Panel: Jonathan Edwards' Spirituality

Dr. Chris Chun hosted a digital panel with two remarkable Edwardsean scholars on the life and works of Jonathan Edwards. Dr. Michael Haykin, professor of church history and biblical spirituality and executive director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies at Southern Seminary, and Dr. Robert Caldwell, professor of church history at Southwestern Seminary, joined him in discussing Edwards’ spirituality, devotional life, and theological impact on American Christianity. Check out their website for further activity at the JEC!

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Joseph Stennett & Anne Dutton on the Lord’s Supper

This may come as a surprise to many modern-day Evangelicals, who do not appear to have seen participation at the Table as an important spiritual discipline. Any talk about the Lord’s Supper nourishing the soul they have tended to write off as Roman Catholic. But it was not always so as the following two samplings of eighteenth-century Particular Baptist reflections on the Lord’s Supper reveal.

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The Martyred Lover

“What seems clear, though, from all that we can determine, is that Saint Valentine was a martyr — yes, a lover, but one who loved the Lord Jesus to the point of giving his life for his commitment to Christ. For Christians to adequately remember Saint Valentine, then, we would do well to consider what it meant to be a martyr in the early church.”

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268 Years Young

Andrew Fuller turns 268 today.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in Andrew Fuller’s lasting impact upon Baptist theology, spirituality, and identity, yet this interest is, in the words of John Ryland, “in no degree attributable to adventitious aids of birth or education.” While his pedigree included those who had suffered for the cause of Christ, the opportunities afforded to him were no more “than [what was] open to the son of any farmer in the middle of the [eighteenth century].”

Given the humbleness of his earthly origins, there is much to be admired about Andrew Fuller. And beyond the nourishment that one will most certainly derive from reading his biblical expositions, ordination sermons, and affectionate correspondence, Andrew Fuller continues be an exemplar to those who faithfully seek to advance the cause of the gospel amidst the difficulties of their own age.

Irrespective of background, the details of Fuller’s beginnings juxtaposed to the size his impact remind those entrusted with the apostolic message that faithfulness has rippling effects through the centuries—whether or not one’s name receives birthday wishes when they turn 268.