Overview

"Inward Baptism analyses the theological developments that led to the great evangelical revivals of the mid-eighteenth century. Baird Tipson here demonstrates how the rationale for the ""new birth,"" the characteristic and indispensable evangelical experience, developed slowly but inevitably from Luther's critique of late medieval Christianity.Addressing the great indulgence campaigns of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Luther's perspective on sacramental baptism, as well as the confrontation between Lutheran and Reformed theologians who fastened on to different aspects of Luther's teaching, Tipson sheds light on how these disparate historical moments collectively created space for evangelicalism. This leads to an exploration of the theology of the leaders of the Evangelical awakening in the British Isles, George Whitefield and John Wesley, who insisted that by preaching the immediate revelation of the Holy Spirit during the ""new birth,"" they were recovering an essential element of primitive Christianity that had been forgotten over the centuries. Ultimately, Inward Baptism examines how these shifts in religious thought made possible a commitment to an inward baptism and consequently, the evangelical experience."

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9780197511473

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By the early seventeenth century, an understanding of religion as a matter of interior experience was coming to the fore in Reformed and Puritan circles. Baird Tipson revisits this process and provides a fresh explanation of how it arose, an explanation that takes us back to Martin Luther. Always a superb historian of doctrine, Tipson is at his lucid best in this important book. * David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School * Baird Tipson's new book offers a thorough investigation and lucid explanation of some of the most complex debates in Christian theology, those centering on how a person is saved and how she can be assured of that justification. He takes the reader on a journey from the sacerdotal approach of medieval Catholicism through to the experience of a new birth experienced by the followers of eighteenth-century revivalists such as John Wesley and George Whitefield. * Francis J. Bremer, author of One Small Candle: The Story of the Plymouth Puritans and the Beginning of English New England * At a time when scholars are interrogating, with fascinating results, the nature and features of an early phase of modern evangelicalism, Baird Tipson's work on Inward Baptism is a welcome addition. He shows how, in the two-and-a-half-centuries and more after the beginning of the Reformation, Protestant theologians shifted from an emphasis on sacramental participation as a basis for assurance of salvation to a subjective mode, from an external to an internal testimony of grace. * Kenneth Minkema, Executive Editor, Jonathan Edwards Center, Yale University *

Author Information

Baird Tipson is Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at Gettysburg College. After seventeen years as a faculty member, Tipson (AB Princeton University, PhD Yale University) became Provost of Gettysburg College (1987-1995), President of Wittenberg University (1995-2004) and President of Washington College (2004-2010). A student of Sydney Ahlstrom, he specializes in the European Reformation and the early history of Religion in America. He is the author of Hartford Puritanism: Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone and Their Terrifying God.

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