The Formation of the Primitive Baptist Movement.

The Formation of the Primitive Baptist Movement. By Jeffrey Wayne Taylor. Studies in the Believers Church Tradition. (Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, c. 2004. Pp. 225. $25.00, ISBN 1-894710-42-8.)

A distinguished Primitive Baptist preacher of my acquaintance once remarked that he would love to have been present with Gilbert Beebe and the others who authored the Black Rock Address of 1832. His statement indicates the extent to which the Primitive Baptist Church still eyes this period in its history. Jeffrey Wayne Taylor's insightful treatment of the denomination's formative period makes a welcome addition to the literature on the movement, informing and challenging the Primitives, their students, and their critics.

While using good primary and secondary sources on the missions controversy among the Baptists, Taylor wisely avoids the sparse accounts in church and associational minutes. He makes masterful use of the three main periodicals of the early Primitive Baptist movement: Gilbert Beebe's Signs of the Times, Daniel Jewett's Christian Doctrinal Advocate and Spiritual Monitor, and the Primitive Baptist. Jewett's paper in particular has suffered undeserved neglect from Primitive Baptists and their scholars. In these periodicals, conservative Baptists expressed their deep concern over compromises in their predestinarian faith and importation into their church of not only a host of novel institutions and practices but also the very "world" from which they had long striven to separate.

After an overview of the Baptist tradition that the Primitive movement reiterated, Taylor critically examines their view of history. While he does not accept their untenable belief in a continuous succession of Baptist churches, he recognizes the strength and guidance they derived from this conviction, and he acknowledges that they did stand in a separatist tradition that has existed throughout most of Christian history.

The book examines their view of the relationship of the church to the society and the apocalyptic expectations that sprang from what they saw as gross departures from orthodoxy by a majority of Baptists. Taylor explores a particularly interesting outgrowth of their separatism: their opposition to all attempts by reforming evangelicals to enact laws imposing purely religious morality on the general public, chiefly Sabbath observance and temperance.

Taylor's work makes a valuable contribution by emphasizing that opposition to mission societies by early Primitive Baptists did not extend to evangelism itself. As their movement progressed, however, some among them denied that preaching was instrumental in the salvation of the elect. Although hotly contested, this view eventually gained the upper hand. They also debated from their inception whether predestination extended only to the salvation of the elect or to all events whatsoever.

In his conclusion, Taylor challenges those who might dismiss the Primitive Baptists as religious fossils. Their questions on the relationship of the church to the surrounding culture and to Scripture remain vital to Christians and those who seek to understand them.

JOHN G. CROWLEY

Valdosta State University