Richard Baxter’s Holy Living
Richard Baxter spent his life and ministry fighting for a place for Puritans in the Church of England. On November 19, 1672 he defied an injunction against him and preached “as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.” He spent his entire ministry in Kidderminster and he saw virtually the entire town of 2,000 adults converted to Christ. J. I. Packer considers Baxter "the most outstanding pastor, evangelist, and writer on practical and devotional themes that Puritanism produced.” The Reformed Pastor (1656), Baxter’s handbook on pastoral ministry (one of 130 books he wrote) was widely influential in his day, and has remained so ever since. Charles Haddon Spurgeon asked his wife to read this to him on Sunday evenings to “quicken my sluggish heart.” Baxter refusing the label of “puritan”; instead called himself a “mere Christian” - a phrase that would be picked up by C.S. Lewis in the past generation and by FitzSimons Allison in this: Mere Anglican.
But, as pastoral and influential as he was, Baxter had a serious and dangerous theological flaw. He was "big enough to have big faults and make big errors,” wrote Packer. His first published book, Aphorisms of Justification (1649), started a storm of protest that stayed with him the rest of his life. Departing from the teaching of Reformation Anglicans and almost all the other Puritans, Baxter taught the necessity of repentance and obedience for salvation instead of salvation that leads to repentance and obedience. (In this way he was not unlike the modern Lordship Salvation controversy of John MacArthur!) He came up with his own doctrine of justification which he believed avoided the extremes of Calvinism and Arminianism, but in fact confuses justification and sanctification, landing him dangerously close to justification-by-works. “Baxter, then, differs from the classical Anglicans who held that the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is the formal cause of justification” (Allison).
This is not an incidental matter, but an essential part of Anglican theology. From the time the Anglican formularies were written we have understood that salvation is solely by the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ (a truly free gift of grace for undeserving sinners, Gal 2:15-6). Richard Baxter was on the works-righteous, moralistic side of this argument, and along with William Laud, Jeremy Taylor and some later Caroline divines, is responsible for leading Anglicanism away from its Reformation foundations. Allison sums up the problem: “Baxter is, then, in accord with the ‘holy living’ Anglicans that faith includes obedience and charity, that the new covenant is more lenient than the old, that Christ’s righteousness is the meritorious and not the formal cause of justification, and that antinomianism is to be shunned by an emphasis upon holy living.”
Any Anglican today will recognize that Baxter’s theology is law without gospel, and it undermines and destroys what is said Sunday after Sunday in our worship:
“We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy…”
The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter, C. Fitzsimons Allison
A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life, J. I. Packer
Worldly Saints: The Puritans As They Really Were, Leland Ryken
The English Reformation and the Puritans, Michael Reeves