Tim Cooper

Fear and polemic in seventeenth-century England : Richard Baxter and antinomianism

Contents: Introduction Part One: Controversy Personality Polemic Part Two: Armies, Antinomians and Aphorisms: The 1640s Disputes and dissipation: the 1650s Recrudescence: the later 17th century Conclusion: Appendix A The Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696) Appendix B Undated treatise Bibliography Index.

Richard Baxter and the Savoy Conference (1661)

The 1661 Savoy Conference has generally been seen as a failure for which Richard Baxter is principally to blame. While it is true that he must share in the responsibility, it should be shared more widely. This article argues that the failure at the Savoy was the end result of tactical errors made a year earlier by the wider Presbyterian leadership who then left Baxter to shoulder the blame alone; and that the restored bishops never had any intention of offering any meaningful concessions at the Savoy.

The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly

In writing this review I am in no small danger of running short of superlatives. To put it simply, this is a sublime scholarly achievement. Knowing the intense labour and demanding exactitude of a project like this, I am very impressed. It is difficult to conceive how Chad van Dixhoorn could have done a better job of putting these minutes and papers at the service of the scholarly community. He had help along the way, to be sure, and the skilful guidance of David F. Wright and John Morrill, but one quickly gets the sense that this is the fruit of his singular vision. If we count his years as a Cambridge PhD student, van Dixhoorn has worked full-time on the Westminster Assembly for longer than it existed in the first place. I recall being told that he had calculated (I think with tape measure in hand) that, yes, all the members of the assembly could squeeze into the smallish Jerusalem Chamber in which they met; he had even taken a shrewd guess, based on the voting records, as to which groups of divines sat next to whom, and where. He once had a dream, he tells us, in which one of the Scottish commissioners to the assembly, Samuel Rutherford, offered to help interpret the nearly impenetrable handwriting of the assemblys main scribe, Adoniram Byfield. It is as good an indication as any of the all-consuming nature of van Dixhoorns task. Perhaps we should add here a note of thanks not just to him (and his assistants) but to his wife and children as well. For this set represents a generous gift to scholars of the seventeenth century and to all those interested in the development of Reformed Protestantism in the English–speaking world and beyond.

Why Did Richard Baxter and John Owen Diverge? The Impact of The First Civil War

This article explores an important but hitherto neglected factor that helps to account for the early divergence between Richard Baxter (1615–91) and John Owen (1616–83). Theological differences alone cannot account for that divergence, since in the early 1640s Baxter and Owen would have agreed on the issues that later separated them. Their starkly contrasting experiences of the First Civil War helped to set them apart. For Baxter, personally caught up in the upheaval, the war was a disaster that corrupted the Gospel. For Owen, untouched by the fighting, the war was a blessing from God that liberated the Gospel from Arminian captivity. All this helps to illuminate some of the ways in which the civil wars continued to shape religious developments and divisions long after the battles had ceased.

Conversion, Autobiography and Richard Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696)

This article juxtaposes two of Richard Baxter’s autobiographical accounts written 5 years apart but along very different lines. In the final chapter of A Holy Commonwealth (1659), Baxter confidently asserted the rightness of Parliament’s cause in the civil wars; for Baxter, it is a strikingly optimistic, triumphalist and providentialist account. In the Reliquiae Baxterianae, which he began to write in 1664, he explicitly distanced himself from any such claims about the wars and he wrote in a more chastened fashion. The former account, and the kind of autobiography it intimates, brings Baxter’s purposes in writing the Reliquiae more clearly into focus. The article advances on recent scholarship by Kathleen Lynch while investigating the nature of autobiography. The iterations of Baxter’s autobiography demonstrate that such accounts are first a story that the author tells himself or herself. If events negate that story, it is never told.

REASSESSING THE RADICALS

The precisianist strain: disciplinary religion and antinomian backlash in puritanism to 1638 . By Theodore Dwight Bozeman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. xv+349. ISBN 0-8078-2850-5.

Richard Baxter and his Physicians

49.95. Making heretics: militant Protestantism and free grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 . By Michael P. Winship. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp. xv+322. ISBN 0-691-08943-4.

The Last Generation of English Catholic Clergy: Parish Priests in the Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield in the Early Sixteenth Century

33.95. Blown by the spirit: puritanism and the emergence of an antinomian underground in pre-civil-war England . By David R. Como. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. ix+513. ISBN 0-8047-4443-2.

Teaching Church History in Global Perspective in New Zealand

70.00. The English radical imagination: culture, religion, and revolution, 1630–1660 . By Nicholas McDowell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Pp. 219. ISBN 0-19-926051-6. £49.00. There has only been one historical monograph on the English antinomians and that was published in 1951. They are long overdue for reassessment. Fortunately, that task is well underway. Taken together, three recent books – cumulatively amounting to well over one thousand pages of text – advance our understanding in substantial and significant ways. Of course, the antinomians have not been absent from the historiography over the last five decades. Their involvement in the ‘antinomian controversy’ that wracked the early New England colony during the mid-1630s has been well-worked ground, whilst they are much too colourful a feature of the mid-seventeenth-century English ferment and upheaval to be overlooked. But they have, more often than not, been background figures, tangential characters in a bigger story. By contrast, in these works, they are in the foreground, with an elaborate and illuminating background within which to understand them in fresh and important ways. The result is a welcome reappraisal that is helpful, insightful, and comprehensive.