Description: Baptists are not often thought of as leading theologians and practitioners of worship. But forgotten in history is one crucial fact: the Baptist tradition formed out of a desire to worship God purely. Early Baptists devoted immense energy to questions of worship and drew conclusions of even contemporary value. Through the seismic liturgical shifts of English society in the seventeenth century, worship was both their most galvanizing and disintegrating impulse. As time passed and terminology changed and Baptists shied away from this divisive topic, this emphasis was lost. No one...

The Holy Spirit and the Lake of Fire What does the Spirit have to do with God's final judgment? The Holy Spirit and God's judgment upon sin are not two topics that are often connected, but to understand the full work of the Spirit, they need to be. It is not enough to view judgment as the work of just the Father and the Son, but in full Trinitarian fashion, it must be understood as the work of all three persons of the Trinity. In The Spirit and the Lake of Fire Rustin Umstattd establishes the Spirit's role in judgment by connecting several symbols that are used for both the Spirit and...

The basic question, ""Where did Baptists come from and why?"" has two camps that offer differing explanations: (1) the English Separatist camp produced the ministries of foundational Baptists, John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, thus takes credit for Baptist origins, and (2) the Anabaptist movement is the alternative camp, understanding either a direct connection via lineage back to the infamous Swiss Brethren or an indirect connection via Anabaptist teachings. Anabaptist ecclesiology is very much akin, if not in some ways identical, to modern Baptist ecclesiology. In fact, the Baptist church, led...