Word: baptism
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...complains that the modern church microphone is "a gadget of the devil, it's bugging me," Grey insists that "spineless and convictionless preaching is contaminating the land" and that Baptists must beware of becoming "ritualistic, formal, cold and dead, like so many other decadent denominations." He characterizes Southern Baptism as "a healthy, wealthy young lady," wooed by ecumenicalism on one side, nondenominationalism on the other. "These ambitious 'Lotharios' are making eyes at us. But we have not, cannot and will not even drop our handkerchief...
Resurgence After Disaster. Both Northern and Southern Baptists share the basic Baptist tenets: the supreme authority of Scripture, baptism by immersion, the autonomy of the individual soul before God. The split between them began with the issue of slavery; the Southern Baptist Conference was founded in 1845, after a Northern majority of Baptists had ruled against missionaries' owning slaves. During the Civil War the Southern Baptists evangelized fervently among Confederate soldiers, financed their foreign missions in part by blockade-running cotton exports to England...
...Until well after World War I, the Southern Baptist trademark seemed to be high-decibel evangelism and opposition to the Pope, Darwin, smoking, dancing and drinking. Between the enactment of Prohibition and the 1928 defeat of Al Smith, Southern Baptism went through some of its rowdiest moments. Some memorably colorful but questionable leaders appeared -and in a denomination without central authority, where each church has complete local autonomy, no one could say whether or not they spoke for Southern Baptism. There was, for instance, J. Frank Norris, a Fort Worth Baptist preacher ("the Texas tornado"), who killed a political...
Thereafter, the "gift of the Holy Ghost" came to be associated with glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, (TIME, Aug. 15) and was sometimes thought to be conferred by baptism or the laying on of hands. St. Augustine of Hippo (354/430) taught that the gift of the Holy Spirit could only be present in the unity of the church, that outsiders could not receive Him. But Martin Luther (1483-1546) took no account at all of the "fellowship of the Spirit." The Holy Ghost, he thought, descended upon one man and not another with no rational explanation ("Faith killeth reason...
...carpenter, he makes crosses on which the hated Romans crucify the prophets that rise periodically to liberate Israel. He struggles against God's call, but eventually he finds that he must surrender. And so his ministry begins, first in the preaching of love and forgiveness, then, after his baptism-by a wonderfully wild and frightening John the Baptist-in his stern proclamation that the end of the world is at hand...