On Wednesday, I wrote for Seen&Unseen about how political parties simply do not understand farming which concludes with this:
And after much consultation and two hundred pages of background and policy – plus footnotes - it turns out that food is a lot harder than we thought. Omniscience and omnipotence are really handy which it comes to a coherent plan for 70 per cent of the land in the UK.
The Rest is Baxter
On 14th June, the Church of England remembers Richard Baxter.
No-one would have been more surprised by this than Richard Baxter himself, having been ejected from the Church of England in the 1660s and frequently imprisoned for running private Christian meetings and Bible studies. These ‘conventicles’ had been outlawed under the Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670 which forbade five or more people, other than an immediate family, from meeting in religious assemblies outside the auspices of the Church of England. They were the kind of laws that also put Bunyan in prison.
These acts came from the government of the libertine, anything-goes, multi-mistressed Charles II. He had been invited back to take the throne and solve the constitutional crisis following the failure of Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Richard Baxter had had a front row seat for this, having been chosen to preach the sermon of repentance to Parliament in April 1660 before they invited Charles II to return to England to be king.
Baxter was made one of Charles II’s royal chaplains and offered the Bishopric of Hereford. But he realised he could not be a bishop, promoting the new king’s religion. To some, the return to moderation seemed broad and generous. But to others it was not moderate, but heretical, leading people to hell and destruction. And this broad, generous and moderate way would have to be rigorously enforced by bishops. Baxter was not prepared to do that.
To be offered the wealth and security of a bishopric would have been beyond the wildest dreams of an only child of a gambling addict, raised by his maternal grandparents for the first ten years of his life. He was not grindingly poor, and received some education, but he never went to Oxford, like most clergy and was, therefore, always an outsider.
Wilderness Years
Baxter would return to the wilderness whence he came. Baxter was prevented even from returning as a curate to his former church in Kidderminster, where he had poured himself out in ministry for many years. During the chaos of the Commonwealth, Baxter had acted as a pastor of pastors, writing a book called The Reformed Pastor. But now, he was not even allowed to preach anywhere in the Diocese of Worcester following a prohibition from Bishop George Morley. Had he been bishop, Baxter would have had to issue the same kind of ban.
Within a few years of preaching repentance to Parliament, Baxter had become the type of whom Samuel Pepys wrote on 7th August 1664:
“I saw several poor creatures carried by, by constables, for being at conventicles ... I would to God they would conform.”
Baxter would not. Some might write him off as a ‘puritan divine’, a troublesome and turbulent pietist, concerned only for his own personal purity. His life and writings do not bear this out. He remained committed to the idea of a national church and a generous orthodoxy. But he always sought clarity on the nature of the disagreement, rather than pretend there was no real difference between two contradictory positions.
We would do well to learn from Baxter. In a few weeks, the General Synod will reconvene, and will be invited to pretend that there really isn’t any significant disagreement on ‘any essential matter’. I won’t get into the details here. The video I made back in November still stands as a useful, breezy summary.
But let us remember Baxter, a prophet without honour in his own time. Unable to throw in his lot with the Church of England at the time, he was willing not only to leave the church but go to jail in order to preach and teach the historical gospel that he had received. An embarrassment to those who just wanted to ‘move on’ or ‘move with the times’. Baxter’s legacy has been vindicated. Here we are, centuries later on 14th June remembering our brother, Richard Baxter.
For more on Richard Baxter, listen to the Cooper and Cary Have Words podcast, in which I have words with the Rev Ash Carter, who has made studying Baxter something of a life’s work: