Can we learn anything from the disputes between two seventeenth-century theologians in England, John Owen and Richard Baxter? In this book, Tim Cooper makes the case that we can. And if we can, there are few better-qualified guides than Dr. Cooper. Extensively published on the period and the men in question, there is no doubt that Dr. Cooper knows his subjects and their context intimately. While there is much that is helpful in this book, the framing of John Owen and Richard Baxter’s theological debates as driven more by circumstance and personality than substance has the potential to undo all the good.
The Men
Cooper begins by introducing us to Baxter and Owen as “two good men.” He does this to help offset the criticism of their behaviours and personalities that will follow. In outlining their early experiences, Cooper highlights their differences. Baxter was an only child and an autodidact. Owen was one of a family of six and an Oxford graduate. But in many ways, their later lives bore important similarities. Both had faithful pastorates, both rose to national prominence (though Owen was closer to power and held official positions accordingly), and both published extensively. In all this, their lives show they were “good men who have earned our respect” (28). Cooper then moves to specific events and features of their lives, which he believes drove their differences.
Experience
One event dominated the lives of those who lived through the seventeenth century in England—the war of the three kingdoms, culminating in the regicide of Charles I in 1649. Owen and Baxter were no exceptions. As Cooper outlines, Baxter and Owen had very different experiences of the brutal civil war.
Owen was relatively remote from the actual conflict. He read the war through a providential and theological lens that saw it as a great blessing and advance for the cause of Christ. Because of his gifting and attitude, he became a preacher to Parliament, preaching after the execution of the King. Owen’s experience of the war was “good.”
Baxter, by contrast, saw the heat of the battle. He saw the brutal aftermath of battles with the bodies of men strewn on the battlefield. He became a chaplain in the army and was horrified by the rise of strange doctrines among the troops. Though not due to the war, he himself came near to death with months of ill health. The war was a “bad” experience for Baxter.
Through showing the contrast of Owen’s and Baxter’s experiences, Cooper helpfully encourages us to think through how our experiences shape us and may be the driver for conflict.
Personality
It was not just experience that divided Baxter and Owen. Their constitutional makeup was different. Owen was a private man, but a man who understood others and how to navigate choppy political waters. He astutely dedicated his publications to the right people, he impressed at the important moments, and he was at ease interacting with powerful figures like Cromwell. But negatively, he was also happy on occasion to play political “games” to get his way, and he did not suffer contradiction easily.
Baxter was the constitutional reverse of Owen. He blurted out everything about himself. He is the most transparent of seventeenth-century men. He did not intuitively understand others and their reactions to his writings. He dedicated his first book on justification to men who profoundly disagreed with him, and in the case of Anthony Burgess, went into print against Baxter’s views. He deferred to no one, ignoring traditional deference to superiors in experience and position. Only, perhaps, in his unwillingness to suffer contradiction was he like Owen. Again, Cooper helpfully calls us to examine the role personality has in conflict.
Theology
Cooper next considers theology. This is the most disappointing and problematic chapter in the book. For Cooper, the theological debates between Baxter and Owen were really all about nothing much. While there is some relevance to today, “we might no longer ask quite the same questions they did. . . . Their questions might seem extremely technical to us” (58). Baxter was simply reacting against antinomianism in how he phrased things. He placed emphasis on judgement by work and now became “anti-antinomian” (63). Owen, by contrast, was concerned with Arminianism. He saw the chief danger in a different direction—not in the direction of attributing too little to human agency, but too much.
And so, “they stood back-to-back, looking in opposite directions and subject to opposite fears” while “we can see both men as Calvinists” (69). The differences between Owen and Baxter were “small differences” (71) and “the product of time and place” (85). This does not do justice at all to the questions that divided Owen and Baxter.
Contact and Collision
So far in Cooper’s book, Owen and Baxter have been kept apart. He now introduces us to their clashes in print and in person. The instigator, unsurprisingly, was Baxter. In his first and supremely controversial publication, Aphorisms of Justification (1649), Baxter addressed Owen as ultimately one who fought against Arminian theology with the “Antinomian’s weapons” (76). Owen did not take this lying down, and in Of the Death of Christ (1649) responded. Baxter would later say, “I meddled too forwardly with Dr. Owen” (78). But, of course, he continued to meddle. Six years later in Richard Baxter’s Confession of his Faith (1655) he renewed the insinuation of antinomianism against Owen. Again, Owen replied in Of the Death of Christ and Justification (1655). His displeasure with Baxter’s inability to fairly represent his views was evident. But that did not silence Baxter, who responded in Certain Disputations of Right to the Sacraments, and the True Nature of Visible Christianity (1657). Baxter was ever the man willing to add another unnecessary round to a debate.
In the middle of this ongoing print dispute, Baxter and Owen met in person. It was 1654. By this point, Baxter was riding high from the success of The Saints Everlasting Rest and from a personal reputation boosted by a remarkable transformation of the town in which he ministered, Kidderminster. Baxter had also won an audience for his vision of a “mere Christian” unity based on professing Scripture alone. (Ironically, this was close to the Socinian vision, which Owen had earlier insinuated by appending his Of the Death of Christ and Justification to an extensive refutation of Socinianism).
At this time, Owen was engaged in trying to foster broad unity, whilst excluding heresy, based on a list of “fundamentals.” He was given this task, along with other divines, by the parliament of Oliver Cromwell. Baxter was also ultimately appointed to this group, and the result was disaster. Baxter refused to countenance anything that was not in the direct wording of scripture, or at least not beyond the Apostles’ Creed. When it was pointed out that this would not counter Socinianism, Baxter replied, “So much the better” (97). It was not that Baxter was endorsing Socinianism, but in a committee founded to exclude Socinianism, he was effectively advancing a Socinian theological method. Baxter found no takers for his approach, but he remained in the committee as a naysayer.
Memory
Even after this debacle, Baxter and Owen’s relationship grew worse. Based on a report of Owen’s leading involvement in the downfall of the Protectorate under Cromwell’s son, Richard, Baxter blamed Owen for the return of the monarchy and the downfall of the Puritan cause. This “memory” of Owen dominated Baxter’s ongoing reflections on him.
In time, they both became leaders of different parties of “dissenters” from the restored Church of England, with Baxter’s party seeking comprehension in the national church, and Owen’s seeking toleration and freedom out of it. There was no rapprochement between them. Even Owen’s death in 1683 did not prevent Baxter from criticising Owen in print in 1684. Cooper notes, “The timing and content of the book do Baxter little credit” (114). Quite.
Cooper’s questions concluding this chapter are helpful.
Conclusion and the Importance of Theology
Cooper’s conclusion offers helpful pastoral pointers. But at this point, the flattening of theological differences reappears in statements like, “The differences between them were relatively narrow” (122). But is this the case? Surely their differences concerned “the main hinge on which religion turns,” the doctrine of justification.1 The failure to realise the significance of the issues under debate results in a mistaken downplaying of the importance of theological convictions as the fundamental key to Owen and Baxter’s debates.
Indeed, it is because the theological constructions of Baxter raised alarm that Owen was only one of many to dispute with Baxter. Others took serious issue with him, not because of personality (at least initially) or experience, but because of theology. Owen’s personality, of course, impacted his interactions with Baxter. But it was his orthodox theological convictions that lay at their root.
For example, contemporary Scottish theologians were outraged by Baxter. Robert Baillie wrote to Simon Ash, “Mr. Baxter does us more harm than all your Sectaries. . . . His intolerable boldness, after his avowed Amyraldisme, to follow and go beyond miserable John Goodwin, in confounding the great head of justification with such a flood of new and unsound notions, does vex us. . . . I entreat that some of you would advise how to get this dangerous evil remedied, [or] at least stopped.”2 Samuel Rutherford accused Baxter of setting up a new “covenant of works.”3 Moreover, he stated that Baxter’s theology “forbids us to believe and accept Christ” until “first we have reformed our lives,” and that under Baxter’s views
Christ’s word to any be of good cheer, thy sins are forgiven, is but comfortless; for they are neither forgiven, nor half forgiven, until he hath taken Christ for his Lord, and wrought his days work to the end; and then, and never till then, can he have comfort in his wages and in his work.4
James Durham complained implicitly concerning Baxter,
Will it not be welcome to Papists, to have Protestants speaking in their terms, and homologating them in condemning the former language of the most eminent Reformers? And though unlearned, or unread Divines be the epithets of the opposers of this Doctrine, yet possibly experience may show that such may most readily be the embracers of it.5
John Brown of Wamphray stated, “Though the difference here may appear to be but small, yet to me it is such, that by Mr. Baxter’s way, the whole frame of the gospel is changed; and such as hold it, do in my judgement, not only confound, but alter the causes of justification.”6 Brown’s work was prefaced by Melchior Leydecker who said of Baxter’s scheme that it “did corrupt the true doctrine of justification.”7
Theology matters. It mattered to Owen. It would be a tragedy if the many helpful pastoral counsels in this book led to a relativising of the theological differences between Baxter and Owen.
Notes
- Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.11.1.
- Robert Baillie, The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1841–1842), 3:391. See also, 3:307, 324, 369, 400-1.
- Samuel Rutherford, Influences of the Life of Grace. Or, A practical treatise concerning the way, manner, and means of having and improving of spiritual dispositions, and quickning influences from Christ the resurrection and the life (London: T.C. for Andrew Crook, 1659), 246.
- Rutherford, Influences of the Life of Grace, 99–100.
- James Durham, A Commentarie Upon the Book of Revelation (Glasgow: Printed by Robert Sanders, 1680), 203. Durham, a known peacemaker in the Church of Scotland, is unusually cutting and sarcastic in his response here. Clearly, he did not like those he felt were theologically confused accusing their opponents like him of being “unlearned.” Once again, Owen’s response to Baxter is hardly unique.
- John Brown, Life of Justification Opened or, A treatise grounded upon Gal. 2, II wherein the orthodox doctrine of justification by faith, & imputation of Christ’s righteousness is clearly expounded, solidly confirmed, & learnedly vindicated from the various objections of its adversaries, whereunto are subjoined some arguments against universal redemption (1695), 199.
- Melchior Leydecker, “The Preface to the Reader” in Brown, Life of Justification Opened, n.p.
©Donald John MacLean. All Rights Reserved.
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Donald John MacLean
Donald John MacLean is President and Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Westminster Seminary, UK. He is a minister in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of England and Wales, and a trustee of the Banner of Truth and Tyndale House. He is married to Ruth and they have two children.
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