Title of the Essay
For any ONE (1) of the following authors: (1) Critically discuss the historical and ecclesial context in which the work was written; (2) Critically discuss the pertinent context and personal circumstances which prompted the author to write the work; (3) Critically discuss its usefulness and applicability for present day Christians.
C. Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (1656).
Commentary:
I have never been a huge fan of the Puritans for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, Richard Baxter did engage me and I found I was quite a fan of this book. Imagine my surprise when the mark was 95%. My highest ever mark.
Abstract
This essay examines Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor (1656) within the turbulent historical and personal circumstances that produced it and considers its continuing relevance for pastoral ministry today. Baxter wrote against a backdrop of civil war, plague and fire, alongside his own chronic ill health and lifelong expectation of an early death, factors that lent his call for pastoral self-examination a personal urgency rather than an abstract ideal. The essay traces the two streams of Acts 20:28 underlying Baxter’s work: pastors’ oversight of themselves and their oversight of the flock, and situates this within his broader project, the Worcestershire Association, which extended his reforming vision beyond his own parish at Kidderminster. Drawing on Miller’s analysis of active spirituality, pastoral integrity and pastoral competence, the essay argues that Baxter’s central claim, that pastors cannot lead others toward a transformation they have not themselves undergone, remains a challenge for the contemporary Church. Rather than offering a nostalgic model of ministry, Baxter’s work continues to expose the gap between professional pastoral practice and the personal conversion he insisted must precede it.
Introduction
Before Richard Baxter’s conversion, the world looked like “a carkass that has neither life nor loveliness” and that experience of the world’s emptiness drove him to “determine first my Ultimate End”, to fix, before all else, what his life was ultimately for.[1] He says that there was “one thing needful” (possibly referencing Luke 10:42 and Mary at the feet of the Lord), to order his life around the telos of the Christian life.[2] The Puritan had to determine their “ultimate end” alone, unaided by “priest or liturgy”, guided by their study of scripture, pursuing a mission testifying of the faith within them.[3] He was a great proponent of Christian Unity, writing to Charles II in support of union with the Presbyterians.[4]
Richard Baxter at his death left nearly 200 writings that “breathe a spirit of deep unaffected piety and reflect his love of moderation.”[5] One of those writings, perhaps not as well-known as his Saints Everlasting Rest was The Reformed Pastor (Gildas Salvianus)[6] published in 1656, which was named after a 6th century monk, Gildas, who wrote a tract blasting the corruption of British Kings and clergy and Salvian who was a 5th century presbyter who was similarly scathing about moral rot in Roman society and clergy.[7] Baxter titles it thus to signal his intent to communicate an uncomfortable truth, with the writing an extended treatment of Acts 20:28, “Keep watch over yourselves and over all the flock, of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God that he obtained with the blood of his own Son.”[8]
The Historical and Ecclesial Context of “The Reformed Pastor”
The background to The Reformed Pastor appears to have been an extraordinarily bloody and painful period, full of turmoil and change. The Civil War in England cast a long shadow and Richard Baxter lived through and in close proximity to it.[9] From an ecclesiastical perspective, the entry of the Scots into the war in 1644, had a profound effect on England with the condition of signing of a “Solemn League and Covenant” requiring the abandonment of “Episcopal polity and establish[ing] Presbyterian standards of doctrine and worship.”[10]
Baxter was a proponent of the personal involvement of Pastors in the family lives of their parishioners, catechising families, fending off antinomianism (the belief that Christians are not subject to moral law as under grace), and calming political chaos in a spirit of unity and “mere Christianity”.[11] He had witnessed “the Vanity of Armies and how little Confidence is to be placed in them” in the aftermath of the battle at Edgehill as he was preaching that Sunday nearby.[12] Although Baxter offers little comment on the actual carnage, Edward Benlowes, Poet, offers: “Edgehill with graves looked white/ With blood looked red/ Maz’d at the numbers of the dead”.[13] Baxter himself reports in a matter of fact way, “I went to Edgehill… about a Thousand dead Bodies in the Field between [the two armies] (and I suppose many were buried before).”[14] Such a sight may well have had a significant impact on Baxter as he was an “ardent proponent of Christian unity” and political calm.[15] This is in contrast to contemporary observations to the two sides of the war as “publicans and sinners on the one side, Scribes and Pharisees on the other”.[16] The two sides were clearly bitterly opposed to one another and it was this bitter opposition that Baxter must have desired to end instead in Christian unity.
The following turmoil with the ultimate execution of Charles I and exile of his family and subsequent rule of Oliver Cromwell meant a period of reform both political and ecclesiastical.[17] It was by no means completed in the Restoration some 16 years later. Out of this context, in 1656, Baxter published Gildas Sylvianus or the Reformed Pastor, fiery, eloquent and idealistic, emphasising catechising and a personal relationship as central to ministry.[18]
In 1660, when The Reformed Pastor had been extant for a mere four years, Charles II returned to England after exile and began to preside over a court that was notorious for its licentiousness.[19] In 1665, the Great Plague of London took the lives of 70,000 people and Richard Baxter observed upon his return home that he “found the churchyard like a ploughed field with graves and many of [his] neighbours dead.”[20] Shortly thereafter, London was consumed by the Great Fire of 1666 and Baxter again comments “… the people having none to conduct them aright could do nothing to resist it, but stand and see their houses burn without remedy…”.[21]
Richard Baxter – Context and Circumstances
Richard Baxter was a noted pastor in reforming morals and religion within his parish: he refused a bishopric during the Restoration, at one time was forbidden to preach and was fined and imprisoned.[22] Plagued by ill health for most of his life, he expected each year to be his last, stating how he could speak to “Sinners with some compassion, as a dying Man to dying Men”.[23] He was drawn to ministry, stating “my own soul being under serious apprehension of the Matters of another World, I was exceeding desirous to communicate those Apprehensions to such ignorant, presumptuous, careless sinners as the World aboundeth with.”[24]
Some regarded Baxter as the saviour of the English Church and others saw him as a kind of champion of Nonconformity, a question that carries into today.[25] Two streams of thought falling out of Acts 20:28 underlie Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor: the need for pastors to “take heed unto themselves” and to “oversee the church of God”.[26] The work is split in three: the need for pastors to have oversight of themselves, pastoral oversight of the congregation and a practical application of these first two sections.[27] Where others thought their task was to feed the sheep, Baxter believed that he needed to convert the sheep which was a complete reconfiguration of the way in which pastoring was framed and applied in the Church.[28] He calls on his brethren clergy to repent and be humbled for their “past sins”, lament them, and change their lives and their hearts.[29] Baxter’s approach was not limited to his own parish where he and his assistants visited fourteen or more families a day, but was determined to engage his “brethren within the county, to the same task”.[30] He offers structured and practical advice in conducting these meetings, including pitching the approach “according to the character of the persons whom you have to deal with”, being plain, offering scriptural proof, being serious in demeanour, paying attention to your own passions, praying, in love and much more.[31]
This led to an association of ministers at Worcester which became famous as the Worcestershire Association.[32] The Association formed “for our mutual help and concord in our work” and was renowned for its catholicity of intention, success over at least a few years and its example to other ministers.[33] From early in his ministry, he was set upon a path which this association furthered: “True Pastors and Bishops of the Church do thirst after the conversion and happiness of sinners and spend their lives in diligent labours to these ends, not thinking it too much to stoop to the poorest for their good…”[34] The association gave pastoral discipline and encouragement, a home outside the formal ecclesiastical authority at a moment when that authority was itself unsettled. The Reformed Pastor was a companion to the ideals of the association.
The Use and Applicability of the Work in a Modern Context
Miller argues that Baxter’s threefold demand for active spirituality, pastoral integrity and pastoral competence in The Reformed Pastor remains as pressing now as in 1656.[35] On spirituality, he draws a sharp contemporary parallel: surveyed American Pastors average only two minutes of prayer daily, a figure that would have appalled Baxter who insisted that ministry is a matter of life and death for the pastor’s own soul before it can be for anyone else’s.[36] Where Baxter warned that a cold heart produces confused preaching, Miller sees the modern equivalent in clergy burnout, pastors depleted not by overwork, but by the absence of the spiritual sustenance that Baxter regarded as non-negotiable.[37]
On integrity, Baxter’s insistence that pastors be “doers of the word and not hearers only” (James 1:22-25) challenges a contemporary tendency to separate public ministry from private conduct.[38] Miller extends this to the Church’s relationship with the poor, arguing that congregations have become predominantly middle class and remote from exactly the population that Baxter made central to his own ministry at Kidderminster.[39]
Finally, Baxter’s fourfold method of study, prayer, conference and practice, offers a correction to a ministry culture that equates competence with natural gifting rather than disciplined growth.[40] Baxter’s own insistence that pastors “study how to preach exactly” only once they have learned to “live exactly” reframes competence as inseparable from character, an integration modern pastoral training may have lost.[41]
Conclusion
Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor emerged from a context of civil war, plague, personal illness and ecclesiastical uncertainty, yet its central claim, that pastors cannot lead others toward transformation they have not themselves undergone, remains a challenge today. As both Jukes and Miller suggest, the seventeenth century’s controversies are not merely historical curiosities but questions still unresolved today.[42] Read alongside Baxter’s own frail health and expectation of an early death, his urgency was never theoretical. It offers the contemporary church less a nostalgic ideal than an uncomfortable mirror. The gap between professional ministry and personal conversion as well as public labour is as important to ministry today as it was to Baxter in the seventeenth century.
[1] V. De Sola Pinto, The English Renaissance: 1510-1688, vol. 2 of Introductions to English Literature, ed. Bonamy Dobree (The Cresset Press, 1938), 89–90; Note spelling and capitalisation in all original sources preserved.
[2] De Sola Pinto, Renaissance, 90.
[3] De Sola Pinto, Renaissance, 90.
[4] Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity (Eyre and Spottiswoode Limited, 1955), 893.
[5] F L Cross and E A Livingstone, eds., Dictionary of the Christian Church, Third Edition. (Hendrickson Publishers Inc, 1997), 172.
[6] Full name is Gildas Salvianus: The Reformed Pastor; shewing the Nature of the Pastoral Work, especially in Private Instruction and Catechising, with an open Confession of our too open Sins; Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, Pathways to the Past (1656; Published by Parables, 2019), 1.
[7] Cross and Livingstone, Dictionary, 675–76, 1500; Eamon Duffy, “The Reformed Pastor in English Puritanism,” Nederlands Archief Voor Kerkgeschiedenis 83.1 (2003): 231.
[8] Paul Miller, “Spirituality, Integrity and Competence: Essentials of Ministry in Richard Baxter’s Reformed Pastor,” The Evangelical Quarterly 69 (1997): 334; Note, all quotations are English Standard Version unless otherwise identified. Baxter, Reformed Pastor, 15.
[9] Tim Cooper, John Owen, Richard Baxter and the Formation of Nonconformity (Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), 44.
[10] John D Woodbridge and Frank A James III, Church History: From Pre-Reformation to the Present Day (Zondervan Academic, 2013), Two:279.
[11] Baxter, Reformed Pastor, 9; Woodbridge and James III, Church History, Two:395; Latourette, History, 893.
[12] Rel. Baxter i42 quoted in Cooper, Foundation, 43; Frederick J Powicke, A Life of the Reverend Richard Baxter 1615-1681 (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924), 60.
[13] Quoted by Carlton, Going to the Wars, 118 in Cooper, Foundation, 43–44.
[14] Powicke, Life, 62.
[15] Cooper, Foundation, 44; Latourette, History, 893; Woodbridge and James III, Church History, Two:395.
[16] Chillingworth quoted in De Sola Pinto, Renaissance, 90.
[17] Cross and Livingstone, Dictionary, 322–23.
[18] Duffy, “Puritanism,” 231.
[19] Woodbridge and James III, Church History, Two:394.
[20] Woodbridge and James III, Church History, Two:394.
[21] Woodbridge and James III, Church History, Two:394–95.
[22] Latourette, History, 824.
[23] Powicke, Life, 87.
[24] Powicke, Life, 20.
[25] Simon J G Burton, “The Heavenly Pattern of the Church: Trinitarian and Covenantal Themes in Richard Baxter’s ‘Association Ecclesiology,’” Ecclesiology 10.1 (2014): 53–54, https://doi.org/10.1163/17455316-01001005.
[26] Baxter, Reformed Pastor, 15; Miller, “Essentials,” 334.
[27] Miller, “Essentials,” 334; Baxter, Reformed Pastor, 17, 47, 91.
[28] Jordan J (Jordan Joseph) Ballor, “Reformation Pastors: Richard Baxter and the Ideal of the Reformed Pastor,” Calvin Theological Journal 41.2 (2006): 239.
[29] Baxter, Reformed Pastor, 91.
[30] Baxter, Reformed Pastor, 10, 126; Cooper, Foundation, 21.
[31] Baxter, Reformed Pastor, 198–200.
[32] Cooper, Foundation, 22.
[33] Geoffrey F (Geoffrey Fillingham) Nuttall, “The Worcestershire Association: Its Membership,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 1.2 (1950): 197.
[34] Quoted in Powicke, Life, 49.
[35] Miller, “Essentials,” 335.
[36] Baxter, Reformed Pastor, 17; Miller, “Essentials,” 336–37.
[37] Baxter, Reformed Pastor, 18; Miller, “Essentials,” 337.
[38] Baxter, Reformed Pastor, 25–27; Miller, “Essentials,” 338.
[39] Miller, “Essentials,” 339.
[40] Baxter, Reformed Pastor, 199–200; Miller, “Essentials,” 341.
[41] Miller, “Essentials,” 341.
[42] Miller, “Essentials,” 342; Henry Augustus Lloyd Jukes, “Gunning and the Worcestershire Agreement,” Modern Churchman 7.3 (1964): 186.
Bibliography
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De Sola Pinto, V. The English Renaissance: 1510-1688. Vol. 2 of Introductions to English Literature. Edited by Bonamy Dobree. The Cresset Press, 1938.
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Nuttall, Geoffrey F (Geoffrey Fillingham). “The Worcestershire Association: Its Membership.” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 1.2 (1950): 197–206.
Powicke, Frederick J. A Life of the Reverend Richard Baxter 1615-1681. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924.
Woodbridge, John D, and Frank A James III. Church History: From Pre-Reformation to the Present Day. Vol. Two. Zondervan Academic, 2013.