A headline in The New York Times on January 4, 2014 suggested in no uncertain terms that “Evangelicals Find Themselves in the Midst of a Calvinist Revival.”[1] Revival is a good word, though when considering Baptists in particular, a better word might be “recovery” or “resurgence.” The fact is that most of the early American Baptists were Calvinists. That’s the second lesson we can learn from William Buell Sprague’s Annals of the American Baptist Pulpit.[2]
A historian and Congregationalist minister, Sprague is best known for compiling the biographies contained in Annals of the American Pulpit. He dedicated one volume to every leading Protestant denomination. In compiling these volumes, he solicited responses from denominational leaders in every denomination and commissioned them to write biographies. For instance, the volume on the Baptists contains contributions from hundreds of different authors: J. Newton Brown, Alvah Hovey, J.L. Dagg, Richard Fuller, and many others. As such, Sprague’s Annals serves as a kind of “time capsule” into Baptist thinking in the 1850s.
One of the benefits of examining a book like Sprague’s Annals is to glean “indirect lessons.” I would be far more suspicious of a contemporary account of “The History of Baptists and Calvinism in
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