Samuel Richardson’s Use of John Murton and Roger Williams on Religious Liberty
In the past couple of years, a great deal of discussion has occurred regarding Baptist political theology. It has often focused on what Baptists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries taught on religious liberty and how Baptists today should approach religious liberty in post-Christian America. Some self-professed Baptists have even advocated for forms of Magisterial Protestantism, which is at odds with Baptist political theology...
Nine Early Baptist Texts on Religious Toleration Everyone Should Read
by Jesse Owens and Jake Stone One of the hallmarks of early English Baptists is their defense of religious toleration. I (Jesse) have argued in previous essays (here and here) that early Baptist arguments for religious toleration were neither dependent on Enlightenment ideals nor were they accidental to Baptist theology. These two points are closely related. First, early Baptist arguments for religious toleration were not dependent...
Christianity and Liberalism at 100 Years
In 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969) preached a sermon entitled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” at the First Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, New York.[1] In the decade prior to Fosdick’s sermon, Americans had suffered through the First World War, and American Protestants (particularly the Baptists and Presbyterians) were amid the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. Fosdick’s “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” was a call for...
HSF Conversations: The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
Originally published in 1994, Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind was a strong critique of evangelicalism’s lack of commitment to the life of the mind. Noll, a renowned historian, attempted to trace the historical roots of what we might call evangelical anti-intellectualism in order explain its continued presence today. In sum, Noll argued that there was no evangelical mind to speak of. The book was Christianity...
Is Religious Toleration Accidental to Early Baptist Theology?
There has been much discussion recently on Baptist views regarding religious toleration. The discussion has covered issues such as: whether religious toleration was widely held among early Baptists, whether religious toleration is essential to Baptist identity, whether arguments for religious toleration were merely a response to the persecution that early Baptists faced rather than something more essential to Baptist theology, and...
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