The Baptist Review

James Robinson Graves (1820-1893) is known for firmly believing that Baptists of his day needed clearly distinct markers in order to preserve a meaningful denominational identity. The founder of Landmarkism, his theology emphasized church succession (an unbroken trail of authentic congregations dating back to the New Testament), the local church (rather than the idea of a universal Body of Christ), and strict baptism guidelines. In this first biography of Graves in more than eighty years, author James A. Patterson portrays the man as bold and brash. A native of Vermont who moved south to Nashville in 1845, the self-educated preacher and budding journalist would become a combative defender of the Baptist cause, engaging in public controversy with Methodists, Restorationists, and even fellow Baptists. Ultimately, Graves sought to influence the direction of the Southern Baptist Convention in its formative period and was the primary shaper of the “Tennessee Tradition,” now considered a key strand of Southern Baptist life and identity. By focusing on Graves’s understanding of essential Baptist boundary markers, this book assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the Landmark legacy. It concludes with an epilogue that discusses the enduring influence of his ideas in the decades after his death.

This in-depth examination of baptist theology provides insight into the contemporary issues related to baptist identity.

In this volume, representatives of several North American Baptist seminaries and a Baptist university make the exegetical and theological case for a Baptist polity. Right polity, they argue, is congregationalism, elder leadership, diaconal service, regenerate church membership, church discipline, and a Baptist approach to the ordinances.

This collection of essays includes historical and theological studies in the sacraments from a Baptist perspective. Subjects explored include the liturgy and sacrement, presence of the Kingdom, some fallacies of Baptist anti-sacramentalism, ...a profound mystry, first communion, sacraments in a virtual world, richly are thy children fed, the scacraments, sacramental pratices of the believing community, priesthood of all the people, "laying on of hands," holistic approach to water-baptism, powerful practices, and enough to set a Kimgdom laughing.

The Christian church confesses "one baptism." But the church's answers to how, whom and when to baptize, and even what it means or does, are famously varied. This book provides a forum for thoughtful proponents of three principal evangelical views to state their case, respond to the others, and then provide a summary response and statement. Sinclair Ferguson sets out the case for infant baptism, Bruce Ware presents the case for believers' baptism, and Anthony Lane argues for a mixed practice. As with any good conversation on a controversial topic, this book raises critical issues, challenges preconceptions and discloses the soft points in each view. Evangelicals who wish to understand better their own church's practice or that of their neighbor, or who perhaps are uncertain of their own views, will value this incisive book.

An analysis that challenges the conventional Christian hierarchy of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth While the Christian tradition has subordinated John the Baptist to Jesus of Nazareth, John himself would likely have disagreed with that ranking. In this eye-opening new book, John the Baptist in History and Theology, Joel Marcus makes a powerful case that John saw himself, not Jesus, as the proclaimer and initiator of the kingdom of God and his own ministry as the center of God's saving action in history. Although the Fourth Gospel has the Baptist saying, "He must increase, but I must decrease," Marcus contends that this and other biblical and extrabiblical evidence reveal a continuing competition between the two men that early Christians sought to muffle. Like Jesus, John was an apocalyptic prophet who looked forward to the imminent end of the world and the establishment of God's rule on earth. Originally a member of the Dead Sea Sect, an apocalyptic community within Judaism, John broke with the group over his growing conviction that he himself was Elijah, the end-time prophet who would inaugurate God's kingdom on earth. Through his ministry of baptism, he ushered all who came to him—Jews and non-Jews alike—into this dawning new age. Jesus began his career as a follower of the Baptist, but, like other successor figures in religious history, he parted ways from his predecessor as he became convinced of his own centrality in God's purposes. Meanwhile John's mass following and apocalyptic message became political threats to Herod Antipas, who had John executed to abort any revolutionary movement. Based on close critical-historical readings of early texts—including the accounts of John in the Gospels and in Josephus's Antiquities—as well as parallels from later religious movements, John the Baptist in History and Theology situates the Baptist within Second Temple Judaism and compares him to other apocalyptic thinkers from ancient and modern times. It concludes with thoughtful reflections on how its revisionist interpretations might be incorporated into the Christian faith.