fourth-century debate about the deity of the Holy Spirit was the argument of the Greek theologian Basil of Caesarea (c.329–79) that the Spirit must be divine if, through his indwelling of both angels and humans, he makes them holy beings. As the One who ultimately provides all of the holiness experienced by rational creatures in the universe, the Holy Spirit must be holy without qualification. And as such he cannot be a creature, but has to be ontologically inseparable from the Father and the Son.[1] The source of this argument was both Scripture and Basil’s experience as a monk. In the early monastic movement Basil had been exposed to a rich charismatic environment that convinced him that genuine progress in a life of virtue was deeply dependent upon the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit.

Another monastic leader who shared this conviction, but who expressed it in quite a different fashion, is the author of four major collections of homilies, discourses and letters known as the Macarian corpus. I have long been interested in this author ever since in 1979 I heard a brilliant lecture by Reinhart Staats on the glorification of the Spirit in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed and his brief discussion of some disciples of Macarius who were present at the Council of Constantinople. And so am reading and thinking about the Spirit in the II collection of Macarian homilies.[2] It is a truly amazing slice of Patristic literature. Macarius’ grasp of the Spirit’s work in the context of human sin is largely very biblical.

All of this is preparation for a paper I have to give at an academic confernce this coming Friday at SBTS, the conference is entitled "Human and Christian Agency" and is sponsored by the Society for Christian Psychology, and I am looking at the Spirit and the sturggle against sin in Macarius/Symeon.

 

[1] Basil of Caesarea, Letter 125.3; 159.2; On the Holy Spirit 19.48. See also J. Verhees, “Die Bedeutung der Transzendenz des Pneuma bei Basilius”, Ostkirchliche Studien, 25 (1976),299–300.

[2] For discussion of the four collections, see Marcus Plested, The Macarian Legacy: The Place of Macarius-Symeon in the Eastern Christian Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 9–12. See also Stuart K. Burns, “Pseudo-Macarius and the Messalians: The Use of Time for the Common Good” in R.N. Swanson, ed., The Use and Abuse of Time in Christian History (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press for The Ecclesiastical History Society, 2002), 3, n.7.

Thinking about Carey's love of Bengali literature

When William Carey went to India, he began a lifelong program of learning about the culture and history of India. So enamoured did he become of Indian literature that he eventually engaged in a systematic re-printing of much of their classical literature. And today he is partly remembered in eastern India as one of the figures responsible for a renaissance of Bengali litertaure. Not surprisingly, some of his close friends in England, like Andrew Fuller, under whose patronymic I serve in part, were surprised and somewhat nonplussed. They had sent Carey out to be a witness to the Christ among the millions of the Indian subcontinent and here he was wasting time on literature. But Carey was wiser than they. He realized that for the gospel to make any headway in his adopted Indian culture, there had to be some understanding of that culture, and the best way to do that was to systematically study the world of India.

I personally do not think Carey's strategy mistaken. A careful examination of the history of mission would show that this strategy was usually far more successful than any alternatives. One of the reasons for the ongoing strength of the Patristic witness, for example, was the amazing ability of the Fathers to transplant the gospel into the soil of Hellenism, a transplant that by and large was accomplished without major compromise of the Faith, though there were many temptations to so compromise.

New Book by Dr. Haykin Helps Rediscover Church Fathers

Justin Taylor has posted an interview with Dr. Michael Haykin offering advise on reading the church fathers.  This affords a good opportunity to mention that Dr. Haykin has a new book on Rediscovering the Church Fathers, due to be released by Crossway on March 31, 2011. Dr. Haykin described the purpose of the book in his interview with Justin as:

The book seeks to stimulate a thirst for the Fathers and to reveal how rich the Fathers are in theology and piety. As such, it is not an exhaustive study of the Fathers. Rather, it presents six Fathers/patristic texts that reveal key themes of that era of church history and hopefully stir up interest and make the Fathers increasingly a known land.

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research and Administrative Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin.

New Element Added to AFCBS Conference

I'm excited to announce a new component just added to next week's "Baptists and the Cross" conference at Southern Seminary.  Dr. David Bebbington and Dr. Michael Haykin have agreed to an open discussion to be held at the LifeWay campus store immediately following the last session of the conference.  The discussion between Dr. Haykin and Dr. Bebbington will begin at 4 pm and last approximately 30 minutes.  The conversation will be followed by a booksigning of the most recent release by each man.  Dr. Bebbington will be signing his Baptists through the Centuries: A History of a Global People and Dr. Haykin will be signing his The Empire of the Holy Spirit. If you haven't already registered for the conference, sign up today!  There will be free books and other materials given to all registrants.  Don't miss this great opportunity to sit under some of the best Baptist scholars alive today!  Plenary Speakers include:  Tom Schreiner, Stephen Wellum, Maurice Dowling, David Bebbington, Glendon Thompson, James Fuller, and Danny Akin.  To find out more about the conference, please visit the conference webpage.

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research and Administrative Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin.

True Christianity thoroughly communal

I am increasingly nonplussed by a Christianity—albeit Reformed in doctrine—that is as hermetically sealed as any of the individualistic ideologies of contemporary North American culture. We do church Sunday morn and eve, and then retreat to our separate worlds and our paths rarely cross with our fellow worshippers till Wednesday prayer meeting or the Lord’s Day following. What kind of Christianity is this? What kind of Christianity is it that does not create communities of friends? I have never gotten over the communitarian spirit of those far-off days of the 1960s when some of us were given a vision of community that the spirit of that era could not achieve. The solidarity of the Marxist International sparked by reading Che and Marcuse turned out to be nothing but a bad dream. And the communes of peace and love espoused by the hippie culture disappeared into the rigidity of the political correct communities and their watchdogs of the 1980s and 1990s.

But when we became Christians we knew we had found the real thing. Forty years on, I have no doubts at all that friendship with the Lord Jesus is the vision we glimpsed from afar in those heady days of the sixties. He is the only One with the words of eternal life. He is the only One who has a plan for community that is sweetly satisfying to the human soul and truly liberating to the human person.

And I admit it, reading such books as Augustine's City of God and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together spoiled me for anything less! And so I know the pain of those in our day who have been hurt by the Church and see that she is not what she should be. May God give me grace that I never give up on the Church, the beloved of my Beloved. But I wonder: what will it take for us to realize the hollowness of affirming we are a community of the Crucified One and yet know nothing of the pain and joy of walking with one another, our Lord's brothers and sisters, in daily life? And don't tell me, such is the way of life in the twenty-first century.

True Christianity thoroughly political

To desire an apolitical Christianity is to ask for a will o’the wisp. Christianity is heavily political: by becoming Christians we are declaring that the kingdoms of this world are not Ultimate and cannot be the focus of worship despite the ravenous hunger of statist politicians since the days of Babel. When we declare that Jesus of Nazareth, the Man now in the glory, is the True King and that one day he will return and the kingdoms of this world will become the Kingdom of the Lord’s Messiah, we are making a deeply political affirmation. Yes, and when that happens, politics will never be the same again. The members of the Confessing Church, blessings be upon the memory of those brethren, knew this so well when they stated as much in the Barmen Declaration: “Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.”

What we as Baptists reject is the confusion of church and state as in the days following Constantine. But make no mistake about it: to say Jesus is Lord is to make a political statement. The martyrs of the Confessing Church who died under Hitler cannot be understood without recognizing this truth.

Research Tips for Unfamiliar Topics

I recently posted the following on my personal blog.  Dr. Haykin has asked that I post it here, as well.

From time to time, students are called upon to write upon topics upon which they have little knowledge of the primary and/or secondary literature.  The following are some suggestions on how to begin researching unfamiliar topics.

  1. Search the online databases of the closest research library (associated with a university or seminary, mine is Boyce Library at SBTS)  for key words or terms related to your topic.  If you don't know where the closest research library is or you want to search multiple libraries at the same time, try WorldCat.org. A search on this database will bring up a list of books, when you click on a title you will have the option of inputing your zip code and libraries containing the book will be listed in order of their proximity to your location.
  2. Look at the books generated from your search above.  Look at their footnotes/endnotes and/or bibliographies to find more books on the topic. Track their sources (going back to Worldcat.org if necessary) to find their sources, to find their sources, ad infinitum.
  3. Another source for bibliographies listing works related to your topic can be general resources such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, and survey works (such as Church Histories and Systematic theologies in my field).  These will sometimes contain specific articles related to your topics written by specialists in the field.  Their bibliographies can be a goldmine for finding the most recent and best resources on a topic.  The general survey works, though probably not useful as a source themselves, will provide listing of more specialized works that will be useful for your research.  Again, track down their sources (going back to Worldcat.org if necessary) to find their sources, to find their sources, ad infinitum.
  4. Search for articles on the topic or related topics using keywords in library databases or online at databases such as Google Scholar. Check their footnotes/bibliography. Then, track down their sources (going back to Worldcat.org if necessary) to find their sources, to find their sources, ad infinitum.
  5. Another good source for bibliographies for further research are scholarly dissertations (which can be found at University/Seminary or through online databases, usually only accessible at research libraries) which have huge bibliographies. In dissertations, as well as the other resources mentioned above, the newer a resource is the better chance that its author has consulted the most resources and therefore would have the most up-to-date bibliography (this is not always the case with shoddy scholarship, so be careful here).

Tolle lege!

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research and Administrative Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin