‘Baptist Life & Thought’ Category

• Dr. Michael Haykin – “Puritanism Under the Cross” (MP3)
• Steve Weaver – “Baptists and 1662: The Persecution of John Norcott and Hercules Collins” (MP3)
• Dr. Tom Nettles – A Brief Summation and Concluding Word (MP3)

One of the most remarkable Baptists of twentieth-century Ontario was a woman, Caroline Holman, the widow of C.J. Holman, a prominent Baptist lawyer. Her husband played an important role in the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the 1920s, but died not long after. She lived into her nineties, dying in 1962. She was a staunch supporter of missions and prolific writer of Christian articles, and served as the first president of the Women’s Missionary Society, formed in 1926 during the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy as the former Women’s Baptist Home Missionary Society of Ontario West divided that year. She was one of the few people who publicly disagreed with T.T. Shields (1873–1955)—which she did in the early 1930s—and maintained his respect afterwards. See The Regular Baptist Call: A Testimony, 36, no.9 (September 1962), for a remembrance of her life and service. A biography of Mrs. Holman is a desideratum.

Fred Zaspel recently gave a talk entitled “Andrew Fuller: The Man Who Rescued The Baptists From Hyper-Calvinism” at Calvary Baptist Seminary in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. According to Fred, “It was very well received, and we’ve begun a tradition now—a series of these kinds of “Baptist Heritage” lectures each semester.” Here is the talk on Fuller.

We are currently accepting paper proposals for this Fall’s conference (September 21-22, 2012). We have a limited number of spaces, so please respond quickly if interested.  These papers should be about 3,000-4,000 words in length and able to be delivered in approximately 20-25 minutes. Those interested in presenting need to e-mail the Center (andrewfullercenter@sbts.edu) with a title and brief outline of their proposal as well as a brief resume.

The topic of papers for the parallel sessions must fall within the theme of the conference, namely, “Andrew Fuller and His Friends.” The plenary session schedule is available here.  Parallel sessions may focus on Fuller’s relationship with others or some aspect relating to one of Fuller’s “friends.” Some examples of papers already accepted are:

• Dustin Benge: “When a Friend Dies: A Funeral Sermon for Andrew Fuller by Joseph Ivimey.”
• Paul Brewster (SBC Pastor): “William Staughton: Andrew Fuller’s American Baptist connection”
• Jimmy Burchett: “Andrew Fuller as a Husband and Father”
• Chris Chun: “Fuller’s Friendly Lapsarian Debate with Samuel Hopkins”
• Roger Duke: “A Rhetorical Reading of Andrew Fuller’s Sermon ‘The Nature and Importance of an Intimate Knowledge of Divine Truth.’”
• Chris Holmes: “ ‘Not the Exact Model of an Orator’:  J. W. Morris’s Assessment of Andrew Fuller’s Preaching Ministry”
• David Pitman: “Fuller’s Forgotten Friends: A Sketch of Andrew Fuller’s Non-Ministerial Friends”
• Dave Schrock: “James Haldane and the Particular Efficacy of Global Missions”

Submission of a proposal does not guarantee acceptance.  The presenters of papers accepted for the conference will be notified promptly.

Presenters must register for the conference (details forthcoming) and are responsible for their own transportation, lodging, and meals.

This conference is held annually on the campus of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY.

Time: 9:30 am – 12:00 pm

Location: Legacy Hotel, 3rd Floor (SBTS Campus)

Lectures:

• Dr. Michael Haykin – “Puritanism Under the Cross”
• Steve Weaver – “Baptists and 1662: The Persecution of John Norcott and Hercules Collins”
• Dr. Tom Nettles – A Brief Summation and Concluding Word

This conference is free and open to the seminary community.

Two quotes from Oliver Hart (1723–95), the first Baptist theologian of the South, that deeply resonate with me:

 “Grant, O Lord!… [w]hen I go to thy house to speak for thee, may I always go full fraught with things divine, and be enabled faithfully and feelingly to dispense the word of life…. Teach me to study thy glory in all I do.” (Oliver Hart, Diary, entry for August 5, 1754)

“If I had not been willing to endure the scoff of the world, I should never have made an open profession of the religion of Jesus; much less should I have become a preacher of his much-despised gospel.” (Oliver Hart, Dancing Exploded [1778])

“Let us cultivate the most cordial esteem for all that love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity. …but let us aim, at the same time, to acquire and retain the most accurate conceptions of religious truth.”

Who said this? None other than Robert Hall, Jr., who is sometimes seen as lax in the second of these two admonitions. I am so glad that Pastor Cody McNutt has done a PhD thesis on Hall at Southern, hopefully a progenitor of an intellectual biography of a man who was the first Baptist celebrity of the 19^th century (that is, before Spurgeon). He defends it in a few weeks.

For the source of the above quote, see Hall’s “Introductory Preface to the Third London Edition” of his father’s Help to Zion’s Travellers (Boston: Lincoln, Edmands and Co., 1833), xv.

While working through the Wapping Church minute book, I discovered this festive account from 1677. The church had voted to withdraw fellowship from Okey in June of the year. Apparently that was not okay with Okey. Okey had responded by praying for God to kill the pastor, Hercules Collins. The church took the following further action on Christmas Day 1677.

At the Church Meeting in ole Gravell Lane the 25th of December 1677 was John Okey Cut off and Excommunicated from all the priviledges of the gospel for the sin of lying and Revilling and for Refusing to hear the Church: together with his Invocating the God of Heaven to cut off and destroy Bro: Collings and saying also that he would be Revenged.

On a bit more pleasant note than the Christmas 1677 meeting, the Wapping Church took up a special collection for London pastor Benjamin Keach on December 25, 1679 in response to his recently having been robbed.

December 25th 1679 The Congregation in old Gravell Lane Did then Raise and give to Bro. Benj. Keach when he was Robed the Sum of Three pound five shillings

The church ultimately gave 3 pounds and eight shillings to Keach. On December 30th 1679, it was recorded in the minute book that: “Bro. Collings gave to Bro. Keach the Sum of three pound Eight Shillings which was gathered for him of the Church.”

The above was posted last week on my personal blog and the Hercules Collins site.

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin.

In many ways, C.H. Spurgeon’s ministry was nothing less than amazing: the crowded auditories that assembled to hear the “Cambridgeshire lad” in the 1850s and that continued unabated till the end of his ministry in the early 1890s; the remarkable conversions that occurred under his preaching and the numerous churches in metropolitan London and the county of Surrey that owed their origins to his Evangelical activism; the solid Puritan divinity that undergirded his Evangelical convictions-something of a rarity in the heyday of the Victorian era during which he ministered for that was a day imbued with the very different ambience of Romanticism; and finally, the ongoing life of his sermons that are still being widely read around the world today and deeply appreciated by God’s children.

What accounts for all of this? Numerous reasons could be cited, many of which may indeed play a secondary role in his ministerial success. For example, in a fairly recent biography of Spurgeon, Mike Nicholls emphasizes the importance of Spurgeon’s voice to his success as a preacher.  He possessed, Nicholls writes, “one of the great speaking voices of his age, musical and combining compass, flexibility and power.”(1) Augustine Birrell (1850-1933), the son of one of Spurgeon’s fellow Baptist pastors and who served as the Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1907 to 1916, testifies to this fact. Birrell records that when he went to hear Spurgeon preach once, the only seat he could find was in the topmost gallery, in what the English call “the gods.” He was squished between a woman eating an orange and a man sucking peppermints.  Finding this combination of odours unendurable, he was about to leave, when, he said, “I heard a voice and forgot all else.”(2) But Spurgeon himself looked to quite a different source for the blessings that attended his ministry.  In a speech that he gave at a celebration held in honour of his fiftieth birthday in 1884, the Baptist preacher forthrightly declared that the blessing he had enjoyed in his pastorate “must be entirely attributed to the grace of God, and to the working of God’s Holy Spirit… Let that stand as a matter, not only taken for granted, but as a fact distinctly recognized.”(3) In other words: behind Spurgeon’s successes as a minister of the gospel was his walk with God.

1. C. H. Spurgeon: The Pastor Evangelist (Didcot, Oxfordshire: Baptist Historical Society, 1992), 37.
2. Cited E.J. Poole-Connor, Evangelicalism in England (London: The Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, 1951), 226-227.
3. C.H. Spurgeon’s Autobiography, compiled Susannah Spurgeon and J.W. Harrald (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1900), IV, 243.

From the first time that he preached at the gathering of the Midland Association of Baptist churches in the 1740s, Benjamin Beddome was active till 1789. But he only appears to have written the Circular Letter once, and that was in 1765. The “masthead” that usually encapsulated the confession of the Association was replaced by a unique element that year which seems to have come from Beddome’s pen.

Beddome identified himself and his fellow Baptists as those “maintaining the doctrines of free grace, in opposition to Arminianism and Socinianism: and the necessity of good works, in opposition to Libertinism and real Antinomianism.” There is more that needs to be said, of course, on other occasions, but this is very nice and succinct. Who are we? We are those who maintain the doctrines of free grace and affirm the necessity of good works. The phrase “the necessity of good works” coming hard on the heels of the statement “doctrines of free grace” obviously qualifies the term “necessity”: necessary proof of true conversion but not needed for justification.