Jim Packer on Richard Baxter

As part of remembering J. I. Packer, who recently went to be with the Lord, we are sharing his entries from the New Dictionary of Theology: Historical and Systematic, and giving away his classic 'Concise Theology'.

BAXTER, RICHARD (1615–91)

Baxter was a leading *Puritan clergyman. In 1641–42 and 1647–61 (he was a parliamentary army chaplain, 1642–47) he exercised at Kidderminster, Worcestershire, the most fruit ful Puritan pastorate anywhere recorded, converting almost the whole town. Under Cromwell’s church settlement (establishing Independency) he formed the interdenominational Worcestershire Association of pastors, pledged to practise congregational evangelism by catechizing families and to maintain parochial *church discipline, with member ministers as the informal consistory court. At the Restoration, Baxter was offered the bishopric of Hereford, but declined it. At the 1661 Savoy Conference he pleaded fruitlessly for the non-prelatical, synodical form of episcopacy devised by his deceased friend Archbishop Ussher (1581–1656), and for a Puritan revision of the Prayer Book. After the 1662 ejections he lived in the London area, an acknowledged leader among the ejected, and wrote constantly, becoming the most voluminous of all British theologians.

His output included three folios. A Christian Directory (1673) summarizes in a million words all Puritan ‘practical’, ‘experimental’, ‘*casuistical’ divinity (i.e. ethical and devotional teaching); Catholick Theology (1675), ‘Plain, Pure, Peaceable: for the Pacification of the Dogmatical Word-Warriours’, as the title proclaimed, embraces Calvinist, Arminian, Lutheran and Roman Catholic (Dominican and Jesuit) views about *grace in a tour de force of ecumenical accommodation; and Methodus Theologiae Christianae (1681) is a Ramist-style analysis of Christian truth in Latin, trichotomizing instead of dichotomizing as *Ramus and other Puritans did. Three more landmark books were The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1650), an 800-page classic that established Baxter as Puritanism’s supreme devotional author; the passionate Reformed Pastor (1656; ‘Reformed’ means not just ‘Calvinistic’ but ‘revived’), a volume which the Broad Church bishop Hensley Henson described in 1925 as ‘the best manual of the clergyman’s duty in the language’; and the electrifying Call to the Unconverted (1658), a pioneer evangelistic pocketbook that sold by tens of thousands. Also, Baxter’s elaborate chronicle of his life and times, Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), is a primary and trusted source for seventeenth-century church history

Miscalled a Presbyterian, Baxter was a reluctant nonconformist who favoured monarchy, national churches, liturgy and episcopacy, and could accept the unsympathetically revised 1662 Prayer Book. But the 1662 Act of Uniformity required renunciation on oath of Puritan ideals of reformation as a condition of incumbency in the restored Church of England, and Baxter balked at that.

Baxter’s gospel presents Christ’s death as an act of universal *redemption, penal and vicarious though not strictly substitutionary, in virtue of which God has made a new law offering amnesty to penitent breakers of the old law. As obedience to the new law, repentance and faith are one’s personal saving righteousness, which effectual calling induces and preserving grace sustains. Called ‘Neonomianism’, this scheme is substantially *Amyraldian, with *Arminian ‘new law’ teaching added. Its obvious legalistic tendency, unrecognized by Baxter, was much criticized in his own day. Baxter also argued the reasonableness of Christianity on the basis of its coherence with *natural theology, a method that boomeranged by producing *unitarianism among his English Presbyterian followers after his death.

Select Bibliography

Works: Practical Works, ed. W. Orme, 23 vols. (London, 1830).

Studies: C. F. Allison, The Rise of Moralism (London, 1966); W. M. Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millennium (London, 1979); Hugh Martin, Puritanism and Richard Baxter (London, 1946); G.  F. Nuttall, Richard Baxter (London, 1965); F. J. Powicke, A Life of the Reverend Richard Baxter (London, 1924); idem, The Reverend Richard Baxter under the Cross (London, 1927). J. I. Packer