Pilgrim Pathways: Essays in Baptist History in Honour of B. R. White

Pilgrim Pathways: Essays in Baptist History in Honour of B. R. White. Edited by William H. Brackney and Paul S. Fiddes with John H. Y. Briggs. Macon: Mercer, 1999, xii + 328 pp., $45.00 cloth.

This engaging and diversified Festschrift commemorates the distinguished career of B. R. White, an English Baptist historian and churchman who served for many years at Regent's Park College in Oxford, England. There in his successive roles as tutor, principal, and senior research fellow, White exercised significant influence on both ministerial students at Regent's and graduate students at the university. As a scholar, his explorations of non-conformist and Baptist history earned him a reputation for careful research and insightful writing. Indeed, White was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1973 and later served for twelve years as president of the Baptist Historical Society.

The editors of this collection have appropriately organized its major divisions around White's scholarly concerns. The first section investigates "Issues of Baptist Identity," beginning with A. P. F. Sells chapter on Baptist views of polity, doctrine, and liberty. Sell, a non-Baptist contributor, effectively sets forth the theological diversity of English Baptists and the integral connection between doctrine and polity. At the same time, however, Sell attempts to cover too much ground, and his essay lacks overall coherence. In contrast, P. S. Fiddes completes this part of the book with a wellfocused treatment of the role of covenant theology in Baptist life. The current principal at Regent's Park is at his best in explaining the varied nuances of the term "covenant" as used by Baptists throughout their history; unfortunately, his prescriptions for the role of covenants in contemporary Baptist life appear to minimize the importance of confessional integrity.

The volume's second division contains four essays that center primarily on Baptist ecclesiology. W. M. S. West launches this discussion with an intriguing account of the English Baptist struggle to articulate a theology of children, including the evolving concepts of infant dedication in their churches. Then, in one of the book's better pieces, S. Brachlow exposes the tension between social solidarity and factional strife that so frequently characterized the ecclesiastical life of the Baptists' English Separatist forebears. K. R. Manley follows with a delightful analysis of the profound impact that J. Rippon (1751-1836) had on Baptist hymnody both in England and America. Finally, K. Smith probes the interplay between personal devotion and covenant community in her study of eighteenth-century Calvinistic Baptists in Hampshire and Wiltshire, England.

The subjects of the third section, "History as Biography," may strike some readers as fairly obscure. G. F. Nuttall, one of White's tutors, offers a brief historical note on J. Norcott, a seventeenth-century English Baptist who wrote a defense of believers' baptism and may have been the same person ejected from an Anglican pulpit in 1662. In a more substantive chapter, R. Hayden examines the influences of evangelical Calvinist B. Foskett (1685-1758) on Baptist theology and education in western England and Wales. M. Reeves provides a useful supplement to Smith's earlier chapter with an introduction to and excerpts from the diaries of J. Attwater (1753-1843), a Baptist woman from Bodenham, England (near Hampshire). The biographical essays close with J. H. Y. Briggs's chronicle of F. Cox, a nineteenth-century English Baptist preacher, educator, and activist who played a key role in the founding of London University. Overall, these case studies present some interesting vignettes of English Baptist life and thought.

Whereas most of the contributors to the first three parts are British, the writers for the last section, "Crossing Boundaries," are all North Americans. Two seasoned Southern Baptist historians, W. M. Patterson and W. R. Estep, address respectively the relationship of Baptists to the English evangelical awakening of the eighteenth century and the valiant efforts of Baptists to champion the cause of religious liberty in both England and America. While neither of these essays represents groundbreaking scholarship, they nonetheless stand as helpful surveys. W. H. Brackney shifts the scene entirely to North America, as he highlights the unmistakable links between Baptists in New England and Nova Scotia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A more transatlantic theme is sounded in the last chapter, as S. M. Gibson demonstrates how the common interests of America A. J. Gordon and Britisher H. G. Guinness in missions, education, and premillennial eschatology brought them into some cooperative ventures in the late nineteenth century. The volume ends with a bibliography of White's published works compiled by S. Copson.

Overall, this collection is a fitting tribute to one of the most prominent English Baptist historians of this era. As in any publication with multiple authors, the quality varies from essay to essay. The efforts of Fiddes West, Brachlow, Manley, and Brackney merit special commendation. Sadly, the editing in this book is consistently poor. In addition to numerous typographical errors, there are several misprinted dates (e.g. pp. 5, 270, and 276), a glaring run-on sentence (p. 23), and a very confusing statement about the relationship of the American Baptist Missionary Union and the Livingstone Inland Mission (p. 308). An expensive volume honoring a scholar of this caliber deserves far better editorial care.