FREE CHURCH FREE STATE
By Nigel G. Wright
Paternoster. 292 pages. £9.99
ISBN 1 84227 353 1
Nigel Wright sets out to explain the ‘convictions and practices which distinguish Baptist Christians’. Wright sees only two broad categories to the church: ‘Catholic’ and ‘Baptist’, with everyone else coming somewhere in the spectrum.
The Roman Church is the inheritor of the ‘style and position of the Roman Empire in the Western world’. It modelled itself on the imperial state and regarded itself as having ‘sacred and legal power over its members’. The year 313 is, for him, a bad year (as in many respects it was), but it has to be said also that, in the providence of God, the legalisation of Christianity in that year had many good effects for the consolidation of Christian thinking on vital matters such as the Person of Christ and the evangelisation of Europe. That said, he has much good to say about the advantages both to the state and the church of a clear separation of spheres.
