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Other Baptists according to Curtis Freeman

Extracts from Contesting Catholicity: Theology for Other Baptists by Curtis Freeman (Baylor, 2014):

Other Baptists are sick, and they know it. This sickness is terminal, and it is shared by others. But there is good news; there is a cure. Other Baptists find the cure for their alterity by participating in the life of the triune God with the communion of saints in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. (p.23)

Other Baptists are committed to continuing reform and retrieving the tradition of the church.

Other Baptists have said farewell to the establishment of Christendom in search of a contesting catholicity.

Other Baptists long to see their churches take a new direction that is neither conservative nor liberal nor something in between.

Other Baptists affirm the beliefs and practices that have shaped the identity and mission of baptistic communities through the centuries,  but they also desire to be in continuity with the historic Christian tradition.

Other Baptists seek to move beyond modernity, yet they are deliberate about retrieving a connection between faith and practice of the once, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

Other Baptists do not claim to have the final word but rather invite the wider community of Baptists to enter a conversation about the way forward.

Other Baptists pursue the direction of a theology that is deliberately baptistic and intentionally catholic. (pp.91-92)

Other Baptists have been more open to the use of creeds when not employed to bind the conscience. By voluntarily reciting the ancient ecumenical creeds of the church, Other Baptists move beyond fundamentalism and liberalism and toward the bedrock of catholicity. (p.138)

Other Baptists seek the recovery of catholicity because there is nothing more qualitatively or quantitatively catholic than the Trinity. The choice is clear. (p.190)

For Other Baptist pilgrims, the journey is about practices, not just principles; convictions, not merely concepts; communion, not individualism. (p.209)

Other Baptists understand that they are priests to one another by participating as ministers in the priestly ministry of Jesus Christ, the mediator of the new covenant. (p.223)

Other Baptists believe that embracing a greater sense of catholicity offers hope of being sustained in the ecclesial pilgrimage through the wilderness of life after Christendom. (p.257)

Other Baptists must see to it that there is enough catholicity existing among them to be recognized by Christians within the wider church. (p.258)

Other Baptists can with expectant hope offer this prayer:

            O Father, Son, and Spirit, send us increase from above;
            Enlarge, expand all Christian souls to comprehend thy love;
            and make us to go on to know with nobler powers conferred;
            The Lord hath yet more light and truth to break forth from his Word.
                         (p.309)

Other Baptists … [seek] to move from a theology of simple faith, private devotion, obligatory ordinance, real absence, and mere symbol to a theology of sacramental participation, common prayer, life-giving practice, real presence, and powerful signs. (p.338)

Other Baptists are prepared to see infant baptism as a form of baptism derived from the norm of believer’s baptism, while only practicing the normative form in their own communities. (p.373)

Other Baptists seek a way forward that enables their churches to “accept into full membership all confirmed Christians, who present themselves for membership, without requiring a second baptism. This is the constraint of catholicity and it is a constraint Other Baptists freely embrace. (p.383)

To their brothers and sisters in the wider church, Other Baptists can only attest that catholicity is not an option. It is the only reality. For either Baptists churches are expressions of the church catholic or they are not the church at all. (p.390)

Beverly Gaventa on being taught by J. Louis Martyn

On the news that J. Louis Martyn has died. Here are some words written by one his former students Beverly Gaventa (in an article from 2005):

My introduction to Lou came during my second semester, when I enrolled in his exegesis class on Romans. To tell the truth, I took that course solely because it fulfilled a graduation requirement. My interest in biblical studies at the time was roughly the equivalent of my current interest in professional football. By the end of the semester, I was studying the course offerings for the following year with an eye to 1 Corinthians and the Gospel of John, not to mention digging out my abandoned under- graduate Greek textbook. To say that I experienced a change of mind is too little. I was grabbed by the text, and it would not let me go. More than 30 years later it still will not let me go.

What happened? I saw exegesis in the making. Lou would come into the classroom, sit down at the end of the table of maybe 15 students, and pull out from his briefcase a Greek New Testament, held together by layers of electrical tape, along with a file of handwritten notes. Discussion would begin. His attention was unabashedly riveted to the text—to every letter and each nuance. 

...

In those early years of coming to know J. Louis Martyn, I do not remember an occasion when he spoke directly of his own personal commitment to the Word witnessed to in the words we were studying. He did not need to: his careful, disciplined attention spoke eloquently to the importance of the text for his own being. I also do not remember an occasion when I wondered about his faith. It did not seem to me possible that the concentration with which he read the lines of Romans or the intensity with which he listened to fumbling voices could be consistent with anything other than a living faith. His eyes and his ears told the whole of the story. Faith was not so much something to be uttered as it was something enacted in our classroom in bodily form. 

Beverly Gaventa, 'Attentive to the Text', Christian Century (22nd February 2005)