THE BAPTISTS
Key people in forming a Baptist identity
Volume Three, The Modern Era
By Tom Nettles
Christian Focus. 462 pages. £17.99
ISBN 978-1-84550-211-9
This third volume completes Tom Nettles’ magisterial history of the Baptists. He keeps in focus the issue of Baptist identity. In other words how would we describe Baptists? What do Baptists believe? What are the distinctive features? And how do they do church?
Volume three begins with the battle of the Downgrade: Spurgeon versus John Clifford, whom Nettles nicknames ‘the irrepressible liberal’. The story then turns to describe A.H. Strong and E.Y. Mullins, who were weak in their resistance to modernism and outright Baptist modernists Shailer Mathews, William Newton Clarke and Harry Emerson Fosdick. The role of the fundamentalists of the early 20th century is described, with special attention given to the extraordinarily fiery and controversial John Franklyn Norris (1877-1952). The recently published book, Catch the Vision by John J. Murray (Evangelical Press, 180 pages), is commended to readers as a lucid account of the modernist movement and the doldrums of the period from about 1900 to 1950, followed by the recovery of the Reformed faith in the 1960s.
