"In an important book, Baptist theologian James William McClendon Jr. has argued that small-b Baptists, a group that includes the Baptists; have produced little theology.

He defines theology as the discovery, understanding, and transformation of the convictions of a convictional community, including the discovery and critical revision of their relation to one another and to whatever else there is.

Baptists have not done much of this kind of work, McClendon says, because through much of their history they have been involved in a struggle for survival, and when they have been secure they have allowed the agenda for their theology to be set by other groups such as the eighteenth-century Reformed theologians whose major concerns were expressed in the Calvinist/Arminian controversies and the twentieth-century Fundamentalists whose major concerns were expressed in controversies with modernists about the Bible.

The issues in these controversies, McClendon says, did not arise naturally from Baptists' own identity with its origins in the radical wing of the Reformation but were borrowed by Baptists from outside their own life."