Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-xxrs7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T16:39:50.775Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Contesting Catholicity: Theology for Other Baptists. Five Perspectives – I - Contesting Catholicity: Theology for Other Baptists. By Curtis W. Freeman. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014. xi + 466 pages. $49.95.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2015

Derek C. Hatch*
Affiliation:
Howard Payne University

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Review Symposium
Copyright
Copyright © College Theology Society 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Curtis W. Freeman, Contesting Catholicity: Theology for Other Baptists (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014). Subsequent references to Freeman's book by page will appear parenthetically in the text. The Contesting Catholicity book review symposium is the culmination of public discussions of the book that took place at the University of Dayton in March 2015 and at the Sixty-First Annual Convention of the College Theology Society at the University of Portland in May 2015.

2 See James William McClendon Jr., Ethics: Systematic Theology, rev. ed. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002), 1:20–26.

3 For more on this history and its impact on the CTS, see Sandra Yocum Mize, Joining the Revolution in Theology: The College Theology Society, 1954–2004 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 238–40, 286.

4 For the entire document, see Mikael Broadway et al., “Re-Envisioning Baptist Identity: A Manifesto for Baptist Communities in North America,” Baptists Today, June 26, 1997, 8–10. Available at https://divinity.duke.edu/sites/divinity.duke.edu/files/documents/faculty-freeman/reenvisioning-baptist-identity.pdf.

5 See, e.g., Shurden, Walter B., “The Baptist Identity and the Baptist Manifesto,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 25, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 321–40Google Scholar.

6 See, e.g., David Stricklin, A Genealogy of Dissent: Southern Baptist Protest in the Twentieth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000).

7 “Therefore, it belongs to the circuit of grace to elicit the gracious response of human freedom. . . .Among the many possible consequences of this reflection, we can note that the paradigm of the sacraments must never be, whether explicitly or implicitly, the baptism of infants, but that of adults” (Louis-Marie Chauvet, The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body [Collegeville, MN: Pueblo, 2001], 126).

8 I am borrowing the phrase “at an angle” from Nicholas Healy's Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 10. For a discussion of why such an approach is fitting to the reigning cultural milieu, see Tran, Jonathan, “An Atheistic Sense to Stanley Hauerwas's Theology,” Review & Expositor 112, no. 1 (2015): 119–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 See David Gushee, “What Will Ex-Southern Baptists Be When They Grow Up?,” Baptist News Global, http://baptistnews.com/news/item/28350-what-will-ex-southern-baptists-be-when-they-grow-up; “Blurry Vision and How We Got Here: The Ex-SBC, Part II,” Baptist News Global, http://baptistnews.com/news/item/28413-blurry-vision-how-we-got-here-the-ex-sbc-part-ii; “Where Do We Go from Here? The Ex-SBC, Part III,” Baptist News Global, http://baptistnews.com/news/item/28432-where-do-we-go-from-here-the-ex-sbc-part-iii; “The ‘Ex-SBC’ Trilogy: A Response to My Respondents,” Baptist News Global, http://baptistnews.com/news/item/28515-the-ex-sbc-trilogy-a-response-to-my-respondents; Roger E. Olson, “A Word from a Founder to All My ‘Moderate Baptist’ Friends,” http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2015/02/a-word-from-a-founder-to-all-my-moderate-baptist-friends/; “Another Great ‘Moderate Baptist’ Leader on the Necessity of Doctrines,” http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2015/02/another-great-moderate-baptist-leader-on-the-necessity-of-doctrines/.

10 Bruce Gourley, “Baptist Identity and Millennials: Re-Imagining Church,” Baptist News Global, http://baptistnews.com/opinion/commentaries/item/28839-baptist-identity-and-millenials-re-imagining-church.

11 “The Word of God in the Life of the Church: A Report of International Conversations between the Catholic Church and the Baptist World Alliance, 2006–2010,” http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/Bapstist%20alliance/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_20101213_report-2006-2010_en.html. See also American Baptist Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2012): 9496Google Scholar.

12 Kasper, Cardinal Walter, “Current Problems in Ecumenical Theology,” Reflections 6 (Spring 2003): 6465Google Scholar; quoted in Gerald Schlabach, Unlearning Protestantism: Sustaining Christian Community in an Unstable Age (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2010), 16.

13 Martin E. Marty, “Baptistification Takes Over,” Christianity Today, September 2, 1983, 33.

14 Freeman offers a contrast to the triumphal celebration presented by some, noting that the two styles are “opposite, but complementary” (Contesting Catholicity, 8).

15 Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, trans. Paule Simon, Sadie Kreilkamp, and Ernest Beaumont (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 58.