Author: Verduin, Leonard
Genre: Theology - Baptist
Tags: Baptist / Baptists
Series:
Rick Shrader‘s Review:
This 1964 Eerdman’s book is one with which I have been familiar for years but had never read cover to cover. Now, after having done so, I regret I took so long. No one who wears the name “Baptist” ought to miss this book, nor anyone who knows he cannot claim Rome or the Reformers as spiritual fathers. Verduin carefully and scholarly traces the origin of independent believers to the New Testament and focuses on their fundamental disagreement with both Roman Catholicism and Protestant Christianity, primarily over the matter of external control on independent churches. The reader will definitely be surprised at Augustine’s, Luther’s and Calvin’s defense of the union of civil authority with the Church, not to mention the twisting of Scripture in order to prove it! The path is also strewn with sad cases of persecution on those who objected.