Baptism In The New Testament In this thorough and well-documented study of the sacrament of Holy Baptism, G.R. Beasley-Murray presents a critical defense of the doctrine of believers' baptism on the basis of the New Testament evidences. The author--one of the leading New Testament scholars in England--is himself a Baptist; but his discussion transcends denominatioal lines. Beasley-Murray begins by discussing various rites that precede Christian baptism historically, and analyzes the relationship between these earlier rites and baptism. From these antecedents--Old Testament ritual washings, Jewish proselyte baptism, the lustrations practiced at Qumran, and the baptism of John the Baptist--the author proceeds to the foundations of Christian baptism in the career of Jesus, its emergence as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, and its development in the New Testament epistolary literature. In his consideration of the doctrine of Christian baptism as ariculated in the New Testament, Beasley-Murray focuses his attention on the necessity of baptism and its relationship to grace, faith, the Spirit, the church, ethics, and hope. A careful examination of the rise and significance of infant baptism follows, and the study concludes with a selected bibliography and several indices.

This title offers a comprehensive analysis of Baptist theology. Embracing in one common trajectory the major Baptist confessions of faith, the major Baptist theologians, and the principal Baptist theological movements and controversies, this book spans four centuries of Baptist doctrinal history. Acknowledging first the pre-1609 roots (patristic, medieval, and Reformational) of Baptist theology, it examines the Arminian versus Calvinist issues that were first expressed by the General Baptists and the Particular Baptists; that dominated English and American Baptist theology during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from Helwys and Smyth and from Bunyan and Kiffin to Gill, Fuller, Backus, and Boyce; and, that were quickened by the 'awakenings' and the missionary movement. Concurrently there were the Baptist defense of the Baptist distinctives vis-a-vis the pedobaptist world and the unfolding of a strong Baptist confessional tradition. Then during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the liberal versus evangelical issues became dominant with Hovey, Strong, Rauschenbusch, and Henry in the North and Mullins, Conner, Hobbs, and Criswell in the South even as a distinctive Baptist Landmarkism developed, the discipline of biblical theology was practiced and a structured ecumenism was pursued. Missiology both impacted Baptist theology and took it to all the continents, where it became increasingly indigenous. Conscious that Baptists belong to the free churches and to the believers' churches, a new generation of Baptist theologians at the advent of the twenty-first century appears somewhat more Calvinist than Arminian and decidedly more evangelical than liberal.

A collection of fifteen essays addressing the basic intellectual challenges to the contemporary Christian church. Professor Torrance deals with such topics as the centrality of Christology in scientific dogmatics, the Reformed and Roman Catholic doctrines of grace, theological education, the relation of theological statements to scientific methodology, the contemporary significance of some past theological giants, and the nature and significance of the Holy Spirit and of the church.

Reproduction of the original: The Acharnians by Aristophanes