Journal: Reformed Baptist Theological Review
Volume: RBTR 02:1 (Jan 2005)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

RBTR 2:1 (January 2005) p. 159

Book Reviews

Readers will understand that we are not able to supply these books.

Baptism in the Early Church, Hendrikus Stander and Johannes Louw (ARBCA and Carey Publications, 2004), reviewed by Michael T. Renihan

Professors Hendrikus Stander and Johannes Louw have provided an invaluable resource for students of the Patristic era of Church History. It is also a provocative volume for inquirers bold enough to look beyond their historical presuppositions regarding baptism. A word of warning: objectivity is required or this book will be a frustrating read.

Stander and Louw are both classical scholars in their own right. Each man’s work can be readily examined in the books, monographs, and articles he has published. Each is a world class scholar. Dr. Stander studied at Yale. On those occasions that took him to the libraries at Harvard, he would travel within a quarter mile of where I presently live. He is a kind and gracious man. Dr. Louw, along with Eugene Nida, is an editor of the acclaimed Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains. The careers of Stander and Louw dovetailed at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. They have been associated with that institution for many years.

The denominational allegiance of the authors makes Baptism in the Early Church remarkable. They belong to churches that are paedobaptist and covenantal by confession and heritage. Yet, their desire was (and is) to be objective, honest, and thorough in their quest to understand how the Early Church understood and practiced baptism. In the end, they gently and graciously remove one of the three legs on which the three-legged stool of covenantal paedobaptism sat for many years; the other two being (from this writer’s perspective) theological necessity and eisogetical induction.

In the Twentieth Century, much work was done in the fields of archeology and history with regard to baptism and the initiatory rites of the Early Church. It is sad that so much has been neglected or dismissed willfully with a few strokes on the keyboard. Everett Ferguson’s volume The Encyclopaedia of the Early Church (which contains articles by Prof. Stander) is a repository for many of these recent discoveries.

Baptism in the Early Church is comprised of twenty-five chapters of varying length. The final chapter contains conclusions that flow naturally from the research and study. There is very little extraneous material. The

RBTR 2:1 (January 2005) p. 160

style is compact, to the point, and engagingly thorough. The only drawback to the work is its slight Afrikaans flavor.

The work unearths many ...