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IBTS Baptistic theology

British Baptist pastor Andy Goodliff is a very active blogger and produces good material about trends in Anglo-American Baptist theology and information on new books from scholars.

An entry of 1 February is entitled “Trends and Directions in Baptist Theology”. The title may be slightly ambitious. Perhaps more apposite would be “some Anglo-American trends in Baptist theology”. He draws attention to what he calls the sacramentalists (“Colwell, Fiddes, Cross and others”) and a US group focused around Curtis Freeman. He also mentions the distinctive work of Paul Fiddes on reviving an interest in covenant. These are not unreasonable perspectives from a pastor living in the north west isles of Europe. Here in continental Europe at IBTS I believe there is another different trend of a baptistic theological perspective. This is formed around a notion of primary theology in gathering, intentional, convictional “thick” communities of faith which engage in life-forming practices. Building on insights from the Anabaptists and using conversant partners such as MacIntyre, Yoder, Stassen, Murphy and McClendon, Parush R Parushev, Lina Andronovienė, Jim Purves, Toivo Pilli  and others and now a host of young doctoral students are engaged in a European baptistic endeavour to affirm a theological stream outside of the magisterial protestant framework in which many others work.

– Keith

2 Comments

  • Andy Goodliff

    Keith, thanks for the comment on my blog and the post here describing some of the trends from IBTS … I look forward to seeing some of the fruit of this work … I didn’t to ignore the wider european baptist theological scene, I guess sadly it still doesn’t get the exposure over here … can I suggest that some of the older editions of the JEBS are made available either as free downloads or at small cost through the IBTS website … I’ve tried to catalogue most of the journal here (http://baptisthistoryandthought.wordpress.com/journal-of-european-baptist-studies), as a means of letting people know what is there, but I no longer have access to the journal on a regular basis.

  • Ed Kaneen

    This is very exciting news. We need a way that we ‘living in the north west isles of Europe’ can benefit from some of this work. Could they be encouraged to add to the IBTS blog every so often, or even just include their abstracts?

    Thanks for letting us know.

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