Baptist Theological Contributions: An Intentional Faith Community Achieved by Reserving Baptism for Believers and Religious Liberty Achieved by Separation of Church and State (Report‪)‬

My subject is Baptist theological contributions, which would be straightforward enough except that the principal words are contested. Who is a Baptist? What is a theological contribution? Twenty years ago James Wm. McClendon began the first volume of his Systematic Theology with an essay that seems to me to represent a high water mark in commentary on baptist theology. (1) His essay is about what he called small-b baptists, a group that comprises not only persons who refer to themselves as Baptists but also most of the heirs of the sixteenth-century Radical Reformation, together with all persons in the Barton-Stone-Campbell tradition of the Churches of Christ and the Christian Church-Disciples of Christ, most evangelicals, most Fundamentalists, and most Pentecostals and charismatics.