This book is concerned with English Calvinistic Baptist churches from the later 1600s until the early 1800s, arguing that there was then no connection between restricted communion and hyper- or high Calvinism. A minimal definition of restricted communion would be the reception at the Baptist communion of those alone who had been immersed in water upon a profession of faith. A sketch of English Calvinistic Baptists in the years preceding and following the 1689 Act of Toleration stresses that they were a denomination other than that of the General Baptists, and that most Baptists, irrespective of party lines, were de facto Strict Baptists. Historical arguments for and against restricted communion will demonstrate that during that period there was no definitive link between the Particular Baptists' communion discipline and their interpretations of Calvinism. Attention is given to John Gill's and Andrew Fuller's interpretations of the relation between the atonement and evangelism.

This volume of essays focuses on the thought of John Gill, the doyen of High Calvinism in the transatlantic Baptist community of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among the topics covered are Gill's trinitarian theology, his soteriological views, his Baptist ecclesiology, and his use of Scripture. Other papers are more focused, examining, for instance, his clash with the Arminian Methodist leader John Wesley over the issues of predestination and election, a clash that decisively shaped Wesley's perspective on Calvinism. The tercentennial of Gill's birth in 1997 is a fitting occasion to issue this study of a man whose systematic theology and exposition of the Old and New Testaments formed the mainstay of many eighteenth-century Baptist ministers' libraries and who has never been the subject of a major critical study.

Shurden on Baptists: Assessments, Appreciations, Apologies contains articles, essays, and speeches given by Walter Shurden on Baptists. Walter Shurden is a longtime champion of the role of freedom in the Baptist tradition. Recognizing that freedom alone does not tell the whole story, Shurden also speaks to and from other cardinal Baptist convictions. Some of the materials in this volume appear for the first time and consist of speeches and addresses that Shurden has made at crucial points in recent Baptist life in America in the latter part of the twentieth century. Especially concerned with the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention and the resulting lack of emphasis on historic Baptist principles, Shurden addresses directly and indirectly the SBC controversy in several of the chapters of this book. More, Shurden emphasizes what makes Baptists distinctive in American religious life.