Towards a Baptist Theology of Creation: Thinking in Place with Willie James Jennings and Baptist Ecclesiology

Abstract

The article takes Willie James Jennings’s vision for a theology of creaturely connection as a starting point for suggesting a distinctively Baptist mode of creation theology — one that both flows out of and may further inform Baptist ecclesiology. It is argued that theologies of creation and church are mutually informing and patterned after one another in ways that tend to go unrecognised. Drawing on the work of Stephen Holmes and Paul Fiddes, it is suggested that the interrelated emphases on responsible discipleship, congregational liberty, and associationalism orient the Baptist imagination toward the particularities of local communities, encouraging a doctrine of creation that analogously begins with and lingers over how a given place is created and sustained by God in its ecological interdependence.