CHAPTER 18: Puritan Evangelism
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Puritan Evangelism
As long ago as 1918 an official Anglican committee defined evangelism thus: ‘So to present Christ Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit, that men shall come to put their trust in God through Him, to accept Him as their Saviour, and serve Him as their King in the fellowship of His Church.’ With one word changed (‘may’ for ‘shall’, so that evangelism is defined in terms of purpose rather than results) this definition makes a good starting-point for the present study.
Did the Puritans tackle the task of evangelism at all? At first sight, it might appear not. ‘Evangelism’ (a twentieth-century word) was not part of their vocabulary. They agreed with Calvin in regarding the ‘evangelists’ mentioned in the New Testament as an order of assistants to the apostles, now extinct, and as for ‘missions’, ‘crusades’, and ‘campaigns’, they knew neither the name nor the thing. But we must not be misled into supposing that evangelism was not one of their chief concerns. It was. Many of them were outstandingly successful as preachers to the unconverted. Richard Baxter, the apostle of Kidderminster, is perhaps the only one of these that is widely remembered today; but in seventeenth-century records it is common to read statements like this, of Hugh Clark: ‘he begat many Sons and Daughters unto God’; or this, of John Cotton: ‘the presence of the Lord … crowning his Labours with the Conversion of many Souls.’ Moreover, it was the Puritans who invented evangelistic literature. One has only to think here of Richard Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted, and Joseph Alleine’s Alarm to the Unconverted, both of them outstanding pioneer works in this class of writing. And the elaborate practical ‘handling’ of the subject of conversion in Puritan books was regarded by the rest of the seventeenth-century Protestant world as something of unique value. Wrote two of the Puritan leaders:
It hath been one of the glories of the Protestant religion that it revived the doctrine of Saving Conversion, and of the New Creature brought forth thereby.… But in a more eminent manner, God hath cast the honour hereof upon the Ministers and Preachers of this Nation, who are renowned abroad for their more accurate search into and discoveries hereof.
The truth is that two distinct conceptions and types of evangelism have been developed in Protestant Christendom during the course of its history. We may call them the ‘Puritan’ and the ‘modern’ types. Today we are so accustomed to evangelism of the modern type that we scarcely recognise the other as evangelism at all. In order that we may fully grasp the character of the Puritan type of evangelism, I shall here set it in contrast with the modern type, which has so largely superseded it in our era.
1
Let us begin, then, by characterising evangelism of the modern type. It seems to presuppose a conception of the life of the local church as an alternating cycle of converting and consolidating. Evangelism almost acquires the character of a periodic recruiting campaign. It becomes an extraordinary and occasional activity, additional and auxiliary to the regular functioning of the local congregation. Special gatherings of a special sort are arranged, and special preachers are commonly secured to conduct them. Often they are called ‘meetings’ rather than ‘services’; in some places they are called ‘revivals’; in any case, they are viewed as separate and distinct from the regular worship of God. In the meetings, everything is directly aimed at securing from the unconverted an immediate, conscious, decisive act of faith in Jesus Christ. At the close, those who have responded or who wish to do so are asked to come to the front for counselling, or raise a hand, or fill up a card, or something similar, as an act of public testimony to their new resolutions. This, it is claimed, is good for those who do it, since it helps to make their ‘decision’ definite, and it has the further advantage of making them declare themselves for ‘follow-up’ purposes. Such persons will then be advised and drafted forthwith into local churches as converts.
This type of evangelism was invented by Charles G. Finney in the 1820s. He introduced the ‘protracted meeting’ (i.e., the intensive evangelistic campaign) and the ‘anxious seat’, forerunner of the counselling room, a front pew left vacant where at the meeting’s end ‘the anxious may come and be addressed particularly … and sometimes be conversed with individually’. In closing his mission sermons, Finney would say, ‘There is the anxious seat; come out, and avow determination to be on the Lord’s side.’ These were Finney’s much opposed ‘new measures’.
Finney, a one-time schoolmaster and lawyer, had come to faith at the age of twenty-nine, and had gone straight into evangelistic work. Brilliant and intense, articulate and commanding, zealous and independent, he held to Edwards’ philosophy of revivals as cyclic visitations from God (see Chapter Nineteen below), while querying Edwards’ assumption that man cannot precipitate revivals and jettisoning altogether Edwards’ assertion of the Augustinian-Reformed-Puritan belief in total inability—the belief, that is, that fallen human beings are totally unable to repent, believe, or do anything spiritually good without renewing grace.
While acknowledging—indeed, insisting on—universal human depravity in the sense of a constant inclination to sin, he was a clear-headed and forthright Pelagian in his emphatic declarations that everyone is naturally able to turn whole-heartedly to God once he or she is convinced that that is the right, proper, and needful thing to do. Accordingly, Finney conceived the whole work of the Spirit in conversion in terms of moral persuasion, that is, of making vivid to our minds the reasons for laying down our rebel arms and surrendering to God. Man is always free to reject this persuasion—‘Sinners can go to Hell in spite of God.’ But the stronger the persuasion is, the more likely it is to succeed in breaking down resistance. Every means, therefore, of increasing the force with which truth impinges on the mind—the most frenzied excitement, the most harrowing emotionalism, the most nerve-racking commotion in evangelistic gatherings—is entirely in order. Finney expressed this in the first of his revival lectures:
To expect to promote religion without excitements is unphilosophical and absurd … untilthere is sufficient religious principle in the world to put down irreligious excitements, it is vain to try to promote religion, except by counteracting excitements.… There must be excitement sufficient to wake up the dormant moral powers.…
Moreover, since everyone, if he will only rouse up his ‘dormant moral powers’, can at any time yield to God and become a Christian, it is the evangelist’s work and duty always to preach for immediate decision and commitment. ‘I tried to shut them up,’ Finney says of a typical mission sermon, ‘to present faith and repentance, as the thing which God required of them … present and instant acceptance of Christ.’ It does not seem too much to say that for Finney evangelistic preaching was a battle of wills between himself and his hearers, in which his task was to bring them to breaking-point.
Now, if Finney’s doctrine of the natural state of sinful man is right, then his evangelistic methods must be judged right also, for, as he often insisted, the ‘new measures’ were means well adapted to the end in view. ‘It is in such practices that a Pelagian system naturally expresses itself if it seeks to become aggressively evangelistic,’ observed B.B. Warfield. But if Finney’s view of man is wrong, then his methods must be called in question—which is an issue of importance at the present time: for it is Finney’s methods, modified and adapted, that characterise a great deal of evangelism today. I do not suggest that all who use them are Pelagians; but I do raise the question whether the use of them is really consistent with any other doctrine than Finney’s, and I shall try to show that, if Finney’s doctrine is rejected, such methods are inappropriate to a degree, and actually detrimental to the real work of evangelism. It may be said that results justify their use; but the truth is that most of Finney’s ‘converts’ backslid and fell away, as, so it seems, did the majority of those since Finney’s day whose ‘decision’ was secured by these means. Most modern evangelists seem to have given up expecting more than a small percentage of their ‘converts’ to survive. So it is not obvious that results justify the methods that stem from Finney. I shall suggest later that these methods have a natural tendency to produce a crop of false converts, as evidently they have in fact done.
2
The Puritan type of evangelism, on the other hand, was and is the consistent expression in practice of the Puritans’ conviction that the conversion of a sinner is a gracious sovereign work of divine power. Let me explain.
The Puritans did not use the picture-words ‘conversion’ and ‘new birth’/‘regeneration’ as technical terms, and usage varies slightly from one to another; but most treated the words as synonyms for the process for which the technical name was effectual calling: calling being the biblical word for it in Romans 8:30; 2 Thessalonians 2:14; 2 Timothy 1:9, and the adjective effectual being added to distinguish it from the ineffectual external call mentioned in Matthew 20:16; 22:14. The Westminster Confession,X:i puts ‘calling’ into its theological perspective by an interpretative paraphrase of Romans 8:30:
All those whom God hath predestinated unto life, and those only he is pleased, in his appointed and accepted time, effectually to call, by his Word and Spirit, out of that state of sin and death in which they are by nature, to grace and salvation by Jesus Christ.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism, answer 31, gives this analysis:
Effectual calling is the work of God’s Spirit whereby, convincing us of our sin and misery, enlightening our minds in the knowledge of Christ, and renewing our wills, he doth persuade and enable us to embrace Jesus Christ, freely offered to us in the gospel.
Concerning this effectual calling, three things must be said if we are to grasp the Puritan view.
(1) It is a work of divine grace. It is not something a man can do for himself or for another. It is the first stage in the application of redemption to those for whom redemption was won; it is the event whereby, on the grounds of the eternal, federal, representative relation to Christ that election and redemption have established, the elect sinner is brought by the Holy Spirit into a real, vital, personal union with his covenant Head and Redeemer. It is thus a work of free mercy on God’s part.
(2) It is a work of divine power. It is effected by the Spirit, who acts both mediately, by the word, in the mind, giving understanding and conviction, and also immediately, with the word, in the hidden depths of the heart, implanting new life and power, effectively dethroning sin and making the sinner both able and willing to respond to the gospel invitation. The Spirit’s work is thus both moral, by persuasion (which Arminians and Pelagians affirm), and also physical, by power (which they deny). (‘Physical’ here means ‘terminating on our personal being at a level below consciousness’, not ‘terminating on the body as distinct from the personal self [i.e., soul].’) Writes Owen:
There is not only a moral, but a physical immediate operation of the Spirit … upon the minds or souls of men in their regeneration.… The work of grace in conversion is constantly expressed by words denoting a real internal efficacy; such as creating, quickening, forming, giving a new heart.… Wherever the work is spoken of with respect unto an active efficacy, it is ascribed unto God. He creates us anew, he quickens us, he begets us of his own will; but when it is spoken of with respect to us, there it is passively expressed; we are created in Christ Jesus, we are new creatures, we are born again, and the like; which one observation is sufficient to evert [overthrow] the whole hypothesis of Arminian grace.
‘Ministers knock at the door of men’s hearts, the Spirit comes with a key and opens the door.’ The Spirit’s regenerating action, Owen goes on, is ‘infallible, victorious, irresistible, or always efficacious’; it ‘removeth all obstacles, overcomes all oppositions, and infallibly produces the effect intended’. Grace is irresistible, not because it drags sinners to Christ against their will, but because it changes men’s hearts so that they ‘come most freely, being made willing by his grace.’
The Puritans loved to dwell on the scriptural thought of divine power creatively put forth in effectual calling, which Goodwin regularly describes as the one ‘standing miracle’ in the church. They agreed that conversion was commonly not a spectacular affair; but Goodwin notes that sometimes it is precisely that, and affirms that hereby God shows us, in a paradigm case, so to speak, how great an exercise of power every Christian’s effectual call involves. Goodwin writes:
In the calling of some, there shoots up very suddenly an election-conversion (I used to call it so). You shall, as it were, see election take hold of a man, pull him out with a mighty power, stamp upon him the divine nature, stub up corrupt nature by the roots, root up self-love, put in a principle of love to God, and launch him forth a new creature the first day.… He did so with Paul, and it is not without example in others after him.
Such dramatic conversions, says Goodwin, are
visible tokens of election by such a work of calling, as all the powers in heaven and earth could not have wrought upon a man’s soul so, nor changed a man so on a sudden, but only that divine power that created the world [and] raised Christ from the dead.
The reason why the Puritans thus magnified the quickening power of God is plain from the passages quoted: it was because they took so seriously the Bible teaching that man is dead in sin (Eph 2:1, 5; Col 2:13), spiritually impotent (Jn 3:3, 5; 6:45; Rom 8:7; 1 Cor 2:14), radically depraved, sin’s helpless slave (Rom 3:9; 6:20–22). Sin has such strength, they held, that only omnipotence can break its bond; only the author of life can raise the dead. Total inability requires total sovereignty for its overcoming.
(3) Effectual calling is a work of divine freedom. Only God can effect it, and he does so at his own pleasure. ‘It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy’ (Rom 9:16, KJV). Owen dwells on this in a sermon on Acts 16:9, ‘A vision of unchangeable, free mercy in sending the means of grace to undeserving sinners.’ First he states the principle:
All events and effects, especially concerning the propagation of the gospel, and the Church of Christ, are in their greatest variety regulated by the eternal purpose and counsel of God.
Then he illustrates. Some are sent the gospel, some not.
In this chapter … the gospel is forbidden to be preached in Asia or Bithynia; which restraint, the Lord by his providence as yet continueth to many parts of the world [while] to some nations the gospel is sent … as in my text, Macedonia; and England.…
Why this discrimination? asks Owen. Why do only some hear? And when the gospel is heard, why do we see
various effects, some continuing in impenitency, others in sincerity closing with Jesus Christ? … In the effectual working of grace also for conversion and salvation … whence do you think it takes its rule and determination … that it should be directed to John, not Judas; Simon Peter, not Simon Magus? Why, only from this discriminating counsel of God from eternity.… The purpose of God’s election, is the rule of dispensing saving grace.
Jonathan Edwards, a Puritan evangelist born out of due time, often makes the same point. In a typical passage from a sermon on Romans 9:18, he lists the following ways in which God’s sovereignty (defined as ‘his absolute right of disposing of all creatures according to his own pleasure’) appears in the dispensations of his grace:
(1) In calling one nation or people, and giving them the means of grace, and leaving others without them. (2) … In the advantages he bestows upon particular persons’ [e.g., a Christian home, a powerful ministry, direct spiritual influences, etc]..… (3) In bestowing salvation on some who have had few advantages [e.g., children of ungodly parents, while the children of the godly are not always saved]; (4) … In calling some to salvation, who have been heinously wicked, and leaving others, who have been very moral and religious persons.… (5)In saving some of those who seek salvation and not others [i.e., bringing some convicted sinners to saving faith while others never attain to it].
This display of sovereignty, maintains Edwards, is glorious: ‘it is part of the glory of God’s mercy that it is sovereign mercy.’
Perhaps no preacher in the Puritan tradition ever stressed the sovereignty of God as Edwards did. Yet his preaching was evangelistically fruitful. Revival swept through his church under his ministry, and in the revival, he says:
I think I have found that no discourses have been more remarkably blessed, than those in which the doctrine of God’s absolute sovereignty, with regard to the salvation of sinners, and his just liberty, with regard to answering prayer, and succeeding the plans, of natural men, continuing such, have been insisted on.
Here, surely, is food for thought.
God’s sovereign freedom appears also in the time of conversion. Scripture and experience show, writes Goodwin, that
the great God for holy and glorious ends, but more especially … to make appear his love and kindness, his mercy and grace, hath ordained it so that many of his elect people should some time remain in a condition of sin and warth, and then he renews them to himself.
It is never man, but always God, who determines when an elect sinner shall believe.
In the manner of conversion, too, God is sovereign. The Puritans taught that knowledge and conviction of one’s sin, in its guilt, pollution, and ugliness, and of God’s displeasure at it, must precede faith, since no one will come to Christ to be saved from sin till he or she knows from what sins salvation is needed. This is the Puritan ‘preparation’ for faith, often misunderstood as restricting access to Christ when in fact it alone opens the door of access to him. There must be, said the Puritans, contrition about one’s sins, in the precise medieval sense of that word (i.e., sorrow for and hatred of one’s sins, as God-dishonouring and self-defiling, so that one longs to be rescued from them); otherwise, one cannot genuinely, sincerely, and whole-heartedly come to Christ to be saved from sin’s power as well as its penalty, which is what the gospel call to faith-and-repentance requires one to do. Wise preachers and counsellors, therefore, will not short-circuit the essential preparatory process, but will continue to press on the seeker’s conscience the sinfulness of his sins and the depth of his need to be not just forgiven, but also led into holiness, until they can see that he has truly fallen out of love with sin; and then they will point him to the Saviour. This, said the Puritans, is the pastoral procedure that knowledge of the manner of God’s work in conversion dictates. To their minds, it would be the worst advice possible to tell a troubled person to stop worrying about his sins and trust Christ at once when that person had not yet faced the specifics of his or her sinfulness and has not yet come to the point of clear-headedly desiring to leave all sinful ways behind and be made holy. To give this advice, they held, before the heart is weaned from sin would be the way to induce false peace and false hopes, and so to produce ‘gospel-hypocrites’, which is the last thing that a Christian counsellor should be willing to do.
But throughout the whole process of preparation God’s free sovereignty has to be recognised. God converts no adults without preparation along the lines described, but within this formula there are any number of variations: ‘God breaketh not all Men’s hearts alike.’ Some conversions, as Goodwin said, are in every sense sudden; the preparation is done in a moment. Some are long-drawn-out affairs, with years passing before the seeker finds Christ and peace, as in Bunyan’s case. No rule can be given as to how long, or how intensely, God will flay each sinner with the lash of conviction. There must be contrition before conversion can result. The work of effectual calling will proceed as fast as God wills, but no faster, and the counsellor’s role is accordingly that of the midwife, whose task it is to see what is happening and give appropriate help at each stage, but who cannot foretell, let alone prearrange, how rapid the birth process will be.
3
The Puritan practitioners of evangelism were pastors with captive audiences (for church-going was part of national life in those days), and their evangelising of those who sat regularly in the pews was to the pastors no more, just as it was no less, than a main part of their larger task of building up the whole congregation in Christ. Their programme as evangelists was no more specialised than this: to teach and apply the Scriptures in a patient, thorough way, ranging wide in their declarations of the whole counsel of God but constantly returning to three themes. Theme one was the length, breadth, height and depth of everyone’s need to be converted and saved. Theme two was the length, breadth, depth, and height of the love of God, who sent his Son to the cross for sinners, and of Christ, who from his throne calls burdened souls to himself for their salvation. Theme three was the ups, downs, blockages and pitfalls that face us as we travel the road from ignorant complacency about our spiritual state to informed, self-despairing, clear-headed and whole-hearted faith in Christ. The Puritan way of opening up this third theme was to keep ringing changes on four truths: the duty of receiving Jesus Christ as Saviour and Master; the danger of settling in religion for anything less; the impossibility of coming to Christ without renewing grace; and the necessity of seeking that grace from Christ’s own hand. Formally from pulpits and informally in personal counselling, they highlighted the present duty of the unconverted to seek Christ; but they did not see this as implying a present capacity to receive Christ savingly, and so one does not find them commanding all the unconverted to ‘decide for Christ’ (the common modern phrase) on the spot, or making appeals in which they profess to be ‘giving them an opportunity’ to make this decision. Plainly, they did not believe that God sent them, or sends anyone else, to tell congregations that God requires everyone to receive Christ at the close of the sermon.
This is the point at which Pelagianism betrayed Finney, and Finney’s example has betrayed many since his day. Believing that it is in everyone’s power to accept Christ at any moment, Finney equated the immediate response that the gospel requires of all with instant conversion on the part of all. But by making this equation he made it impossible to avoid doing damage to some souls. If one tells people that they are under obligation to receive Christ on the spot, and calls in God’s name for instant decision, some who are spiritually unprepared will come forward, accept directions, ‘go through the motions’, and go away thinking they have received Christ, when in reality they have not done so because they were not yet able to do so. So a crop of false conversions results from these tactics in the nature of the case. Bullying for ‘decisions’ can actually impede and thwart the work of the Holy Spirit in human hearts. When the evangelist takes it on himself to try to pick the fruit before it is ripe, the result is regularly false conversions and hardening. ‘Quick sale’ techniques in evangelism always tend to boomerang in this way; their long-term effect is regularly barrenness. Not for nothing was one of the areas where Finney first worked later labelled ‘the burned-over district’. Finneyism, which seeks to break up the fallow ground, issues rather in a scorching of the earth, a state of diminished rather than enhanced responsiveness to the gospel.
Certainly, there have always been individuals—Finney himself, Richard Baxter, George Whitefield, John Wesley, D.L. Moody, Charles Spurgeon, John Sung, Billy Graham, Luis Palau are names that come at once to mind—whose gifts and personal qualities God uses in a special way to bring adults via the necessary preparation to conscious faith in Christ. Such men are properly called evangelists. But possession of an evangelistic gift does not oblige one to embrace false principles and flawed procedures in tackling the evangelistic task. It is not necessary to do all the things that Finney did just because Finney did them, nor to suppose that Finney’s distinctive methods are the best option just because Finney thought they were. The work of evangelism has to be done afresh in every generation, and half the human race remains unevangelised today. While liberalism in the churches fades, evangelicalism steadily gains strength, and within evangelicalism evangelistic zeal is currently rising, for all of which we should thank God. But our increasing concern for evangelism makes it all the more important that careful thought be given to principles and procedures for future action. Facts to face as we think about this matter include the following.
During the past century, the headline-hitting Finneyan procedure—the ‘spasm’ evangelism of the big-scale, short-term, special-effort, hyped-up ‘campaign’ or ‘crusade’—has been widely exported from America on what appears to be the evangelical equivalent of the secular slogan: ‘What’s good for General Motors is good for the world.’ It has received a great deal of criticism of the kind expressed in this chapter, which has led some of its practitioners (not all) to take care lest they appear to have bought into the evangelical Pelagianism which the instant-commitment focus of the procedure naturally implies. Yet God, who graciously blesses truth even when error sits alongside it, has constantly used Finneyan ventures to bring to decisive and lasting commitment persons who have previously been touched by ministry of the word in church and/or the witness of Christian friends. Though the fallout of false conversions has been tragically and scandalously heavy, Finneyan ‘protracted meetings’ all round the world have brought sufficient spiritual gains, one way and another, to show they are not simply under God’s curse, and Billy Graham, who uses a modified version of the Finneyan formula, has been one of the most significant figures on the world Christian stage in recent years. (One can say that without ceasing to suspect that better procedures might have been devised, just as one can thankfully acknowledge the many real conversions through mass evangelism without assuming that the parties concerned would never have been converted otherwise.) In the light of these facts, the following conclusions seem to suggest themselves:
First, modern evangelism will always depend for its fruitfulness, under ordinary circumstances, on the prior exposure of the audience it gathers to evangelism of the Puritan type—longer-term, broader-based, deeper-digging, church-, community- and friendship-centred, oriented more to worship and less to entertainment. Modern evangelism is only likely to reap where Puritan evangelism has first sowed.
Second, evangelism of the Puritan type, through faithful preaching and teaching of the gospel over a period of time, with applications that acknowledge the spread-out steps and stages via which a person’s path to faith is likely to run, and sustained by confidence in God to give fruit in his own way at his own speed, is essential, always and everywhere; and modern evangelism must justify itself, if at all, as a rational supplement to Puritan evangelism rather than an alternative to it.
Third, practitioners of Puritan evangelism, who bow to the sovereignty of God in drawing people to faith, appear sometimes to lapse into unconcern about seeing conversions through their ministry, while practitioners of modern evangelism appear sometimes to imagine that no preachers seek conversions save themselves. Both states of mind are to be stigmatised as deplorable, and need to be renounced: the first because it is ungodly, and the second because it is unfounded.
Fourth, when ventures in ‘spasm’ evangelism are mounted, preachers and counsellors will be wisest if, while stressing the urgency of seeking Christ and becoming a true and thorough Christian, they funnel enquirers into catechetical classes, nurture groups, and church worship, highlighting these involvements as the proper way to express sincerity of contrition and commitment, rather than letting it seem that immediate ‘decision’, as an isolated act, is all that is needed to settle the issues of eternity for ever. That trust in Christ out of a changed heart does settle the issues of eternity for ever is not in question, but not all enquirers will have reached the point where they can exercise that truth in an authentic ‘decision’, even though they may think they can. So the provision of structures for further instruction and help towards conversion is a matter of necessity, just as ‘follow-up’ structures for establishing the converted are. But embrace of the Pelagian mistake can blind people to this necessity, and there is no doubt that in circles where modern evangelism has been practised during the past century it has constantly done so.
4
Principles have more power with us when we see them embodied in persons whom we admire. Accordingly, I now round off my commendation of Puritan principles of evangelism by once more introducing the most distinguished and attractive, and happily also the most accessible, of Puritan evangelists, Richard Baxter, to whose Kidderminster ministry reference was made earlier. Brilliant, passionate, eloquent, honest, open-hearted, sharp-sighted, and wholly devoted to the glory of God and the good of others, Baxter ranks with Augustine, Luther, Bunyan, Wesley and Finney (to look no further) in his flair for unselfconscious, self-revealing intimacy on paper. In the account of his Kidderminster days which, five or six years after he left the town, he put on paper ‘to the Praise of my Redeemer’ and ‘for their sakes that would have the means of other Mens Experiments [experiences], in managing ignorant and sinful Parishes’, Baxter shares himself prodigally, as he also does in his classic on care for the congregation, The Reformed Pastor. Let us meet him.
‘BAXTER, Richard, gentleman; born 12 November 1615, at Rowton, Salop; educated at Donnington Free School, Wroxeter, and privately; ordained deacon by Bishop of Worcester, Advent 1639; head of Richard Foley’s School, Dudley, 1639; curate of Bridgnorth, 1639–40; parish lecturer at Kidderminster, 1641–42; army chaplain at Coventry, 1642–45, and with Whalley’s regiment (New Model Army), 1645–47; vicar of Kidderminster 1647–61; at Savoy Conference, 1661; lived privately in or near London, 1662–1691 (Moorfields, 1662–63, Acton 1663–69, Totteridge 1669–73, Bloomsbury 1673–85, Finsbury 1686–91); married Margaret Charlton (1636–81), 1662; imprisoned for one week at Clerkenwell, 1669, for twenty-one months at Southwark, 1685–86; died 8 December 1691; author of The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1650), The Reformed Pastor (1656), A Call to the Unconverted (1658), A Christian Directory (1673), and 131 other items printed in his lifetime, also of Reliquiae Baxterianae (autobiography, edited M. Sylvester, 1696), five other posthumous books and many unpublished treatises; special interests, pastoral care, Christian unity; hobbies, medicine, science, history.’ Thus in Who’s Who style I present Richard Baxter, the most outstanding pastor, evangelist and writer on practical and devotional themes that Puritanism produced.
Baxter was a big man, big enough to have large faults and make large errors. A brilliant cross-bencher, widely learned, with an astounding capacity for instant analysis, argument and appeal, he could run rings round anyone in debate, yet he could not always use his great gifts in the best way. In theology, for instance, as we saw earlier, he devised an eclectic middle route between the Reformed, Arminian and Roman doctrines of grace: interpreting the kingdom of God in terms of contemporary political ideas, he explained Christ’s death as an act of universal redemption (penal and vicarious, but not strictly substitutionary), in virtue of which God has made a new law offering pardon and amnesty to the penitent. Repentance and faith, being obedience to this law, are the believer’s personal saving righteousness. Baxter, a Puritan conservative, saw this quaint legalistic construction as focusing both the essential Puritan and New Testament gospel and also the common ground with regard to God’s grace that the warring trinitarian theologies of his day (Calvinist, Arminian, Lutheran, Roman Catholic) actually occupied. Others, however, saw that ‘Baxterianism’ (or ‘Neonomianism’, as it was called because of the ‘new law’ idea at its heart) altered the content of the gospel, while its ‘political method’, if taken seriously, was objectionably rationalistic. Time proved them right; the fruit of the seeds which Baxter sowed was Neonomian Moderatism in Scotland and moralistic Unitarianism in England.
Again, Baxter was a poor performer in public life. Though always respected for his godliness and pastoral prowess, and always honestly seeking doctrinal and ecclesiastical peace, his combative, judgemental, pedagogic way of proceeding with his peers made failure in his pacific purposes a foregone conclusion every time. For more than a quarter of a century after the ejections of 1662 he was the nonconformists’ chief spokesman, and the comprehensivist ideal which he championed was undoubtedly statesmanlike, yet Baxter can hardly be called a statesman himself. Granting that his habit of total and immediate outspokenness (‘plain dealing’) on all matters of theology and ministry was a compulsion of conscience and not just compensation for an inferiority complex (in fact, it was probably a bit of both), his lifelong inability to see that among equals a triumphalist manner is counter-productive was a strange blind spot. That (for instance) in 1669 he went to the great John Owen, with whom he had in the past crossed swords theologically and politically, in hope of achieving solidarity and co-operation with the independent leader in the ongoing church conflict, was typical and admirable. That on meeting Owen ‘I told him that I must deal freely with him, that when I thought of what he had done formerly, I was much afraid lest one that had been so great a breaker would not be made an instrument of healing’, though he was glad to see that in his most recent book Owen gave up ‘two of the worst of the principles of popularity’, was also typical, though perhaps less admirable. But that he was afterwards surprised, disappointed and hurt that Owen, while professing goodwill, took no action is surely remarkable! The plain fact is that Baxter insulted people, treating them as knaves or fools, and that has never been the way to win friends. Whether different behaviour or absence on Baxter’s part could have altered any part of the wretched run of events (rejection, ejection, and persecution of Puritan pastors) between the Restoration (1660) and the Act of Toleration (1689) is doubtful, for passion, interest and distrust ran very high. The fact remains, however, that Baxter’s well-meant but censorious interventions regularly deepened division, as when in 1690 he published The Scripture Gospel Defended to stop Tobias Crisp’s sermons from causing trouble and thereby wrecked the ‘Happy Union’ between Presbyterians and Independents almost before it had begun.
As a pastoral evangelist, however, Baxter was incomparable. His achievement at Kidderminster was amazing. England had not before seen a ministry like it, and by the late 1650s Baxter was a widely acclaimed role-model for pastors throughout Puritan England. Kidderminster parish contained about 800 homes and 2,000 adults, most of them in the town itself, and Baxter saw himself as spiritually responsible for them all. It appears that the majority came to a solid Christian faith under Baxter’s ministrations. How did it happen? It has been said that there are three rules for success in the pastorate: the first is, teach; the second is, teach; and the third is, teach! Baxter is an outstanding instance of a man who observed these rules. A schoolmaster by instinct and prior experience, Baxter usually called himself his people’s teacher, and teaching was to his mind the minister’s main business. So, in a whole series of complementary ways, he gave himself to this task.
In his regular sermons (one each Sunday and Thursday, each lasting an hour) he taught basic Christianity.
The thing which I daily opened to them, and with greatest importunity laboured to imprint upon their minds, was the great fundamental principle of Christianity contained in their baptismal covenant, even a right knowledge, and belief of, and subjection and love to, God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and love to all men, and concord with the church and one another.… The opening of the true and profitable method of the Creed (or doctrine of faith), the Lord’s Prayer (or matter of our desires), and the Ten Commandments (or law of practice), which afford matter to add to the knowledge of most professors of religion, [takes] a long time. And when that is done they must be led on … but not so as to leave the weak behind; and so as shall still be truly subservient to the great points of faith, hope and love, holiness and unity, which must be still [always, constantly] inculcated, as the beginning and end of all.
Such was Baxter’s teaching programme in the pulpit.
In addition, he held a weekly pastor’s forum for discussion and prayer; he distributed Bibles and Christian books (one-fifteenth of each edition of his own books came to him free in lieu of royalties for him to give away); and he taught individuals through personal counselling and catechising, giving an hour to the members of each of seven family units in his own home (seven hours altogether) on Monday and Tuesday afternoons and evenings, and so getting through nearly all the parish families once a year. (A few families refused to visit him for this purpose, but not many.) Christians, he urged, should regularly come to their pastor with their problems and let him check their spiritual health, and ministers should regularly catechise their entire congregations. To upgrade the practice of personal catechising from a preliminary discipline for children to a permanent ingredient in evangelism and pastoral care for all ages was Baxter’s main contribution to the development of Puritan ideals for the ministry; and it was his concern for catechising that brought The Reformed Pastor to birth.
The members of the Worcestershire Association, the clerical fraternity of which Baxter was the moving spirit, had committed themselves to adopt the policy of systematic parochial catechising on Baxter’s plan. They fixed a day of fasting and prayer, to seek God’s blessing on the undertaking, and asked Baxter to preach. When the day come, however, Baxter was too ill to go; so he published the material he had prepared, a massive exposition and application of Acts 20:28. Because of his forthrightness in rebuking and exhorting his fellow-ministers, he called his work Gildas Salvianus, after two writers of the fifth and sixth centuries who also had not been mealy-mouthed about sin, and added The Reformed Pastor as subtitle. But on the title-page of the first edition it is the word ‘Reformed’ in the subtitle that stands out, being printed in bigger and bolder type than anything else, and this is surely how Baxter wanted it. By ‘Reformed’ he does not mean Calvinistic in doctrine (through he was a sort of Calvinist, and wanted others to share his beliefs at this point); he means rather renewed and revived in practice. ‘If God would but reform the ministry,’ Baxter wrote, ‘and set them on their duties zealously and faithfully, the people would certainly be reformed. All churches either rise or fall as the ministry doth rise or fall (not in riches or worldly grandeur) but in knowledge, zeal and ability for their work.’ It was the ‘rise’ of the ministry in this sense that Baxter sought.
The Reformed Pastor is the supreme transcript of Baxter’s heart as a Puritan evangelist, and it is dynamite. Evangelism as an expression of Christian love through ministerial labour is what it is about, and its spiritual honesty, integrity, energy, and straightforwardness are almost unnerving. It is often said, quite fairly, that any Christian who seriously thinks that without Christ men are lost, and who seriously loves his neighbour, will not be able to rest for the thought that all around him people are going to hell, but will lay himself out unstintingly to convert others as his prime task in life; and any Christian who fails to behave this way undermines the credibility of his faith, for if he cannot himself take it seriously as setting priorities for his own living, why should anyone else take it seriously as a source of guidance for theirs? But The Reformed Pastor silences such thoughts: for here in the person of Richard Baxter we meet a terribly frank and earnest Christian who thinks, talks and behaves with perfect consistency at this point, being content to accept any degree of discomfort, poverty, overwork, and loss of material good, if only souls might be saved. When one knows one is going to be hanged in a fortnight, said Dr Johnson, it concentrates the mind wonderfully; and when, like Baxter from the time of his majority, one lives with one foot in the grave, it imparts an overwhelming clarity both to one’s sense of proportion (what matters, and what does not), and also to one’s perception of what is and what is not consistent with what one professes to believe.
‘O sirs,’ cries Baxter to his clerical colleagues (laymen will do well to listen, too),
surely if you had all conversed with neighbour Death as oft as I have done, and as often received the sentence in yourselves, you would have an unquiet conscience, if not a reformed life, as to your ministerial diligence and fidelity: and you would have something within you that would frequently ask you such questions as these: ‘Is this all thy compassion for lost sinners? Wilt thou do no more to seek and to save them? … Shall they die and be in hell before thou wilt speak to them one serious word to prevent it? Shall they there curse thee for ever that thou didst no more in time to save them?’ Such cries of conscience are daily ringing in my ears, though, the Lord knows, I have too little obeyed them.… How can you choose, when you are laying a corpse in the grave, but think with yourselves, ‘Here lieth the body; but where is the soul? and what have I done for it, before it departed? It was part of my charge; what account can I give of it?’ O sirs, is it a small matter to you to answer such questions as these? It may seem so now, but the hour is coming when it will not seem so.…
Nobody can say that Baxter was not real; and who will question our need of such reality today, and in the ministry most of all?
Then, again, as the book projects reality, so it is a model of rationality in relation to evangelism. Baxter is utterly thorough in working out means to his end. Like Whitefield and Spurgeon, he knew that men are blind, deaf and dead in sin, and only God can convert them; but, again like Whitefield and Spurgeon, he knew too that God works through means, and that rational men must be approached in rational fashion, and that grace enters by the understanding, and that unless all the evangelist does makes for credibility, his message is not likely to be used much to convince. So Baxter insisted that ministers must preach of eternal issues as men who feel what they say, and are as earnest as matters of life and death require; that they must practice church discipline, to show they are serious in saying that God will not accept sin; and that they must do ‘personal work’, and deal with individuals one by one, because preaching alone often fails to bring things home to ordinary people. Baxter was very frank on this.
Let them that have taken most pains in public, examine their people, and try whether many of them are not nearly as ignorant and careless as if they had never heard the gospel. For my part, I study to speak as plainly and movingly as I can … and yet I frequently meet with those that have been my hearers eight or ten years, who know not whether Christ be God or man, and wonder when I tell them the history of his birth and life and death as if they had never heard it before.… But most of them have an ungrounded trust in Christ, hoping that he will pardon, justify and save them, while the world hath their hearts, and they live to the flesh. And this trust they take for justifying faith. I have found by experience, that some ignorant persons, who have been so long unprofitable hearers, have got more knowledge and remorse in half an hour’s close discourse, than they did from ten years’ public preaching. I know that preaching the gospel publicly is the most excellent means, because we speak to many at once. But it is usually far more effectual to preach it privately to a particular sinner.…
Therefore personal catechising and counselling, over and above preaching, is every minister’s duty: for this is the most rational course, the best means to the desired end. So it was in Baxter’s day. Is it not so now?
One of the unhappy by-products of the institutionalising process that produced modern evangelism is the spread of the idea that evangelising is a special skill, confined to a minority. Granted, some pastors are used by God in the ministry of conversion more than others, but Baxter insists that every pastor must study the difficult art of winning souls. He writes:
Alas! How few know how to deal with an ignorant, worldly man, for his conversion! To get within him and win upon him; to suit our speech to his condition and temper; to choose the meetest subjects, and follow them with a holy mixture of seriousness, and terror, and love and meekness, and evangelical allurement—oh! who is fit for such a thing? I profess seriously, it seems to me, by experience, as hard a matter to confer aright with such a carnal person, in order to his change, as to preach.… All these difficulties in ourselves should awaken us to holy resolution, preparation, and diligence.…
Every pastor an evangelist, dealing with individuals about their souls, is Baxter’s Puritan formula. Some will do it more fruitfully than others, but it is a ministry to which all are called and in which all must engage. This is the challenge of Puritan evangelism.
The Reformed Pastor faces the modern minister with at least these questions. (1) Do I believe the gospel Baxter believed (and Whitefield, and Spurgeon, and Paul), the historic biblical gospel of ruin, redemption and regeneration? (2) Do I then share Baxter’s view of the vital necessity of conversion? (3) Am I then as real as I should be in letting this view of things shape my life and work? (4) Am I as rational as I should be in choosing means to the end that I desire, and am charged to seek, namely, the conversion of all the people whose pastor I am? Have I set myself, as Baxter set himself, to find the best way of creating situations in which I can talk to my people personally, on a regular basis, about their spiritual lives? How to do this today would have to be worked out in terms of present circumstances, which are very different from those Baxter knew and describes; but Baxter’s question to us is, should we not be attempting this, as a practice constantly and inescapably necessary? If he convinces us that we should, it will surely not be beyond us to find a method of doing it that suits our situation; where there’s a will, there’s a way!
Baxter’s basic principle is that in the life of the church evangelism must be a matter of constant priority. He works this out within the clericalist frame of reference that the Puritans inherited from the Middle Ages and maintained against lay-led anarchy, as they saw it, during the Interregnum; so naturally he limits his discussion to the pastor’s role, and represents evangelistic ministry to the captive congregation and its individual members as the pastor’s exclusive responsibility. The evangelism Baxter envisages is catechetical and heavily didactic, and that emphasis reflects the deep doctrinal ignorance which at that time characterised the lay people of semi-rural Worcestershire, apart from some exceptional folk in his own congregation. Nowadays, things are different: the churches of the West are minority enclaves within secular communities; evangelism focuses on those who do not yet come to church; and knowledgeable laymen share in it, as they should. In bringing Baxter’s approach to bear on today’s situation we must not lose sight of these differences. But the things that Baxter writes about—the need for pastors seriously to watch over themselves, and seriously to discover and minister to the spiritual needs of each member of their flock, taking pains to ensure first and foremost that these members are all thoroughly converted and truly regenerate—still apply; and this is where evangelism of the Puritan type finds its initial focus, in this or any age.
Said G.K. Chesterton: it is not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting, but that it has been found hard, and not tried. Are we not compelled in honesty to say the same about Puritan evangelism?
1.I discuss this definition, and the necessary change, in Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (Inter-Varsity Press: London and Downers Grove, 1961), pp 37–41.
2.Samuel Clarke, Lives of Fifty-Two…Divines(1677), pp 131, 222, etc.
3.Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye, preface to Thomas Hooker, The Application of Redemption, 1956.
4.Charles G. Finney, Revivals of Religion (Oliphants: London, 1928), chap XIV, p 304.
5.Ibid, chap I, p 3.
6.Finney, Autobiography (Salvation Army Book Dept, nd), p 64.
7.B.B. Warfield, Perfectionism,Works of B.B. Warfield, vol VIII (reprinted Baker Book House: Grand Rapids, 1981), II:34.
8.John Owen, Works (see Chapter Four n 43), III:316f.
9.Thomas Watson, A Body of Divinity, p 154.
10.Owen, Works, III:317f.
11.The Westminster Confession,X:i
12.Thomas Goodwin, Works, IX:279.
13.Ibid.
14.Owen, Works, VIII:5–41.
15.Ibid, VIII:14–16.
16.Jonathan Edwards, Works, II:849f.
17.Ibid, I:353.
18.Goodwin, Works, VI:85.
19.Reliquiae Baxterianaefirst pagination, p 7.
20.Above, Chapter Three.
21.Reliquiae Baxterianae, first pagination, pp 83, 86.
22.Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Banner of Truth: London, 1974).
23.Above, Chapter Nine.
24.See Richard Baxter’s Catholick Theologie: Plain, Pure, Peaceable: for the Pacification of the Dogmatical Word-Warriours (1675).
25.See above, Chapter Nine.
26.On Baxter’s ecclesiastical ideals, see Irvonwy Morgan, The Nonconformity of Richard Baxter (Epworth Press: London, 1946), and A. Harold Wood, Church Unity without Uniformity (Epworth Press: London, 1963).
27.Reliquiae Baxterianae, second pagination, pp 61–69.
28.Cf Peter Toon, The Emergence of Hyper-Calvinism in English Non-conformity 1689–1765 (The Olive Tree: London, 1967), chap 3; ‘Puritans and Calvinism’ (Reiner: Swengel, 1973), chap 6.
29.‘…the minster is in the church, as the schoolmaster in his school, to teach, and take an account of everyone in particular; and…all Christians, ordinarily, must be disciples or scholars in some such school’ (The Reformed Pastor, pp 180f).
30.Reliquiae Baxterianae, first pagination, pp 93f.
31.‘Every Thursday Evening my Neighbours…met at my House, and there one of them repeated the Sermon, and afterwards they proposed what Doubts they had about the Sermon, or any other Case of Conscience, and I resolved their Doubts; And last of all I caused sometimes one, and sometimes another of them to Pray’ (ibid, p 83).
32.Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, pp 86ff, 170ff.
33.Baxter describes his practice in detail in The Reformed Pastor, pp 162ff.
34.Reproduced opposite p 51 of J.T. Wilkinson’s edition of The Reformed Pastor (Epworth Press: London, 1939).
35.Reliquiae Baxterianae, first pagination, p 115.
36.The Reformed Pastor, pp 194f.
37.Ibid, pp 186f.
38.Ibid, p 193.
39.Ibid, pp 173ff, 221–246.
40.Lay involvement did in fact emerge spontaneously in Kidderminster: ‘Another Advantage which I had was, by the Zeal and Diligence of the Godly People…who thirsted after the Salvation of their Neighbours, and were in private my Assistants, and being dispersed throughout the Town, were ready in almost all Companies to repress seducing Words, and to justify godliness, and convince, reprove, exhort Men according to their needs; as also to teach them how to pray; and to help them to sanctifie the Lord’s Day; For those People that had none in their Families who could pray, or repeat the Sermons, went to their next neighbour’s house who could do it, and joined with them; so that some Houses (of the ablest Men) in each Street were filled with them that could do nothing, or little on their own’ (Reliquiae Baxterianae, first pagination, p 87).