Preface
In A Messenger of Grace : A Study of the Life and Thought of Abraham Booth
Raymond Arthur Coppenger
I wrote the preface to this reprint of my father’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Edinburgh. It came out the week before he turned one hundred, so that he was able to sign copies for seventy-five of the guests gathered to celebrate his birthday at First Baptist Church, Arkadelphia, Arkansas. This was the city where he taught for two decades at Ouachita Baptist University, having earlier been a professor at Belmont in Nashville, Tennessee, and Carson-Newman in Jefferson City, Tennessee. Before these teaching years, and equipped with a BD (now MDiv) from SBTS, he served as a pastor in Tennessee and Virginia, a campus minister at Auburn and Kentucky, and a Navy chaplain in the South Pacific.