To repeat my point, Owen could have had any number of authors in mind when he offered this extended critique, but it has to be said that Richard Baxter fitted the bill pretty well. In his first publication, the Aphorismes of Justification, published in 1649, Baxter had laid out a system of soteriology that distinguished between the “Legal Righteousness” that God supplies and the “Evangelical Righteousness” that the believer provides. This Evangelical Righteousness involved the sincere but imperfect performance of the gospel conditions, namely faith, which encompassed repentance, obedience and perseverance. Right from the beginning Baxter blended Christ’s righteousness with the believer’s righteousness; and this was just the first of countless distinctions that Baxter offered up in the course of his long career, not least in Catholick Theologie, where they came thick and fast. In the course of that work Baxter tendered a typically half-hearted apology for minor infelicities in the Aphorismes of Justification but he stood by the doctrine it delivered. Moreover, in 1676 Baxter engineered an affirmation of reason in The Judgment of Non-conformists of the Interest of Reason in Matters of Religion, signed by 15 men within his circle. Baxter seemed to be reinforcing those trends that so worried Owen, not standing against them.
…During the 1640s Baxter went through a soteriological transition in which his theology of salvation was entirely inverted. He went into the decade holding a set of doctrines that were not just Calvinist, but Antinomian. As he admitted in the Aphorismes, he had “remained long in the borders of Antinomianisme, which I very narrowly escaped.” In 1645 he had visited friends in the New Model Army after its victory at Naseby, only to find that bad doctrine was rife: Arminianism on one side and, far more prevalent and concerning, Antinomianism on the other. He began to see where his own doctrines might take him. Two years of contending against heresy and error as an army chaplain came to an end deep in the winter of early 1647 in a crisis of ill health. The severe cold brought on a bleeding nose. Baxter concluded that he needed to reduce his body’s evident surfeit of blood by opening four veins. That treatment very nearly killed him. During his recovery he had a profound experience that precipitated the inversion of his soteriology: it became anti-Antinomian. In a moment of dazzling clarity the system he outlined in the Aphorismes fell into place.
I would argue that Baxter’s civil war experience left him in some measure traumatized: for the rest of his life he lived in the shadow of that trauma. Even before the fighting began he was chased out of Kidderminster by a mob that threatened to kill him. He was on hand to witness the first physical skirmish of the wars, the ambush at Powicke Bridge; a month later he surveyed the field on which lay around a thousand corpses, men killed during the battle of Edgehill the previous day; and in his tenure as an army chaplain he witnessed several battles and sieges. Though it may seem a small thing now, a bleeding nose can be a symptom of intense stress. It is a dangerous thing to try to assess the psychology of an individual in the past; even so, the wars left Baxter with a deep and abiding desire for order and stability. In A Holy Commonwealth, published in 1659, Baxter reviewed how the civil wars had changed him.
Read More»Tim Cooper | “John Owen, Richard Baxter and the Battle for Calvin in Later-Seventeenth-Century England” | Winter 2016
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