Apocalypse How? Baptist Movements During the English Revolution
Book Description from Amazon.com
A study of the relation of religion and political thought during the English Revolution, Mark R. Bell's Apocalypse How? challenges earlier historical claims that early Baptists "hardly had any political opinions at all." This reexamination demonstrates that Baptists were close to the secular radicals who became known as the Levellers and to the more religious revolutionaries known as the Fifth Monarchists. The reintegration of the religious and political aspects of their thought reveals Baptists as a movement capable of generating support for both radical groups.
In clear and lively prose, Bell discusses the transformation of Baptists from an aggressively critical sect to one more accommodating to its larger culture. This development is identified with two changes in Baptist views of the end time. The first of these was an overall decline in eschatological enthusiasm during the 1640s, while the second was the way apocalyptic language among Baptists gradually came to refer more to endorsing society than to transforming it. This engaging study is a solid contribution to the historiography of the earliest Baptists.
"…a well-written, well-documented study that provides information about early Baptists that is not collected in one existing source" --Bill J. Leonard, Dean of the Divinity School, Wake Forest University
"After reading Mark Bell's book one remains unsure whether he is a historian with an interest in theology or a theologian with a sympathetic understanding of the weaknesses and strengths of historical research. This work will be essential for historians of religion, certainly, but also will raise important questions for theologians and Anglo-American cultural theorists."—Professor Alice Bach, Archbishop James A. Hallinan Chair in Catholic Studies, Case Western Reserve University
About the Author from Amazon.com
Mark R. Bell is a graduate of Stanford University, where this study won the Weter Prize for History. He is a U.S.--Marshall Scholar and the Jowett Senior Scholar in the Humanities at Balliol College, Oxford University. He has taught history in Oxford for several colleges and currently holds a lectureship in modern history at Christ Church College, Oxford.
My Review
This book gives a history of the Baptist movement in England during the English Revolution. Mark Bell does a very nice job in covering the theology and history of the General Baptists, the Particular Baptists (Reformed Baptists), and some of the more extreme Baptists movements (like the Fifth Monarchs and the Seventh day Baptists).
I was always curious about how the Ana-baptist movement evolved to the more orthodox Baptist movements. Mark Bell points out that, the Particular Baptists were key in thwarting Baptist persecution in England, differentiating Baptists from the more radical Ana-baptists, and establishing Baptist theology amongst orthodox protestantism.
Mark Bell provides overwhelming evidence that the Particular Baptists had a lot more to do with establishing liberty of conscience in England than any Ana-baptists movement.
The important crux of this book is that Baptist theology, aside from Believer's Baptism, was motivated by immanent eschatological interpretation of the book of Revelation.
John Calvin warns in his Institutes that failure to see baptism as a continuation of circumcision endangers one to view the Old and New Covenants as two separate Covenants. Although the author does not draw attention to Calvin's warning, you can clearly see this play out in Baptist eschatology in the Seventeenth Century.
Knowing that the United States is a predominately Baptist culture, Mark Bell's book is very enlightening to our theological roots in this country.
