‘Go Fetch Baxter’

In his autobiography, nineteenth-century preacher Charles Spurgeon records a conversation he had with his wife one Sunday evening: “My dear, I fear I have not been as faithful in my preaching today as I should have been. I have not been as much in earnest after poor souls as God would have me be! Go to the study and fetch down [Richard] Baxter’s Reformed Pastor, and read some of it to me. Perhaps that will quicken my sluggish heart.”

Spurgeon was far from the only one helped by the seventeenth-century British Puritan’s writings. Baxter has been called the greatest of all English preachers, the virtual creator of popular Christian literature, and “the most successful preacher and winner of souls and nurturer of won souls that England has ever had.” He was also at the center of some of his day’s most heated ecclesiastical debates. In this three-hundredth anniversary year of his death, Baxter’s achievements—and his character, theology, and ministry—provide arresting examples for us to follow.

Baxter the Man

Any understanding of Baxter’s influence must begin with a look at the man himself. Indeed, like all the Puritans, he believed that what a person is—his character—is basic to what he does.

In Baxter’s case, Puritanism formed his basic identity. Noting that two of his literary opponents had called him (in Latin) a dyed-in-the-wool Puritan who oozed Puritanism from every pore, he commented, “Alas I am not so good and happy” (that is, fortunate). While he was what we would nowadays call an ecumenical Christian, sympathetically alert to the main Christian traditions of his day, his supreme ambition was to embody ideal Puritanism, which to him was ideal Christianity.

He also lived in a time of revolution and counterrevolution, of brutal religious persecution, of fierce controversy in print about almost everything. Born in 1615, Baxter lived through England’s Civil War, the beheading of Charles I, the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660, the Great Ejection from the Church of England of two thousand Puritan pastors in 1662, the subsequent persecution of these nonconformists and their followers, and the return of toleration in 1689. It was a time of hardship for everyone. He was personally involved in these traumatic events, and his memoirs are a main source for knowledge of the period. And they display him as the classic Puritan and authentic Christian that he ever sought to be.

In his era, any Christian of consistent principles faced rough going at times (depending on which way the theological and political winds were blowing). Baxter consistently showed himself a man of conviction, willing to take unpopular stands. Integrity of conscience led him to refuse an invitation to become a bishop, for example, and he withdrew from Anglican ministry rather than violate his principles regarding what was tolerable and what was not.

His lifestyle was rigorously disciplined, so as to get done as much as possible in the time available. Living with one foot in the grave, as he did for more than half a century (tuberculosis, so he believed, invaded his body in his early twenties), he cultivated a sense of how precious time is and often would say that he could not “spare an hour” for trivialities. He classed “losing [wasting] time” as a major sin, and his chief complaint about his illnesses was the loss of time that they occasioned.

As it turned out, his entire life was spent battling sickness. He was harassed by a constant cough, frequent nosebleeds, migraine headaches, digestive ailments, kidney stones, gallstones; he was a virtual museum of diseases. He believed that several times the ability to resume work when illness had robbed him of all strength was supernaturally restored to him in answer to the prayers of his people. He also pointed to supernatural intervention when a cancerous-looking tumor in his throat vanished while he was in the pulpit testifying to God’s mercies in his own life. However, bodily pain, often acute, was with him to the end, and he once remarked that from the age of 21 he was “seldom an hour free from pain.”

He knew what it was to suffer in other ways, too. After 1662, he suffered great hatred and harassment because he was a prominent nonconformist leader. This led to several arrests for preaching, spells in prison, and the confiscation of his goods to pay fines, including, on one occasion, the very bed on which he was lying sick. Finally, when he was 70, his views led to a trial, if it can be called that. He had to appear before the appalling Judge Jeffreys, Lord Chief Justice of England, James II’s human whip for flaying rebels.

The charge was sedition: a ridiculous, trumped-up accusation based on expository words in Baxter’s Paraphrase of the New Testament, into which was read an attack on England’s rulers in church and state. (Baxter later commented that by the same logic, he could have been indicted for uttering the words “deliver us from evil” in the Lord’s Prayer.) Jeffreys would not let Baxter and his six legal representatives say anything coherent, and the disputed passages in the Paraphrase were never discussed. The jury promptly found him guilty without retiring. The result for Baxter was 18 months in jail.

It is no surprise, then, that Baxter firmly believed that suffering must be the church’s “most ordinary lot.” True Christians need to live as “self-denying cross-bearers,” he said, not flinching when nominal Christians become “the cross-makers,” as they often do.

Baxter was a spiritual man, deeply committed to and disciplined in prayer and meditation. He believed meditation was a vital discipline to motivate the heart for vigorous prayer and subsequent vigorous obedience. He especially advocated meditating on “the hope of glory.” Bed-bound after a total collapse at 35, and expecting to die, Baxter began to meditate on heaven’s joys as part of his preparation for leaving this world, and he wrote his thoughts to help himself in his thinking. He recovered, and his written meditations, greatly expanded, became the sprawling, but wonderfully powerful Saints’ Everlasting Rest, released in 1650 to become a runaway best seller. His own practice of meditating on heaven for at least a half-hour a day is reflected in his challenge to his readers: “If thou wouldst have light and heat,” he wrote, “why art thou no more in the sunshine? For want of this recourse to heaven, thy soul is as a lamp not lighted, and thy duty as a sacrifice without fire. Fetch one coal daily from this altar, and see if thy offering will not burn.… Keep close to this reviving fire, and see if thy affections will not be warm.”

Baxter the Teacher

As Puritanism’s leading writer on practical, devotional, moral, and apologetic themes (a status gained with The Saints’ Everlasting Rest), Baxter produced over 140 books marking out various aspects of the path of truth and holiness, key themes in Puritanism.

Baxter was more than a theorist regarding Christianity. In the course of his 15-year pastorate at Kidderminster, England (interrupted for a brief stint as a military chaplain), he brought to faith, it seems, most of the town’s two thousand adult inhabitants and discipled them so well as to leave a mark on the place that lasted a hundred years. (We have George Whitefield’s word for that.) It was the most fruitful Puritan pastorate anywhere recorded, and through the transcription of Baxter’s heart and practice in his Reformed Pastor (1656), Baxter’s minstry has become a model for very many since his day.

Baxter penned treatises on grace and salvation, apologetics, “popery,” antinomianism, the sacraments, millenarianism, ethics, nonconformity, devotion, conversion, politics, and history, not to mention a systematic theology (in Latin). In this mass of material there are novelties of detail, but on all essentials, Baxter stands in the Puritan mainstream, stressing sin, redemption, regeneration, repentance, faith, hope, love, glorifying God, spiritual conflict, and duty—the main topics of all Puritan practical teaching.

Among his greatest contributions were his writings on conversion, including A Treatise on Conversion, Now or Never, Directions and Persuasions to a Sound Conversion, and A Call to the Unconverted. His Call was the most popular book of its day in all of England, selling over 20,000 copies the first year. He received letters week after week from those converted by his books.

Baxter taught that conversion was a process. People lie dead in sin and cannot respond until God moves them to do so through effectual grace. But this does not mean that they are to sit by idly and wait for God to work. They should prepare themselves through seeking God and listening to his word (though Baxter avoided saying that such preparation makes God beholden to an individual, a position sometimes erroneously attributed to him).

Some recent interpreters have characterized the Puritans as teaching that all must follow a set pattern of experiences to be converted. Baxter knew from Scripture and observation that this was not the case and taught that “God breaketh not all men’s hearts alike.” Breaking them, however, in the sense of causing inbred love of sin to shrivel up so that love for Christ and holiness can blossom is something that God must do and does, one way or another, in every case of new birth.

Baxter anticipated, in a way, the current debate about “lordship salvation.” “Faith entereth at the mind,” he taught, “but it hath not all its essential parts, and is not the gospel faith indeed, till it hath possessed the will. The heart of faith is wanting, till faith hath taken possession of the heart.” Christ must be believed in with all a person’s heart, soul, and strength: “He will not be divided: you shall not have Christ as justifier of you, if you will not have him as guide, and ruler, and sanctifier of you.”

Behind Baxter’s expositions and analyses of conversion stood a theology that was typically Puritan in assuming the sovereignty of God and the total inability and depravity of humanity. He also affirmed Puritan themes of unconditional election, God’s effectual calling, and the preservation of the saints as key features in God’s plan of salvation. Yet he fell prey to an idiosyncratic account of Christ’s work in redemption and justification. This was part of a larger eccentricity, an interpretation of the kingdom of God in terms of seventeenth-century political theory. Baxter defended his view vigorously, believing it to constitute middle ground on which warring Calvinists, Arminians, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics could all stand together. But it also meant relativizing biblical teaching in the light of extrabiblical beliefs, subjecting them, in other words, to secular reason. By insisting that it was proper to let the rationalist camel get its nose into the Christian tent in this way, Baxter unwittingly sowed seeds from which were later to grow English Unitarianism and liberal theology.

On this and other topics his aggressive and triumphalist manner of discussing was counterproductive. His fertility of mind and fluency of speech were his Achilles’ heel. One of his favorite maxims was “overdoing is the ordinary way of undoing.” But he could quote it better than he could live it. In his attempts to secure peace, he regularly began more wars. A great part of his life was spent trying to quiet the controversies he himself had started. While his heart desired peace, he was too blunt to be a bridge builder.

Baxter the Minister

Whatever failings Baxter may have had as a theologian, as a pastor-evangelist he stood without equal. He exemplified James Denney’s oft-quoted statement, “If evangelists were our theologians or theologians our evangelists, we should at least be nearer the ideal church.” Baxter displayed a great zeal for evangelism. He said, “He is not a true minister of Christ whose heart is not set on the winning, and sanctifying, and saving of souls.” He advocated Protestant missionary efforts long before it was in vogue to do so, remarking that the unreached regions of the world lay heavy on his heart, and they received utmost attention in his prayers.

Baxter’s pastoral method was laid out in his best-known work, The Reformed (today we would say revived) Pastor. The key to his pastoral work was personal care of individuals, based upon intimate knowledge of their daily lives, prompted and sustained by love for them all. Baxter had discovered that for his preaching to be fruitful he must follow it up with direct conversation with every family. He observed that he could have a greater impact on a person’s life in 30 minutes of “personal work” than he could through ten years of public preaching.

His pastoral strategy focused on the family. He met individually with 16 families a week to instruct them in the catechism. This rigorous schedule allowed him to contact personally all members of all the 800 families in Kidderminster each year. He led the menfolk to set up family worship in their homes where they themselves could communicate the Christian faith to their families and to others.

When it came to preaching, Baxter’s method was to instruct the mind and then appeal to the conscience: “first, light—then, heat.” He wanted his hearers not only to see and acknowledge the truth, but also to feel it. “Whatever you do,” Baxter told his fellow preachers, “let the people see that you are in good sadness” (that is, earnestness). He felt that nothing is more shameful than to be a “dead” preacher speaking the living Word of God.

Baxter’s ministerial influence extended beyond his Puritan circles. Throughout his life, Baxter worked for consensus among Christians. He wanted Anglicans, Presbyterians, independents, and Baptists to work together, a view that went largely unheeded at a time when party spirit and dog-eat-dog wrangling were seen as a proper sign of Christian seriousness. For all his sharp rhetoric, he has been justly called “the apostle of Christian unity” and “the first exponent of ecumenism in England.” He popularized (though did not originate) the motto “unity in things necessary, liberty in things not necessary, and charity in all things.” C. S. Lewis acknowledges his indebtedness to Baxter for the title of Lewis’s famous work Mere Christianity. Baxter maintained that “mere Christianity” is no more (nor less) than the sincere profession of the essentials contained in the Decalogue (“the summary of things to be practiced”), the Apostles’ Creed (“the summary of things to be believed”), and the Lord’s Prayer (“the summary of the things to be willed, desired, and sought”).

Baxter’s emphasis on what is essential makes him more than a man of his times, and a Christian worthy of our attention today. As two students of Baxter who cannot be sufficiently thankful for the impact he has made on our lives, we would say to every believer, get to know Baxter, and stay with Baxter. He will always do you good.

Timothy Beougher is associate director of the Institute of Evangelism and assistant professor of evangelism at the Wheaton College Graduate School, Wheaton, Illinois. J. I. Packer is Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of many books, including Knowing God and A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life.

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