The Victorian preacher Charles Spurgeon once said of Baptist Christians, “The claim which we make to have been the first expositors and advocates in modern times of religious liberty,m is based on the surest foundation, and is capable of the most satisfactory proof.”
This volume aims to concisely examine that foundation, particularly within the historical and theological context of the years 1612-1689 and the cultural context of England. Hopefully readers will be both informed, and perhaps even transformed, by a better understanding of the Early English Baptist development of a biblically distinctive theology of religious liberty in an era when it was not enjoyed by many and was endorsed by few, well before the radical cultural and intellectual shifts of the eighteenth century.