Recycling the Past or Researching History? (Paperback or Softback)

Recycling the Past or Researching History? brings together an international group of Baptist scholars who explore various issues in Baptist historiography and myths. To this end, contributors examine and re-examine areas of Baptist life and thought about which little is known or the received wisdom is in need of revision. Historiographical studies include the date Oxford Baptists joined the Abingdon Association, the death of the Fifth Monarchist John Pendarves, eighteenth-century Calvinistic Baptists and the political realm, confessional identity and denominational institutions, Baptist community, ecclesiology, the priesthood of all believers, soteriology, Baptist spirituality, Strict and Reformed Baptists, the role of women among British Baptists, while various "myths" challenged include the nature of high-Calvinism in eighteenth-century England, baptismal anti-sacramentalism, episcopacy, and Baptists and change. The theme which ties these studies together is that research into Baptist history should deal with the primary sources and not, as has too often been the case, rely uncritically on the scholarship of previous generations.

Philip E. Thompson is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Heritage, North American Baptist Seminary. Anthony R. Cross is a Fellow of the Centre for Baptist History and Heritage, Regent's Park College, Oxford.

Anthony R. Cross has written extensively on the subject of baptism, most recently in his Recovering the Evangelical Sacrament: Baptisma Semper Reformandum (Pickwick Publications, 2013). He has also written on the issues of the place of theology in Baptist ministerial preparation, and the factors which led to English Baptist acceptance of the Evangelical Revival in the eighteenth century. He was an Adjunct Supervisor at The International Baptist Theological Seminary Centre, Amsterdam, having previously served as a Baptist minister, and taught church history and theology at the Universities of Surrey, Roehampton, and Oxford.