Today my copy of Baptist Theology A Four Century Study arrived. It is an impressively fat book for the money - and on case anyone is puzzled by the typo in the image on Amazon (where theology is mis-spelled) it is correct on the book itself. It certainly represents one heck of a lot of work by the author and in due course I will get round to reading it - well after all the other things I haven't read yet...
For some reason, the book has only one index - an index of persons which is almost exclusively an index of men (a few women, mostly writers of secondary sources, are identified). Why? I can buy it up to the mid-twentieth century but not thereafter. Surely someone like Anna Maffei should be in there somewhere? Feels like it may turn out to be another book of Baptist blokes afterall.
Comments
Now there's a surprise.
BTW who's Anna Maffei?
You're teasing me right? She's spoken at Baptist Assembly and BWA things and is/was president of the Italian BU. Great speaker - creative and clever. Could add some of our Brits too.
Quite right Catriona.
The book is embarrassingly unbalanced. It's as if the writer doesn't recognise recent changes in the way we do / think about history. This book remains a history predicated on theology as that which is written about by theologians. What about theology as that which happens in believing communities, as the articulation of a community's style of Christian existence - an attempt to explore populist, community, congregational theology as that is expressed in the later Baptist tradition of 20th and into 21st Century.
What you've identified is the reason the book feels and reads as a rather dated approach to understanding the continuity between the living contemporary tradition and the roots from which we were hewn.