Historia ecclesiastica
The Weblog of Dr. Michael A. G. Haykin & friends

By Ryan Patrick Hoselton

The Boston Marathon bombing represents a society that is worlds apart from the Boston inhabited by the Puritan Increase Mather (1639-1723). Abhorrent evils perpetrated in any city—like the Newtown shooting, 9/11, and the Oklahoma City bombing—raise the very human question: why? Each generation has to wrestle with new and complicated manifestations of wrongdoing. Increase Mather had no category for making sense of how two Chechen brothers could plant explosives at a massive annual foot-race. However, perhaps his response to the calamities of Boston in his day could help us gain perspective on the city’s recent catastrophe.

In many ways, modern-day Boston has failed to live up to Mather’s lofty aspirations for the city. Mather, the former minister of the historic Second Church and President of Harvard from 1685-1702, planned for Boston to become the new Jerusalem—God’s holy society on earth. But even in his day, Boston was far from heaven. The seventeenth-century New Englanders intimately knew suffering. The reason many of them came to New England was to flee religious persecution. If they survived the long voyage, they faced the threat of frequent and devastating plagues.

But it was the attacks from the native New England tribes that evoked one of Mather’s fullest reflections on the evil of his times, An Earnest Exhortation to the Inhabitants of New-England (1676).[1] In this treatise, Mather blamed the tragedies on the sins of Boston’s citizens: “What shall we say when men are seen in the Streets with monstrous and horrid Perriwigs, and women with their Borders and False Locks…whereby the anger of the Lord is kindled against this land (9)!” He’s just getting warmed up. He listed Boston’s iniquities and warned that unless the citizens reform their lives, “New-England hath not seen its worst dayes.” For Mather, Boston’s prosperity and its demise was contingent on its righteousness before God. Thus, his solution for eradicating Boston’s suffering was to recruit its citizens to significant moral reform.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking (or should be thinking if you’re not): so far, Mather is not helping us understand evil today! But briefly give him a little grace. As a result of these events, Mather ministered to many hurting people: “Is it nothing that Widdows and Fatherless have been multiplyed among us?” He wanted to see evil and its effects eliminated just as much as those impacted by the Boston Marathon bombings. However, no earthly city could ever be righteous enough to completely evade adversity—all of mankind is fallen. His solution was geographically misguided.

Mather placed his hope in the right city, but he located it in the wrong place. Revelation 21:2-4 describes how the new Jerusalem will come:

And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’

Boston is not the New Jerusalem—it does not exist on earth. The events from last week’s race testify to the sad reality that evil still afflicts the city four-hundred years later. Ever since Babel, mankind has had the tendency to rely on the kingdoms that we can construct. We like our societies because they reflect us rather than God. However, despite our best efforts, we cannot create the righteous kingdom that will bring us peace.

Mather was right that God will entirely eradicate all evil and its consequences in his new Jerusalem. However, this is not a city that mortals can build.  Instead, we must rest our hopes for peace on the King of the new Jerusalem, Jesus Christ, who will lovingly assemble this city for his people.

By Dustin Bruce

Every historian knows the rare joy of finding an unsuspected link to his or her primary research interest when engaging in a secondary research project. This recently happened to me as I found mentions of and quotations from Andrew Fuller (my primary research interest) in 19^th century Baptist newspapers. Though the findings were not directly applicable to the project I was working on, I learned a great deal about Fuller’s reception among 19^th century Baptists in the South and filed the articles away for later use.

To illustrate how 19^th century Baptist papers were using Fuller, I would like to mention two articles taken from the Baptist Recorder, the North Carolina state paper. My main reason for highlighting the Baptist Recorder is the ease of doing research in the paper’s online database. Researching most state papers involves hours spent gazing at a microfilm machine, but here the Biblical Recorder has been digitized and rendered fully searchable from the years 1834-1970.

The first article I would like to highlight is entitled “Did Judas Partake of the Lord’s Supper” and appears in a June 29, 1844 issue of the Biblical Recorder.[i] In this article, the author addresses the question posed in the title by examining Fuller’s opinion on the topic. We learn a great deal about the esteem in which Fuller was held by the author’s remarks. He states, “Andrew Fuller, whose opinion, on all theological subjects, is entitled to great consideration, has answered this question in the negative.” He then follows with a summary of Fuller’s argument, capping the article off with a direct quotation taken from his works.[ii] Nearly thirty years after his death and across the Atlantic Ocean, Fuller’s opinion carried weight with Baptists of North Carolina.

The second article I would like to highlight comes from the September 9, 1885 issue and is entitled, “To What Causes in Ministers may Much of Their Want of Success be Imputed?”[iii] In this article, the author cites relevant portions of Fuller’s Memoirs[iv] in an effort to show “how little the world has changed in some respects in a hundred years.” After discussing the 1785 minister’s meeting associated with this piece, the author cites Fuller’s three main points to answer the question presented in the title. His answer is as follows:

1^st. The want of personal religion; particularly the neglect of close dealing with God in closet prayer.

2^nd. The want of reading and studying the Scriptures more as Christians for the edification of our souls. We are too apt to study them merely to find out something to say to others without living upon the truth ourselves. If we eat not the book, before we deliver its contents to others, we may expect the Holy Spirit will not much accompany us.

3^rd. The want of being emptied of self-sufficiency. In proportion as we lean upon our own gifts or parts or preparations, we slight the Holy Spirit; no wonder that, being grieved, he should leave us to do our work alone. Besides when this is the case, it is, humanly speaking, unsafe for God to prosper us, especially those ministers who possess considerable ability.

Recognizing the religious climate had undergone some changes, the author added two more reasons of his own: a lack of ministerial sympathy for God’s people and the presence of a spirit of fear among ministers. Yet, it is clear that the name and ministry of Andrew Fuller resonated with at least a portion of the readership of the Biblical Recorder in 1885.

Fuller’s ministry remains just as instructive for Baptists today as it was for North Carolina Baptists in the 19^th century. I look forward to the next time my primary research interest and my secondary research interests collide.

By Nathan A. Finn

I need to begin this post with a caveat: I have never written a historical monograph. There are many reasons for this, chief among them my propensity toward distraction and boredom. Simply put, at this season in my life I can’t think of a single historical topic to which I want to devote 200 or more pages. I can, however, think of dozens of historical topics to which I want to devote 15–50 pages as well as numerous historic primary sources that I wish to see reprinted in critical editions. For that reason, my own scholarly publications tend to fall into three broad categories: 1) journal articles or contributed essays; 2) critical book reviews; 3) editing primary sources. Perhaps I’ll write a monograph or two at some point, but don’t hold your breath. For the time being, that’s not really my style.

Because I have never written a monograph, I’m obviously not an authority on this topic. However, I know lots of authorities on this topic. I also know that many readers of this blog are graduate students and younger church historians who probably do want to write monographs. So my desire in this post is not to position myself as an authority, but rather to point readers to a helpful resource I have found for those interested in publishing historical monographs.

Religion in American History is a consortium blog of mostly college and university historians who study American religious history. Some of the contributors are evangelicals, while others are not. Many have written on topics that at least intersect with Baptist Studies, which is a particular emphasis of the contributors to Historia Ecclesiastica. Religion in American History is a particularly helpful resource if you want to read substantive reviews of recent monographs (and sometimes important journal articles) in the field of American religious history.

Randall Stephens, who serves as one of the three “blogmeisters” for Religion in American History, has written a helpful post titled “Turning it into a Book.” In that post, Stephens collates suggestions from various publishers, along with his own insights on the topic. While Stephens focuses primarily on publishing for university presses, his suggestions also apply to church historians who wish to publish monographs with other types of scholarly presses such as Eerdmans, Baker Academic, IVP Academic, Pickwick, or T&T Clark (to name a few options). I think they also generally apply to historians who wish to publish textbooks or semi-scholarly books with evangelical presses such as Crossway, B&H, Moody, Zondervan, and Kregel. (For the record, the latter presses have scholarly divisions and regularly publish monographs in other disciplines such as theology, biblical studies, ethics, and apologetics. My not including them in the first list is not a “knock” on these fine publishing houses, but simply a recognition of the reality that they rarely publish scholarly monographs in my field.)

If I ever do get around to publishing a monograph (my lonely and heretofore unpublished dissertation is screaming at me from the shelf as I type), then I’ll consult Stephens’s helpful post on the front-end of that project. Perhaps many of this blog’s readers will “beat me to the punch” and publish one or more historical monographs. If so, I hope you folks also find Stephens’s post useful.

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Nathan A. Finn is associate professor of historical theology and Baptist Studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is also an elder at First Baptist Church of Durham, NC and a senior fellow of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies.

By Dustin W. Benge

Click to enlarge poster.

On Saturday, May 11, 2013, in Otisville, Michigan, Dr. Michael A. G. Haykin will be speaking in a conference on women in Baptist history at Emmanuel Baptist Church (map and directions here). The conference schedule is posted below:

8:30–9:30 a.m. Contentinal Breakfast
9:30–10:30 a.m. Baptist women, 1640s–1890s
10:45–11:45 a.m. Anne Dutton (1692–1765) and her writings: a means of edification
12:00–1:00 p.m. Anne Steele (1717–1778) and her hymns: a means of revival
1:00– 2:15 p.m. Lunch and Fellowship
2:15–3:15 p.m. Ann Judson (1789–1826) and her letters: a means of missions

By Ian Hugh Clary

Canadian Baptists have a history too, eh? Though some of you may have heard of T. T. Shields, you are probably not as familiar with names like Alexander Stewart, R. A. Fyfe, Henry Alline, or C. J. Holman (and his powerful wife Caroline!). These are just a selection from a group of men and women who helped establish the Baptist denomination in Canada. Our history is colourful, theologically rich, and is deeply significant not only to Canadian Baptist identity, but to Canadian history as a whole—for instance, did you know that the man who discovered that the Germans were using chlorine gas in the Great War was Col. George Nasmith who attended Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto?

Last month the Canadian Baptist Historical Society met at Heritage College in Cambridge, ON. We were delighted to see our numbers doubled and two members join the executive—including yours truly. Papers were given by our president, Michael Haykin, and one of his students, Michael Plato, who is also a professor at Seneca College in Toronto. Dr. Haykin presented on Andrew Fuller and trinitarianism, while Plato gave a stimulating paper on E. Y. Mullins. You might find it odd that neither address dealt with a Canadian; we’re okay with that, we have confidence in our identity!

The Society is based out of McMaster Divinity College and is connected to the work at the Canadian Baptist Archive. We were thankful to hear a report that the Archive is making progress in terms of preserving old and deteriorating manuscripts, and that they have made changes so that scholars have an easier and more comfortable time doing their work. I, for one, have benefited greatly from the Archive this past year. The Society is also hoping to have a social media presence, so keep your eyes peeled for us on Facebook and Twitter in the coming weeks. Our most important work, however, is the publication of various works related to Baptist history. McMaster’s series in Baptist history published with Wipf & Stock is a vehicle towards that end. Our first book dealt with Baptists in Canadian public life, and our upcoming book is on Baptists and War; many of the papers from a recent Fuller Center conference will be included.

As a Canadian and a Baptist, I am thankful that there are a growing number of men and women committed to keeping the memory of our forebears alive. If you are a Chronicling Canuck with a Baptist flavour, or you if are merely interested in coming to the next event or becoming a member of the Society, please go to our website to find out how.

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Ian Hugh Clary is finishing doctoral studies under Adriaan Neele at Universiteit van die Vrystaat (Blomfontein), where he is writing a dissertation on the evangelical historiography of Arnold Dallimore. He has co-authored two local church histories with Michael Haykin and contributed articles to numerous scholarly journals. Ian serves as a pastor of BridgeWay Covenant Church in Toronto where he lives with his wife and two children.

By Evan D. Burns

In a sermon on Proverbs 14:8, Andrew Fuller looked long and hard at the virtue of godly wisdom.  He extracted many helpful principles from this verse, and one of the most insightful comments he made was how to use the Word of God in getting wisdom.  He says that the Word functions in two main ways in teaching us wisdom.  It shows us what the destructive end will be of folly, from which wisdom deters us.  Moreover, he makes an amazing observation about wisdom—the eye of wisdom should not chiefly look to the negative consequence of folly in order to avoid it; rather, the eye of wisdom should zealously fix its sight on Christ who is worthy of its gaze.  Such Christ-enamored wisdom is cultivated through meditation and prayer.

We shall read the oracles of God: the doctrines for belief, and the precepts for practice; and shall thus learn to cleanse our way by taking heed thereto, according to God’s word. It will moreover induce us to guard against the dangers of the way. We shall not be ignorant of Satan’s devices, nor of the numerous temptations to which our age, times, circumstances, and propensities expose us. It will influence us to keep our eye upon the end of the way. A foolish man will go that way in which he finds most company, or can go most at his ease; but wisdom will ask, “What shall I do in the end thereof?” To understand the end of the wrong way will deter; but to keep our eye upon that of the right will attract. Christ himself kept sight of the joy that was set before him. Finally, as holy wisdom possesses the soul with a sense of propriety at all times, and upon all occasions, it is therefore our highest interest to obtain this wisdom, and to cultivate it by reading, meditation, prayer, and every appointed means.^[1]

By Ryan Patrick Hoselton

Christians implore the help of their pastor for a range of reasons—at a range of hours of the night. I know this not because I’m a pastor but because I’m a Christian. But how many requests for help does the average pastor make of his congregation? He likely won’t get many, so he better choose his petitions wisely.

Andrew Fuller (1754-1815) requested the help of his congregation in evangelism. In 1806, he wrote a letter to believers entitled, The Pastor’s Address to His Christian Hearers, Entreating Their Assistance In Promoting the Interest of Christ.[1] He asked for help to promote the gospel, and pastors today can learn from his recruiting methods.

First, he aimed to convince his congregation that evangelism was their mission too, “There is an important difference between Christian ministers and the Christian ministry. The former…exist for your sakes…but the latter, as being the chosen means of extending the Redeemer’s kingdom, is that for which both we and you exist (345-46).” Sharing the gospel is the job description of every Christian. As Nehemiah and Ezra enlisted the help of the Israelites to construct the temple, argued Fuller, so pastors today need believers to build the church (346).

Secondly, Fuller made his congregants aware that their involvement in the Christian mission was necessary for the continuation of churches. People are more willing to participate when they know that they are needed. God uses means to save unbelievers, and the “ordinary way in which the knowledge of God is spread in the world is, by every man saying to his neighbour and to his brother, ‘Know the Lord’ (351).”

Thirdly, Fuller not only entreated their assistance for the mission but he also equipped them for it. Perhaps the reason why many think that their sole duty in evangelism “consisted in sending the [unbelieving] party to the minister” is because they’ve never been trained in evangelism (348). Fuller would not allow his congregants to make this excuse. The chief rule in evangelism, Fuller instructed, was to “point them directly to the Saviour” (349). Merely sharing truths about Christianity without directing the unbeliever to Christ will only mislead him or her to “a resting place short of him (350).” Thus, it is crucial for every believer to “be skilful in the word of righteousness; else you administer false consolation (349).”

To put these principles to use, Fuller suggested three accessible opportunities. First, parents can assist the pastor in evangelism by dialoging with their children about the sermon. Second, Christians should invite their unbelieving friends to the preaching of the Word and discuss it with them. Thirdly, believers’ lives must be walking testimonies to the fruit of the gospel before their neighbors. “Enable us to use strong language when recommending the gospel by its holy and happy effects,” Fuller begged (351).

By Dustin Bruce

By J. Ryan West

As shown yesterday, Ward was concerned deeply to see significant changes regarding social issues in India.  Successful social action would not, however, come without the power of Christ’s gospel according to Ward.  When reading this book, it is highly important to note Ward’s evolution concerning how he addressed injustices.  Otherwise, readers easily misunderstand his position.  In his earlier years, Ward proved to be a radical activist that nearly escaped imprisonment twice.  Political upheaval modeled on the French Revolution was his ideal during the 1790’s.  His conversion and subsequent development over several decades of ministry in India brought about a much different approach to such concerns by the time he preached these sermons.  For the seasoned Ward, lasting social change would only occur if the gospel permeated a society: “Let the females of the United Kingdom speak, and they must be heard…By such an interposition, so worthy of the sex in these countries, the females in India will be blessed with all that profusion of privileges which women in Christian countries enjoy; and, being thus blessed, will become the light, the shade, and the ornament of India” (83-84).  As one can see, he never expected significant change apart from the gospel taking root in India.  Ward had thus transformed from a political activist to a ‘gospel activist’ by the end of his career.

For Ward, addressing social concerns was a given.  Biblical Christians could not be concerned with their neighbors’ eternal condition without caring for their immediate needs.  Biblical Christians had no choice but to pursue biblical justice through the means of social action coupled with anchoring a society in biblical beliefs.  As contemporary Baptists think about the relationship of addressing the physical, social, and mental needs evident in the surrounding culture, it would be helpful to look to our Baptist predecessors.  Baptists should concern themselves with rescuing women from sex trafficking, loving—and possibly adopting—children abandoned to foster care or absentee parents, and speak out against the horrors of abortion and systemic oppression.  To ignore these matters is irresponsible and unloving.  Such responses would prove equally irresponsible and unloving, however, if Baptists do not seek to establish gospel wisdom in these conversations.  Lasting social change will only come through individuals who experience the grace and peace of Jesus Christ.  The gospel activist William Ward certainly thought so.

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J. Ryan West (PhD Candidate, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is the LoveLoud National Coordinator at the North American Mission Board. He assists Southern Baptist churches and educational institutions throughout the United States and Canada in establishing and conducting gospel-centered ministries of mercy to proclaim Christ while meeting human needs in significant and sustainable ways.  Also, he was tasked recently as an Assistant Editor for The Andrew Fuller Works Project, a fifteen-volume series to be published by Walter de Gruyter.