This last Tuesday, February 14, I delivered the MacDonald Lecture series at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. I failed to post about these ahead of time, but if you are interested in watching/listening you can find the recordings linked below. For those who have read some of the things I have posted on my blog over the past while, or if you have read my book or articles, you will recognize bits and pieces of the lectures. These lectures, though, attempt to give a much larger and more coherent story.
The lectures are academic in nature and are attempting to make an extended argument. There are four total lectures and each are 45-50 minutes long. That is a lot to listen to (it was a lot to prepare!) but they did give me a unique opportunity to develop a longer historical argument than what any one individual lecture or article might. Because of that, I had the opportunity to float a trial balloon on some ideas I have been thinking through for several years. As the title and subtitle indicate, these lectures explored 19th century northern Baptist seminaries and their development. I begin with their founding round about 1820 and go through the end of the century. I try and give one narrative schematic by which we might be able to understand this movement as a whole. I am not aware of anything else that has tried to do what I have done here. The closest would be William Brackney in his Genetic History of Baptist Thought, which is foundational in the field. But whereas he was taking individual schools and tracing their heritage, I am moving taking all the schools together together diachronically. Again, this was my chance to do a historical exploration, and it was a good time.
Here are the titles to the four lectures:
- A New Direction in Baptist Theological Education
- Foundations: The First Generation
- Expansion: The Second Generation
- Divergence: The Third Generation
The lecture videos can be found at this link.
You can also find the handout/outlines at this link.
Historically Situated 