Today I went to Manchester to read and photocopy chunks out of Baptist Quarterly (BQ).  Now to most people, this would be a good working definition of boring beyond belief - and certainly I do feel medals should be awarded to those who have the patience to wade through a century's worth of stuff - but it was a useful and quite entertaining enterprise.

I was looking for clues as to how the Baptist Historical Society (BHS) saw itself- aims and objectives along with any views on historical method and/or denominational history.  I think I discovered in H Wheeler-Robinson something of an ally - or more properly that I am probably a potential ally of his - as he seeemd to be saying almost a century ago what I'm thinking now.  I also found some useful stuff by Paul Fiddes that I could understand (maybe my brain power is slowly increasing) and a few others on 'God and History' written in the 1980s.

What amused, and to a degree irritated, me was a piece on denominational history commissioned for the BHS golden jubilee by a Methodist writer.  He was quite derisory about the move of BQ from simply chronicling history to including aspects of theology (something of which Wheeler-Robinson seemed quite proud; rightly in my view) and a kind of 'popularising' that the writer equated to reducing BQ to something like 'Men Only' magazine.  I have no idea what this magazine was like but I did find a few copies for sale on Ebay and a typical front cover is below:

The blurb in Ebay suggests this was a very light publication full of jokes and pictures - so maybe not as racy as its name suggests.  But whatever the truth of the matter, the title put me in mind of something like GQ ((assuming that's still in print (which used to be in my dentist's waiting room in Warrington)) an analogy I find rather bewildering and extremely funny.  I'd say BQ was more 'People's Friend' than 'Cosmopolitan' any day - and would not have a clue which men's magazines that might match with.

The dichotomy of theology and history is, in my view, a false one, and it is nice, another fifty years on, to be allowed the space to challenge it.  The writer 50 years back had some useful points but was, I felt, advocating an antiquarian (and slightly misogynist) viewpoint that will not serve Baptists in the 21st century.  Wheeler-Robinson, as in print, seems to have had a good vision for the BHS - one that can be usefully renewed for the 21st century (hey, the ideas are forming, finally!)