Baptists and the Catholic Tradition: Reimagining the Church's Witness in the Modern World Paperback - 2020

From the rear cover

"A splendid demonstration of theological thinking at its best"

Barry Harvey provides a doctrine of the church that combines Baptist distinctives and origins with an unbending commitment to the visible church as the social body of Christ. This second edition has been updated, streamlined, and recontextualized to speak to the broader Christian community. Harvey offers a style of ecclesial witness that can help Christian churches engage culture and shows how the fragmented body of Christ can be re-membered after Christendom.

"When they were a persecuted religious minority, Baptists took great pains to demonstrate the continuity of the faith they confessed with the catholic tradition. But cultural establishment brought with it disdain for and disconnection from a catholicity that in modernity seemed awkwardly countercultural. Barry Harvey's Baptists and the Catholic Tradition does not only cogently argue that Baptists have no ecclesial future apart from a catholic one; this manifesto for Baptist ecumenical engagement also boldly proposes that the needed catholicity cannot be found in reconstruction or idealization but only by identification with--and not separation from--concrete manifestations of the catholicity of the church."
--Steven R. Harmon, Gardner-Webb University School of Divinity

Praise for the First Edition

"Harvey has written a small summa for our time, a fine compendium of ecclesial wisdom for making Christian witness to the principalities and powers of our age. With massive learning, both theological and biblical, he offers us a real masterwork, a splendid demonstration of theological thinking at its best, fully mature and fully engaged with church and world alike."
--Ralph C. Wood, Baylor University

"A masterful account of the contemporary church. Harvey's scholarship is profound, although he displays it gracefully, and his insights penetrating. While accurately describing the political, social, and economic forces that have severed the sinews of Christ's body, this marvelous work also represents a fresh breath of the Spirit, offering a rich account of the ecclesial practices that may yet clothe us with new life."
--Elizabeth Newman, author of Untamed Hospitality: Welcoming God and Other Strangers