Baird Tipson is Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at Gettysburg College. After seventeen years as a faculty member, Tipson (AB Princeton University, PhD Yale University) became Provost of Gettysburg College (1987-1995), President of Wittenberg University (1995-2004) and President of Washington College (2004-2010). A student of Sydney Ahlstrom, he specializes in the European Reformation and the early history of Religion in America. He is the author of Hartford Puritanism: Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone and Their Terrifying God.

"Baird offers a strong logic-driven argument...I think the book [is] excellent for an academic classroom discussion." -- Rick Kennedy, Church History

"an excellent introduction to the theological ideas that underpinned eighteenth-century evangelicalism." -- Simon Lewis, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society

"Tipson's study is creatively presented, well written, and persuasively argued...Tipson's study deserves attention by those looking to connect the world of ideas with the lived experiences of early modern subjects." -- Ryan Shelton, Queen's University Belfast, Journal of the Northern Renaissance

"At a time when scholars are interrogating, with fascinating results, the nature and features of an early phase of modern evangelicalism, Baird Tipson's work on Inward Baptism is a welcome addition. He shows how, in the two-and-a-half-centuries and more after the beginning of the Reformation, Protestant theologians shifted from an emphasis on sacramental participation as a basis for assurance of salvation to a subjective mode, from an external to an internal testimony of grace." -- Kenneth Minkema, Executive Editor, Jonathan Edwards Center, Yale University

"Baird Tipson's new book offers a thorough investigation and lucid explanation of some of the most complex debates in Christian theology, those centering on how a person is saved and how she can be assured of that justification. He takes the reader on a journey from the sacerdotal approach of medieval Catholicism through to the experience of a new birth experienced by the followers of eighteenth-century revivalists such as John Wesley and George Whitefield." -- Francis J. Bremer, author of One Small Candle: The Story of the Plymouth Puritans and the Beginning of English New England

"By the early seventeenth century, an understanding of religion as a matter of interior experience was coming to the fore in Reformed and Puritan circles. Baird Tipson revisits this process and provides a fresh explanation of how it arose, an explanation that takes us back to Martin Luther. Always a superb historian of doctrine, Tipson is at his lucid best in this important book." -- David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School